In this week’s British Medical Journal there is a report on the effectivenesss of swimming with dolphins on alleviating mild to moderate depression.

This is just the latest, but perhaps best executed of reports of the beneficial effects of interacting with animals. Humans need touch and connection. We are the only higher mammal that does not routinely engage in mutual grooming. And we miss it.

There is more and more research evidence of something that every pet owner knows: that animals can experience emotion. They seem well able to experience happiness and pleasure. Though science hasn’t proven it, they can almost certainly also feel sadness and unhappiness. I have a horse whose original human friend passed away. I was told that he was not well, and my first question was, "Has anyone told him what happened?" This may seem an odd thing to say. But when I met the horse, he showed all the signs of clinical depression. And yes, I did talk to him, and explain what had happened to his human companion. He nuzzled me as he grieved. And today he is the happiest horse you could ever hope to meet.

The Chalice and the Blade is the title of an extraordinarily fine book by Riane Eisler, in which she shows that beliefs about society, nature and the world about us were very different just a few years ago, and utterly different a few thousand years ago. We have all been raised in educational and social systems that stress an unhealthy "dominator" model of society, in which one person dominates another, or we dominate and control nature. It should not be this way, and Eisler stresses a "partnership model" in which all relationships should be expressions of partnership, containing respect, harmony and love.

One of the most helpful and yet neglected things that we can do for ourselves and for others is to explore our relationships with other living things. Do you have any relationships with animals? Are they dominator or partnership? Do you talk about owning an animal or of sharing your life with one? Do you make time to be with animals? Do you notice any differences in the animals after they have spent time with you? Do you notice any difference in yourself?

We have just mentioned the new study and there here has been a lot of work on using horses in therapy, and there is good evidence that they can bring a wonderful new dimension to treatment. Some therapists have introduced visualization exercises based on horse riding to help people cope with anxiety, and have found that not only did it help with anxiety, it also deepened peoples’ sense of connection with themselves and with nature. And don’t neglect other creatures: how would you characterize your relationships with insects? Do you have a dominator relationship with them? Do you squish something you don’t like?

Think about it.

(As an aside to this story, I was musing about researchers based in the notoriously cold and wet English Midlands having the wisdom and perspicacity to do their research in Honduras. I’ll have to remember that the next time that I’m writing a grant proposal…)

Addendum:  MSNBC has written a story "Into the Wild: A Scientific Approach" about the dolphin study published in the BMJ.

Technorati Tags: Pets Horses More blogs about Animal therapy.

I promised that I would be posting more on some of these important matters. If you’ve had the opportunity to look at the posting on empathy, and why it is likely more than just a neurological phenomenon, I would now like to pose two questions for you:

I am not going to try and answer my own questions, but instead make a couple of suggestions. I think that strong empathy, if attached to amorality would produce the perfect con man. Hervey Cleckley’s classic book, the Masks of Sanity, identified a small proportion of sociopaths (a.k.a. psychopaths) whom he described as "charismatic" and could be totally charming and apparently warm and caring. But only in as far as it suited them. These people tend to have a weird kind of empathy, in that they can use empathic skills, but do not attach them to any emotion.

The much larger group of sociopaths seem to have a lack of empathy, no conscience and an inability or unwillingness to learn from experience. There is clearly a genetic component to this type of behavior and personality, but as I pointed out in the earlier post, biology is not destiny. There are some interesting points made at: http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm

I would also like to make another suggestion, and that is that a good definition of human evil is a complete lack of empathy."

Technorati tags: Empathy Sociopath

Acupuncture has been in use for at least three thousand years and some evidence that our ancestors were first exploring this amazing form of healing seven thousand years ago. We now have several forms of acupuncture being practiced: Traditional Chinese, that operates on a system of yin and yang, of five elements, of Qi and channels along which it flows. It was this system that I studied in China almost fifteen years ago. There are many schools and styles of traditional acupuncture, and distinct forms of treatment have grown up in many parts of the Far East, including Japan, Korea and Vietnam. There is also something called “medical acupuncture,” that ignores the principles and precepts of traditional Chinese medicine, and instead focuses on stimulating tender spots and using simple “recipes” for treating people. This stimulation might be with needles, lasers of electricity. Both types of acupuncture have been subjected to a great deal of research.

It may be that medical acupuncture works simply by stimulating the release of endorphins, or modulating some other chemical transmitters in the brain and spine. But the situation with traditional acupuncture is more complex. Every competent practitioner has seen clinical responses that cannot be explained on that basis alone. I have personally treated people paralyzed by strokes, and have seen them recover far more than we would ever expect in Western medicine. Other odd things too, like the cartilage being restored in people with arthritis. The frustrating thing is that none of the treatments works every time. But when it does, it can be amazing.

