For almost 100 years (since Wm James) the social sciences have ignored, suppressed, and neglected personal consciousness. For 24 centuries before that (in Western and Asian history) consciousness was at the very center of human concerns. In science today we are in a comeback, but the curriculum and the institutions are way behind. So students are the last ones to benefit from the huge upsurge in first-rate consciousness science from psychology, social psychology, and bioscience.

We’ve still got it backwards. There is no conflict between science and the humanities. I’m less sure of this one, but there may be no conflict between science and religion.

It’s high time to heal the split between the “Two Cultures.”

You are connected not just via Facebook and the Internet, you’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons.

There are chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness. This is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. For the longest time people have regarded science and the humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet.

(Excerpt from his TED Talk – VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization.)

I believe that unless experience grabs kids, or adults for that matter, as having a searing relevance in their life are discussed in the science curriculum — most students will just tune out. I made this attempt to connect brain science with the experiences of my characters/patients in my book “The Female Brain” and “The Male Brain” — especially look at Chapter Two: Teen Boy Brain.

When I present the science material in classrooms to 13-16 year olds you can hear a pin drop.

That said, many critics have said this isn’t ‘real science’. I disagree, and feel that making a bridge between the laboratory science and real life is the only way to get kids into having a passion about it.

I’d be most interested to hear others’ experiences and approaches.

Louann Brizendine, MD,  clinician, best-selling author

The challenger and the Matrix.

Dr. Walter J. Freeman is a professor of Neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley. He received an M.D. from Yale University. He completed postdoctoral training in neurophysiology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1959, the year he joined the Berkeley faculty. He is an acknowledged pioneer of brain research whose books include Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate.

In fact, Dr. Freeman believes he has physiological evidence for his bold assertions.

Dr. Freeman is a pioneering neurobiologist who has been doing brain research at the University of California at Berkeley since 1959. He is a medical doctor, student of physics, mathematics and philosophy, and an author.

An acknowledged pioneer in brain research, Dr. Freeman’s experimentally-based ideas about consciousness and the central role of cooperation in the brain, family, tribe, and society are revitalizing honored scientific and philosophical traditions.

His work challenges many in today’s scientific establishment, including Nobel Laureates. But Freeman is secure in the company he keeps — many of his ideas have been around for centuries. He is droll in casting himself in the role of midwife, someone to update and recognize the critical role of cooperative action.

Experimental work leads Dr. Freeman to believe that we evolved within a matrix of cooperative action within brains and between them. Cooperation is a profound reality for humans. It is fundamental between neurons, in families, within tribes, and among nations. In fact, Dr. Freeman believes, consciousness itself is rooted in these cooperative interactions. He believes we create ourselves by our actions and that he has the experimental data to demonstrate it. In terms of Darwin’s natural selection, Dr. Freeman is confident we were selected to be cooperative.

Freeman also has evidence that learning is action-based. We learn from experience. But before we can learn new behaviors, we must first un-learn old ones. Both un-learning old ways and learning new ones were required for our hominid ancestors survival, he believes. Freeman thinks the physiology of un-learning requires deeply emotional experiences, with neurochemical mechanisms at work during those emotional experiences. Where do learning, un-learning and cooperation come together? In rhythmic, predictable actions like drumming, dancing and singing. And according to Dr. Freeman, only humans have rhythm.

There are profound implications for our species in Dr. Freeman’s new way of seeing consciousness. His work gives him confidence that human beings have only just begun to comprehend our full potential. He does not see any limitations on our growth or the richness of human experience.

So what have we to fear as we face an uncertain future? Fear itself. Sound familiar?

Walter J. Freeman (b. 30 January 1927 in Washington DC) studied physics and mathematics at M.I.T., electronics in the Navy in World War II, philosophy at the University of Chicago, medicine at Yale University, internal medicine at Johns Hopkins, and neuropsychiatry at UCLA. He has taught brain science in the University of California at Berkeley since 1959, where he is Professor of the Graduate School.

Dr. Freeman received his M.D. cum laude in 1954, and he has more than 20 awards, among which are the Bennett Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry in 1964, a Guggenheim in 1965, the MERIT Award from NIMH in 1990, and the Pioneer Award from the Neural Networks Council of the IEEE in 1992. He was President of the International Neural Network Society in 1994, is Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Chair, IEEE Oakland-East Bay Section, EMBS, 2006.

He has authored over 450 articles and many books including Mass Action in the Nervous System, Societies of Brains, Neurodynamics, and in 2001 – How Brains Make Up Their Minds.

Author: Paula Gordon Read & Listen to More

Reposted by: Natalie Geld, WhyCon.org

If looking at today’s headlines makes you wonder about the fate of our planet, here is some news that may surprise you: from an evolutionary standpoint, we are exactly where we need to be.

We are surrounded by the proof that we are poised to take an incredible step forward in the growth of our species. This evolution is driven by a change in human consciousness.

We are, each and all, active participants in what will amount to be the greatest of human adventures.

