Jeffrey M. Schwartz

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For the American anthropologist, see Jeffrey H. Schwartz.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. is an American psychiatrist and researcher in the field of neuroplasticity and its application to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Schwartz received a bachelors with honors in philosophy and then pursued a career in the medical sciences. He is currently an associate research professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. Schwartz is also the overseas ambassador/patron for the UK's national Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder charity, OCD-UK.

Schwartz is a researcher in the field of self-directed neuroplasticity. He is the author of almost 100 scientific publications in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry, and several popular books.^[1] His major research interest over the past two decades has been brain imaging/functional neuroanatomy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), with a focus on the pathological mechanisms and psychological treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

For his book The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Schwartz collaborated with Sharon Begley.

[]Support for Intelligent Design

Schwartz has signed the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism ^[2] and is a proponent of mind/body dualism.^[1][3][4]

Schwartz appeared in the 2008 Film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that science should not be separated from religion.

When we see an elite, and it is an elite, an elite that controls essentially all the research money in science saying there is no such thing as moral truth, [that] science will not be related to religion.

If you believe in God, and you believe that there's an intrinsic order in the universe, and you believe that it's the role of science to try to pursue and understand better that order, you will be ostracized.^[5]

However, Schwartz's 1998 book A Return to Innocence plainly attributes the development of human cognitive neurology to biological evolution:

Because its wiring is quite similar to that of a chimpanzee (our closest nonhuman relative, who shares 98 percent of our genes), your human "vehicle" has goals, desires, and impulses of its own.

Over the course of the book, Schwartz describes how human beings can transcend their animal nature through spiritual disciplines, drawing extensively on Theravada Buddhist philosophy, while noting occasional parallels with Judeo-Christian moral teachings. Schwartz commends Buddha as the most relevant spiritual master for modern times, because Buddha's teachings are phrased in empirical terminology that doesn't strike modern people as religious.^[6] These statements suggest that Schwartz's views on intelligent design are not Biblical Creationist in nature, unlike most members of the organized Intelligent Design organizations such as Discovery Institute, but reflect Buddhist philosophies that emphasize the role of consciousness in directing evolution.

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