Richard G. Petty, MD

Nonlocal Interactions and Entangled Neurons

“Nonlocal” has become a bit of a buzzword recently, so let me explain what it means and why it so very important. It is an idea first proposed by the Irish physicist, J.S. Bell, in the 1960s, that at the microscopic quantum level particles that have been in contact remain permanently connected.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory, but for a long time seemed no more than a curiosity, the effect being infrequent and unstable, and only occurring at the quantum level. But then data started coming in from surprising sources: The “distant viewing” experiments of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in the 1970s, and work reported from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. Then some exquisitely clear-cut research by Dean Radin, first while he was at the University of Nevada, and now at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and finally data on distant healing. Together these have really made it seem very clear that these nonlocal effects do indeed occur in the world of large physical objects. Not surprisingly, this research is so important for our understanding of the world, that it has all been viciously attacked. But the fact is that the data keep coming in, and keep resisting the most ferocious attacks.

Larry Dossey, an important voice in medicine for more than two decades, asserts that we are now seeing the emergence of what he calls Era III or nonlocal medicine that acknowledges that your thoughts and intentions may affect the functioning of other individuals, at any distance, and with or without the awareness of the recipient.

The same Dean Radin whom I just mentioned, has recently suggested the existence of entanglement in biological systems. A study published by a group of scientists from the University of Milan is intriguing. The investigators used cultures of human neurons derived from neural stem cells. What they did is fascinating and important. They split the neurons into two little dishes, and equipped each dish with tiny electrodes to record the electrical activity of the cells. I remember doing something similar back when the world was new, and I was a physiology student. But what we did not do back then is this: one of the dishes was shielded from electrical or optical inputs, so that there could be no ordinary influence of one dish on the other. However, when cells in the unshielded dish were stimulated with a laser beam, the cells in the shielded culture responded at the same time. The team took every possible precaution to ensure that there was no known way of one dish or cells influencing the other, and yet the stimulation of one dish caused the other to respond. This experiment was repeated and repeated over a three-year period. This provides evidence for some form of nonlocal linkage or entanglement between the cells in the dishes.

Interestingly, the authors themselves remain very cautious and despite repeating the experiment in a number of different ways, still worry that some of the laser light might somehow have leaked and stimulated the cells in the shielded dishes. The prospect that they have genuinely found a new force at work in biology is enough to worry anyone whose future is in the hands of grant givers.

Technorati tags: Nonlocal medicine. Larry Dossey, nonlocal, medicine, neurons, intentions

The Ethical Brain

There is a nice blog, Brainethics, that discusses an interesting new book Hardwired Behavior by Laurence Tancredi. This really is an outstanding piece of work. The author is both a psychiatrist and a lawyer who argues that Society's assumptions about free will and individual responsibility must be drastically revised in the light of scientific discoveries about the brain.

This is part of a large debate that is going on within psychiatry and psychology and within the legal profession. As an example, at what age should a young person be able to drive a car or be legally liable for their decisions? The driving question comes up because the brain and nervous system of a fifteen-year-old is still far from being fully mature, and may lead to poor coordination and decision-making. Can an eighteen-year-old be held liable for his behavior, at a time that his brain is not fully formed? Yet he is able to fight for his country. You will see that your answers to those questions are likely to be a mixture of political positions and personal experience. But there is also no doubt that the explosion of knowledge about the brain will be factored into some future legal decisions.

In Tancredi’s book, he applies knowledge derived from recent research to such traditional moral concerns as violence, sexual infidelity, lying, gluttony and sloth, and even financial fraud and gambling. For anybody working in the field, it is very clear that hormones, nutritional status, drugs, genetic abnormalities, injuries and traumatic experiences all have profound effects on the structure and functioning of the brain. Therefore they may all have an impact on our moral choices. Some experimental work implies that our actions are initiated by pre-conscious and unconscious processes in the brain before we are consciously aware of them. Does that mean that our sense of moral agency is a retrospective illusion? And what about free will?? Is that an illusion too?

