Consciousness: January 2014

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Consciousness: A Play In One Act

from philosophyynow.org

David Dobereiner imagines a meeting of great minds.

Characters:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Poet, playwright, scientist.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Philosopher.

Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner: Chemist.

It is 1829, and we are in the Faculty Club of the University of Jena.

Goethe: Ah Herr Döbereiner! I am pleased to introduce Herr Hegel to you.

Döbereiner: I am honoured to meet you, Herr Hegel. I had not heard that you are lecturing here in Jena?

Hegel: I started my career here, but I am now established in Berlin. I have just come back to Jena to deliver a lecture on consciousness. I am also a protégé and friend of Herr von Goethe, and pleased to see him again. And yourself?

Döbereiner: Oh, I am a Professor of Chemistry here. I have discovered some affinities between certain triplets of chemical elements that I call ‘triads’. I have also discovered a new principle, by which a reaction can be brought about between two chemicals by a third which remains unaffected. And I too am a protégé and friend of Herr von Goethe. So what will you be telling us about consciousness?

Hegel: Well, consciousness is a property of mind, and individual human minds are nothing but tiny reflectors of the radiance of God’s Mind. In that sense all human consciousness is connected to the Creator, and therefore all minds partake of the Absolute Idea. But at our present state of development we are not yet fully conscious of this connection.

Goethe: Hegel, with your ‘Absolute Idea’, you talk as if mind were the only reality. But what kind of a Creator would go to the lengths of constructing a whole universe of materiality if its only purpose was to be transcended, with difficulty, by just one of its creatures? And surely, at the moment that Johann here makes an amazing discovery in his laboratory, through close observation of entirely material properties, he is just as close to the divine as the saint or mystic ever was?

Goethe, Hegel, Döbereiner

Döbereiner: Thank you for that kind comparison. And I should say, you yourself were almost at a point of divine madness when you conceived the idea of basing your novel Elective Affinities on my triads. From chemical to psychological affinities – what brilliance! But it speaks to the fact that the roots of life, and therefore consciousness, must be embedded deep within the physical realm.

Hegel: Yes of course. God must be conceived as both transcending Nature and immanent in Nature. But consciousness itself emerges as a later development in the history of the universe. We are now at that later point. Consciousness’s role in history is now to achieve a higher state, and that is transcendence. Consciousness is of course not a material thing. But it is just as real as your body, and it is something you must acknowledge as being as real, in fact more real, than any phenomenon you experience. Objects presuppose subjects.

Goethe: I disagree. I believe subject and object are two sides of the same coin. We experience ourselves subjectively and the Other as object. But everything down to the smallest atom has some prototypical stirring of intent, which in plant life emerges as sentience, and in animals includes consciousness.

Döbereiner: I am prepared to accept what you say, Goethe – as a working hypothesis. As a scientist I can see no evidence that there is a God, but if there is none such, then I must accept an earthly origin for every phenomenon I experience, however immaterial it appears to be in our present state of knowledge.

Hegel: Are you seriously advising us to reject any guiding force in the progress of civilization? Are you claiming that the lives of Jesus, Socrates and Plato were a result of mere chance – the outcome of a natural process, perhaps? It is through the minds of such great teachers inspired by the workings of the dialectic that we are now on the cusp of understanding the ultimate reality – pure thought!

Goethe: Hegel, I must take issue with you here. I would submit that there is no such thing as pure thought. And if there ever was, it would be as cold as a corpse. The great innovators of pure mathematics – Pythagoras, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz – were all creatures of flesh and blood. Pythagoras’ theorem, Descartes’ coordinate geometry, the calculus of Newton and Leibniz – all these most abstract systems sprang from a problem-solving impulse. They all desired to serve mankind; and the proof of their earnestness is the extent to which we have seen these systems applied, with spectacular success, ever since; and especially since the beginning of our present scientific era.

Döbereiner: And the joy, the surge of visceral delight that surely accompanied the inspired moment of the seeding of their systems must have been as intense as that of the greatest artists conceiving their greatest works.

Hegel: I don’t deny there may well be some emotional by-product of creativity, but it is not of the essence. These mathematicians were indeed inspired. They had stepped up the dialectical ladder of Ideas into the realm of Spirit. There they found their answers already pre-existing, in the Mind of God.

Goethe: How do you know?

Hegel: My dear friend, how could it be otherwise? Look at the whole sweep of human history, and the natural history that prepared the ground for it. This progress, beset by set-backs such as the French Revolution, nevertheless persists. Can it all be meaningless?

Goethe: But if we are to search for meaning scientifically, we must only accept an explanation if there are good reasons for doing so. Hegel, you posit a higher realm of Spirit which is eternal and unchanging, and to which we humans all aspire, albeit fitfully and with many backslidings. I see no evidence for this theory in the natural world – of which the mind of man forms only one part, and not necessarily the most significant part.

Hegel: Can you give a more plausible accounting for progress?

Goethe: I am going to shock you. So be prepared.

The other two smile wryly.

Goethe: All mere theory, dear friends, is gray; but the golden tree of life springs ever green, and love anddesire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds! Authentic romantic love is the highest point in our life-experience! And only when lovers consummate their love do human beings truly experience the divine. In your terms, Hegel, this encounter of ‘thesis and antithesis’ may achieve its sublation in the form of a baby human – a synthesis that combines within itself elements of both its parents, but is, at the same time, something completely new. This is the archetype of your dialectic. And prior to the mind is the body, just as prior to thought is feeling. And prior to the human animal are other animals – who behave in emotionally similar ways.

Döbereiner: I can take this theory a few steps further back if I may. Prior to the organism is the organelle. Prior to the organelle is the complex molecule. Prior to the molecule is the atom. We scientists have not yet finished even here. Before this century is over, we may even have discovered the structure of the atom. Then that will be prior.

Hegel: You two talk as if everything in the universe somehow developed out of primordial matter. How could that possibly be? What is God’s role in all this?

Goethe: Perhaps God is a female and is in process of giving birth to ever improved versions of Herself.

Hegel: I have never heard such nonsense!

Goethe: Perhaps because you haven’t studied ancient Chinese texts, tablets from ancient Sumer, or taken seriously Pythagoras’s beliefs. Do you dismiss St Francis as an aberration? All these sources – and, I am sure, many more – lend credence to that view. Your trouble is that in your efforts to construct a comprehensive system, even before putting Western philosophy and history under a microscope, you have said to yourself that everything that happened here in our Western world must have been a result of God’s Will. Then you have built your system up around this prejudice, and generalized it to embrace the whole universe!

