On the track of consciousness

As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott is working on a new understanding of the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Meditation research and near-death experiences make her doubt conventional neuroscientific models. We spoke with her about how new scientific approaches are reimagining the relationship between the brain and consciousness.

evolve: You have an interesting double expertise. On the one hand, you are a neuroscientist at the cutting edge of our understanding of the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Despite the tremendous success and research work in neuroscience, there is a fundamental discussion about the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’: How can science explain the phenomena of consciousness? On the other hand, you also have a meditative background and you studied phenomena like near-death experiences. So, can science, as we know it, do justice to the phenomenon of consciousness, as we experience it?

Marjorie Woollacott: When we use the word science, I would note the different ways we use the word. When we talk about the science that I was trained in as a neuroscientist, it was a materialistic science. This science holds that matter is the fundamental substance of reality. It starts with subatomic particles as building blocks of the universe and continues all the way up to more complex phenomena, such as the brain and consciousness. Here the basic assumption is that all of matter, including our mind and our consciousness, are secondary to the material interactions that are occurring. And it proposes that the cells of our brain create our awareness and control our thoughts and our actions. According to that view, which is the view of some of my more extreme neuroscientist colleagues, we are like machines, because they think we basically react reflexively or automatically to sensory inputs. They say we don't really have free will, even though we think we do. We are isolated beings in this machine-like universe. So that's the materialistic perspective.

But I know there are also other scientists who have a different understanding of science. I helped to organize and I'm now the president of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Science, the AAPS. The scientists that we interact with in that group and related groups like the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) are saying that there is much more to the universe and reality than the materialist point of view. Some would consider consciousness as fundamental or primary, and matter as secondary. That would mean that consciousness has the ability to transform our brain and the material world around us.

I always want to remind myself that I can have both of those caps on at the same time. I want to look at the scientific evidence from the material perspective, but I want to remain curious about the evidence that supports the view that consciousness may be fundamental. In fact, I would say that any scientist who is actually curious and looks at the data that support the fundamental nature of consciousness would have to agree that this evidence is quite strong.

An example of this work comes from Dr. Pim van Lommel from the Netherlands, and Dr. Bruce Greyson from the United States, who have done a lot of research on near-death experiences. They've chosen the best subject population possible for getting good objective data: people that had a cardiac arrest in a hospital. They do prospective studies, which are the gold standard of scientific studies. You start collecting data within a hospital system on a particular day, including all people who undergo cardiac arrest and continue the study for 3-4 years. You interview those who survive. And what you find in these cases is astonishing. When people had no cardiac activity with a flat-lined EEG, which means no cortical activity, they shouldn't have sensory experience according to scientists. In these studies, they find that twenty-five percent of them have a near-death experience. And 12% of those people have a core NDE, with 25% of those reporting that they were looking at the hospital staff from above their body in the room, trying to resuscitate them. They are giving accurate information about everything that happens. I don't know how you can make sense of this from a materialist perspective. When you show those data to scientists who aren't curious, they simply say there has to be a flaw in your system. But there are so many studies now, that the data are hard to refute. Are you willing to expand the framework to include those data, or do you simply have to push it aside because it does not fit in the current framework?

But how can one hold both of those philosophical points of view simultaneously? I don't throw out the scientific materialistic point of view, but I simply expand it to include the fact that consciousness may be fundamental, and it may be able to interact with my brain cells just as my brain cells may also affect my conscious activity. If we allow this two-way interaction and see both as being important, we don't throw away science, but we add a broader perspective, which gives us a better understanding of reality.

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Meditative Science

e: If I understand you right, your own journey was also very much triggered by your own experience of a different form of science, which one can call “inner science” or meditative science. How did you come to this broader view?

MW: Before my first meditation experience, I felt like probably any of my materialist colleagues, that anyone who believed in spirituality or life after death was weak-minded. Until you have the experience, it is very hard to accept that there's more to reality than what your five senses tell you is the case. In a meditation experience, I suddenly had the experience of a broader understanding of reality, a sense of interconnectedness between myself and other human beings and the planet. That first meditation experience, with a sense of unity awareness, love, and of deep compassion for others, inspired me to want to meditate more. Back then I didn't know how to actually put it together with my materialist point of view as a scientist.

THAT THERE IS AN INFINITE AWARENESS THAT IS AVAILABLE TO US IN THE UNIVERSE.

For many years I lived what I would call a schizophrenic life; I had two separate lives going on. I would talk in one fashion to my friends at the university about scientific matters, and then when I would go to a meditation center or a retreat, I would talk in a totally different way. That was very hard because it didn't feel like I had true integrity. Finally, I said, “I have to start doing research on meditation and be more curious about putting the two worlds together” – that is, to find the things that would satisfy my objective mind that wants data and integrate it with my phenomenal subjective experiences of unity, of integrative awareness with all of reality. As I began to do my own research in the laboratory and explored other peoples’ research, I was shocked to find out how much research has already been done in this area.

With the discovery of this kind of research, I expanded my view of material reality and began to understand that consciousness cannot be explained only from the bottom-up perspective: that the neurons in the brain create our awareness. I found that there has to be a consciousness that is fundamental and is probably more expansive than we realize. In this top-down perspective, consciousness gets filtered down by neural networks in our brain to an amount of sensory information that is useful for us in our day-to-day activities. But it also filters out a vast amount of information that people can have during near-death experiences, in meditation and at other moments in their lives.

e: How did you go about this research?

