Natalya Bekhtereva: the body does not live without the soul. The human brain - Bekhtereva N.P. Bekhtereva about the soul

Natalya Bekhtereva: "It's not death that's terrible, but dying ... I'm not afraid"

She believed that the human brain is a living being in our body, and knew more about the labyrinths of thought than anyone else.

This year, the granddaughter of the world-famous physiologist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist Vladimir Bekhterev, a world-famous neurophysiologist, head of the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Natalya Bekhtereva would have turned 91 years old. She died on June 25, 2008 in a hospital in Germany at the age of 94.
Reference

N. P. Bekhtereva has been brainstorming for more than half a century. She was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in the field of science. She was awarded the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, "For Services to the Fatherland", III degree, etc. Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, honorary member of dozens of international scientific societies, author and co-author of over 370 scientific papers. For the first time in the Soviet Union, she applied the method of long-term implantation of electrodes into the human brain.

Here are some of her thoughts:
Illumination - the pearl of the soul

Neurophysiologist Natalya Bekhtereva in the laboratory of the Department of Neurophysiology of the Institute of Experimental Medicine. 1966

I often think of the brain as if it were a separate organism, like a "being within a being." The brain guards itself so that a flurry of negative emotions does not capture it entirely. When I realized this, I felt like I had found a pearl.

Is there a soul? If so, then what is it?.. Something that permeates the entire body, which is not hindered by walls, doors, or ceilings. The soul, for lack of better formulations, is also called, for example, what seems to leave the body when a person dies ... Where is the place of the soul - in the brain, in the spinal cord, in the heart, in the stomach? You can say - "in the whole body" or "outside the body, somewhere nearby." I think this substance needs no space. If it is, then in the whole body.
Is there life after death?

I know one thing: clinical death is not a failure, not a temporary non-existence. The person is alive at this moment. It seems to me that the brain dies not when oxygen does not enter the vessels for six minutes, but at the moment when it finally begins to flow. All the products of a not very perfect metabolism “pile up” on the brain and finish it off ... Why do we sometimes see the surroundings as if from the outside? It is possible that at extreme moments in the brain, not only the usual mechanisms of vision are activated, but also the mechanisms of a holographic nature. For example, during childbirth: according to our research, several percent of women in childbirth also have a state, as if the “soul” comes out. Women giving birth feel out of the body, watching what is happening from the side. And at this time they do not feel pain.

Another secret of the brain is dreams. The biggest mystery to me seems to be the very fact that we sleep. Could the brain arrange itself so as not to sleep? I think yes. For example, in dolphins, the left and right hemispheres sleep in turn ... How can one explain "dreams with continuation" and similar oddities? Let's say that this is not the first time you have dreamed of some very good, but unfamiliar place - for example, a city. Most likely, the "fabulous cities" of dreams are formed in the brain under the influence of books, movies, and become, as it were, a permanent place of dreams. We are drawn to something that has not yet been tested, but very good ... Or are prophetic dreams - is it receiving information from the outside, foreseeing the future or random coincidences? mother.

Almost all people are afraid of death. They say that the fear of waiting for death is many times worse than death itself. Jack London has a story about a man who wanted to steal a dog sled. The dogs bit him. The man bled to death and died. And before that he said: "People slandered death." It is not death that is terrible, but dying ... I am not afraid.

Natalya Petrovna was a person of amazing destiny. The granddaughter of the great scientist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev should have had lifelong immunity against any adversity. And Natalya Petrovna got repressed parents, an orphanage and the blockade of Leningrad, a family tragedy, a struggle with fierce criticism. Like a stubborn sprout, she pierced the asphalt into which they wanted to roll her up. She spoke about this in numerous interviews and in her book “The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life”, one of the chapters of which she called Per aspera, which means “through thorns”.

“There is NO DEATH, LORD, IT CAN BE PROVED!”

She was born in the year of Lenin's death. Three years later, her famous grandfather, a psychologist and specialist in several more human disciplines, Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, passed away. According to his son and granddaughter, Vladimir Mikhailovich was killed.

At one time, there was a widespread version that linked the murder of Bekhterev with the name of Stalin. Allegedly, Bekhterev, as a successful student of Charcot himself and the director of the Institute for the Study of the Brain and Mental Activity, was invited to examine Iosif Vissarionovich for dry hand. Leaving the leader, Bekhterev seemed to tell someone that he was sick with paranoia. The academician's days were numbered.

However, Natalya Petrovna at first supported this version, and later rejected it. She explained: grandfather was a prominent scientist and doctor who sacredly honored the laws of professional ethics and could not divulge the secret of the patient.

The best idea about Vladimir Bekhterev is given by his portrait by Ilya Repin. A white tunic, almost crackling on a wide chest, a thick spade of a beard, gray-haired, but still powerful hair with a side parting, sharp deep-set eyes, an obvious power of character and destiny.

Igor Guberman, who once lived in the USSR, who wrote not only “gariki” on the table, but also published a book about Vladimir Bekhterev, spoke in it about the hero’s father and childhood: “The bailiff Bekhterev died of an evil consumption when his youngest son Vladimir was only eight years. He didn't even remember his father. Only this petty village policeman, the king and god in his district, was obviously not quite ordinary. An exiled Pole, a participant in the uprising of the 63rd year, continuously stayed in his house, feeding himself and avoiding longing. It was he who taught literacy and arithmetic to the six-year-old son of his strange guardian and benefactor.

Remarkable strength was required to grow from the sons of a bailiff into academicians. Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev passed away at the age of 70, but even then he was full of energy, did not complain about his health, and shortly before that he married a second marriage to a young woman, at least in relation to the groom. That's when suspicion fell on her.

They met 30-year-old Berta when her husband was being treated by Bekhterev. The patient died, and when Bekhterev was also widowed, he proposed to Bertha. This happened 10 years after they met. Probably, Berta, like many others, was fascinated by the halo of an extraordinary thinker, a pioneer in the most intriguing field of knowledge dealing with the human brain and psyche.

A psychologist, psychiatrist, neuropathologist (this term was invented and introduced into medical use by Bekhterev, there is also a disease named after him, Nikolai Ostrovsky was ill with it, for example), Vladimir Mikhailovich mastered the art of hypnosis. He set up experiments on the transmission of thoughts at a distance together with the animal trainer Durov.

Small digression. Professor Leontovich also took part in the sessions, who then returned from Moscow to his native Kyiv, where he became an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The views of Bekhterev and Leontovich had a great influence on Bernard Kazhinsky, who became the prototype of one of the heroes of the science fiction book by Alexander Belyaev "The Lord of the World". Bekhterev's ideas are mentioned twice there. Kazhinsky's work "Biological Radio Communication", dedicated to Leontovich, was published only once in Kiev.

Natalia's grandfather Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev is an outstanding psychiatrist, neuropathologist, physiologist, founder of reflexology and pathopsychological direction in Russia, founder of the St.
Institute (1907)

And Bekhterev in one of his scientific works - "The Secret of Immortality" concluded: thought is material and is a kind of universal energy, therefore, in accordance with the law of conservation of energy, it cannot disappear. This sounded at the height of the First World War, when a human life was not worth a pinch of tobacco and people no longer understood what they were dying for if everything was decided by a stupid bullet. Bekhterev proclaimed: "There is no death, gentlemen, it can be proved!" He returned faith in the meaningfulness of life and, therefore, responsibility for actions.

It was Bekhterev who introduced the concept of a psychic microbe capable of leading to psychic pandemics. “It is enough for someone to arouse base instincts in the crowd, and the crowd, united due to lofty goals, becomes in the full sense of the beast, the cruelty of which can surpass all probability.”
Western intelligence agencies were very interested in the work and personality of Bekhterev. In Berlin and Paris, the intelligence departments brought registration cards to him. In the USSR, as some researchers believe, they tried to involve Bekhterev in the creation of weapons, which in our time would be called psychotropic. He refused.

On the day of her grandfather's death, little Natasha encountered a strange coincidence for the first time. On December 24, 1927, her parents were decorating the Christmas tree. Father put Father Frost and three candles under the branchy branch. Admiring the composition, he said to his wife: "Look how Santa Claus looks like his father." At that moment the phone rang: Vladimir Mikhailovich suddenly died.

The official cause of death was food poisoning. There is a photograph in which the head of Bekhterev lying in a coffin is tied with a white scarf. She hid the consequences of a trepanation of the skull. Shortly before his death, the scientist himself came up with the idea to create a Pantheon of the brain of great people. “And fate decreed with its characteristic irony,” wrote Igor Huberman: the brain of its creator was the first to be in the museum.

Many years later, Natalya Petrovna asked where her grandfather's brain was kept. She was told that they had cut him all over for drugs a long time ago, but they did not find anything special that distinguishes the brain of an outstanding scientist from ordinary people.

“DAD IS DIFFICULT TO STAND ON FEET, HE FALLS - AND I WAKE UP WITH A SCREAM”

In total, Natalya Petrovna had four prophetic dreams in her life. The first - in the 37th, about the father.

Pyotr Vladimirovich Bekhterev, the son of Vladimir Mikhailovich, inherited his father's inquisitive mind, but he chose an engineering profession and was engaged in the development of military equipment. He was often rewarded, and it seemed that an eternal holiday reigned in the house.

Suddenly - a terrible dream: “Dad is standing at the end of the corridor, for some reason very poorly dressed, in something old, summer, as if in canvas shoes. And dad even at home dressed well, although differently than at work. And suddenly the floor begins to rise, exactly from the end where dad stood .... And under the floor - fire, and flames - on the sides of the corridor. It is difficult for dad to stand on his feet, he falls - and I wake up screaming.

The next night, Natasha woke up from the noise: they came for dad. He never returned home. The family was told - 10 years without correspondence. They didn't know what it really meant yet.

Soon they took my mother to the camp. They said for five years, it turned out eight. Much later, Natalya Petrovna was shown a list for arrest, her name was next to her mother's. But she was only 14 years old, and the children's colony was replaced by an orphanage.

Even relatives turned away from Natasha, her brother and sister, the children of “enemies of the people”. Much later, Natalya Petrovna will appreciate their betrayal as a boon. At least she didn't know what it's like to be a homemaker. And the mental anguish from the misfortune that had befallen would be the same in a family of callous people, as in an orphanage, where newly arrived children cried before going to bed, covering themselves with blankets with their heads - it was not allowed to cry out loud. “And every night I fell asleep with the thought that cheerful dad and mom would come tomorrow, take my brother and me home, and everything would be fine again. And my kind, talented and innocent dad has already been shot.”

In the orphanage, two roads opened in front of Natalya. One - after seven years to go to work at a brick factory, there they "corrected the consciousness" of the children of "enemies of the people." The second - by all means to be an excellent student, the best of the best. Natasha did not want to go to the brick factory.

In the orphanage, she learned that the war had begun. Its inhabitants were loaded into wagons, but it was not possible to evacuate, Leningrad had already fallen into the iron ring. The train circled and circled around the city, miraculously managing to escape from the bombing, and returned to where it left.

In the orphanage, they somehow fed, so it was better there than in the wild, where hunger and cold mowed down entire families. However, the orphans also suffered. The former, beloved, director went to war and died, and another was put in his place, who turned out to be a sadist. Before each meal, the new director of the orphanage lined up the children on a ruler and demanded that the food be thoroughly chewed until it turned into a frozen lump. Natalya Petrovna admitted that even 10 years after the end of the war she could not eat her fill, she was tormented by phantom hunger.

