Deepak Chopra and Intent

By Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MD

One of modern science’s great strengths is that any questionable finding dies a quick death if it’s invalid. The safeguards are mainly two: Your new finding must be repeatable when other researchers run the same experiments, and peer review by qualified scientists subjects every new finding to microscopic scrutiny. So it surprised the millions of admirers of TED, whose conferences attract wide attention to new, cutting-edge ideas, when that organization decided to practice semi-censorship.

The flap is over two videos of TEDx talks delivered in the UK in January that were summarily removed from TEDx’s YouTube channel (TEDx is the brand name for conferences outside the main TED events that are allowed to use the TED trademark, such as TEDxBoston or TEDxBaghdad — so far, about 5,000 such events have used the name). This amounts only to semi-censorship because the videos were reposted on TED’s blog site. Yet the reputations of the two presenters, Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, were besmirched. In a letter to all the TEDx organizers, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, proposed certain “red flag” topics, among them health hoaxes and the medicinal value of food but also the general area of pseudoscience. The response has been decidedly negative — scientists don’t like the suppression of free thinking — and among the thousands of comments aired on the Internet, one pointed out that Sheldrake and Hancock spoke at a TEDx conference explicitly dedicated to ideas that challenge mainstream thinking.

There’s no need to stir the coals. TED has been badly singed already. At a cursory glance, much of Anderson’s letter sounds reasonable: TED has every right to give guidelines to conferences using their name. Who’s in favor of health hoaxes and pseudoscience? As it happens, Sheldrake’s talk was on “The Science Delusion” and covered ten dogmas in mainstream science that need to be examined; there wasn’t a hint of bad science in it. Hancock’s talk was on consciousness and psychedelics, a topic without fangs for anyone who has heard of the Sixties, much less lived through them. Even as the videos were begrudgingly reposted, TED felt justified in tagging them as “radical” and attaching a “health warning”.

Yet something quite pivotal is occurring that inflames strong feelings. The decision to remove the two videos was apparently instigated by angry, noisy bloggers who promote militant atheism. Their target was a burgeoning field, the exploration of consciousness. For generations bringing up consciousness as a scientific topic was taboo. In the wildly popular fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones,” now running as an equally mad success on HBO, the mythical kingdom of Westeros is divided by a great wall 700 feet high. On the other side of the wall are lethal enemies and malefic magic. For centuries, no one has seen the zombie-like White Walkers who live on the other side of the wall, nor the dragons that once ravaged Westeros.

Even so, after magic and zombies fell into disbelief, a hereditary band of guardians swore an oath to keep watch at the wall, generation after generation. TED has put itself in rather the same position. What the militant atheists and self-described skeptics hate is a certain brand of magical thinking that endangers science. In particular, there is the bugaboo of “non-local consciousness,” which causes the hair on the back of their necks to stand on end. A layman would be forgiven for not grasping why such an innocent-sounding phrase could spell danger to “good science.”

The reason becomes clear when you discover that non-local consciousness means the possibility that there is mind outside the human brain or even outside material reality, that a conscious mind is in some way intrinsic to the quantum universe, and that we all are quantum entangled. One of us (Menas Kafatos) has devoted many years of research on the connection of quantum theory to consciousness. Four of us (Stuart Hameroff, Rudolph Tanzi, Neil Thiese, and Deepak Chopra) have devoted years of research to neuroscience, clinical studies and consciousness. For millennia it went without question that such a mind exists; it was known as God. Fearing that God is finding a way to sneak back into the kingdom through ideas of quantum consciousness, militant atheists go on the attack against near-death experiences, telepathy, action at a distance, and all manifestations of purpose-driven evolution. Like the guardians in “A Game of Thrones,” these militants haven’t actually looked over the wall, and given their absolute conviction that the human brain is the only source of awareness in the universe, you’d think that speculative thinking on the subject wouldn’t be so threatening. (Most people wouldn’t picket a convention of werewolves in their hometown. It’s not hard to tell what is fantasy.)

