depak chopra - your brain is the universe.docx

7/28/2019 Depak Chopra - Your Brain is the Universe.docx

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ByDeepak Chopra, M.D., FACP,Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.,Joseph P. and RoseF. KennedyProfessor of Neurology atHarvard University, and Director of the Genetics and AgingResearch Unit atMassachusetts General Hospital(MGH), P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP,

Professor of Psychiatry,Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina,Menas C.Kafatos, Ph.D.,Fletcher JonesEndowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Centerof Excellence,Chapman University.

In our previous articles, we challenged a cherished point of view, that reality is material andexternal. There is a world out there that that every baby plops into when it is born.Convincing someone that this didnt really happen is disturbing, and among scientists, whose

worldview depends on the material world being real, hackles are raised as soon as you sayotherwise. But we arent straying outside science in the quantum era. Our basic point, thatthe physical world lost its reassuring status, based on what the senses perceive, a hundredyears ago when the quantum revolution began is beyond dispute.

But the fact that every particle in the universe winks in and out of the quantum field, or thatparticles can transition into waves that spread in all directions doesnt strike very close to

home. Quantum physicists get into their cars every morning with no fear that the engine willvanish into a cloud of energy. But this new, nonmaterial reality actually lies much closer thananyone supposes. The human brain is where the quantum meets the road, with far-reaching implications.

What if there is physical evidence that the brain is a quantum device, and that its designreflects the cosmos in an uncanny way that cannot be by chance? In the Vedic tradition of

India, it is held that as is the smallest, so is the greatest. As is the microcosm, so is the

macrocosm. Were using modern terminology, but the concept is timeless: Nature showssimilar patterns over all scales, its subtlest level to its grossest. Some clues to this truth arevisual - the helix that appears in DNA and in spiral nebulas, for example. Hard science isntmoved by casual resemblances, however.

To tighten the parallels, one can turn to recent work by physicists including Dmitri Krioukov

and reported in mainstream journal like Natures Scientific Reports. To quote: The universemay be growing in the same way as a giant brain - with the electrical firing between braincells 'mirrored' by the shape of expanding galaxies. Looking at simulations of galaxyinterconnections in the early universe and neuron interconnections makes it virtually

impossible to tell them apart. The brain and the cosmos, like the Internet, are networks, and

they evolve the same way. The result, the authors argue, is that the universe really doesgrow like a brain. In a related article in the prestigious journal Science, researchers havediscovered that the connections in the brain are highly organized, the brains structure is likea grid of city wiring, the neurons traversing in all directions.

Several years ago the philosopherClark GlymouratCarnegie Mellon Universitypublished an

intriguing paper titled When is a brain like the planet? He provocatively concluded thatwhen it thinks, the brain parallels the ecology of our planet. A phenomenon like El Nino,

which is coordinated with weather events far away in Africa, is similar time series correlationsobserved in an fMRI brain scan. (Similarly, Greek seismologists at theUniversity of Athens

have concluded that the tremors before an earthquake are identical to the heart patternsbefore a heart attack. )

The similarities in physical systems can be inexplicable. We ourselves noticed that thenumber of neurons in a brain (about 100 billion) is on the same order of magnitude as the

number of trees on the Earth (estimated by NASA to be about 400 billion). In their actual

physical appearance, neurons look like trees with a main trunks (axon) and branches(dendrites, which comes from the Greek word Dendron or tree). Neurons connect togetherin a tree-to-tree fashion as their branches nearly touch. The life of a single neuron is asentangled with every other neuron as the trees in a rain forest. The number of synapses in

different neurons (neurons come in many varieties) vary from around 1,000, to 200,000 forlarge Purkinje cells. Trees have branches that show a self-similar pattern from a few hundredto more than 100,000. And even though neurons and trees come in different sizes, the size of
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a neuron to the size of a human being stands in similar ratio to the size of a tree to the sizeof the Earth. All be chance? Maybe not.

Its hard for a neuroscientist to look up at trees and not see even more intricate parallels.Trees receive information in the form of carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water to produce the

oxygen that sustains life on Earth. Animals in turn produce carbon dioxide, which forms a

feedback loop back to trees which are fed by it. In a sense oxygen and carbon dioxide,flowing through every living system, are like neurotransmitters. The synapses where brainactivity occurs from neuron to neuron are organized through feedback, with one side feedingchemicals to the other.

The fact is that all systems seem to be self-organized, from the complex way that replicantRNA organizes a new strand of DNA to the way the brain produces a single picture of reality

that organizes the firing of billions of neurons. The constants that rule the evolution of the

universe are so precise that stars are organized to live through definite, orderly stages, andthe formation of galaxies from interstellar dust follows its own life cycle.

In recent decades it has become established that a single cell is a system, as is the brain, and

the entire body you are presiding over an entire ecology, and like planetary ecology,everything finds a delicate balance. The phenomenon of homeostasis is the bodys way of

balancing hundreds of different functions (e.g., blood pressure, body temperature, thesymphony of hormones coursing through the blood stream, digestion, respiration, and wakingand sleeping). It strikingly mirrors planetary ecology and its living response to forces ofbalance and imbalance. The Gaia hypothesis, which looks upon the Earth as a singleorganism, may well apply to our own bodies as cells in the body of the cosmos.