“BEKHTEREVA WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO SEE THE BRAIN ON THE SCREEN AND WAS AWESOME”

Despite all the horror of the blockade existence, she managed to enter the medical institute. I remembered not so much the frost of that winter as the icy wind. Every time, approaching the bridge, where there was no escape from the wind, I wanted to turn back, get under the covers and never leave the house again. But she reached the middle of the bridge, and there it became all the same - to go forward as much as back, so she went forward.

The end of the war and the flowering of bright hopes for cloudless happiness coincided for Natalya with great love. But the man who inspired this feeling in her, as acquaintances said, still loved the other, who died at the beginning of the war. Natasha began to be burdened by relationships with her beloved. After all, it turned out that he kept her with him as a replacement. She wanted to leave, he didn't let go.

Once in a dream, Natalya went to the house where they grieved for his former lover. It turned out that the culprit of grief was sitting at the table as if nothing had happened and drinking tea. “I am happy to turn to her: “Hello, Tatiana (for some reason I call her that), sorry, I don’t know your patronymic.” Answer: Alekseevna. Saying goodbye, does not get up. Again (this is all in a dream) I go to bed. Then (already awake) I wake up, I run to tell the news that Tasya is alive - I don’t doubt it for a minute - and I find Tasya in exactly the same position, in the same white dress, as in a dream. “Hello, Tatyana (why Tatyana again?), - sorry, I don’t know your patronymic.” - Alekseevna. We shake hands. T.A. does not get up. And then I find out that she is nine months pregnant. I run away very happy.” After the foreshadowing of the Pope, it was the second prophetic dream of Natalya Petrovna, one in one realized in reality.

She gnawed the granite of science easily, like nuts, and entered graduate school without much difficulty. Then there was a "thaw". She brought the rehabilitation of mom and dad and the bitter knowledge that all the years she dreamed of meeting him, he, shot shortly after his arrest, lay in the damp earth.
She greedily pounced on the work, progress began in many directions. But the “freezes” brought disappointment and anonymity. The party commission of the regional committee was engaged in it. Natalya Petrovna did not tell about the essence of the accusations - why replicate slander? And then in the regional committee she was indignant, because even Tsar Peter ordered that anonymous letters not be allowed to go through. In response, they promised to turn Bekhterev into camp dust. They knew which string would resonate with particular pain in it. Fortunately, no matter how hard the biased commission tried, they did not find facts confirming the anonymous accusations. Exhausted, Natalya returned to work, the scar in her soul remained for life.

Natalya Petrovna's parents - Zinaida Vasilievna (doctor) and Pyotr Vladimirovich (engineer-inventor) - were repressed: their father was shot, their mother was sent to a camp

At the time of Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, scientists were only approaching the secrets of the brain. Previously, it was thought of as a monolith, not amenable to study. Or as about a "divine vessel", encroaching on the study of which is sacrilege. The feat of scientists of the Bekhterev generation was that they removed this taboo.

At the time of Bekhterev's granddaughter, science was equipped with tomographs and other miracle devices - it is clear that this required a different level of knowledge and skills. Natalya Petrovna was one of the first to see the brain on the screen and admired it. “I admit that some younger employees from neurophysiological laboratories and the PET laboratory (positron emission tomography. - Auth.) go to the institute as a regular service ... It's a pity if this is so ... Surprise at the miracle of nature - the human brain , gradually learned through ever-evolving technology, and the ideas illuminating the brain of a scientist are a great, stimulating joy in life.

Once Raisa Gorbacheva dropped in at a scientific conference. A philosopher by education, she listened with great interest to Bekhtereva's report, then sat down with her in the hall, they talked for a long time, as a result, the Institute of the Brain of the USSR Academy of Sciences appeared in Leningrad with a clinic attached to it, which brought healing to many. Ankylosing spondylitis learned to help people in those cases that were considered hopeless before them, restored memory, the ability to move, speak, read. Natalya Petrovna, who became the director of the institute, will write that what she once dreamed of came true - about the Castle of her Dreams.

She and her staff managed to break through to many secrets. She wrote more than four hundred scientific papers, received recognition from colleagues from around the world, became an order bearer and a member of many foreign academies. At the same time, she was an atypical scientist, and, for example, the hypothesis that the super-complex mechanism of intelligence has an alien origin was closer to her than the accepted statement about its earthly evolution.

"THE TRUTH OF THE BRAIN AND THE LIFE OF SOCIETY, APPEARS TO BE UNITED"

The more Bekhtereva studied the brain, the more confidently she came to the conclusion: “The truth of the brain and the life of society, apparently, is one.” A well-functioning brain is like a well-ordered society. Particularly relevant is her assertion that for a harmonious existence, society and the brain must distribute part of the powers to the periphery according to the principle of optimal decentralization.

Natalya Bekhtereva became very popular during the perestroika years. The daughter of the repressed, who herself almost ended up in the Gulag, she wholeheartedly wanted changes for the better, she knew how to speak convincingly and without regard to critics. When they attacked her: “Do not stick your nose into state affairs,” she answered: “Who knows exactly what and how to do it? At least I have a model - a brain.

Many people remember their own prophetic dreams, which at first they did not attach importance to, and then they were surprised that they came true. But there is a persistent opinion that all this is fiction, superstition. In order not to get hung up on the incomprehensible, the people came up with the excuse "sleep - and dream." The current view of the mystery of dreams is simple: during sleep, the brain continues to process information received during the day. Dot. Many do not dream at all, there are such lucky ones. Academician Bekhtereva had prophetic dreams.

Once it was a dream about my mother, whom Natalya Petrovna sent with a reliable escort to the Krasnodar Territory to rest, breathe clean air, and eat fruit. Letters came from there, from which the daughter learned that her mother's health was satisfactory.

Suddenly, in a dream, the postman brought a telegram: “Your mother is dead. Come to bury." In a dream, the daughter rushed to the funeral, arrived, was surrounded by strangers, whom for some reason she called by name. Everything looked shockingly real. I woke up in tears and told the dream to my husband. He was skeptical: "Do you, a specialist in the field of the brain, believe in dreams?" Anxiety did not let her go, she wanted to run away on a plane, but her acquaintances, whom she told about the dream, persuaded her not to believe. She was ashamed of her "unscientific" nature and did not go.

“Well, after 10 days everything happened exactly as it was in my dream. And down to the smallest detail. For example, I forgot the word “village council” a long time ago, it was simply never needed. In a dream, I was looking for the village council, and in reality I had to look for it - that's the story.

Bekhtereva did not dismiss the opportunity to look into the "mirror", as she called the strange, inexplicable phenomena associated, in her opinion, with the activity of the brain. Having visited Bulgaria with scientific lectures, she wished to meet Vanga. At the Sofia Documentary Film Studio, she was shown a film about the famous soothsayer, so Natalya Petrovna was prepared for the meeting.

The car stopped before reaching the line stretching to Vanga's house. Natalya Petrovna, surrounded by colleagues, walked along the soft dust of a country road. They were neither heard nor seen from the house. We got to the end of the line. A cry came from the house: “I know that you have arrived, Natalya, come to the fence, do not hide behind a man!” Natalya Petrovna was not surprised: Vanga must have been informed of her arrival.

Natalya was the daughter of "enemies of the people", grew up in an orphanage, survived the besieged Leningrad, graduated from the 1st Pavlov Leningrad Medical Institute

The meeting began with embarrassment: Bekhtereva did not bring a piece of sugar with her, which, as Vanga demanded from all visitors, had to be kept with her for a day.
Vanga was unhappy. But either sugar is still not such an obligatory receptacle of information, or the clairvoyant had other ways of unraveling the Russian that was sitting in front of her, but Bekhtereva was forgiven.

She handed Vanga a luxurious Pavlovsky Posad scarf in a plastic bag, she took it out, stroked it and said disappointedly: “But you didn’t touch him at all ...”. That is, the hope for this source of information was not justified either. Suddenly she said: “Now your mother has come. She is here. Wants to tell you something. And you can ask her.

Natalya Petrovna got ready to hear some reproach. From the film she had seen in Sofia, she knew that the dead usually blame living relatives for something. "No. She is not angry with you, - Vanga said. "It's all a disease," she says, "it's all a disease." And then Natalya Petrovna died. Mom really often uttered this particular phrase: "It's all a disease, it's all a disease." No one could tell this to Vanga, except ... Then Vanga made a gesture with trembling hands, showing what her mother was sick with. Yes, Natalya Petrovna agreed, she suffered from parkinsonism.

Vanga continued: mother asks her daughter to go to Siberia. Natalya was surprised: to Siberia? What is there to do? She has no friends or relatives in Siberia.
It seems that Vanga did not shock Bekhtereva, like many other visitors, with clairvoyance, but she definitely interested her. When Natalya Petrovna returned to Leningrad, an invitation to Siberia was waiting on the table. They asked me to come to the readings dedicated to Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev.

“NATALIA PETROVNA HOPED THIS IS ANOTHER ALIK’S HORROR STORY - HE HAVE TALKED ABOUT SUICIDE BEFORE, BUT EVERYTHING WAS CORRECTED”

And in that meeting, Vanga said to Natalya Petrovna: “Something I see your husband very badly, as if in a fog. Where is he?". - "In Leningrad". - "In Leningrad ... yes ... it's bad, I see him badly." Perhaps it should have been understood as "I see something bad."

The second marriage of Natalya Petrovna with Ivan Ilyich Kashtelyan was not easy. “Being late home is a small tragedy, being late is a disaster. I perceived this as a huge inconvenience, further - as oppression, then - as a complexity of a high order. She complained that the warmth that she received for the first time in her life did not compensate for the infringement of freedom. It got to the point that she developed hypertension, and along with taking the pills - drowsiness, which increased the feeling of discomfort. She closed herself, spent more time at the desk.

And then there was harassment in the newspapers, a frequent occurrence in the late 80s, when the country was divided by ideological barricades. The most annoying thing is that the authors of many articles were former friends.

The husband insisted that Natalya Petrovna give battle. I had to take on this backbreaking work, which led to mental and moral exhaustion. “Sleep began to literally dump me as soon as I entered the house. And it seemed: a little more - and I would fall asleep and not wake up ... My husband, on the contrary, felt good, kept telling me: "Give up your useless business, and you will rest, you will be like me." This is in the evenings. And in the morning he was again a warm friend - and his support was enough for several hours of work and a very unusual and very offensive defense.

But all these experiences turned out to be a prelude to what happened next. Alik, the son of Ivan Ilyich from his first marriage, “was infinitely beloved and very difficult. Handsome, capable doctor, married, had a son. Drugs..."

That day, he called to say goodbye, saying that he would take potassium cyanide. Father's strength left, Natalya Petrovna went to Alik's apartment, accompanied by her employee Raisa Vasilievna.

Natalya Petrovna hoped that Alik was once again frightening, he had spoken of suicide before, but everything worked out. She knocked for a long time, called someone to bring the keys, and later scolded herself: she should have immediately broken the door. Finally, entering the apartment, she found Alik in a noose. Ivan Ilyich called, she, shocked, said it like it was.

When Natalya Petrovna and her friend returned home, seemingly calm Ivan Ilyich brought a sliced watermelon from the kitchen and put it on the table. “It seems to me that he only gradually became aware emotionally of what he already knew. Half an hour or an hour later - it's hard for me to say how much time has passed - the husband almost calmly said that he would go to bed. I lay down - and after four or five hours we urgently called the doctors, but the doctors could not help. Looking back, I understand that I could have saved him only by putting him in intensive care immediately upon arrival from Alik. However, nothing foretold a terrible ending.