But TED took the threat seriously enough that Anderson’s letter warns against “the fusion of science and spirituality,” and most disappointing of all, it tags as a sign of good science that “it does not fly in the face of the broad existing body of scientific knowledge.” Even a newcomer to science knows about Copernicus, Galileo, and other great scientists whose theories countermanded the prevailing body of accepted knowledge. Einstein believed in a static universe at a time when early proponents of an expanding universe were ignored, and the early reception of the now-popular “multiverse” theory was scornful. The greatest breakthroughs rarely come by acts of conformity.

Anderson’s letter is cautiously couched on the one hand — he takes pains to divorce his warnings from outright bans and acknowledges that the dividing line between real science and pseudoscience is hardly sharp and clear. But the dose of cold water is frigid enough, since his red-flag subjects include “healing” of any kind (his quotation marks) and using neuroscience to explain various mind-body puzzles (“a lot of goofballs” inhabit this area).

TED finds itself on the wrong side of censorship, semi- or not. But this fracas actually opens a window. The general public — and many working scientists — isn’t aware that consciousness has become a hot topic spanning many disciplines, and its acceptability is demarked by age. Older, established scientists tend to be dead set against it, while younger, upcoming scientists are fascinated. There are any number of books on “the conscious universe.” There are peer-reviewed journals on consciousness and worldwide conferences on how to link mind and brain (the so-called “hard problem”). Nobody wants to guard the wall except the self-appointed watchers and minders who form a society for the suppression of curiosity (it should be noted that TED’s Science Board, which undoubtedly plays a role in this dispute, remains anonymous).

Freedom of thought is going to win out, and certainly TED must be shocked by the avalanche of disapproval Anderson’s letter has met with. The real grievance here isn’t about intellectual freedom but the success of militant atheists at quashing anyone who disagrees with them. Their common tactic is scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The most prominent leaders, especially Richard Dawkins, refuse to debate on any serious grounds, and indeed they show almost total ignorance of the cutting-edge biology and physics that has admitted consciousness back into “good science.”

Militant atheism is a social/political movement; In no way does it deserve to represent itself as scientific. Francis Collins, a self-proclaimed Christian, is an acclaimed geneticist who heads the National Institutes of Health. To date, Collins hasn’t let any White Walkers or dragons over the wall. Dawkins, who has a close association with TED, gave a TED talk in 2002 where he said the following:

“It may sound as if I am about to preach atheism. I want to reassure you that that’s not what I am going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. [scattered laughter] No, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism.”

In a society where militant atheism occupies a prestigious niche, disbelief in God is widespread, but it isn’t synonymous with science. In his mega-bestseller “The God Delusion,” Dawkins proclaims that religion is “the root of all evil.” He describes teaching children about religion as “child abuse.” He spoke publically on the occasion of a papal visit to London calling for the Pope to be arrested for “crimes against humanity.” To propose, as Dawkins does, that science supports such extremist views is an errant misuse of science, if not a form of pseudoscience.

TED is a huge enterprise bringing cutting edge ideas to the world, and local TEDx organizers will no doubt feel a chill when they read Anderson’s stern reproof: “It is not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science or not. It is your job.” If the intent of this warning wasn’t explicit enough, TEDx rescinded their trademark from a recent conference in West Hollywood because of “questionable” speakers, causing the cowed organizers to cancel the event before they reconsidered and held it without the coveted brand name. A call to caution is hard to tell from a desire to censor.

One of the authors of this article (Stuart Hameroff) recently gave a TEDx talk in Tucson where he made the point that critics of the possibility of consciousness outside the brain cannot explain consciousness inside the brain. While neuroscience is at a loss, the notion of consciousness being based on finer scale, deeper order quantum effects in microtubules inside brain neurons (the Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR model) has been boosted by recent discoveries of quantum resonances in microtubules, and anesthetic action on microtubules. Quantum entanglement could account for Rupert Sheldrake’s findings, and consciousness occurring outside the brain. Stuart Hameroff’s TEDx talk ‘The future of consciousness‘ explains how this can scientifically happen. Should it be censored also?

