neuroscience

Review: The Sacred Art of Slowing Down

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Cover image of "The Sacred Art of Slowing Down" by A. C. Seiple

The Sacred Art of Slowing Down, A. C. Seiple, foreword by Chuck De Groat. Tyndale | Refresh (ISBN: 9798400506321) 2025.

Summary: Explores ways to become aware of our inner state, to tune into our bodies, and tend our souls.

Dallas Willard often advised his mentees as follows: “Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” But how do we eliminate hurry and slow down? Especially, how do we do so when our mind is racing and our body is tense? Licensed counselor A. C. Seiple combines therapeutic practices and spiritual insights to slow down, tune in to our bodies, and tend to our souls. In fact, those three phrases form the outline of this book. She approaches us as integrated beings woven from cognitive, emotional, somatic and spiritual strands combined with the narrative strands of our life story.

First, she explores how we can slow down. Seiple describes how in her own life she had two gears–go and stop, gas pedal and brake. Mostly, she was go, go, go until she crashed. She was caring for a husband with a traumatic brain injury. She didn’t feel any margin existed for stopping. But she was weary. A counselor helped her understand how her body was geared up to go, a function of her autonomic nervous system’s response to crisis. Often our bodies are trying to tell us things through pain, tension, or weariness. She describes her own experience of learning to listen to those messages and offers exercises for readers to practice the same. She also helps us hear with compassion the embedded beliefs that may be driving or dogging us.

Then she explores how we may tune in with the body. She explains neuroception and the subconscious ways our bodies respond to different situations. We may think our brain is driving, but not always. She helps with exercises to discern who is driving and whether that part is stepping on the gas or the brake, perhaps explaining why we want to slow down but can’t. She identifies three states–safety, stress, and shutdown–and our autonomic responses to each. Then she explores how we may anchor ourselves with God in a sacred space amid each of these states. She helps us reflect on our life story, and how different parts of us have responded in different episodes–how we fight or self-protect or freeze or flee.

Thirdly, she discusses how we use all this to tend to the depths of our souls. She offers help in tending to the forgotten or neglected parts of our lives. Then she turns to the places where we’ve been wounded. Finally, Seiple helps us explore our longings and steps that might be new movements for us.

Seiple illustrates ideas from her own experiences. Each chapter has “Pause and Play” sections where we can explore the concepts she’s shared in our own experience. Throughout, one has the sense that Seiple is a caring counselor, walking alongside and extending compassion, creating the safety to look at different parts of our lives. She invites curiosity rather than judgement or shame. She helps us find rest for every part of us, the place where we both know ourselves and are unafraid to know God. And she translates the “relentless elimination of hurry” from abstract advice to lived experience.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score

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Cover image of "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780143127741) 2015.

Summary: An account of the growing understanding of the effects of trauma on the brain and the body and promising treatments.

Since its initial publication in 2014, The Body Keeps the Score has prompted a widespread conversation about the effects of trauma on the brain and body. Particularly, in recent years the focus on #MeToo and on race-based trauma have extended the conversation.

For Bessel van der Kolk, his awareness of trauma began with some of the Vietnam war veterans he was seeing. They suffered from nightmares, waking flashbacks, hair-trigger anger responses, alcoholism, depression and suicidal ideation. They also often felt detached from their lives. This book traces the growing understanding of the effects of trauma that didn’t fit existing clinical diagnoses or treatments. Often, efforts to treat symptoms brought little relief.

This book chronicles the learning journey of van der Kolk and other clinicians to understand trauma. A key to all of this was the growing field of neuroscience. They found that the brains of the traumatized were not like others. Either they were in an amygdala-triggered hyper-vigilant state that bypassed the pre-frontal cortex, or they were shut down. Not only this, effects of trauma were also evident in the body from auto-immune issues, headaches, and a number of other somatic complaints. They discovered genes that turned on under stress. Hence the book’s title: the body does keep score.

While his work began with soldiers, van der Kolk began to realize the ongoing marks on mind and body of childhood traumas. These include physical and sexual as well as emotionally abusive situations. They learned to take trauma histories. But they also learned that people were not always consciously aware, or could only remember bits and pieces. And these memories were not integrated parts of one’s life story.