She was tormented by the fact that she had not helped either Alik or her husband, who had hoped so much for her. “Right on the melting snow stands a strangely dressed man and - eye to eye - looks at me. I know him too well, but it just can't be. Never".

After the double funeral, things began to happen around her that she herself would never believe in, believing that she had become a victim of mirages of a sick imagination. But there was a witness nearby - Raisa Vasilievna.

Both of them distinctly heard footsteps in the room when no one else was there. Another time, Natalya Petrovna, washing herself in the bathroom, again heard someone coming towards her, got frightened, called Raisa, she did not answer, but the steps began to move away. “When I came out six or eight minutes later, R.V. said to me: “Why did you just go out? Why didn't they answer me?" And she added that she was sitting with her back to the “steps”, and she experienced a strange feeling: it was difficult for her to turn to “me”. She tried to speak to "me", but "I" did not answer. This story made a very strong impression on both of us, the impression of someone's presence.

A large portrait of her husband hung in the bedroom. Natalya Petrovna talked to him for a long time, as if he were alive. Once he and Raisa Vasilievna entered the bedroom and froze: a large tear flowed from Ivan Ilyich's right eye. Not believing themselves, they turned on the light. The tear continued to roll.

Natalya Petrovna tried to critically comprehend what she saw: “I conditionally enter this “strange” phenomenon in the “mirror”. I had a fear of late arrival, although, unfortunately, there was no one to be afraid of. And in this situation, I could take some feature of the portrait for a tear ... Yes, but why did it seem to me that the tear was moving? Because tears usually move? Here - I do not exclude. And why, after all, R. V. also said about tears? Now this is more difficult for a simple explanation. And yet the rule: where you can at least assume a conventional mechanism, not “behind the looking glass”, - accept it. And in this case, it is likely.

I should have calmed down, but I couldn't. Soon, accidentally looking out the window, she saw: “Coming down from the curb, right on the melting snow, stands a strangely dressed man and, eye to eye, looks at me. I know him too well, but it just can't be. Never".

She called Raisa Vasilievna into the room, but did not say why. She suddenly looked out the window: “Yes, this is Ivan Ilyich standing there! .. Didn’t you recognize him ?!” Natalya Petrovna, of course, found out.

With a son from his first marriage. Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich Medvedev -
Director of the Institute of the Human Brain, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

She was never a primitive materialist in the spirit of "Marxist-Leninist teachings." But where she could, she resisted her “through the looking-glass”, attributed visions-hearings to hallucinations against the background of an altered state of consciousness due to the tragedy that had piled on. But how then to be with the same "hallucinations" at Raisa Vasilievna? Natalya Petrovna admitted that her emotional state caused a similar reaction in her (recall Bekhterev's "mental microbe"). And yet she asserted: “And now, after many years, I can’t say: it didn’t happen. Was".

In the same mournful days, she dreamed that she met her husband under the windows of their house. Nearby on a bench lay a pile of sheets written on a typewriter. We talked for a long time about different things. Then: “I ask: “But how did you come? Are you dead?" - "Yes, he died, it was very necessary - they let him go." - "What about where you are?" - I ask. "Nothing". "But you can't come from nothing." “You'll find out later. You never had time for me, you didn't need me." - "How? I love you so." He: “But I’m not talking about that, I didn’t have time, I managed on my own, I didn’t ask. Now, do you understand everything?”

She woke up in horror and realized that she had missed something most important, that for which he came, for which he was released. The next day, before going to bed, she prayed: “Come and explain.” He came: “An empty three-room apartment. A smiling I.I. walks along it. In his hands he has sheets of typewritten text. He hugs me tenderly: “Well, don’t you understand? You know, the manuscript did not have time to publish, you did not read it, you did not have time for me. Do your best!"

Bekhtereva simply did not know about the existence of this manuscript. Probably pride, which she did not have the strength to calm down, did not allow him to attract the attention of his wife to his great work.

Natalya Petrovna rummaged through Ivan Ilyich's papers and found a pile of typewritten sheets. I gave it to the publisher, they printed it. She was pleased: "The book came out good." The fourth prophetic dream came true.

“I KNOW HOW DANGEROUS TO MOVE INTO THIS “LOOKING LOOK”

"Strange" phenomena further undermined her health. Under the pretext of sleep disorders, she asked for a privileged hospital, she had the right to do so as a People's Deputy of the USSR. The daily routine, water procedures benefited her. “They treated a suffering woman,” she ironically.

But the longing did not let go, and Natalya Petrovna went to church. After a 15-minute conversation with the priest, the depression stopped. And every time she overtook her again, the priest took her off. “Truth is truth, and why should I, who have been looking for (and not always finding) the truth of nature all my life, lie when it comes to myself (and, in general, also nature)? What I write here is unlikely to glorify me, but I would be in conflict with my sense of duty and conscience if I did not tell this truth.

Natalya Petrovna already understood how risky it was to be interested in "through the looking glass". But I decided to meet in the USA with the clairvoyant Andersen. Vladimir Pozner undertook to organize their meeting, who had already interviewed Andersen and learned a lot of things that he had no idea about, but which later found confirmation.

Natalya Petrovna really wanted to find out if this Andersen was a charlatan, and if not, then whether he was somehow connected with the “mirror”. But her confessor advised against it, fearing that after the shocks she had endured, she would not be able to withstand this meeting.

A little over 10 years ago, a new wave of criticism rolled in. The head of the fight against pseudoscience of the Russian Academy of Sciences, physicist Eduard Kruglyakov, called Bekhterev among the authoritative people who do not reject what official science does not approve of. It was said about the Ministry of Defense (works with sorcerers), the Ministry of Emergency Situations and personally Shoigu (uses the services of astrologers), Bekhtereva was accused of interest in the phenomenon of alternative vision.

Natalya Petrovna answered immediately: “The academic physicist considers it possible for himself to criticize a physiological article without appeal. Note: it was published not just anywhere, but in the reviewed respected journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Human Physiology” - an article that went through all the procedures required in such cases ... Several years ago, people who claimed the ability to see blindfolded applied to the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences. .. Of course, the simplest answer would be that we are dealing with high scientific problems and we are not interested in amateurs. However, many years of experience in studying the human brain taught us to respect its capabilities ... We invited the guys and asked them to complete the tasks we developed ... Result: 100 percent correct answers! Thus, we have established that the phenomenon exists, and although much remains unclear, it is interesting to do and it should be investigated.

Academician Bekhtereva understood that, despite the significant successes of her beloved science, it was not possible to offer not only a theory, but even a plausible hypothesis of how the brain works. For example, it has been found that it processes the received information at a gigantic speed, and the existing technique fixes too slow interaction of neurons. So, she thought, the brain had properties that had not yet been discovered.

Summing up her observations of herself, of her dreams and visions, she wrote: “I know how dangerous it is to move into this “mirror”. I know how to calmly remain on the wide road of science, how the “citation index” rises in this case, and how the danger of trouble decreases - in the form of devastating, annihilating criticism ... But it seems to me that everyone on earth, to the best of his ability, should do your duty." And now, when it comes to Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva, you can hear: yes, an outstanding scientist, no doubt, but why did she get carried away into mysticism?

But the fact is that when ordinary people talk about "strange" phenomena and predictions, they can be believed or not believed. More often they are not believed, sometimes they are correct: charlatans love to frolic in the field of the little-known. But Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva's "mirror-like" experience is hard to ignore - her honesty, human and scientific authority are undeniable.

And it has always been so. There was always someone with open eyes, for whom there were no dogmas prescribed once and for all, and who exclaimed: “But it still spins!”. And it turned out that she really spins ...

Academician who devoted her life to studying the human brain dies at the age of 84 [interview]

Change text size: A A

Yesterday, June 22, at the St. George's Hospital in Hamburg, at the age of 83, the famous neurophysiologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, laureate of the USSR State Prize, member of many foreign academies Natalya Bekhtereva died.

For almost two decades, Natalya Petrovna was the scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The famous researcher studied how the brain of a healthy and sick person works. Natalia Bekhtereva is the author of about 400 scientific papers, she owns discoveries in the field of mechanisms of thinking, memory, emotions and the organization of the human brain.

So, for example, Bekhtereva discovered that it is the neurons of the subcortical formations of the brain that “understand” speech, that the pathological state of the brain is the main cause of many chronic diseases of the nervous system. Academician Bekhtereva was one of the first to use the method of long-term implantation of electrodes in the human brain. Under her leadership, the central task of neurosurgery was finally solved - sparing contact with brain structures.

Fate. Natalya Bekhtereva was born in Leningrad on July 7, 1924 in an intelligent family. She was the granddaughter of the great scientist Academician Vladimir Bekhterev (when he died, she was 4 years old). Her childhood was difficult. After her father, an engineer, was shot as an enemy of the people, and her mother was sent to Stalin's camps, the girl ended up in an orphanage. She became seriously interested in medicine during the war, when she was on duty in hospitals in besieged Leningrad, caring for the wounded.

Scientific career. In 1947, Natalya Bekhtereva graduated from the 1st Leningrad Medical Institute named after academician Pavlov, in 1950 she completed her postgraduate studies at the Institute of Physiology of the CNS of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. From 1950 to 1990 she worked at the Institute of Experimental Medicine of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. She headed the Research Institute of Experimental Medicine of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Then she began to lead the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Natalya Bekhtereva was a laureate of the USSR State Prize, a member of the Austrian and Finnish Academies of Sciences, the American Academy of Medicine and Psychiatry, and an honorary citizen of St. Petersburg.

Area of interest. Natalya Petrovna was a very interesting person, she studied the brains of leaders, met Vanga, and in recent years she believed in God and became interested in the phenomenon of experience after death. Natalya Bekhtereva wrote a book for the mass reader, where she spoke in understandable language about the human brain and its mysteries.

FROM INTERVIEWS IN DIFFERENT YEARS

About Faith in God

You are interested in how I came to faith. This moment had nothing to do with either Vanga's personality or his studies in science. It so happened that after a trip to Vanga - it just coincided in time - I experienced a lot. I survived the betrayal of my closest friends, the persecution at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, which I then headed and where I announced my decision to leave for the new Institute of the Brain, and the worst thing was the death of two of my close people: my husband and his son from my first marriage. They died very tragically, almost at the same time: Alik committed suicide, and her husband could not bear his death and died the same night.

That's when I changed a lot. My personal experience went completely beyond the explanation of the world known to me. For example, I could in no way find an explanation for the fact that my husband, after that, appeared to me in a dream, asked for help in publishing the manuscript of his book, which I had not read and which I would not have known without his words. This was not the first such experience in my life (before my father's arrest in 1937, I also had a dream, then reflected in reality), but here for the first time I thought seriously about what was happening. Of course, this new reality was frightening. But then my friend, priest, rector at Tsarskoye Selo Father Gennady helped me a lot ... By the way, he strongly advised me to talk less about this kind of experiences. Then I did not listen to this advice very much and even wrote about what happened in the book - just like I used to write about any other of my observations.

About the Internet

If I were asked what I consider the most important invention of mankind, I would certainly name the Internet. This is the most useful invention. But humanity, as a rule, does not invent the best for itself. He builds houses and builds an atomic bomb to destroy them, fights infections and creates new infections, which then have to be fought again, and so on ... I would like to think that the peak of the Internet frenzy should pass and everything should fall into place. The person will use the Internet as needed. I believe that the possibilities of contact between people that the Internet has provided are fabulous. This is what people dreamed about. The possibilities of the Internet are such that the language does not turn around, to say that using it is harmful or not good. But when there is dependence on it, it is really bad. This dependence, in principle, is even treated in psychiatric institutions. And there is no need to argue whether this dependence of others is better or worse. Any addiction is not very good. The world has now fallen in love with the Internet so much that it is useless to discuss this problem, humanity will still use it.

