Letters to the Editor
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Give me a break......
While Wallace claims to admire science for its rigor, he doesn't seem to understand it. The purpose of science is to develop testable, naturalistic explanations of things. No explanation of the mind can assume that it is anything OTHER than an emergent property of the brain while still being a scientific explanation. Contrary to Wallace's assertions, there are scientific studies of mental imagery, recalling faces, autobiographical memory, and other "purely mental" processes. It takes all of 30 seconds on PubMed to discover this. These studies find different patterns of brain activation for different kinds of mental tasks, as one would expect. Brain scan studies are merely correlative, but the fact that drugs (physical objects with well-defined mechanisms of action) produce reliable changes in consciousness is strong evidence that consciousness has a physical component. I have yet to see any evidence that consciousness has a non-physical component.
When scientists talk about the brain, one can learn what they are talking about by doing some background reading. When Wallace says
"[t]he human psyche is in fact emerging from an individual continuum of consciousness that is conjoined with the brain during the development of the fetus."
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, and I doubt he does, either.
I like to meditate. I find that my mood improves for a while after meditating, and I feel that meditating is a good use of my time, when I find the discipline to do it. That doesn't mean it's necessary for me to make anti-scientific statements that we'd all laugh at if they came from the Christian Right. In fact, a 2005 paper in Neuroreport by Lazar and colleagues found that extensive meditation experience increases the thickness of at least two cortical regions. Why doesn't Salon interview one of the authors of this paper, since they actually contributed something to the intersection of science and Buddhism?