I'd never heard of Jeffrey Schwartz until Ambivablog recommended him. I've since read his book, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, and I'm astounded. He's saying in print a radical idea I've long espoused, but been unable to get anyone to take seriously--that the mind can affect the brain.

Is that really radical? Common sense tells us that our minds make a difference. We decide to snap our fingers, and it happens. But for many scientists, saying that mind can affect matter smacks of parapsychology. They would say that our neural circuits caused us to snap our fingers, and our mind merely observed the decision.

At best, some who hold this view are willing to accept the mind as an epiphenomenon, a byproduct of the brain, or as William James put it, like a shadow which accompanies the body but has no influence over it. For some reason, the notion that matter affects mind doesn't seem as pseudoscientific as its opposite. An example of this orthodoxy can be found in Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift Of Consciousness, by brain scientist Gerald Edelman, a winner of the Nobel Prize.

Schwartz, a UCLA psychiatrist, who wrote the book along with Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley, argues that influence can go in the direction of mind to brain. His professional expertise is in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD). He has pioneered a therapy for OCD patients which teaches them to reframe their thoughts. Schwartz discusses the concept of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself as a result of thinking. He presents evidence of PET scans which demonstrate changes in brain function following cognitive behavior therapy, a form of talk therapy that does not involve drugs.

Schwartz does not provide iron-clad proof of the mind's ability to rewire the brain, but makes a good preliminary case. A hardcore materialist would argue that talk therapy itself is a purely material phenomenon, whereby the human voice produces sound waves which excite the auditory cortex of the listener, which arouses neural circuits throughout the brain. But this reductionist view doesn't adequately explain why conscious attention seems to help these changes occur, while subliminal suggestions seem to have much less power.

Schwartz also discusses the experiments of Benjamin Libet, who has shown that before people notice having decided to make a voluntary movement, preparation for the movement can be observed in the brain, though the actual movement occurs after the feeling of having decided. Some scientists, like Richard Restak, have used these results to argue that free will is an illusion, and that the feeling of having decided follows a decision made in the neurons. However, Libet himself believes that there is time in the sequence for the conscious mind to veto the otherwise automatic movement. Instead of free will, there is free won't. Our unconscious presents an agenda, and brings it to the attention of consciousness. The chief role of the mind is to inhibit wrong action.