Woman with hemorrhage and transmitted power from Jesus
Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Jesus turned and saw her, “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that moment. (Matthew 9: 20-22)
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. “Who touched me,” Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” (Luke 8: 43-48)
We see evidence of a dual interaction in these passages between the woman and Jesus, a healing power that flowed from Jesus to the woman. In my writings I offer a description of that power. We have seen in multiple blog posts that the immaterial, nonphysical energy of dual interactionism exerts causal effects on the material components of the neural synaptic networks. Reference to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary shows that the definition of power, the noun, includes the ability to produce an effect, a mental efficacy, or a means of supplying energy. The energy of wave forms having amplitude, frequency and shape has been attributed to the synaptic transmission of specified information encoded within action potentials to bring about intended action. I posit that the healing power that went out from the Spirit of Jesus consisted of the energy of wave forms spoken to by Luke 2000 years ago.
Knew their thoughts
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand. . . . (Luke 6: 7-8)
I have discussed in blog posts the likelihood that wave forms are generated by the intention of a cognitive mind that may be transmitted to a recipient brain, accounting for Jesus’ knowing “what they were thinking.”
Mental imagery and the brain
I now return to posting blogs that address findings from the neurosciences that give compelling support to dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material synaptic networks that are involved in cognition.
My first post addresses the findings of O’Craven and Kanwisher reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12:6, (2000) pp. 1013-1023. The authors refer to the “mind’s eye” of mental imagery that engages many of the same cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in visual perception of physical stimuli. Cortical regions selectively involved in the visual processing of a material object physically present show similar selectivity during mental imagery in the absence of a material stimulus. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses in the brain were robust to the extent that a single mental event could be determined with high accuracy in the inspection of raw fMRI data. Their “data are the first to show that the content of a single thought can be inferred from its fMRI signature alone.” I conclude with the authors’ statement, “The present study takes the final step . . . by showing that content-specific neural activity in . . . visual cortex can be created by a pure act of will even when no visual stimulus is present at all.”
The stimulus, whether real or imagined, could have generated wave forms actualized with specification within neural codes transmitting information through synaptic networks interpreted as to meaning by the cognitive mind of the subject.
Mental imagery and the "mind's eye"
Deana Vitrano has compared perception and imagination at the visual cortex in a recent article. She presented the findings in her Dickinson College Honors Thesis, Paper 12, in 2012. Her work is consistent with articles that have been presented in the last decade by neuroscientists.
Her study found that imagined patterns and seen patterns produced similar waveforms in 30 college students. Her findings supported “the claim that the visual cortex is activated in a similar manner during both imagination and perception.” That perception and visual mental imagery share common processes in the visual cortex was strengthened by the application of fMRI and PET scans. She recognized the importance of analyzing imagined stimuli that had not been seen before, so that imagined images would not be drawn from memory but were described verbally to the study subject. “The same neural substrates are involved in both imagination and perception.”
Evoked potential waveforms that were recorded were reflective of images that were both perceived and imagined in the “Mind’s Eye.” As I have shared in previous blogs, including “Waves in Our Brains,” Parts 1-3, it can be inferred as the best explanation that the immaterial cognitive mind can generate waveforms that are transmitted through the visual cortex as neural codes that can be interpreted as the images imagined as well as perceived. Her study is consistent with the premise of dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material components of the brain’s synaptic networks. That the human mind has been created in the imago Dei infers in a compelling manner that the Mind of God can in fact commune with the mind of Man via the indwelling Holy Spirit, a process supported by the brain’s synaptic networks.
Mind and matter
My thesis is that the explanations based on the present materialist/reductionist views on how experiential qualities developed out of inert matter are unconvincing and that an alternate viewpoint offers a more parsimonious and logically coherent account. This is a quotation taken from Leonard Freris’ article entitled “Mind and Matter.” It appeared in Communicative and Integrative Biology in 2014 (http://dx.doi/org/10.4161/cib.26658). He goes on to state that the truth of dualism would support the possibility of the mind surviving the death of the body. “The fundamental problem of Dualism is that it has no convincing explanation of how the two realms of mind and matter interact.” This last statement by Freris underscores the very objective of my studies over almost 30 years, the findings of which are presented in my two books and now in my blogs.
