What Makes Us Human? Scientific and Buddhist Views

1. What Makes Us Human?Scientific and Buddhist Views B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies (http://sbinstitute.com)

2. Scientific View Neurologist Antonio Damasio: “We are generally taking the person as a whole, a brain and a body. We can [use] the metaphor…that human beings are brains that have a body on their backs.”

3. Cases of Severe Brain Damage • A 10-year-old girl from Germany was born with only half her brain, for the right brain hemisphere failed to develop while she was in the womb. • Dr. Lars Muckli: “The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half…Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent.” • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 20, 2009.

4. Cases of Extreme Brain Damage British neurologist John Lorber documented over 600 scans of people with hydrocephalus and breaking them into four groups: • those with nearly normal brains • those with 50-70% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid • those with 70-90% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid • and the most severe group with 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Of the last group, half had IQs greater than 100.

5. Case of Brain Death • In 1991, when Pam Reynolds was diagnosed as having an aneurysm in her brain stem, requiring a radical procedure called hypothermic cardiac standstill. • She was anesthetized with a heavy dose of barbiturates, resulting in a very deep comatose condition, and her core body temperature was dropped to sixty degrees, completing stopping all activity of her heart and brain. The surgeons then drained the blood vessels in her brain and successfully operated on the aneurysm.

6. Case of Brain Death • Pam Reynolds the next day gave accurate visual and auditory reports of what occurred in the operating room during her operation from a perspective above her body. • Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, Director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, who conducted this procedure, responded, “She really had a sort of bird’s-eye’s view of what was going on. Now whether that image came from somewhere else that she then internalized somehow, I don’t think there’s any way to tell. But it was sort of intriguing with how well she described what she shouldn’t have been able to see.”

7. Anesthesia Awareness? • Anesthesia awareness: the claim that patients under general anesthesia can still hear (but no claim that they can see) • Controlled studies provide no convincing evidence that adequately anesthetized patients retain any conscious memory of events during surgery. • Partial awakening does occur in about 0.1 to 0.3 percent of general surgical procedures (Heier & Steen, 1996; Sandin, Enlund, Samuelsson, & Lennmarken, 2000), but these awakenings are altogether different from NDEs, and generally extremely unpleasant, frightening, and painful (Osterman, Hopper, Heran, Keane, & van der Kolk, 2001; Spitelli, Holmes, & Domino, 2002.

8. Cases of Past-Life Memories • Dr. Jim Tucker, from the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia has studied cases of children who allegedly remember an intermediate period between the end of their past live and their birth in the current life. Such children tend to make more accurate statements about the previous life they claim to remember than do other children who allegedly recall their past life, and they tend to recall more names from that previous life.

9. Scientific Versus Buddhist Views • Such evidence suggests that the factors that contribute to the uniqueness of human nature are not confined to the brain, genetics, and the physical environment, but also include influences from past lives that somehow intermingle with biological processes in this life. • To account for the transference of birthmarks from one body to the next incarnation, Dr. Ian Stevenson postulated the existence of a “field” that retains memories and dispositional characteristics of the deceased. He called this hypothetical field a “psychophore.”

10. Buddhist Views on How We Become Human • The human mind emerges from a subtle continuum of mental consciousness known as the substrate consciousness, carrying memories and other imprints from past lives, human and nonhuman. • Following conception it is configured by the body and environment and after birth by one’s upbringing.

11. What Makes Us Human? • Humans have the ability to distinguish between hedonic pleasure and genuine happiness. • We have a unique capacity to cultivate genuine happiness by developing exceptional mental health and balance. • We can gain insight into fundamental aspects of reality and thereby dispel the fundamental cause of suffering, ignorance. • For this, our faculty of reason and abilities of speaking and understanding language are crucial.

12. The Ultimate Ground • Buddha spoke of an ultimate state of awareness experienced by those who realize nirvana, which he called “consciousness without characteristics,” for it is undetectable by all ordinary states of perception. • It persists even after one who has achieved nirvana has died, and this unconditioned, timeless dimension of consciousness is imbued with immutable bliss. • In this inconceivable, timeless, radiant state of awareness one is completely freed from physical embodiment. The ordinary mind and body have been transcended and vanish, leaving no traces.

13. Modes of Sentient Existence • Gods • Demigods • Human Existence • Animals • Hungry ghosts • Denizens of hell realms