Exploring the Mind-Brain interface
The quest for consciousness has many brave seekers. An enthusiastic VSO on campus, Stanford Conscious Living, delved into such explorations on a relaxed Saturday evening on Jan 28, 6:30pm at the Graduate Community Center with an audience of about 40+ students. The dialogue was led by Dr. Guruprasad Raghavan, Co-founder and Lead Research Scientist at yurts.ai.
Many of us often grapple internally with the significance of free will versus determinism in our mundane lives. Such debates often start out playfully among curious freshmen leading to a feeling of gradual stoicism as banter turns philosophical. Our internal, subjective experiences (qualia) inform and update our external world. Do our conscious and subjective experiences have a basis? Do such experiences and memories have a zip code? Who is the self in this world?
Does free will exist? Perhaps exerting some free will could help us solve problems. This is exactly what Jeffrey Schwartz and his team at UCLA previously discovered with a four-step treatment for Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Clinical trials showed that a relatively simple practice of exerting free will for even just two months could significantly decrease OCD symptoms. PET scans showed significant reduction in misfiring in the “C-shaped” caudate nucleus circuitry of the human brain. The treatment included “relabelling” an identified thought that is obsessive, “re-attributing” it to the neural circuitry but not their “true self”, “re-focusing” their thoughts on pleasant experiences and habits, and finally “re-valuing” the status of that obsessive thought identified initially. This fascinating experiment demonstrated how the conscious will influences firing in the neural circuitry and opened further avenues in science. The question thus arises: Could we have a holistic framework for patients where several mental disorders could be treated with integrating both the brain and mind in its treatment plan?
“That the brain influences mental health and behavior is well-embraced and quantified in the modern scientific world, but the reverse effect is a central aspect of Eastern philosophy and wisdom. I always wondered whether this is just ancient wisdom or do we have any concrete scientific evidence”, commented Khonika Gope, a PhD student and a lead organizer of the Stanford Conscious Living club. Dr. Raghavan showed evidence of this bi-directional relationship of the brain and mind. It has been tested in a mesmerizing study led by Pascual Leone where subjects were divided into two groups and a control set. While one group (A) learned to play the predefined set of piano keys conventionally by physically pressing the keys, the other group (B) had to just consciously think of playing the piano piece without moving their digits. The part of the brain coding and firing for finger movements, called the motor cortex was also mapped and analyzed. Interestingly, human subjects in both groups A and B had significant changes in their cortical motor map while the control did not. This observation clearly showed how directed mental effort can alter the brain aka the underlying physical neural substrate. This leads to yet another related question.
“Can mental states or the mind exert causal control on the brain? It would be useful to investigate how conscious redirection of attention could impact and potentially alter brain activity. Testing this hypothesis would be a unique opportunity to go beyond the surface as most brain-mind models neglect this aspect”, says Dr. Bhavika Mam, a Postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Raghavan discussed different brain-mind models in his talk. The ‘Functionalism’ model denies the separate existence of the mind and attributes all qualia to brain activity. ‘Epiphenomenalism’ states that the dynamic brain produces the mind, but the mind cannot affect the brain. There have been some elegant experiments suggesting what has been imprinted in the old Eastern texts on meditation and Yoga all along - that the mind can also affect the brain. Old may be gold. This brings us to a potential winner, the model of ‘Emergent Materialism’ where the mind, a product of the brain, can have a top-down impact on the physical brain. The top-down control in communication and fate regulation may not be unique to the brain. Recent experiments led by Mike Levine’s group at Tufts University have demonstrated a top-down control of developmental fate in the flatworm (D. japonica). Instead of manipulating genes in the worm, altering the bioelectric communication between ion-channels caused regeneration to change course and produce a headless or two-headed planaria.
Thus, ‘Emergent Materialism’ is a holistic model that was delicately re-constructed during the talk by surveying key experiments and observations across the field of neuroscience and developmental biology. A lively Q&A followed for about an hour post the seminar. The questions were diverse ranging from discussing experimental techniques in flatworms and the human brain to applying this Eastern philosophical framework in our daily lives. Many students eagerly signed up to join tutorials that Stanford Conscious Living conducts to study such philosophically rich and practically valuable texts of wisdom, such as Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. Some of them are interested in pursuing related questions to research modern experiments from an Eastern lens and assisting in the endeavor of developing realistic models.
We are in the age of data and being in the Bay Area gives us access to top notch research and technological facilities. We are yet to fully understand a wide gamut of phenomena in the physical world such as mind, consciousness, meaning, life, and causality. Integrating knowledge systems and shifting perspectives could help us uncover such secrets and the key to better mental and physical health.
