D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• Quantum Mechanics and Causality. • David Bohm: “No…bottom level of unambiguous reality is possible.” • J.S. Bell: “The essentially tentative nature of any physical theory.” • The perennial search for a dependable route to certainty. • The “cave” of the verbal and symbolic mind. • Socrates and Artistotle: the holistic experience of a thing as foundation for knowledge of it.• Goethe: “The phenomena…are themselves the teaching.” • The translation of being into mind. • Facts and words. • The necessary relationship between the object and the mind of its maker. • Quantum Physics: unity between observer and observed. • Bohm: the thing and its significance are not separate. • Everything that is true is true all together at the same time, but language is sequential. • Roger Wolcott Sperry and “Whole Mind.” • Buddha’s last sermon, and Zen Buddhism. • Jung-Beeman and Kounios: research on the “unconscious” mind and insight, using fMRI imaging machines. • The insight process, and the Right Hemisphere of the brain. Einstein and Poincaré. • Verbal thought and the arts. • Helen Vendler: the poet’s decisions, inherent in poetic forms. • The false assumption that intellect is only verbal or mathematical. • An unimaginably large number of relationships in any work of art. • Too much order versus a state of “exquisite coherence” in physical health. • Role of insight in finding and recognizing “perfect coherence.” • Rules at best a rough guide to judgement. How to “tell a fiddle.” • “What we can say about Nature” allows exams and grades and storage in computers. • The Logos is beyond words and beyond conscious thought.

[S]ince Descartes…the idea of the quest for knowledge…is increasingly conceived, not as the effort to understand something which is itself of great importance, but rather as the accumulating of information which is guaranteed to be correct, almost regardless of its content.

[Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information, and Wonder, p 128]

…[T]he sciences contained in books (such at least of them that are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations)…are farther removed from the truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgement draws respecting the matter of his experience.

[René Descartes, Discourse on Method, opening section of Part 2, p 10]

The Yellow Emperor said, “Do-Nothing-Say-Nothing is the one who is truly right because he doesn’t know. Wild-and-Witless appears to be so—because he forgets. But you and I in the end are nowhere near it—because we know.”

Wild-and-Witless heard of the incident and concluded that the Yellow Emperor knew what he was talking about.

[Chuang Tzu, quoted in John Briggs and David F. Peat, Turbulent Mirror p 134]

In Descartes’ great dream, the unproven theories (“probable reasonings”) found in books would be abandoned in favor of a disciplined search for the elusive truths of the real world. Those truths, once found, could be demonstrated again and again, as dependably and consistently as could the conclusions of rational mathematical equations—which, as we have seen, are simply symbolic expressions of logical statements. To this end, a meticulous and objective empiricism, necessarily founded in measurement of every kind, became the basis of the new science. Yet as we have also seen, to make the dream of certainty and control come true it was necessary to dismiss as noise—the distorting effects of extraneous influences undeserving of attention—anything that didn’t quite conform to the established “laws.” Symbols for gravity and time are included in the equations, though no one knows what either gravity or time actually is.

As we know, twentieth century discoveries in physics, biology, and mathematics compelled contemporary science to acknowledge possible exceptions to the hard-won classical rules, and even to accept such aberrations as being intrinsic and essential to the systems in which they occur.[1] Experiments in quantum mechanics demonstrate that unsettling possibilities such as non-causality—that is, spontaneous happening—must be accepted at the sub-atomic or quantum level of being which both underlies and constitutes the actual. In 1997 the quantum physicist J. S. Bell stated that “ [A]ny sharp [i.e. determinate] formulation of quantum mechanics…has a very surprising feature: the consequences of events at one place propagate to other places faster than light.…a gross violation of relativistic causality. Moreover the specific quantum phenomena that require such a superluminal explanation have been largely realized….”[2] Dr. Bell calls this “the extraordinary ‘non-locality’ of quantum theory,” which has led some theorists to a ‘many worlds’ interpretation of the data. He asks,

To what extent are these possible worlds fictions? They are like literary fiction in that they are free inventions of the human mind. In theoretical physics sometimes the inventor knows from the beginning that the work is fiction, for example when it deals with a simplified world in which space has only one or two dimensions instead of three. More often it is not known till later, when the hypothesis has proved wrong, that fiction is involved.”

[J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, pp 192, 195]

Here is David Bohm, another distinguished twentieth century quantum physicist, on the quantum world:

Of course, it must be kept in mind that all scientific knowledge is limited and provisional, so that we cannot be certain that what we think is a “bottom level” [of physical reality] is actually so (for example, atoms were thought to be the bottom level, and are now known to be constituted of electrons, protons, neutrons, etc., and these in turn are now thought to be made up of quarks, which in turn may be structures of preons (sub-quarks) etc., etc.).…It is not commonly realized, however, that the quantum theory implies that no such bottom level of unambiguous reality is possible.

[David Bohm, “Soma-Significance: a New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental,” (www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/bohm.html (6/13/13)]

J.S. Bell warns of “the essentially tentative nature of any physical theory.” Such theories are “at best a candidate for the description of nature, he says.”[3] How different this is from Richard Dawkins’ claim that today’s scientists know almost everything! In 1930, in mathematics (which is the very language and justification of science), Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel’s “first incompleteness theorem” stated that

[I]n most cases, such as in number theory or real analysis, you can never create a complete and consistent finite list of axioms, or even an infinite list.…Each time you add a statement as an axiom, there will always be other true statements that still cannot be proved as true, even with the new axiom. Furthermore if the system can prove that it is consistent, then it is inconsistent.

[John Francis, Philosophy of Mathematics, p 61]

Godel’s two theorems of mathematical logic prove that all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic have built-in limitations.[4]

It is clear that in this new conceptual world, much is necessarily (though to varying degree) uncertain. The real world as we experience it has always been like this, and we’ve all known it, using Descartes’ “natural and unprejudiced judgement” of “men of good sense.” A satisfactory theory of knowledge, the radiant goal of the logical positivists, has not yet appeared; contemporary science claims only an overall statistical “probability” for its proofs.