But the main flaw in TED’s position has been made abundantly clear. It isn’t the organizers’ job to exclude questionable science but a job shared between them and the audience. We’re all adults here, right? Any speculative thinking worthy of the name should make somebody in the audience angry, inspire others, and leave the rest to decide if a challenging idea should be thrown out or not. Any other approach casts shame upon tolerance, imagination, and science itself.

Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, ChopraFoundation.org/

Stuart Hameroff, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, www.quantumconsciousness.org

Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University,
Facebook: kafatos@chapman.edu

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital

Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, www.neiltheise.com

Every country has a national character that it taught to children from a young age and then becomes part of everyone’s story. In the case of America, “opportunity” is a theme known worldwide and constantly referred to when we talk about what this country means. In the same category are freedom, power, innovation – and decency. We look upon ourselves as the good guys, and we expect to be seen that way by others.

Analysts warn us that American opportunity is flagging, especially if you are poor and want to rise up the ladder. Innovation is being challenged by the Chinese, and most developed countries are just as free as America. And decency? It took a huge blow with the military adventurism of the Iraq War, a war of choice that destroyed Iraqi society, increased tensions throughout the region, strengthened Iran, and ultimately turned into a Vietnam-style quagmire, as the Afghanistan War is right now.

As a result, large swaths of the world disapprove of America, making it harder for us to cling to our self-regard as generous, charitable, moral, and decent people. Perhaps this was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Being the only super power makes us suspect. Other nations project their vulnerability as if the U.S. caused it – look at the ultra-paranoid North Korea, whose national story consists of armed preparedness for imminent assault by American devils.

It’s hard to be the good guys when you are also the world’s biggest arms dealer and spend more money on defense than the next fifteen nations combined. But I think there’s a deeper ambivalence about decency in this country. In a decent society, do the following things happen?

- Politics is rancorous and divisive, with each side demonizing the other.
- In political races, the object is not simply to defeat your opponent but to destroy him?
- Gun violence is rampant, and attempts to counter it can destroy a politician’s career.
- The financial sector operates sheerly out of greed and takes no responsibility when its actions lead to economic collapse.
- Corporations abandon health care and pensions for their workers.
- The richest become richer while the poor become poorer.

Each of these bullet points represents a trend, and the trends aren’t in the direction of decency. The rest of the world is appalled by things we take for granted, like the existence of 300 million assault-style weapons in private hands. What’s more appalling is the lack of morality shown when a gun-happy minority leads the rest of society around by the nose. The most heartbreaking thing about the Iraq war was to see how decent and trusting our soldiers were, how much they cared about helping the Iraqi people, and yet how horrifying the circumstances they landed in.

Reality exists when illusions are shattered. It’s time to reach a state of untainted decency that America can be proud of. The trends I listed are well known. They are causing a deterioration of trust and social justice. No one can reverse these trends except us. Who will speak up for this? Our leaders are tentative and intimidated, a sure sign that decency has lost its hold.

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By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University

We all take the physical world for granted, with no doubt that it will still be here when we wake up tomorrow morning. But in fact the subatomic particles that construct the physical world aren’t “here” when they assume the state of a wave, and it appears that 96% of the universe is “dark” matter and energy.  “Dark” may mean unknowable, since we seem to be talking about matter not based on atoms and energy not based on quantum interactions like electromagnetism.

In the first post we addressed the fact that the source of reality cannot be physical.  In fact, it is almost certain to be inconceivable.  Our brains are constructs of billions of years of hardware-building, known as evolution.  Even if you accept that the brain is a quantum device (please see our first post for an explanation of this notion), what the quanta spit out are thoughts, wishes, hopes, fears, dreams –and science. A seemingly random jumble of processes happening at the very boundary of time and space gives birth to experience. Quarks are allowed to be “spooky,” as quantum physics declares, but not your car, orange juice, and armchair. The physical world, and how we think about it, is limited by time and space.  They are the foundation of our home. Asking the brain to understand where reality comes from is like asking a robot to dismantle itself to find out what it’s made of – you won’t have a machine after the dismantling is done, and therefore no answer.

