The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7380 p754
17 December 2005

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Neuroscientists find common ground with traditions embracing contemplation more
A plant with a rich historical background more
Some maternal attachments may be highly insecure more

Neuroscientists find common ground with traditions embracing contemplation

When the Society for Neuroscience in the US recently invited the Dalai Lama to address its annual meeting in Washington there was considerable controversy. Nevertheless, when the event took place, controversy faded, according to a report in the 18 November issue of Science.

Talking to an audience estimated to number 14,000, the Buddhist leader presented the practice of meditation as an empirical way of investigating the mysteries of the human mind. Rather unexpectedly, he acknowledged that he preferred the scientific mode of enquiry over recourse to religious dogma. This approach disarmed the more than 500 scientific researchers who had earlier signed a petition expressing opposition to the Dalai Lama’s being allowed to address the assembly, on the ground that his ideas would blur the distinction between science and religion. There had also been a suspicion that there was a political aspect to the opposition and that the organisers of the petition were of Chinese ancestry and antagonistic to anything Tibetan.

The talk was the first in a series of planned dialogues between science and society in general. The Dalai Lama called for greater interaction between neuroscience and the traditions embodying contemplation. He urged his audience to work towards improving human happiness by discovering ways of reducing negative emotions and enhancing positive ones. In the event, the Dalai Lama raised some laughter and applause, which was clear evidence of good feelings throughout the audience.

Some scientists regard meditation as controversial because it is an integral part of many religions and different people may give it different definitions. However, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School reported physical brain structure differences between individuals who meditated and others who did not. Areas of the cortex associated with attention and sensory processing were thicker in subjects who had practised meditation for many years than in others, especially older subjects, in whom normal age-related thinning of brain tissue was reduced. Another psychologist considered that mental skills conferred by long spells of meditation may also explain visual perception. There was much food for thought.

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A plant with a rich historical background

The name silphium has been applied in antiquity, and in more recent times, to a number of different plants, both umbellifers and composites. In the September issue of Pharmaceutical Historian, however, Michael Peretz has discussed a silphium for which there is a rich historical background.

The silphium he describes was an umbelliferous plant, probably Ferula tingitana, that once grew prolifically and wild upon the dry mountainside facing the Mediterranean over an area of some 200 sq km south of Cyrene in Libya, anciently called Cyrenaica. According to Theophrastus its medicinal and culinary virtues were discovered by those colonising the area in about 600BC and it made them famous and sometimes wealthy into the bargain.

The settlement of Leptis Magna was an important Roman site but, before then, it was the source of a wild plant called silphium that was shipped in vast quantities to Greece and Rome between 600BC and the early years of the first century AD. Then it became extinct, because of either excessive cropping or climate change, possibly both.

At the time it became valuable, making Cyrene the richest city in North Africa before the development of Alexandria. Indeed, Pliny described silphium as “The most precious gift from nature to man”. Coins minted in Cyrene from 600 to 200BC bore engravings of its fruit or leaf or the whole plant.

Theophrastus described a thick root, a five-foot stem, a celery-like leaf and yellow flowers. He recorded that its collectors tapped the root carefully and used the pungent sap of stem, root and leaves as medicine. Indications included coughs, fluid retention, leprosy, warts and alopecia, but it was used particularly as an abortifacient, contraceptive and aphrodisiac. A tea was made from its leaves and a pessary from its juices.

In the kitchen, the Greeks valued its flavour and aroma when cooked with meat and it was considered excellent for the digestion. When it grew extinct in the wild, attempts to cultivate it in similar territory in Greece and Syria failed. Nero in the first century AD is said to have been the last user. It as apparently replaced by asafoetida, popular with Alexander the Great.

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Some maternal attachments may be highly insecure

Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Münchhausen (1729–97) has given his name to a curious syndrome attached to patients who make a habit of travelling from one hospital to another telling untruths about their sufferings and even undergoing unnecessary surgical operations when they are taken seriously.

The syndrome was first identified and named by Richard Asher in 1951. The Baron served in the Russian army against the Turks and on retirement related extraordinary tales of his adventures during military campaigns. These were collected by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737–94), who published them in English in 1785.

Complementary with this syndrome is another called Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, in which a person, usually a mother, fabricates a child’s illness, using it as an explanation for some form of abuse. A paper published in October in the British Journal of Psychiatry has commented upon this type of child abuse as poorly understood. There is evidence, however, that mothers implicated show defective concepts of care-giving relationships and that this arises from their own childhood experiences of neglect or abuse.

Women who suffer from the syndrome by proxy, it is explained, should not be regarded as truly mentally ill, but do suffer from psychological problems that call for treatment.

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