The human mind is entirely part of the world, but since its capacity to observe itself is radically limited, it habitually perceives itself as a separate entity. Like every other object in reality, it is individual as well as part of the whole. The conscious mind observes, categorizes—and transmutes into words. Niels Bohr pointed out that the task of physics concerns only what we can say about Nature (according to the rules of formal logic, scientifically, mathematically)—not how Nature is.[5] Why is this distinction important, and how did we arrive at a situation where it is necessary to note so obvious a fact?

Plato’s image of the Cave can serve well here. But let us imagine that the fire-cast shadows on the cave wall do not represent the crude “illusion” of the physical world as contrasted with the “real” world (the world of the immortal Ideal, of Ideas, the Forms) outside the cave. Instead the flickering two-dimensional shadows can represent our verbal and symbolic constructions of the world, “what we can say about the world” to ourselves. The infinitely glorious reality then lies unseen, “spread out upon the earth” beyond the cave’s entrance…the cave being the verbal mind, both individual and collective.

In Western culture, the perennial search for a dependable route to certainty can be traced back to the earliest Greek philosophers, more than six hundred years BCE. It was well in progress by the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For Socrates and Aristotle, knowledge of a thing must begin with an effort to discover its essential nature in its wholeness, in the real world—the answer to the Socratic question “ti esti” (τί ἐστι), “what is it?”, its “whatness”—in order to capture that reality and bring it into the mind.[6] It is only when we have done this that we can demonstrate something of the success of our attempt in a verbal account of its salient features.

A holistic experience of the thing in its full being is still the necessary foundation for knowledge of it. Any conceptual division of it into pieces which can be labelled, studied in isolation, and discussed, is secondary—in value as well as in sequence. Eighteenth century German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote:

The greatest achievement would be to understand that everything factual is already its own theory. Do not look beyond the phenomena; they are themselves the teaching. [[7]]

[quoted in Rudolf Magnus, Goethe as a Scientist, p ix]

Here we find ourselves at the precise location of the great and mysterious drama of human consciousness—and of all consciousness—which is the translation of being, both exterior and personal, into mind.[8] Within the confines of the human skull, in the human brain, a further critical transmutation may then be attempted: the rendering of the mind’s gatherings in words. But words often fail us; we must use metaphors, which allow access to the domain of shared human experience imprinted non-verbally in the mind of the listener.

Knowledge of the thing’s ti esti comes first, in mute sensory experience of the thing. Words enable us to communicate facts about the thing, how big it is, how quickly it moves, what color it is: what we can say about it. We “know” whatever we have been able to experience; we can label and describe it to ourselves and impart that description by means of words. Or, inspired and non-verbally informed by it, we can attempt to make something we can hope to love—in music, or paint, or movement, or words, or in some other medium.

The ancient Greeks encompassed all of the drama of consciousness—in which the players are Being, Mind and Word—in the single profoundly significant term, logos. Changing metaphors, we can say that the term logos over-arched (or included) the deep conceptual ditch which we dig (and must dig in order to think verbally) between the world (the thing observed), and the mind of the human observer.

On the side of the thing observed, logos signified first the reason (motivation) for that thing’s making; second, the reasoning used in the process of its making; and third, that reasoning as embodied by, and intrinsic in, the object or action. As we have seen, Heraclitus chose to use the word in this third way, as in: “Men should try to comprehend the underlying coherence of things: it is expressed in the Logos, the formula or element of arrangement common to all things.” [9]

In the territory of the human mind, on the other side of our conceptual ditch, logos represented our mind’s response to the thing, beginning with the fullest possible sensory/mental experience of its being, and continuing with an identification of its salient features, and further to ideas as to its significance and relation to things already known. All of this could then allow an account of it in words.[10] In the cosmology implied by this foundational understanding of logos, the creative thought of God is not divided from the world, just as the thought of the maker is integral to the thing which is made.

Today, little attention is given to the necessary relationship between the object, whether natural or human-made, and the reasoning mind of its maker. In truth, both emotion (“feeling”) and non-verbal thought are embodied in the form, the physical actuality of the thing made (poem, tree, bicycle, string quartet). Helen Vendler of Harvard, professor, critic, and authority on the poetry of Yeats, wrote in 2007:

Poetic form has become to the ordinary modern reader a discipline indeed secret, one that has remained unmentioned even in the standard Commentary on the poetry of Yeats. There has been no volume in which students can find descriptions of the inner and outer formal choices Yeats made, the cultural significance his forms bore for him, or the way his forms—in all their astounding variety— became the material body of his thought and emotions.

A poem is an experience in time activated by its forms, from the phonetic to the structural.…To me, the formal shapes of a temporal art—as they appear, gather force, evolve into coherence and climax, and round themselves into completion—are beautiful and revealing to contemplate, and the poet’s decisions as he invents and revises and finishes such shapes deserve investigation. [emphasis mine]

[Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, p xv]

An understanding that achieved form is indeed “the material body of…[the]thought and emotions” of the maker is essential if one is to grasp the ancient meaning of Logos in all its breadth and profundity. Why is recognition of this common reality so rare? Is it because so few of us make things any more? How is it that what is said about a work of art has such exalted status now? I have referred to this strange fact often in this book, and much of what follows can be seen as an attempt to get at something of the history of the triumph of Logos-as-Word over Logos. At present we have the dog being wagged by its tail.

While working, the visual artist now and then experiences a unity of subject with eye, mind, and hand, in a kind of productive bliss that is entirely non-verbal. Johannes Brahms wrote of corresponding moments in the composition of music, “Straightaway the [musical] ideas flow in upon me, directly from God." More commonly, our strongly dualistic thinking —dividing the body from the mind and psyche, science from religion, the material world from a God imagined as transcendent or Ideal —is obsessively concerned with separating This from That, good (for me and mine) from not-good.

Yet twentieth century quantum physicists David Bohm and Yuri Orlov and others arrived at a monistic conception of a unity between observer and observed, the mental and the physical. Bohm wrote of what he called “soma-significance,” a term he coined “to emphasize the unity of soma [body, thus physicality] with significance, and ultimately with meaning, in all its implications and possibilities.” [11]

The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not separate in the sense that soma and psyche are generally considered to be; rather they are two aspects of one overall indivisible reality.[The example of the two oppositely charged poles of a magnet is suggested as illustration.] By such an aspect, we mean a kind of view or a way of looking. That is to say, it is a form in which the whole of reality appears (i.e. displays or unfolds) either in our perception or in our thinking.

