Quotes from Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Attending to one sense, such as vision, does not simply kick up the activity in the region of the brain in charge of that sense. It also reduces activity in regions responsible for other senses. If you are really concentrating on the little black lines and curves on this white page, you are less likely to feel someone brush against you, or to hear someone speaking in the background.

Mindfulness and mental effort would then be understood as a way of using attention to control brain state by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect.

TANs could be crucial to the acquisition of new behavioral skills in cognitive-behavioral therapy. In neurological terms, we could say that cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches people purposefully to alter the response contingencies of their own TANs. This is a crucial point. Such therapy teaches people to alter, by force of will, the response habits wired into their brains through TANs.

One of the most striking aspects of OCD urges is that, except in the most severe cases, they are what is called ego-dystonic: they seem apart from, and at odds with, one's intrinsic sense of self.

This statement was tremendously gratifying because it stated, from a physicist's perspective, what seemed to me the essential core of all my OCD work: that effort itself is the key to altering one's brain function. Stapp's insight was that quantum theory naturally allows for the direct influence of mental effort on the function of the brain. It thus makes mental effort and its effect on attention a primary causal agent.

With attempts to find scientific support for free will failing badly, it is no surprise that the twentieth century saw the slow decline of free will as a scientifically tenable concept. In 1931, Einstein had declared it "man's illusion that he [is] acting according to his own free will.

In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion but, rather, our culture's newfound faith—science—that challenges the belief in free will.

T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process.

I tried to point out that it's not a gimmick to teach patients suffering with OCD that their intrusive thoughts and urges are caused by brain imbalances, and that we now know they can physically alter those imbalances through mindfulness and self-directed behavioral therapy techniques.

To assert a belief in free will is to accept responsibility for our actions and to recognize the mind as "more or less a first cause, an unmoved mover," as the theorist Thomas Clark says: it is to hold the view that "we could have willed otherwise in the radical sense that the will is not the explicable or predictable result of any set of conditions that held at the moment of choice.

identify the cravings for what they are—a desire to feel better right now.

this kind of increased synaptic strength is a key to the formation of enduring neuronal circuits and has become known by the maxim "Cells that fire together, wire together.

The more often you act in these unhealthy ways, the more you teach your brain that what is simply a habit (a learned behavior) is essential to your survival.

The molecular basis of memory and learning, the discovery of which earned Kandel a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, stands as one of the best understood of the changes the brain undergoes. It is one of the mechanisms that underlie the plasticity of the developing brain. Changes in how an organism interacts with its environment result in changes in connectivity.

F]ree will seems to violate all we know of how the world works, but as long as we cannot construct a logical proof of its nonexistence we cling to it tenaciously, even desperately.

Avoidance itself is a compulsion.

This is the textbook position on quantum mechanics and the nature of reality: that the Cartesian separation of mind and matter into two intrinsically different substances is false.

The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Greatness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

If there is to be a resolution to the mystery of how mind relates to matter, it will emerge from explaining the data of the human brain in terms of these laws-laws capable of giving rise to a very different view of the causal efficacy of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics makes it feasible to describe a mind capable of exerting effects that neurons alone cannot.

M]aterialism clearly poses a bit of a problem for a central tenet of the justice system - namely, that people exert free will in their actions, including their criminal actions. If actions are merely the inevitable consequences of hard-wired brain circuitry - or, pushing the chain of causation back a step, of the genes we inherit from our parents - then the concept of genuine moral culpability becomes untenable.

Study after study has indeed found a primary role for the prefrontal cortex in freely performed volitional activity. "That aspect of free will which is concerned with the voluntary selection of one action rather than another critically depends upon the normal functioning of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and associated brain regions," Sean Spence and Chris Frith concluded in "The Volitional Brain.

T]he cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child's windup toy.

In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion, but, rather, our culture's newfound faith - science - that challenges the belief in free will.

Carried to its logical limits, a system in which no one has a choice about what action to take is unworkable.