More Support for the Quantum Information Model

I recently came across this article, describing a paper outlining the discovery of scale-invariant fractal patterns within the information dynamics that are believed to give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness. Yeah, that's a mouthful. The ramifications of this study, should it stand up to peer review and all that, are huge for my quantum information model of magick. So far all the latest discoveries related to consciousness have been consistent with the model, and I actually have been a little surprised at how close they seem to line up. I'm pretty sure none of the folks behind this research are familiar with my work, so it's significant that results emerging from the scientific community and results emerging from the study of magick seem to be coming together.

Major breakthroughs in the study of the physics of consciousness—and information dynamics in general—are occurring through the discovery and elucidation of holographic and fractal principles underlying fundamental properties of nature. For instance, in a fractal organization the degree of complexity of a system is scale-free, or invariant under any translation of magnitude. This means that one can “zoom in” or “zoom out” forever and the same degree of complexity will be observed—patterns of patterns reiterate ad infinitum. This has implications for the science of consciousness, as it is often assumed that consciousness emerges in a system once it reaches a significant threshold of complexity and integration. Yet, if the complexity is scale-invariant, is it not possible that the same information processes engendering consciousness at one observable domain are occurring at smaller scales as well?

The authors of the paper—Dr. Meijer, professor emeritus at the University of Groningen; and Dr. Geesink, a biophysicist who has developed novel EM-shielding technologies and led projects on polymer development and mineral nanotechnology DSM-research —have been performing ground-breaking work in biophysics research that is answering some of the most difficult outstanding questions in biology and other major scientific fields. From a meta-analysis of more than 500 biomedical publications relating to electromagnetic (EM) radiation and interaction with the biological system, Geesink and Meijer identified a novel and specific pattern of coherent EM frequencies that have statistically significant bio-resonances. With the identification of specific EM frequency domains that have significant effects within the inter- and intra-cellular system, the researchers were able to correlate their data with known wave resonances of nucleotides in aqueous solution, proteins and enzymes, as well as sound-induced vibrations evoked in bio-polymers and cellular membranes.

The research describes in detail the interplay of light and sound within the biological system—how photonic, phononic, and solitonic waves are instrumental and integral in maintaining and directing coherence and order of the inter- and intra-cellular system in development and information processing. Solitonic oscillations in large bio-molecules can result in quantum coherence, known as Fröhlich condensation, which Meijer and Geesink have explained can create quantum geometric wave patterns that guide biomolecules and cells much like the pilot-wave structure of Bohmian mechanics. Showing how the living system, and the information processes underlying life consciousness reside at a much deeper, intrinsic level of the universe.

The Real Story of MK-ULTRA

The Central Intelligence Agency's MK-ULTRA program has been a staple of conspiracy theorist for decades. Despite that, the program was entirely real. It ran for about ten years from the early 1950's to the early 1960's, and involved a whole panoply of techniques that chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the program, hoped would produce a viable form of mind control for use in intelligence work.

This involved all sorts of unethical and in many cases horrific techniques intended to break down the structure of the target's mind in order to replace it with new contents. Among other things, it involved a whole lot of drugs administered to subjects without any ethical controls or safeguards. NPR has an article up today that covers the history of the program and Gottlieb's work. As the article notes, the program never actually worked for mind control but it was largely responsible for introducing LSD to the counter-culture of the 1960's.

MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."

Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.

"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."

Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.

Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.

Read the whole article. It's fascinating and also pretty disturbing stuff. The CIA really was out of control back then, whether or not it is today.

Not The Pineal Gland

There is so much nonsense on the Internet about Ordo Templi Orientis and magick in general that we get people coming in the doors of our local bodies with a lot of weird beliefs. Here in the Twin Cites, we once had an individual show up who was convinced that there was a "five-foot pineal gland" in the Vatican archives.

We pressed said person - do you mean a carving or a statue? No, they replied, it was a "real pineal gland." I entertained whether this was even possible for a second or two. But I don't think there are any animals on the planet with a pineal gland that big, even a blue whale. The only reason I gave it any credence at all, in fact, was that whale organs were harvested throughout the nineteenth century, and the Vatican archives are supposed to house some weird stuff. But no, none of it made any sense.

Later on I think I found the YouTube video this individual was referring to, and it was about a statue of a pine cone that was supposed to represent the pineal gland. It isn't all that weird that the Vatican might have such a statue, simply because Rene Descartes believed the pineal gland to be "the principle seat of the soul" based only on its position in the brain and its geometry. Descartes first published this hypothesis in 1637 and it has proved surprisingly enduring, even though pretty much everything he knew about the function of the pineal gland is now known to be incorrect.

Salem Encephalitis?