[David Bohm, “Soma-Significance: a New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental,” www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/bohm.html, (6/13/13)]

Experiments in quantum physics are said to demonstrate that mind has a role in causing what happens at the quantum level. But perception and thinking are both activities of mind, and obviously our mind is only an infinitesimal part of “overall indivisible reality.” Is something like the ancient Greek concept of Nous, Universal Mind, being proposed? The idea was put forward by presocratic Greek philosophers, and Aristotle supported it. Philosopher T.P.Kazulis writes, in Zen Mind, Zen Person, “[The great thirteenth century Zen Master] Døgen is not a naive realist insofar as he is sensitive to the contribution of mind in the constituting of experience…. Although mind cannot be separated from reality, reality cannot thereby be reduced to mind. Døgen’s tack is to concern himself only with what is experienced. Limiting himself to this, he is not concerned with notions of reality outside this process of experiencing consciousness.” We are thus returned to the everyday world, where we can simply be, simply observing.

Human thought is clearly much more than verbal or mathematical reasoning; the whole brain is involved. We are told that Logos can mean “reason,” as well as “Word,” but our contemporary English word “reason” differs from the Greek logos in a crucial way. For us, now, it can mean the cause of, or motivation for, the action of making, the account given of it and the thought producing that (verbal) account—and even the very capacity to reason.[12] It does not include any indication that both the motivation and the reasoning of the human maker or makers inhere, are manifest and (non-verbally) available in the object observed as it simply exists, or any reference to a divine “reason.” The ti esti of the object, its “whatness” or “suchness” in the world we can touch, see, hear, smell and taste is apparently no longer the first concern of reason. Because we think of reason and thought in terms of verbal and mathematical symbols, we look for “meaning” in that same abstract realm.

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The hubristic claim that reductionist science has now explained “almost everything” was reiterated in 2013 by the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson in an interview on public radio. Science has at least “built the outline” of almost everything except the brain and the nature of consciousness, he said, although “we don’t have it figured out as to how it can be put together.”[13]

An ultimate, or “final” scientific theory would consist of verbal and mathematical statements, “what we can say about the world,” allowing the wholeness which is the cosmos to be set down as a formula. It would be a symbolic expression of the Logos (understood as the overall pattern of relationships, of every kind and in all dimensions, underlying reality). The way in which all the pieces with all their aspects and attributes (however vast or miniscule or disparate) relate to one another, are “put together” in space and time, would have to be included, and that seems to me the most interesting and important thing we could hope to know. We don’t know it now even for a fruit fly.

Here is Stanford University anthropologist and philosopher René Girard on the Logos:

The word ‘Logos'…is a term that designates the actual object philosophical discourse is aiming at, over and above language as such. If such a discourse could come to completion, it would be identical to the Logos—that is to say, to the divine, rational and logical principle according to which the world is organized.

[René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p 263]

I wonder how “discourse” of any kind can hope to identify something which is “over and above language,” and I doubt that any adequate statement of the Logos is possible, whether in verbal or in mathematical terms.

The 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley took a curious position on the relationship between the observed and the observer, being and mind. He argued that nothing exists independent of mind, that to be is to be perceived (or to perceive).“Light and colours, heat and cold, extensions and figures—in a word, the things we see and feel—what are they, but so many sensations, notions, ideas?” There are no things, Berkeley claimed, if there are no minds to experience them.[14] This seems to dovetail nicely with David Bohm’s proposal that observed and observer (soma and psyche) are two aspects of one indivisible reality, which “displays or unfolds” either in our perception or in our thinking—that is, in mind.[15]

The discoveries of quantum physics, formalized in the 1920s, demanded that prevailing conceptions of both matter and mind be modified. Professor Bohm wrote:

For now, there is no absolute distinction between [mind and matter]. Rather, there is only one field of reality as a whole….What we call matter is…encountered wherever the somatic [physical] side of this universal and fundamental distinction is the major factor and what we call mind is encountered wherever the side of significance is the major factor. However, in addition, we are proposing that not only do we move toward ever greater degrees of subtlety as attention goes deeper into the mental side, but that this also happens as we go deeper into the physical side. One may even surmise that perhaps both sides ultimately meet at infinite depths, on a ground from which the whole of existence emerges. But because of the necessary dependence of each level on yet more subtle contexts, there can be no finite bottom level of reality.

[David Bohm, “Soma-Significance”]

But what is now the relationship between reality and our symbolic languages (verbal, mathematical, and visual)? Professor Yuri Orlov addressed that relationship in his paper, “Peculiarities of Quantum Mechanics: Origins and Meaning,” presented to the Nordic Symposium on Basic Problems in Quantum Physics in 1997:

Though undescribed nature certainly exists, scientific knowledge of nature exists only in the form of logically organized descriptions. When these descriptions become “too precise” at some level of accuracy, the fundamental features of logic and language acquire the same importance as the features of what is being described. At this “micro” level, we cannot separate the features of “matter per se” from the features of the logic and language used to describe it.

[Yuri Orlov, “Peculiarities of Quantum Mechanics: Origins and Meaning,” 1997]

The only way to avoid or escape our human-made patterns of logic and language is to experience without symbolizing that experience in thought or talk—in “the death of speech,” as Wendell Berry says in his great poem “The Silence,” quoted in full on p 227,

---

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men’s silence

like a root.

[Wendell Berry, “The Silence,” from The Country of Marriage 1973 p 23 ]

Anatomical studies of the brain, and electronic brain imaging, suggest that a large proportion of what we believe to be our ongoing “experience,” continuously brought to the mind by the senses, is in fact strongly shaped by information provided by other parts of the brain, particularly memory. For instance, only twenty per cent of the fibers going to the brain’s primary visual cortex appear to come from the retina: the rest originate in regions involved with functions like memory.[16] The current conclusion is that our senses bring us only partial and distorted information; the mind supplies what’s needed to make a coherent picture.[17] Perhaps the indigenous people of Mexico literally “saw” strange islands gliding toward them across the surface of the sea in 1519—islands which were in fact the ships of the invading Spaniards.

