Reviews for Beyond the brain

The average rating for Beyond the brain based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-08-26 00:00:00 Mike Hanley 2016.08.21-2016.08.24 Grof S (1998) (09:00) Transpersonal Vision, The I'd often heard Grof's name in association with psychedelic 'science', so I listened to this lecture expecting at least some surprising data or statistics that would challenge my/our current worldview. But instead of that, Grof made me increasingly question his methods and rationality. He seems to believe in, among other things, astrology, astral projection (forming memories from a POV flying outside the body), and past life memories. Grof's main theory seems to rely on birth events and mythologies from the collective unconscious affecting (through some mechanism?) our later experiences of negativity, archetypal encounters, and healing. For these, I'd love to see good studies, because at times it felt that correlations are suggested wildly all over the place (as well as with the planets, thus astrology), but interpretation of causation is done Theory First, i.e., how you'd like to see the world work as opposed to what's the most likely explanation of your supposedly hard-to-explain data. Pardon me (and point out) if I'm wrong, but I don't recall the lecture containing any discussion of the problems of (confirmation) bias; correlation and causation; the troubles with anecdotes and testimonials; or that among the criticisms of Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research is that he sometimes interviewed non-English speaking children through translators who themselves believed in reincarnation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I don't think I've seen any yet.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-10 00:00:00 Cherri Sandler In this book, Stanislov Grof details his theory about the connections between a person's birth experiences (being born, not giving birth) and later issues in life, psychological, physical and spiritual. Grof breaks birth down into stages, or Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). He then details the experience of the infant in each of the stages, cycling through the blissful experience of floating in the womb, the increasing sense of being crowded and then panicked, feeling the contractions and having no way out, the physical pain of being out of the mother and into the world, and the first bewildering experiences of world outside the mother. Grof ties these experiences to later symptoms such as anxiety, addiction, chronic pain, asthma, etc. He describes a method of taking a person back through the birth experience, through breathwork, to resolve some of these issues. Some critics countered that breathwork is ineffective and noted that Grof's initial information came from research with LSD in psychotherapy, which is currently illegal in the United States. I have no idea what initially prompted me to pick up this book. It's a fairly hefty read, and this was years before I was in graduate school for counseling. And truthfully, reading Grof's work, I had no desire to practice the kind of experiential, birth-focused therapy he advocated. But this book was my introduction to the world of transpersonal psychology, and I still remember my incredible excitement, reading some of his ideas, thinking, that's it, this is what I want to do.