At this holiday season, when there is so much to be worried and upset about, e.g., the war and potential other wars, a growing divide between the richer and poorer countries and communities, global warming and environmental crises, etc., I would like to post some reflections and observations on the human condition, its mysteries, as well as the mystery which permeates the universe from the level of quantum reality through the human genome to the whole human being and her or his relationships. Being aware of this helps me to face the adversities in our world today.
Brain, mind and culture are all essential aspects in the etiology and course of severe mental illness, as well as in other mental and medical disorders. We need to be trilingual and multidimensional in our approach. Sometimes, I think we need to speak a fourth language, the language of spirit. Motimer Ostow (2007), psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, in his recent volume Spirit, Mind, & Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality & Religion, notes that spirituality can be a positive instrument for mood regulation. Ostow concluded:
“Yes, spiritual and religious experience does have biological value. It plays a part, sometimes an important part, in mood regulation, and therefore in current mental activity and the avoidance of mental illness” (p. 141).
In Native American culture, the medicine wheel starts in the East with spirit, moves to the South with emotion, to the West with the physical body, and ends at the North with mind and community (Mehl-Madrona, 2005). Native American spirituality, such as in the Lakota tradition, is not plagued with the Western Cartesian split between mind and body. Native American spirituality, like the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, see persons as unified mind-body-spirit wholes, with no separation between subject and object. In Cherokee and Lakota healing, healing involves restoration of “right relationship.” Mehl-Madrona, (2006) a Western-trained psychiatrist with genetic roots to the Lakota and Cherokee people, in speaking of psychological healing, noted:
“I need to hear your story, the story you tell about yourself and your illness, to know where your relationships are disturbed. The unfolding of the story provides the clues about where to restore balance and harmony” (pp. 4-5).
Complexity of our brain and relational neurobiology
To begin with, it is important to keep in mind that the human brain is the most complex organ that we know of. Gerald Edelman (Edelman & Tononi, 2000), Nobel Prize Laureate in Medicine and director of The Neuroscience Institute of Scripps, pointed out that of the 100 billion or so neurons, the cerebral cortex contains about 30 billion and 1 million billion synapses-the possible number of neural circuits is a factor of 10 followed by at least a million zeros. If we counted one synapse per second, we would not finish counting for 32 million years. Sanguineti (2007) noted that there are an average of 10,000 to 100,000 synapses per neuron. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives concludes Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council (26 November 2005 NewScientist.com news service). The number of possible neural circuits, or mental states, i.e., individual minds, which could potentially be constructed from all of the possible dynamic patterns among cell assemblies is at least as large as 101017. This hyperimmense number is staggering when you compare it to the atomic mass of the universe, i.e., the number of protons in the universe, which is 1080. The age of the universe (about 20 billion years) in units of picoseconds (the basic time unit of chemical dynamics) is about 1030. Because of this complexity,
Sanguineti (2007) concluded:
“Therefore the complexity of the structural organization that forms the foundation to mind can be described as hyperimmense and justifies the opinion of many scientists that the brain is the most complicated known physical structure in the entire universe and that its connectivity, dynamics, and ways it relates to the body and to the world are like nothing else science has ever encountered” (p.16).
We are continuously learning about the impact relational and social experience has on the developing person, including the CNS. There is research emerging demonstrating that fetal cells in the rat could transform into neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and macrophages-crossing the maternal blood brain barrier and responding to molecular distress signals if the mother's brain is injured (Choi 2005). The human mother's brain regulates to a significant degree, e.g., through the maternal- placental-fetal neuroendocrine system, the developing fetal brain, creating long-term predispositions towards stress reactivity, e.g., placental corticotropin releasing hormone/factor (Wadhwa 2005). Social pain, e.g., social exclusion, is equivalent neurobiologically, i.e., through activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), to actual physical pain-words and social isolation are painful. Social status influences the actual structure of certain neural regions, e.g., “high-status” animals actually have greater degrees of neurogenesis, and more neurons, in the hippocampus, a neural region important in learning and memory. Mirror neurons help us to replicate within our own brains and minds the experience, goals and motivations of the other.
I believe that certain findings in quantum physics (e.g., entanglement), neurobiology (e.g., mirror-neuron systems), and relational approaches to psychoanalysis, all point to the essential aspect of the human condition: relation is the basis and nature of the self. Relationship is the psychobiological basis for all forms of psychotherapy.
Francis Collins (2006), director of the Human Genome Project, in reflecting on the mystery observed in the universe, a universe which rests upon a “knife edge of improbability,” notes:
“In the early moments of the universe following the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created in almost equivalent amounts. At one millisecond of time, the universe cooled enough for quarks and antiquarks to ‘condense out.’ Any quark encountering an antiquark, which would happen quickly at this high density, resulted in the complete annihilation of both and the release of a photon of energy. But the symmetry between matter and antimatter was not quite precise; for about every billion pair of quarks and antiquarks, there was an extra quark. It is that tiny fraction of the initial potentiality of the entire universe that makes up the mass of the universe as we now know it.
