science and brain snatching

Science and Religion; Brain snatching

By John Taylor; 28 August, 2005

Toward a Return to Harmony Between Science and Religion

Looking over what I have written about harmony between science and
religion, I find this principle neglected more than almost any other.
With the exception of a spate of essays around May of 2003, I seem
hardly to have touched it. Not surprising, then, that going through
the lighter side of the Baha'i principles earlier this spring, that
exactly here is where I got stuck and could not continue. My joking
around stopped dead. Although my research has a large enough
collection of raw material for humor, I could not find a spark to
catch my imagination and burn out a living essay. What is it, I asked
over and over, about harmony between science and religion could
possibly make me laugh?

Now that I have this Dragon dictation program going and to some extent
have trained myself in its operation and it has adapted to the
peculiarities of my voice, I hope quickly to read in enough new, dry
kindling from my intimidatingly large pile of printed, non-digital,
hard copy odds and ends on science and religion to get the flame
going. Of course, it would be nice to do actual writing with Dragon
Naturally Speaking instead of just typing; but I did not purchase it
with that in mind. I bought it to fill a cavernous input gap between
laboriously typing material in manually and laying it up against the
glass of my scanner. The latter is a laborious process good only for
inputting longer printed articles. However, it is useless for
handwritten notes and other short, printed snippets. These, the
scanner's OCR software either fails to recognize at all or takes so
long to process and is so replete with errors that it is quicker and
easier just to type it all in directly. This Dragon Naturally Speaking
dictation program looks like it can neatly fill this niche between the
long and the short of it. In the meantime, I am forcing myself into
thinking about science and religion by going over past work and
working out at least one, perhaps a series of new, non-funny -- not to
say serious -- essays on science and religion.

Invasion of the Brain Snatchers, I; An Idle Brain Repents

A great deal has been said against laziness. Witness the familiar
condemnation: "The devil makes work for idle hands." Wits make their
own twists on this familiar stance, like Oscar Wilde, who said that
action is the "last resource of those who do not know how to dream."
But what moralist in his most priggish imagination could imagine what
scientists just discovered about the ravages of idle daydreaming on
the brain? Brain researchers have made great strides over the past
decade and a half by giving test subjects puzzles and mental exercises
and literally looking inside their heads with electromagnetic brain
scanners to see what is going on.

Lately in a new study reported in, among others, a 28 August Newsday
article by Jamie Talan, it seems that one at last came up with the
idea of looking at brains when they are not problem solving, when they
are idling.

Like an internal combustion engine, the brain does have a default.
Keeping it too long in the state described by the expression "my mind
wandered," is definitely not a good thing. Like muscles or any other
tool, the brain's rule is "use it or lose it;" actually, what they
found is worse than that. Like motorists who cloud up all of our air
when they sit and idle their engines, idling the brain, sitting and
uselessly cogitating destroys grey material in the long term.

Daydreaming wears down -- to use the researcher's own expression --the
very regions under the skull that later are marked by the malfunctions
of dementia and the more severe form of the same condition,
Alzheimer's disease; the origins of both are now thought to be decades
in the making, the result of habits of long years and entire
lifestyles. The article, called, "Idle brain invites dementia;
Researchers say daydreaming may cause changes that lead to the onset
of Alzheimer's disease,"
(http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsalz254396781aug25,0,1676238.story?coll=ny-health-headlines),
reports findings from the most recent edition of "Journal of
Neuroscience." The head researcher reports surprise at this discovery,
saying that he,

"suspects these activity patterns may, over decades of daily use, wear
down the brain, sparking a chemical cascade that results in the
disease's classic deposits and tangles that damage the brain. The
regions identified are active when people daydream or think to
themselves ... When these regions are damaged, an older person may not
be able to access the thoughts to follow through on an action, or even
make sense of a string of thoughts. `It may be the normal cognitive
function of the brain that leads to Alzheimer's later in life,'
Buckner said. He suspects the brain's metabolic activity slows over
time in this region, making it vulnerable to mind-robbing symptoms.
The scientists say this finding could prove useful diagnostically - a
way to identify the disease early, even before symptoms appear."

When I think about the time I have wasted daydreaming in my life, I
repent, I repent, I repent. All the dreams I had of finding lost
caches of money in the street ... my long, detailed reveries about
what I would do if I won the lottery or if Sophia or Raquel turned up
on my doorstep declaring eternal love, for all that I repent! If only
I had known that I was wearing out my brain, I would have spent that
time solving math problems, crossword puzzles, or memorizing tables of
Arabic conjugations. If only, if only! Since Alzheimer's runs in our
family I now know that my private mental sin is dissolving me into a
fate that for me is far worse than death, dementia at best, a brain so
worn away that it cannot remember or connect one thought with the
next.

On a more general social level, this is why I worry about the effects
of television. Over the past century Alzheimer's and dementia in old
folks have exploded from negligible almost to the norm. Scientists are
not sure about the reason for this; most people I talk to immediately
conclude, "It must be the explosion of chemicals being introduced by
pollution." This is an explanation that is impossible to disprove, but
I have my doubts. I do not have a brain scanner so I cannot confirm
this, but it seems clear that the mental state we are in when watching
television is very like daydreaming. Television has got to be a large
part of the cause, whatever the effect of chemicals. Most oldsters
that I know live by the television.

At least young people have reduced the amount of TV they watch, not
for virtuous reasons but in order to play video games, whose effects
are very different and for all we know insidious in different ways. I
used to look at my father zonked out in front of the TV and think,
what a great anodyne that is for a sick or old person. It passes the
time for them. Then I happened to walk by and glance at him, and his
mouth was gaping open, his eyes unnaturally wide, and he looked for
all the world like one of the pod people victims of the invasion of
the body snatchers. Only it is worse, it is the invasion of the brain
snatchers.

Worse, while they wear out what is left of their faculties idling,
daydreaming, sponsors pay billions of dollars for a place in those
damaging, idling thoughts. Mind pollution breeds mind pollution. The
job of the old is to connect the lessons of the past to the very
young. Forget that, they are told, television and other media will do
that for us, automatically, with no effort. Just sit back, codger, in
front of that glowing screen and relax. The image here is brighter,
more colorful, more real than the reality you think you have lived.

The long term effects only now are becoming evident. Adolescents are
growing up solidly convinced by advertising – un-tempered for the
first time in history by the opinions and experience of older
relations -- that fast food restaurants provide the ideal human diet.
Forget the fact that this is the reverse of what the tiny voice of
dieticians, doctors and teachers try to convey. What chance do experts
have in countering obesity and other ills when false notions jump the
line, short circuit the brain? Idle minds with daydreams bought and
paid for. Now even video games and feature films revolve around
"product placement," a euphemism for unavoidable advertisements. Thus
things fall apart from the center to the periphery, and nothing holds.

What should be at the center? What center will hold? That is the
sticky, gluey job of faith and philosophy, both of which are more
relevant to the policies that make science, health and diet than is
generally realized. I will get into that next time.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com