Tomorrowland (7 page)

5.

Morse, van Lommel, and Britton are not the only researchers probing the transformative. In fact, just the opposite. Over the past fifteen years, as our brain-imaging technologies have continued to mature, a great number of scientists have begun studying the neurobiology of mystical experiences, be them out-of-body, near-death, or otherwise. Arguably, the most well-known of these researchers are University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew Newberg (he’s now director of research at the Jefferson Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine) and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychiatrist Eugene d’Aquili (now deceased).

In the late 1990s, Newberg and d’Aquili began trying to decode “cosmic unity,” which is the sensation of becoming “one with everything” and the most celebrated of all mystical experiences. Unity shows up in nearly all of the world’s wisdom traditions. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, meditating monks reach a state of “absolute unitary being” — that is, a state where they feel one with the universe. In Catholicism, for nuns lost in ecstatic prayer, it’s
unia mystica
, or oneness with God’s love. So common, in fact, is this unitive experience that author Aldous Huxley dubbed it the “perennial philosophy,” meaning it is one of the foundational cornerstones for all of our spiritual traditions.

To investigate this cornerstone, Newberg and d’Aquili put meditating Tibetan monks and praying Franciscan nuns into a single positron emission computed topography (SPECT) scanner and took pictures of their brains at the exact moments their subjects reported experiencing unity. It was the very first time anyone had tried to use next-generation brain imaging technology to capture the spiritual. It wouldn’t be the last.

What the duo discovered was a marked decrease in activity in the right parietal lobe — which is a critical part of the brain’s navigation system. The right parietal lobe is an area that helps the body move through space by helping us judge angles, curves, and distances. But to make these judgments, the right temporal lobe must also draw a boundary around “the self” — a border that allows us to know where our body ends and the rest of the world begins. (It is also worth pointing out that this border is flexible, which is why blind people claim to “feel” the sidewalk through the tips of their canes and tennis players “feel” the racket as an extension of their arm.)

The SPECT scans showed that intense concentration temporarily shuts down the information processing capabilities of the right parietal lobe. And to profound effect. Newberg explains: “Once we can no longer draw a line and say this is where the self ends and this is where the rest of the world begins, the brain concludes — it has to conclude — that at this particular moment you are one with everything.”

This discovery marked a sea change. Before Newberg came along, telling a doctor that you felt one with everything was a pretty good way to end up in a locked psych ward. Afterward, it was the by-product of measurable biology. And that was only their first discovery.

The SPECT scans also showed that when the parietal lobes go quiet, portions of the right temporal lobe — the same portions that Wilder Penfield showed produced feelings of excessive religiosity, out-of-body experiences, and vivid hallucinations — become more active. They also found that activities often found in religious rituals — like rhythmic drumming and repetitive chanting — produce this same effect.

And all of this folds back on the work done by Morse, Britton, and van Lommel, helping explain some of the more puzzling out-of-body reports, like those of airplane pilots suddenly floating outside their planes. Those pilots were intensely focused on
their instrumentation, much in the way that meditating monks are focused on mantras. Meanwhile, the sound of the engine spinning produces a repetitive, rhythmic drone, much like tribal drumming. If conditions were right, said Newberg, these two things should be enough to produce the exact kind of temporal lobe activity needed to trigger an out-of-body experience.

Another researcher probing this question is Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist with Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada. Using a specially designed helmet that produces weak, directed magnetic fields, Persinger applied these fields to the brains of over 900 volunteers, mostly college students. When he lit up their temporal lobes, these volunteers experienced the same sort of mystical phenomena common to right-temporal lobe epileptics, meditators, and — at least in my case — skydivers.

As a result of all this work, most scientists now feel that our brains are hardwired for mystical experience. This is not — as these researchers are quick to point out — proof for or against the existence of God. Instead, it’s proof that these experiences are as real as any other, proof that there’s biology beneath our spirituality.

Of course, as our imaging and measurement technologies continue to improve, we’re going to get a much clearer picture of this biology. By itself, this is profound in its ramifications. Out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, cosmic unity — these are all core mystical experiences at the heart of the world’s major religious traditions; they are the very phenomena upon which all of our spirituality rests. Yet it’s where this work leads that is truly startling.

Persinger’s helmet proves that not only are these mystical experiences decodable — they’re reproducible. Sure, today such phenomena are only accessible in the lab, but science always moves from ivory-tower research to commercial application. This means, at some point in the not-too-distant future, there are going to be consumer devices available — brain stimulators
or immersive virtual reality googles or some combination of the two — that can provide us with direct access to the preternatural. So forget about the need to join a monastery or volunteer for a science experiment or, for that matter, go skydiving. Soon the experience of the numinous will be available via video game.

Amen.

Evolution’s Next Stage

THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION

There’s a pretty good chance you know something about evolution. More importantly, there’s a pretty good chance that the thing you know is how slowly it proceeds. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the “gradualism” of Charles Darwin or the “punctuated equilibrium” of Stephen Jay Gould (more on this in a moment), the point is the same: Evolution takes eons.

But not anymore. The changes we’re talking about in this story aren’t unfolding in millions of years; they’re unfolding in a handful of decades. Moreover, these changes are far more radical than anything that came before. And none of these trends appear to be slowing down. In fact, just the opposite. Which means, as many are starting to suspect, the era of
Homo sapiens
is coming to a close. We have massively accelerated evolution and the results are soon to fracture our species. In short, we are no longer human beings, we are now human becomings — and that, my friends, is a whole new kettle of fish.

1.