About the possibilities of the brain

It always surprises me when someone tries to judge how much the human brain is loaded. I have been working with the human brain all my life, and I know all the methods of brain research, but I cannot understand who and how it calculates.

We know that the brain is arranged in such a way that no matter what happens in it, the whole brain is necessarily activated. He loses all the possibilities, and then there is a minimization of the areas of the brain that will be involved. There are no situations when the brain does not lose options. This was once proved by Pavlov. We see this all the time. And this is wonderful, this is the best mechanism for self-preservation of the brain.

About recipes to strengthen memory

In order for the memory to be better, it must be exercised. Just as there are exercises to strengthen the muscles of the arms, legs, and abdominals, there are also exercises to strengthen the memory. They are very simple, public, they can be done in any setting. For example, many people are very fond of acquiring a large number of notebooks, personal weeklies, notebooks. Why not train your memory and try to memorize all the phone numbers of your friends and acquaintances?

After all, it is no coincidence that earlier in schools children were forced to cram a lot of things by heart. Cramming was generally one of the teaching methods. We have always been very critical of it and, in the end, liquidated it. And along with it, a good memory trainer was thrown into the trash. For memory training, it is very useful to study some foreign language, memorize at least five to ten new words every day. Or learning poems by heart - it would seem a completely idle task, but, believe my experience, this is a very effective exercise. Many people are fond of solving crossword puzzles - also a good method for developing memory and associative thinking.

Be sure to replenish your vocabulary, read more. And not only newspapers, although the press now we have is quite interesting and diverse, but also science fiction, and lyrics, and special literature - in order to receive as much information as possible. That is, to force your brain to work. In general, the more diverse information a person will try to remember, the better his memory will be. Therefore, do not take long breaks in mental work.

There are other ways to improve memory. For example, natural outdoor recreation. Forest walks are very beneficial, because it is not only a different composition of the air, different smells, but it is also a fundamental change in the environment, which in itself has a positive effect on the mechanism of our memory.

About prophetic dreams

As a rule, dreams are not related to the future, so dream books should not be taken seriously. But in my life there were several dreams that turned out to be prophetic. And one of them was incredibly prophetic, down to the details. It was a dream about my mother's death. Mom was alive and well, resting in the south, shortly before that I received a good letter from her. And in a dream, and I fell asleep during the day, I dreamed that a postman came to me with a telegram saying that my mother had died. I go to the funeral, I meet people there whom I have never seen before, I say hello to them, I call them by their names - it's all in a dream. When I woke up and told my husband about my dream, he said: "Do you, a specialist in the field of the brain, believe in dreams?"

In short, despite the fact that I was firmly convinced that I should fly to my mother, I was talked out of it. In fact, I allowed myself to be dissuaded. Well, ten days later everything happened exactly as it was in my dream. And down to the smallest detail. For example, I forgot the word village council a long time ago, I just never needed it. In a dream, I was looking for the village council, and in reality I had to look for it - that's the story. This happened to me personally, but I'm not the only one. There are many other cases of prophetic dreams and even scientific discoveries in a dream. For example, Mendeleev's discovery of the periodic system of elements.

It cannot be explained. It is better not to be wiser and to say bluntly: since this cannot be explained by any of the modern scientific methods, we will have to assume that the future is given to us in advance, that it already exists. And we can, at least in a dream, get in touch either with a higher Mind, or with God - with Someone who owns knowledge about this future. With more definite formulations, I would like to wait, because the advances in the technological direction of brain science are so great that, perhaps, something else will be discovered that will shed light on this problem as well.

Used interviews from sites,.

Academician who devoted her life to studying the human brain dies at the age of 84 [interview]

Change text size: A A

FROM INTERVIEWS IN DIFFERENT YEARS

About Faith in God

About the Internet

About the possibilities of the brain

About recipes to strengthen memory

About prophetic dreams

Used interviews from sites,.

Bekhtereva Natalya Petrovna

* Bekhtereva Natalya Petrovna (b. 1924), physiologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (1975), academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1981), academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1991).

Granddaughter of the famous Russian neurologist, psychiatrist and psychologist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev.

For many years she headed the Institute for the Study of the Brain and Mental Activity.

Laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1985).

I testify that individuals trained to see without the use of the eyes are actually able to read texts previously unknown to them and perform a variety of other activities that normally require vision. The results showed that the presence of any special properties in the trained person is not required. I saw, first of all, the presence of a training system, where there is a constant movement towards maximizing the use of the body's capabilities. The formation of a new vision is quite possible for the blind. Research emphasizes its physiology for the human brain. "Bronnikov's Boys" have received and demonstrate their superpowers, acquired as a result of systematic long-term training, carefully revealing the possibility of alternative (direct) vision.

Bekhtereva Natalya Petrovna (July 7, 1924, Leningrad - June 22, 2008, Hamburg, Germany) - supporter and popularizer of vision according to the Bronnikov method, author of scientific research in the field of brain neurophysiology. Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, has scientific awards for his high contribution to the development of neurophysiology and neurosciences. Author of about 350 scientific papers in the field of physiology of the human brain.

Natalya Bekhtereva. The winding path of thought

IN CHILDHOOD, the world-famous academician and neurophysiologist Natalia BEKHTEREVA tested her will with the help of a red-hot nail: she heated it on fire and applied it to her palm. Since then, she has not changed herself and is still "taking a hit." For 13 years he has been the scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain in St. Petersburg and unravels the secrets hidden in the convolutions of the gray matter. On July 7, she turns 80.

family karma

- NATALIA PETROVNA, your son Svyatoslav said: “When an idea takes possession of a mother, she becomes material force". Who is closer to you in spirit - Galileo, who, on his knees, renounced the teachings of Copernicus, or Giordano Bruno, who went to the stake for his beliefs?

- In front of me, as a scientist, there was no fire (or execution - this is more modern). Therefore, it is difficult to say whose fate I would choose. What would I do in the face of death? I do not believe those who say that they are not afraid of anything. It's scary for everyone. But how you can live, overcoming fear, is shown in the film "The Passion for Christ." This conviction is higher than the instinct of self-preservation... Although I was persuaded more than once to renounce my scientific principles.

According to legend, your grandfather, psychiatrist and neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev, was poisoned after he diagnosed Stalin with paranoia. Parents were repressed, and you yourself ended up in an orphanage. And now the Pseudoscience Commission is after you. Just "family karma"!

- I don’t know if it’s true that my grandfather made such a diagnosis to Stalin. But it is known that as a result of a visit to Lenin, Bekhterev said that the leader had syphilis of the brain. If the grandfather was removed, then so that, God forbid, he would not mention among the doctors about the diagnosis. My father believed that the second wife of grandfather Berta Yakovlevna became the executor of this black deed, although those who saw them together said that she treated her husband with sympathy. She was a party member, and in those years it was also a “diagnosis”… My father, engineer and inventor Pyotr Bekhterev, was shot, my mother was serving time in a camp in Mordovia. Perhaps it would be tempting to answer you that I myself am a martyr in science. Well, I do not!

Illumination of society

SOME states of the soul and circumstances of life are difficult to explain with logic: fatal love, fate-predestination, suicidal tendencies, insight as the peak of creativity, intuition - the "sixth sense", clairvoyance, prophetic dreams. All this seems surreal, like another dimension. Is it a product of the brain?

- I will answer this way: "Not only the brain, but the brain - definitely." It's a shame, but it often seems that in terms of personal life, we are completely free only in small things. By the way, something similar said to me Vanga, when I visited her in Bulgaria.

- They say that the brain is only a receiver, a receptor through which the soul perceives the world...

- I am sure that the brain is not only a receptor! Not all of its secrets have yet been revealed.

- Probably, if it were, then life in society would die out. It is not good for society. He also has a self-preservation instinct. But it happens that clairvoyance, as it were, manifests itself - for example, when mothers at a great distance feel that trouble has happened to their child. This connection begins in the womb. Or prophetic dreams: rare, but it happens.

- Is the brain of a sick person different from the brain of a healthy one?

- Certainly! Normally, the brain fights disease. But, if he fails to cope with the disease, he, for want of a better one, adapts to it. To overcome the disease, you need to shake this system.

- You talk about the brain as if it is a separate organism, as if "a being in a being"!

- You're right. Sometimes he amazes me. Society lives according to the same laws as the brain! For example, during shock therapy in the 90s, many became scared. But I do not. For me, it was a destabilization that replaced pathology. We began to recover through shock. Although therapy has been delayed ...

Storm in the brain

YOU DISCOVERED a special mechanism in the gray matter - the error detector - and said that you think you have found a pearl. Where does such an analogy come from?

- I love Steinbeck's story "Pearl". Its heroes, divers, say: to find a real pearl, you need to want it, but not too much. This is a special state of consciousness, and it happens that insight comes in it. Remember Archimedes with his "Eureka!"? I experienced it myself: twice in my life the formulas of theories came to me just like that… I did not immediately believe in my happiness when I met with the clever laws of the brain. How beautiful and impeccable are the formulations that we receive, as it were, from nowhere! And the bug detector! The brain has its own self-preservation and protection unit - like a fuse. He guards himself so that a flurry of negative emotions does not capture him entirely.

- Is your detector good or bad for creativity? Does it promote the flight of creative thought or hinder it?

- At first it seemed to me that, of course, he should only interfere. Creativity is always the creation of something new, and the detector seems to compare this “something” with the matrix and, if there are inconsistencies, takes action. That is, when you are ready to soar, it seems to pull you back: “Don’t get in there, stop, you won’t end up in trouble!” But now I think that it can help so that we do not waste energy on reinventing the bicycle.

What kind of state is it, after all, into which you need to fall in order to be enlightened? "Brainstorm"? Detachment? A kind of trance when you can perceive the "inner voice" or "voice from above"?

- I could answer you as in the multiplication table: "For insight, activation of certain areas of the brain is necessary, including, probably, the 39th and 40th field according to Brodman." But if you do not get into such jungle, then you simply should not be too excited or, on the contrary, indifferent. You need a little detachment and at the same time a long focus on the problem. And then, perhaps, the brain will turn on hidden reserves.

Masters of culture describe the moment of creativity as follows: “I started to create, but woke up two hours later.” What is happening at this time?

- It's all about emotional intensity. This happens even in times of trouble. It happens that a person will see something terrible, for example, signs of an incurable disease in a loved one. Due to severe shock, he can forget about it, and a vague feeling remains - "something happened." It's the same with creativity. Remember how Pushkin exclaimed when he wrote "Eugene Onegin": "What did this Tatyana throw out to me ?! She got married! .. ”And I’m also amazed by the defense mechanisms in the brain of actors that allow them to survive under the onslaught of storms of emotions.

- You are trying to prove the existence of alternative vision. Is that the ability to see through walls?

- This “pearl” was not discovered by me, we are only studying it. The phenomenon seems to be associated not only with the brain, but also with the senses. People trained in this perception can see through opaque glasses: read, distinguish objects, etc. It seems that there are other channels for transmitting information to the brain besides the eyes. "Alternative seers" are even able to identify objects on the monitor. But this does not mean that you can put a board in front of the subject and he will look through it. Although it is probably possible to teach this, if you let the person get used to the board and the unusual situation.

