The mathematics of the heart

Math and the heart – the words sound completely opposed.  We like to divide things into “left-brain” and “right-brain” and never the twain shall meet. I’m this or I’m that.  In fact, that neat distinction isn’t something neurology supports, and we might do better to follow the Renaissance ideal – to achieve in all spheres.  At the moment, most of our respect is reserved for the math side of things – for proof, for science, for good empirical fact, for logic. And the moment we do that, we automatically consign all matters of the heart and emotion to a box labeled unscientific, illogical, unproven, fluffy.  This is a dangerous way to live – and as we start to use math to explore the heart, we find out why.

The maths of being nice

In a recent article in the New Scientist, Martin Nowak explains how he’s used mathematics to explore human cooperation – and been able to show some surprising and powerful results.  For evolutionary psychology, cooperation is fascinating: why would we evolve to help each other, often to our own cost? Why should I tell you about a great job opportunity if you’re more likely to get it than I am, or spend my weekend painting your house when mine needs cleaning?  How does that help natural selection in my favor?  There are five main ways we cooperate that do act in our favor – some obviously, others more subtly:

• Ÿ         kin selection – helping a close relative, I’m painting your house because you’re my mom
• Ÿ         direct reciprocity – tit-for-tat, I help you paint so you’ll help me clean
• Ÿ         indirect reciprocity – if I help you, other people will know and help me later
• Ÿ         spatial selection – we’re neighbors, so we help each other and survive in clusters
• Ÿ         group selection – we’re part of a group who all help each other, plus that means we do better than other groups

Martin Nowak’s mathematical models are a neat, elegant way of showing how these different forms of cooperation work and benefit us.  As a strong religious believer, he’s equally interested in looking at how his work overlaps with religious beliefs:

I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. In a sense, the world's religions hit on these ideas first, thousands of years ago.

The power of forgiveness versus punishment is a point to which he returns.  Punishment can be used to police cooperation – cooperate or else! – and most people hold on to the belief that punishment works, or if at least it should, or even if it doesn’t, we still need it, because not to have it would just be… just be…

Not to have punishment would just be forgiveness.  “Who would have thought,” says Nowak, “That you could prove mathematically that, in a world where everybody is out for himself, the winning strategy is to be forgiving, and that those who cannot forgive can never win?”

HeartMath

The Institute of HeartMath has a similar intersection between “left-brain” approaches to knowledge and a “right-brain” subject – except the “right-brain” aspect, emotion, might not be in the brain after all.  As we explored in Listen to Your Heart-Brain, the heart has its own brain.  Neurocardiology looks at how our heart’s thoughts are communicated to the brain and the role that this plays in our thinking, our life, and even our health.  The relationship between stress and heart-attacks has been known for years, but this heart-health relationship is now being explored much more widely and in much more detail.  A healthy metaphorical heart, seat of love and emotions, is intimately tied together with a literally healthy heart.  We weren’t such fools, after all, all those years that we said the heart, not the brain, is the seat of emotion.

Much of the Institute’s work and focus is on individual health and helping individuals deal with their emotions – which is also, inevitably, helping individuals deal with their relationships.  We are too rooted in society, it turns out, to deal with each individual as a separate entity.  And our responses to each other are a crucial part of our health.  Interestingly, the Institute also soon addressed the subject of forgiveness.  A study compared the effect of feeling angry or caring towards other people, by measuring secretory immunoglobulin A (S-IgA).  This antibody is a major part of our immune system, and used to indicate our general immune functioning.  The higher your S-IgA levels, the stronger your immune system.

Anger, it turns out, has an immediate and negative effect on our own ability to fight disease and stay healthy.  Suddenly Michael Nowak’s mathematical findings start to make sense.  Punishment really does hurt us more than the person we punish, because our anger makes us vulnerable to disease and illness.  Forgiveness really is the way to win and those who don’t forgive can never win.

The HeartMath blog has plenty more to say about forgiveness, from the many ways it helps and heals your body, with everything from back pain to depression, and also how to find the capacity to forgive within ourselves, those things that help us let go of our grudges, our pain, and our bitterness, be that music, reflecting on our own faults and mistakes, remembering the feeling of being in love, or simply surrounding ourselves with beauty.

