Creationists declare war over the brain

22 October 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Amanda Gefter

“YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN’s east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the “battle” between “maverick” scientists like himself and those who “believe the mind is what the brain does” is a “cultural war”.

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

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    October 24, 2008 | Filed Under World News

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    Reading This Will Change Your Brain

    Jeff Sherman / Taxi-Getty Images
    SCIENCE
    By Jeneen Interlandi | NEWSWEEK
    Published Oct 14, 2008

    A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?

    Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small’s new book, “iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” he writes. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.”

    The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain’s plasticity—it’s ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes’ brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That’s because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that’s not the same thing as evolution.

    To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain’s capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

    Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap. On one side, what he calls digital natives—those who have never known a world without e-mail and text messaging—use their superior cognitive abilities to make snap decisions and juggle multiple sources of sensory input. On the other side, digital immigrants—those who witnessed the advent of modern technology long after their brains had been hardwired—are better at reading facial expressions than they are at navigating cyberspace. “The typical immigrant’s brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time,” he says. “Immigrants learn more methodically and tend to execute tasks more precisely.”

    But whether natural selection will favor one skill set over the other remains to be seen. For starters, there’s no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.

    In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There’s no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we’ve spent so many eons cultivating. “Too many people write about this as if kids are in one country and adults are in another,” says James Gee, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What the future brain will look like is still anybody’s guess.

    October 14, 2008 | Filed Under World News

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    Meditation Practice Can Boost Compassion for Living Beings

    (NaturalNews) People who practice meditating on feelings of compassion increase the activity of sections of the brain associated with empathy, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

    “There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” said lead researcher Antoine Lutz. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

    The researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators, including some Tibetan monks, and 16 people from the United States with no meditation experience. The novices were given basic training in meditation practice before beginning the study.

    The fMRI scans measured the blood flow in participants’ brains as they either meditated or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while hearing a series of sounds designed to elicit emotional responses.

    In the group of expert meditators, blood flow increased to the insula, associated with visceral emotional response, when the sound of a woman’s scream was played while they were meditating.

    While they were not meditating, the experts still experienced more activity in the right temporal-parietal juncture than the novices did when hearing a woman scream or a baby laugh. This area of the brain is believed to play an essential function in helping interpret others’ emotions.

    “The way you are going to understand the emotion of someone else is by somehow simulating, experiencing the emotion,” Lutz said. “It makes sense that we found some activation of the brain region which is critical for the experience of an emotion.”

    The researchers are following up on their findings with a long-term study into whether and how the brain can be trained to experience empathy over time. In addition, they are studying whether different kinds of meditation, such as simple concentration vs. concentration on compassion, have different effects.

    October 10, 2008 | Filed Under World News

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