BBC has an interesting article up today discussing the possibility that an autoimmune illness, anti-NMDAR encephalitis, may have been responsible for some of the symptoms of "witchcraft" that fueled the Salem Witch Trials. Since the 1970's, the hypothesis that the witch craze in Salem might have been fueled by ergot poisoning - which can cause vivid hallucinations - has been reported in a number of places. However, as the article points out, no other symptoms of ergot poisoning were reported during the Salem trials.

Capital-S Skeptics like to run to their favorite explanation for the symptoms seen in Salem, "mass hysteria." As I've mentioned here before, this is basically the Skeptic version of "paranormal powers." We don't understand how it works, we can't predict situations in which it will happen, and we don't understand what triggers it. When a Skeptic describes something as "mass hysteria" he or she really means "I can't explain any of it, but what I do know is that anybody who calls it paranormal is deluded." In fact, whatever this phenomenon is, it is rare enough that it might as well be considered paranormal just like psychic abilities.

While I do understand that the witch trials and other events like them have a psychological component, I also know that they usually start with something, not nothing, and that something is usually inexplicable. That's why the ergotism hypothesis seems so appealing. It's fairly obvious that religious fundamentalists like the Puritans would interpret hallucinations as some sort of spiritual force, and interpret them as evil if they were threatening and scary - as hallucinations out of the blue often are.

But with no other symptoms consistent with ergotism the contention remains weak. That's why, according to an article published in the Journal of Neurology by Michael Zandi and Johnny Tam from University College in London, anti-NMDAR encephalitis could be a better candidate, especially in the case of the two cousins who started the whole thing up.

Here’s the story of a typical patient. She initially develops a flu-like illness. Within weeks, she becomes obsessed by god or the devil, consumed by paranoia and racked with insomnia. Now, she repeats the same words, then is struck mute. Next: seizures, writhing and contorted limbs, odd repetitive movements of the mouth and tongue. Her pulse races or slows, her blood pressure rises and falls. She sweats, drools, grunts and grimaces. She becomes catatonic and then comatose.

Thinking as Navigation

Science Daily has an article up today discussing the idea that human cognition may be closely related to spatial navigation. I've talked a bit over the years how I think that conflating thought and language is a big mistake, in part because my mind clearly (to me, anyway) does much of its internal processing using spatial rather than linguistic means and it always has seemed obvious to me that this is just how thinking works - though of course this is a classic "generalization from self" and there are apparently a significant number of people out there who do think mostly in words and probably find my self-description as mystifying as I find theirs. The article discusses how spatial thinking seems to work and some of the implications of this new model.

In their proposal, [Christian] Doeller and his team combine individual threads of evidence to form a theory of human thinking. The theory begins with the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of place and grid cells in rodents' brains, which were subsequently shown to exist in humans. Both cell types show patterns of activity representing the animal's position in space, for example, while it forages for food. Each position in space is represented by a unique pattern of activity. Together, the activity of place and grid cells allows the formation of a mental map of the surroundings, which is stored and reactivated during later visits.

The very regular activation pattern of grid cells can also be observed in humans -- but importantly, not only during navigation through geographical spaces. Grids cells are also active when learning new concepts, as shown by a study from 2016. In that study, volunteers learned to associate pictures of birds, which only varied in the length of their necks and legs, with different symbols, such as a tree or a bell. A bird with a long neck and short legs was associated with the tree whereas a bird with a short neck and long legs belonged to the bell. Thus, a specific combination of bodily features came to be represented by a symbol.

In a subsequent memory test, performed in a brain scanner, volunteers indicated whether various birds were associated with one of the symbols. Interestingly, the entorhinal cortex was activated, in much the same way as it is during navigation, providing a coordinate system for our thoughts. "By connecting all these previous discoveries, we came to the assumption that the brain stores a mental map, regardless of whether we are thinking about a real space or the space between dimensions of our thoughts. Our train of thought can be considered a path though the spaces of our thoughts, along different mental dimensions," Jacob Bellmund, the first author of the publication, explains.

More on Magical Experiments

In last month's post on magical experiments, I discussed how I go about testing techniques and recording results, and why that approach to magick is superior to blindly following a tradition or trying to reconstruct techniques from centuries ago and somehow fit them into how we now live in the modern age. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about how we might go about verifying the effects of magick using the formal scientific method.

As I've said before, we're not quite there yet as far as practical magick is concerned. At this point research on mysticism is actually a little further along. The idea that spiritual practices can trigger specific altered brain states is a little more palatable to mainstream scientists, as it does not necessarily require a new metaphysical model to explain how it works. Neuroscientists have been very interested in meditation since the 1990's, and have conducted various studies with both novice and advanced meditators. The Buddhist tradition has been especially open to meditation studies, with the Dalai Lama going so far as to say that if the science doesn't match the teachings of the tradition, students should go with what the science tells them.