These studies haunt the Commission on Pseudoscience and are relegated to the level of zirconium bracelets and quackery. You, a world-famous scientist, are not offended by this?

- There is no resentment. But it is a pity that my other works do not cause such close attention!

Don't you think that all the fuss around "pseudoscience" is explained by the fact that science itself in Russia is rather orthodox? So they made you a heretic!

- Much of what we study is recognized and even included in textbooks. The stupidest thing I can do is oppose science. Nothing like this! I live in science, like everyone else. You don't even need fame. Orthodoxy can cement the foundation, and the new, if it is true, gradually acquires the features of orthodoxy, and then there is a “new” new, etc. thorny shrub. What kind of heretic am I? Terribly uncomfortable at the stake!

Vladimir KOZHEMYAKIN

class="gadget">

From an interview with N.P. Bekhtereva newspaper "Volzhskaya Pravda", March 19, 2005 "The example of Vanga absolutely convinced me that there is a phenomenon of contact with the dead

Natalia Bekhtereva - Brain Labyrinths

“ONLY I ask you,” she said at the beginning of the conversation, “do not make me a witch or a clairvoyant!” Actually, I didn't come for that. Few living people have studied the human brain as thoroughly as Natalya BEKHTEREVA, a world-famous neurophysiologist, academician, honorary member of dozens of scientific societies. For 12 years she has been the scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain in St. Petersburg. In the chapter "Through the Looking Glass" of the book "The Magic of the Brain and the Labyrinths of Life", published for her 75th birthday, Bekhtereva writes that she considers it her duty to study the inexplicable. And he studies: according to his own statement, he “does not shy away” from paranormal phenomena associated with thinking.

Illumination is the pearl of consciousness

- NATALIA Petrovna, Nobel laureate physiologist Eccles argued that the brain is only a receptor with which the soul perceives the world. Do you agree?

- For the first time I heard the speeches of Eccles at the meeting of UNESCO in 1984. And I thought: “What nonsense!” It all seemed wild. The concept of "soul" for me then was beyond the bounds of science. But the more I studied the brain, the more I thought about it. I want to believe that the brain is not only a receptor.

- If not a "receptor" - then where is it?

- I think we will be able to get closer to the solution when we study the brain code of mental activity - that is, we look at what happens in the areas of the brain related to thinking and creativity. So far it's not clear to me. The brain absorbs information, processes it and makes decisions - it's true. But sometimes a person receives a ready-made formulation as if from nowhere. As a rule, this happens against an even emotional background: not too much joy or sadness, but not complete peace either. Some optimal "level of active wakefulness." Twice in my life the formulas of theories, which then turned out to be very viable, came to me in this way. - The phenomenon of insight?

- Everyone who is engaged in creativity knows about him. And not only creativity: this still little-studied ability of the brain often plays a decisive role in any business. In Steinbeck's novel The Pearl, pearl divers say that in order to find large and clean pearls, a special state of mind is required, comparable to the creative one. There are two hypotheses about this. First: at the moment of insight, the brain works like an ideal receiver. But then it must be admitted that the information came from outside - from outer space or from the fourth dimension. This is not yet proven. And we can say that the brain created ideal conditions for itself and “lit up”.

Madness is in the genes

- And how can you explain genius?

- There was an idea to create a research institute in Moscow to study the brain of gifted people during their lifetime. But neither then nor now have they found any differences between a genius and an ordinary person. I personally think it's a special biochemistry of the brain. As for Pushkin, for example, it was natural to “think” in rhyme. This is an "anomaly", most likely not inherited. They say that genius and madness are similar. Madness is also the result of a special biochemistry of the brain. A breakthrough in the study of this phenomenon will most likely occur in the field of genetics.

- What do you think yourself: insight is a connection with the cosmos or processes that occur in the brain?

“Now is not the right time for scientists to be very bold. Because the Academy of Sciences has a commission on pseudoscience. And our institute is, as it were, their “client”. They look at us very carefully. As for insight... Could it be the result of brain work? Yes maybe. I just don't have a good idea how. Because the formulations that we receive as if from the outside are painfully beautiful and perfect.

My work today is the study of creativity, inspiration, insight, "breakthrough" - when an idea appears out of nowhere.

- You once said: “Faith, not atheism helps science…” Is a believing scientist capable of more than an atheist?

- I think yes. There is too much denial in atheists. And that means a negative attitude towards life. In addition, religion is to a large extent our history. One major scientist (not a believer and not an atheist, but somewhere in between) calculated that the most popular person in the history of mankind was Jesus Christ. At least by the citation index. The Bible is in itself an excellent material for scientific study. It, like many other books, talks about existing, but not yet studied phenomena.

Vision without eyes

- Is the INSTITUTE of the human brain engaged in the study of such paranormal phenomena?

- Directly - no. And if along the way of our work we come across really “strange” phenomena, we study them. For example, the phenomenon of alternative vision. This is vision without direct use of the eyes. This phenomenon has been seriously tested by us.

- You once said that we are free in small things ... But by and large?

- This was not said by me, but by the Bulgarian fortuneteller Vanga, when I was visiting her. Most religions give us freedom of choice. Like atheism, by the way. You can go left or right... What do I believe? A person lives, and life, as if by chance, without caring about him, more or less often puts in his way some things that are advantageous for the future. The smart one sees them, uses them, realizes them. And the other does not implement. And here the fate of one is one, and the other is another. Essentially, they are in the same position. Both life throws something. It is important to "see" in time.

- Is this also a phenomenon of illumination?

- Maybe, but with a stretch. I often felt when fate offered me something, and then I used these new opportunities. But, unfortunately, sometimes missed. You need to be able to see.

Remember all

AFTER a series of experiments on the human brain, Japanese researchers led by Professor Yasuji Miyashita of the University of Tokyo discovered the mechanism of how memory works. It turned out that a person does not forget anything. Everything that we have ever seen, heard, felt, is stored, as in a data bank, in the temporal lobes of gray matter and, theoretically, can be called again. The speed of information reproduction in the regions of the cerebral cortex responsible for memory is several times slower than its memorization, and the information flow, as it were, settles in the head. The same thing long before the Japanese claimed Natalia Bekhtereva.

Indicative in this sense are cases when people find themselves on the verge of life and death. Many say that at such moments, and only a few seconds pass from the beginning of the “process” to its completion, a film rolls in the memory, as it were, but only in the opposite direction. A person sees his life until childhood, often recalling details that he has long forgotten about. According to the Russian neurophysiologist, in this way the brain in an extreme situation looks for similar moments in life experience in order to find the only right solution to save the body. It even seems that, if necessary, the brain speeds up its internal "biological" time in search of an answer. According to Bekhtereva, the brain does not just function like other organs of the body, but lives its own life.

Nevertheless, a person cannot, at his own whim, recall absolutely everything that happened to him. The older we are, the harder it is to do this. Over the years, memory becomes selective: old people remember their childhood well, but often they cannot say what they did the day before. When the secrets of memory are revealed to the end, the Japanese are convinced that diseases such as sclerosis will be finished.

Reading other people's minds is dangerous!

"DO NOT BE AFRAID of being a dissident,- the famous Russian neurophysiologist Natalya Bekhtereva told me. - Once I told about my views on the possibilities of the human brain to colleagues at the institute and expected that they would say: "You need to be treated by a psychiatrist." But this did not happen: they began research in the same direction.

Who benefits from telepathy

- NATALYA Petrovna, did you manage to "catch" the thought with the help of equipment? Many hopes were pinned on the positron emission tomograph at the disposal of the Institute of the Human Brain ...

- Thought - alas, no. The tomograph is not able to either confirm or refute anything here. Other methods and devices are needed, they have not yet been developed. Today we can judge the state of the active points of the brain. In the brain, during special tests, certain areas are activated ...

- So, thought is still material?

- What is the idea here? We can say that in these areas there is active work - for example, creative work. But in order to “see” a thought, one must at least extract from the brain information about the dynamics of the impulse activity of neurons and decipher them. So far, this is not feasible. Yes, certain areas of the brain are related to creativity. But what exactly is going on there? It's a mystery.

- Suppose you study all thought processes. So what is next?

- Well, let's say ... mind reading.

- Do you think telepathy exists? Why can't we read each other's minds?

- Reading thoughts is unprofitable for society. It is, as it were, "closed" from telepathy. This is the instinct of self-preservation. If all people learn to read other people's thoughts, life in society will stop. If this phenomenon existed, over time it would have to fade away.

Who has not tried to engage in telepathy! A lot of such "crazy" people came to our institute. Nothing has been confirmed. Although striking coincidences are known - for example, when mothers felt at a great distance that something tragic was happening to their children.

I think that this connection is formed in the womb.

"Evil Fire"

- YOU are familiar with Kashpirovsky. You write that there is some “evil fire” in it.

Yes, there is something evil about him. His method is verbal influence and "suggestion without words." Unfortunately, this also happened during experiments that were humiliating to human dignity in stadiums. He makes fun of people, with apparent pleasure makes them sob in public and wring their hands. He revels in unlimited power. This can be done not by a psychotherapist, but by a sadist. He has an incredible drive to produce miracles. His operations with anesthesia at a distance - it's scary ...

- You mentioned dreams. Are they a mystery to you?

- The biggest mystery to me seems to be the very fact that we are sleeping. I think that once, when our planet settled down, it was beneficial to sleep in the dark. That's what we do, out of habit. The brain has a huge number of interchangeable elements. Could the brain arrange itself so as not to sleep? I think yes. For example, in dolphins, the left and right hemispheres sleep alternately. They say that there are people who do not sleep at all.

- How can you explain "dreams with continuation"? Actress Svetlana Kryuchkova said that from year to year she dreams of the same Central Asian city, in which she had never been. Sun-drenched streets, clay fences, ditches…

- Does she feel good there? Well, thank God. I see that you want to bring here the belief in reincarnation (transmigration of souls. - Auth.) - that she saw this in some other lives. But this phenomenon has not been proven by science. Most likely, the city of dreams was formed under the influence of books, films, and became, as it were, a permanent place of dreams. I think that Svetlana Kryuchkova is drawn to something that has not yet been experienced in life, but very good. Everything is more or less clear here ... But why I dream of apartments - I don’t understand at all!

- Prophetic dreams, "dreams in the hand" - is it receiving information from the outside, foreseeing the future, random coincidences?

How many dreams does a person see in a lifetime? Infinite set. Sometimes thousands a year. And from them prophetic it turns out, well, one, two. Probability theory. Although the monk Abel lived, who predicted the future of royal families, and Michel Nostradamus, and other prophets. How to treat it? I myself, in two weeks, with all the details, saw in a dream the death of my mother.

Scalpel to your liking

American neurophysiologist, Dr. Bruce Miller from the University of California, is convinced that the soul is a philosophical concept, and the mentality and habits of a person can be changed as you like with the help of surgical instruments. He recently studied the brains of patients with a disease similar to Alzheimer's. It turned out that if the disease affected one of the temporal lobes - the right one, a person's behavior changed beyond recognition. “Many believe that the principles of life, the choice of one religion or another, the ability to love are the essence of our immortal soul. However, this is an illusion, says Miller. “It’s all about anatomy: you can turn an exemplary family man and churchgoer into an atheist, a robber and a sexual maniac with the movement of a scalpel.”

According to Natalia Bekhtereva, such experiments on a person's personality are at least immoral. Another thing is to learn how to manage creative abilities. When scientists solve this problem, genius will no longer be such a rare phenomenon, and humanity will make a qualitative leap in its development.

