What Thinking Means:
Book Review of The Mind and the
Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. By Jeffrey Schwartz
& Sharon Begley.
By: William
A. Dembski
First Things
May 1, 2003

Original
Article

Book review:
The Mind and the Brain:
Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.
By Jeffrey Schwartz and
Sharon Begley. HarperCollins. 432 pp. $27.50.

In the epilogue to Jeffrey
Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the
Power of Mental Force, we read: “Finally, after a generation or more in
which biological materialism has had neuroscience—indeed, all the life
sciences—in a chokehold, we may at last be breaking free. . . . Biological
materialism did and does have real-world consequences. We feel its reach every
time a pharmaceutical company tells us that, to cure shyness (or ‘social
phobia’), we need only reach for a little pill. . . . Biological materialism is
nothing if not appealing. We need not address the emotional or spiritual causes
of our sadness to have the cloud of depression lift; we need not question the
way we teach our children before we can rid them of attention deficit
disorder.”

Schwartz, a research professor in psychiatry at UCLA, is
convinced that the life sciences as a whole and neuroscience in particular have
been subverted by materialist philosophy. (Because the book centers on
Schwartz’s research and thought, I shall refer to him as the primary author of
the book.) The Mind and the Brain is his attempt to unseat that
philosophy and substitute a dualist conception of mind (according to which mind
and brain are ontologically distinct). Anyone familiar with current discussions
of neuroscience, consciousness studies, and the mind-body problem will realize
just how fiercely materialistic and non-dualist these fields are. Schwartz’s
explicit antimaterialism and embrace of dualism therefore places him very much
at odds with the scientific and philosophical mainstream.

Schwartz
provides a nonmaterialist interpretation of neuroscience and argues that this
interpretation is more compelling than the standard materialist interpretation.
He arrived at this position as a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD sufferers recognize
obsessive-compulsive thoughts and urges as separate from their intrinsic selves.
For instance, after a few washings, the compulsive hand-washer realizes that his
hands are clean and yet feels driven to keep washing them. It was reflection on
this difference between the obvious truth (the hands are clean) and the
irrational doubts (they might still be dirty) that prompted Schwartz to reassess
the philosophical underpinnings of neuroscience.

From brain scans,
Schwartz found that certain regions in the brain of OCD patients (the caudate
nucleus in particular) exhibited abnormal patterns of activity. By itself this
finding is consistent with a materialist view of mind (if, as materialism
requires, the brain enables the mind, then abnormal patterns of brain activity
are likely to be correlated with dysfunctional mental states). Nonetheless,
having found abnormal patterns of brain activity, Schwartz then had OCD patients
engage in intensive mental effort through what he called relabeling,
reattributing, refocusing, and revaluing (the 4 Rs). In the case of compulsive
hand-washing, this involved a patient acknowledging that his hands were in fact
clean (relabeling); attributing anxieties and doubts about his hands being dirty
to a misfunctioning brain (reattributing); directing his thoughts and actions
away from handwashing and toward productive ends (refocusing); and, lastly,
understanding at a deep level the senselessness of OCD messages
(revaluing).

Schwartz documents not only that patients who undertook this
therapy experienced considerable relief from OCD symptoms, but also that their
brain scans indicated a lasting realignment of brain-activity patterns. Thus,
without any intervention directly affecting their brains, OCD patients were able
to reorganize their brains by intentionally modifying their thoughts and
behaviors. The important point for Schwartz here is not simply that modified
thoughts and behaviors permanently altered patterns of brain activity, but that
such modifications resulted from, as he calls it, “mindful attention”—conscious
and purposive thoughts or actions in which the agent adopts the stance of a
detached observer.

After reviewing his own research on OCD in the early
part of the book, Schwartz devotes its middle half to summarizing the last
twenty years of research on neuroplasticity. This research is very exciting, and
Schwartz and Begley’s description of it is worth the price of the book. There is
a long tradition in neuroscience that sees neural circuits as laid down early in
life, after which they become entrenched and any subsequent disruption leads to
irrevocable deficits. Reviewing research over the last twenty years, Schwartz
shows that this view is false and that the brain remains plastic throughout
life. A key implication is that conditions previously thought to be untreatable
are in fact treatable. Thus Schwartz describes how neuroplasticity offers real
hope to everyone from stroke victims to dyslexics.

For instance, 600,000
people in the United States suffer a stroke each year. Of these, a quarter die
immediately and half are left seriously disabled. On the assumption that neural
circuitry is hardwired early in life and thereafter fixed, there is no reason to
think that stroke victims experiencing serious disabilities should see any
marked improvement. Like a shattered piece of china whose beauty cannot be
reconstructed, there would seem to be no way to recover brain function once it
has been lost. But Schwartz shows that this view is erroneous. Granted, damaged
portions of the brain may never recover. But undamaged portions may be
“rezoned,” and functions previously assigned to the damaged portions may be
“reallocated” to the rezoned portions.

