Default mode network as seat of our ego - The entropic brain hypothesis

I want to recommend Chapter 5 of Michael Pollan's recent book "How to change your mind," on the neuroscience of the psychedelic experience, as an excellent description of the functions of the default mode network (DMN) of our brain mentioned in the previous post. Pollan points to a 2014 article by Carhart-Harris et al. (open source, which I regret not having been aware of earlier) titled "The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs." The article presents evidence that the DMN is the core component of our self or ego. It's activity is reduced during the psychedelic experience, during meditation by experienced meditators, and in young children who have not yet formed strong egos, allowing the expression of a more open and naive primary kind of consciousness. This primary consciousness is more disorganized, has higher entropy. The DMN is a secondary sort of consciousness that normally inhibits this primary consciousness to enforce a stable ego and lower entropy. The Carhart-Harris et al. article is quite long and dense, so the authors try to condense their points down to a summary graphic that I though worth passing on to MindBlog readers (click to enlarge):

Legend - This schematic is intended to summarize much of what this paper has tried to communicate. It shows an “inverted u” relationship between entropy and cognition such that too high a value implies high flexibility but high disorder, whereas too low a value implies ordered but inflexible cognition. It is proposed that normal waking consciousness inhabits a position that is close to criticality but slightly sub-critical and primary states move brain activity and associated cognition toward a state of increased system entropy i.e., brain activity becomes more random and cognition becomes more flexible. It is proposed that primary states may actually be closer to criticality proper than secondary consciousness/normal waking consciousness.

Homo Prospectus - the brain as a time traveler - augmentation by A.I.?

Steve Johnson does an engaging article on the discovery and significance of the default mode network of our brains, which has been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts. This system recruits association cortices of the brain that are the last to become fully operational and our brain development continues through early adulthood, into our 20s. It is central to our internal mind wandering between past, present, and future.

...this aptitude for cognitive time travel, revealed by the discovery of the default network, may be the defining property of human intelligence. “What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”

Johnson discusses the augmentation of our future predicting by A.I. algorithms:

Accurate weather forecasting is merely one early triumph of software-based time travel: algorithms that allow us to peer into the future in ways that were impossible just a few decades ago...In machine-learning systems, algorithms can be trained to generate remarkably accurate predictions of future events by combing through vast repositories of data from past events. An algorithm might be trained to predict future mortgage defaults by analyzing thousands of home purchases and the financial profiles of the buyers, testing its hypotheses by tracking which of those buyers ultimately defaulted.

Machine-learning systems will also be immensely helpful when mulling decisions that potentially involve a large number of distinct options. Humans are remarkably adept at building imagined futures for a few competing timelines simultaneously: the one in which you take the new job, the one in which you turn it down. But our minds run up against a computational ceiling when they need to track dozens or hundreds of future trajectories. The prediction machines of A.I. do not have that limitation, which will make them tantalizingly adept at assisting with some meaningful subset of important life decisions in which there is rich training data and a high number of alternate futures to analyze.

These algorithms can help correct a critical flaw in the default network: Human beings are famously bad at thinking probabilistically. The pioneering cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky once joked that where probability is concerned, humans have three default settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen” and “maybe.” We are brilliant at floating imagined scenarios and evaluating how they might make us feel, were they to happen. But distinguishing between a 20 percent chance of something happening and a 40 percent chance doesn’t come naturally to us. Algorithms can help us compensate for that cognitive blind spot.

Whether you find the idea of augmenting the default network thrilling or terrifying, one thing should be clear: These tools are headed our way. In the coming decade, many of us will draw on the forecasts of machine learning to help us muddle through all kinds of life decisions: career changes, financial planning, hiring choices. These enhancements could well turn out to be the next leap forward in the evolution of Homo prospectus, allowing us to see into the future with more acuity — and with a more nuanced sense of probability — than we can do on our own. But even in that optimistic situation, the power embedded in these new algorithms will be extraordinary, which is why Ludwig and many other members of the A.I. community have begun arguing for the creation of open-source algorithms, not unlike the open protocols of the original internet and World Wide Web. Drawing on predictive algorithms to shape important personal or civic decisions will be challenging enough without the process’s potentially being compromised or subtly redirected by the dictates of advertisers. If you thought Russian troll farms were dangerous in our social-media feeds, imagine what will happen when they infiltrate our daydreams.

