by Paul Singh
One reason believers in alternative medicine often give for not being able to do more research is the lack of financial resources to conduct double-blind studies. It turns out that hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into such research from private and government grants, but the research always ends up being conducted by those who already firmly believe in alternatives medicine. They always come up with positive data through self-serving, flawed and fudged, sub-standard research, the kind of research that can be used to prove almost anything because it is based on data mining and cherry picking anecdotal evidence. Some modes of treatments in alternative medicine defy basic laws of physics and chemistry and are primarily based on wishful thinking, not to mention that some of these modes of alternative treatments are unambiguously fraudulent and deceptive marketing hoaxes to fleece the naive of their money.
Our Brains and Our Beliefs
My disappointment with mind-body medicine motivated me to embark on a new journey to study how the human brain works with regard to belief systems we have, such as the Hindu mind-body connection paradigm that has taken millions by storm in the last three decades. One of my keen interests was to find out if the mind is separate from the brain. Either that was true or false; it could not be both. This, I thought, was something important to figure out because most of these alternative forms of medicine were based on age-old religious traditions of spirit and soul, chi, prana, animus, or some sort of life-force or consciousness. If the mind was not separate from the brain, I hypothesized, then the brain was responsible for producing the illusion of an independent consciousness. On the other hand, if it could actually be scientifically proven that the mind was independent of the brain, then that would certainly be something worth knowing. Either way, it was worth investigating.
Consciousness of Dreams
My interest in research on the human brain peaked with some incidental findings in 1998. In the early hours of the morning on July fourth when I was in my final REM sleep of the night (called waking dreams), I dreamt that I was pumping air into the tire of my bicycle with an air-pump and that I could actually hear the air going into the tire. Some noise woke me up and I realized that my ears heard the air coming out of my nostrils in the early quiet hours of the morning and that my brain constructed a quick story around it in my dream. It turns out that the time between each pump was the same as the time between each exhalation of air—about twenty per minutes. The sound of the air coming out of the nose, it turned out, sounded the same to the ears as the air coming out of air pump. I consider this day independence day because this discovery, which appeared to be insignificant at the time, changed my life. It made me curious to see what else the brain was capable of doing during dream states. It also used to intrigue me when I started automatically waking up at 6:29 in the morning after I had set the alarm set for 6.30. Was it my consciousness that automatically woke me up, I wondered. How could it be that the consciousness that was dead for the most part for most of the night brought me back into consciousness? Was there a time clock in my brain or was it simply my brain chemistry. It opened up a flood of questions. It turns out that we do have a time clock in our brain, which, I later studied at great length.
These experiences motivated me to start observing very keenly the behavior of my own brain and that of others. I began to pay more attention to the functioning of my own brain. I discovered that if I fell asleep with the TV on and then I suddenly woke up from a dream; my dream had incorporated the content of the TV program into its own dream narrative. This sort of thing fascinated me and I started keeping a journal recording my discoveries.
My sleep apnea used to worsen in spring due to congestion caused by severe seasonal allergies. I would often dream that I was inside a narrow pipe or trapped deep under the ground or even choking in smoke close to a fire—any narrative that would explain the dearth of breathing air. So my brain would often construct different stories in my dreams to build a scenario around the fact that I had trouble breathing during my REM sleep. I wondered what other narratives my brain was able to manufacture from the stimuli it received through the five senses during my dreams. I opened an experimental lab in the back of my doctor’s office where I started testing all my senses’ input into the brain during sleep. I put on a YouTube video on a cell phone next to me, a video that I knew by heart. I noted again how my brain would incorporate into my dream sentences from the video and construct a narrative around that sensory input. Such experimental findings about dreaming often reminded me of a commercial I once saw on TV. The commercial goes like this: A female with a faucet of “Kohler Brand” in her hands walks up to the table in a meeting of the company’s executives, places the faucet on the table and says, “Build me a house around it.” That is what the brain does, I thought. It builds a coherent story around the bare minimal input from any one of the five senses. It was a profound discovery for me that set me on a life-long journey to understand the brain and its different states of consciousness.
I had a well-trained researcher put a piece of dissolvable candy in my gaping mouth (a common sign of obstructive sleep apnea) and then wake me up within the next minute during my REM sleep and ask me about the dream I was having. I wanted to find out how the brain receives information from the tongue’s sense of taste during dream states. Sure enough, enjoying sweet candy had become part of the narrative of my dream. The dream would often fritter away within moments of my describing it, and sometimes I could not even finish describing it. I was curious about the other senses such as touch, smell and sight, but I was more curious about stimuli to the brain such as the stimuli to the brain from the visceral organs and stimuli from the brain itself. I had the same results when I experimented with the two other senses of touch and smell. These experiments taught me that the brain’s primary source of learning was the five senses and that it constructed a narrative by fabricating a story based on its previously stored memories that are embedded in the brain as fingerprints.