What we have been able to determine so far is that even with practice lasting only a few weeks, basic "mindfulness meditation" - a simplified non-sectarian method of meditation similar to shamatha and zazen - a physiological process dubbed the "relaxation response" is activated. This results in reduced stress and anxiety and improved attention. With advanced meditators, we have been able to identify a sort of "brain signature" related to the mystical state of samadhi or absorption which consists of high gamma brainwaves in certain areas and suppressed firing in others. As I see it, this work could be extended into practical magick by testing whether or not operations performed in these mystical states have a higher likelihood of success.

Consciousness Truthers

Could anything possibly be dumber than denying the existence of something that you directly experience every single day? I honestly sat here for a bit and gave it some thought, and you know what? I can't come up with anything. But there really are such folks as "consciousness deniers." That is, people who contend that your subjective sense of awareness doesn't really exist. I suppose you can define a world in which "real" and "objective" are synonyms, and since consciousness is by definition subjective it must be unreal, but that's really quite silly.

As the late Stephen Hawking demonstrated in his work on black holes, particles aren't even "objective" in the philosophical sense because their nature is not constant across all possible frames of reference. So that sets up a world in which nothing at all is "real" - and so, in another sense, everything might as well be. The particles making up a baseball bat may not be entirely objective, but they're real enough to hit you in the face. Likewise, your consciousness is real enough to be aware that getting hit in the face with that baseball bat hurts.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short.

What is it? Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelled anything knows what it is; anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or hot or cold or remorseful, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things involve what are sometimes called “qualia”—that is to say, different types or qualities of conscious experience. What I am calling the Denial is the denial that anyone has ever really had any of these experiences. Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Free Will Truthers and Magick

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, the "Free Will Truthers" have been at it again. Now I just made that term up, but it seems appropriate for those psychologists and neuroscientists who are busy trying to prove that their idea of "free will" does not exist. As a magician, I obviously think the whole idea is ridiculous. If you have no conscious will at all, the very idea of practicing magick doesn't make sense. At the same time, the idea that our conscious wills are entirely free, at every moment, regardless of what we are doing, is also probably wrong.

To be clear, the formal "free will" debate is to a large degree over a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, since the definition of "free will" can refer to many things. Obviously, human beings can learn, so we're not talking about free will as opposed to absolute determinism. What psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to tease out with these studies is to what degree the mind as we experience it directs the body. And even that Cartesian breakdown isn't really correct. It's pretty clear at this point that the mind and body are not separate, but rather components of what we perceive as a unified human experience.

So really, the free will truthers are not necessarily trying to argue that human behavior is constrained in certain ways, but rather how much of our behavior is really motivated by "the unconscious." In a way, they're a little like the Freudians from a hundred years ago, arguing that our conscious perception of the world is merely the tip of a metaphorical unconscious iceberg. So that's not the same thing as what philosophers mean by "free will" at all, and that's not what I'm talking about in this article. When I use the term "free will," what I really mean is a sort of "unconscious will" versus "conscious will" as we generally experience it.

At any rate, the original "free will" observations came from studies that seemed to show that brain scans could predict the decision a person was going to make before said persons were conscious of having made them. As I have previously mentioned, these studies were undertaken around the same time as Daryl Bem's presentiment studies were going on. Using a similar technique, Bem seemed to have proved the existence of precognition, showing that subjects seemed to react to emotionally charged images before the images were actually displayed.

The Weirdest Scandal Ever?

Probably not. But it's still pretty weird.

Slate has an article up today about a Seattle neuroscientist named Larry Farwell. Farwell was one of the early researchers exploring the possibility of EEG-based brain-computer interfaces, technology that led to the development of my Emotiv Insight consumer EEG headset. Slate published the article in the first place because Donald Trump's nominee for National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was briefly involved with one of Farwell's companies. So it's actually not that much of a scandal per se, but it still makes for fascinating reading.

Farwell got his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. For 10 years after graduation he invested in real estate and studied transcendental meditation, among other avocational pursuits. (He’s also been a semiprofessional swing-dance performer and a broadsword-wielding black belt in kung fu with a penchant for the flying kick.) Finally, in 1984, Farwell went back to school for a Ph.D. in neuroscience in the lab of the brain-electrode pioneer Emanuel Donchin.

Farwell produced extraordinary work while a student in the Donchin lab. In 1988, four years before completing his graduate degree, he and Donchin devised one of the first brain-computer interfaces for converting thought directly into speech. Their system worked through electroencephalography, or EEG—the measurement of broad oscillations in the brain’s electrical activity by electrodes placed atop the scalp.