The author asks how experiential phenomena can be physical. The materialist/reductionist agenda is problematic. It is the mind-body problem. He refers to “eliminative materialism” wherein “mental phenomena are considered to be an ‘aspect’ of brain activity,” being physical phenomena. “Cognitive psychology” on the other hand views the brain as a computer. Mental activity is “information processing with experiential activity reduced to a computational process.”
Freris addresses the “mind-body” problem well. He closes with a postscript by Erwin Schrodinger:
But now let us assume that in a particular case you eventually observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents, which issue from the brain and through long cellular protrusions (motor nerve fibers), are conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence, tends a hesitating, trembling hand to you to bid you farewell - for a long heart rendering separation; at the same time you may find that some other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears. But nowhere along this way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and the tear glands - nowhere, you may find, however far physiology advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever meet the dire pain, the bewildered worry within this soul, though their reality is to you so certain as though you suffered them yourself - as in actual fact you do!
Immaterial aspects of thought
In support of dualist interactionism I am identifying an article by Edward Feser that appeared in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 1, 2013. Its title is “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.” Feser cites comments by the materialist philosopher of mind, Jerry Fodor, who stated, “Lots of mental states are conscious, lots of mental states are intentional, and lots of mental processes are rational, and the question does rather suggest itself how anything that is material could be any of these.” One of the authors, the late James Ross, formulated a “powerful argument for the immateriality of our intellectual operations.” (His argument for the immateriality of the intellect was rooted in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition.) He identified a contrast between “the determinacy of thought and the indeterminacy of the physical.” Favoring the immateriality of thought is “the contrast between the universality of thought and the particularity of physical processes.” The determinacy of thought was considered by him to be immaterial.
Visual mental imagery
Visual mental imagery refers to the perceptual experience of “seeing in the mind’s eye.” Mario Senden and coworkers published an article in 2019 that addressed the subjective correspondence known between imagined images and physical image perception and further showed that correspondence exists in their neural representations (https://dol.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01828-6). Visual “imagery-based reconstructions of letter shapes are recognizable [by fMRI] and preserve their physical geometry” in the visual cortex. Their results confirmed “that visual mental imagery preserves perceptual topographic organization” in the brain. Images of letters directly perceived by sight were generated via waveforms (photons) transmitted from the letters perceived and transmitted through the retina and optic nerve to the visual cortex. Of great interest in their study is that imagined letters were also detected in visual cortex by fMRI with the same “physical geometry” or topography. This finding suggests that mental imagery by the cognitive immaterial mind also generates waveforms that are transmitted through coherent neural networks to topographically corresponding visual cortex as neural codes. It is the cognitive mind that interprets the codes as perceived, or imagined, imagery. One can reason that the Mind of God has the power to stimulate neural networks to generate images as in dreams and visions?
Decoding thoughts of the human mind
STEPHANIE MARTIN AND COWORKERS PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE IN FRONTIERS IN NEUROENGINEERING, MAY 2014, VOL. 7, ENTITLED “DECODING SPECTROTEMPORAL FEATURES OF OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH FROM THE HUMAN CORTEX.” IN THEIR STUDY SUBJECTS READ THE SAME STORIES BOTH ALOUD AND SILENTLY, OVERT AND COVERT RESPECTIVELY. SPEECH IMAGERY IS INNER SPEECH, SILENT SPEECH, IMAGINED SPEECH, COVERT SPEECH, OR AUDITORY VERBAL IMAGERY. IT IS HAVING WORDS IN THE MIND. IT REFERS TO THE ABILITY TO “HEAR” SPEECH INTERNALLY WITHOUT THE INTENTIONAL MOVEMENT OF ANY BODY PARTS INVOLVED IN GENERATING AUDIBLE SPEECH. THE AUTHORS UTILIZED A METHOD TO “RECONSTRUCT OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH FROM DIRECT INTRACRANIAL RECORDINGS” TAKEN BY ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHY. THEY FIRST BUILT A NEURAL DECODING MODEL FROM SELF-GENERATED OVERT SPEECH, AND THEN [EVALUATED] WHETHER THIS SAME MODEL COULD RECONSTRUCT SPEECH FEATURES IN THE COVERT SPEECH CONDITION.” THEY FOUND THAT “AUDITORY FEATURES OF COVERT SPEECH COULD BE DECODED FROM MODELS TRAINED FROM AN OVERT SPEECH CONDITION, PROVIDING EVIDENCE OF A SHARED NEURAL SUBSTRATE FOR OVERT AND COVERT SPEECH.” THOUGHTS WERE MAPPED TO BRAIN ACTIVITY IN THE FORM OF WAVEFORM TRACINGS THAT WERE DECODED SO THAT BRAIN ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY COULD BE TRANSLATED INTO UNDERSTANDABLE SPEECH. BUT THE PROCESS BY WHICH WAVEFORMS WERE GENERATED THAT WERE REFLECTED IN THE BRAIN TRACINGS WAS NOT ADDRESSED. AND JUST WHAT “HEARS” THE INTERNAL SPEECH? I OFFER THAT IT IS THE IMMATERIAL COGNITIVE MIND IN BOTH INSTANCES, BUT THE AUTHORS PROPOSED THAT “IMAGERY-RELATED BRAIN ACTIVATION COULD RESULT FROM TOP-DOWN INDUCTION MECHANISMS, INCLUDING MEMORY RETRIEVAL AND MOTOR STIMULATION.” THEIR PROPOSAL SUGGESTS A MATERIALIST REDUCTIONISM, ASSIGNING NO ROLE FOR THE IMMATERIAL COGNITIVE MIND.