This view of the brain has
radical implications for treatment. If the brain as a matter of course loses
plasticity early in life, then the proper counsel for seriously disabled stroke
victims is resignation. But if the brain retains its plasticity throughout life,
then the proper counsel is a therapy that will help rezone and reallocate
portions of the brain.

What does all this have to do with materialism?
If materialism is correct, then mentation is the product of brain processes
(much as digestion is the product of stomach processes, to use an analogy
proposed by the philosopher John Searle). But this would mean that even though
the brain can readily affect the mind, there’s no sense in which the mind can
affect the brain except by way of the brain. That is, top-down causation in
which the mind affects the brain must invariably presuppose bottom-up causation
of the brain first affecting the mind. And yet Schwartz clearly shows that a
conceptual act with no clear physiological underpinnings (for instance, the
conscious decision by an OCD sufferer to implement the 4-R therapy) can
dramatically and lastingly alter patterns of brain activity. And in such cases,
top-down causation seems to operate without prior bottom-up causation.

Is
this a good argument for mind being fundamentally distinct from brain? It
depends what you are looking for. If you want a knock-down argument against
materialism and materialist accounts of mind, this won’t do it. But if you are
looking for consilience, in which multiple lines of independent evidence
converge on the same target, then Schwartz’s argument is a good one to have in
your arsenal, for it fits nicely with biological arguments for intelligent
design (cf. Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box), recent philosophical work
on mental causation (cf. Robert Koons’ Realism Regained), cosmological
fine-tuning (cf. John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological
Principle), and consciousness studies (cf. Dean Radin’s The Conscious
Universe).

No one argues that the mind is entirely unconditioned by
the brain (psychotropic drugs make this abundantly clear). The issue is whether
the brain determines the mind without remainder. For conceptual acts like
Schwartz’s “mindful attention” to permanently alter patterns of brain activity
that otherwise would remain stuck is therefore exactly what one would expect if
the mind transcends the brain and yet is capable of physical effects. To be
sure, the materialist has counterarguments here. A popular one these days is to
treat conscious will as an illusion—we think that we have acted deliberately
toward some end, but in fact our brain acted on its own and then deceived us
into thinking that we acted deliberately. There’s even a recent book making just
that claim in its title: The Illusion of Conscious Will by Harvard
psychologist Daniel Wegner.

Schwartz effectively engages this
literature, especially the experiments by Benjamin Libet, which usually get
interpreted as supporting the materialist view that conscious will is an
illusion. Schwartz shows how these experiments are in fact better interpreted as
leaving room for conscious will—and, indeed, a thoroughly libertarian free will.
In this respect, Schwartz’s discussion of free will as “free won’t” (namely, the
idea that free will consists in the ability to rule out possibilities) is deeply
illuminating. It calls to mind the Judeo-Christian idea that creation does not
add to God but rather subtracts from God: in the act of creation God rules out
those worlds that are not actualized. The idea of ruling out possibilities is
also the essence of the mathematical theory of information, in which information
increases and possibilities get ruled out.

The Mind and the Brain
is strongest where it reviews current neurological research, showing how it
leaves the door open to a nonmaterialist interpretation of the mind. The book is
somewhat weaker where it attempts to place that research and its nonmaterialist
interpretation within a theoretical framework. One might suspect that Schwartz’s
Buddhism is the problem, but it isn’t. “Mindful attention,” which Schwartz draws
from the Buddhist tradition, is a spiritual discipline right in line with the
practice of detachment employed by the Church’s desert fathers. Spiritual
disciplines work. Schwartz simply shows that they work in the therapeutic
context. Schwartz doesn’t force his nonmaterialist interpretation of
neuroscience into the mold of Buddhist philosophy (Buddhist doctrines like
emptiness, nirvana, and reincarnation are absent).

Nevertheless,
Schwartz’s theoretical framework is incomplete. For instance, Schwartz looks to
quantum mechanics to allow an opening for “mental force,” as he calls it, to
interact with the material world (and thus brains in particular). Schwartz makes
a good case for quantum mechanics being compatible with such a nonmaterialist
view of mind. But then he wants to argue that the problem of making quantum
measurements requires consciousness for its resolution—which, if true, would
certainly strengthen the case for his nonmaterialist interpretation of mind. Yet
he falls short of demonstrating that consciousness is the key to resolving the
quantum measurement problem. There are other plausible explanations of quantum
measurement that do not invoke consciousness. Schwartz therefore needs to do
more than he does here to exclude such explanations.

When it comes to
situating Schwartz’s nonmaterialist view of mind within a theoretical framework,
The Mind and the Brain is definitely a work in progress. Even so, I give
Schwartz’s project great hopes for ultimate success. In particular, I’m
optimistic that Schwartz’s concept of “mental force” can be given a solid
metaphysical underpinning in terms of Rob Koons’ above-mentioned work on mental
causation. And a useful synergy between Schwartz’s work in neuroscience and
intelligent design’s work in the life sciences is also highly
promising.

William A. Dembski is on the faculty of Baylor
University. His books include The Design Inference and No Free
Lunch.

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