Donchin had expertise in a particular EEG brain-wave pattern called the “P300,” which corresponds to a brief change in voltage that shows up on neural traces about half a second after people are presented with a meaningful or surprising stimulus. (The name P300 refers to the fact that this signal can appear as soon as 300 milliseconds after the triggering sound or image.)

So right off the bat, Farwell sounds like quite the character. Farwell and Donchin employed the P300 response to develop their brain-computer interface, which presented subjects with a series of letters. The subject would then concentrate on the letter he or she wished to communicate. When they did, an EEG would pick up the P300, which tightly correlated with concentrated attention.

Free Will, Presentiment, and an fMRI Bug

Over the course of the last decade, a number of neuroscientists have come to the conclusion that "free will" is in fact an illusion, and that all human behavior is fundamentally deterministic. As evidence, they cite studies showing that brain scans can predict the decisions individuals make moments before those individuals become aware of their decisions. They have even developed a model built around this notion, called passive frame theory. According to this model, consciousness does not make decisions, but simply observes the results of autonomous processes.

But there's a big problem with this model and the studies on which it is based. Other studies have identified a phenomenon called presentiment, which appears to show that the brains of subjects who are randomly shown photographs that are either neutral or designed to provoke strong emotional responses react to each photograph a moment before it is displayed. This may not be evidence of some sort of psychic awareness, but it does call the studies on which passive frame is built into question.

Simply, you can't conclude that a free choice has not occurred if the brain can somehow perceive future information. Likewise, if a problem with the scanner is making it look like the brain can react to the future when it really cannot, the same issue is probably affecting the free will studies. When confronted with the presentiment results, most skeptics will immediately jump to the conclusion that something must be wrong with the scanner. But the free will studies have not received the same scrutiny.

Normally I find skeptics far too dismissive of possible paranormal results, but based on some recent findings I'm going to agree with them this time around, believe it or not. A recent review of fMRI data from the last fifteen years has turned up a bug in the software that runs the machines, and those bugs could easily have produced data collection errors in both the free will and the presentiment studies.

This is especially true because both sets of studies rely on tracking neural firing at a very high resolution, where any inaccuracy could significantly skew the results. Generally speaking, all it would take is a shift of a tenth of a second or so in the scans to produce results for both studies that conform to common-sense intuition. That is, they would show that the conscious mind is making decisions as they happen, and that it is not seeing into the future.

Religious Experiences in the Brain

An Israeli epilepsy patient recently had a sudden religious experience. This is not necessarily uncommon, but the difference this time is that he was hooked up to an EEG machine at the moment he experienced what he interpreted as the presence of God. While a number of studies have been done tracking brain activity in meditators, such practice is much more deliberate and controlled. Sudden experiences are unpredictable, which makes them hard to investigate.

According to the authors, Israeli researchers Arzy and Schurr, the man was 46 years old. He was Jewish, but he had never been especially religious. His supernatural experience occurred in hospital where he was undergoing tests to help treat his right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a condition which he had suffered from for forty years. As part of the testing procedure, the patient stopped taking his anticonvulsant medication. Here’s how the authors describe what happened:

"While lying in bed, the patient abruptly “froze” and stared at the ceiling for several minutes, stating later that he felt that God was approaching him. He then started chanting prayers quietly, looked for his Kippa and put it on his head, chanting the prayers more excessively. Then, abruptly, he yelled “And you are Adonai (name of the Hebrew God) the Lord!”, stating later that god had revealed to him, ordering him to bring redemption to the people of Israel.

The patient then stood up, detached the EEG electrodes from his skin, and went around the department trying to convince people to follow him, stating that “God has sent me to you”. When further questioned, he said that he does not have a concrete plan, but he is sure that God is going to instruct him what he and his followers should do on their way to redemption."

What makes this so interesting is that the patient was undergoing online EEG recording at the time of his unexpected messianic moment – right up until he ripped the electrodes off. Arzy and Schurr were therefore able to examine the neural correlates of the behaviour. It turns out that there was an increase in activity in the low-gamma band (30–40 Hz) localized to the left prefrontal cortex, which occurred during the onset of the ineffable event.

There have been a number of studies over the last twenty years showing that advanced meditators can induce gamm brainwave activity via their practices. But many of those studies were done back in the 1990's, when EEG technology was less sophisticated. As such, they were only able to track aggregate rather than localized activity. Studies done over the course of the last decade generally include that information, but up until now I don't know of any case where a patient had a sudden religious experience while being monitored.

Finally...

