"The Secret" scam....

More of Michael Schermer's terrific debunking of popular myth in the June Scientific American... Some clips:

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret--write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money.

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: "It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." No, it hasn't. "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients. "You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency."

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field...The brain's magnetic field... quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth's magnetic field ... which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews--along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans--had it coming.

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle--as you did when you discovered that James Frey's memoir was a million little lies--and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

Magical Thinking

Benedict Carey writes an engaging article in the Science section of today's New York Times (1/23/07) on why otherwise very rational people think that small ritual acts (always enter a room with the right foot) or signs (8 is my lucky number) improve or protect their prospects for an activity at hand.


Credit: New York Times

Cognitive psychologists believe "the appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior." Daniel Wegner at Harvard and collaborators have reported experiments showing how easy it is to induce magical thinking in well-educated young adults (young men and women instructed on how to use a voodoo doll suspected that they might have put a curse on a study partner who feigned a headache.)

An idea is that the brain has evolved to make snap judgments about causation, and will leap to conclusions well before logic can be applied. A relevant interpretation that connects all the dots can be preferred to a rational one. Wegner also suggests: "For people who are generally uncertain of their own abilities, or slow to act because of feelings of inadequacy, this kind of thinking can be an antidote, a needed activator."

A bull market in Brain Fitness and Calisthenics

I've been meaning for some time to do a post on the avalanche of interest in aging baby boomers not loosing their marbles any faster than absolutely necessary. An article on this topic by Pam Belluck in the 12/27/06 New York Times prompts me to go ahead. We are seeing a blooming of blogs and start up companies that focus on techniques for preserving memory and mental acuity (Posit Science, Third Age, Vigorous Mind, Rocky Mountain Learning, Sharp Brains, Happy Neuron, My Brain Trainer, to mention just a few). The Developing Intelligence blog has a post that discusses the Sharp Brains company, and the Sharp Brains Blog and the Brain Reserves Blog are among several that focus on brain fitness.

There are positive individual testimonials to the effectiveness of brain exercises, and a number of group studies are underway, but we are still absent any hard data that brain exercises bring a benefit that is distinguishable from general cardiovascular exercise. Belluck notes "human studies have generally relied on observations of people with healthier brains, but have not tested whether a particular behavior improves brain health. Perhaps people with healthier brains are more likely to do brain-stimulating activities, not the reverse." She also makes the point: "Certainly most brain-healthy recommendations are not considered bad for people. They do not have the potential risks of drugs or herbal supplements... The challenge we have is it’s going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?"

When the "why?" isn't crucial...

I would like to point you to a brief article by Sally Satel in today's New York Times Science Section that mirrors my own sentiments about the usefullness of insight into how a maladaptive behavior, such as drug use or over-eating, might have originally started. Insisting on finding a cause can be an excuse for not working on changing a maladaptive behavior, and knowing a cause doesn't guarantee that behavior will change. There is no convincing data for the effectiveness of insight therapy, while there is such data for cognitive therapy - which trains one to note what isn't working when it starts up and choose to do something else. Satel says "It is time to retire the myth that insight is a prerequisite for change," and she offers two case studies:

"...the grail-like search for insight can backfire when it becomes a way for patients to avoid the hard work of change. This was my experience with Joe, a 24-year-old heroin addict. At every session, Joe would talk about his childhood relationship with his father, seeking new clues for how it damaged him and drove him to heroin...When I tried to change the topic to on-the-job stresses, which he linked to heroin craving, he said he’d rather “do psychotherapy.” Joe was forestalling the need to make practical changes. The many-layered drama with his dad doubled as an excuse for using heroin, absolving him of the responsibility to quit. When I proposed that possibility to him, he said, “Maybe you’re right.” But nothing really changed. He died of an accidental overdose a few months later."

"..insight has no guaranteed relationship to change. A colleague of mine treated a 45-year-old woman, Joan, who came for therapy because she hated her chunky body. Joan firmly believed that once she discovered The Reason for her overeating she would stop...After a few months, Joan told my colleague that her father had developed cancer the year she went off to college...“You know, I never made the connection until now,” she announced triumphantly, “but I started overeating when he began to waste away. It’s like I was trying to nourish him through myself.” ..A poignant metaphor, yes, but months later she hasn’t lost a pound."