“Clinical death is not a black hole…”

A BLACK tunnel, at the end of which light is visible, a feeling that you are flying along this "pipe", and something good and very important awaits ahead - this is how many of those who survived it describe their visions during clinical death. What happens at this time with the human brain? Is it true that the soul of a dying person leaves the body? The famous neurophysiologist Natalya BEKHTEREVA has been studying the brain for half a century and has observed dozens of returns “from there” while working in intensive care.

weigh the soul

- NATALIA Petrovna, where is the place of the soul - in the brain, spinal cord, in the heart, in the stomach?

- It will all be fortune-telling on the coffee grounds, no matter who answers you. You can say - "in the whole body" or "outside the body, somewhere nearby." I think this substance needs no space. If it is, then in the whole body. Something that permeates the entire body, which is not interfered with by walls, doors, or ceilings. The soul, for lack of better formulations, is also called, for example, that which supposedly leaves the body when a person dies.

Are consciousness and soul synonyms?

- For me, no. There are many formulations about consciousness, one worse than the other. This one is also suitable: “Awareness of oneself in the surrounding world.” When a person comes to his senses after a faint, the first thing he begins to understand is that there is something nearby besides himself. Although in an unconscious state, the brain also perceives information. Sometimes patients, waking up, talk about what they could not see. And the soul... what the soul is, I don't know. I tell you how it is. They even tried to weigh the soul. Some very small grams are obtained. I don't really believe in it. When a person dies, a thousand processes take place in the human body. Maybe it's just thinner? It is impossible to prove that it was precisely the “soul that flew away”.

- Can you tell exactly where our consciousness is? In the brain?

- Consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain, although it is very dependent on the state of the body. You can deprive a person of consciousness by pinching his neck artery with two fingers, change the blood flow, but this is very dangerous. This is the result of activity, I would even say - the life of the brain. So more precisely. When you wake up, at the same second you regain consciousness. The whole organism "comes to life" at once. It's like all the lights are on at the same time.

Sleep after death

- WHAT happens to the brain and consciousness in the minutes of clinical death? Can you describe the picture?

- It seems to me that the brain dies not when oxygen does not enter the vessels for six minutes, but at the moment when it finally begins to flow. All the products of a not very perfect metabolism “pile up” on the brain and finish it off. For some time I worked in the intensive care unit of the Military Medical Academy and watched it happen. The most terrible period is when doctors take a person out of critical condition and bring him back to life.

Some cases of visions and "returns" after clinical death seem convincing to me. They are so beautiful! Doctor Andrey Gnezdilov told me about one thing - he later worked in a hospice. Once, during an operation, he watched a patient who experienced clinical death, and then, waking up, told an unusual dream. Gnezdilov managed to confirm this dream. Indeed, the situation described by the woman took place at a great distance from the operating room, and all the details matched.

But this is not always the case. When the first boom in the study of the phenomenon of “life after death” began, at one of the meetings, the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences Blokhin asked academician Arutyunov, who experienced clinical death twice, what he still saw. Arutyunov replied: "Just a black hole." What is it? He saw everything, but forgot? Or was there really nothing? What is the phenomenon of the dying brain? This after all is suitable only for clinical death. As for the biological one, no one really returned from there. Although some clergy, in particular Seraphim Rose, have evidence of such returns.

- If you are not an atheist and believe in the existence of the soul, then you yourself do not experience fear of death ...

- They say that the fear of waiting for death is many times worse than death itself. Jack London has a story about a man who wanted to steal a dog sled. The dogs bit him. The man bled out and died. And before that he said: "People slandered death." It's not death that's terrible, it's dying.

- Singer Sergei Zakharov said that at the time of his own clinical death, he saw and heard everything that was happening around, as if from the outside: the actions and negotiations of the resuscitation team, how they brought a defibrillator and even batteries from the TV remote control in the dust behind the cabinet, which he lost the day before. After that, Zakharov stopped being afraid to die.

It's hard for me to say exactly what he went through. Maybe this is also the result of the activity of a dying brain. Why do we sometimes see the surroundings as if from the outside? It is possible that at extreme moments in the brain, not only the usual mechanisms of vision are activated, but also the mechanisms of a holographic nature. For example, during childbirth: according to our research, several percent of women in childbirth also have a state, as if the “soul” comes out. Women giving birth feel out of the body, watching what is happening from the side. And at this time they do not feel pain. I don't know what it is - a brief clinical death or a phenomenon associated with the brain. More like the last one.

From the body - with the help of electric shock

SWISS professor Olaf Blank, after observing the condition of his patients at the University of Geneva hospital, came to the conclusion that the phenomenon known as the “exit of the soul from the body” during clinical death can be caused by electrical stimulation of the brain. At the time of processing the area of the brain responsible for the synthesis of visual information, disturbances in perception occur, and patients experience a feeling of extraordinary lightness, flight, the soul seems to be floating under the ceiling. At this moment, a person sees from the outside not only himself, but also what is nearby.

In Western scientific circles, such an assumption has also appeared: human consciousness is not connected with the brain, but only uses the gray matter as a receiver and transmitter of mental signals that are converted into actions and emotions. It is not yet clear where these signals come from in the brain. Maybe from outside?

Vladimir KOZHEMYAKIN, "Arguments and Facts"

Natalya Bekhtereva, a world-famous neurophysiologist, believes that alternative vision is one of the superpowers of the human brain. Visually impaired people who have mastered this method can freely navigate in space, play sports, and read. Children are especially successful.
(Photo: SERGEY TYAGIN)

http://noosphera1.narod.ru/text/natbeht.htm

Three years ago, Moscow scientist Vyacheslav Bronnikov began teaching the blind to see. He developed an original technique that allows you to sharply activate the activity of the right hemisphere of the brain. As a result, in ten days of classes, Bronnikov developed the skills of so-called direct vision in his wards - blind and visually impaired people were able to receive information about the world around them without using their eyes. Children with visual impairments after special training could ride bicycles, play chess, read books.

A blind person, according to doctors, sees a veil in front of him. Meanwhile, Svetlana Kononets, a leading specialist at the International Academy of Human Development, which trains people using the Bronnikov method, claims that people who have mastered the skills of alternative vision see a white field, and on it a clear image of objects that are in front of it. At the same time, a person can keep this image in his mind for as long as he needs. Incredible? Indeed, it was difficult to believe in this phenomenon, and many considered Bronnikov a clever charlatan. However, not all serious scientists have rejected the idea of "direct vision" or alternative vision out of the blue. The scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Natalya Bekhtereva, became interested in Bronnikov's experiments. Especially after I met in my office with one of his students, 26-year-old Larisa N, who lost her sight at the age of 8. Bekhtereva was wearing a bright red woolen mohair poncho donated by her son. "Larisa, what color are my clothes?" Bekhtereva asked. “Red,” she answered calmly. And then she added: “Or maybe blue?” Bekhtereva wore a dark blue dress under the poncho. “I can’t always clearly define the color and shape, I still need to practice,” Larisa noted ...

And at the very end of last year, a unique experiment was conducted at the Institute of the Human Brain. Seven adolescents with normal vision were involved in the research, who had previously been trained according to the method of Vyacheslav Bronnikov. Participation in the planned experiment of sighted people made it possible to compare the work of the brain with normal vision and alternative vision. The experiment took place in a room with normal, natural light. The faces of the subjects were covered with black masks made of opaque matter. Participants were required to read the text from the proposed book, brochure, announcement. All seven participants in the experiment easily read any presented text in a mask, only occasionally pausing on unfamiliar words. After that, the subjects were told that letters, numbers, or signs would appear on the computer screen, which they needed to name. In addition, images of various objects were displayed on the screen, which the "blind" teenagers did not know about in advance. However, the subjects coped with this task. Participants in the experiment were able to move freely around the room, bypassing obstacles.

In order to further verify the results of the experiment, the director of the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Svyatoslav Medvedev, conducted a special experiment. For one of the subjects, a mask was made of thermoplastic - a particularly durable material that completely excludes the possibility of "peeping". The study showed that even with such a face mask, a person was able to see images on a computer screen. Thus, the conducted experiments confirmed the existence of an alternative vision.

In the course of research, scientists measured various physiological parameters, electrical activity of the brain and tried to fix changes in brain processes that occur during "direct vision". With the help of an electroencephalograph, the brain parameters were recorded with "on" and "off" alternative vision, with mental reproduction of visual images, with closed eyes, when opening the eyes. “The human brain,” says Natalya Bekhtereva, “is fenced off from the outside world by several shells. But we have learned to register what is happening in the brain behind all these shells. And this is what happens: with “direct vision,” information quite clearly enters the brain, bypassing sense organs. It is possible that the formation of alternative vision is achieved through direct activation of brain cells by environmental factors. How this happens is still not clear. "

“When we took the parameters with alternative vision and with normal vision,” continues Natalya Bekhtereva, “we caught the following picture: the signal characteristic of the phenomenon under study was preserved in several participants even with normal vision. That is, the person looked the way he was convenient". In addition, the electroencephalogram data showed that when “direct vision” was “switched on”, the bioelectrical activity of the brain changed in the subjects, the so-called beta rhythm appeared, which is normally barely visible. The beta rhythm is traditionally considered an indicator of excitatory processes. In other words, the brain worked, if not at the limit, then in an enhanced mode. As a result, scientists concluded that today it is already appropriate to talk not so much about the phenomenon as about the method of alternative vision. The electroencephalogram data confirmed the restructuring of the brain to a different mode of operation. The subjects' brains used so-called conditioned pathological excitations. During the normal operation of vision, an impulse from the receptors of the eye enters the posterior parts of the cerebral hemispheres, and when alternative vision is "switched on", the signal traveled in an unconventional way and came to the central part of the brain, where it was sprayed. Natalya Bekhtereva believes that the skills of "direct vision" can be possessed by people who have ever been sighted, and then lost their sight. In her opinion, ever-seen images are stored in the hemispheres of the brain, and an impulse coming from outside can extract them from numerous cells and restore them - in this way, a comparison of the impulse and the image is carried out.

However, there is still no consensus on the nature of "direct vision". There is a hypothesis according to which it is carried out with the help of the skin. There is no direct evidence for this, but there is indirect evidence. With the development of the body, the skin is formed from one cell with the nervous system. In teaching alternative vision, an important step is the formation of the skill of comparing skin sensations with color and other properties of objects. In nature, there are cases when living beings (some marine invertebrates, butterflies) "see" the entire surface of the body.

Scientists believe that in the process of mastering an alternative vision, the brain is retrained. “The human brain is ready for everything in advance, it lives, as it were, not in our century, but in the future, ahead of itself,” says Natalya Bekhtereva. “What do we know today about those conditions, those principles, on the basis of which not only opportunities are realized but also the superpowers of the human brain? The answer is simple: in providing intellectual superpowers, the activation of certain, and probably many brain structures plays a crucial role.Superpowers are initial - talent, genius, under certain conditions of an optimal emotional regime or in extreme situations, they can manifest themselves in form of insight with a change in the speed of time. But most importantly, superpowers can be formed with special training, as well as in the case of setting a super-task. "

“It can apparently be assumed,” continues Natalia Bekhtereva, “that under the conditions of the most important task - the formation of alternative vision - the result is really achieved through direct vision, direct activation of brain cells by environmental factors. However, now this is nothing more than a fragile hypothesis. And maybe the electric waves of the brain themselves are able to "search" the outside world? Like "radar"? Or maybe there is another explanation for all this? We must think! And study!"