THE AUTHORS TRANSLATED THE BRAIN TRACINGS USING THE MODEL THEY BUILT, AND IT IS AN ELEGANT STUDY THAT HOLDS ULTIMATE PROMISE FOR BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES THAT CAN MAKE COMMUNICATION POSSIBLE FOR PATIENTS UNABLE TO SPEAK BUT ABLE TO HAVE THOUGHTS. I PROPOSE THAT THEIR STUDY RESULTS POINT TO THE IMMATERIAL MIND AS THE “TRANSLATOR” OF LINGUISTIC NEURAL CODES GENERATED BY BOTH AUDIBLY PERCEIVED AND IMAGINED SPEECH. WE HAVE SEEN IN PREVIOUS BLOG POSTS AND IN MY BOOKS THAT WAVEFORMS ARE TRANSMITTED PROBABILISTICALLY VIA QUANTUM TUNNELING THROUGH POTENTIAL BARRIERS WITHIN SYNAPTIC COMPONENTS TO GENERATE SPIKE TRAINS OF ACTION POTENTIALS TRANSMITTING IN TURN LINGUISTIC NEURAL CODES THROUGH COHERENT SYNAPTIC NETWORKS WITH PURPOSE, SUCH AS TO TRANSMIT SPEECH. I OFFER THAT THE COGNITIVE MIND IS THE GENERATOR OF THE WAVEFORMS AND THE TRANSLATOR/INTERPRETER OF THE LINGUISTIC NEURAL CODES. THAT THE COGNITIVE MIND OF A HUMAN HAS THIS CAPACITY LEADS ONE TO DEDUCE THAT THE MIND OF GOD INDWELLING US AS THE HOLY SPIRIT ALSO HAS THE CAPACITY FOR DUALIST INTERACTION WITH THE MIND AND BRAIN OF MAN.
God's omnipresence and omniscience
I am offering verses from Psalm 139 that show concordance with points I have shared in my two books and blogs, that God has the power to “translate” neural codes that course through the synaptic networks of our brains as well as to generate them. He knows our thoughts.
You have searched me, Lord, and you know me….you perceive my thoughts from afar….Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely….Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there….if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me….For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
Imagined touch by the mind
In an article published in 2021, the authors “recorded neurons within the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of a human . . . participant during actual touch presentation and during a tactile imagery task” (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLilfe.61646). The results of the study showed that PPC neurons that are activated by physical touch are also activated “during a tactile imagery task in a body part-specific manner.” It is a novel finding that suggested “PPC involvement in the cognitive processing of touch [encoding]. . . . cognitive processing prior to active imagery as well as during imagery shares a neuronal substrate with actual touch.” Of particular interest is that the study participant was a tetraplegic in whom touch sensation was tested in insensate parts of the body. Actual touch in those parts was found to elicit no neuronal activation, but imagined touch did activate the known coherent neuronal pathways normally activated by direct touch. Activation was attributed to the cognitive mind through the PPC. The mechanism for the activation was not addressed, but there is accumulating evidence that activation could have been via waveforms generated by the cognitive mind and transmitted encoded through the PPC and its coherent synaptic networks. I propose that the immaterial mind of the study participant accounted for the interpretation of the neural codes as touch, a dualist interaction between immaterial and material entities.
