The NATURAL HISTORY OF EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE

1. The NATURAL HISTORY OF EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE Art & Organism 2012 Neil Greenberg Departments of Ecology, Medicine, and Psychology University of Tennessee, Knoxville God in the Brain

2. BIOLOGY of EXPERIENCE DEVELOPMENT – ECOLOGY – EVOLUTION – PHYSIOLOGY God in the Brain Tiffany, “Education” (1890)

3. PSYCHOLOGY of EXPERIENCE Project for a Scientific Psychology – Freud 1895… God in the Brain Tiffany, “Education” (1890)

4. EXPERIENCE Common Extraordinary Anomalous God in the Brain

5. EXPERIENCE • How “different” do experiences have to be from the mundane to be regarded as “anomalous” ?? • Is a Spiritual, or Mystical, or Religious exeperience anomalous? God in the Brain

6. EXPERIENCE Common Extraordinary Anomalous God in the Brain

7. KNOWLEDGE How do you know … … anything ? “we create connections!” Connections create a “feeling of knowing” God in the Brain

8. CONNECTIONS create PATTERNSmemories are patterns of neuronal activation God in the Brain

9. We can look for connections, or connections can find us. We were born to create connections ... From the beginning we see how things are put together, we tinker & tweak .. a little reverse engineering to see if we really understand how something is put together and thereby arrogate the control of nature, the power of creation God in the Brain

10. FEELING of KNOWING Is immediate, intuitive ... Gnosis Agnosis Anosognosia Hypergnosia God in the Brain

11. EXPERIENCE • We can perceive and be unaware (agnosisa) • We can be aware of things we do not perceive (hallucinations) God in the Brain

12. KNOWLEDGE Agnostic Gnostic Hypergnostic God in the Brain

13. we are developmentally biased (2) we rely on words PROBLEMS words both enable and bias understanding words “. . . are the instruments of thought; they form the channel along which thought flows; they are the moulds in which thought is shaped.” --Aldous Huxley

14. Words both enable and bias understanding "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world…“ -- LeraBoroditsky

15. Names of God • EL ("mighty, strong, prominent") • ELOHIM (a plural noun) • ADONAI(Lord in our English Bibles (plural of "adon“) • JEHOVAH: (Yahweh, the covenant name from "to be,” "The Self-Existent One," "I AM WHO I AM”)

16. “There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself, and the rapture with which it fills you. Dostoyevski Experience

17. Religious and Spiritual Experience • To Gadamer experience may seem obscure and self-organizing; but we can speak of • anomalous experiences such as • perceiving things that are not there (false positives, type 1 errors) or • not perceiving things that are there (false negatives, type 2 errors) • In the extreme, this is pareidolia or apophenia involving the finding of images or sounds, connections or meaning, in ambiguous field of stimuli.

18. Religious and Spiritual Experience • Spiritual experience: very broad; is pursuit of such an experience motivated by narcissism? (Maybe but it isn’t selfish) • Religious experience: within a faith tradition • Mystical experience: related to the pursuit and (hopeful) resolution of mystery (at an extreme: the mysteriumtremendensof Rudolph Otto) • Scientific experience: corroborated, validated – not illusory, hallucinated, or mistaken

19. GRADUAL Narrow attention, “partial response information before the processing of a problem has been completed.” SUDDEN Diffuse attention Greater right hemisphere resting state activity Recruits right hemisphere association areas involved in semantic cognition Experience and INSIGHT

20. Ineffable:defies expression, cannot be described in words. Noetic:gives insight and knowledge into deep truths. Transient: brief and cannot be accurately remembered, though easily recognized if it recurs. Passivity:facilitated by preparation, but once begun it seems out of one’s control … as if controlled by a superior power William James 1918 mystical experienceepiphany, insight

21. The language of extraordinary experiences” • Is Buddha's "awakening“ Jung's "individuation?" Is the "luminosity" of the Tibetan Book of the Dead the same as the Quaker's "inner light" or Jacob Boehme's "light which is the heart of God" or the "living flame" of Saint John of the Cross? • Is Saint Paul's "peace that passeth understanding" the same as Thomas Merton's "transcendental unconscious"?

22. The language of extraordinary experiences” “mystical experiences” Could Blake's "divine intuition" be linked to Gurdjieff's"objective consciousness" or Brother Lawrence's "unclouded vision" or Arthur Deikman's"deautomatization"? How are Arthur Clarke's "overmind" and Emerson's "Oversoul" related? Could Colin Wilson's "intensity experience," Eliade's"shamanic ecstasy," and Saint Teresa's "ecstasy" be the same as the LSD explorer's "moment of truth" ??

23. The language of extraordinary exexperiences” “mystical experiences” or what Julian Silverman (writing of acute schizophrenia) called "the oceanic fusion of higher and lower referential processes"? Might all these be a manifestation of part of the neurophysiological "drive-arrest-release sequence in biogenic amine inhibitory systems, releasing temporal lobe limbic, hippocampal -septal hypersynchrony that lasts for long periods of afterdischarge?“

24. The language of extraordinary exexperiences” “mystical experiences” IS Dostoevski’s "eternal harmony" the same as Maslow's "peak experience” or the Zen Buddhist's "satori" or the yogi's "samadhi"?

25. “experiences” of scientists "The personal participation of the knower in the knowledge he believes himself to possess takes place within a flow of passion. We recognize intellectual beauty as a guide to discovery and as a mark of truth" (Polanyi 1958:300)

26. experiences of scientists "It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment a part of the truth I sought..."

27. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . . Current experiences are BIASED by past experiences ..

28. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . .

29. COGNITIVE CHANGEevokes more or less stress Conceptually, this also bears on the ORIGIN of BELIEFS God in the Brain

30. EXPERIENCE God in the Brain

31. EXPERIENCE INPUT INTEGRATION OUTPUT God in the Brain

32. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. -- Albert Einstein

33. Seeking mystery exploration, curiosity • We have an innate NEED to enlarge our experience; this begins without regard for obvious utility, and tends to taper off when costs of exploring exceed utility (biological fitness). • When circumstances enable a cost-effective continuation of exploration, it will reach the limits of biological constraint both physically and conceptually.

34. Seeking mystery exploration, curiosity • Stress associated with perceptions of needs-not-met “energizes” motivation and can elevate a real or perceived need to high intensity and seeming urgency • One element of stress-reduction is the resolution of the cognitive dissonance that can be evoked by the experience of constraint. Constraints are revealed by confrontation with unsolvable mystery.

35. MYSTERY Two neurobehavioral phenomena are at work here; the first is 1. The need for accurate models of the world within us and confidence in our beliefs. 2. This derives from the “essential tension” between “reality testing” and the fining validated percepts into a narrative: “story telling”

36. High confidence = “truth” Confidence in a belief is grounded is grounded in the interaction of two reciprocal processes: • CORRESPONDENCE: our sensory experience of the world. Does it match reality? [“reality testing”] (Novelty evokes stress – it is anxiogenic – it evokes the stress response) • COHERENCE: our reasoning experience of our sensations. Do they fit in with all our other experiences? [“Story-telling”] (Familiarity mitigates stress – it is anxiolytic – it relieves stress)

37. MAIN POINTS TO COME • THE BIOLOGY of MYSTERY • DEEP MYSTERY and BIOLOGICAL NEEDS • INFOVORES: the NEED to KNOW • WE ARE BORN INTO MYSTERY • THE MYSTIC in the CRIB • STRESS and DISSONANCE

38. We must come to termsin an environment of perpetual change and apparent paradox We are “wired” to seek stability HOMEOSTASIS: "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" –Claude Bernard God in the Brain

39. We must come to termsin an environment of perpetual change and apparent paradox Seeking stability andnovelty, like seeking to minimize stress andexperience stress ... reflects the wisdom of the body in maintaining a developmentally and environmentally appropriate level of growth and alertness. Like relaxation and exercise: the maintaining of “tone” (as in muscle tone) assures an organism rapidly ready to take action to cope with the exigencies of its environment. God in the Brain

40. We must come to termsin an environment of perpetual change and apparent paradox For example, We are “wired” to seek stability "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" –Claude Bernard We are “wired” to explore, to seek novelty “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”-- Little Gidding God in the Brain

41. INTRODUCTION : SOME ASSUMPTIONS • PHYSIOLOGY of SEEKING and SOLVING MYSTERY is • Regulated by emotions: “states evolved to improve the Darwinian fitness of individuals as they seek resources and avoid dangers” (Nesse & Berridge 1997) • Guided by pleasure and pain: Recent … studies have demonstrated the important role of the opioid and dopamine systems in modulating both pain and pleasure.” Leknes & Tracey 2008) God in the Brain

42. SCIENCE and SPIRITUALITY As with all motives, when meeting this need is thwarted, a primary STRESS RESPONSE is evoked in proportion to the mystery’s perceived urgency … an affective phenomenon that is interpreted in the context in which it emerges… Among the key effects of stress is enhanced sensory and cognitive abilities Link for DUALITIES and DICHOTOMIES God in the Brain

43. INTRODUCTION : SOME ASSUMPTIONS • HOW IMPORTANT IS THE NEED FOR CONFIDENCE ? • You can “let the mystery be” or • Perceive the SEEKING and SOLVING of MYSTERY urgent enough to evoke the coordinated STRESS responses • STRESS will retask, reorchestrate, and regulate specific functional centers of the brain, leading to different choices and actions. God in the Brain

44. NEUROLOGICAL CONNECTIONS : ALZHEIMER’S • Exploratory eye movements are diminshed in Alzheimer’s (Daffner et al., 1992) • The novelty P3 event-related potential (ERP) ... anindex of the neural processes involved in allocating attentionto novel events [is significantly diminished in Alzheimer’s] (Daffner et al., 1992) God in the Brain

45. NEUROLOGICAL CONNECTIONS : EPILEPSY • Aura” indicates site of intense electrochemical activity preceding a seizure and often produces a “feeling.” • Temporal Lobe Epilepsy God in the Brain

46. An Aside about Stress The brain structures and circuitry of the stress response -- mainly the autonomic nervous system – are always mildly in play – like muscle tone, autonomic tone keeps us ready to act and prevents atrophy … all coping with dissonance is at least a mild stress. If more stressful episodes are too frequent, too great or sustained for too long, the subsequent reallocation of energy can lead to “diseases of adaptation.” God in the Brain

47. Modularitychecks and balances FRONTAL LOBES: concentration; incr activity during meditation MID-TEMPORAL LOBE: Affect … awe, joy INFERIOR TEMPORAL LOBE: image focussed meditation ANGULAR GYRUS: response to key words PARIETAL LOBE: activity maintains boundaries God in the Brain

48. “the boundaries of my body dissolved, I felt one with everything” Left temporal lobe stimulation creates a “sense of self” … when the left temporal lobe is stimulated but the right temporal lobe is quiet, the sensation is that of A sensed presence that is not you. God in the Brain

49. “the boundaries of my body dissolved, I felt one with everything” superior parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain (orientation association area) processes information about space and time and the orientation of the body in space. right orientation area deprived of input, defaults to a sense of infinite space. The left orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited body. God in the Brain

50. IMPORTANCE of REALITY TESTING Acceptance of experience that doesn’t correspond to external reality (False positive (confident match with memories); Type I Error; gullible, trusting) hallucinations; Bonnet’s Syndrome (filling in scotoma); dismorphic body; pareidolia.