Guide to brain health

I received a review copy of "The Dana Guide to Brain Health", Dana Press, softcover, 2006, and I guess for the freebie should make a few comments. It is a cobbling together of contributions from 104 contributors edited by Floyd E. Bloom, M. Flint Beal, and David J. Kupfer, establishment guys with lots of credentials. William Saffire (Charman of the Dana Foundation board of directors), in the introduction says "This book is for amateurs like most of us...." It is meant to be the major home health reference on the brain. Such a source sounds good in principle, but I found myself wondering how a steelworker in Flint Michigan worried about his grandmother's stroke could deal with such a flatly written and encyclopedic effort. The huge volumne is not very approachable or friendly. He or she would pick up this book wanting perhaps to know something about strokes, and have to read though a long table of contents to figure out that Part IV "Conditions of the Brain and Nervous System", section 18, parts C59 and C60 had the word stroke in their title. To be
fair, if you get as far as the third section "How to read this book" it says you should look in the index. There you find a very long list of computer generated page and cross references. I'm not sure how our steelworker would deal with all the choices presented. If he or she simply entered "stroke" in google or any other search engine more engaging information from authoritative sources would immediately appear.

On the positive side, Part IV does present a comprehensive list of the basic ways that brains can go wrong, and this alone makes such a compliation worthwhile. Perhaps the volume will prove useful to those who are not computer literate (so why include a CD that adds absolutely nothing to the book?). I guess my take is that is book is a noble idea that in practice is not going to yield the benefits that its sponsors hope for.

For Some People, Intimacy Is Toxic.... The Virtues of Solitude

I've been wanting to mention a brief essay in the Nov. 21 New York Times by psychotherapist Richard Friedman that describes a patient who defied the "article of faith among psychotherapists that an intimate human relationship is good for you." A software engineer pushed by family and constant therapy to be more social, he finally became engaged to a woman, and then came to Friedman after a suicide attempt, treatment for depression, and breaking from the engagement. Friedman found "He wasn't depressed or unhappy at all. He enjoyed his work as a software engineer immensely, and he was obviously successful at it. It was just that human relationships were not that important to him; in fact, he found them stressful...intimacy, it seems, is not for everyone."

It hardly seems surprising that genetic and developmental reasons lead some humans to be extremely affiliative, while others can be quite content in solitude. "Solitude: a return to the self" is in fact the title of an excellent and thoughtful book by Oxford University psychiatrist Anthony Storr. He notes: "The current emphasis upon intimate interpersonal relationships as the touchstone of health and happiness is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Earlier generations would not have rated human relationships so highly; believing, perhaps that the daily round, the common task, should furnish all we need to ask.." Storr provides an interesting history of how mental health came to be equated with the quality and quality of social relationships, and argues that a preference for solitude, self understanding, and a more muted social presence can be also be compatible with robust mental health.

The power of positive (and negative) thinking about aging

I wanted to pass on the graphic below, from the Thursday, Oct. 5 New York Times, taken from an article on robustness versus frailty in aging. Why do some people still run marathons at age 72 while others show 'frailty', i.e. weakness, exhaustion, weight loss, and loss of muscle mass and strength? In many cases undetected cardiovascular constrictions may be at issue. What is striking is the apparent correlation of positive attitude towards aging with staying healthy longer. This is yet another example of how anticipation can shape an actual outcome. (see the 9/11/06 post on construals and performance).


Click to enlarge picture.

On average, people who had a positive view of aging when 50 years old lived an average of 7.6 years longer than those who did not hold those views. It is, of course, hard to sort out what is cause and what is effect. Some of the people with negative attitude about aging may have intuited or know that they were not really physically well. Still it seems likely that self image and stereotypes of aging play a strong role.

From the article: "When Becca Levy, a psychologist at Yale University, began her work on stereotypes’ effects on the elderly, she was not sure that she would find anything of note. ... a method that was used to study the effects of stereotypes about race and gender. The idea is to flash provocative words too quickly for people to be aware they read them. In her first study, Dr. Levy tested the memories of 90 healthy older people. Then she flashed positive words about aging like “guidance,” “wise,” “alert,” “sage” and “learned” and tested them again. Their memories were better and they even walked faster. Next, she flashed negative words like “dementia,” “decline,” “senile,” “confused” and “decrepit.” This time, her subjects’ memories were worse, and their walking paces slowed.

Thomas Hess, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University, came to a similar conclusion about the effects of stereotypes of aging. In his studies, older people did significantly worse on memory tests if they were first told something that would bring to mind aging stereotypes. It could be as simple as saying the study was on how aging affects learning and memory. They did better on memory tests if Dr. Hess first told them something positive, like saying that there was not much of a decline in memory with age."