I like this book, and also the recent book by Michael Gazzaniga, entitled The Ethical Brain. But I need to sound a note of caution: we are bewilderingly complex creatures, and there is powerful evidence for the existence of systems that can over-ride some of the neurological ones. So even after reading and studying hundreds of books and scientific papers and talking to hundreds of scientists around the world, I remain convinced that free will is not an illusion, and that there really is a genuine morality which is a great deal more than the firing of neurons in the brain.

Technorati tags: ethics, free will, morals,brain

Meditation and the Brain

In the last few years, there have been a number of studies of the brain in people who are practicing different forms of meditation. Andy Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania has looked at cerebral blood flow of meditators, and there has been a long-standing collaboration between Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin and the Dalai Lama, who has provided the University with a steady flow of experienced meditators for an array of different types of electrical measurements of their brains. One of the most consistent findings in experienced meditators is that some of these electrical rhythms become synchronized. This was first reported over 20 years ago, but some of those early experiments had some technical problems associated with them. But the new findings seem to be very robust. Meditators also produce an unusual type of high frequency electrical activity known as gamma waves, that oscillate at 40 cycles per second.

This work has some important implications:

1. There are many types of meditation: many are a form of intense concentration, others are a witnessing or watching of thoughts, yet others are a form of profound devotion. So it is no surprise that different forms will produce different effects in the brain.

2. The fact that the brain can be trained to produce certain types of electrical activity is in line with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that the brain is not the static structure that we used to think it to be: it can learn and develop. We already knew that with motor functions and some cognitive abilities, but now we can extend those findings into the emotions: feelings of love and empathy can be developed, expanded and deepened. The old metaphor that the brain can be exercised like a muscle may not be a metaphor after all, but a biological fact.

3. The fact that there are neurological correlates of meditation or of any emotional or psychological state does not mean that we can reduce the experience to the firing of some neurons or the synchronization of regions of the brain. Some of this research has been misinterpreted to mean that meditative states or mystical insights are no more than the calming of neural activity. It is vital that we also acknowledge the subjective experiences and reports of individuals and recognize that they are as valid descriptors as changes in the brain.

4. Meditation has been shown to have a great many physiological and psychological effects, from lowering blood pressure, to improving the performance of sleep-deprived individuals, reducing age-related cortical thinning and ultimately leading to demonstrable psychological and spiritual development. So the neurological and psychological findings provide a partial explanation for those observations.

The fact that some researchers are cooperating with the Dalai Lama has not sat well with some critics, but I think that it is important for us to remember that we are living in a time when it is essential for us to synthesize different approaches and to find common ground. So I applaud these studies and will continue to report them.

Technorati tags: meditation, Dalai Lama, brain, Neuroscience

Thinking and Sleep

There is an important article in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Effects of Sleep Inertia on Cognition Adam T. Wertz; Kenneth P. Wright Jr; Joseph M. Ronda; Charles A. Czeisler JAMA. 2006;295:163-164.)

The study by a team at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the University of Colorado examined the phenomenon of sleep inertia: how long it takes for someone to wake up and think effectively, and to compare that with thinking after a person has been awake for 24 hours. For most of the first three years after I graduated from medical school, I worked on what was then known as a “one in two” on-call roster: every other night and every other weekend. Fortunately that inhumane system was abandoned some years ago, but it was not uncommon to be up and working for three straight days at the weekends, and we all became absolute experts on sleep and how to handle sleep deprivation. The problem was that if we did manage to get a few minutes sleep, there was always the chance of being awoken and being asked immediately to perform important tasks that would require very high levels of thinking and analysis. The results of this new study will not be a surprise to anyone who has done night work, or anyone who has been out all night burning the candle at both ends.