In 1958, Harvard economists Alfred Conrad and John Meyer published a book about the financial profitability of slavery — which was too much for a University of Chicago economist named Robert Fogel to abide. While Fogel was white, his wife was African American. Very African American. “When I was teaching at Harvard,” recounts Fogel, “she hung a sign outside the door to our house. It read: ‘Don’t be upset because you’re not black like me — we’re not all born lucky.’ ”

Not surprisingly, Fogel decided to prove Conrad and Meyer wrong.

He spent almost a decade on the problem. In his earlier work, Fogel had helped pioneer the field of cliometrics, sometimes called economic history, which is the application of rigorous statistical analysis to the study of history (this development earned him a Nobel Prize in 1993). Next, working alongside University of Rochester economist Stanley Engerman, Fogel began applying these methods to the study of slavery. As this enterprise required an understanding of caloric input and energy output, questions like
How much food did the average person consume in the Nineteenth century? How much work could be produced from that food?
and
How long did that person live?
became critically important. These questions led him deeper into the relationship between economics, physiology, and longevity, which is when the theory of evolution came into the picture.

To examine these relationships, Fogel needed data and metrics. For data, he used an NIH-maintained database of American Civil War veteran records, a physiological treasure trove containing things like height and weight at time of conscription, daily
roll calls of the sick and injured, periodic postwar checkups, census data, and, often, death certificates. For metrics, he chose height and body mass, because of a steadily growing consensus among scientists that these factors were phenomenal predictors of mortality and morbidity. “Height,” says UCLA economist Dora Costa, who cowrote papers on these ideas with Fogel, “turns out to be a fantastic health indicator. It’s net for nutrition, infectious disease, sanitation, and demands placed on the body.” (As a result, the United Nations now uses height as a way to monitor nutrition in developing countries.)

What all this information provided was a population-eye view of life in the nineteenth century, which is what Fogel needed to understand broad trends and reach startling conclusions. The first of those conclusions, which he and Engerman detailed in their now famous
Time on the Cross: An Economic Analysis of American Negro Slavery
, was that Conrad and Meyer were correct: slavery, while still morally repugnant, was neither as inefficient nor as unprofitable as most historians assumed.

“As it turns out,” recounts Fogel, “most slaves, especially those on smaller plantations, were fed better and lived in better conditions than free men in the North. This meant they lived longer, healthier lives and thus produced more work. Certainly, it’s an odious conclusion, but it’s right there in the data.”

And then things got even stranger.

Around 1988, Fogel began to notice another trend in the data: Over the past three hundred years, but predominantly in the past century, Americans have been growing taller. They have also been getting thicker, living longer, and growing richer. In 1850, for example, the average American male was 5´7˝ and 146 lbs. By 1980, those numbers had jumped to 5´10˝ and 174 lbs. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t just Americans. Working with a team of economists, Fogel expanded this inquiry internationally, and the trends turned out to be global. “Over the past 300 years,” he says, “humans have increased their average body size by over 50
percent, average longevity by more than 100 percent, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.”

From an evolutionary perspective, three hundred years is an eye-blink. A sneeze. Not nearly enough time for these sorts of radical improvements. In fact, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, none of these developments should even be possible.

2.

To understand what should be possible, it helps to understand a little more about Darwin’s theory. For starters, evolution is a search engine, but not a very good one. We’re not talking Google. We might be talking Google drunk, blindfolded, on crutches, and with a frontal lobotomy. This is why the Nobel laureate Francis Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer. Engineers know where they’re going — they have a plan, an aim, an end result in mind. Tinkerers are just fastening parts together, glomming this bit on to that in an exploration of functionality that is both goalless and relentless.

The realization that evolution’s search engine proceeds blindly, thus gradually, came from Darwin. Before he came along, the assumption was that the process proceeded by huge leaps — which was the only way anyone could explain the sudden appearance of new species. Darwin saw things differently. He had been thinking long and hard about scarcity. He realized that because resources are often scarce, organisms are always in competition with one another. In this endless battle, those individuals who happen to possess some slight innate advantage will flourish, and pass along that advantage to their descendants. By this method, new species could be created — one imperfect change at a time. But this certainly wasn’t going to happen quickly.

In fact, historically, massive geological shifts — like a meteor impact or an ice age — turn out to be the only way to speed up the
process. What these shifts provide is a wedge that opens up novel ecological niches, new possibilities for the search engine of evolution to explore. This fits-and-starts hypothesis — what in 1972 evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge dubbed “punctuated equilibrium” — helps explain the sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record. But really, there’s nothing all that sudden about it — according to Gould, those periods of punctuation span roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years.

The point is this: Natural selection is a plodder’s game. It dithers. It wanders. Mildly beneficial mutations do not become radical steps forward overnight. Sure, one individual might be significantly taller or smarter or more long-lived than his peers, but no matter how beneficial the change, extremely long stretches of time are required for it to spread across an entire population. Those are the rules — or, at least until Robert Fogel came along — those were supposed to be the rules.

3.

Fogel spent the next two decades trying to figure out why humans were suddenly breaking those rules. He came to believe a steady stream of technological improvement — advances in food production, distribution, sanitation, public health, and medicine — facilitated our rapidly advancing evolutionary processes. “In the past hundred years,” says Fogel, “humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment, a degree of control so great that it sets them apart not only from all other species, but from all previous generations of
Homo sapiens
.”

Fogel’s core idea, which he calls
techno-physio evolution
and explained most fully in his 2011 book
The Changing Body
(cowritten with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), is fairly straightforward: “The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infant and childhood
experience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then, in their turn, be used to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.”