The final part of the book describes a variety of therapeutic approaches. In one sense, trauma cannot be undone. But people can learn to manage the feelings, the triggers that bring up the past. They can learn to be present to others. And they can stop keeping secrets from the self. The author describes the use of neurofeedback, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy. He devotes a chapter to finding the language to name one’s experience. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is another approach he describes in processing trauma. Because mind and body often detach in trauma, he also addresses approaches like yoga, theater, choral singing and others that re-establish that connection, often in the context of community.

The book combines explanation of neuroscience and physiology with case studies. Another aspect of the book is how the author describes his own learning journey. He considers patients his first teachers. But he also learns from other clinical approaches and allows himself to be the subject of those approaches, sharing how he changes through them. While not ruling out using medications, he prefers other approaches. This makes sense if the goal is for a person to be able to integrate traumatic memories, self-manage, and be present.

Two things I wonder about. One is the “grabbag” of therapeutic approaches. It seems important over time to develop standards of care, identifying the most effective therapies where possible. It also seems like we are in a pendulum swing from not recognizing trauma to possibly applying the label overly freely. I hear people describing listening to the news as traumatizing. Distressing, yes. But traumatizing? It doesn’t seem to be the same thing as childhood sexual abuse or rape. I wonder if clinicians will develop greater precision in what is labelled as and treated as trauma.

Still, I found this a fascinating book and can understand its path-breaking nature. Van der Kolk describes his own journey to understanding trauma’s effects on brain and body when there wasn’t a category for this. And he offers hope that, while we can’t undo trauma, what we’ve learned about neuroscience and therapy can help people get their lives back and understand and not just react to trauma. There is hope.

Review: Free Agents

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Cover image of "Free Agents" by Kevin J. Mitchell

Free Agents, Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press (ISBN: 9780691226231) 2023.

Summary: An argument based on the evidence of the development of nervous systems, for the evolution of individual agency–free will.

Philosophers have long debated whether human beings have free will or are creatures determined by the various forces that impinge upon us. Then enter the neurobiologists who have been able to increasingly map the fine structures and neural networks of the brain. They have accounted for a vast array of animal and human behaviors For many in the field, they have concluded that ultimately, we only have the illusion of free will. We only think we are thinking and deciding.

Kevin J. Mitchell, while accepting the evidence of evolutionary neurobiology, argues otherwise. He believes there is evidence that human beings, and perhaps other species, have agency that is not an illusion but an evolved quality. There are at least two strands to his argument. First, he traces evolutionary history from single-celled organisms to human beings. The simplest organisms have sensory abilities oriented toward sustaining life (seeking nutrients) and avoiding harm (from poison to predators). Over several chapters he shows how, as multicellular organisms developed, giving way to more complex species, that sensory apparatus developed. Neural inputs fed into ganglia, and eventually a cerebral cortex. Increasingly complicated responses developed to the variety of inputs involving layered and connected neural networks. In human beings, this resulted in a large pre-frontal cortex with semantic capabilities carrying the possibilities of thought and meaning within the recursive and layered neural processes.

The other part of Mitchell’s argument is based on quantum effects and neural “noise” factors that introduce indeterminacy into the system. He argues that this creates room for choice in what might otherwise be a determined system. Combined with human evolution, this allows space for higher level thinking, consciousness of self, and real agency.

He also argues against an approach to freedom as a lack of prior influences on choice. He argues that we have greater freedom when we have access to these factors and can draw upon them. This means we enjoy degrees of free agency rather than some impossible “absolute freedom.”

Until reading Mitchell’s book, I thought there were only two major options. One is dualism which posits a non-material mind, consciousness, or soul interacting with the brain. The other is reductive materialism where we are our brains and agency is illusion. What Mitchell posits is a third option, cognitive realism, in which neural patterns comprising “thoughts” may have causal power based on what they “mean.”

As interesting as this is, I still can see this collapsing into reductive materialism. All of what he posits is rooted in material processes. All material is subject to quantum indeterminacy. Random probability is different from free agency.

Mitchell is still making a materialistic argument. While I recognize that philosophic dualism has its own challenges, not least that it is incapable of scientific proof, I found that Mitchell was dismissive of this long tradition of thought that has its own explanatory power in terms of what it means to be human. Mitchell relegates this to “the ghost in the machine” language, and in doing so thinks he has satisfactorily dismissed it. Yet I wonder if he has substituted material for non-material “ghosts.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Have we Lost Our Minds?