TODAY, IT SEEMS, mind-wandering is under attack from all sides. It’s a common complaint that our compulsive use of smartphones is destroying our ability to focus. But seen through the lens of Homo prospectus, ubiquitous computing poses a different kind of threat: Having a network-connected supercomputer in your pocket at all times gives you too much to focus on. It cuts into your mind-wandering time. The downtime between cognitively active tasks that once led to REST states can now be filled with Instagram, or Nasdaq updates, or podcasts. We have Twitter timelines instead of time travel. At the same time, a society-wide vogue for “mindfulness” encourages us to be in the moment, to think of nothing at all instead of letting our thoughts wander. Search YouTube, and there are hundreds of meditation videos teaching you how to stop your mind from doing what it does naturally. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.

According to Marcus Raichle at Washington University, it may not be too late to repair whatever damage we may have done to our prospective powers. A few early studies suggest that the neurons implicated in the default network have genetic profiles that are often associated with long-term brain plasticity, that most treasured of neural attributes. “The brain’s default-mode network appears to preserve the capacity for plasticity into adulthood,” he told me. Plasticity, of course, is just another way of saying that the network can learn new tricks. If these new studies pan out, our mind-wandering skills will not have been locked into place in our childhood. We can get better at daydreaming, if we give ourselves the time to do it.

What will happen to our own time-traveling powers as we come to rely more on the prediction machines of A.I.? The outcome may be terrifying, or liberating, or some strange hybrid of the two. Right now it seems inevitable that A.I. will transform our prospective powers in meaningful new ways, for better or for worse. But it would be nice to think that all the technology that helped us understand the default network in the first place also ended up pushing us back to our roots: giving our minds more time to wander, to slip the surly bonds of now, to be out of the moment.

The emotional dimension of pain.

Corder et al. examine the unpleasant percept that dominates the affective dimension of pain, which is coupled with but distinct from the motivational drive to engage protective behaviors that limit exposure to noxious stimuli:

Pain is an unpleasant experience. How the brain’s affective neural circuits attribute this aversive quality to nociceptive information remains unknown. By means of time-lapse in vivo calcium imaging and neural activity manipulation in freely behaving mice encountering noxious stimuli, we identified a distinct neural ensemble in the basolateral amygdala that encodes the negative affective valence of pain. Silencing this nociceptive ensemble alleviated pain affective-motivational behaviors without altering the detection of noxious stimuli, withdrawal reflexes, anxiety, or reward. Following peripheral nerve injury, innocuous stimuli activated this nociceptive ensemble to drive dysfunctional perceptual changes associated with neuropathic pain, including pain aversion to light touch (allodynia). These results identify the amygdalar representations of noxious stimuli that are functionally required for the negative affective qualities of acute and chronic pain perception.

Social networks explain academic success and failure.

Interesting work from Stadtfeld et al.:

Significance

Understanding the factors that explain academic failure and success of university students is a core interest of educational researchers, teachers, and managers. We demonstrate how the dynamic social networks that informally evolve between students can affect their academic performance. We closely followed the emergence of multiple social networks within a cohort of 226 undergraduate university students. They were strangers to each other on their first day at university, but developed densely knit social networks through time. We show that functional studying relationships tended to evolve from informal friendship relations. In a critical examination period after one year, these networks proved to be crucial: Socially isolated students had significantly lower examination grades and were more likely to drop out of university.