Yet even if the source of reality is inconceivable, the uncanny match between your brain  and the world “out there” cannot be doubted.  Very well known is how the ring-like structure of benzene was discovered in a dream by Friedrich August Kekulé. More obscure is the fact that using no scientific data, the ancient sages of India made remarkable calculations recorded in the Puranas regarding the age of the universe and the distance to the Sun, to name two out of many. In the Western ancient world, Archimedes made an amazing calculation about the universe’s size in the “Sand Reckoner,” asking how many grains of sand it would take to fill the Greek Kosmos. He had to invent a new number system, since the ancient Greek system was woefully inadequate. When you convert the number of grains of sand that Archimedes found to protons, you come up with the actual number of particles in the universe, known as Eddington’s number. A “coincidence”?

Someone may object, claiming that the physical behavior we are describing is just “self-similarity,” a set of resemblances (the way the spiral shape of a chambered nautilus’s shell resembles the spiral made by the seeds in the center of a sunflower) that can be predicted by a mathematical model like non-linear dynamics (by which one can generate helixes, or spirals, in any system).  But that objection already assumes that there is an interconnection between the very large and the very small, up and down at all levels. Also, insights into Nature that came about using the mind alone are hard to comprehend unless there is a cosmic interconnectedness between all things.

The easiest hypothesis is that comparing hardware to hardware and software to software, the human brain is the universe. What made this proposition seem like nonsense in the past doesn’t hold much water anymore.  Science used to be fooled by dimension: the brain is small, the universe very large.  But that’s like saying that a mountain of chocolate must be different from a Hershey’s kiss just because it’s bigger. The same chocolate unites both; the same behavior of systems unites brain and cosmos. Science was also confirmed in certain prejudices from lack of knowledge. Now, with the sophistication of biology and physics reaching unprecedented levels, we know enough about a cell, an atom, a planet, and a galaxy to see more similarities than differences.

In a word, calling the human brain “the three-pound universe” is no longer a metaphor.

It is perhaps the case that the universe speaks to thinkers at all ages.   The voice we hear in our heads sounds human, but why shouldn’t it? All experience is human, and the ultimate translator is the brain, which mysteriously translates raw data from the outside world, which have no color, sound, or texture, into the vivid mental picture we recognize as the “real” world.  In truth, the only real world is tangled somewhere in the process of translation.

The brain has been assigned to create reality, and it’s frustrating that we, who use and instruct our brains, can’t figure out how the thing is done.  As photons in space, sunlight has no brightness. The same photons have no brightness when they strike the retina and begin their journey to the visual cortex. The brain is totally dark, and yet whatever happens in the visual cortex creates the brightness of light as well as all colors and shapes, all movement, and all distinctions between trees, mountains, clouds, and every other object.

We’ve made a quantum argument for the connections that bind human existence into the life of the universe, but in the end our scheme is based on consciousness.  Two theorists are asked where music comes from.  One dismantles a piano, splintering it into dust and the dust into particles until he reaches the quantum domain. Aha, he says, here it is; this is where music comes from. The other theorist goes to music school, learns to play the piano, and explores the masterpieces of Bach and Mozart, back to the origins of Western music.  Aha, he says; this is where music comes from. Which answer would you believe?

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co author with Deepak Chopra of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being.(Harmony)

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.

Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Center of Excellence,Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

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By Deepak Chopra
Senior Scientist, the Gallup Organization
Jim Clifton
CEO, the Gallup Organization

When they think of India, many people still have the shining image of it as a rising economy, one of the four most promising in the world, in fact. As one of the BRIC countries, along with Russia, Brazil and China, India’s rise from a long history of poverty raised hope for the rest of the developing world. So it’s startling when Fareed Zakaria recently asked on CNN, “Is India the broken BRIC?” In the same vein, Jim O’Neill, the most important global economist at Goldman Sachs, and the man who coined the term BRIC, considers India the biggest economic disappointment with its 5 percent fall in growth since 2010.