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Cover image of "Have We Lost Our Minds?" by Stan W. Wallace

Have We Lost Our Minds?, Stan W. Wallace. Foreword by J. P. Moreland. Wipf & Stock (ISBN: 9781666789133)

Summary: Have we lost our minds to neuroscience? A challenge to neurotheology’s eclipse of the soul and reduction of mental events to brain events.

Classically in Christian thought, human beings have been thought of as embodied souls. We believe that an immaterial nature is joined to our physical bodies. The advances of neuroscience have ushered in the new field of neurotheology. This field seeks to foster the spiritual flourishing of human beings by drawing upon the findings of neuroscience. In doing so, neurotheologians accept the premise that our mental processes are simply expressions of brain processes. There is no soul or “mind.” At best our sense of this is an emergent property of what is going on in the brain.

This book arises as an attempt to engage the expression of these ideas by two popular Christian authors, Curt Thompson and Jim Wilder. Both base their work of counseling and spiritual formation on an understanding of how the brain functions, and the spiritually re-wiring those functions when they are awry. Wilder even appropriates the spiritual formation work of Dallas Willard, saying his work extends that work. Stan W. Wallace contends that their work is contrary to Willard, who understood spiritual formation as something that occurred with the soul. He makes a case for our two natures as embodied souls or what he calls holistic dualism over against the physicalism of neurotheology.

Wallace lays out a careful biblical and philosophical argument to make his case. Before he begins the argument, he reviews the findings of neuroscience. His point is not to challenge these findings but rather to challenge the conclusions neurotheologians derive from them. Firstly, he considers the biblical argument on what we are as human beings–everlasting souls united with bodies. Then Wallace shows how the neurotheologians view differs in assuming an identity between mental and brain processes.

Refuting this identity, Wallace observes our first-person subjectivity, our free will, and our use of reason. Additionally, the assumption that mental and brain processes are identical leads to physicalism and the eclipse of the soul. But this ignores both our unified experiences at a given moment and the unity of our sense of self through time.

From here, Wallace discusses further from philosophy the nature of the soul, noting the correspondence with biblical ideas of us as individuated human nature, a “spiritual substance.” But how does the soul relate to the body? Against Cartesian dualism, where there is a sharp divide between soul and body, Wallace proposes “holistic dualism,” which he defines as “a form of substance dualism in which the body is caused by the soul, and therefore the two are deeply united.”

In the next two chapters, Wallace considers and refutes three arguments neurotheologians advance, and three arguments against holistic dualism and defenses against these arguments. I was most interested in the defense of holistic dualism against the challenge that neurotheology provides a simpler answer to understanding our nature. Parsimony or “Ockham’s Razor” is a fundamental principle in science. Wallace defends holistic dualism as the simplest answer for all the relevant data, including reason, free will, unified experience and unity through time. The most surprising objection was one that if we posit human souls then we have to admit animal souls. Wallace affirms the objection, noting the application of soul language to animals in the Bible and the belief that animals had souls of some sort until the seventeenth century!

Finally, in the last two chapters, Wallace applies all this to loving God and loving others. He draws on the work of Dallas Willard to show how important the soul is to our spiritual formation. Then he illustrates how important affirming the soul can be across the professions.

I found Wallace’s approach both compelling and winsome. It was compelling because of his step by step logical argumentation. It was winsome because he sought a middle way in addressing neuroscience. Unlike some, he neither outright accepts or rejects. Because he offers a model that highly values embodied life, he can affirm neuroscience while challenging the conclusions of neurotheology.

While Christians have been fighting hundred-year-old battles about science, neuroscience has crept up unawares, posing important questions about our nature. Wallace shows that some Christian neurotheologians have adopted assumptions contrary to what we learn about human nature both from the Bible and philosophy. He shows why this may be harmful rather than helpful in our formation. In so doing, he offers a helpful corrective for all who care about the spiritual formation of God’s people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. New York: Touchstone, 2006 (originally published in 1985).

Summary: Brief case histories of twenty-four patients with unusual neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks is one of those authors I discovered in recent years, beginning to read him only shortly before his death in 2015. Only now have I gotten around to what is probably his most famous work. It is organized in four sections: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Each section is introduced by a clinical discussion followed by four to nine illustrative case histories.