The study participants had had six nights of monitored sleep lasting eight hours per night, they were given a performance test that involved adding randomly generated, two-digit numbers. Based on the results of this test, the researchers concluded the subjects exhibited the most severe impairments to their short-term memory, counting skills and cognitive abilities from sleep inertia within the first three minutes after awakening. The most severe effects of sleep inertia generally dissipated within the first 10 minutes, although its effects were often detectable for up to two hours.

The study follows other research that has looked at the effects of going without sleep for over 24 hours, and found that the cognitive impairments were roughly the same as being drunk. Yet in the Colorado experiments, the cognitive skills of test subjects were worse upon awakening than after extended sleep deprivation: In a nutshell, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad as or worse than being legally drunk. The most likely explanation is that certain areas of the brain take longer to "wake up".

Previous research has shown that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functions: planning, problem solving, complex thought and emotional control, is one of the brain regions that takes longer to come "on-line" following sleep.

What should be the conclusions from these studies?

1. Ideally, nobody should be doing anything really important for 15 to 30 minutes after they wake up.

2. If you are asleep, it's a much bigger transition to go from that to being awake, rather than staying awake, even for a long time, because then you will be aware that you are drowsy.

3. The study did not examine emotion and motivation, and that may come in to play. If you are asleep in a hotel and the fire alarms go off, you may well be able to wake up and think very well and very quickly for a few minutes, but then you brain plays “catch-up,” and you will once again we groggy and cognitively impaired.

As a young doctor, there was no option: I had to wake up fast and be able to think straight. So I just did it, and fortunately the quality of my decisions seemed to be fine when older and wiser physicians checked them the next morning. Though I am VERY pleased not to have to work like that any more!

Technorati tags: Sleep, thinking,

Scientific Misconduct

I don’t think that anyone can derive any pleasure at all in the public disgrace of a human being, and the reports about the South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk are particularly sad.

This case is enormously high-profile because the claims were so extraordinary, and also because his claims created false hope for hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. I respect and understand the opinions of people who felt, on moral or religious grounds, that the research should not have been attempted at all: it is an incredibly complex ethical issue.

But I would like to focus on the issue of scientific misconduct in general. The sad truth is that it is not uncommon at all. In June of 2005, the journal Nature published an important paper entitled “Scientists behaving badly.” In a survey of more than 3,000 scientists, over a quarter admitted to some failings in their work. Few of them had made things up, or cooked results, but there were even some of those.

Scientific and medical journals, as well as the Government, who commonly hands out a lot of research grants, are all engaged in very serious discussions about this problem, as are pharmaceutical companies, who fund a huge chunk of research. I spent over twenty years working in or administering laboratories, and during that time I have had first hand knowledge of three cases in which data was fabricated and there were major consequences for senior academics. In each case it was a junior researcher who cooked the books and the senior author had just tacked his name onto the publications. I have never published as many papers as I could have, because I always refused to be a “passenger” on a paper: someone who gets authorship credit even if it was not their own research. It’s often done to swell a curriculum vita. But I didn’t want to do that unless I was sure of everything in the paper, and that meant being at the bench doing the work. Somebody was once teasing me and told me that it’s because I’m a Virgo. Well, maybe. I don’t know enough about such things.

So why on earth do people cheat at anything? I find it difficult to understand in science and medicine because my whole life, since I was a child, has been directed toward finding Truth. And to mess with that is almost sacrilegious. Interestingly, many of the cheaters are actually the most gifted of people. Though that’s not always true. The first personal experience that I had was more than 20 years ago, when a more senior member of the department, who was not at all productive, took some of my data out of a file in my desk, and then presented it at a meeting as his own work. Well, I was but a tadpole back then, so I was told to grin and bear it.

Although it is complex, I think that the main reasons for misconduct are:

1. Personal: the career pyramid has steep sides and some people want to climb to the top, come what may. It’s really no different from someone putting cork in his baseball bat, or greasing a cricket ball.