Hegel: Don’t you believe in God, von Goethe?

Goethe: Certainly not in One who stands serenely outside His creation and determines the course of history like Napoleon at the battle here.

Hegel: I am in agreement with you there. God works from within our minds, which are but fragments of His Mind. Through reason, operating by dialectical laws, civilization makes its way forward, or rather, upwards. We are free, but only within the limits of God’s law, which manifests itself in the State. In a state of nature we are slaves to our passions. Even Rousseau came around to seeing that. We need strong states under enlightened leaders. Only then are we truly free. And wars between states are sometimes necessary to extend the realm of the most advanced civilizations. Think of human progress under the Pax Romana.

Döbereiner: What? Your State idolatry will spawn a future of many new Napoleons rampaging over Europe, and it barely survived the original! But at least we are clear now. Hegel says make war. Goethe says make love. If I had to choose, I would say make love, not war.

Goethe: But that is a false dichotomy. There is a universal polarity of attraction and repulsion present in all things; in life, and even in inert matter. Also present is a third impulse, which I call ‘intensification’. This is the urge to combine, complexify, to grow – if you like, to transcend. And as beings of higher consciousness, including conscience, we know what we must do in relation to other living beings. We must not harm them even if we find them repulsive. We must affirm ordinary life and personal love. But we must also work to improve the lives of our fellow beings, and this is what I call ‘social love’.

Hegel: But this is straight from the New Testament. If you accept that, you must also see the truth of the Holy Trinity: that Father, Son and Holy Ghost is thesis, antithesis negating it, giving rise to the synthesis through sublation, which negates the negation. This shows that the divine must assume a dialectical form. Just as the triangle is the strongest and most stable of forms in Nature, so it is in the Supernatural.

Döbereiner: Hegel, you have completely lost me here. This is all speculation. You have taken Goethe’s theory, which for all its outlandishness is based on observation of the physical world, and have tried to force it into a mould derived from the dubious revelations of pre-scientific authors combined with your own thoughts about the thinking process. Next you will be recruiting my triads to join your dialectical host. And Goethe has given you another triangle to play with in any case: attraction, repulsion, and intensification.

Goethe: But the universally-acknowledged giant intellect of Professor Hegel is not playing games. Far from it. His discovery of the fundamental law of thought assures his enduring fame regardless of its applications. But concerning thought, I would like to get back to our original topic, to what degree consciousness transcends the personal. It is true that when we look at nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else before it, beside it, under it and over it. And what I am conscious of at any given moment is only a tiny part of what I know. But doubt grows with knowledge. Furthermore, all things are only transitory.

Hegel: Hah, Goethe, now you are beginning to sound a little like that misanthrope Schopenhauer – who, by the way, has tried to lure away my students into his web of gloom by lecturing at the same time as myself. Needless to say he has failed.

Döbereiner: Herr Hegel, neither your optimism nor Schopenhauer’s pessimism have any place in the objective search for truth. We must take nature as she is and try to analyse her secrets step by step. When experiment discloses an unexpected reaction, we need to repeat it many times under different conditions. Only then are we entitled to form a rational hypothesis about what has happened. This is just common sense.

Goethe: But Herr Döbereiner, objective truth is not the only truth. There are also the subjective truths which we recognize in the beauties of nature and art. Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words. Perhaps therefore we should accordingly say there are different phases of consciousness? The emotional is one, and the intellectual another.

Hegel: Well, the surge of feeling that forces itself into our consciousness arises from our bodies and is animalistic. As such it may be good or bad. That is for our consciences to decide. Our rational selves alone can know whether a particular appetite is compatible with the social structures that surround us and unite us with our fellows. But although we are in a sense split in our consciousness, the dividing line between the two halves should be considered as running horizontal, not vertical. The higher self is the rational, the lower self the emotional.

Döbereiner: You place the rational self above the emotional, but you say nothing about the rationality of the social structures to which our conscience must attend, and to which we must make our emotional reactions compatible. Do the laws and customs of any society inevitably embody what is best for the citizens they regulate? I don’t think so.

Goethe: As a member of the aristocracy I am immensely privileged. When I wake up in the morning I can decide to do anything I like. If anything onerous needs to be done, I can easily command a servant to do it. The prevailing social structure provides me with total freedom and my servant with very little, since he must hold himself in constant readiness to attend to my orders. This obviously is far from an ideal social order. Nevertheless, I suspect any alternative would likely be even worse – and I am not eager to be led off to the guillotine. So my conscience teaches me that in order to make the status quo humane, I must take it upon myself to consider the welfare of my personal servants and the villagers who also serve me. I will always help them and save them from troubles, if I can.

Hegel: Patronising them all the while.

Döbereiner: But von Goethe is a Patron. Even of you and me. Who got us our jobs here?

Goethe: Well in your cases I was just an intermediary. I am a friend of the Duke. It is an operation of what the English call ‘the old boy network’. But in both your cases, the brilliance of your lectures and publications subsequently vindicated our decision to hire you.

Hegel: Thank you, Goethe. But now let me step back and try to analyse our differences over the nature of consciousness. You both seem to see consciousness like the flowering of an organism with deep roots in the material world, and therefore present in the material world outside the human realm.

Döbereiner: You are right Professor Hegel, to a certain extent. Indeed the degree of convergence in our thinking is remarkable considering our radically different starting points. But there are differences. Goethe and I both want the betterment of mankind, but I am from a humble background and approach my work as a scientist from a utilitarian perspective. Goethe is at heart a romantic and a poet. He sees the world from the perspective of art, as I do from science.

Goethe: (smiling) That is a little sweeping, but let us not quibble. It seems that art and science are united in seeing consciousness as emerging out of the material world. It is now for philosophy to demonstrate exactly why we must both be wrong!

Hegel: I accept the challenge. My answer has already been prepared for me by my predecessor, Kant. He acknowledged – as indeed did Aristotle – that animals show they must have a measure of practical reason. Therefore, they must have minds of a sort, and so consciousness, of a sort. What they clearly don’t have is pure reason, nor any sense of the morality that comes from it. They can judge what may be more or lessadvantageous for them, certainly, but not what is right or wrong. They have no conscience. The higher form of consciousness, capable of abstract thought and moral judgment, is found in only one place under the sun, and that is in the mind of man. Here only do we find true Consciousness.