The title essay is found in the first section on losses, or cognitive deficits due to disease or damage to a particular brain structure. In the case of Dr. P, a musician and teacher, while the cause remained undetermined, he could not identify the objects he was seeing. He could describe them in detail, but he did not know what he was seeing. Hence at one point, when getting dressed to go out, he grabbed the top of his wife’s head, thinking it a hat. His visual agnosia left his musical abilities untouched, and with accommodations was able to continue in this work. One of the other cases described in this section was of a woman who lost all sense of her body, a loss of what is called proprioception. She could not tell where her arms or legs were apart from seeing them and had to learn to function by sight rather than by this sense of ourselves we take for granted. Sacks also describes cases of phantom limbs, pain, of someone who could see only the right half of their world, and a man who could not remember his life after 1945.

The section on excesses covered cognitive functions that might be describe as being in hyper mode. He covers things like Tourette’s syndrome, and a fascinating instance of “Cupid’s Disease,” a case of late onset in a patient nearly 90 of symptoms from syphilis contracted when she worked in a brothel as a young woman. It made her “frisky,” symptoms which for her were actually somewhat welcome! Although treated for syphilis, the symptoms remained.

“Transports” covers instances of sensations, memories, or visions that come due to epilepsy, or sometimes drugs, as was the case of a student who suddenly had a heightened sense of smell for a three week period before reverting to normal. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Hildegard of Bingen, whose migraines were accompanied by visions rendered in drawings.

The final section, discussing subjects with profound mental deficits were some of the most touching as Sacks recognizes what they possessed rather than what they lacked, such as Rebecca, who blossomed in a theatre program despite an IQ of 60, or twins who spoke to each other in prime numbers and could almost instantaneously calculate the day on which any calendar date would fall for 80,000 years. The last case of an autistic patient, Jose, shows how much things have advanced since Sacks wrote. He was considered mentally deficient but Sacks discovered an artistic ability that brought him to life. When he was moved to a quieter setting and allowed to develop his artistic expression, he flourished. Perhaps Sacks anticipated (and maybe helped) the advances in the treatment of those on the autism spectrum.

Sacks account is fascinating for its account of unusual neurological conditions, revealing the influences of neurophysiology on our personalities. What is also impressive is the delightful respect Sacks has for his patients. He listens to them and recommends treatments and accommodations that respect their individuality. At the same time, this book strikes me as a “snapshot in time” that reflects the state of knowledge in the 1980’s, which has advanced tremendously since then. What hasn’t changed is the care for the person Sacks shows. They are not just cases to him but people, and hopefully we will never advance beyond respecting the dignity of each person in the way Sacks does.

Review: Conscience

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Conscience

Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia S. Churchland. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (Forthcoming June 4) 2019.

Summary: Exploring the neuroscience of our sense of right and wrong, integrating our knowledge of neurophysical causation, social factors, and philosophy, arguing that moral norms are based in our brain functions, interacting with our social world.

Conscience. Unless one is significantly cognitively impaired, there is this inner sense we have about what is morally right or wrong, or sometimes this place where we determine right or wrong. Where does this come from? Theists will claim a transcendent basis for this, something written on the heart. Yet, what is written on one heart often varies from another’s. Often we experience uncertainty about these things in our own hearts. Furthermore, those “cognitive impairments” and advancing neuroscience are demonstrating that many aspects of human moral behavior from social bonding and care for others to where one may fall on the political spectrum with regard to moral issues is rooted in the neurophysiology of the brain. Are we conscious actors, or is our moral sense and moral behavior in some way determined by our brain chemistry?

Patricia S. Churchland is one of the pioneers in the field of neurophilosophy–exploring this intersection of neuroscience research and philosophical discussion of questions like ethics and free will. This work is an engaging introduction to her work that moves between discussions of neurotransmitters and a philosophical survey of theories of moral behavior and the question of free will.

She looks at the role of oxytocin in human attachment (“The Snuggle to Survive”), how we are wired for sociality, and how behavior is shaped by the reward system in our brains, and the physiology of empathy. We learn what the brain response to a person eating worms may indicate about political attitudes. Churchland explores the bewildering field of psychopathology–those whose anti-social behavior reflects a lack of moral compass, guilt or remorse–and thus far, our futile efforts to arrive at remedies.