As is the smallest, so is the greatest has come full circle from ancient wisdom to modern

science once we accept that every system is driven by feedback loops, homeostasis, andcontinuing self-organization. At this point, it is up to dissenters to prove that we arentinhabiting a living universe, tied into it by the most fundamental characteristics ofbiological systems.

If it seems too much to grant that the universe is a living organism, that point isntnecessary. What we wanted to show in this article is that the material world isnt primary but

secondary. Without homeostasis, feedback loops, and self-organization driving every level ofNature they are invisible and intangible. Without them, the fine- tuned universe couldntexist, or the fine-tuned human brain.

There are further horizons to cross. Might it be that forests here on Earth are not onlyresponsible for energy generation but also connect planetary consciousness to cosmicconsciousness? This may not be just bold speculation. If indeed the universe behaves like a

brain, then why wouldnt it harbor universal consciousness? After all, if the hardware looks

the same, then the software that creates coherence at every level might be the same. Even

though everyone uses phrases like Im making up my mind and My minds not very sharptoday, the my is only an assumption.

When you get out of the shower, you are wet; you dont say, This is my wet. Generalqualities arent individual. You cant call the Earths atmosphere my air. In the same way,

human pride in being able to think and reason may be a false assumption. The greatquantum pioneer Erwin Schrdinger thought so:

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness.[I]n truth there is only one mind.

The implication is that just as our bodies are cells in the body of the universe, our

consciousness is immersed in the universal mind. But how would we go about validating this

scientifically? Going beyond resemblances in Nature, systems give us a toehold - studying the


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evolution of physical systems on Earth will tell us a lot about the evolution of the brain, andvice versa.

If the universe is encoded in the brain, then perhaps insights that scientists andphilosophers have had in the past (breakthrough thoughts about reality) are not be so

mysterious. Einstein was astonished that relativity, a theory formulated in his mind, turned

out to match Natures workings with incredible mathematical precision. Such astonishmenthas evolved beyond amazement by now. The brain is now being examined in the light ofquantum biology, and it is dawning that thinking involves quantum operations at the basiswhere ions exchange charges thus exchanging information in a precise, even digital way

down to a finer level where normal interactions between particles ceases. People dounexpected, strange, weird, and spooky things so do quanta. If their weirdness isentangled with ours, there is more than resemblance, parallels, and coincidence. The samesource is at work for stars, brains, and thinking.

Perhaps, we are all tapping into cosmic knowledge (the ultimate software), acting as a portalfrom one piece of hardware to another, from the brain to reality out there. Using the same

build for the hardware, Nature has allowed us to enter our mental universe, only to discoverthe infinitude of the conscious universe. Infinity is hard to think about, but happily, our brainskeep evolving. Having evolved to the point that we can look out there and see incredible

mathematical orderliness, weve reached the horizon where reality may reveal its true source.(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times

bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Powerof Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at HarvardUniversity, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts GeneralHospital (MGH), co author with Deepak Chopra of Super Brain: Unleashing the ExplosivePower of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center,Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health,

cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.

Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics,

Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of theforthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

There are further horizons to cross. Might it be that forests here on Earth are not only

responsible for energy generation but also connect planetary consciousness to cosmicconsciousness? This may not be just bold speculation. If indeed the universe behaves like a

brain, then why wouldnt it harbor universal consciousness? After all, if the hardware looksthe same, then the software that creates coherence at every level might be the same. Even

though everyone uses phrases like Im making up my mind and My minds not very sharptoday, the my is only an assumption.

When you get out ofthe shower, you are wet; you dont say, This is my wet. Generalqualities arent individual. You cant call the Earths atmosphere my air. In the same way,human pride in being able to think and reason may be a false assumption. The great

quantum pioneer Erwin Schrdinger thought so:

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness.

[I]n truth there is only one mind.

The implication is that just as our bodies are cells in the body of the universe, ourconsciousness is immersed in the universal mind. But how would we go about validating this


4/4

scientifically? Going beyond resemblances in Nature, systems give us a toehold - studying theevolution of physical systems on Earth will tell us a lot about the evolution of the brain, andvice versa.

If the universe is encoded in the brain, then perhaps insights that scientists and

philosophers have had in the past (breakthrough thoughts about reality) are not be so

mysterious. Einstein was astonished that relativity, a theory formulated in his mind, turnedout to match Natures workings with incredible mathematical precision. Such astonishmenthas evolved beyond amazement by now. The brain is now being examined in the light ofquantum biology, and it is dawning that thinking involves quantum operations at the basis

where ions exchange charges thus exchanging information in a precise, even digital way down to a finer level where normal interactions between particles ceases. People dounexpected, strange, weird, and spooky things so do quanta. If their weirdness isentangled with ours, there is more than resemblance, parallels, and coincidence. The samesource is at work for stars, brains, and thinking.

Perhaps, we are all tapping into cosmic knowledge (the ultimate software), acting as a portal

from one piece of hardware to another, from the brain to reality out there. Using the samebuild for the hardware, Nature has allowed us to enter our mental universe, only to discoverthe infinitude of the conscious universe. Infinity is hard to think about, but happily, our brains

keep evolving. Having evolved to the point that we can look out there and see incrediblemathematical orderliness, weve reached the horizon where reality may reveal its true source.(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times

bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Powerof Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at HarvardUniversity, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts GeneralHospital (MGH), co author with Deepak Chopra of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive

Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center,

Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health,cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.

Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics,

Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of theforthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

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