Goethe: Hegel, you have raised your standard high and clear, so now it is easy for me to aim my cannon! Birds, beasts and bees all, like human beings, must bring their offspring into the world and care for them, until they grow to replace their parents. In the process they all, like us, must make their peace with their neighbours in order to secure a private space within their tribe. This is their morality, and ours.

Döbereiner: But this is just instinct. They are not acting morally. They don’t have any choice about it.

Hegel: Exactly.

Goethe: I have not finished. You have just raised the issue of free will, Herr Döbereiner. You seem to take the common position that human behaviour is uniquely self-prescribed, but that of other animals is determined by something we label ‘instinct’. We nail these labels onto human and animal to reinforce our prejudice that we are completely and utterly different, but this cannot be so. Anyone who has an emotional tie with an animal knows that they differ in personality one from another, just as humans do. If they were only automatons, as Descartes theorised, they would all behave the same way. There is a much simpler and more satisfying explanation of why they appear so much like us – loving, hating creatures, behaving sometimes rationally, sometimes spitefully, but always with the appearance of self-control. They are like us. And we are like them. Moreover, I predict that before many years have passed some scientific genius will prove a natural law that connects the species and shows how they grew one out of another, culminating in human beings. But the human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live. Until science can provide the means for us to re-integrate working and living and make both pleasurable and fulfilling, we will not have progressed beyond the wild ones. This is what I am being told by my consciousness.

David Dobereiner is a distant relative of the famous chemist. He is an architect, and is the author of The End of the Street: Sustainable Growth within Natural Limits (Black Rose Books, 2006).

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

What Is Cosmic Consciousness? The Quest for Hidden Reality

from huffpost

Deepak Chopra

Co-author with Rudolph Tanzi,Ph.D. of 'Super Brain'; Founder, The Chopra Foundatio

Is there such a thing as higher consciousness? For a tiny fraction of the population who believe they have experienced God directly, this is a spiritual question with a definite answer. But for most people the question is hypothetical. Every spiritual tradition has asserted that there is a hidden reality which can be uncovered through transcending -- or going beyond -- the five senses. There are elaborate directions for accomplishing this leap, in the form of prayer, meditation, renunciation, and faith -- the religious history of humankind has never stopped directing its aspirations to a higher plane. But everyday life consumes our attention, and in a skeptical age the erosion of belief makes higher consciousness seem very far away if not irrelevant.

On a separate track, or so it seems, quantum physics has altered the universe in radical ways. Solid matter has been reduced to invisible waves existing in a field of mathematical probabilities. Time and space form a background in which relativistic quantum fields float, completely different from the reliable time ticked off by clocks, and the space enclosed inside rooms where solid objects find a place. Yet as with the higher dimensions aspired to by religion, quantum space remains hidden from the five senses. For the vast majority of physicists, quantum reality is about intricate mathematical constructs and experiments that validate them using billion-dollar particle accelerators.

Standing back a little, the resulting picture is quite startling. The two most important ways of explaining creation, science and spirituality, both depend on a hidden dimension. Without this dimension there would be no human existence. Shouldn't that knowledge revolutionize our lives, here and now? Somehow it doesn't. A missing link needs to be filled in. Otherwise, the world we inhabit will be disconnected from its source, as it largely is right now.

One proposition, which we strongly endorse, is that the missing link is consciousness. Because so many people relegate spirituality to faith, assuming that nothing about God or the soul can be proved, let's set that aside for the moment. The link has to be scientific. We must thread a path from quantum theory to higher consciousness. This takes some hard thinking, but a huge reward awaits. Hidden reality will reveal itself for what it actually is. Higher consciousness may well become an everyday experience.

To begin, quantum theory, which has been called the most successful scientific theory in history, unequivocally states that we live in a participatory universe -- what we consider as an independent, external reality is in fact tied to how we observe it. The late physicist John Wheeler of Princeton and the University of Texas campaigned for the importance of our participation, pushing against the notion that the universe was simply "out there," like a bakeshop, he said, that we look at with our noses pressed against the window.

Yet how strange to think that when a physicist makes observations and measurements, the quanta that constitute everything in the cosmos change; indeed, it is meaningless to talk of their properties without presupposing an observer. The universe is tied to conscious acts of observation all the way from the most elementary particles to vast galaxies. Moreover, quantum theory assigns a primary role to the quantum vacuum, the emptiness that precedes observable phenomena like atoms and molecules. Unlike the common sense notion of empty space, the quantum vacuum is abundantly full of dynamic potential. Wheeler, besides coining the term "participatory universe," also held that the quantum vacuum is primary in all physics, a view that has gained wide acceptance. The quantum vacuum is a vast plenum (fullness) of spacetime "foam," beyond which time, space -- and physics -- come to an end.

Cosmology, which is based on the other most successful theory we have, Einstein's general relativity, states that the universe emerged from this plenum of quantum foam at the time of the Big Bang and has been evolving ever since, for some 13.5 billion years. Everything we consider real, either to our senses or to scientific investigation, first passed through the so-called Planck era (a state so minuscule, brief, and turbulent that it cannot be penetrated -- it's a mathematical formulation that describes the limit of what we can know) and entered the phase of general expansion that created matter, energy, stars, galaxies, and biological life.

With a definite limit set on space and time, science has to wrestle with the fact that the human brain operates in space and time. But this doesn't need to be discouraging. If the universe is in fact participatory, then the human brain must be participating on the quantum level. Why is this so? Because the quantum foam, which is the source of every particle in existence and its oppositely charged anti-particle, must be the brain's source, too. It isn't tenable to posit a universe where quantum reality is divorced from everyday reality. The micro and macro worlds derive from the same origin, not just billions of years ago, but at this very minute -- reality bubbles up from the quantum vacuum continuously.

The quantum foam allows entangled quanta to emerge from it, while the vast majority of them fall back onto it. Thus the creation, maintenance, and re-absorption of virtual particles occur at all times and at all space points. Our senses force us to see one sunrise at a time, one birthday party at a time, one person at a time. Yet without a doubt reality isn't confined to linear experience in space and time. One can even say that beyond our confined perceptions, the Big Bang is happening everywhere at once, in an eternal now. Creation is a single process, and we are totally immersed in it.