Why did this asymmetry exist? It would seem more ‘natural’ for there to be no asymmetry. But if had been complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, the universe would quickly have evolved into pure radiation, and people, planets, stars, and galaxies would never have come into existence.
The way in which the universe expanded after the Big Bang depended critically on how much total mass and energy the universe had, and also on the strength of the gravitational constant. The incredible degree of fine-tuning of these physical constants has been a subject of wonder for many experts. Hawking writes: ‘Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed before it ever reached its present size.’
On the other hand, if the rate of expansion had been greater by even one part in a million, stars and planets could not have been able to form. Recent theories involving an incredibly rapid expansion (inflation) of the universe at very early times appear to offer a partial explanation for why the present expansion is so close to the critical value. However, many cosmologists would say that this simply pushes the question back to why the universe had just the right properties to undergo such an inflationary expansion. The existence of a universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability.
The same remarkable circumstance applies to the formation of heavier elements. If the strong nuclear force that hold together protons and neutrons had been slightly weaker, then only hydrogen could have formed in the universe. If, on the other hand, the strong nuclear force had been slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium, instead of the 25 percent that occurred early in the Big Bang, and thus the fusion furnaces of stars and their ability to generate heavier elements would never have been born.
Adding to this remarkable observation, the nuclear force appears to be tuned just sufficiently for carbon to form, which is critical for life forms on Earth. Had that force been just slightly more attractive, all the carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
However, there are fifteen constants whose values current theory is unable to predict. They are givens: they simply have the value they have. This list includes the speed of light, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces, various parameters associated with electromagnetism, and the force of gravity. The chance that all of these constants would take on the values necessary to result in a stable universe capable of sustaining complex life forms is almost infinitesimal. And yet those are exactly the parameters that we observe. In sum our universe is wildly improbable.”
Is it possible that the ‘unity of being’ we witness at the level of human relation could also be operating at more elemental levels, for example, at the level of quantum physics? In my most inspired moments, I receive a dawning awareness of the ‘one in the many,’ i.e., an elementary perception of the seamlessness of all of phenomena. This reminds me of the quip that God did not create the universe along university departmental lines: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology are different aspects of a superordinate reality which eludes cognitive understanding, but like looking at stars, needs to be approached obliquely, through deeper emotional forms of knowing. In 1935 physicist Albert Einstein proposed a theory on quantum mechanics which has become known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox. He subsequently denied the viability of quantum theory. Many others have remained uncomfortable with the disparity between the world as we experience and see it-solid objects which stay where you put them-and the documented quantum world where nothing really is as it seems. More recently, the nonlocal connectedness of two particles has been referred to as entanglement.
In quantum physics, experimental research on “entanglement,” points to the interconnectedness of what classical physicists call matter. Cloninger (2004), Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, notes:
“The experience of nonlocality leads to increasing depth of recognition of phenomena that are unique to quantum physics, such as noncausality and nonlocality. Nonlocality refers to the inseparability of the bits of information. It is the beginning of the recognition that information may be the fundamental basis of reality. Localized particles of matter cannot be the fundamental basis of reality, as shown by rigorous demonstrations of action at a distance. When there is nonlocal causality or action at a distance, a causal influence on one ‘object,’ has an instantaneous influence on another remote but ‘entangled object.’ Noncausality and nonlocality are the properties that distinguish quantum physics from classic and relativistic models of local physical realism” (p.195).
Clegg (2006-see Clegg, B. 2006 The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon. New York: St. Martin’s Press) proposed that entanglement consists of the linkage between the incomprehensibly small particles which make up our universe. Clegg noted:
“Even if these entangled particles are then separated to opposite sides of the universe, they retain this strange connection. Make a change to one particle, and that change is instantly reflected in the other(s)-however far apart they may be” (p.2).
Parenthetically, quantum physics is strange not just because it violates common sense and sense data (Ford, 2005). Many physicists, despite its long history of unblemished success in experimentation, believe that quantum mechanics is incomplete. Ford noted:
“...quantum mechanics is eerie not just because it violates common sense. It is strange for deeper reasons: it shows that nature’s fundamental laws are probabilistic; it permits particles to be in two or more states of motion at the same time; it allows a particle to interfere with itself; it says that two widely separated particles can be entangled” (p. 247).
Despite his aversion to quantum reality, Einstein believed: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-- a kind of optical delusion in his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living, creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
Wishing all a peaceful and hopeful holiday season.
Brian Koehler
