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" Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
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" Axons and dendrites enable neurons to wire up with a connectivity that computer designers can only fantasize about. Each of the 100 billion neurons connects to, typically, anywhere from about a few thousand to 100,000 other neurons. The best guess is that, at birth, each neuron makes an average of 2,500 of these specialized junctions, or synapses; reaches a connectivity peak of 15,000 synapses at age two or three; and then starts losing synapses in a process called pruning. If we take a conservative mean for the number of connections (1,000), then the adult brain boasts an estimated 100,000,000,000,000—100 trillion—synapses. Other estimates of the number of synapses in the adult brain go as high as 1,000 trillion. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
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" Family members can be most helpful by offering support, understanding, kindness, patience, and encouragement in doing the Four Steps—but not by pampering or indulging the person’s OCD. Reinforcement is essential; every improvement should be recognized. People with OCD need to feel good about themselves, since it’s been a long time since they’ve done so. What they don’t need is angry criticism; they are already critical enough of themselves. Nor should they be pushed too fast to get well; their goal will be reached by taking a lot of small steps, not giant leaps. Sure, there will be times when the partner is tired and out of patience with OCD and needs his or her own time out. That’s okay, too. There should be no guilt feelings about that—in fact, the person with OCD should encourage it. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior
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" The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century-with the attendant attempt to analyze all observable phenomena in terms of mechanical chains of causation-was a knife in the heart of moral philosophy, for it reduced human beings to automatons. If all of the body and brain canbe completely described without invoking anything so empyreal as a mind, let alone a consciousness, then the notion that a person is morally responsible for his actions appears quaint, if not scientifically naive. A machine cannot be held responsible for its actions. If our minds are impotent to affect our behavior, then surely we are no more responsible for our actions than a robot is. It is an understatement to note that the triumph of materialism, as applied to questions of mind and brain, therefore makes many people squirm. For if the mysteries of the mind are reducible to physics and chemistry, then "mind is but the babbling of a robot, chained ineluctably to crude causality," as the neurobiologist Robert Doty put it in 1998. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
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" I became more and more intrigued by the idea that there must be a force to account for the observed brain changes. The willful effort OCD patients generate during treatment, I suspected, was the most reasonable way to account for the generation of this force. The results achieved with OCD supported the notion that the conscious and willful mind differs from the brain and cannot be explained solely and completely by the matter, by the material substance, of the brain. For the first time, hard science—for what could be “harder” than the metabolic activity measured by PET scans?—had weighed in on the side of mind-matter theories that, as explained in the previous chapter, question whether mind is nothing but matter. The changes the Four Steps can produce in the brain offered strong evidence that willful, mindful effort can alter brain function, and that such self-directed brain changes—neuroplasticity—are a genuine reality. Let me repeat this: the Four Steps is not merely a self-directed therapy; it is also an avenue to self-directed neuroplasticity. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
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" Historically, the great advances in physics have occurred when scientists united two seemingly disparate entities into a coherent, logical whole. Newton connected celestial motions with terrestrial motion. Maxwell unified light and electromagnetism. Einstein did it for space and time. Quantum theory makes exactly this kind of connection, between the objective physical world and subjective experiences. It thus offers a way out of the morass that the mind brain debate has become, because it departs most profoundly from classical physics at a crucial point: on the nature of the dynamical interplay between minds and physical states, between physical states and consciousness. It ushers the observer into the dynamics of the system in a powerful way. Following quantum theory into the thicket of the mind-matter problem actually leads to a clearing, to a theory of mind and brain that accords quite well with our intuitive sense of how our mind works. In Stapp's formulation, quantum theory creates a causal opening for the mind, a point of entry by which mind can affect matter, a mechanism by which mind can shape brain. That opening arises because quantum theory allows intention, and attention, to exert real, physical effects on the brain, as we will now explore. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
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" According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, it is the observer who both decides which aspect of nature is to be probed and reads the answer nature gives. The mind of the observer helps choose which of an uncountable number of possible realities comes into being in the form of observations. A specific question (Is the electron here or there?) has been asked, and an observation has been performed (Aha! the electron is there!), corralling an unruly wave of probability into a well-behaved quantum of certainty. Bohr was silent on how observation performs this magic. It seems, though, as if registering the observation in the mind of the observer somehow turns the trick: the mental event collapses the wave function. Bohr, squirming under the implications of his own work, resisted the idea that an observer, through observation, is actually influencing the course of physical events outside his body. Others had no such qualms. As the late physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his wonderful 1982 book The Cosmic Code, “There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space… independent of any actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!” Physical theory thus underwent a tectonic shift, from a theory about physical reality to a theory about our knowledge. Science is what we know, and what we know is only what our observations tell us. It is unscientific to ask what is “really” out there, what lies behind the observations. Physical laws as embodied in the equations of quantum physics, then, ceased describing the physical world itself. They described, instead, our knowledge of that world. Physics shifted from an ontological goal—learning what is—to an epistemological one: determining what is known, or knowable. As John Archibald Wheeler cracked, “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” The notion that the wave function collapses when the mind of an observer registers a new bit of knowledge was developed by the physicist Eugene Wigner, who proposed a model of how consciousness might collapse the wave function—something we will return to. But why human consciousness should be thus privileged has remained an enigma and a source of deep division in physics right down to today. "
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz , The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