This is where the missing link is most urgent. Physics needs the quantum vacuum for various reasons, most of them mathematical, but everyday life seems to chug along quite nicely without it. However, since everything in existence depends upon the quantum vacuum, including all living beings, our belief that we live outside it must be false. There's no logical escape from this fact, so the burden lies with changing our sense of reality -- the "going beyond" that supposedly belongs to saints and mystics actually applies to everyone (perhaps saints and mystics are just the ones who caught on first).

Here a subtle point arises. The strangeness of the quantum world, which approaches legendary status, grew out of its contradictions with prevailing theories of long standing. (For example, the accepted idea of cause-and-effect isn't consistent with the quantum possibility of time and causation going backwards.) Yet no matter what model you use to explain reality, the map is never the territory. Whatever secrets it reveals, reality remains what it is, unanswerable, irrefutable, and inconceivable.

This, too, doesn't have to be a discouraging thought. It's liberating to realize that we are part of this inconceivable reality, navigating through it with all kinds of questions yet sustained by it no matter how wrong, limited, or misguided our answers may be. Participating in the quantum field makes a serious difference in how life can be led. For it turns out that all the spooky phenomena in the quantum world are perfectly human and familiar -- once you stop comparing them to old, worn-out explanations.

In the next post we'll restore the missing link by an act of destruction and creation, knocking down the perceptions that limit everyday life and replacing them with perceptions that allow hidden reality to come alive.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, is the author of more than 75 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers.

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness and the above fields. His doctoral thesis advisor was the notable M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kafatos' studies involved quantum physicists Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf and cosmologist Thomas Gold. He is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

Saturday, January 18, 2014

E.L. Doctorow explores consciousness in ‘Andrew’s Brain’

from psdispatch.com

January 17. 2014 4:47PM
DAVID L. ULIN Los Angeles Times

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“Andrew’s Brain” by E.L. Doctorow; Random House (200 pages, $26)

• • •

E.L. Doctorow has long operated in the shadow of the Transcendentalists: Emerson, who inspired his 2003 collection of essays, “Reporting the Universe;” Hawthorne, whose story “Wakefield,” he updated in 2008. Like them, his great subject is consciousness, what he has called “a mind in the appalled contemplation of itself.” Like them, he is a romantic, a true believer — in the myth of America as a shining city, despite its various and ongoing failures to live up to its better self.

His finest efforts embody this tension, between who we are and who we wish we were, between promise and despair. I think of “The Book of Daniel,” narrated by the son of a Julius-and-Ethel-Rosenberg-like couple, or “The March,” with its panoramic portrait of the chaos that was Sherman’s march.

“Fiction goes everywhere,” Doctorow suggests in his 2000 novel “City of God,” “inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. … Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness.” Inherent in such a statement is the faith that literature can (yes) transcend our vagaries, or at least cast our contradictions in stark relief.

Doctorow’s 12th novel, “Andrew’s Brain,” operates out of precisely this intention. Constructed as a dialogue between a cognitive scientist named Andrew and an unnamed interlocutor, it begins by framing an irreconcilable dilemma: “If consciousness exists without the world, it is nothing, and if it needs the world to exist, it is still nothing.”

Andrew is talking from an undisclosed location, so indistinct it may not be physical: He could be a phantom of his neurology. “(T)he great problem confronting neuroscience,” he argues, “is how the brain becomes the mind. How that three-pound knitting ball makes you feel like a human being.”

The implications are not only material but also spiritual. If consciousness is just a matter of neurons flashing, then what is the essence of humanity? “To have feelings, states of mind, memory, longing,” Doctorow writes: That is what sets us apart. But “if we figure out how the brain gives us consciousness, we will have learned how to replicate consciousness” — which means “the end of the mythic human world we’ve had since the Bronze Age. The end of our dominion. The end of the Bible, and all the stories we’ve told ourselves until now.”

If all that sounds a bit abstract, it can be, though “Andrew’s Brain” is not exactly a novel of ideas. Rather, it is a memory book, a retrospective, in which Andrew looks back over his life to figure out how he came to be wherever he is. His is a hard-luck story, marked by a dead child and a dead wife, and a series of retreats and surrenders, beginning when he was a boy.

Bad things happen to him (or more accurately around him): the death of a motorist who veered into a tree so as not to hit him while he was sledding, an attack on his dachshund puppy by a red-tailed hawk in Washington Square. “Son,” he recalls his father saying, “lots of kids were sleigh riding and it could have been any one of them in the path of that car. It just happened to be you. He didn’t believe this any more than I did. He knew that if any kid was likely to cause a fatal crash it would be me.”

These memories raise an enigmatic question: Do our experiences shape our personalities or is it the other way around?

“Deep down,” Andrew admits, “at the bottom of my soul, if such exists, I am finally unmoved by what I’ve done.” What he’s getting at is how our actions and attitudes create ripples, reverberations, a butterfly effect. To what extent is Andrew the agent of his disastrous circumstances, and what does it mean that they don’t affect him much?

This is both a narrative and a philosophical issue — although the paradox is that the more Doctorow tilts toward the former, the more he undermines the book. It’s a strange criticism, because fiction is an art of narrative, but the plot he develops in the final third of “Andrew’s Brain” is so unlikely as to seem serendipitous, a radical right turn that runs the novel off the road.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Pastor Rick Warren: Fighting Obesity with Faith

from wsj

The pastor aims to build a healthy congregation with a new diet book

Jan. 17, 2014 8:50 p.m. ET

'If you're not following me on Twitter, TWTR +2.69% you're going to hell," says megachurch pastor Rick Warren, before cracking up. Mr. Warren—or Pastor Rick, as his teeming staff calls him—is leaning back in a red leather chair with his sneaker-clad feet up on the coffee table in one of his many offices on the 120-acre Saddleback Church campus in Lake Forest, Calif. He's only joking. He has plenty of followers already: Almost 1.3 million keep up with him on Twitter, and around 30,000 attend his sermons.