MW: First, I tried to understand my meditation experience in light of the research on meditation. When my mind became still in meditation, I began to have experiences that were beyond my normal five senses. Once we begin to analyze our meditation with curiosity, we begin to see a fascinating phenomenon. Often, we focus on the breath in meditation to help quiet the mind. With an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner, scientists found that there are certain parts of the brain that are active when you’re first focusing on your breath. This is the executive attention system, which is in the dorsal-lateral frontal areas of the brain.

But invariably during meditation, the mind wanders. Some distraction comes up in our environment or in our memories, and suddenly we're off somewhere else. Using fMRI, scientists found activity in an interesting network called the Mind-Wandering Network or the Default Mode Network (DMN). This network is the basis of our ego, our stories about who we are and how we relate to the world. They also found another part of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, that recognizes the mind-wandering activities and brings us back to focusing on the breath. When people meditate over a certain period of time, the activity in the DMN or mind-wandering network gets lower as the chatter of the brain is lower. And that seems to be highly correlated with expansive states of awareness. Through this research, I could finally correlate what I experienced in meditation with some data that were actually being collected in different people's laboratories.

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Lack of Curiosity

e: It seems that several colleagues of yours went through a similar journey, but some of them came to other conclusions. Some of the most famous ones are Thomas Metzinger in Germany and Sam Harris in the US. They are meditators, they have a deep spiritual experience. They consider themselves a spiritual person. But they strongly base their conclusions or interpretations on the usual materialist understanding of consciousness and reality. How would you respond to them?

MW: Some of my colleagues think the same way. I think it's because it is very difficult to let go of a theory of reality that you have held since you were a young student. And all the way through graduate school, this was the theory that held your world together. Also, if you change your theory, and I can vouch for this, your scientific friends will consider you weak-minded. So, there's a taboo to even talking about those things as a scientist with your colleagues, because immediately you're imagined to be ‘New Age’.

THE RESEARCH ON MEDITATION SHOWS THAT IT INCREASES OUR SENSE OF INTERCONNECTEDNESS.

e: Do you see some points of weak thinking in holding on to the traditional modernist understanding of consciousness?

MW: I believe that weak thinking comes from a lack of curiosity. Most of the scientists and materialists who I introduce to these studies and ask if they want to read them say: “No, I don't need to read them because I know they're not true. They simply can't be true if they disagree with our materialist perspective.” What I ask of people is to have sufficient curiosity to look at these peer-reviewed studies and the data that are presented, and to alter their theory even slightly to allow these data to be included within that theory.

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Boundless Consciousness

e: You spoke before about two perspectives that you try to bring together. One you called the bottom-up, and the other the top-down perspective: The bottom-up perspective seems to be very much the usual materialistic understanding of molecules and atoms. What is the top-down perspective and how would you describe this perspective?

MW: When I talk about the top-down perspective, I mean that consciousness, our awareness, is fundamental. That there is an infinite awareness that is available to us in the universe. In other words, I can be connected. I can be connected with other people like yourself. I can be connected with other aspects of the universe beyond my five senses. That infinite expansive awareness gets filtered down when it comes into our brain through the filters that all scientists agree are there, like the default mode network.

That top-down perspective is saying, if you can quiet down the filters in your brain, you can have access to this more expansive awareness. And that is what I believe happens with people who have a near-death experience, for example. The brain is completely shut down and they have access to a much wider consciousness. That's how they can see, from outside their body, what's going on in the operating room, but also have experiences of unity awareness with everything around them, a feeling of unconditional love.

e: The materialist naturalist-scientific perspective is in many ways under scrutiny. For instance, what we do to our environment has to do with the way we perceive reality. How do you see the situation that we are in as a culture?

MW: I think we need a fundamental shift in our awareness from individualism to interconnectedness. Right now, the planet's health is deteriorating with global warming and other problems, including our COVID-19 crisis. The research on meditation shows, based on clear data, that it increases our sense of interconnectedness with other people and with the planet.

I just want to mention one study because I'm a scientist and I like data. Claudia Orellana-Rios and her colleagues at the University of Freiburg trained healthcare workers in hospice or palliative care in meditation. The scientists found that the staff burnout rates went down and the care that the patients experienced increased. One staff member said, “I′m a person who really worries an awful lot…and I am now more capable to interrupt this at an earlier stage: to say, ‘see what good you can do in this very moment, and how you can change the situation towards something positive.’” That is the type of change we need to have not only in our healthcare settings but also in our society in general.

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A Holistic Approach

e: When we talk about the scientific perspective and the development of society and culture, we can see how we developed a scientific mindset. As the president of a society that talks about post-material science, it seems that you are envisioning a step here that is not necessarily a step back before science but is an important step into further integration. What are you envisioning here?

MW: It is really an integrated approach that is taking the research data from our natural sciences perspective and integrating it with research from our post-materialistic perspective, that is, looking at how consciousness and an awareness of our interconnectedness can change our behavior by changing our understanding and experience of our connection with other people and with the planet.

I think we could begin to educate people, even children from a young age to quiet their mental chatter, and thus nurture a sense of compassion and interconnectedness. And we can do it in a totally secular setting; it doesn't have to be associated with some particular ideology or another. When we do that, starting at a young age, then young people could grow up with an understanding that they can integrate both sides of this understanding, materialist and post-materialist, in a very beautiful way without sacrificing all the beautiful things that our science has given us in the past.

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