What makes the disappointment worse is that since the early 90s, as Western media and business people were jetting back and forth between India and China sizing up these two growing economic giants, business magazine covers, famous economists and top CEOs at conferences were saying, “India is the one to watch, not China.”

How did so many brilliant prognosticators miss so badly? As economists ponder what went wrong, the Gallup data gives telltale clues on the human side. Economics comes down to millions of individual workers and what they experience at work. The worker’s story from India is discouraging. A staggering 33 percent of employees are what Gallup scientists refer to as “actively disengaged,” meaning not only are they miserable at work, but they walk the halls and petition their colleagues to be as miserable and discontented as they are. On the positive end of the spectrum, a tiny 9 percent of Indian employees are engaged. These are the people who build new products and services, generate new ideas, create new customers and ultimately spur an economy to create more and more good jobs.

The workplace tends to be symptomatic of society as a whole, and here the picture is just as gloomy. India’s state of mind is severely troubled right now. Gallup’s World Poll, currently in its eighth year in the field, finds more Indians than ever are “suffering” – 31 percent — while fewer are “thriving,” just 10 percent. This is among the worst in the world.

When any society reaches a low point of well-being with a sizable number of people suffering, it is in trouble. When the quotient of suffering sharply rises (as it did in Libya before the Arab Spring and is happening today in Egypt), social turmoil often results. The street rioting over sexual harassment of women in India — an endemic problem that the government and judicial system turned a blind eye to for decades — is another warning sign.

What will happen next? Officially, India is being upbeat about its economic projections, with a forecast of growth between 6 and 7 percent for 2013 after falling below 7 percent for the past two years and generally underperforming since 2008, according to a recent story in the New York Times. In the Gallup data, 36 percent of the Indian population rated economic conditions as “good” or “excellent” in 2012, as compared to nearly half (46 percent) who thought so in 2008.

Of course, we are rooting for India’s economic uptick, but the human side needs deeper examination. In many ways India is facing a crisis of the soul. When only one person out of 10 is thriving, and around that number feel engaged at the workplace, it indicates that the vast majority are not reaching a desirable level of fulfillment — far from it.

A nation’s soul is the sum total of all interactions between all people in that society. Every moment lasts a few seconds and is positive, negative, or neutral. In those moments, people may make very tiny decisions that, as they accumulate, can profoundly change their day and even the rest of their lives. An old adage says, “Miss a bus, and you change the rest of your life.” In our world of unprecedented interconnectedness, that axiom may need updating: “Miss a bus and you change the rest of the world.” With India’s vast population, there are trillions of interactions per year. If they swing too far to the negative, the society’s soul is suffering a malaise.

Analysts point to large-scale problems, such as the widespread corruption that persists in Indian government, local and national, and the failure of reform parties to gain a strong political footing. But we think the story of moment-to-moment experience counts the most. What if every interaction with a bureaucrat brings expectations of obstacles, red tape or a bribe? What if every woman walking out alone expects catcalls, whistles and physical intrusions from men on the street? What if domestic violence and rape go hugely underreported and when reported lead to minimal consequences for the perpetrator?

India needs to come to terms with its soul sickness, and slowly, haltingly, it seems to be. Most Indians are lodged in the slot of low expectations. The Gallup data shows a surprising complacency, because despite the alarmingly low level of well-being, around 60 percent of Indians between 2006 and 2011 said that they were satisfied with their standard of living. The bubble seems to have burst since then, however, with that figure dipping below 50 percent in 2012.

There is something important here that India’s leaders — and all global leaders — must consider: A nation’s soul precedes its human development. Organic human development will not occur in India if the majority of everyday experiences are negative. Even so, India’s resilience and optimism — along with its resignation in the face of problems going back for generations — gives hope that the country will look to its soul. A great culture can only persist by doing so. We are pained to deliver gloomy news, but our deepest feeling is that the most spiritual nation on earth, and its largest democracy, can find a path to reform, with the well-being of its people held out as a primary goal.

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