Rick Warren Amanda Friedman for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Warren's popularity soared after the release of his 2002 best seller, "The Purpose Driven Life," a self-help book about discovering and exploring a relationship with God that has sold about 40 million copies. "All of a sudden, people are calling me, well-known people are calling me, and I'm saying, 'Why are you calling me? I'm just a pastor,' " he recalls. Now he has come out with "The Daniel Plan," a diet book—though he says it is more than just a diet book—written with two doctors. It's already a best seller, and Mr. Warren, 59, plans to turn it into as much of a brand as "The Purpose Driven Life," which thousands of churches, corporations and even sports teams adopted as a 40-day plan.

Mr. Warren came up with the idea for "The Daniel Plan" a few years ago while doing baptisms "the old-fashioned way"—by physically raising and lowering people into the water. That day he baptized 850 people. "That's about 150,000 pounds, which is why I'm so buff," he says with a chuckle. "But as I'm lowering people, I literally felt the weight of America's obesity problem," he adds. "I thought, good night, we're all fat!" Then he says he realized, "Good night, I'm fat!"

He didn't think he could ask his congregation to get healthy without doing so himself. The following weekend, he declared he would set out to lose 90 pounds (at 6-foot-3, he weighed nearly 300 pounds) and asked if anyone wanted to join him. Mr. Warren says that he thought he might get 200 people, but by the end of the week, 15,000 people had signed up on Saddleback's website.

Next he recruited three friends in the medical field, including Mehmet Oz, the surgeon and television show host, to come up with a system for how they would do it. Along with fitness and nutrition, Mr. Warren says he added the "special sauce" of "focus, friends and faith"—in other words, help from a higher power and from friends and community.

Named for the Biblical prophet Daniel, who challenged himself to eat only vegetables and water, Mr. Warren's Daniel Plan instructs people to rely on "God power" rather than just willpower to eat healthily. His theory is that guilt only motivates people to follow diets in the short term, but "grace" lasts longer.

The book, released in December, provides a meal plan that includes lean protein, fruit, vegetables and whole grains, and it encourages regular exercise. The day after a two-hour rally to kick off the plan at Saddleback, he says local grocery stores were out of vegetables. "That's the power of a congregation," he says. "When an elephant is walking, it shakes the ground, and that's a congregation—it shakes the ground."

His book follows upon a rough period for Mr. Warren. He says, "2013 was the worst year of my life." In January, he had severe back problems that put him in the hospital for weeks, and in April, his 27-year-old son committed suicide. "That was the worst day of my life, of course," he says.

He could not sleep for the next six months. "You know what happens when you don't sleep?" he asks. "Your cravings go crazy, you don't exercise, and on top of that, I had a church family that loved me bringing me casseroles." After losing 65 pounds in his first year and a half on the Daniel Plan, he gained 35 pounds back. In October, he went back on the diet and lost 35 pounds before the book's release in December. He still has 25 pounds to go. "I'm the first guy who lost weight on the Daniel Plan twice," he says. "I tell that story because I want my failings to encourage people."

With his new book, Mr. Warren aims to make health a form of worship. "The Bible says…God made your body, Jesus died for your body, and He expects you to take care of your body," the pastor says. "We are repositioning health as a spiritual stewardship."

He thinks our culture sees the body in one of two extreme ways. "We either idolize the body, and there are people who do that and it's all about how you look, or we go to the other extreme and we say, 'We don't care about that,' " he says. It's health's higher purpose that Mr. Warren says distinguishes his plan from other diet books. "It's not so much what you eat; it's what eats you," he says. "It's the stresses, the unreached goals, the broken heart and the grief."

Mr. Warren thinks he knows more about these psychological concerns—and about health care—than any government or counseling system. "The church has been in the health-care business 2,000 years longer than the government, so the audacity of the government trying to tell the church what they should do with health care is—are you kidding me?" he exclaims.

Mr. Warren gives the church credit for inventing the hospital and says that one of Jesus' three key tenets was "healing." "One-third of his ministry was health care," he says. "We believe the Daniel Plan is really taking the church back to what it has done for 2,000 years, because only in the last 75 years have we abdicated education and health care to the government."

He feels the same way about poverty and unemployment: "Churches know more about poverty than any government will ever know, because we're dealing with the poor every day."

Mr. Warren aims to continue to expand Saddleback beyond the U.S. He and members of his congregation have traveled to every country around the world (and he shows off his album of visits to 196 of them to prove it) as part of his nonprofit P.E.A.C.E. Plan, an initiative to "assist the poor and care for the sick." With branches already built in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong and plans to create over a dozen other locations in strategic "hub" cities from Tokyo to Mexico City, his hopes for Saddleback are increasingly global.

And what's his personal purpose? "My ultimate goal…is for you to live the life you're intended to live," he says. "You drift through life and let things happen to you, or go by design and say, 'This is what I'm intended to do.' The Bible is very clear that God has a purpose. But even if I know that purpose, I can't fulfill it if I'm out of shape."

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com

Rick Warren

The megachurch pastor aims to build a healthy congregation with a new diet book

One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters by Larry Dossey, MD

from huffpost

Suna Senman

Author of “Peace”

On my journey for new perspectives on meaningfulness, I discovered a newly published book, One Mind. At last, the iron curtain between science and spirituality is coming down as we look beyond theory and theology to honestly observing life on the inside and out.

Reading this book gave me a sense of relief. Anyone who has had any unexplained experience should find One Mind both fascinating and comforting. The well researched book explores many areas of conscious being including group behavior, sixth sense and near death experiences. Even before my research revealed that the author, Larry Dossey, MD is known as a reliable medical doctor who dares to erase the boundaries between science and spirituality while fully respecting both, I respected his honest openness and intellect. One Mind is Dossey's ninth book exploring dimensions of the mind-body-spirit dynamic, and is an exploration of harmonious life energy, which is often referred to by many names such as God, Allah, Buddha, Source, and Higher Mind.

In efforts to express the vast concept in words Dossey writes, "The One Mind is like an invisible, nonphysical cloud-computing platform with infinite storage capacity that is user free. There is no need for linkage, because all minds are already connected non-locally as a unitary whole." Yet in this connectivity, there is order that includes sorting out all knowledge and stimuli for the purpose of being present to ourselves and those closest to us. He gives the example that a mother can intuit what is happening to her child, yet not be bombarded by the situation of all children. My understanding is that we are given the knowledgeof what we need when we need it as to be most effective where needed in accord to our heart's true desires. Dossey concurs to the idea that love is the "lubricant" that binds us, a concept that opens the door to understanding connection with each other beyond time and space, even beyond earthly life.