One day I woke up from a dream because of a muscle spasm in my right thigh; in my dream, I had just convinced everyone else around me that I hurt myself while at the gym the day before. Of course, I realized when I woke up that my spasm had nothing to do with me getting hurt at the gym. This made me think that the brain manufactures narratives around not just the external stimuli from the senses but around stimuli that arrive from any source, external or internal, including those from visceral organs. Then I had a bizarre dream that woke me up. In my dream, I was trying very hard to stay awake while sitting in my living room sofa. Trying to stay awake was painful because I just could not, no matter how hard I tried. I fell back asleep within a millisecond. Trying to stay awake gave me a severe headache and dizziness. It felt good when I fell right back asleep and it scared me when I tried to wake myself up. The scare woke me up and I realized that I was doing all this in a dream and that I was actually sleeping in my bedroom. The dream was so scary that I could not fall back asleep for a while that night. My interpretation of this dream was that the stimuli came from the brain’s own mental activity and that my brain was also able to turn this self-stimulus into a convincing narrative.
I have become convinced that almost any phenomenon that has something to do with the brain can be understood only in light of understanding how the brain works. For example, interpreting any dream in terms of the brain’s electrical activity during sleep makes perfect sense and it explains why the dreams are vague and incoherent most of the time. The incoherence of the stories in the dreams originates from the fact that the brain, which is in a screen-saver mode, is susceptible to random electrical activity that taps into stored memories and randomly stitches them together. We cannot read or write or even speak in dreams (except in pathological conditions) because the participation of vision is necessary to do certain tasks. So the brain invents narratives to make coherent sense of this randomness. That tells us that consciousness may be buried in the memories but full consciousness is not possible without the active
involvement of the senses and sense perception—senses that gave rise to the memories in the first place. Memories are nothing but the long-term results of the five senses’ interaction with the external world.
If we ignore the understanding that we have of the brain’s role in the production of our dreams, then we will very quickly resort to religious and superstitious interpretations of dreams. Two examples from the Bible of interpreting dreams are Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of the Pharaoh in Egypt and the dream interpretations of Daniel in Babylon. Such interpretations are the stuff of legendary fiction and religious superstition, but most religious people in the world still believe such biblical stories literally happened. Have you ever had a dream where your brain was able to stitch together remotely related things from your entire life into a coherent story that disappeared within a second or two of your waking up? That is because random electrical activity in the brain combined unrelated memories from your past life and stitched them together in a way your consciousness never could have done. So you are only partially conscious while you are in a dream state as opposed to full awareness while you are awake.
Wakeful Consciousness
It turns out, as we will soon see, that we are not as conscious as we think even when we are awake. So what about wakefulness? Although I was already convinced that the brain and the five senses are the only sources of our knowledge about the world, I had to conduct research to verify or refute my hypothesis. I turned my attention to the behavior of the brain during wakeful hours. Then I suddenly realized that I had been experiencing similar phenomena all my life in broad daylight and did not know it. Often the brain hears or perceives things and makes up stories around what it experiences through the five senses while we are wide awake because regions of the brain that deal with reality-testing are actively engaged during wakefulness. Our brains usually construct a model of the world which is consistent with reality and is often accurate. But this is true only when the brain is dealing with stable situations and objects, situations that have an element of constancy. However, the moment our brain encounters a situation, an object, or an experience which is out of the ordinary or lacks constancy, it fails to see the world as it is and instead draws conclusions based on previous experiences that are stored in its memory. This is because the brain constantly compares every sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste with what it is already familiar with. It has literally hundreds of thousands of patterns built inside it, perhaps millions, with which to make sense of external reality. Meanings are drawn out of the comparisons with the data already stored in the brain. Previously re-enforced neural circuits already embedded in the form of memories are like millions of different fingerprints against which the brain tries to the come up with the closest match before describing what it perceives as a “new experience.”
These brain patterns are formed very rapidly when an infant is learning with all five senses working in overdrive. The formation of new patterns slows down as we grow older. The older we are, the more we depend on the previously established pattern recognitions. Pattern recognition becomes the mainstay while the need for formation of new patterns is relegated into the background and becomes less useful as the brain grows to adult size. Once the brain has a sufficient data base to make sense of nearly every situation or experience it will ever encounter, the new pattern formations become more redundant and less fruitful. Nearly all pattern formations necessary for survival have already occurred by the time the brain reaches adult size.
