Fringe-ology (42 page)

Author's note:
These observations about brain function, belief, and how we evaluate information are supported by my interviews with Newberg and his lectures. Please also see Notes and Sources for chapter 1 for a full selection of papers demonstrating the kinds of automatic brain processes (by no means restricted to the functioning of the amygdala) that influence our cognition and predispose us to emerge from every conversation with our belief system intact. The following papers help prove the point.

J. G. Gunnell, “Are We Losing Our Minds? Cognitive Science and the Study of Politics,”
Political Theory
35, no. 6 (December 2007): 704–31.

E. A. Phelps, “Emotion and Cognition: Insights from Studies of the Human Amygdala,”
Annual Review of Psychology
57 (2006): 27–53.

T. Landis, “Emotional Words: What's So Different from Just Words?”
Cortex
42, no. 6 (2006): 823–30.

S. Hamman, “Positive and Negative Emotional Verbal Stimuli Elicit Activity in the Left Amygdala,”
Neuroreport
13, no. 1 (2002): 15–19.

T. Frodl et al., “Larger Amygdala Volumes in First Depressive Episode as Compared to Recurrent Major Depression and Healthy Control Subjects,”
Biological Psychiatry
53, no. 4 (February 2003): 338–44.

Y. Matsuoka, “A Volumetric Study of Amygdala in Cancer Survivors with Intrusive Recollections,”
Biological Psychiatry
54, no. 7 (October 2003): 736–43.

E. Yoshikawa, “Prefrontal Cortex and Amygdala Volume in First Minor or Major Depressive Episode After Cancer Diagnosis,”
Biological Psychiatry
59, 8 (April 2006): 707–12.

Ara Norenzayan et al., “Mortality Salience and Religion: Divergent Effects on the Defense of Cultural Worldviews for the Religious and the Non-Religious,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
39 (2009): 101–13.

Author's note:
Here is a further selection of studies that illustrate the way human beings, regardless of belief systems, seek to ally themselves with preferred groups and reject members of
out
groups without analysis.

A. Olsson et al., “The Role of Social Groups in the Persistence of Learned Fear,”
Science
309, no. 5735 (July 2005): 785–87.

N. T. Feather, “Acceptance and Rejection of Arguments in Relation to Attitude Strength, Critical Ability and Intolerance of Inconsistency,”
Journal Abnormal and Social Psychology
69, (1964): 127–36.

A. Miller, ed.,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
(Guilford Press, 2004).

C. A. Insio et al., “Conformity and Group Size: The Concern with Being Right and the Concern with Being Liked,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
11, no. 1 (March 1985): 41–50.

Mark Robert Waldman, Interviews, January, February, and March, 2009. Like Newberg, Waldman was generous with his time.

Waldman is an Associate Fellow at Newberg's Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is now adjunct faculty in the Executive MBA Program at Loyola Marymount University, where he teaches communication strategies based on their collaborative experiments.

“Father Thomas Keating—Centering Prayer: Its History and Importance,” April 13, 2009, from Ken Wilber's
Integral Options Café,
accessed August 22, 2010, http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2009/04/father-thomas-keating-centering-prayer_13.html

J. R. Carey et al., “Neuroplasticity Promoted by Task Complexity,”
Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews
33, no. 1 (January 2005): 24–31.

Chris McDougall,
Born to Run
(Knopf, 2009): 145–46.

C. Trageser, “Transcendental Steps (or How I Learned to Love Running Without an iPod),”
Runner's World
(May 2010).

T. Wright, “The Spirit of the Running People: Three Cultures You Should Know,”
Vagabondish
, accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.vagabondish.com/running-cultures/

Dean Radin, Interview, October 2009.

R. J. Davidson, “Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation,”
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
176 (September 2007).

A. Lutz, “Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
no. 46 (2004): 16369–373.

R. J. Davidson, “Empirical Explorations of Mindfulness: Conceptual and Methodological Conundrums,”
Emotion
10, no. 1 (2010): 8–11.

Author's note
: The material describing how science might teach us what kind of God is most beneficial to us, neurologically, is found in chapter 7 of Newberg,
How God Changes Your Brain
. It's also something I discussed with Mark Robert Waldman and Andrew Newberg.

“1000 Rabbis Warn: Open Homosexuality in the Military Is a Disaster and May Cause Further Natural Disasters,”
Christian Newswire,
Contact listed as Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Spokesman, Rabbinical Alliance of America.

J. F. Harris, “God Gave U.S. ‘What We Deserve,' Falwell Says,”
Washington
Post
, September 14, 2001.

J. A. Dusek et al., “Genomic Counter-Stress Changes Induced by the Relaxation Response,”
Plos One
3, no. 7 (2008), accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002576.

R. Chari et al., “Effect of Active Smoking on the Human Bronchial Epithelium Transcriptome,”
BMC Genomics
(2007), accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471–2164/8/297

Author's note:
Smalley's site (http://www.suesmalley.com/topics/mindfulness/) provides a good introduction to her work. Also see her collection of mindfulness meditation research at: http://www.mindfulexperience.org/publications.php)

S. L. Smalley,
Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness
(Da Capo, Lifelong Books, 2010).

Patricia Fitzgerald, “What Inspired A Scientist to Open a Meditation Center at UCLA?”
Huffington Post
, July 15, 2009, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-patricia-fitzgerald/what-inspired-a-scientist_b_228356.html

Author's note:
I find Hitchens's comments on Buddhism particularly instructive in illustrating the degree to which the New Atheism can lead to throwing the baby out with the bathwater—dismissing spirituality along with dogmatic religion. Hitchens, in fact, said this of Buddhism in his own
God Is Not Great
: “Those who become bored by conventional ‘Bible' religions, and seek ‘enlightenment' by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning. They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals” (p. 204).