So I just received word today that my Emotiv Insight headset is finally going to ship. For those of you don't who remember me talking about this a couple of years ago, my wife and I are Kickstarter backers for the Insight, a new high-performance consumer EEG headset. At the time, Emotiv Systems was selling the Epoc, an EEG headset that worked but which had several drawbacks that the Insight was supposed to improve upon.

Kickstarter can be hit or miss. My wife is still waiting on a 3D printer she backed years ago, and the Insight has also taken a long time to develop. But I will finally be getting the darn thing, which means that I can move on with a particular project that my lack of a functional headset has been holding up. It will still be a couple weeks before I have it, but have it I will. My research will be able to go forward.

Here's the idea. In my original Operant Magick manuscript, I proposed a simple model of the brainwave changes that may occur during magical operations, derived from studies of advanced meditators as reported in James Austin's 1999 book Zen and the Brain. The model was pretty simple - overly simple, as it turned out, based on subsequent research done during the following decade.

The model relied on the idea of tonic - that is, synchronized - brainwaves starting off in the low-alpha/high-theta range induced by basic relaxation meditation, and then shifting into full alpha, beta, and finally gamma at the climax of the ritual before shifting back to the alpha-theta baseline. It made sense with the information I had available, but that information dated back to the late 1990s.

Austin published Zen-Brain Reflections in 2008, which included more studies that thoroughly muddied the picture presented in Zen and the Brain. Better EEG technology meant that specific areas of the brain could be monitored with axial positioning sensors, which revealed that aggregate brainwaves gave a massively oversimplified view of what was going on.

In order to really break down the brain correlates of magical consciousness, areas of the brain in which firing increases and decreases in response to particular subjective states of consciousness must be mapped. Crucially, the Insight has a positioning sensor, unlike the Epoc which only tracked aggregate values. Without a positioning sensor, I'm limited to working with something like my old model.

A Psychic Savant?

Ramses Sanguino is a five year old California boy who is a genuine savant. Ramses is on the "high-functioning" end of the autism spectrum - or, in his case, the "superior-functioning" end. He's not neurotypical, he's better. Ramses has already been tested as one of the most intelligent five-year-olds in the world, is learning seven different languages, and can solve reasonably complex mathematical equations.

And according to Dr. Diane Powell, a neuroscientist who trained at Johns Hopkins university, he might even be telepathic. Ramses' mother posted videos of her son in which he seems to be able to guess numbers and playing cards that are out of sight with almost perfect accuracy. Powell has set up a research study to test the boy's abilities, and if they really can be replicated under controlled scientific conditions they will constitute a highly significant finding.

In Ramses's case, he has apparently been able to demonstrate a degree of telepathy with Dr Powell during three meetings. She used a random-number generator to pick numbers for Ms Sanguino to write down and think about, before asking Ramses to try and read his mother's mind to guess them. The little boy did this successfully in the meetings, she said.

Ms Sanguino, who works as an artist, says her son has sometimes been able to recite 38 numbers written out of sight. She vows there is no trickery involved in his 'talent', or her home videos. In another test with Dr Powell, Ramses was able to correctly guess 16 out of 17 numbers hidden out of sight - including one double digit number, according to his mother.

She said: 'I was amazed when we began testing Ramses. We do have a very close bond which may have something to do with his abilities - but this is beyond anything I would have imagined. However, Ms Sanguino's main concern is helping to find a specialist school for Ramses, whom Dr Powell has described as 'one of the smartest five year olds on the planet'.

So there are couple things that need to be ruled out here that I can think of right offhand. The first, which probably would show up in a close analysis of the video is the "clever Hans effect," which is named after a famous performing horse who appeared to be able to understand small numbers, count, and add. But careful testing showed that Hans was simply well-trained to spot his trainer's body language, which would subtly change once the right number was reached. Without the trainer present, the horse's ability vanished.

The second thing to check is that I want to know what "out of sight" means in this situation. Autistic savants often have an almost superhuman sense of space and shapes. Temple Grandin, a well-known writer on the subject who is on the autism spectrum herself, believes that this is because people on the spectrum think in images rather than words. So it's possible that even if Ramses could not see the numbers themselves, he might be able to identify a number being written by reading his mother's arm and hand motions if she is writing in the same room.

A third possibility is a trick like what one person allegedly used back in the 1930's to guess Zener cards in the original Rhine trials. With the way those trials were set up, it was possible to see the symbol on the card reflected in the sender's eye if you looked at it at just the right angle. In addition to their faculty with spatial relations, autistic savants also can be much more aware of such small details in their environments than a neurotypical person generally would be.

Now if all those can be ruled out, though, we might just have something. And if young Ramses really is as accurate as his mother claims, he might turn out to be the subject who finally validates the existence of psychic perception.

