May 17, 2016. Los Angeles, CA.

My head still throbbing this morning from last night’s late arrival from Atlanta, I sought solace in the quietude of the Science Section of The New York Times. I was in Atlanta to cover the yearly convocation of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) , where inflammation, epigenetics and a new take on ribonucleic acid (RNA) was on display — so I was fully expecting to see something on new drug development, or PTSD, or the state of psychiatry, at the very least — with an Atlanta, GA dateline.

Instead, what I found was a fabulously antithetical article by Mr. George Johnson, entitled, “A Carnival of Consciousness,” about a meeting called the Science of Consciousness (SOC) that took place recently in Tucson, AZ. Like the APA, SOC addressed the mysteries of the mind.

Now, before I fully launch, it should be admitted that there really is no scientific explanation for consciousness. Faced with this vacuum, “hundreds of people gathered in Tucson where wild speculations and carnivalesque pseudoscience were juxtaposed with sober sessions like ‘Agency and Mental Causation’ and data-filled talks about probing conscious brain states with PET scans and EEGs.”

The author finds himself “late one afternoon, in ‘Vibrations, Scale, and Topology,’ where a musician from Tulsa, Okla., who called himself Timbre Wolf, was strumming a guitar and singing the ‘Bing’ song. ‘Bing’ is a word that Stuart Hameroff, the University of Arizona professor uses to describe the moment when the spark of consciousness lights up the brain. The audience seemed familiar enough with the words, and so they sang along in 4/4 time.”

While the folks in Tucson were engaged in song, I was in Atlanta trying to tease apart the subtleties of the most complex of slides on the Neurobiology of Depression from the world’s most famous psychiatric names like Nemeroff, Lieberman, Thase, Oquendo, and Schatzberg. Not to be outdone by the physicians at APA, the SOC symposium did have one speaker with a seemingly sensible starring role; that of Deepak Chopra, who lectured on the belief that human consciousness (through epigenetic feedback) directs the unfolding of human evolution. Wow, kids. Don’t try that at home.

Not for lack of good faith — but if APA and SOC did meet at one common crossroad — it was well summarized in Mr. Johnson’s last line: “For all of the effort, the goal of providing a compelling explanation — one so clear it would make your head go bing — seemed as remote as ever.” And the APA goes “Do-Do-Do-Wa-Wa-Wa.”