In the book, we take a journey through science, psychology, religion, philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other disciples to explore many life questions and find the connectiveness in our beings.

The stories of remarkable experiences such as people who had known of tragedies occurring miles away or in the future, communication between humans and animals, and visits from deceased loved ones are most engaging. Dossey reveals technical and esoteric explanations to real, yet unusual events. For example, clarifying how the One Mind acts in responding to need, Dossey compares the entity to a natural dynamic in a human body. "Like stem cells, the One Mind, the Source, awaits instructions and prompting." There seems to be a higher intelligence that creates vital support as yearned for. This energy rallies assistance from the people around us as if there is an innate communication system far more advanced than smart phones.

As individuals interact with one another, we find that we are not so "individual" but more of a blend of our original constitutions with influence from others. Where are the lines between you and me and us? Similar to how bits of light move into the dark of night to eventually bring in day, using the mathematic concept of fractals, Dossey describes the fuzzy line between unique persons. We are both our own being and contain fractals of others within our identity. Conversely, is experiencing self as separate from others that which permits us to take a perspective of being higher or lower and entering power play? Is individual isolation a mindset that blocks allowance for compassion and even effective problem solving?

The section called "Accessing the One Mind," gives general guidance for consciously connecting with the energy. Dossey explains working with dreams, developing compassion and practicing meditation as a few of the methods. He seems to be careful to keep from going into specific spiritual practices, yet states that knowledge of One Mind is key to an improved experience of life. He goes, as far as to say, "unity, commonality and a One-Mind consciousness are not philosophical niceties but necessities preventing our decent into depravity." My personal experience as a counselor concurs that there is a high correlation between building a mindfulness of a Higher Source with a person's health and happiness.

Perhaps lacking awareness of the One Mind, the energy behind uncanny circumstances and miracles, may come from having a perspective crowded with trivialities as if the bowl to fill us with knowledge is already full of ideas. "Silence means that a place has been created where a higher form of knowing can enter," Dossey confirms.

Reading One Mind was like being informed by a compassionate authority on the state ofbeing. Like a doctor with excellent bed-side manners, difficult topics were addressed with sound knowledge and personal care. The book kindly entices the reader to gain awareness of connectivity I can imagine that every human can relate to at least one if not many of the accounts retold in the book, and will gain a sense of relief to both know that "the unusual" is not abnormal and there are multifaceted explanations.

Follow Suna Senman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sunasenman

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' corroborates theory of consciousness

from phys.org

Jan 16, 2014

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in Physics of Life Reviews claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside brain neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in "microtubules" inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.

The theory, called "orchestrated objective reduction" ('Orch OR'), was first put forward in the mid-1990s by eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, Mathematical Institute and Wadham College, University of Oxford, and prominent anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson. They suggested that quantum vibrational computations in microtubules were "orchestrated" ("Orch") by synaptic inputs and memory stored in microtubules, and terminated by Penrose "objective reduction" ('OR'), hence "Orch OR." Microtubules are major components of the cell structural skeleton.

Orch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too "warm, wet, and noisy" for seemingly delicate quantum processes. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair's theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations. In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff, MD, at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.

"The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?" ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review. "This opens a potential Pandora's Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, 'proto-conscious' quantum structure of reality."

After 20 years of skeptical criticism, "the evidence now clearly supports Orch OR," continue Hameroff and Penrose. "Our new paper updates the evidence, clarifies Orch OR quantum bits, or "qubits," as helical pathways in microtubule lattices, rebuts critics, and reviews 20 testable predictions of Orch OR published in 1998 – of these, six are confirmed and none refuted."

An important new facet of the theory is introduced. Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in megahertz) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG "beat frequencies." Despite a century of clinical use, the underlying origins of EEG rhythms have remained a mystery. Clinical trials of brief brain stimulation aimed at microtubule resonances with megahertz mechanical vibrations using transcranial ultrasound have shown reported improvements in mood, and may prove useful against Alzheimer's disease and brain injury in the future.

Lead author Stuart Hameroff concludes, "Orch OR is the most rigorous, comprehensive and successfully-tested theory of consciousness ever put forth. From a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions."

The review is accompanied by eight commentaries from outside authorities, including an Australian group of Orch OR arch-skeptics. To all, Hameroff and Penrose respond robustly.

Penrose, Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay will explore their theories during a session on "Microtubules and the Big Consciousness Debate" at the Brainstorm Sessions, a public three-day event at the Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, January 16-18, 2014. They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. "Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music which is harmonic," Hameroff explains.

Explore further: Good vibrations: Mediating mood through brain ultrasound

More information: "Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory," by Stuart Hameroff, MD, and Roger Penrose, FRS.dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Planetary Consciousness and the Tears of the World

from opednews.com

Planetary Consciousness and the Tears of the World:

A Review of Carolyn Baker's Collapsing Consciously

By Gary Corseri

From http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8508/8410678920_df34c1a3b9_n.jpg: Planetary Consciousness--Not for Sissies!

Planetary Consciousness--Not for Sissies!
(image by Gary Corseri)

One can open this 173-page book just about anywhere, read a few pages, and have something to contemplate and meditate for the rest of the day, or several days, or a lifetime. The book is divided into 2 parts: "Collapse, Transition, the Great Turning" and "Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times." The first part, about 2/3 of the book, works as a kind of Zen-slap to wake up the disconnected, mesmerized and unfocussed to the terrible predations we have made on Planet Earth these past 200 years of the Industrial Revolution and 100 years of Corporate-Federal Reserve-Media-Military-Academic State-ism. The last 63 pages consist of pertinent, sometimes glittering, quotes from Ms. Baker's wide and varied reading in Jung and psychology, the Arts, environment and political matters--and her thoughts in response to those quotes and insights. This is a book with "designs" on the reader: the author intends to warn, inform, and transform.

The book's author-profile states that Dr. Baker is a "former psychotherapist and professor of psychology and history. She is nationally renowned for her writing and workshops on emotional resilience in challenging times". Her books include Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition and "Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse. Her website is SpeakingTruth to Power, at www.carolynbaker.net ."

I confess that I have not read Ms. Baker's previous books, but I have, in recent years, profitably read her articles appearing at some of the best progressive websites as well as her own site. In spite of her obvious erudition, Ms. Baker has a way of "telling it like it is," without frills--a wise woman talking frankly to those wise enough to listen.