Natalia BEKHTEREVA:

"I DON'T LIKE WHEN THE HUMAN BRAIN IS COMPARED TO A COMPUTER"

You will learn about the undisclosed secrets of the human brain, about the mysterious nature of dreams, about the mysteries of human memory by reading an interview with the scientific director of the Institute of the Human Brain, Academician Natalia Petrovna Bekhtereva.

- People say: "a girl's memory is short", but in fact, there are some peculiarities in a woman's memory?

Mechanisms of memory in both women and men are the same. They include the acquisition, storage and retrieval of information. The inability to extract information is called forgetting. And why does a person remember one thing and forget about another?

Because our memory is selective. Let me tell you one incident that happened to me. I saw signs of a serious illness in a person I knew well. Then for a while I lost sight of him and even forgot about his existence. But I was always haunted by a vague feeling that something serious and terrible had happened. Exactly what, I couldn't remember. When I met him again, I immediately remembered what struck me two weeks ago, and the whole situation in which I saw him then.

What happened to me? Short term memory loss? But thirty years ago, and that was just then, my memory did not fail me. Very rarely does she let me down even now, and then only when I'm nervous. Or maybe I forgot about it because I wanted to forget about it?

Our memory works on the principle of self-regulation: no need - I forget, out of sight - out of mind. In this case, we are dealing with such a form of forgetting as suppression. It plays a useful protective role, preventing unpleasant thoughts from entering the mind. There was an incident that traumatized me, and every time I tried to retrieve it from my memory, the internal censor intervened and stopped this operation. Suppression is the simplest form of forgetting. There are other, more dramatic cases, such as clinical amnesia, in which the patient forgets a whole piece of life.

- Is there any specificity of memory disorders today?

- Today, many people experience prolonged stress associated primarily with uncertainty about the future, with national, ideological, political, economic, personal problems. And this often leads to pathological reactions that can develop in two directions. Or a person is in an overexcited state, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or another extreme develops - a state of mental stupefaction as a result of the activity of the body's defense mechanisms, trying to withstand emotional stress.

The protective reaction of inhibition often manifests itself in the form of lethargy, drowsiness, and also in the form of a violation of memory management processes. Do not forget that we live in a time of ever-increasing information flow. There is so much information in memory that access to it becomes a major problem. Because our memory can only keep a certain amount of material active at any given moment.

- What memory improvement recipes could you give to our readers?

- In order for the memory to be better, it must be exercised. Just as there are exercises to strengthen the muscles of the arms, legs, back, neck, abdominals, there are also exercises to strengthen the memory. They are very simple, public, they can be done in any setting. For example, many people are very fond of acquiring a large number of notebooks, personal weeklies, notebooks. Why not train your memory and try to memorize all the phone numbers of your friends and acquaintances?

After all, it is no coincidence that earlier in schools children were forced to cram a lot of things by heart. Including memorizing, without any conversational practice, the so-called "dead languages", which people have not spoken for a long time. Cramming was generally one of the teaching methods. We have always been very critical of it, and in the end liquidated it. And along with it, a good memory trainer was thrown into the trash. For memory training, it is very useful to study some foreign language, memorize at least five to ten new words every day. Or learning poems by heart - it would seem a completely idle task, but, believe my experience, this is a very effective exercise. Many people are fond of solving crossword puzzles - also a good method for developing memory and associative thinking.

Of course, we do not refuse medical treatment, the use of pharmacological drugs, such as nootropil, piracetam, encephabol, which improve brain activity. They, as a rule, help in childhood, and in adulthood, and in old age - when memory is disturbed, associative processes in the brain slow down. There are other ways to improve memory. For example, natural outdoor recreation. Forest walks are very beneficial, because it is not only a different composition of the air, different smells, but it is also a fundamental change in the environment, which in itself has a positive effect on the mechanism of our memory.

We often say: "Oh, my head is breaking, oh, I'm tired of thinking." And in principle, can the human brain get tired?

- You know what, I don't believe in brain fatigue. But adverse additional factors can affect the well-being of a person. For example, a person worked for a long time in a stuffy room and the unfortunate brain was poorly supplied with oxygen, or the person sat uncomfortably, which is why the blood supply to the brain was insufficient. It seems to him that he is tired of thinking, but he is not. You just need to work in good conditions.

Do you think that this "computer" located in our skull has almost inexhaustible possibilities?

Yes, but I don't like it when the human brain is compared to a computer. Indeed, it was created in such a way that I cannot even imagine what the requirements of life could have led to the appearance of such a perfect apparatus. The brain can do so much that one never ceases to be surprised.

- If you look at the map of the brain, which part of it has been studied and which has not?

- It cannot be said that some part of the brain has been studied and some has not. The whole brain has been studied, but not very well studied, there are still a lot of properties of the brain that we have to study. What do we know about the brain and what do we not know? We know a lot about the organization of movements. We already know some general principles for the organization of thinking and emotions. Not to mention the fact that such a function of the brain as the management of the entire internal sphere of the body has been studied quite well. But here's what we don't know yet, and don't even see a way to find out - whether it will ever be possible to understand, on the basis of objective data, what a person thinks about.

- So, the saying "foreign soul - darkness" will remain relevant for a long time?

- I think so .. Today we can fix what happens in the human brain when some kind of test is applied, but the inverse problem is much more difficult. For example, to connect some sensors to a person, and, looking at their readings, to say: a person is thinking about something - this is almost impossible. It is difficult to say whether science will ever achieve this.

Traditional healers claim that good results can be achieved in the treatment of diseases by influencing the subcortex of the brain with the help of suggestion. What do you think about it?

- In general, as follows: those healers who can bring to life a person's own abilities are able to help. If a person who finds himself in a difficult situation is helped a little to raise himself, then there is nothing wrong with that. But there are so-called healers who only say that they influence a person, but in fact the influence of these healers in quotation marks brings very great harm.

Say, the first sessions of Kashpirovsky instilled delight and hope in the souls of people, and subsequent ones led to negative effects. Therefore, you must be very careful when allowing public sessions. We, doctors, divide diseases into two types: with damage to organs and without pathology of organs, but with damage to their functions. Doctors treat and cure an infinite number of patients. A healer who has the gift of suggestion, at best, cures one out of a thousand - the one who has the so-called functional disease.

- Is it possible to distinguish a real healer from a charlatan?

It's better to do without them at all. If this fails, then it is necessary to combine treatment with such a healer, who influences the will of the patient and his hidden reserves, with treatment with an ordinary doctor who operates with pharmacological agents or a scalpel. It is dangerous to rely only on healers - you can miss something serious and then it will be too late.

Today, no one is surprised by the transplantation of human organs - the heart, kidneys, liver. And the transplantation of the human brain - is this at least hypothetically possible, in the distant future?

- It's very, very difficult. We do a fetal brain transplant, but this is done in order to correct the disturbed brain biochemistry, which succeeds when the operation seems to be successful. Embryos are taken in the early stages of development and transplanted into the brain of a patient with a violation of some biochemical function. Is it possible to completely replace one brain with another? I doubt. The fact is that countless nerves and blood vessels depart from the brain and approach the brain. It is very difficult even to imagine that it is possible to first interrupt all these connections between the brain and the body, and then restore them exactly. Even if you sew each nerve to the one that the recipient had, it will take many months to wait until it takes root. It is not very easy to count on a favorable outcome here. We can say that theoretically it is possible, but practically - no.

Natalya Petrovna, our readers are interested in the nature of dreams. Do you believe in dream books, which, as many believe, are able to predict the future?

- As a rule, dreams are not related to the future, so dream books should not be taken seriously. But in my life there were several dreams that turned out to be prophetic. And one of them was incredibly prophetic, down to the details. It was a dream about my mother's death. Mom was alive and well, resting in the south, shortly before that I received a good letter from her. And in a dream, and I fell asleep during the day, I dreamed that a postman came to me with a telegram saying that my mother had died. I go to the funeral, I meet people there whom I have never seen before, I say hello to them, I call them by their names - it's all in a dream. When I woke up and told my husband about my dream, he said: "Do you, a specialist in the field of the brain, believe in dreams?"

- How do you explain it yourself?

You know, you can't explain it. It is better not to be wiser and to say bluntly: since this cannot be explained by any of the modern scientific methods, we will have to assume that the future is given to us in advance, that it already exists. And we can, at least in a dream, get in touch either with a higher Mind, or with God - with Someone who owns knowledge about this future. With more definite formulations, I would like to wait, because the advances in the technological direction of brain science are so great that something else may be discovered that will shed light on this problem as well.

- Since you yourself have started talking about God, I cannot but ask you about how you feel about religion?

- I believe in God and had the opportunity to see for myself the possibilities of religion. I have never been a militant atheist, but this faith came to me after I experienced so much that is beyond the endurance of man. And then what was beyond the power of the doctors - to get me out of a difficult condition - was done literally in ten seconds by an ordinary priest.

- What was it - severe depression?

- No, it was not depression, it was a state in which I saw and heard more than an ordinary person is supposed to see and hear. I saw strange things, heard strange sounds, and these were not hallucinations.

- Why listen if the mind says one thing, and the heart - another?

- Heart or mind?I would formulate this problem differently: a rational and intuitive approach. It all depends on the person. The fact is that there are people who intuitively solve the problem very well. And then others, already on the basis of objective methods, prove the same provisions, building a "building" brick by brick, based solely on reasonable grounds. Both paths have a right to exist. The only thing is that the first path is the path doomed to streams of criticism against him, and the second path, on the contrary, is practically safe. But nevertheless, I consider myself to be the first type of people, and when I start something in science, I know in advance what will be obtained. And, as a rule, this is confirmed later.

Tell me, are mental abilities inherited, as is the case with physical signs - height, hair and eye color?

- There are not so many examples of parents and children having the same outstanding abilities: father and son Dumas, musicians Strauss, Dunaevsky.

Some of them are more talented, some less, but in any case there are such examples. However, it cannot be argued that a talented father will necessarily have a talented son.

Your great grandfather, Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, invented a potion with wonderful healing and sedative properties. But today it is easier to buy Bittner's drops than Bechterew's medicine...

- Well, Bittner's and Bekhterev's drops are completely different, although both are necessary and beneficial for health. Otherwise, the question is not for me, I do not distribute medicines.

- Why does one person forget everything at the age of forty, and the other retains a clear memory even at ninety?

- You see, in the process of aging, all sorts of troubles await us in the form of diseases, age-related changes. Including often there are problems with memory. Why do some people retain memory until old age, while others do not? Much is explained by genetic factors, hereditary predisposition - this is the first. And secondly, of course, living conditions. For example, one person smoked a lot all his life, another abused alcohol, the third ate malnourished, as a result of which the body did not receive the necessary vitamins and minerals.

Unfortunately, many people do not know how to properly take vitamins. It happens that a person swallows a large amount of vitamins and wonders why this does not help. And the thing is that he takes them wrong. Vitamins should be taken only with meals, and always - along with trace elements. On packages of good vitamins, two lists are usually printed in small print. The upper one is the vitamins themselves, and the lower one is microelements: zinc, iron, various mineral and organic substances that are necessary for the human body.

When, God forbid, we are twisted by sciatica or a tooth hurts, we, without wasting time, run to the doctor. And if there are some problems with memory, then we usually dismiss it: oh, okay, nonsense, then I'll remember ...

