The Mind and The Brain - Schwartz

The Mind and the Brain- 2003
Jefferey M. Schwartz & Sharon Begely
(Dedicated to Buddhist Monk)
To the Venerable U Silananda Sayadaw
1. Hamlet: My father, methinks I see my father. Horatio: O! where, my lord? Hamlet: In my mind’s
eye, Horatio.(Mind Sees)
2. Nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the
two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being, but how or why, no
mortal may ever know. —William James Principles of Psychology, Chapter VI(Mind arises from
brain)
3. To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one. —Sir Charles Sherrington, “The Brain
and Its Mechanism,” 1933(Who decides)
4. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell. —John Milton, Paradise
Lost(Mind operates brain)
5. Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of
the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method… changes and transforms its
object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object. —Werner Heisenberg,
1958(Mind cannot be known through scientific means)
6. If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of
fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect— what is the source of the free will possessed
by living things throughout the earth? —Lucretius, On the Nature of
7. The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Greatness comes from
within. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man. —
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
8. The task is… not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet
thought, about that which everybody sees. —Erwin Schrödinger(On Mind and Understanding)
EPILOGUE
Since attention is generally considered an internally generated state, it seems that neuroscience has
tiptoed up to a conclusion that would be right at home in the canon of some of the Eastern
philosophies: introspection, willed attention, subjective state— pick your favorite description of an
internal mental state— can redraw the contours of the mind, and in so doing can rewire the circuits of
the brain, for it is attention that makes neuroplasticity possible. The role of attention throws into stark
relief the power of mind over brain, for it is a mental state (attention) that has the ability to direct
neuroplasticity. In so doing, it has the power to alter the very landscape of the brain. “Experience
coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous
system,” Merzenich and deCharms concluded. “This leaves us with a clear physiological fact… moment
by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be
the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our
material selves.”
The power of attention, and thus the power of mind, reshapes neural circuitry and cortical maps— and
does so by means of what I call Directed Mental Force. We now have a scientific basis for asserting that
the exercise of the will, the effort of attention, can systematically change the way the brain works.
Mind, we now see, has the power to alter biological matter significantly; that three-pound lump of
gelatinous ooze within our skulls is truly the mind’s brain.
What does mind choose to attend to? Buddhist philosophy offers one avenue to understanding this. The
traditional practice of Buddhist meditation is based on two broad categories of mental activity:
samatha, translated as “calmness,” “tranquility,” or “quiescence” and vipassana, or “insight.” In the
beginning stages of training in samatha, attention plays a crucial role by focusing on a single tranquil
object, such as the surface of a calm lake or the sensation of breath passing through the nose. The goal
is to develop the level of concentration required for attaining a quality of Bare Attention that is
steady, powerful, and intense enough to achieve vipassana.
The shift in understanding inspired by neuroplasticity and the power of mind to shape brain undermines
the claim of materialist determinism that humans are essentially nothing more than fleshy computers
spitting out the behavioral results of some inescapable neurogenetic program. “The brain is going to do
what the brain was always going to do,” say the materialists. Both modern physics and contemporary
neuroscience reply that they are wrong. The teachings of faith have long railed against the perils of the
materialist mind-set. Now neuroscience and physics have joined them at the barricades. The science
emerging with the new century tells us that we are not the children of matter alone, nor its slaves. As
we establish ourselves in the third millennium, the Law of Karma elaborated so eloquently by Gotama
five hundred years before the first millennium still resonates: “All Beings are owners of their Karma.
Whatever volitional actions they do, good or evil, of those they shall become the heir.”
Schwartz, Jeffrey M.; Begley, Sharon. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental
Force (pp. 374-376). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

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The Mind and the Brain- 2003

Jefferey M. Schwartz & Sharon Begely

(Dedicated to Buddhist Monk)

To the Venerable U Silananda Sayadaw

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