Recent studies that have been published in major journals have extended the list of conditions that may improve with acupuncture to include:

• Fibromyalgia
• The side effects of HIV medicines
• Arthritis of the knee
• Overactive bladder in women
• Itching associated with dialysis

On the other hand, I was surprised to see a large study of people with migraine, who failed to obtain much benefit. More than 20 years ago I reported good results using acupuncture for migraine at a conference in London. An esteemed colleague from Chicago immediately disagreed, saying that he had tried acupuncture and it had not worked for him. I think the message here is that it is not just the therapy, but also who is doing it.

Technorati tags: acupuncture Energy medicine Qi

This week there is a timely article in Newsweek Magazine about Charles Darwin the man.

The article begins with these words:

"He had planned to enter the ministry, but his discoveries on a fateful voyage 170 years ago shook his faith and changed our conception of the origins of life."

That emphasizes a very important point: Darwin was lead to propose his theories based on observation. He was so troubled by the direction in which these observations were leading him, that it would be 25 years before he published his observations and theories.

Now we are seeing another round of attacks on the notions of evolutionary theory. Critics use the term "Darwinism," yet no scientist that I know ever would. Yes, he was ONE of the people who first came up with the theory, but the theories have been refined and tested for over one hundred years. The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, a passionate defender of evolutionary theory and an outspoken atheist, once said that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

While it is absolutely true that we can conceptualize a mechanism for the development of species, does it also mean that the theory necessarily exclude the existence of a Higher Power? No, of course not. Current scientific models have been developed to examine the physical world. When scientists have strayed into areas in which they have no special expertise, they can easily run into trouble. And they simply do not have models or methodologies for examining questions of purpose and meaning.

A complete model needs us to honor and respect all of the realms and domains of existence. Evolution OR intelligent design is a false dichotomy. Cannot the answer be evolution AND intelligence?

Technorati tag: More blogs about Charles Darwin.

Evolution

"The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy."
–Meryl Streep (American Emmy and Oscar-winning Actress, 1949-)

Most people think of empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, human or otherwise. Yet there is another piece to empathy, and that is the ability to communicate that understanding back to the other person. We use empathy in our day-to-day interactions with others; by showing others that we know how they feel. Empathy is a skill that helps us navigate our way through life: if we know how someone else feels, we can imagine how he or she might react and plan accordingly. Good therapists have to be good empaths, and so do good interviewers. One of Oprah’s extraordinary skills is her ability to empathize and establish rapport in a matter of seconds.

Yet we know learn that empathy is not a purely human attribute. Until 4-5 years ago, most scientists said that emotion and empathy were unique to humans, and were some of the ways in which we were differentiated from the other inhabitants of our world. Yet everyone who lives with a non-human creature knows that that is not so. Now scientific research has confirmed it. Some of it is summarized in a very nice new book by Frans de Waal, entitled Our Inner Ape. Professor de Waal is originally from Holland, but now directs the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. Many mammals have been shown to have higher levels of empathy such as being able to take on the perspective of other animals and show great caring and sharing. The Darwinian idea that competition is the key factor driving behavior is giving way to an understanding that cooperation is a key to the survival of groups.

In the last decade, there have been some stunning breakthroughs in neurology. We have learned that genes in the brain do not so much determine behavior, but they instead predict how an individual will respond to the environment. That is why we constantly say that "Biology is not destiny." Yet there is more. Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma in Italy have made an extraordinarily interesting discovery. They discovered that there are in the frontal cortex of the brain what they call "mirror neurons." If I gently touch one of your fingers, a group of neurons will light up in the sensory parts of your brain, and so will some association neurons in the frontal lobes. If you now watch me touch my own fingers in the same way, those areas in your frontal lobes will light up once again. Just watching the touching produces a mirror effect. If I taste peanut butter ice cream, part of my brain illuminates. When I watch you eat peanut butter ice cream, the same part of my brain illuminates again. The implication is that my brain is resonating with what someone else is feeling. This is a lot more than salivating because someone else is eating something that I enjoy. V.S. Ramachandran from the University of California, San Diego, quite rightly described this discovery as the single most important and unreported story of the last decade. "Rama" as everyone calls him, is the author of a marvelous book – A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Imposter Poodles to Purple Numbers - which I recommend highly.

So we have a probable neurological explanation for one of our key behaviors. But is that the end of it? Far from it. Empathy can almost certainly be learned and amplified. Ten years ago a Canadian Educator named Mary Gordon founded a project called Roots of Empathy, which has been shown to increase the ability in children, and many medical schools are trying to teach medical students to be more empathic.

But there are dimensions of empathy which stretch beyond the neurological. Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath in California have reported that brain rhythms synchronize to the rhythmic activity of the heart, and when people are feeling love or appreciation, their blood pressure and respiratory rhythms become entrained with that of the heart. Sustained positive emotions produce a state of coherence throughout the body. But this is where it becomes even more interesting. The electromagnetic field of the heart can transmit information between people, up to a range of about five feet, and one person’s brain waves can synchronize to the heart of another.

There is also increasing research indicating that empathy can be a non-local phenomenon, enabling people to pick up thoughts and feelings over great distances.

I am going to post some more material about this fascinating field over the next few weeks

Technorati tags: empathy