If our experience of the world is both limited and fragmentary, should that persuade us that such conceptions as the Greek ti esti, or Zen suchness, are either fantasies or patchworks made of memories? I assume that the “sensory experience” studied in the laboratory is not the relaxed and selfless contemplation recommended in mystical traditions, but rather our habitual automatic perception leading to a rote presumption of identity—look, conclude, name, move on. This is profoundly different from real observation, where full attention—both hemispheres of the brain functioning together—is given to the object, bestowed upon it, over a period of time.[18] The difference is between what Buddhists call “waking sleep,” dominated by the chattering monkey mind…and authentic awareness.

The only way to understand this difference is to experience it; it is completely outside the realm of words. One must “fall still.” Today, descriptions of ancient spiritual disciplines by means of which one’s periods of full awareness can be lengthened and deepened are available in most bookstores.

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Everything that is true is true all together at the same time. In the first chapter of this book I suggested the image of a great glass dome, with all the concepts to be discussed written on slips of paper and pasted up inside it; in a dream of comprehension one could walk into it and read everything all at once. Whole mind can be something like this. What we currently call “intellect” or “conscious mind,” however, must move sequentially. In our “logical” thinking, and in speaking and writing, we are limited to a linear path—one word, one statement after another—and that is inescapably a distortion of reality, which is a wholeness. In 1987, Roger Wolcott Sperry, winner of the 1981 Nobel prize for his research on the brain, wrote:

When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.…

Science traditionally takes the reductionist approach, saying that the collective properties of molecules, or the fundamental units of whatever system you’re talking about, are enough to account for all the system’s activity. But this standard approach leaves out one very important additional factor, and that’s the spacing and timing of activity—its pattern or form.…At some point, the higher properties of the whole begin to take over and govern the fate of its constituents. [emphasis mine]

[Roger Wolcott Sperry, “New Mindset on Consciousness,” Sunrise magazine, December 1987/January 1988]

Dr. Sperry is talking about the thinking brain, but what he says is precisely true of a bird or a symphony or any living thing. And its “pattern or form” in space and time is its logos.

A famous story tells of the Buddha’s last sermon, given shortly before his death. When his followers had gathered and fallen still to receive his wisdom, Siddhartha Gautama silently pulled a blooming lotus plant from a pond, muddy roots and all, and held it up before them radiant and dripping in the sunlight. The disciple Mahakasyapa understood this, and smiled. The Buddha also smiled, and said to those assembled, “What can be said I have said to you, and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.” And he named Mahakashyapa his successor and spiritual heir, saying:

I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvana, the true form of the formless, the subtle dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahākāśyapa.

[Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p 55]

Mahakashyapa’s teachings were the foundation for the Zen school of Buddhism; they grew out of his deep understanding of that last, wordless, “Flower” sermon. The joyous experience is of Zen “suchness,” of the fullest and deepest meaning instrinsic to reality, which “does not rest on words or letters.”[19]

If the anatomical evidence indicates that the senses provide the conscious mind with only feeble and fragmentary data, how should we integrate that scientific information with the estimation that the conscious mind receives something like forty environmental stimuli per second, while in that same hearbeat of time the unconscious mind receives an estimated 20,000,000 (twenty million!) such stimuli?[20]

Until quite recently, the unconscious mind was little known and given little respect; it was seen as the domain of “mindless” automatic functions, primitive compulsions, and repressed guilt. A typical way of referring to it is to say that “The newer conscious mind is an important evolutionary advance. The earlier, subconscious mind is our “autopilot;” the conscious mind is our manual control….”[21] However, ongoing investigations, beginning with Roger Wolcott Sperry’s studies of the functions of the brain’s right hemisphere, have shown that the non-verbal mind has unsuspected capacities and functions. Though relatively mute, it is far more than just a mechanical “autopilot” managing bodily functions like digestion and hormonal balance.

Here it may be helpful to consider recent neuroscientific research into the remarkable capacity of the human brain known as “insight,” which is defined as “the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.”[22] Using insight, the brain is able to achieve sudden, accurate and profound understanding—an understanding immediately recognized by the mind as the truth, as in Mahakashyapa’s comprehension of the Flower Sermon.[23]

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines allow electronic observation—however clumsy and coarse-grained—of the living brain at work. In studies published in 2004 and 2006, neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios described their observations of the insight phenomenon in the brains of volunteers attempting to solve word puzzles, puzzles designed to be solvable either logically (by reasoning) or by insight. In these experiments, fMRI imaging of the subjects’ brain activity was combined with electroencephalogram (EEG) machine measurement of that activity’s duration in time.[24]

Two features appear to be characteristic of the insight process. First, when all possible information has been gathered to no avail, there is a mental block, an apparent impasse, such that the conscious mind gives up. Then, when the insight finally arrives, it is accompanied by a feeling of elated certainty of its correctness, its truth.[25] Jung-Beeman says that the process may never be entirely understood, and that “at some point, you just have to admit that your brain knows much more than you do.”[26] The researchers also note:

Suddenly recognizing new connections between problem elements is a hallmark of insight, but it is only one component of a large cortical network necessary for solving problems with insight, and recognizing new connections likely contributes to other tasks, such as understanding metaphors…and deriving a story theme….

[Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios et al, “Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight,” http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020097 (3/11/15)]

A further observation is clearly relevant to the perception of aesthetic quality in literature:

It is striking that the insight effect observed in the RH [right hemisphere] in our experiments occurred when people solved verbal problems, which traditional views suggest should involve mostly LH [left hemisphere] processing with little or no contribution from the RH. It is possible that insight solutions to nonverbal problems would require different cortical networks. However, the observed effect cannot be due simply to verbal retrieval, which must occur for both insight and noninsight solutions….

[Ibid.]