Lymphatic Vessels Link Brain and Body

Back when I was in college around 1990 one of the hot areas of interdisciplinary study was psychoneuroimmunology, a field built around the experimental observation that cognitive states could affect the function of the immune system. Researchers hoped that such a connection could provide an explanation for the placebo effect, the effectiveness of alternative healing modalities such as acupuncture, and impaired immune system function in depressed patients. It was also thought that it might be relevant as an explanation for the "relaxation response" provoked by meditation, which appears to have anti-inflammatory properties.

The base hypothesis was a logical one, but the mechanism behind it proved incredibly stubborn. Especially in the case of the placebo effect, it's not that anyone doubts something real is going on. It has to be controlled for in every medical drug trial, even though it's poorly understood. Also, last year researchers studying acupuncture may have discovered a chemical pathway involving interleukin-10, an anti-inflammatory compound produced by the immune system, that seems to be activated by acupuncture treatment.

In my article, I offered up the hypothesis that this interleukin-10 pathway could work in conjunction with the lymphatic system to produce the results reported for acupuncture treatment. A chart of the acupuncture meridians follows the lymphatic system fairly precisely, and a needle pentrating a lymphatic vessel will promote an immune response. So the needle would promote the production of interleukin-10 at the point of contact, and the lymphatic system would move the substance some distance from it. This is a straightforward chemical model that involves no mysterious energies, while at the same time explaining the effectiveness of exercises such as Qigong sets that promote the movement of lymphatic fluid.

Neuroscientists have now identified that the network of lymphatic vessels connected with the brain is more extensive than previously thought, which not only supports some of my contentions about acupuncture but which may also finally provide the mechanism that psychoneuroimmunologists have been seeking for nearly thirty years. It could explain the placabo effect and many other findings that relate subjective state of mind to immune system function. The newly discovered vessels are shown in green in the image on the right.

Recovered Memories are False Memories

As a follow-up to my piece on the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's and early 1990's, I present this recent article from The New Yorker. Freudian psychology has become so embedded in our culture that many people still believe in the concept of "repressed memories" that can be "recovered" by psychotherapy. But as recent research has shown, this entire model of how the mind supposedly works is fundamentally flawed. Notably, even our conscious memories are less reliable than than we generally expect, and material that we have difficulty recalling is not being "repressed" - much of the information such memories seem to contain is actually gone.

The human brain does an admirable job of coping with this missing information, to the extent that we seem to be able to recall it. But what the brain is really doing there is filling in the gaps with what it considers reasonable assumptions about reality. But as many of those assumptions are context-dependent, it is surprisingly easy to manipulate circumstances in such a way that completely inaccurate recollections can be manufactured. This was the basis of the "recovered memory therapy" that led to the Satanic Panic and produced so many outlandish accusations.

The article deals with this issue from a different perspective, that of law enforcement. One of the problems with the way that suspects in criminal cases are often questioned is that interrogators can manipulate those situations in order to obtain false confessions of criminal activity. Furthermore, in some cases this manipulation can be so complete that suspects come away from questioning believing that they did in fact commit the crime in question.

In television shows and movies false confessions generally only come about because the suspect is protecting someone else, or because they are mentally disturbed and seeking attention. But the truth is much scarier. According to recent research discussed in the article, by the time interrogators finish their questioning, an innocent suspect may in fact believe themselves to be guilty, because they have been manipulated into creating a new memory of themselves committing the crime.

In the early nineteen-nineties, American society was recuperating from another panic over occult influence; Satanists had replaced witches. One case, the McMartin Preschool trial, hinged on nine young victims’ memories of molestation and ritual abuse—memories that they had supposedly forgotten and then, after being interviewed, recovered. The case fell apart, in 1990, because the prosecution could produce no persuasive evidence of the victims’ claims. A cognitive psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus, who had consulted on the case, wondered whether the children’s memories might have been fabricated—in Münsterberg’s formulation, involuntarily elaborated—rather than actually recovered.

Brain Waves, Memory, and Magick

A recent MIT study has found a link between brain wave patterns and the formation of new memories. The researchers tracked the brain wave patterns in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of monkeys as they were trained to associate pairs of images. What they found was that the brain waves in those regions rose when the monkeys got the association right, but dropped when they guessed wrong.

Intrigued by previous research in the area, a team led by Earl Miller and Scott Brincat, both from MIT, decided to study how the brain waves of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex - two regions that are crucial to learning - changed while the brain was trying to learn to associate two unrelated objects.

What they found was pretty, well, mind-blowing - whenever the brain correctly linked the two items in question, the brain waves oscillated at a high, “beta” frequency, but when the guess was wrong the waves oscillated at a lower, “theta” frequency.