Political philosopher, Steve Bhaerman is co-author of Spontaneous Evolution

The development of thinking as a certain personal and unique language is, at the same time, influenced by our education and shaped on a very aggressive level, by the lords of the monetary system. That said your idea is very rational with vast grounds for validation. For students, as a platform for discussion on many twin issues intricately related — for example: How does the perception of love, sorrow, security, cruelty, self-esteem, etc. affects our thinking patterns? Humans are in a continuous process of desensitization where, from a very young age, we learn how to limit different feelings that affect us; we learn how to restrain these feelings from disturbing our productivity and not how to positively influence our adverse reality.

Yes, I believe you have a very powerful idea but if children will learn how to think, it will be much harder to control them. To prevent them from discovering simple solutions to numerous, basic problems that ‘seem to’ afflict us all.

If you go one step further with this concept, I am afraid you will find very tall, thick and complicated obstacles in your way. And that’s why this initiative holds such promise and beauty.

Here’s a somewhat irrelevant fact — I grew up mixed race in Jim Crow Louisiana. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was legally black in my home state until 1983. Still, I lived in a “white” neighborhood, with people fond of the Ku Klux Klan — yet who devoutly worshiped in the Southern Baptist church or even the Catholic church on weekends. They were afraid of blacks, Hispanics, even Asians back then.

Though their power to oppress those groups has largely worn away, they greatly fear anyone different — and what you propose is a curriculum that would teach people to embrace their differences, to become more of an individual rather than a conformist. When you look at the school curriculum in a state like Virginia today, which is largely developed around a state-administered standardized test, you do not see an emphasis on, nor a desire for “critical thinking, creativity, self-reliance, innovation and motivation, as well as building a foundation for free thinking – healthier – minds.” The emphasis is on regurgitating, and ultimately doing, just what one is told.

Too much “learning” nowadays is focused on rote memorization of received wisdom. It’s a problem from both sides of the spectrum — from educators who want an objective measure of results to students who only want to be told what they need to know for the test. Inquiry beyond following the same old steps in the same old set-piece labs is often discouraged. The environment is so controlled it all but eliminates the possibility of serendipitous discovery and equally serendipitous insight into the connections between lab and reality.

Of course, asking students how they would define consciousness might get them engaged in the discussion from the start (but often asking students to get involved in ANY discussion yields a lot of annoyed stares). I haven’t seen a definition of consciousness — not that I ever came up with one myself when broaching the subject in the biology classes I taught.

In my geography classes, I try to get students to become aware of the landscape around them. Situational awareness can, of course, enhance their survival, but I want them to do things like make the connection between the distribution of payday lenders, for example, and the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhoods where those businesses occur. For me, much of what I teach is about direct, physical experience of the landscape around you — but I get criticism from students who presume to tell me (and administrators) that it has nothing to do with geography. If what I taught didn’t come out of the review section of a boringly written geography textbook, it can’t be geography, right?

I guess the relevance here is that administrators and many students are suspicious of the legitimacy of personal experience (the students are taught to be that way, and those teachings carry into adulthood). I was, in yet another boring example raised a Catholic. One message I frequently received was that sex, with oneself or others, is sinful. Sex may be natural, but nature equals sin, therefore the only way to avoid sin is to deny nature.

Whether we’re dealing with sex or something else, we constantly get these signals to deny our nature in many aspects of our lives. The paradox here (at least it seems like a paradox at this hour) is that you’re proposing to do something that runs counter to American tradition — to embrace our nature rather than deny it, to learn from it rather than be skeptical of it.

The success of your initiative would threaten to break the conformists’ stranglehold on education and society. I grew up in a time when those of that ilk were ready to kill rather than give up that kind of power. The society I live in has evolved somewhat from the 60s and 70s, but I fear that progress could evaporate on a moment’s notice. (Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress disorder on my part — as I age, I become more of an angry off-white man.)

Now if you can reach the students early enough, you may win some converts, but those successes will prove the danger of your ideas to the status and security of those who have appointed themselves controllers of primary and secondary education in this country.

In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. It’s the combination of technology and its transformation effect on work, demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true?

Education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We all have bodies, don’t we? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. They become disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive.

The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has ‘mined our minds’ in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principle on which we’re educating our children. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

*(This article is an excerpt of Sir Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk: Do Schools Kill Creativity?)

The mind leads – the body follows. Simple, right? Not really. From our first flickering of consciousness, we are taught what to think, not how to think. Unfortunately, most of us know more about our iPhone Apps than about what makes us, and our world tick. Let alone the integral nature of energy.

In the 2008 Towards a Science of Consciousness conference, *Brack and Hill noted that most undergraduate and graduate students in the healing sciences “… admit to distrusting science as any form of guide for working with “real human problems.” And they proposed: “helping to map human problems onto the domain of Quantum Mechanics, Chaos/Complexity theory, and Consciousness offers exciting new perspectives on the human experience.”

Great idea – I propose we grease their wheels before they reach grad school.

Many people, in general, are science phobic, thinking science is something for what’s ‘out there.’ Generally our chemistry, biology and physics courses in primary education (perhaps even secondary and beyond, you tell me) tinker with external forces to reveal process and potentiality; using equations, beakers, elements, a blowtorch, philosophical discussions, or a frog, cat, pig and scalpel. All important explorations and inquiry to be sure.