2. Financial: people have told me, though without evidence, that they have changed or withheld information because that’s what the grant-giving body wanted. I once, and only once, had someone tell me what results I would produce if I did a certain study for his company. We were talking about my department being paid a great deal of money to do the work. I am quite sure that his company didn’t know about him saying that, but it was enough for me to show him the door.

3. Some people are so convinced that they are correct, that they fail to see any flaws in their arguments. I remember once seeing an elderly Nobel Prize winner completely misquote some research data so that it fit with his hypothesis. I happened to know about it because I was involved with the research that he quoted. There was no malice involved: that was just the way that he saw things.

4. Hubris: I wonder if this was at play in the Hwang Woo-suk case in Korea? If enough people tell you it’s great, and you so want to believe that you’ve made the breakthrough that everyone wants, eventually you may believe it yourself. The scientist just gets carried along on the bandwagon. And it is not just Hollywood and the Opera that has prima donnas!

I was sorry, recently, to hear of the passing a very fine English physician who once roasted the editor of the British Medical Journal for having had the temerity to reject one of her papers! Because of course she was right, and the editor and the reviewers were not smart enough to understand her work. And yes, science, like any other area of human life, has its sociopaths who will do anything for power and glory; and its hangers on and wannabes who need to do something to say in the loop.

I keep coming back to the same points: we have been given the ability to do this work. We are but stewards of our gifts and of the public’s money. We own neither, and millions of people wait anxiously for us to give them the help and the advice that they need.

So as sad as I am to see the public humiliation of Hwang Woo-suk, I have a final question: How could anyone ever betray that trust?

Addendum: As an addendum to the entry on scientific misconduct: on January 16th, the BBC reported yet another case of scientific misconduct in a study from Norway that was published in the journal the Lancet in October 2005. The Lancet study was entitled "non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and the risk of oral cancer.

According to the reports that have emerged today it appears that the data were entirely fabricated, with 250 of the 908 alleged patients in the study sharing the same birthday.

If the reports are all accurate, it is another tragedy. And I am going to ask again:

The public and the grant giving bodies work hard to give scientists the tools to do research to improve the quality of all our lives. How could anyone ever betray that trust?

Technorati tags: scientific misconduct, hubris, Hwang Woo-suk

Stardust and Dark Matter

Sometimes discoveries made in the heavens have direct implications for us on earth. For if you think about it for just a moment, we are ultimately all composed of stardust. We came from the stars, and one day we shall return to them. Whatever the makeup of stars may be we are made of the same molecular stuff.

For almost a century, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have been examining the idea that the Universe that we can see may only be part of what is out there, and that it may contain material that emits little or no detectable radiation. The most recent estimates are that more than 90 percent of the universe is “missing.” We know that it is there because of its effects, but we cannot see it. This missing piece of the Universe is being referred to as “dark” matter. There is another idea that there is something called “dark” energy, that is causing the Universe to accelerate. We know very little about dark matter, but it is utterly extraordinary that our vision of the universe may have been so incomplete. Some visionary scientists have been wondering if this dark matter and dark energy may have something to do with the burgeoning evidence for the existence of “subtle” systems associated with the body, which have been given names like Qi (Chi), Prana, the Etheric or the Fifth Element, after Earth, Fire, Air and Water. An interesting an entirely speculative idea that we shall return to in a future post.

Some scientists have remained skeptical about the very existence of dark matter, so it is fascinating to read the announcement from a team at John Hopkins University who has been using the Hubble telescope to map the location of invisible dark matter in unprecedented detail in two very young galaxy clusters. The new findings, reported in the Astrophysical Journal, lend support to the theory that the galaxies that we can see in space form at the densest regions of massive “cosmic webs” of invisible dark matter. This is rather like the way that froth gathers on top of ocean waves.

Though so little is known about dark matter, these new findings are consistent with one of its most spooky properties. Normal matter can collide and scatter like so many billiard balls, but dark matter appears to be “collision-less.” When particles of dark matter meet each other, they seem just to pass through each other. Yet they can clearly interact with “normal matter.” You will see why some scientists have engaged in some extraordinary speculations about the role of dark matter on the earth and in our bodies.