The last two chapters of the book focus on the philosophical questions, and here is where it got really interesting for me. Churchland considers “rule based” moral behavior from the ten commandments to Kant’s categorical imperative to utilitarian-based systems. The flaw, she argues, is that human behavior endlessly deviates from these rules, and there is even significant disagreement on the rules. She argues for a socio-biological basis for moral behavior in which the evolution of our neurophysiology is such that we are well-equipped to engage in social life and behavior that sustains the bonds between us. This leads her to a definition of morality as “the set of shared attitudes and practices that regulate individual behavior to facilitate cohesion and well-being among individuals in the group.”  She seems sympathetic to forms of virtue ethics in which habits of behaving may be modified by particular case constraints.

The final chapter explores free will, and here, Churchland seems to be trying to navigate between those who would fully advocate for free will, and even argue moral certainties, and those who would argue that what we have learned about causation in neuroscience undermines free will, and exonerates criminals from guilt. She argues for the distinction between causes beyond our control and causes under our control, using the example of Bernie Madoff, who was under no compulsion, but knew exactly what he was doing.

Churchland’s discussion in these two chapters also indicated to me some of the concerns that underlie this book. She is deeply concerned about those who tout moral certitudes and also authoritarian approaches that may lead to morally justified abuses of others. She believes that an understanding of how we are “wired” for morally decent behavior shaped by social norms to be superior to such approaches.

As a Christian theist with a deep respect for scientists, and one who shares a sense of being humbled before the realities of our existence, I wonder whether there is a third way between a pure naturalism of “morally decent humans” and a rule-based authoritarianism, whether rooted in ideology or theology. Might we not allow for the possibility that we are indeed “wired” for moral behavior in social contexts that reflect transcendent concerns expressed in the great commands, which are really broad moral statements of principle, to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself? It seems we often get caught in binary discussions of either science or the transcendent. Might there be an approach of both-and that both celebrates the wonderful mechanisms that bond parents and children, or larger social groups, the mechanisms by which we learn what it is to be moral, in all its societal variants; and recognizes the possibility that at least some communal norms might be grounded in transcendent realities that are not occasions for arrogance or authoritarianism, but humility and grace and empathy, and are consonant with the ways we are wired?

I could be wrong, but it was not evident that Churchland has engaged with neurotheologians like Andrew Newberg, (see my review of his book Neurotheology) who covers similar ground. There are many others interested in a conversation rather than a war between science and religious belief, and see the possibility of a kind of consilience that mutes the voice of neither. When I consider Churchland’s account, I find myself marveling anew at the marvels hidden within my own body and am grateful for her exposition of these. I hope going forward, there might be a growing appreciation on the part of neurophilosophers like Churchland, not merely of problematic aspects of rule-based ethics in philosophy or religious teaching (which I will admit exist, just as there are problematic questions in neuroscience), but also the ways religious frameworks of moral teachings have profoundly shaped many communities for good (for example Andre’ Trocme’ and his community of Le Chambon, which hid Jewish refugees during the Holocaust), and helped individuals lead morally worthy lives as people of conscience.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

 

 

Review: Neurotheology

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neurotheology

Neurotheology, Andrew Newberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Summary: A survey of the field of neurotheology, arguing for its viability as a field of inquiry, exploring the various research studies on religious and spiritual experience and practice and correlates of activity and changes in various brain structures, and what might be learned at the intersection of religion and neuroscience that may help us understand the most profound questions of our existence.

There has been an explosion of research in the field of neuroscience and related disciplines in the study of the functioning of the brain and how various brain structures interact with everything from autonomic processes like breathing and heart rate, creation and loss of memory, reasoning, stress responses, sexual response, motor skills, language–indeed every aspect of human experience. This includes a growing field of studies of religious experience and a whole host of questions that arise as to whether brain differences account for different experiences, how such experiences change the brain, and even whether the neuroscience of religious experience can account for the religious nature of human beings. Needless to say, such inquiry can both offer deeper insight into the significance of religious practices, rituals and experiences in our lives, and arouse controversy around the fear that neuroscience could “explain away” faith.

In this work, Andrew Newberg navigates this potentially contentious ground by offering us a survey of the work that has been done, the research questions that might be explored, and the potential or actual value that may be derived from this multi-disciplinary approach to studying neuroscience and religion.

