Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
The Buddha’s Brain
Posted on November 27, 2006 in Genetics Personality Disorders Psychotropics Reading Thinking
Buddhism comes closer to a scientific perspective than perhaps any other religion. The Dalai Lama, for example, has said that “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
I’ve often wondered what the Buddha might think about the current trend to deal with mental illness through drug therapy. Observing myself and observing others, I have tentatively concluded that the medications help a great deal but they are not enough. You can stabilize your mood and still suffer from personality disorders — like antisocial personality disorder, narcissism, and emotional instability — which resemble organic illnesses but are actually due to complex constructs of thinking.
The sudden swings of borderline (emotional instability) personality disorder sufferer can look very much like mania. The trouble is treatment. You can say to the bipolar “Take your meds and this will pass” but to the sufferer of the personality disorder, you often have to sigh and watch her self-destruct and destroy others. The narcissist wages jihad against anyone who does not love him. The emotionally unstable will love you and hate you, often at the same time, striving to manipulate you and contain you. The sociopath smirks and slithers on his way. No pill changes these patterns of thinking.
An interview with a former monk in Salon explores the problem I have mentioned here, that of what is due to the brain and what is due to consciousness, those states of mind which are not easily accounted for by the results of an MRI or an EEG or a cut to one of the lobes:
Cognitive science has plenty of hypotheses that are testable. For instance, is Alzheimer’s related to a particular malfunctioning of the brain? More and more, scientists are able to identify the parts and functions of the brain that are necessary to generate specific mental states. So these are scientific issues. But now let’s tap into what the philosopher David Chalmers has called “the hard problem” — the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness. What is it about the brain — this mass of chemicals and electromagnetic fields — that enables it to generate any state of subjective experience? If your sole access to the mind is by way of physical phenomena, then you have no way of testing whether all dimensions of the mind are necessarily contingent upon the brain….
when you have no possible means of investigating the mind as it might operate independently of the brain, then to even raise it as an issue is indeed absurd. But there is one avenue of inquiry that’s been largely left out or simply repudiated. Right now, you and I have an ability to monitor our own mental states. Can we generate a mental image of an apple? Can we remember our mother’s face? Can we recite the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address or some favorite poem? Are these mental images that you generate nothing other than brain states or parts of the brain? At this point, those are not even scientific questions because nobody knows how to tackle them.
What mysteries await us in the Buddha’s brain?