David Adam, “Plan for Dalai Lama Lecture Angers Neuroscientists,”
Guardian
, July 27, 2005, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/27/research.highereducation

Gardiner Harris, “For N.I.H. Chief, Issues of Identity and Culture,”
New York
Times
, October 5, 2009, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06nih.html

Andrew Brown, “Sam Harris and Francis Collins,” Andrew Brown's blog,
Guardian
, August 2, 2009, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/jul/31/religion-atheism-harris-collins-witchcraft

Jon Hamilton, “The Links Between the Dalai Lama and Neuroscience,” November 11, 2005, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5008565

Marc Kaufman, “Dalai Lama Gives Talk on Science,”
Washington
Post
, November 13, 2005, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/12/AR2005111201080.html

CHAPTER 8: THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

T. E. Lawrence,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(Wordsworth Editions, 1997): 7.

Most of the material here was gathered at the Lucidity Institute's March 2010 workshop on the big island of Hilo, Hawaii.

J. Horgan, “
Inception
Is a Clunker, but Lucid Dreaming Is Cool,”
Cross Check
blog,
Scientific American
(August 2, 2010), accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=inception-is-a-clunker-but-lucid-dr–2010–08–02

Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking,”
New York
Times
, September 23, 2007, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/fashion/16lucid.html

T. W. Rinpoche,
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
(Snow Lion Publications, 1998).

Aristotle,
On Dreams
, Part III, accessed November 1, 2010, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/dreams.html

H. Saint-Denys,
Dreams and How to Guide Them
(trans., Duckworth, 1982).

C. M. Den Blanken, “An Historical View of Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them . . . ,”
Lucidity Letter
7 (December 1988), accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.spiritwatch.ca/anhis.htm.

F. van Eeden, “A Study of Dreams,”
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
26 (1913), 431–61, accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.lucidity.com/vanEeden.html.

Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold,
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
(Ballantine, 1990): 13–15 (lucid dreaming and waking life), 23–24 (effort to scientifically verify lucid dreaming), 27 (machines malfunction), 39 (unusual things in real life), 40 (reading as a state test, digital watch), 61–64 (testing the dream/waking states).

Jeff Warren,
The Head Trip
(Random House, 2007): 121–23, 213–15 (visualization studies, neuroplasticity).

S. LaBerge et al., “Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
52 (1981): 727–32.

Author's note:
LaBerge's story of academic disinterest, or active suppression, was shared in Hawaii. I checked the PubMed database for myself in August 2010 and indeed, page after page of the 1981 issue in which LaBerge published his findings is available—but not his article.

Also, the informed reader should know that in the 1970s British researcher Keith Hearne was concurrently working with lucid dreamer Alan Worsley to establish the validity of the lucid dream.

R. Stephenson et al., “Prolonged Deprivation of Sleep-Like Rest Raises Metabolic Rate in the Pacific Beetle Cockroach,”
Journal of Experimental Biology
210 (2007): 2540–47.

T. Yokogawa et al., “Characterization of Sleep in Zebrafish and Insomnia in Hypocretin Receptor Mutants,”
PLoS Biol
5, no. 10 (October 2007).

T. L. Lee-Chiong,
Sleep
(Wiley-Liss, 2005): 13–16.

J. D. Payne, “Sleep, Dreams, and Memory Consolidation,”
Learning and Memory,
11 (2004) 671–78.

R. D. Cartwright, “The Role of Sleep in Changing Our Minds: A Psychologist's Discussion of Papers on Memory Reactivation and Consolidation in Sleep,”
Learning and Memory
11 (November 2004): 660–63.

F. Crick, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” Nature Publishing Group 304, 5922, (1983): 111–14.

Daniel Williams, “While You Were Sleeping,”
Time,
April 5, 2007, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1606872,00.html

Hara Estroff Marano, “Why We Dream,”
Psychology Today
(March 1, 2005), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200504/why-we-dream

Jim Horne,
Sleepfaring
(Oxford Univ. Press, 2007): 66–67, 182.

A. Revonuso, “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming,”
Behavioral and Brian Sciences
23,(2000): 677-901.

O. B. Ramsay and A. Rocke, “Kekulé's Dreams: Separating the Fiction from the Fact,”
Chemistry in Britain
20 (1984): 1093–94.

D. M. Locke, “The Putative Purity of Science,”
Science as Writing
(Yale Univ. Press, 1992): 133–66.

Paul Strathern,
Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements
(Thomas Dunne Books, 2000): 285–92.

U. Weiss, R.A. Brown, “An Overlooked Parallel to Kekule's Dream: The Discovery of the Chemical Transmission Of Nerve Impulses by Otto Loewi,”
Journal of Chemical Education
64, no. 9 (1987): 770.

J. van Gijin, “Book Review: The Chemical Languages of the Nervous System: History of Scientists and Substances,”
New England Journal of Medicine
355 (November 2006): 2266–67.

George K. York III, “Otto Loewi: Dream Inspires a Nobel-Winning Experiment on Neurotransmission,”
Neurology Today
4, no. 12 (December 2004): 54–55.

S. Krippner et al.,
Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them
(State Univ. of New York Press, 2002): 24.

Mark Blagrove, “Scripts and the Structuralist Analysis of Dreams,”
Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams
2, no. 1 (March 1992): 23–38.

D. Barrett, “The ‘Committee of Sleep,' ”
Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams
3, no. 2 (1993), accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.asdreams.org/journal/articles/barrett3–2.htm

D. Pick and L. Roper,
Dreams and History
(Routledge, 2004): 159–71.