Newberg begins by discussing the “happy prison of the brain” within which all of us are trapped and that all of our perceptions of the world come through our senses and are processed by our brains–religious perceptions as well as scientific ones. He contends that an approach that draws upon both has the potential to help us more fully understand what it means to be human and our belief systems and how we experience them.

The early chapters of the book focus on overview, defining neurotheology and the disciplines that contribute to this study, the most relevant neuroscience data looking at different brain functions as they pertain to religious and spiritual experiences and the elements of religion and spirituality that might be studied by the neurotheologian and the tools that may be used in such study. I was struck by how much was defined by what could be studied while in an fMRI scanner, although sensor “helmets,” magnetic fields, as well as survey data are also used. I wonder for example about how one would study various forms of active service in one’s community or one’s ethical behaviors that arise from one’s faith.

Beginning with chapter 6, the focus of the next three chapters are on what various scientific disciplines contribute to our understanding. Evolutionary biology and anthropology helps us understand the evolution of the human brain and known correlates between the development of aspects of religion and the development of specific brain structures. Psychology helps us understand various “cognitive, emotional, attachment, and social elements of religion” and their connection to brain processes. The study of brain pathologies and pharmacology reveal the connection between some forms of brain disorders and some extreme types of spiritual experience. This raises the question of “the God delusion,” although the author notes that if this contention is true, much of humanity is delusional.

Chapter 9 and following turn to elements of religion–the creation of mythic stories, rituals and practices like prayer or meditation. Each of these chapters explore some of the brain processes that connect to the various elements of religion as they have been studied. Then chapter 12 and the remaining chapters focus on some special questions such as whether there may be differences in brain function between religious, “spiritual,” and non-religious persons, what neuroscience reveals about free will (or free won’t, as the author suggests at one point), and the nature of mystical experience, where one experiences transcendence, perceiving that one has escaped one’s body. It is fascinating to see the changes that occur both in the frontal and parietal lobes during such experiences.

The final chapter (15) was perhaps the most controversial to me in the author’s proposal that neurotheology might offer a “metatheology” or “megatheology.” This struck me as at best unhelpful to collaboration between science and faith, suggesting that particular religious or theological perspectives might be subsumed in some universal. This feels a bit like those who claim with smug superiority that all religions really are “different ways up to the ultimate” that they, unlike the poor benighted adherents of particular religions, are enlightened enough to see. Much of this work was characterized by a becoming modesty, that seemed to be suspended at this point. The most charitable interpretation I can place on this is the author’s enthusiasm for this multidisciplinary approach, which made this an informative and engaging read.

Overall, I found this work quite helpful in getting up to speed on the current state of research in this field. I found myself often reading with a sense of wonder at how amazing the brain is that is reading that text (not that I am claiming my brain to be amazing in any distinctive way)! Personally, I think, just as we are wired up to function in so many ways effectively in the world, so it is not incredible that if there is a spiritual dimension to life, we would equally have cognitive capacities to apprehend and experience those realities. I do hope there can be a continuing respectful conversation between scientists and believing people (sometimes they are one and the same!). It is clear we have much to learn from each other!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The World in Six Songs

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the world in six songs

The World in Six Songs, Daniel J. Levitin. New York: Dutton, 2008.

Summary: Proposes that all the world’s songs can be grouped into six categories, and explores the evolutionary, cultural, and musical reasons for each category.

According to Daniel J. Levitin, I could reorganize the music in my collection into six categories–at least the music meant to be sung.

They are songs of:

  1. Friendship: These are the songs that emphasize the bonds within a group, from the classic “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” to protest songs like “For What It’s Worth” that promoted solidarity around a cause.
  2. Joy: Songs that express delight, the thrill of a wonderful experience, or of just being alive. These include everything from ad jingles like “Sometimes I feel like a nut” to “You are My Sunshine” and often have a TRIP structure (Tension, Reaction, Imagination and Prediction). Singing these songs often releases endorphins  and oxytocin, hormones often release during peak physical experiences including sex.
  3. Comfort: These are the cathartic songs that lift our spirits in times of crisis, from “God Bless America” (during the aftermath of 9/11) to many country and blues songs, that comfort through the release of prolactin, a hormone associated with crying replacing sorrow with a kind of peacefulness and hopefulness for the future.
  4. Knowledge: Many of these are songs that convey information that help us learn everything from the alphabet (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) to counting songs like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to “Thirty Days Hath September.” He explores why sung words are so readily remembered (as I found out the Karaoke night when I got called out to sing “American Pie” and discovered I knew most of it from memory!).
  5. Religion: He includes here all the songs we use for the important rituals of our lives such as “Pomp and Circumstance” and “The Wedding March” and why they are not appropriate outside certain settings. He proposes evolutionary origins behind why music may be so powerfully connected to the rituals that express ultimate human concerns.
  6. Love: He explores the paradoxical quality of the romantic songs we sing and how they often express some ideal version of real human relationships. Yet there are others that express more realistically the choices in love, such as Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” the line being one between marital faithfulness and philandering.