The central role of "construals" in determining performance... the power of brief interventions

An article in the Sept. 1 issue of Science by Cohen et. al. and an accompanying review by Wilson point out the power of brief interventions that change people's self- and social perceptions.

You may... "undoubtedly be surprised, or even incredulous, that a 15-min intervention can reduce the racial achievement gap by 40%. Yet this is precisely what Cohen et al. .... African American seventh graders randomly assigned to write about their most important values achieved significantly better end-of-semester grades than students in a control condition. How can this be?"

The table shows the result of this and similar studies (click to enlarge):

Legend: Brief theory-based interventions improved students' grades [increases shown on a four-point grade point average (GPA) scale, relative to randomly assigned control groups].

"The Cohen et al. study and the others like it illustrate key social psychological points. It can be as important to change people's "construals"--their interpretations of the social world and their place in it--as it is to change the objective environment....It is not clear why students in the Cohen et al. sample failed to self-affirm on their own. Why did it take an in-class essay to focus students' attention on values that were important to them? Issues of generalizability also arise, such as whether the self-affirmation exercise would work with younger age groups."

"Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind" and "The Wayward Mind"

These are the titles of two books by British psychologist Guy Claxton (see his website) that I think have received less attention than they should. (It seems to me that British and American psychologists group themselves in quite separate worlds.) The first book is a lucid presentation of experimental work that supports Herbert Spenser's dictum "The determined effort causes perversion of thought." Claxton uses the term "undermind" to describe intuitive and integrative processes normally beyond the range of, and can be inhibited by, our focused awareness. Extremes of being indiscriminately intuitive or insisting on lots of high-quality information can block results.

The term 'undermind' hasn't caught on, and the subsequent excellent book "The Wayward Mind" reverts to using the term "unconscious". "The Wayward Mind" is a history of human attempts to explain the unconscious mind, from ancient descriptions of the 'underworld' to the theories of modern neuroscience.

Here are (clipped and truncated) some lines from pp 348-352 of "Wayward Mind" that I like:
"What we call our ‘self’ is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients: cans, needs, dos, oughts, thinks….these constructions hold out an overwhelming temptation: to assume that the “I” is the same in all of them… so that instead of having an intricate web of things that make me Me, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, to which they all refer…the attempt to keep this fiction going, to ‘hold it together’ can become quite tiring and bothersome… If “I” am essentially reasonable, if I imagine that my zones of control – over my own feelings for example – are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to ‘control myself.’ If I have decided that who I am is clever, attractive, athletic, stable, creating the hub of “I” locks everything together and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can’t enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of ME….All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude toward the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.. "

A ‘Senior Moment’ or a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

This is the title of an article by Benedict Carey in last Tuesday's NYTimes science section (7/18/06) pointing to work reported in the current issue of the journal Social Cognition. Men and women in late middle age (48-62) underperformed on a standard memory test when told they were part of a study including people over age 70. Inclusion with an older group — an indirect reminder of the link between age and memory slippage — was enough to affect their scores, especially for those who were most concerned about getting older. Scores were higher when participants were told they were competing with a group in their 20's. The findings “show how negative images of aging on TV, in other media and in jokes reinforce negative stereotypes that can affect performance even before people reach retirement age."

This self-undermining is a stereotype effect, of the sort that has been documented it in many groups. Other studies have shown that women perform less well on math exams after reading that men tend to perform better on them. Similarly, white men perform less well when they are told that they are competing in math against Asian students.

The Self-Help Scam

In the May 2006 issue of The Scientific American, Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic magazine) argues that the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM), an $8.5 billion-a-year business, is a scam. He notes the recent book by Steve Salerno, "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005). There is an eighteen week rule: the most likely customer for a self help book is someone who bought a similar book with the preceeding eighteen months. If the books worked, why would one need further help? A bulletproof shield surrounds SHAM: if your life does not get better, it is your fault, your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help. SHAM books market a clever mix of victimization and empowerment. We are all victims of our demonic "inner children" replaying negative tapes. Redemption comes from empowering yourself with the new "life script" offered by the self-help book or by the masters themselves at prices ranging from $500 to $6,000. Unfortunately there is no evidence that any of the SHAM techniques is better than doing something else or even doing nothing (the same problem is faced by virtually all therapies).