Patricia Smith Churchland explores the impact of scientific developments on our understanding of consciousness, the self, free will, decision making, ethics, learning, and religion and issues concerning the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free will, as well as on more technical questions concerning to what degree the nervous system is hierarchically organized, how the difficult issue of co-ordination and timing is managed by nervous systems, and what are the mechanisms for the perceptual phenomenon of filling-in. A professor at the University of California, San Diego and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, Patricia believes that “…to understand the mind one must understand the brain.” Our bodies, our minds and brains are mysterious and fascinating and the perfect ‘tools’ for stimulating curricular relevance, and to show the resonance of science to life.

A science of consciousness and volition… we humans are walking chemistry Labs – Petri dishes for our own human experiments – quantum possibilities awaiting our observation. Great minds are not anomalies. They use their minds differently – consciousness is key. This is our time to begin introducing students to the vital, exciting and challenging domains of consciousness, of our potentiality.

Supple, fertile minds of youth are eager for the discovery of how to tap and use their potential, and wither when their studies and experiences don’t make sense for them. Let’s show them how powerful they are — how they’re influenced by/and influence their overall environments.

To Be The Pinball… or The Pinball Wizard?
That is The Question.There is exciting opportunity for providing a supplement to current science curriculum to include an experiential examination of their personal biological science laboratory – that of their brain, body-wide systems and their consciousness – and this direct connection to all experience, both internal & external.

Let’s bridge the gap! Quality instruction on the science of being human, simplifying our complex mind/body maps and experimenting with their own individual chem labs, will generate improvements for students across the board – including critical thinking, creativity, self-reliance, innovation and motivation, as well as building a foundation for free thinking – healthier – minds.

How Do We Accomplish This? Develop stimulating supplemental curriculum which springboards from current Science, Humanities and Math Curriculum — which we can provide to private and public Science Departments. Imagine the ripple effect!

A curriculum on consciousness is needed. Introductory psychology textbooks don’t address it, actually. Most have a chapter on “states of consciousness.” These include dreaming, drugs, hypnosis, even meditation, but not consciousness itself. Odd, really, when you think about it. Chapters on learning do not discuss how attention, consciousness focused, is required for most learning.

As far as using introspection, I currently teach an “Introduction to Consciousness Studies” course at University of Montana – Helena. I use “subjectivity labs” as part of the pedagogy. If this were a biology course, we would have labs looking in microscopes and doing dissection. As a course on consciousness, students have direct access to the subject matter – their own subjectivity. They love it.

I am currently using Susan Blackmore’s text Consciousness: an Introduction. She has designed exercises such as asking one’s self “Am I conscious now?” as many times as you can and writing down what you find. At first students go rather nuts, as this isn’t the typical college assignment. They want more instructions. To help explain this “lab” I compare it to having them look in a microscope and drawing what they see, only here the microscope is their own introspection. Their results then are brought back to class and discussed.

Most students end up talking about this class to friends and family, having them ask themselves “Am I conscious now?” I’ve had students dream asking this question. That of courses generates much discussion. Is dreaming a state of consciousness?

I offer this to show using introspection as a teaching assignment/tool can be done. Is it science? I would say yes, sort of. Obviously the topic of study isn’t objectively measured, it is subjectivity itself. However, students make observations and share findings. That is what science is as well. I don’t get into all the philosophical issues with this. I want students to examine their own subjectivity, to learn mindfulness observation.

I’ve given this some thought, actually. I believe a curriculum on consciousness should include:

• The philosophical background: Mary the color scientist, philosopher’s zombies, how all this salt/protein/sugar/etc can slosh together just so and result in subjectivity, materialism/dualism/panpsychism, all that stuff.
• Cognitive neuroscience — This field is growing amazingly fast. Maybe Dr. Baars’ textbook could be used?
• Mystical traditions, meditation, first-person perspectives
• Less than readily accepted fields such as parapsychology — Granted this is a matter of debate, this area, but there is a significant body of data to examine.
• Theories of consciousness including quantum mechanics theories
• A myriad of other topics

Theories combining the non-understood phenomena of quantum mechanics and the non-understood phenomena of consciousness might indeed help the understanding of both. The ramifications of this possibility are profound and far-reaching.

One of the frustrations students have with my course is the fact that we really do not have a good scientific explanation of consciousness. They are used to classes that give them material to learn and assume what they learn are facts. This course provides nice opportunities to develop critical thinking skills. Students have to struggle with unknowns. They have to see how there are various areas of study within a broad field but none of these areas have the final say. They get to explore something absolutely personal, their own subjectivity, in a public format. It helps them realize that the other topics they study – biology, psychology, chemistry, whatever – are based on scientific theory and scientific processes and that this process is never done.

What is taught as fact today, may not be tomorrow as new data arises. New data is arising all the time in consciousness. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are getting to the point in human evolution where we can have a science of consciousness giving us comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon so close to us all yet so completely non-understood: our own subjectivity.

My course is college level, but could be adapted to middle and high school. Developing a curriculum for consciousness studies and science is exciting and is one whose time has apparently come!