Despite the fact that the problems are verbal, those solved by insight are solved by the generally non-verbal right hemisphere of the brain. Further,

…[I]t is the strong response to insight solutions in the RH aSTG [anterior superior temporal gyrus] that stands out. There is no insight effect anywhere within the temporal cortex of the LH. [emphasis mine]

[Ibid. ]

The fMRI images showed that although multiple areas of the brain are active in the insight process, the overall mental activity seems to be directed by the RH prefrontal cortex. That RH prefrontal cortex is also the locus for what the EEG shows to be the instantaneous recognition both of the insight once it is attained, and of the subject’s equally baffling certainty that the insight is true. The non-verbal right hemisphere of the brain is active throughout. Brain cells in this hemisphere are believed to be more “broadly tuned” than those in the left hemisphere; they have longer branches and more dendritic spikes, and thus are able to collect information from a larger area of cortical space.[27]

On the surface of the right hemisphere, with its profusion of multiply-connected cells, there is a small fold of tissue known as the anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus, or “aSTG.” Its function is mysterious, though it appears to be associated with holistic activities in the comprehension of language such as the detection of themes in literature and the deciphering of metaphors and jokes.[28] Jung-Beeman and Kounios observed that the aSTG is intensely active just before the recognition of the insight by the prefrontal cortex.

The suddenness of the insight comes with a burst of brain activity. Three hundred milliseconds before a participant communicates the answer, the EEG registers a spike of gamma rhythm, which is the highest frequency generated by the brain.… [It] is thought to come from the “binding” of neurons, as cells distributed across the cortex draw themselves together into a new network, which is then able to enter consciousness. [emphasis mine]

[Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker 7/28/08 p 43]

A new network is of course a new pattern. There are obvious parallels between the findings of the Jung-Beeman and Kounious experiments and the self-observations of Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein, quoted earlier.[29]

In the 1980s Stanford professor of psychology Jonathan Schooler, then a graduate student, found that asking people to describe a face (in words) while looking at it significantly weakened their ability to remember it later. He called this phenomenon “verbal overshadowing” and went on to demonstrate its effect in subjects solving creative puzzles, or remembering the taste of a wine.[30] This, Dr. Jung-Beeman has said, makes sense “since the act of verbal explanation would naturally shift activity to the left hemisphere, causing people to ignore the more subtle associations coming from the right side of the brain.”[31]

Observers and listeners who are fully aware may experience an ecstatic sense of rightness, of meaning, of truth in the presence of great works of art. At these times, as Longinus observed, our soul is “uplifted,” and is “filled with joy and vaunting.”[32] Wonderfully, as we know, we are able to recognize the truth of an insight arrived at by someone else, as well as the truth of our own.[33] If a way of arriving at aesthetic insight with one’s head in a machine can be devised, science may one day observe that insight is essential both in the making of art and in its appreciation, activities which can sometimes bring intense pleasure and elation—joy—and a sense of indisputable rightness and inevitability. I imagine that full holistic thinking includes an ongoing series of small insights, with a dramatic “Eureka” revelation like that of Archimedes in his bath happening only rarely. A reporter once asked Einstein when his ideas came to him: was it, for instance, while sailing his boat, or playing his violin? “In fact,” said Einstein, “I’ve only had two or three.”

When attempting to solve the word puzzles set by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, the journalist Jonah Lehrer observed that his mind followed both possible paths of approach. He saw that when using methodical, conscious analysis, a process of logic, he “tended to sound out each possible word combination, cycling through all [possibilities],” and that he always double-checked his solutions. An insight, however, “felt instantaneous: the answer arrived like a revelation.”[34] At the same time, he wrote, “There is something paradoxical and bizarre about this. On the one hand, an epiphany is a surprising event; we are startled by what we’ve just discovered. Some part of our brain, however, clearly isn’t surprised at all, which is why we are able to instantly recognize the insight [as being true].…”[35]

What can it be, this aspect or capacity of the brain that “clearly isn’t surprised” by the insight (our own or another’s), but instead is joyfully certain that it is true?

Like most people who write, I want my text to flow smoothly from paragraph to paragraph, but here, I think, we ought to stop in amazement. Jung-Beeman and Kounios and their fellow researchers are reporting that with fMRI machine imaging they can “see” the active brain, after a period of conscientious and logical effort and the accumulation of relevant information, arriving at last at an apparently hopeless impasse. It then appears to assign to itself a search for the answer to the problem, a search in which the non-verbal right hemisphere predominates.[36] When the correct answer is found, the pre-frontal cortex seems to instantly recognize it as true—in a burst of gamma rhythm, “the highest frequency generated by the brain,” lasting only a few microseconds. The brain then reorganizes itself into new neuronal patterns of connection in response to the new understanding, which now enters consciousness.[37] Sudden great breakthroughs in every field of human activity are arrived at in this way. Insight can bring new truth about reality, truth which we can recognize even when it has been discovered by someone else. But where does it come from? And how do we recognize it?

Henri Poincaré, watching his own mind at work, observed that what he called “the special sensibility of the geometer” was somehow able to choose the truth from among the multitude of manifestations “blindly formed by the subliminal self.” Such conceptions are “beautiful and harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful,” and are recognized by what he called an “aesthetic” sensibility.[38] The insight appears as a new pattern of relationship among things already known, with sometimes an imaginative leap in the form of a possibility which completes the whole.

It is possible that the right pattern, the “truth,” is recognized as being right in a deep realization that it is coherent with the divine Logos, the overall pattern intrinsic to the cosmos and to us. Poincaré’s “aesthetic sensibility” is our innate capacity for such recognition. Cézanne liked to take his paintings outdoors and stand them next to “God made objects” like trees to see whether they were coherent with them, to make sure that the painting had the pattern inherent in natural things. “If it clashes, it is not art,” he said.[39] That infinitely variable pattern is, I believe, Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name,” or “I-ness” (since it is intrinsic to both object and observer). Robert Pirsig calls it “Quality,[40]” Luis Menand has called something like it “the expected unexpected.” It is represented here by the symbol < >´.

Dr. Jung-Beeman points out that we don’t have any idea how insight happens, or why, despite the fact that it is one of the features that defines the human mind.[41] The reservoir of knowledge from which the insight arises may be what we call the “unconscious” mind. Or it may be what we think of as “empty space,” which appears now to be in fact a vast “cauldron of seething energies,” existent everywhere in the universe, and known as the Zero Point Field.[42] The British author Lynne McTaggart has suggested that perhaps

With practice, people could enlarge their brain’s receiving mechanisms to gain access to information stored in the Zero Point Field. This giant cryptogram, continually encoded with every atom in the universe, held all the information of the world—every sight and sound and smell.…encoded in the quantum fluctuation.…In a sense, the Field allowed us to hold the whole of the universe inside us. Those good at remote viewing weren’t seeing anything invisible to the rest of us. All they were doing was dampening down the other distractions.

[Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p 159]

Such ideas are still in the realm of speculation, of course. But in the practical realm of our everyday experience, the ability to recognize, in a fraction of an instant, which among all the syntheses of information possible to the brain’s right hemisphere is the correct insight, to recognize a newly discovered truth —there’s a marvel, surely! At the same time, the apparently clear connections between insight and humor, and between insight and the detection of themes (and comprehension of metaphors) in literature, bring those conceptually separated human activities into a coherence which we may recognize intuitively. If such things can ever be studied in a laboratory, spiritual and aesthetic experiences may also be recognized as instances of insight, of a sudden holistic comprehension of a totality. It could be said that we “feel” the connections among these experiences, but clearly the actual mental process is far more discriminatingly intellectual (though entirely unconscious) than that which we usually mean by “feeling” or “emotion.”

Information gathered by scientists at various institutions (Princeton is one) seem to indicate that the “unconscious” may even have a role in picking up extrasensory signals.

It seemed that when the left brain was quieted and the right brain predominated, ordinary people could gain access to [extrasensory information]….[T]he Vedas, India’s bible of the ancient Hindus…described siddhis, or psychic events, that would occur during profound meditative states. In the highest state, the meditator experiences feelings of a type of omniscient knowing—a sense of seeing everywhere at once….

Could it be that this communication is like any ordinary form of communication, but the noise of our everyday lives keeps us from hearing it?…Would perception improve if you deprived [the mind] of ordinary stimuli?

[Ibid. p 134]

Whether or not one accepts the possibility of extrasensory perception, the capacities of the right hemisphere are essential to our thinking, not narrowly in extreme situations where only inspiration—a sudden revelation, a “stroke of genius”—can help, but in everyday life.

One of the participants in the Jung-Beeman/Kounios studies published in 2004 and 2006 was an accomplished meditator in the Zen tradition. Dr. Kounios reported that at first this man couldn’t find the answer to any of the verbal puzzles. Then, ready to give up, he began solving one after another, eventually getting them all right. Paradoxically, Dr. Kounios said, the change may have been enabled by the meditator’s trained ability to “focus on not being focused” once he understood the process.[43] He could silence the monkey mind at will, and contemplate the puzzle, hold it (and solve it) in quiet, non-verbal mind—verbal though it was.[44]

+

When the subject is art of any kind, our culturally habitual dependence on verbal thought causes difficulties. In an admirable article on the 17th century Dutch still-life painter Adriaen Coorte, Benjamin Moser writes of the prejudice against still life as a subject for painting prevalent in Coorte’s time—a prejudice active since at least the end of the classical period:

[T]he genre always seemed a bit prosaic. Its primary appeal, after all, was not to the mind but to the eye. Clever and refined allusion to older stories always ranked higher in the hierarchy of painting. Part of this was snobbery, of course: people who might not grasp complex religious or classical allusions…could surely understand a charmingly rendered breakfast table.

[Benjamin Moser, Harper’s magazine, February 2009, p 77]

The “mind” referred to here is the verbal mind; the allusions are to stories told in words. What is called the “eye” is in fact the non-verbal mind, informed in this case by the eye; the “snobbery” will be familiar to anyone who’s ever spent much time in school. But further on, Dr. Moser observes of Coorte’s profound painting, Three Medlars and a Butterfly:

Coorte’s object of contemplation is infinitely subtler [than the painted object as symbol—the skull as momento mori, the vase of lilies as the purity of the Virgin]. …[His] painting achieves the quality of symbolism without the least pretension to being symbolic. Like wordless music, it stimulates feeling without directing it, shutting off the intellect and appealing directly to the senses.

[Ibid, p 82]

I imagine that what Dr. Moser calls “the quality of symbolism without the least pretension to being symbolic” is the quality that I would call “meaning,” and that it connects us to the deeply known but utterly unsayable within us. Again, the presumption here is that “intellect” is entirely conscious and verbal, an activity of the left hemisphere of the brain. When the right hemisphere, categorized as the domain of emotion and the senses, is “stimulated” without being “directed” (to a verbal account of the stimulus?) the intellect is “shut off.” However the intellect has capacities far beyond its verbal or mathematical skills, and as time goes on scientific recognition of the non-symbolic mind’s activities can be expected to broaden. Brain imaging has already helped to undermine the certainties of genetic determinism by demonstrating the elasticity and malleability of the brain

A work of art, even the simplest drawing or the briefest poem, embodies an unimaginably large number of relationships, both obvious and not. Therefore it seems likely that insight is essential both to the making of art and to the full experience of it, in the wordless comprehension (“comprehension” once meant “inclusion”) of vastly complex and yet harmonious and lively patterns of relationship. Remember the painter Richard Diebenkorn’s description of “a cumulative excitement in the sequential encounters with the parts” in which “right response mounts, if the chain isn’t broken, to an extreme and almost physical sympathy with the presentation.”[45] And Helen Vendler’s account of “the formal shapes of a temporal art as they appear, gather force, evolve into coherence and climax, and round themselves into completion,” and of “the way [Yeats’s] forms—in all their astounding variety—became the material body of his thoughts and emotions.” [[46]] Professor Vendler understands that the poet’s decisions “as he invents and revises and finishes such shapes,” all of them “beautiful and revealing to contemplate,” are inherent in his poetic forms.[47] I would venture that many of those intellectual decisions are intuitive; they are arrived at by means of insight.[48] And I would propose that Yeats’s ultimate goal—like that of every great artist—was to achieve in each work a state of life, in some sense of health.

At the quantum level of reality, physical health appears to be an “optimum state” of “exquisite coherence.”[49] In studies of multiple sclerosis in the 1970s, for instance, German biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp discovered that the disease was the product of “too much order,” in contrast to the “perfect coherence” of perfect health.

Too much cooperative harmony prevented flexibility and individuality: it is like too many soldiers matching in step when they cross a bridge, causing it to collapse. Perfect coherence is an optimum state just between chaos and order.

[Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, p 51]

Similar observations have been made in relation to schizophrenia and heart disease, as we saw in chapter 8. (Predictably, “a perfect coherence…just between chaos and order” sounds to me like that state of “enlivened harmony” in art and nature being represented in this book by the symbol < >´). But what constitutes perfect coherence at the quantum level?