Whatever happened, whoever’s fault, it is time to forgive.  To move forward and evolve as a species, we need to take care of our hearts, we need to cooperate, and we need to forgive.  We cannot move from a fear-based, hate-based society into a society based on love without passing through that crucial arch, forgiveness.  And of all the virtues, the greatest of these is love.

Heaven and hell

We speak often of creating heaven on earth by December 21, 2012 on this website. Before we go any further, we should describe what heaven is.  For us, heaven is living in the love, light, vibration, and spirit in the moment.  Throughout this website, we speak of raising our consciousness to achieve this heavenly experience.  What does that mean? 

To help us understand the concept of raising our consciousness, let’s start with the simple concepts of self-conscious thoughts & ideas.

I’m not good enough.  I’m not skinny enough.  I’m not clever enough.  I’m not lovable.  They’re out to get me.  No one likes me.  They talk about me behind my back.  They hate me.  I hate them.

Do any of these ring a bell?  These are the obsessive thoughts that we cling to, that create the darkness in our lives.   These are the thoughts that create our living hell.   These are the self-inflicting thoughts that close off the pearly gates and our ability to experience heaven.

Original Sin

If we look at the story of Adam and Eve, it was a change in consciousness that changed the Garden of Eden from heaven to a living hell.   In Genesis, Adam and Eve ran around naked and experienced heaven until they ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and as a result became self-conscious of being naked.  Perhaps being self-conscious was our original sin; perhaps this story is a metaphor for the evolution of our species to being self-aware and, as a result, self-critical. Eating that apple is a metaphor for the moment humanity evolved to the point of self-actualization, creating a living hell where once only heaven existed.

Seven Deadly Sins

When we think of hell, we tend to think of “sin”.  The word “sin” is actually an archery term for “off the mark”.  “Sin” means our thinking is off the mark.   And if we look at the “seven deadly sins” of the Christian faith, they aren’t actually actions but are emotional prisms through which we choose to view the world and live our lives.   

Wrath – anger or rage

Greed – excessive thoughts of or desires for wealth

Sloth – laziness or indifference

Pride – a desire to be more important than others

Lust – excessive thoughts or desires of a sexual nature

Envy – desires for other’s belongings

Gluttony – excessive thoughts or desires for food.

If we choose to observe the world through angry, lustful, or prideful eyes, we won’t see the light of heaven.  If we choose to see the world through greed or envy, we won’t experience the love of heaven.  And if we choose a life laziness and gluttony, we won’t feel the spirit of heaven.  For this website, earth is already heaven – but to experience it, we, the human race, must evolve our emotional prism from fear-based emotions and “sin” to love-based emotions.     

Raising our consciousness

Ultimately, the only way to raise your consciousness and is first, love yourself (with compassion, not arrogance)  and second, love others.  The second becomes much easier once we’ve mastered the first. No matter what the perceived worldly human experience appears to be through your self-critical ego-mind, if you can quiet the-self conscious critics and see your experiences  through the prism of love, your reality will be love.  You’ll experience heaven on earth.  Although this website looks at spirituality through everything from neurology to quantum mechanics, raising consciousness and experiencing heaven is not rocket science.  It’s just learning how to turn your fear-based emotions into love.

Creating heaven on earth

Creating heaven on earth is our planetary goal.  Obviously, that’s more difficult  than a single person experiencing the light, love, and vibration of heaven at a single moment.   But if we can get enough individuals to experience heaven on earth through a prism of love, and share this experience through social networks, this will ripple out.  It ripples through simple cause and effect, through mirroring neurons, through changing our noosphere. And through enough rippling changes to love-based thoughts, the human race can reach critical mass and experience a quantum leap in evolution to experience heaven on earth as a species. 

We’re already been seeing the power of online social networks to change consciousness, with twitter campaigns and Facebook groups stirring up genuine political movement, changes in policies, and shared awareness.  We believe it can be used the same way to change our planetary consciousness toward spiritual evolution – by creating a belief that love on a planetary scale is possible, even inevitable.

Evolutionary Mapquest

The evolutionary mapquest of the human race might be as simple as going from an evolving body to an evolving mind to an evolving spirit.  From a one-cell amoeba, to survival of the fittest & king of the jungle, to the Age of Reason, to the Information Age, to the Age of Love, Light, and Spirit – our new age of enlightenment.    And we believe we can accomplish this, by December 21st, 2012.