"Our inexorable reality in this moment is one of contraction, decline, and demise. Industrial civilization is collapsing." Thus, with punches un-pulled, she launches us outward, upward and within from the get-go. There, in the intro, we also learn a little about her recent battles: "As I send this book to publication, I have recently confronted a personal collapse in the form of a health challenge. I have been humbled and constrained by a recurrence of breast cancer. And although my treatment is complete and my prognosis very good" I recognize it as yet another spiritual rite of passage".

Rites of passage, of course, are not easy to navigate" and impossible to circumvent. Fact is humankind in 2014, decades after those prophetic masters'--Orwell's and Huxley's--dark premonitions" has succeeded in trumping those foreboding visions. With Ms. Baker's book and the daily headlines, it's easy to catalogue the innumerable crises we face: Polar Vortex? What the hell is that? Is there a tie-in with Global Climate Change? What about all this methane gas being released from Siberia's permafrost melting? What about "Peak Oil"? What about the plume of radiation emanating from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plants? Why hasn't something been done about the hole in the ozone that I first read about some 30 years ago? When will the endless "peace process" end and we simply have Peace in the Middle East and elsewhere? Are we incapable of transcending our warrior past, our reptilian brain, our genetic, social and historical limitations?

These are some of the questions Ms. Baker would have us examine, and, always, she urges us to know ourselves, to understand deeply. With her background in psychology--especially Jungian--, she exhorts us to know our "Shadow" side--to embrace even the darkness. Collapse consciously! That's the ticket. There's hell to pay. We've messed up our only home and things will get a lot worse" before they" if they ever get better!

But we can conceive the multitude of challenges we face as a spiritual journey, too.

Let me be clear: this is no namby-pamby "New Age" book where everything turns out honky-dory if only we chant "Om" while the Earth gets fracked beneath our rising kundalinies. More than once, Ms. Baker enjoins the human race to "grow up!" We are forewarned in the intro: "I am drawn to the perennial wisdom of the towering giants of poetry, story, art, music, and literature. They never have and never will offer us happy stories with happy endings. Rather, they offer us life-- in all of its angst, beauty, ire, terror, joy, celebration, ecstasy and demise." And, again, in her first chapter: "Preparing logistically or emotionally for the collapse of life as we have known it since arriving on this planet is not supposed to be fun." And, in a later chapter: "Unless we include the possibility of death in our presentation, we aren't really preparing." Yes, this is also a book about learning how to die, how to face death.

Like Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion, Ms. Baker has no patience with our cult of "positive thinking." I think that cult is a legitimate target of real thinkers (who acknowledge the Shadow), but, occasionally, Ms. Baker over-shoots her mark, conflating all New Agers with Dale Carnegie-type positivists. Of course, "New Age" goes back some 40 years, and is feeling its knees. But much of it was about much more than positive thinking and Ms. Baker knows that in her bones every time she relates a bit of Eastern wisdom, or quotes Lao Tzu or Buddha.

This is a book about becoming whole again; reaching deep within, not to overcome the Shadow, but to integrate and join forces with it. It's a book about developing a planetary consciousness to confront the global muck we've created. It's a book about making connections--within ourselves, and with others. Ms. Baker quotes Francis Weller, author ofEntering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual, and the Soul of the World:

"Our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open again and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world."

Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. His dramas have been produced on Atlanta-PBS; he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library; and his prose and poems have appeared at hundreds of publications/websites worldwide, including, The Greanville Post, Redbook, OpEdNews, Village Voice, The New York Times, Smirking Chimp, L.A./Hollywood Progressive, Countercurrents, BraveNewWorld.in.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Goodnight. Sleep Clean.

from nytimes

By MARIA KONNIKOVAJAN. 11, 2014

SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna?

“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”

We’ve known for some time that sleep is essential forforming and consolidating memories and that it plays a central role in the formation of new neuronal connections and the pruning of old ones. But that hardly seems enough to risk death-by-leopard-in-the-night. “If sleep was just to remember what you did yesterday, that wouldn’t be important enough,” Dr. Nedergaard explains.

In a series of new studies, published this fall in the journal Science, the Nedergaard lab may at last be shedding light on just what it is that would be important enough. Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.

Recall what happens to your body during exercise. You start off full of energy, but soon enough your breathing turns uneven, your muscles tire, and your stamina runs its course. What’s happening internally is that your body isn’t able to deliver oxygen quickly enough to each muscle that needs it and instead creates needed energy anaerobically. And while that process allows you to keep on going, a side effect is the accumulation of toxic byproducts in your muscle cells. Those byproducts are cleared out by the body’s lymphatic system, allowing you to resume normal function without any permanent damage.

The lymphatic system serves as the body’s custodian: Whenever waste is formed, it sweeps it clean. The brain, however, is outside its reach — despite the fact that your brain uses up about 20 percent of your body’s energy. How, then, does its waste — like beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease — get cleared? What happens to all the wrappers and leftovers that litter the room after any mental workout?

“Think about a fish tank,” says Dr. Nedergaard. “If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?”

UNTIL a few years ago, the prevailing model was based on recycling: The brain got rid of its own waste, not only beta-amyloid but other metabolites, by breaking it down and recycling it at an individual cell level. When that process eventually failed, the buildup would result in age-related cognitive decline and diseases like Alzheimer’s. That “didn’t make sense” to Dr. Nedergaard, who says that “the brain is too busy to recycle” all of its energy. Instead, she proposed a brain equivalent of the lymphatic system, a network of channels that cleared out toxins with watery cerebrospinal fluid. She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.

She was hardly the first to think in those terms. “It had been proposed about one hundred years ago, but they didn’t have the tools to study it properly,” she says. Now, however, with advanced microscopes and dyeing techniques, her team discovered that the brain’s interstitial space — the fluid-filled area between tissue cells that takes up about 20 percent of the brain’s total volume — was mainly dedicated to physically removing the cells’ daily waste.

When members of Dr. Nedergaard’s team injected small fluorescent tracers into the cerebrospinal fluid of anesthetized mice, they found that the tracers quickly entered the brain — and, eventually, exited it — via specific, predictable routes.

The next step was to see how and when, exactly, the glymphatic system did its work. “We thought this cleaning process would require tremendous energy,” Dr. Nedergaard says. “And so we asked, maybe this is something we do when we’re sleeping, when the brain is really not processing information.”