Our inability to cope with what empirical data show us to be true about how our minds work...

I get frustrated when I try to reconcile what I know from empirical data to be true about my self (see the "I-Illusion" essay on this website) with the common sense feeling of agency and responsibility that we are share.

Our commonsense conceptions of ourselves have co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, along with their physiological, homeostatic, neuroendocrine, and limbic emotional correlates. This whole complex (us, that is) can be upset by facing what it can come to know to be true about the impersonal physical processes that actually run our show, finding it impossible to integrate its 'illusory' self image.

Here is a clip, and then its more extended context from the piece by Metzinger on edge.org..his response to the question "What is your dangerous idea." He frames it much better than I can. First the clip:

"I think that the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will actually has nothing much to do with the actual options on the table. It has to do with the perfectly sensible intuition that our presently obvious answer will not only be emotionally disturbing, but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models."

Then the more extended quotation:

"For middle-sized objects at 37° like the human brain and the human body, determinism is obviously true. The next state of the physical universe is always determined by the previous state. And given a certain brain-state plus an environment you could never have acted otherwise. A surprisingly large majority of experts in the free-will debate today accept this obvious fact...."

"Yes, you are a physically determined system. But this is not a big problem, because, under certain conditions, we may still continue to say that you are "free": all that matters is that your actions are caused by the right kinds of brain processes and that they originate in you. A physically determined system can well be sensitive to reasons and to rational arguments, to moral considerations, to questions of value and ethics, as long as all of this is appropriately wired into its brain. You can be rational, and you can be moral, as long as your brain is physically determined in the right way. You like this basic idea: physical determinism is compatible with being a free agent. You endorse a materialist philosophy of freedom as well. An intellectually honest person open to empirical data, you simply believe that something along these lines must be true.

Now you try to feel that it is true. You try to consciously experience the fact that at any given moment of your life, you could not have acted otherwise. You try to experience the fact that even your thoughts, however rational and moral, are predetermined — by something unconscious, by something you can not see. And in doing so, you start fooling around with the conscious self-model Mother Nature evolved for you with so much care and precision over millions of years: You are scratching at the user-surface of your own brain, tweaking the mouse-pointer, introspectively trying to penetrate into the operating system, attempting to make the invisible visible. You are challenging the integrity of your phenomenal self by trying to integrate your new beliefs, the neuroscientific image of man, with your most intimate, inner way of experiencing yourself. How does it feel?

I think that the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will actually has nothing much to do with the actual options on the table. It has to do with the perfectly sensible intuition that our presently obvious answer will not only be emotionally disturbing, but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models.

Or our societies: The robust conscious experience of free will also is a social institution, because the attribution of accountability, responsibility, etc. are the decisive building blocks for modern, open societies. And the currently obvious answer might be interpreted by many as having clearly anti-democratic implications: Making a complex society work implies controlling the behavior of millions of people; if individual human beings can control their own behavior to a much lesser degree than we have thought in the past, if bottom-up doesn't work, then it becomes tempting to control it top-down, by the state. And this is the second way in which enlightenment could devour its own children. Yes, free will truly is a dangerous question, but for different reasons than most people think. "

Why do I feel an urge to write about how the mind works?

Here are some sentences trying to put together one motivation for doing this website and this mindblog....and for working up a new web essay titled "The Merging of Minds" .. about how our behavior is unconsciously regulated by our social brains and their mirroring systems. If you are reading this (I don't know whether the counter on this web page is monitoring real people or web-bots) I would appreciate any expression of interest or disinterest. (Feedback on this site is very close to zero).

Some sentences of rationale:

Understanding the biological processes that generate our sense of self, our feelings, and our connections to each other reveals engines of our behavior previously hidden from our awareness. Using our awareness to get partial glimpses of those engines in action can loosen their iron grip and let our behaviors be more spontaneous and competent.

I want to cast this material in the form of the lived body understanding it as it plays out in our self observed moment-to-moment behavior, in addition to the more conventional expository writing. This was the point of the self exercises in my "Biology of Mind" book.

Power of Prayer? - apparently not.....

Herbert Benson, author of "The Relaxation Response" and researcher into medical effects of relaxation and prayer has just published, along his coworkers, some long awaited results: "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer." (American Heart Journal Volume 151, Issue 4 , April 2006, Pages 934-942). There have been several claims that prayer by strangers could ameliorate the condition of patients at another location (by unknown or supernatural forces...). Over ten studies have been carried out over the past six years with mixed results, but none approached the scientific rigor and number of patients involved in Benson's study.