The Noosphere

Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir

Creating the noosphere

We create the world we live in; we are part of the world that others have created for us. Throw your mind back a hundred years, to 1911, just before the Jazz Age, before the Great War (which had to be renamed the First World War when we had another), when the telephone was still new and penicillin had yet to be invented. Throw your mind back another thousand years, to 911, deep in “the darkest of the Dark Ages”, way before printing, before the Norman Conquest, before the vast Gothic Cathedrals flung their spires into the air, when the Byzantine empire peaked and Mayan civilization collapsed. 

The world of the mind is as much part of our world as the landscape and the living environment around us. It’s called the noosphere, to match the geosphere (the physical earth) and the biosphere (the plants and animals) – in Greek, nous means “mind” and sphaira “sphere”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term in 1922 in his book, Cosmogenesis, although he and Edouard le Roy may have first heard at a lecture by Vladimir Vernadsky. It’s the sphere of thought, of our collective human intelligence: our spiritual, cultural, social, and technological abilities and development.  We can see the evidence of it in everything around us, in the patterns we use to think, in the assumptions we make. But there’s also a suggestion that we might be able to measure it directly.

Measuring the noosphere

As the noosphere is collective human intelligence, the Global Consciousness Project has set about to measure the effects of our thoughts directly – not just the actions and creations they lead to.  This project hypothesizes that our thoughts themselves have direct effects.  To prove this, they start with random-number generators, nicknamed EGGs. If numbers are really random, then you can actually expect certain patterns. Think of dice. If you throw a dice 1000 times, you’d expect about a sixth of your throws to give a “six”. If six comes up much more often, you know the dice is loaded.  In the same way, we can test the random numbers from the EGGs – are they properly random? Most of the time, yes.

But the Global Consciousness Project’s theory is that massive changes in our thought patterns will directly affect the EGGs, so that they start producing non-random numbers. They have 66 of these EEGs (it stands for electrogaiagram) distributed across the world, feeding their data into a central server. The project has analyzed data from large-scale events such as Princess Diana’s death, the 9/11 attacks, New Year’s Eve celebrations, and the Indian Tsunami.  The results, they say, show that the numbers really do become less random when large numbers of people are focusing on one thing. The numbers even seem to show a change before the event – for instance, spiking during and before the 9/11 attacks. (That would suggest either that our hive-mind has some kind of prescience, or that those events have backwards causality, which should be impossible.)

The critics have a different interpretation.  Truly random numbers will always create spikes and troughs. We expect randomness to create something smooth and even – tell anyone to draw random dots on a page and they’ll space them quite evenly. Really random dots, though, would be clumped and scattered. For instance, only two of these sets of dots are actually random:

In the same way, genuinely random numbers will create spikes. What’s more, say independent scientists Edwin May and James Spottiswoode, the project looks very selectively at their chosen time windows.  Another critic, Jeffrey D Scargle, suggests their data analysis is off. (For data analysts: they check the p-value but not the Bayesian analysis.) And finally, it’s not clear what – if anything – the EGGs are responding to. Even if there are statistically important changes, what are we actually measuring? It might not be the noosphere at all.

Analyzing the noosphere

Another way to come to grips with the noosphere is to analyze it by looking at memes. A meme is a cultural "gene" – a belief, idea, symbol, or practice, that is passed down through society, much like our genes are passed down from our parents. A catch-phrase can be a meme; so can a religious rite. A group of memes is a memeplex. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and has proven very useful as a way of talking about how ideas take shape and life beyond the individual person.  It’s also given rise to memetics, supposedly the study of how memes reproduce, transfer, and evolve. The Journal of Memetics was short-lived, though, running from just 1997 to 2005, and the concept is fraught with problems. Useful as the idea of memes might be, memetics doesn’t seem the answer to understanding the noosphere.

Our understanding of how to analyze and measure collective knowledge and awareness is clearly still incomplete – in its infancy, some might say. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use that collective knowledge and awareness.

Joy of the Collective

The joy of the collective is incredibly powerful: something larger than you, which can achieve so much more than just you, of which you are a part. Even witnessing a collective project is thrilling – look at Eric Whitacre’s choir and the spine-tingling goose-pimpling effect of having all those individual people’s voices, each singing in their own home to his silent conducting, come together in one chorus. A collective project, creation, or movement, especially a spontaneous or unled one, lifts us above ourselves.