Because our interpretation of the world depends on the pre-built patterns in the brain, the brain is often fooled if the information coming in through the senses deviates even slightly from the expected patterns. This only adds to the limitations that our senses already have compared to other animals that can see better, hear better, smell better, or taste better. We did not evolve to see as much of reality as some animals have. For example, we can see only the smallest fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Similarly, we can hear only a narrow range of decibel sounds. Neurobiologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists have been able to describe literally thousands of such situations in which our brains are fooled because of consistent lack of constancy of stimuli in normal day-to-day experiences. As a result, we are often fooled by illusions—as the following examples from my own examples from my own personal experience will show.
When I come down the steep zigzag hill during my morning walks, I always see people coming towards me; it turns out, I later realized, that they are really walking away from me. I brought two other people with me on two different days to verify the phenomenon and noted the others had the same illusion. Perhaps two or more factors were contributing to this illusion—the steep downward slope of the hill and the zigzag descent. One day, on the same walk down the hill, I noted that a crane’s arm at a distance was coming down to pick up a load. It turned out that the arm was not actually moving. It was I who was moving. Another day, this arm seemed to be going upwards as if to reach the top of the building. It turned out that the arm was not moving upwards but swiveling on its fulcrum. This was a 3-D illusion. Again I confirmed these illusory phenomena by replicating this observation with assistance from other research associates and my office staff.
Here is a simpler example that we all have experienced at one time or another in our lives. We all fool ourselves into thinking that the full moon is several times bigger when it is at the horizon against structures, trees, or buildings. This is because our brains are used to constancy and when it doesn’t experience constancy it compensates for it by reinterpreting what is sees to conform to what it expects to see.
One breezy, cold, and drizzly evening when I was taking a walk with my ten-year-old son, bundled up in our wool turtle-necks, he looked up and asked me why the moon was moving so fast. I told him that it was the clouds that were moving, not the moon. He caught me by pointing out that I had always told him that the moon moved around the earth. “How come you are contradicting yourself?” the snappy lad asked. This led me to explain to my son how we were oblivious to relative motions. I explained to him that not only were the clouds moving, but the moon was moving around the earth and the earth was moving too. In fact, the earth was moving very fast, and we didn’t even know it. Furthermore, the earth went around the Sun and the Sun in turn sped around the super massive black hole at an unbelievable speed along with its entire family of planets. Every second our position in space and time changes dramatically and we are clueless. We can see and feel none of this. “That is why we do science,” I told my son. We need science to understand things that we don’t ordinarily understand just through observation with our five senses. The senses’ interaction with the world is also what becomes synthesized into higher brain functions such as thought. If a mistake occurs at the level of the senses, then this mistake gets carried over to the higher level brain functions, just like a mathematical mistake in the first steps gets carried over and results in an erroneous answer. We must then test our experience through objective reality testing to learn anything at all. Reasoning alone does not cut it.
It is scientific methodology alone combined with the brain’s own logic and critical thinking that can compensate for the foibles and limitations of the human brain. No methodology other than science can correct the illusions and delusions of our brains. This is what has placed science above everything else. Scientists would rather live with uncertainty than take refuge in a certainty based on wishful thinking.
We see a picture on television which is not a picture; it is a collection of tens of thousands of dark and light pixels. A 3D- movie in “Soaring over California” at Disneyland can completely fool all our senses. Simply ask yourself, “Can I see behind my head or under my own seat, the chair that I am sitting on?” This sounds like an oxymoron, but it is rather a serious question and an important one. It shows in the most simplistic way that we have very poor or sometimes no awareness of our surroundings at any given moment in time, let alone of something as complex as
our thoughts.
Some artists can draw the picture of a well on a pavement that will give us the illusion of a real well. The illusion gives us the impression that we will fall into the well if we keep on going straight, so instead we go around it, even though we know that what we see is most likely an illusion, because they don’t dig wells on city streets. If there were no clues from the surroundings confirming this illusion, one would really be convinced that this was a real well. There are tens of thousands of optical illusions such as these that we experience daily without realizing it. An artist can put smudges of paint on a canvas and our brain matches it with prior patterns stored in the brain, and all of a sudden every smudge looks like a face or a building or a structure well defined.
Psychologists have also devised optical illusions that exploit the known ways in which our brain processes information. There are perspective illusions which exploit the ways in which our brain can construct three-dimensional images out of the two-dimensional input. Any three- dimensional movie is a real life example of this. There are optical illusions that are based on relative shades and sizes of objects. There are illusions that are based on ambiguous stimuli, in which the brain can construct reality in more than one way and switch back and forth between different constructions. There are after-image optical illusions that the brain can create by adapting to lighting and color.