- Indeed, we are very negligent about such signals that our brain sends us. And completely, by the way, in vain. Forgetfulness, memory lapses - this is a very alarming sign, which should be paid the most serious attention. I would say that every person should be very concerned about the state of his memory, the quality of his thought processes. In these matters, one should not rely on the self-defense of the brain. Yes, the human brain has many degrees of protection, but it has no protection against memory impairment. Unfortunately. Our memory functions as follows: first, some information is put into it, and then, when you need to remember something, you read it, extract this information from memory. So, the thing is that the mechanism for reading information from memory is very fragile, easily injured, it often fails. But the memory is trained.

When should you start training your memory?

- You need to start doing this as soon as the first difficulties appear in the process of reading information from memory. Not forgetting, no - after all, you have not forgotten, you, in the end, remember what you wanted to remember, but not immediately, with difficulty. This is a worrying symptom. You need to immediately take it into account and take your memory seriously. I have already said that the brain can be trained by forcing it to perform a variety of activities. And not necessarily, by the way, mental. If a person is engaged in motor activity, he also trains the brain, because all types of human activity, one way or another, are connected with the brain.

Experiments conducted by specialists from the Institute of the Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences confirmed the existence of alternative vision in homo sapiens

Interview with Natalia Bekhtereva

Maria Vardenga

Natalya Petrovna, I said, I personally need this meeting. A close friend of mine died, he was also a doctor, an oncoimmunologist. At the last meeting, we talked about faith. And he said: you know, the further I do science, the more I become stronger in the idea of the divine origin of the world.

Do you agree that pain can be overcome only by faith?

I understand you ... although I'm not sure about the accuracy of the question. Science is by no means an antagonist to faith. If you look through the literature, you will see that religion has never in history opposed itself to science. Giordano Bruno, for example, contrary to the accepted point of view, was condemned not for his teaching, but for completely different things. Another question is that science itself at some point began to oppose itself to religion. And this, from my point of view, is strange, because its current state just convinces of the veracity of the postulates set forth, for example, in the Holy Scriptures.

But did your own studies in science and in such subtle matter as the human brain have anything to do with coming to God? Or was it a process completely independent of professional activity?

They had to do with my usual way of analyzing events. The thing is, I'm not the type of scientist who says that what I can't measure simply doesn't exist. By the way, these are the words of a colleague I respect. To which I always object: science is the way to the stars. Road to the unknown. How, for example, in this case, to deal with documentary evidence, on the basis of which the history of wars is recreated? Isn't confirmed evidence of the same event a reason for analysis and a serious document? In this case, I am not defending the Gospel, which does not need to be defended - in this case I am talking about the very system of understanding incomprehensible, extraordinary things, such as, for example, numerous testimonies of people who saw and heard others in a state of clinical death. This phenomenon is confirmed by many patients, and the evidence is strikingly consistent when interviewing patients by different people at different ends of the earth.

Many women experienced this state during childbirth - as if temporarily leaving the body and observing themselves from the outside ...

Science knows that a violation, especially a cessation of the activity of the organs of vision and hearing, necessarily leads to a violation, respectively, of vision and hearing. How then can one see and hear when leaving the body?

Let's assume that this is some state of the dying brain. But how then to explain the immutability of statistics: only 7-10% of the total number of survivors of clinical death remember and can talk about the “out-of-body phenomenon” ...

Do you think this is proof of the postulate that “many are called, but few are chosen”?

I'm not ready to answer this yet. I just don't have it. But the scientist must first of all clearly pose questions to himself. Not afraid. Today it is obvious: the body cannot live without the soul. But whether biological death leads to the death of the soul is the question of questions.I first put it in front of me during a meeting with Vanga ...

Has your desire to study this phenomenon changed after a personal meeting with Vanga?

I honestly told Vanga about the research purpose of my visit. She didn't take offense at all, by the way. But the desire to study it after our meeting, I personally did not arise.

Are you just convinced that there are unexplored superpowers of the brain? Or did you still pose for yourself the question of the existence of an invisible reality?

I will answer you like this. Despite the fact that I have devoted my whole life to the study of the human brain, it never occurred to me to prove that its structure convinces of the origin of man from a mammal. Just up to a certain point, this problem was outside the scope of my scientific and human interests.

In other words, only the experience of suffering led you to some new understanding of reality?

Perhaps it is. But not suffering itself, but the fact that this experience completely went beyond the explanation of the world known to me. For example, I could in no way find an explanation for the fact that my husband, after that, appeared to me in a dream, asked for help in publishing the manuscript of his book, which I had not read and which I would not have known without his words. This was not the first such experience in my life (before my father's arrest in 1937, I also had a dream, then reflected in reality), but here for the first time I thought seriously about what was happening.

Of course, this new reality was frightening. But then my friend, priest, rector at Tsarskoye Selo Father Gennady helped me a lot ... By the way, he strongly advised me to talk less about this kind of experiences. Then I did not listen to this advice very much and even wrote about what happened in the book - just like I used to write about any other of my observations. But over time, we all change! I've taken this advice more seriously.

You know, my childhood fell on an extremely anti-religious period. In those days, for example, the magazine “Godless” was very popular, which told about how a dark grandmother, having cut her finger, ties it with cobwebs, and in these cases a smart granddaughter smears her finger with iodine. As you know, penicillin was later discovered in the web ...

And for a very long time, even when I had already started traveling abroad, I visited churches, perceiving them exclusively as a work of art. I really liked them from an artistic point of view. But I could not even imagine that it would ever become close to me in a different sense ...

And in this regard, how do you understand the gospel saying “no one will believe except by the will of the Creator”?

It is obvious that one cannot come to faith under anyone's influence, not only due to an emotional impulse, and even more so because of logically constructed conclusions. The spiritual path of a person is too thin matter. No examples are relevant here.

And how do you today, from the height of all received scientific titles and awards, perceive the phrase “in the beginning was the Word”?

At the beginning of everything lies thought. The thought of man. I am not talking about this in a denial of the materiality of the world and evolutionary theory, although a different view is closer to me personally. Obviously different. If there is a brain, then - whatever you want - everything really begins with a word.

Creator's words. So?

I will answer like this. It is well known that creativity is the highest way of nervous activity. Creating the visible from the invisible is always a great act, whether it be composing music or poetry...

In your opinion, is it possible to comprehend the process of creation of the world from this position?

The whole point is that a scientist under no circumstances has the right to reject facts on the grounds that they do not fit into his worldview. From my point of view, in this case it is wiser to rethink the position.

Natalia Bekhtereva is an outstanding neurophysiologist, the granddaughter of the legendary scientist Vladimir Bekhterev. Studying the secrets of the brain, in my own life I myself encountered an incredible ...

Many facts prove that that world exists.

She describes the details in detail in her book in a chapter under the characteristic title "Through the Looking Glass". According to her, after the death of her husband, which shocked her, she was in a special state in which a person “begins to hear, smell, see, feel what was previously closed to him and most often, if you don’t specifically support it, it will close for him later."

But what is so unusual that Academician Bekhtereva began to see, hear and feel? She began to hear the voice of her husband and, which is absolutely incredible, she saw the one who was already lying in the grave! Moreover, what is probably the most important thing, not only she was a witness to this, but also her secretary, whom Bekhtereva calls the initials R.V. First, in the living room, they clearly heard the steps of a walking person, but they did not see anyone. Then both of them began to have a feeling of someone's presence, one of the two who had already gone to another world.

And here is another, quite fantastic episode.

Behind the curtain on the window overlooking the courtyard-garden, there is a jar of water, - the academician dispassionately leads his story. - I stretch out my hand to her, slightly pushing the curtain, and absent-mindedly look down from my third floor ... Coming down from the curb, right on the melting snow, a strangely dressed man stands and - eye to eye - looks at me. I know him too well, but it just can't be. Never. I go to the kitchen, where R.V. should be right this minute. and, meeting her halfway, I ask you to look out the bedroom window.

For the first time in my life I saw the face of a living person, really white as a sheet, she continues. - It was the face of R.V., who was running towards me. "Natalya Petrovna! Yes, this is Ivan Ilyich (the late husband of N. Bekhtereva - V.M.) is standing there! He went towards the garage - you know, with this characteristic gait of his ... Didn't you recognize him ?! The fact of the matter is that I found out, but in the full sense of the word I did not believe my eyes ... And now, after many years, I cannot say that this did not happen. Was. But what?

- Does the soul “fly away”? I am a believer and I am convinced that there is a soul. But where is she? Probably all over the body. But from a scientific point of view, it is impossible to prove that the “soul flew off”.

Natalya Petrovna also described her strange dreams, which she also could not rationally explain in any way. One of them is related to her mother, who was ill and lived elsewhere. Once in a dream, a postman came to her, who brought a telegram: "Your mother has died, come to bury." In a dream, she comes to the village, sees a lot of people, a village cemetery, and for some reason the forgotten word “village council” buzzes in her head. After that, Natalya Petrovna woke up with a severe headache. She began to cry, began to tell her relatives that she urgently needed to go to her mother, she was dying. “You are a scientist, how can you believe in dreams!”, they object. She let herself be persuaded and left for the country. Soon I received a telegram. In it - everything is like in a dream! And then the village council was needed to get help.

It must be admitted that Natalya Petrovna spoke and wrote about all the incredible things that happened to her very carefully. Clearly fearing that his colleagues might ridicule him by accusing him of an "unscientific" approach. She was reluctant to use words like "soul". And the afterlife was called "Through the Looking Glass".

She was interested in many things. “I thought a lot about how genius can be explained,” she said. - How does creative insight happen, the process of creativity itself. In Steinbeck's story The Pearl, pearl divers say that in order to find large pearls, you need a special state of mind, some kind of insight. But where does it come from? There are two hypotheses regarding this. The first is that at the moment of insight, the brain works as a kind of receiver. In other words, information suddenly comes from outside, from space or from the fourth dimension. However, this cannot yet be proven. On the other hand, we can say that the brain itself creates ideal conditions for creativity, “illuminates”.

As a scientist occupied with the problems of the brain, N. Bekhtereva could not help but be interested in the “Vanga phenomenon”, which was much talked about in Soviet times. Although at first she did not believe in her extraordinary abilities, she thought that she used a whole staff of informers. But when she nevertheless went to Bulgaria and visited the fortune teller herself, she changed her mind. Vanga told her about such details of her life that the meeting literally shocked the academician.

N. Bekhtereva visited her again after the death of her husband, and Vanga told her: “I know, Natasha, that she suffered a lot ... She suffered a lot ... And the pain in her heart and soul has not subsided yet ... Do you want to see your dead husband?”

Natalya Petrovna did not believe then that this was possible. But when she returned back to Leningrad, the incredible, as described above, actually happened. For a long time she did not want to make public everything that happened to her, fearing ridicule from her scientific colleagues and accusations of charlatanism. She published her memoirs only shortly before her death.

Natalya Petrovna came to an incredible conclusion for a scientist: the future already exists today, and we can see it.

In her opinion, a person comes into contact with a higher mind or with God and receives the necessary information, but this is not given to everyone. Only a few, like her, manage to look into the Looking Glass.

At the same time, she was sure that such knowledge could be cruelly paid. In other times, she said, “I would have been burned like a witch… For example, I can answer a person to his thought. Very rarely. But you still can't do it. And in the Middle Ages, I would definitely have been killed for this!

She passed away in 2008. She devoted her whole life to studying the mysteries of the human brain. And I came to the conclusion that the brain is the greatest mystery of the universe, which hardly anyone will be able to solve. When she was asked the question whether there is still an other world or not, she answered that she did not know, but many facts say that that world exists.

So did her great grandfather. "There is no death, gentlemen!" - Natalia Bekhtereva, - Academician Vladimir Bekhterev once said.

Essence in the cycle of life and death