Creating Heaven on Earth

Thoughts are energy and energy can be measured.   The purpose of our website and corresponding blogs is to get the human race to believe that creating Heaven on Earth is possible and can be achieved by December 21^st, 2012.  If the human race can create compassionate, loving thoughts through collective Intelligence (such as the internet and social media), mirror these loving thoughts through our day-to-day activities (by activating mirror neurons or by simple cause & effect), create a vibrant collective behavior, and energize our Noosphere with loving and compassion thoughts – is this creating Heaven on Earth?   Will a vibrant Noosphere light up this planet and trigger the collective consciousness of the human race to take a quantum evolutionary leap in consciousness?  We believe the answer is “Yes”.

Reflective behavior

Karma

Cause & Effect

You reap what you sow

What goes around comes around

Be the change you want to see in the world

Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you

There’s a lot of good advice out there about how to live one’s life and to assure it will be happy, healthy and trouble-free.  The ideas above could be summarized as Newton’s third law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. But we could also say, for every action there’s a reaction and a co-action.   When we watch someone else’s actions, we observe them and react to them, but our brains also respond as if we’re doing the action ourselves. This is down to “mirror neurons”.

Mirroring Behavior

Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when we do something and when we watch someone else do something. If I smile, parts of my brain are activated. If I see you smile, some of the same parts are activated. If I read the word “smile”, those same parts aren’t activated – mirror neurons are responding to the action, not the concept. This effect can be exceptionally strong: if I see you doing something, I may even get a false memory of doing it myself!

Until recently, researchers have found these neurons in animals, including primates, but only guessed that they’re in people too.  Now, researchers believe they’ve found direct evidence of mirror neurons in humans.

Mirror neurons seem to be the key to huge swathes of human behavior.  They will “do for psychology what DNA did for biology” wrote V.S. Ramachandran, the acclaimed neuroscientist. They offer us insight into how we learn, empathy and compassion, theory of mind, imitation, and collective behavior, to name a few.

Collective Behavior

 Collective behavior is a social process or event which doesn’t go according to existing social structures (laws, conventions, institutions, and so forth) but which appear to happen spontaneously.  Christmas dinner, for instance, will have a set pattern in each house, part of a larger social pattern; the public response to Diana’s death in 1999, on the other hand, was spontaneous and even out of character for the British.

Traditionally, collective behavior in sociology includes the crowd, the public, the mass, and the social movements which creating behaviors like rumors, riots, trends, and fads – from broken windows at a demonstration to the popularity of a sneezing panda.  We see collective behavior every day of our lives, from the rumors that fly around the office to extreme change in fashion trends we experienced in our lifetime. (So yes, we can blame collective behavior for bell-bottom jeans in the 70s, women’s shoulder pad in the 80s, and the parachute pants of the 90s!)

Reflective Behavior

Let’s take this mirroring of actions and emotions a step further by looking at the advice listed at the top of the page.  Each piece of advice claims that whatever you put out will be mirrored back to you.  That if you behave badly, and exhibit negative emotion, it will be mirrored back to you and negative things will happen to you.  If you show evil intentions and exhibit hatred in your heart, eventually evil and hatred will be reflected back to you – what the Buddhists call “Karma”, what the Bible describes as “you reap what you sow”. It may be that mirror neurons explain neurologically how our behavior takes on a life beyond us, rippling outwards. This can be extremely negative, as with the bystander effect, but it can also be a powerful good. (By the way, new research shows that the bystander effect is not as bad as we thought – we are more likely to help each other than not.)

Good Behavior

The beauty of mirror neurons and collective behavior is they can also be used for good. When I see you smile, part of my brain experiences that smile as if it were my own. When I see your act of kindness to someone, part of me experiences that act of kindness too. One person intelligently breaking the bystander effect can galvanize an entire crowd.  And this also has implications for creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012.  Part of the strategy to create heaven on earth is to use collective intelligence (internet and social media) to create a collective conscious thought, “to love one another”, to people around the world.  When people begin to act on this conscious thought, mirror neurons kick in and create collective behavior. This, in turn, can create a critical mass, to create heaven on earth.

Every act of kindness you perform, every smile you give, every skill you use in front of someone else, takes on a life beyond your own, in other people’s minds. The enormous power that mirror neurons is the power to do good, for our actions to be larger than themselves.