"It's like you're playing a computer game and you get a ding when you get it right, and a buzz when you get it wrong,” said Miller in a press release. “These two areas of the brain are playing two different 'notes' for correct guesses and wrong guesses.”

"Brain waves had been ignored for decades in neuroscience. It's been thought of as the humming of a car engine. What we're discovering through this experiment and others is that these brain waves may be the infrastructure that supports neural communication," he added.

The researchers now believe that this brain wave feedback system could actually reinforce correct guesses while suppressing the wrong answers, helping the brain to learn the correct answer.

There are a couple of interesting points here that could be related to magical practice. We know from studies of advanced meditators that experiences subjectively described as samadhi correspond to particularly high brain waves in particular areas. One of the practices employed by many modern magicians is the memorization of correspondences, which are then employed in the construction of rituals. It may be that combining a set of previously associated sensory impressions facilitates these heightened firing frequencies and contributes to the effectiveness of the practice.

On a more speculative note, a number of researchers have hypothesized that consciousness may be linked to quantum-level interactions within the brain that exhibit interference patterns similar to those exploited by quantum computing. While it's a big step from brain waves, which simply map the frequency at which neurons in a particular region are firing, to wavelike behavior at the quantum scale, finding a connection there could constitute a big piece of the puzzle that currently is described as the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Hopefully I will soon be in a position to do some of this research myself. I am one of the Kickstarter backers for the Emotiv Insight headset, a next-generation EEG device. Critically, the Insight includes reference sensors that provide some data on the location of the brainwaves it is tracking, in contrast to current models that simply track aggregate activity. The release date for the device is more than a year behind schedule, but Emotiv has announced that they plan on having the first run ready sometime this spring.

New Study of Near-Death Experiences

A large new study has confirmed life after death - sort of. Researchers found that a significant subset of cardiac patients retained some form of conscious awareness up to three minutes after they were declared clinically dead. This finding is not that surprising given how many patients report classic near-death experiences, but it does refute the contention that such experiences are merely hallucinations.

A team based in the UK has spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences, and found that almost 40 per cent of survivors described having some form of “awareness” at a time when they were declared clinically dead.

Experts currently believe that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating – and that it is not possible to be aware of anything at all once that has happened. But scientists in the new study said they heard compelling evidence that patients experienced real events for up to three minutes after this had happened – and could recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated.

Dr Sam Parnia, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and a former research fellow at the University of Southampton who led the research, said that he previously thought patients who described near-death experiences were only relating hallucinatory events. One man, however, gave a “very credible” account of what was going on while doctors and nurses tried to bring him back to life – and says that he felt he was observing his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Researchers still haven't come up with results that imply consciousness actually leaves the body. To do that, some sort of scenario would need to be set up to test whether patients can accurately recall information that they could not possibly perceive with their regular senses. A few doctors here and there have placed pictures on top of cabinets and so forth where they could only be seen by someone floating near the ceiling, but as far as I know it's never been done on a large scale.

So this latest study is interesting from the standpoint of consciousness and its relation to brain states, but it doesn't reveal anything truly paranormal. Rather, it shows that many peoples' minds are much more resilient than previously thought.

Brain Research and Meditation Methods

One of the more intriguing current trends in brain research is that over the course of the last decade or so, neuroscientists have been paying more attention to altered states of consciousness produced by "mystical" practices such as meditation. While I am not a proponent of the "mind as epiphenomenon of the brain" model of consciousness, at the same time it's clear that subjective experience can be related to neural events.

One of the more recent developments that came from this research is "mindfulness meditation," a non-sectarian meditation method similar to the Buddhist shamatha method. In this practice, thoughts are observed as they arise, and whenever the practitioner notices his or her attention being drawn to them, the attention is returned to the breath. This method produces a physiological state that researchers call the "relaxation response."

In this state, both the mind and the body are calmed. Studies have shown that the relaxation response can reduce everything from anxiety to inflammation, and that the benefits of this can be obtained after a relatively short period of practice. It should be no surprise to anyone familiar with neuroanatomy that the relaxation response achieves those results by activating the parasympathetic, or calming portion of the nervous system.

This explains in part why Theravada Buddhists who primarily practice this sort of meditation abstain from alcohol. Alcohol behaves like a stimulant in low doses because while it is a depressant, it depresses the parasympathetic nervous system before it acts upon the sympathetic, or arousing nervous system. So in fact there is a clear physiological reason why consuming alcohol interferes with Theravada practice - it undermines the primary mechanism behind the relaxation response.