The author is a researcher in Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, but has also worked as a professional musician and music producer. What is surprising is that this is not a research-based book. There is no research by Levitin or others cited to justify his six categories. It seems, rather that this is simply his own conceptual schema, which he fills out in this book. Chapters are made up of a mix of musical examples, musical anecdotes including interviews with musicians ranging from Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon to David Byrne and Sting. He also incorporates speculative theory on evolutionary origins of particular aspects and effects of music, and draws on cognitive research on the neurophysiology of music, a field where he has made his own contributions, as may be found on his website.

I found this an interesting but rather “rambling” book. The particular song type of each chapter seems just a starting point for a wide-ranging mix of research, song lyrics and anecdote, that doesn’t always seem well connected, but certainly reflects his wide experiences playing with bands like Blue Oyster Cult, visiting the hotel suite where John Lennon, Yoko Ono, staged their “bed-in” and recorded “Give Peace a Chance,” as well as his explorations of evolutionary biology and cognitive research.

I came across a small factual error where he refers to the four “student protesters” (p. 69) who were killed at Kent State. In actual fact, only two of the four were protesters, the other two were students in the vicinity walking between classes who were not part of the protests. This factual inaccuracy (easily checked online) led me to wonder about the author’s method and how much he relied on recollection as opposed to carefully documented and cross-checked research. I would probably place the highest confidence in those areas most directly related to his own field of cognition.

One of the most moving sections was in his chapter on “Religion.” He writes of attending his Jewish grandmother’s funeral and the powerful effect of singing a version of Psalm 131. He writes:

“It was not the memorial speeches that brought us to tears, not the lowering of her casket into the ground, but the haunting strains of that hymn that broke through our stoic veneer and tapped those trapped feelings, pushed down deep beneath the surface of our daily lives; by the end of the song, there wasn’t a dry cheek among our group. It was this event that helped all of us accept the death of my grandmother, to mourn appropriately, and ultimately, to replace rumination with resolution. Without music as a catalyst, as the Trojan horse that allowed access to our most private thoughts–and perhaps fears of our own mortality–the morning would have been incomplete, the feelings would have stayed locked inside us, where they might have fermented and built up tension, finally exploding out of us at some distant time in the future and for no apparent reason. Grandma was gone; we had shared the realization and etched it in our minds, sealed with a song” (p. 228).

While Levitin’s ideas sometimes get lost in his rambling narratives, his categories and discussion do help us understand the different ways that music powerfully works in our lives, and what might be going on in our brains as it does so.

 

Review: The Mind’s Eye

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The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks. New York: Picador USA, 2010.

Summary: Narratives of those who because of optical or neural issues experience distortions in or loss of sight, and how they adapt to such losses.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks left us a series of narratives of neurological impairments and how people with these adapted to life. In this volume he considers cases of visual impairment or loss, describing both a collection of different impairments, some in the eye, some in the brain, and how real people have adapted to losses or changes in this seemingly essential sense.

He begins with a concert pianist who loses her ability to read music. She could remember pieces and play them with perfection, and yet could not make sense any longer of musical notation. In this, as in other narratives, he wrote eloquently, and with admiration of her adaptation:

“Lilian had been ingenious and resilient in the eleven or twelve years since her illness started. She had brought inner resources of every kind to her own aid: visual, musical, emotional, intellectual. Her family, her friends, her husband and daughter, and above all, but also her students and colleagues, helpful people in the supermarket or on the street–everyone had helped her cope. Her adaptations to the agnosia were extraordinary–a lesson in what could be done to hold together a life in the face of ever-advancing perceptual and cognitive challenge. But it was in her art, her music, that Lilian not only coped with disease but transcended it. This was clear when she played the piano, an art that both demands and provides a sort of superintegration, a total integration of sense and muscle, of body and mind, of memory and fantasy, of intellect and emotion, of one’s whole self, of being alive. Her musical powers, mercifully, remained untouched by her disease.”