[Q]uantum coherence means that subatomic particles are able to cooperate. These subatomic particles…are highly interlinked by bands of common electromagnetic fields, so that they can communicate together. They are like a multitude of tuning forks that all begin resonating together….

Coherence establishes communication.…the end result is a bit like a large orchestra. All the photons are playing together but as individual instruments that are able to carry on playing individual parts. Nevertheless, when you are listening, it’s difficult to pick out any one instrument.

[Ibid. p 43]

It is customary to think of perfect order or perfect harmony as the ultimately desirable state. But “perfect” coherence (at least at the quantum level) is something different—it lies “just between chaos and order.” Our health apparently requires a similar dynamic equilibrium on the material level, and so, I propose, does form in any of the arts. How could such subtly unbalanced equilibrium be either found or recognized except by instinct, intuition, insight? In the arts and in everyday life, a lively equilibrium—not static order or static harmony—is the point at which “you wouldn’t want to change anything;” the point of optimal life. Imperfect perfection, perhaps; perfection as “perfect” in the real world rather than the Ideal. It can’t be found by rules, or talked about. It can only be, or not be.

Our ability to recognize such coherence may differ from person to person and from one time to another. A nineteenth century English violinist and writer on music, the Rev. H.R. Haweis (1838-1901) tried to explain his ability to judge the quality of a musical instrument, to “tell a fiddle”:

You want to know how I can tell a fiddle. Well, I don’t know how I can tell; and there are days when I don’t trust my judgement—days when I can’t see, for instance. I leave off looking at fiddles for a day or two; and when I come back I take up this fiddle and that, and just at first I can’t see anything—those fiddles tell me nothing; it’s a peculiar state of mind—just as a player or a surgeon’s hand gets out, so a judge’s eye gets out. I know exactly when I see and when I can’t see, and when I can’t see I hold my tongue; and I know exactly how much I can see, but I don’t tell everybody.

[Rev. H.R Haweis (1838-1901), Old Violins, p 134-5]

“I know exactly when I can see and when I can’t see.” The state of mind required for such seeing is “peculiar” not because it is unique, but because it cannot be identified or expressed in words, or summoned up by will power, or scientifically measured, or programmed into a computer. We do seem to have the innate capacity to “see”—perhaps in a mysterious synthesis of vast amounts of observed data by the brain’s non-verbal right hemisphere—what might in fact be a “perfect coherence” at the quantum level.

Sub-atomic “perfect coherence” must necessarily be an aspect of the pattern intrinsic to all that is, Heraclitus’s Divine Logos.[50] Can it be that Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name,” or “I-ness,” or Robert Pirsig’s “quality,” is in reality a pattern coherent with it, a manifestation of the same universal system? Is it a pattern underlying and common to all that lives—perhaps to all that is, a pattern more apparent in some things and at some times than at others? Could optimal health in living things, and “life” in the arts, and all that which we so love in the natural world, be in fact examples of it? If that were the case, then our most complete possible experience of it would have to be by means of insight, which now appears to be principally or entirely the achievement of the right hemisphere of the brain.

I have already quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein statement that “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”[51] This could be to say that the insight required to fully grasp the sensory nuances of an entity, its aesthetic quality, is the same insight required to grasp the nuances of an ethical situation. Or that what we judge “good” in behavior in some way resembles what we judge “good” in art—that ethical choice and aesthetic choice are the same kind of activity. I would say “Yes, and both are vigorously thoughtful but mostly non-verbal.” Rules and principles are at best rough and preliminary guides to ultimate aesthetic or ethical judgement. To find the right answer to any kind of problem in the real world, in all that world’s inconceivable complexity, we might begin with the gathering of information, and with our rules for logical reasoning. But for “inspired” solutions, we must finally depend on our capacity for insight, as we always have done. To say that the fully functioning brain is an instance of a “perfect coherence” on the borderline between order and chaos allows us to say that the quiet, ego-free mind is itself an instance of it—and in being it, is somehow, and entirely mysteriously, equipped to recognize it.

Knowledge as we now identify it is expressed in words, numbers, or other symbols—“what we can say about Nature.” In this realm, exams can be set and computers programmed to grade students’ answers. But that is not “how Nature is.” We throw conceptual nets of words and numbers, metaphors and symbols and slogans over the real, existent world, and then mistake the net for the reality which escapes it. Such thinking is valuable; it is essential to us, and anyway we can’t help it any more than could Adam and Eve. But it is the territory, in one way or another, of Logos-as-Word. Reality is immeasurably greater and immeasurably richer than that.

Now and then we recognize the Logos in Nature and in human activity in the real world, and can even bring it into being. R.H. Blythe writes that Japanese haiku and English poetry about nature have something in common:

This common element is sense in thought, thought in sense; the thought is not mere thought, but the thought subsumed in sensation; the sensation is not simply sensation, but the sensation involved in real thinking, that is, poetical thinking. When they are divided or divisible, when the word and the object, the man and the thing are in any way separated or separable, no poetry, and especially that of haiku in any language, is possible.

[R.H. Blythe, A History of Haiku, Vol I p 38]

By falling deeply still, we may be able to rest our mind in that palpable reality which can be called “Emptiness,” or “the mind of God,” but is beyond all naming. The Logos is the pattern of creative thinking of that “mind,” which underlies and is intrinsic to the world. In some inexplicable way, we are able, sometimes, to know it and rejoice in it, and to work and act so as to produce an instance of it.

[1] Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p 10.

[2] J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, p 171. Also see www.wired.com/2012/04/quantum-long-distance-link/ (12/2/15)

[3] Ibid. p 174.

[4] Wikipedia: Godel’s incompleteness theorems. (3/29/12)

[5] See chapter 2, p 15.

[6] J.H. Esher, “Presocratic Contributions to the Theory of Knowledge” 1998. Plato arrived at a different, dualistic conception, in which the form of the thing, which was transcendent, was seen as separate from the mundane reality of matter. The form was Ideal, existing in an ideal realm, the realm of Universal Mind, of Nous.