In some cases, mindfulness meditation can produce the same sorts of cognitive problems that Buddhist teachers also sometimes encounter with shamatha. Again, this should be no surprise since the methods are so similar. Earlier this summer an article was published by The Atlantic discussing the work of Dr. Willoughby Britton, who is investigating cases in which the mindfulness meditation technique goes wrong.

Birth Season and Brain Development

Twenty years ago when I was considering going for a graduate degree in neuroscience this was one of the studies that I wanted to perform if I eventually became a research scientist. It occurred to me as an undergraduate that some of the tenets of astrology might be derived from observations based on birth seasons. I live in Minnesota, where the seasonal variations are quite severe, and it only made sense that the month in which a child was born would influence how they experienced their first year of life, and potentially set them on a cycle of activities that could influence their personality development. For example, a baby born at the beginning of winter would spend his or her first several months indoors, while a baby born at the beginning of summer would have access to outdoor exposure right away. Now a neuroscience researcher has performed such a study, and identified a specific brain characteristic that seems to correlate with birth seasons.

The season we’re born in can have far-reaching consequences. For instance, Spring babies are more likely than others to develop schizophrenia later in life, whereas Summer babies tend to grow up to be more sensation seeking. There are many more of these so-called season of birth effects. Scientists aren’t sure, but they think such patterns could be due (among other things) to mothers’ and infants’ exposure to viruses over the Winter period, or to the amount of daylight they’re exposed to, either or both of which could influence genetic expression during early development. Now Spiro Pantazatos, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center, has studied links between season of birth and brain structure in healthy adults. He thinks the association between season of birth and psychiatric and behavioural outcomes later in life could be mediated by genetic factors that affect the growth of the brain.

Pantazatos has analysed MRI brain scans taken from 550 healthy men and women at hospitals in London, England. In one analysis he looked to see if there were any particular areas of the brain that differed between people according to the season they were born in. He defined the seasons as follows: Winter (Dec 23 to March 19); Spring (March 22 to June 19); Summer (June 22 to September 21); and Fall (September 24 to December 20). For the men only, he found that those born in the Fall and Winter tended to have more grey matter in a region known as the left superior temporal sulcus (STG), as compared with men born in Spring and Summer. Looking month by month, men born at the end of December tended to have the most grey matter in this region; men born at the end of June tended to have the least.

This particular correlation between season and brain structure only seems to hold for men, but with the way that protosciences work that could be enough to suggest a relationship between birth season and particular traits. The sifting process of information gathering in such disciplines is based on holding onto information that seems to valid and discarding relationships that fail to hold up over time. It is far more vulnerable to error and cognitive bias than formal scientific inquiry, but the observations thus accumulated can suggest potential areas for more rigorous inquiry. It's too bad that anything dubbed "paranormal" has gotten so little attention in academic circles, but some of that is starting to turn around with studies like this one and others relating brain activity to altered states of consciousness such as those employed in both meditation and magical operations.

Studying Out of Body Experiences

Here's a fascinating case study, a Canadian graduate student who claims to be able to induce out-of-body experiences at will. One of the biggest problems with studying OOBE's is that usually it's hard to predict when they will occur. Therefore, controlled scientific experiments on this phenomenon pretty much require at least a small population of such subjects. Experimenters are hopeful that more will be found, as the woman only brought it up during a psychology class that discussed how rare such experiences actually are. She thought everybody could just do it.

The 24-year-old "continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that 'everyone could do it.'" This is how she described her out-of-body experiences: "She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling along with the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving “real” body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience."

An unusual find, wrote the scientists, University of Ottawa researchers Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier--this is the first person to be studied able to have this type of experience on demand, and without any brain abnormalities. Instead of an "out-of-body" experience, however, the researchers termed it a "extra-corporeal experience" (ECE), in part because it lacks the strong emotions that often go hand-in-hand (such as shock & awe, for example).

To better understand what was going on, the researchers conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of her brain. They found that it surprisingly involved a "strong deactivation of the visual cortex." Instead, the experience "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery," such as mental representations of bodily movement.

Even without the strong emotions, I think it's likely that what the subject is experiencing could very well be the same process. Those strong emotions could be the result of cognitive dissonance stemming from the surprise of such an unusual experience, whereas the intensity just won't be the same for someone who does it all the time. The cognitive dissonance would also imprint the memory of a singular experience much more strongly.

While it's fascinating to see the brain activity during an OOBE, I'm hoping that researchers will take the next step and see if the woman can actually obtain new information while "out of her body." With a subject who can do it at will, that's extremely easy to test - just write down an unknown word and put it someplace where she could only see it by floating or something similar. It would really be a shame for no such tests to be conducted just because researchers assume that nothing paranormal is going on.