In succeeding chapters, he describes a patient with receptive aphasia resulting from a stroke, a man who no longer could decode letters into words and sentences, even though he could continue to write them, the challenges of those who are face-blind, a woman who through therapy, achieves stereoscopic vision for the first time in her adult life, and how this changed her perception of the world, and what happens within the brain when a person becomes blind and yet continues to have a “visual sense” of the world– a “mind’s eye.”

Perhaps the most moving was the description of the author’s own experience of visual distortion due to a form of melanoma and eventual loss of stereoscopic vision with retinal bleeding in one eye. He describes the changes in his own perception of the world, his loss of a sense of the existence of half of his visual field, and how he personally adapted to this loss.

Like other books by Saks, he brings together the fascinating world of neuroscience, and the marvelous uniqueness of the human beings whose stories he tells. He helped me marvel at the sense of sight that I take so for granted, and yet could change or be lost for a host of reasons (I need to make that eye check up appointment!). And he helped me appreciate the tremendous ingenuity of individuals, and the fascinating properties of the brain, that enable people to adapt to devastating loss.

Review: The Wired Soul

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The Wired Soul, Tricia McCary Rhodes. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2016.

Summary: Explores how our communications technology is changing how our minds work in ways that militate against a centered, focused life and introduces practices of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation that help us attend to God in a distracted world.

There is no question that laptop computers, wireless technology, tablets and smartphones, and other electronic devices in our lives have changed the way we live and think. They provide an unprecedented connectedness (during the recent attack at Ohio State, I learned that 150 friends were “safe” in under an hour thanks to a Facebook app). They give us instant access to information and also to consumer opportunities. They also can be a huge source of distraction. The average person checks a smartphone at least 100 times a day. It cuts into productivity, distracts driving, and even interferes with our sleep.

Tricia McCary Rhodes asks the uncomfortable question of how all this affects our spiritual lives and our ability to pay attention to God. Drawing on some of the latest findings in neuroscience, Rhodes writes that this technology, and our use of it literally rewires the neural pathways in our brains. We read differently, we are more easily distracted, we no longer remember things like phone numbers or directions that we once remembered. This has implications both for how we read and reflect upon the scriptures, our ability to slow down, and focus upon and attend to God.

Rhodes draws upon the Benedictine practice of lectio divina and the four most common elements of this practice, to counter the influences of this technology. In each section, she includes not only some basic discussion of the practice, but also exercises that can be done in 15 minutes to an hour, that take us into spiritual practices, indeed alternative liturgies, to use James. K. A. Smith’s terminology, on which she draws, to help us engage with God. These four elements are and the specific practices are:

  • Lectio. Here she focuses on both slow and reflective reading. In the slow reading, she has us focus on a single paragraph that we read and re-read, and then reflect upon. In retentive reading she introduces a method of Bible memorization.
  • Meditatio. The section on meditation focuses on giving our whole-body attention to God through an exercise that combines breathing, simple motion, and words. The exercise on biblical meditation begins with establishing a clear intention, moves to preparation of the heart, and then uses a set of simple questions to reflect upon a biblical text.
  • Oratio. In this section the focus is on prayer. First, she introduces the examen as a way to “pray the texts of our digital lives” and to consider their influence upon us. Then she turns to considering our relationships and the proportion of virtual to real face to face interactions make up our lives. She concludes with encouraging the practice of table conversation over meals.
  • Contemplatio. Reflects a movement from stillness in the presence of God into action shaped by that awareness of God. She offers exercises that help to enter into that place of resting in God, and then to return to that contemplative place throughout an active day.

Rhodes is not a Luddite, urging us to throw away our tablets and smartphones. Some of the exercises include their use and she speaks both of the helpful uses of this technology, and her own struggles with it. Most of all, Rhodes gives us some helpful practices to keep technology in its place, to keep it from becoming, in Neil Postman’s words, technopoly that controls and shapes our way of life. Christ followers want a Christ-shaped, rather than iPhone-shaped life. In a simple, readable format, Rhodes introduces us to some practices and helps us to ask some challenging questions that help us to embrace the life to which Christ calls us in a wired world.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher . I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.