[http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/Lesher.html (3/6/15)] and Christopher P. Long, The Ethics of Ontology, pp 63-64

[7] Goethe is often called the greatest poet in the German language. His accomplishments as a scientist are less known, but he founded the discipline of comparative morphology in botany, and was one of the founders of comparative anatomy. He thus initiated the whole field of scientific morphology, in which Darwin’s Theory of the Evolution of Species was based. [Gunther Schmid, in his foreword to Rudolf Magnus, Goethe as a Scientist, p ix] It is said that in ancient China a painter/calligrapher intending to re-present a subject—a mountain, a bird—would sit and contemplate it until it was fully “known,” then turn away and attempt to render the essence of its being with brush and paint, without looking at it further.

[8] Certainly other animals do this, although it is commonly believed that they have no consciousness of themselves as individuals, an assumption based on their reputed lack of interest in their own reflections in mirrors. That “fact” has been disproved by more recent experiments. [Margaret Talbot, “Birdbrain,” The New Yorker, 5/12/08 p 64]

[9] Heraclitus, quoted in G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, p 168

[10] See Einstein quotation in chapter 6, “Thought and Contemplation”, p 69.

[11] As we saw in chapter 9, “meaning” in this sense comes from the same ancient Indo-European root as does “mind,” and we now think of mind mostly in its verbal aspect.

[12] The Oxford Dictionary of American English

[13] Radio program “On Point,” WBUR Boston, 5/8/13. Dr. Wilson suggested that young biologists still have lots to do in naming and categorizing all the many still scientifically unrecognized insects.

[14] Bishop George Berkeley, “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” 1710.

[15] See p 336 here.

[16] Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 6/30/08 p 63

[17] Ibid.

[18] See chapter 6, “Thought and Contemplation.” Drawing is a very good way to really see.

[19] This is of course the same reality translated as “whatness” in English translations of Aristotle. See p 334.

[20] Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, p 166. I have been unable to corroborate these numbers, but if this is an informed guess (and what can it be but a guess?) it seems a believable one, and appears to be widely accepted.

[21] Ibid. p 166

[22] The New Oxford American Dictionary

[23] It is also the mental process used by the Japanese physicist mentioned in Chapter 17 (p 277) to “guess” which among the vast number of data generated by his computers would be useful for his purpose. This was described as a “dazzling display of ingenuity,” “a daring mathematical leap,” and “a bold way to reason” by physicist Steven Strogatz in his book Sync.

[24] Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, 7/28/08 pp 41, 45. For further fascinating and clearly written information on the Jung-Beeman/Kunious experiments, see the relevant scientific papers, available online at: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020097 (3/11/15)

[25] Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, 7/28/08 p 40

[26] Ibid. p 45

[27] Ibid. p 43

[28] A bookish ten year old observed: “What I love is when the author is trying to imply something and I know what he’s trying to imply!” This is true of all good readers, I believe. It is the power and pleasure of the unsaid, accessible by insight.

[29] Albert Einstein, p 69; Henri Poincaré, p 122.

[30] Jonah Lehrer, “The Truth Wears Off; Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” The New Yorker, 12/13/10 p 53. Mr. Lehrer tells of the long-recognized difficulty in getting the same results from identical experiments, at different times or in different experimental venues, among them pharmaceutical drug-effectiveness studies and Dr. Schooler’s “verbal overshadowing” experiments. Dr. Schooler himself has been active in drawing attention to the ubiquity of this “decline effect” in the outcomes of scientific studies. Mr. Lehrer writes that the effect reminds us of the difficulty in finally proving anything. “We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth…. But [j]ust because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” [Ibid. p 57] I accept the Jung-Beeman/Kounious “insight” results because they are consistent both with my own experience and with the testimony of others through the ages.

[31] Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker 7/28/08, p 41

[32] Longinus, “On the Sublime.” See Beauty chapter Part II p 60. For many people, music is the most dependable source of experience of the sublime, but of course it can be found in all forms of art and in Nature.

[33] Jonah Lehrer, op. cit, p 44

[34] Ibid. p 42

[35] Ibid. p 44

[36] I am aware that left-brain, right-brain categorizations are often simplistic, and that brains, whether intact or injured in some way, are at the same time strongly individual and vastly complex—but as always, categorization allows us to talk. The Left Hemisphere/Right Hemisphere image is a useful diagram in thinking about thinking, and approximates the actual physical form of the brain.

[37] Ibid. p 45. This explanation is based on an “integrative” theory of the prefrontal cortex developed by MIT neuroscientists Earl Miller and Jonathan Cohen, published in 2001.

[38] Henri Poincaré, quoted earlier in chapter. 9, “Meaning and Motive,” p 122.

[39] From brainyquote.com (6/21/13)

[40] See p 231 here.

[41] In his article on the Jung-Beeman/Kounios research, Jonah Lehrer refers to the phenomenon of insight as an “epiphany,” while at the same time noting that Professor Jung-Beeman is determined to “purge” the phenomenon of its mystery by mapping it as “a journey between cortical circuits.” [“The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, 7/28/08 p 41]

[42] Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p 33. In Eastern thought, this insight is thousands of years old. In Physics, “[Q]uantum physics predicts that all of space must be filled with electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations (also called the zero-point field) creating a universal sea of zero-point energy.” [ http://www.calphysics.org/zpe.html 3/21/15]

[43] Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, 7/28/08 p 44

[44] In the quotation from the Jung-Beeman/Kounios study given on page 342 here, the authors emphasize that “It is striking that the insight effect observed in the RH [Right Hemisphere] in our experiments occurred when people solved verbal problems, which traditional views suggest should involve mostly LH [Left hemisphere] processing with little or no contribution from the RH.”

[45] Chapter 13, p 208. This experience is of course as “real” as any physical experience.

[46] That is, music, literature, dance, etc.—but also painting and sculpture, if we contemplate them as they require and deserve.

[47] Chapter 18, p 336.

[48] For details of the Jung-Beeman/Kounios studies which might suggest further implications relevant here, see the original paper: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020097 (3/22/15)

[49] Lynn McTaggart, The Field, p 50. For the same observation in relation to heart disease and schizophrenia, see chapter 8, “Order and Chaos,” p 104.

[50] Heraclitus: “Men should try to comprehend the underlying coherence of things: it is expressed in the Logos, the formula or element of arrangement common to all things.” See p 335.

[51] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractacus 6.421, quoted in Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals p 28