Not only were there no effects of prayer, but the third of the subjects who were informed that they were being prayed for did slightly worse (performance anxiety?)

What We Know May Not Change Us

Here are a few quotations from a very sane and brief essay by Barry Smith, a philosopher at the University of London.

"Human beings, like everything else, are part of the natural world...we need many different kinds of theories at different levels of description to account for everything there is.

Theories at these different levels may not be reduced one to another. What matters is that they be compatible with one another. The astronomy Newton gave us was a triumph over supernaturalism because it united the mechanics of the sub-lunary world with an account of the heavenly bodies. In a similar way, biology allowed us to advance from a time when we saw life in terms of an elan vital. Today, the biggest challenge is to explain our powers of thinking and imagination, our abilities to represent and report our thoughts: the very means by which we engage in scientific theorising. The final triumph of the natural sciences over supernaturalism will be an account of nature of conscious experience. The cognitive and brain sciences have done much to make that project clearer but we are still a long way from a fully satisfying theory.

But even if we succeed in producing a theory of human thought and reason, of perception, of conscious mental life, compatible with other theories of the natural and biological world, will we relinquish our cherished commonsense conceptions of ourselves as human beings, as selves who know ourselves best, who deliberate and decide freely on what to do and how to live? There is much evidence that we won't. As humans we conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents. We see ourselves and others as acting on our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, and has having responsibility for much that we do and all that we say. And even as results in neuroscience begin to show how much more automated, routinised and pre-conscious much of our behaviour is, we are remain unable to let go of the self-beliefs that govern our day to day rationalisings and dealings with others.

We are perhaps incapable of treating others as mere machines, even if that turns out to be what we are. The self-conceptions we have are firmly in place and sustained in spite of our best findings, and it may be a fact about human beings that it will always be so. We are curious and interested in neuroscientists findings and we wonder at them and about their applications to ourselves, but as the great naturalistic philosopher David Hume knew, nature is too strong in us, and it will not let us give up our cherished and familiar ways of thinking for long. Hume knew that however curious an idea and vision of ourselves we entertained in our study, or in the lab, when we returned to the world to dine, make merry with our friends our most natural beliefs and habits returned and banished our stranger thoughts and doubts."

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

Our Wayward Minds

I want to mention the excellent book by Guy Claxton - THE WAYWARD MIND, an intimate history of the unconscious (2005, Little, Brown, and Co. Great Britan, published only in Britan but available from amazon.com with 4-6 week wait) Here is a excerpt and paraphrase from pp. 348-252:

"What we call our "self " is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients, cans, needs, dos, oughts, thinks - the temptation is to assume that the "I" is the same in all of them - so that instead of having an intricate web of things that make me ME, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, to which they all refer - the attempt to keep this fiction going, to "hold it together" can become quite tiring and bothersome - If "I" am essentially reasonable, if I imagine that my zones of control - over my own feelings for example - are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to "control myself." If I have decided that who I am is clever, attractive, athletic, stable, creating the hub of "I" locks everything together and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can not enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of ME - (note: he gives Ramachandran's two foot nose pinocchio demonstration as evidence of plasticity of self image), and then says - The orthodox sense of self is thrown by such experiences, and tends to suffer a sense-of-humour failure. It sees all waywardness as an affront, and tends to become earnest or myopic in response. In a nutshell: it is bad enough to have a nightmare, without your rattled sense of self telling you that you are going mad. Weird experience can never be just funny (as the pinocchio effect can be) or matter-of fact (as possession is in Bali), or transiently inconvenvient (as a bad dream is), or wonderful (as a mystical experience can be), or just mysterious (as a premonition might be). For the locked-up self they have to be denied, explained or dealt with. All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude toward the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.

So what use is knowing all this brain stuff??

Sure, the material I am posting in this blog is fascinating in its own right. Yet, I think all of us studying how the brain works have either an explicit or hidden agenda: We want understanding how the mind/body works to help with understanding not only our personal internal conflicts but also those of the cultural or political organisms of which we are cellular parts. Inappropriate conditioning - enabled by our ancient limbic repertoires (see The Beast Within essay on my website) - contribute to both personal and social conflicts. Wouldn't it be great if more fundamentalists of every stripe could be coaxed into examining the origins and mechanisms of how their minds work. The hope would be that insight into the nature of their anger at outsider infidels might soften their fanaticism...