This is an area of research that we shall continue to monitor closely.

Technorati tags: dark energy, dark matter, cosmic webs, subtle energy

Homeopathy R.I.P.?

Homeopathic medicine has now been in use for over two centuries since its basic ideas were rehabilitated by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. And its essential concepts have always seemed strange to anyone with any scientific training. The central idea is that people have a life force that, if disturbed, can lead to illness. The second idea is the "doctrine of similars, " or of "like curing like." If you peel an onion, then your eyes and nose may start to run. So one treatment for a person with runny eyes and nose might be onion. The third peculiarity of homeopathy is the use of super-dilute remedies that are prepared in a very precise way. There is a nice summary article of some of the basic ideas.

There is an important principle in scientific research which sometimes gets forgotten: there are many different types of study and one of the most fundamental of errors is to mix up pragmatic (does it work?) and mechanistic (how does it work?) experiments. Pragmatic studies usually follow on from clinical observations, and even if something is shown to work, it can take years to work out the mechanisms. Aspirin would be a good example: it was used in various forms for over a century before it was discovered how it worked.

In August of this year the Lancet published an article on homeopathy that has been taken to signal the end of homeopathy. In fact in an accompanying editorial, there was a call for homeopathy to be abandoned, altogether. However, in the three months since then, a number of us have been through the Lancet study very carefully, and have found some snags in it. So far the Lancet has chosen not to publish responses to the article, and the authors themselves have, as of now, refused to disclose exactly which studies they analyzed. This is highly unusual, and should give pause to gleeful skeptics who have taken this one study to be the death knell of this form of treatment. Worse yet, the folk who have dismissed homeopathy based upon media reports of the study, without examining the original.

As examples of some of the astonishing problems identified in the Lancet publication: there was no clear statement of aim. This is normally required before you even begin a piece of research. The investigators first look at every homeopathic study that they could find and then decided which studies to include. This is again a very unusual way of doing things. And then there are a lot of questions about the statistical analysis. We all know that you can use statistics to prove almost anything that you want to, and the debate about the appropriateness of the methods used is going to go on for a very long time. 

The next time that somebody tells you that homeopathy is now a dead duck, tell them that the study is still being discussed. And as I have said on previous occasions, we do not make progress on the basis of one single paper. Even Watson and Crick’s model of the structure of DNA had to be confirmed before it was accepted, and going back further, some of the brilliant insights of Albert Einstein were not confirmed for almost fourteen years. But this study has already led to the Swiss Government deciding to reduce reimbursement for homeopathic treatment.

I have also seen some violent criticism of a six-year study involving around 6,500 patients who attended the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in England.  This was a simple naturalistic study that asked a simple question: of all the people who visited the hospital, how many felt better afterwards? This is the kind of audit that is being done all the time to see how people have got on with a hospital or a treatment. It does not "prove" or "disprove" homeopathy, it just asks people how they feel. And most said that they had benefited. To criticize it for not being randomized or placebo controlled is a bit like going to an Italian restaurant and complaining that they don’t serve Chinese food!

Homeopathy is no "cure all," but I will not abandon it unless we get some far more impressive data than that from the Lancet paper, for not only have I seen it work in patients and in animals with monotonous regularity, but because behind the scenes, we have been seeing more and more research coming not from patient studies, but from physics and cell biology laboratories, that seems to be giving the specialty a firm theoretical footing.

I shall continue to report both the positive and the negative studies as they are published, and offering guidance about how we can use different forms of treatment in combination.

Technorati tags: homeopathy

Autism and Mirror Neurons

On November 28th, I made some comments about the discovery of "mirror neurons" in the frontal cortex that enable us to imitate other people. I have just seen a most interesting report implicating these cells in autism. The paper was published in the journal Nature, but click here for a good summary.