In a series of new studies on mice, her team discovered exactly that: When the mouse brain is sleeping or under anesthesia, it’s busy cleaning out the waste that accumulated while it was awake.

In a mouse brain, the interstitial space takes up less room than it does in ours, approximately 14 percent of the total volume. Dr. Nedergaard found that when the mice slept, it swelled to over 20 percent. As a result, the cerebrospinal fluid could not only flow more freely but it could also reach further into the brain. In an awake brain, it would flow only along the brain’s surface. Indeed, the awake flow was a mere 5 percent of the sleep flow. In a sleeping brain, waste was being cleared two times faster. “We saw almost no inflow of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain when the mice were awake, but then when we anesthetized them, it started flowing. It’s such a big difference I kept being afraid something was wrong,” says Dr. Nedergaard.

Similar work in humans is still in the future. Dr. Nedergaard is currently awaiting board approval to begin the equivalent study in adult brains in collaboration with the anesthesiologist Helene Benveniste at Stony Brook University.

So far the glymphatic system has been identified as the neural housekeeper in baboons, dogs and goats. “If anything,” Dr. Nedergaard says, “it’s more needed in a bigger brain.”

MODERN society is increasingly ill equipped to provide our brains with the requisite cleaning time. The figures are stark. Some 80 percent of working adults suffer to some extent from sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should sleep seven to nine hours. On average, we’re getting one to two hours less sleep a night than we did 50 to 100 years ago and 38 minutes less on weeknights than we did as little as 10 years ago. Between 50 and 70 million people in the United States suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder. When our sleep is disturbed, whatever the cause, our cleaning system breaks down. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology, Sigrid Veasey has been focusing on precisely how restless nights disturb the brain’s normal metabolism. What happens to our cognitive function when the trash piles up?

At the extreme end, the result could be the acceleration of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. While we don’t know whether sleep loss causes the disease, or the disease itself leads to sleep loss — what Dr. Veasey calls a “classic chicken-and-egg” problem — we do know that the two are closely connected. Along with the sleep disturbances that characterize neurodegenerative diseases, there is a buildup of the types of proteins that the glymphatic system normally clears out during regular sleep, like beta-amyloids and tau, both associated with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.

“To me,” says Dr. Veasey, “that’s the most compelling part of the Nedergaard research. That the clearance for these is dramatically reduced from prolonged wakefulness.” If we don’t sleep well, we may be allowing the very things that cause neural degeneration to pile up unchecked.

Even at the relatively more benign end — the all-nighter or the extra-stressful week when you caught only a few hours a night — sleep deprivation, as everyone who has experienced it knows, impedes our ability to concentrate, to pay attention to our environment and to analyze information creatively. “When we’re sleep-deprived, we can’t integrate or put together facts,” as Dr. Veasey puts it.

But there is a difference between the kind of fleeting sleep loss we sometimes experience and the chronic deprivation that comes from shift work, insomnia and the like. In one set of studies, soon to be published in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Veasey lab found that while our brains can recover quite readily from short-term sleep loss, chronic prolonged wakefulness and sleep disruption stresses the brain’s metabolism. The result is the degeneration of key neurons involved in alertness and proper cortical function and a buildup of proteins associated with aging and neural degeneration.

It’s like the difference between a snowstorm’s disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there’s likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet. “Recovery from sleep loss is slower than we’d thought,” Dr. Veasey notes. “We used to think that after a bit of recovery sleep, you should be fine. But this work shows you’re not.”

If you put her own research together with the findings from the Nedergaard lab, Dr. Veasey says, it “very clearly shows that there’s impaired clearance in the awake brain. We’re really starting to realize that when we skip sleep, we may be doing irreparable damage to the brain, prematurely aging it or setting it up for heightened vulnerability to other insults.”

In a society that is not only chronically sleep-deprived but also rapidly aging, that’s bad news. “It’s unlikely that poor sleep as a child would actually cause Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” says Dr. Veasey, “but it’s more likely that you may shift one of those diseases by a decade or so. That has profound health and economic implications.”

It’s a pernicious cycle. We work longer hours, become more stressed, sleep less, impair our brain’s ability to clean up after all that hard work, and become even less able to sleep soundly. And if we reach for a sleeping pill to help us along? While work on the effects of sleeping aids on the glymphatic system remains to be done, the sleep researchers I spoke with agree that there’s no evidence that aided sleep is as effective as natural sleep.

There is, however, reason to hope. If the main function of sleep is to take out our neural trash, that insight could eventually enable a new understanding of both neurodegenerative diseases and regular, age-related cognitive decline. By developing a diagnostic test to measure how well the glymphatic system functions, we could move one step closer to predicting someone’s risk of developing conditions like Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia: The faster the fluids clear the decks, the more effectively the brain’s metabolism is functioning.

“Such a test could also be used in the emergency room after traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Nedergaard says, “to see who is at risk of developing decline in cognitive function.”

We can also focus on developing earlier, more effective interventions to prevent cognitive decline. One approach would be to enable individuals who suffer from sleep loss to sleep more soundly — but how? Dr. Nedergaard’s mice were able to clear their brain’s waste almost as effectively under anesthesia as under normal sleeping conditions. “That’s really fascinating,” says Dr. Veasey. Though current sleeping aids may not quite do the trick, and anesthetics are too dangerous for daily use, the results suggest that there may be better ways of improving sleep pharmacologically.

Now that we have a better understanding of why sleep is so important, a new generation of drug makers can work to create the best possible environment for the trash pickup to occur in the first place — to make certain that our brain’s sleeping metabolism is as efficient as it can possibly be.

A second approach would take the opposite tack, by seeking to mimic the cleanup-promoting actions of sleep in the awake brain, which could make a full night of sound sleep less necessary. To date, the brain’s metabolic process hasn’t been targeted as such by the pharmaceutical industry. There simply wasn’t enough evidence of its importance. In response to the evolving data, however, future drug interventions could focus directly on the glymphatic system, to promote the enhanced cleaning power of the sleeping brain in a brain that is fully awake. One day, scientists might be able to successfully mimic the expansion of the interstitial space that does the mental janitorial work so that we can achieve maximally efficient round-the-clock brain trash pickup.

If that day comes, they would be on their way to discovering that all-time miracle drug: one that, in Dr. Veasey’s joking words, “could mean we never have to sleep at all.”