Brain-computer interface technology
While seeking articles from the neuroscience literature that speak directly to the generation of brain waves by the immaterial mind, I am posting summaries of some articles that address applications of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. ‘Mind-Reading’ Technology Allows Paralyzed Man to Rapidly Text is an article discussed by Amy Norton in WebMD, May 12, 2021.
In this technological application, “tiny chips are implanted in movement-related areas of the brain, where they tap into electrical activity in cells. When a person imagines [Italics added] executing a movement, the relevant brain cells start firing. Those electrical signals are then transmitted by wires to a computer, where they are “decoded” by sophisticated algorithms and translated into action, allowing people to control assistive devices with their own mind power.”
The “cells” are neurons, and the electrical activity consists of the spike trains of action potentials generated within and transmitted across the synapses of coherent, synchronized neural networks explained in my blogs. That the signals are “decoded” signifies that the frequencies and amplitudes of the neural impulses are transmitting actualized codes relevant to the specific intended motor action. It is remarkable that it is now possible for neuroscientists to access nerve impulses generated by the imagined objectives of a subject’s mind, by “mind” power according to the author. How the immaterial mind generates the neural impulses is the subject of my research, and in my blogs I have presented evidence suggesting that it is via wave forms transmitted to and through synapses via quantum tunneling.
Researchers at Stanford University asked a man with full-body paralysis to imagine handwriting utilizing BCI technology. This approach allowed him to “churn out text at a rate of roughly 18 words per minute, . . . nearly on par with the typical smartphone user.” Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a co-senior researcher and professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, “implanted two microchips in the man’s motor cortex, an area in the brain’s outermost layer that governs voluntary movement. . . . The microchip had electrodes that sensed the encoded signals from neurons involved in moving the hand. The computer algorithms utilized by the investigators decoded [Italics added] the mental handwriting codes. The curves and speed changes resulting from visualizing handwriting provided a “rich signal” that was relatively easy to decode using their algorithms”.
Immaterial mind's causal effects
Today while driving I found myself behind a bus with an interesting sign on the back. Pictured was an Asian man wearing a team uniform preparing with great concentration to kick a soccer ball. He had had an amputation of his left leg just below his hip joint, and he was balancing his body by holding onto special canes, one on each side, so that he could kick the ball. As I viewed the image on the sign I found it inconceivable that the physical brain could account solely for this action. No, there had to be an immaterial mind that expressed the will and intent to kick the ball and that exerted causal effects on the man’s nervous system to bring it about in the face of such a significant physical hindrance and specific circumstance in time.
In my previous blog post I identified the precise focus of my research over nearly thirty years. Just how does the immaterial, cognitive mind exert causal effects on synaptic networks. Synaptic transmission is understood to be electrochemical in nature, and it is now understood that wave forms enter the potential barriers of synapses and pass through via quantum tunneling. Are the wave forms generated by the immaterial mind? I have presented evidence suggesting that this is the case.
Wave of the gaps
I want to identify the focus of my research very concisely. I refer to it as the “wave of the gaps.” I draw upon the phrase “God of the gaps” that has caused such confusion among people over time, a view often expressed by the atheist perspective. Just how does the cognitive, immaterial mind, including the Mind of God, initiate causal interaction with the synaptic networks of the human brain? In my books and blogs I have discussed how wave forms stochastically/probabilistically pass through potential barriers of synaptic components to generate spike trains of action potentials that are encoded and transmitted through neural networks. The “gap” is between the mind of Man/Mind of God and wave forms that have amplitude, frequency and shape and are now acknowledged to pass through neural synapses via quantum tunneling. My hypothesis is that the immaterial mind of Man/Mind of God generates these wave forms which interact with synaptic dendrites of neural networks. My ongoing search is to find articles from neuroscience literature that address the hypothesis, a hard task when so much of the literature accepts materialist reductionism that denies the causality of the immaterial mind. This is an issue I have identified in previous blogs.
God created the waves
Consider that God created the waves that comprise our universe. God transcends His creation but can and does interact within it. To be sure God may have the means to commune with Man apart from all that is known about information transmission, but there is reason to accept the likelihood that He also uses the wave forms He created. Also, consider that the Holy Spirit indwells repentant mankind. As our own minds have the capacity to generate wave forms that pass through our neural networks, so also does the Mind of God via His indwelling Holy Spirit.