Autism, an illness that affects a person’s ability to communicate with others and to mount appropriate responses to environmental cues, is part of a spectrum of developmental differences, which run all the way from people who are severely disabled to people who function at extremely high levels. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the apparently linked disorder, called Asperger’s Syndrome. There has been a lot of speculation that some well-known high achievers have a form of it. We are always loath to describe something as an "illness, " unless there are strong grounds for doing so: some people’s brains are just wired differently. So perhaps the best criterion for calling something an "illness," is whether it is causing suffering. I was once cussed out by someone whom I had treated for a manic illness. He was as happy as a clam and was not suffering in the slightest. But he was causing great suffering to his wife and young children. And to fellow motorists, as he drove his car at extremely high speed down the wrong side of the highway.

Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles found that some children with autism had less brain activation in a region in the frontal lobes that is involved in understanding another person’s state of mind. The degree of activation of the 'mirror neurons' in this region correlated with measures of social impairment. The children with the lowest activation had the most severe social impairment.

I do not doubt the value of this neurological approach to autism, but it is important to recognize that it is only a part of the picture. We also need to respect the importance of other ways of looking at an individual. As an example, using the Four Quadrant model developed by the philosopher Ken Wilber, we also need to consider not just the objective neurological aspect, but also the subjective, social an cultural aspects of a person. And each of these perspectives is irreducible: we cannot explain culture by neurons or how your liver works by an appeal to cultural dynamics.

So although studies like this are valuable in that they show that there is a neurological association with autism, and it is not the result of, say, bad parenting, they do not tell us the whole story. And we must not allow these findings to blind us to the other domains when we are working on coping strategies or treatments.

"I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."

--James Thurber (American Writer, 1894-1961)

Technorati Tags:  autism  Ken Wilber   More blogs about Mirror Neurons.

Charles Darwin Revisited

This week there is a timely article in Newsweek Magazine about Charles Darwin the man.

The article begins with these words:

"He had planned to enter the ministry, but his discoveries on a fateful voyage 170 years ago shook his faith and changed our conception of the origins of life."

That emphasizes a very important point: Darwin was lead to propose his theories based on observation. He was so troubled by the direction in which these observations were leading him, that it would be 25 years before he published his observations and theories.

Now we are seeing another round of attacks on the notions of evolutionary theory. Critics use the term "Darwinism," yet no scientist that I know ever would. Yes, he was ONE of the people who first came up with the theory, but the theories have been refined and tested for over one hundred years. The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, a passionate defender of evolutionary theory and an outspoken atheist, once said that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

While it is absolutely true that we can conceptualize a mechanism for the development of species, does it also mean that the theory necessarily exclude the existence of a Higher Power? No, of course not. Current scientific models have been developed to examine the physical world. When scientists have strayed into areas in which they have no special expertise, they can easily run into trouble. And they simply do not have models or methodologies for examining questions of purpose and meaning.

A complete model needs us to honor and respect all of the realms and domains of existence. Evolution OR intelligent design is a false dichotomy. Cannot the answer be evolution AND intelligence?

Technorati tag: More blogs about Charles Darwin.
Evolution

Synchronicity

In my forthcoming book, Sacred Cycles: Regaining Health and Harmony by Mastering the Natural Rhythms of Life, I disucss synchronicity as  a really important aspect of our lives. The notion of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences, was first proposed by the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his friend the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Are there really such connections in our lives, or do we live simply at the whim of random chance in a Universe whose every law has been laid bare by the impassive probing of modern science?

There have been countless attempts by mathematicians and physicists to explain away synchronicity, which some skeptics describe as some sort of refuge of the mathematically challenged. Yet other plenty of other scientists have said, “Wait a minute, there really may be something here.” Or is the whole discussion a pointless comparison of objective mathematical apples with subjective metaphysical pears?

I am very interested in hearing your views as well as any personal experiences.

Technorati tags: synchronicity Carl Jung