Abstract

Academic success of students has been explained with a variety of individual and socioeconomic factors. Social networks that informally emerge within student communities can have an additional effect on their achievement. However, this effect of social ties is difficult to measure and quantify, because social networks are multidimensional and dynamically evolving within the educational context. We repeatedly surveyed a cohort of 226 engineering undergraduates between their first day at university and a crucial examination at the end of the academic year. We investigate how social networks emerge between previously unacquainted students and how integration in these networks explains academic success. Our study measures multiple important dimensions of social ties between students: their positive interactions, friendships, and studying relations. By using statistical models for dynamic network data, we are able to investigate the processes of social network formation in the cohort. We find that friendship ties informally evolve into studying relationships over the academic year. This process is crucial, as studying together with others, in turn, has a strong impact on students’ success at the examination. The results are robust to individual differences in socioeconomic background factors and to various indirect measures of cognitive abilities, such as prior academic achievement and being perceived as smart by other students. The findings underline the importance of understanding social network dynamics in educational settings. They call for the creation of university environments promoting the development of positive relationships in pursuit of academic success.

How exercise protects memory.

Gretchen Reynolds points to an interesting study on a mouse model for Alzheimer's disease by Lourenco et al. showing that exercise causes an increase in the level of a small protein,irisin, that boosts synaptic plasticity and memory. Here is the technical abstract:

Defective brain hormonal signaling has been associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a disorder characterized by synapse and memory failure. Irisin is an exercise-induced myokine released on cleavage of the membrane-bound precursor protein fibronectin type III domain-containing protein 5 (FNDC5), also expressed in the hippocampus. Here we show that FNDC5/irisin levels are reduced in AD hippocampi and cerebrospinal fluid, and in experimental AD models. Knockdown of brain FNDC5/irisin impairs long-term potentiation and novel object recognition memory in mice. Conversely, boosting brain levels of FNDC5/irisin rescues synaptic plasticity and memory in AD mouse models. Peripheral overexpression of FNDC5/irisin rescues memory impairment, whereas blockade of either peripheral or brain FNDC5/irisin attenuates the neuroprotective actions of physical exercise on synaptic plasticity and memory in AD mice. By showing that FNDC5/irisin is an important mediator of the beneficial effects of exercise in AD models, our findings place FNDC5/irisin as a novel agent capable of opposing synapse failure and memory impairment in AD.

Can psychological scientists make the world a better place?

I want to point to the January 2019 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that addresses the question asked in the title of this post. It includes open source articles from more than 20 renowned psychological scientists. The issue is devoted to highlighting the ways that psychological scientists are currently applying their knowledge and skills to make the world a better place. From the introduction to the issue by Gruber et al.:

Psychological science is a multifaceted “hub science”, relevant and connected to many other disciplines. Rapid technological advances have enabled scientists to measure psychological phenomena from bodily responses invisible to the human eye through broad group behavior in large societies and then apply these findings to real-world issues to enhance human well-being and enact real-world behavioral and policy changes. Yet despite this remarkable progress, critical global issues face our society that call for immediate attention and action from psychological scientists. For example, within the past decade, we have seen escalating rates of serious and costly mental-health challenges in young adults and concurrent failure to provide mental-health treatment to those who need it the most; increases in self-reported loneliness and isolation that may compromise physical and mental health; high rates of sexual harassment and incivility toward women in the workplace and in science itself; political policy decisions that actively harm vulnerable children and their parents seeking refuge and a better life; seeming lack of concern for the welfare of many sentient nonhuman species; and rapid environmental degradation and climate change.

In the face of these and other ominous challenges, we argue that the time is ripe for our field to engage more deeply with societal issues. As a discipline that intersects with many other disciplines and with the public directly, psychological science is well positioned to contribute to cultivating a healthier, happier, and more sustainable world.

The passing of governance to corporate oligarchies serving the top 10%?

Three recent articles suggest to me a direction for our future. Bret Stephens' article describes the U.S. and Great Britain as rudderless and scarcely able to govern themselves, never mind shape world order. Several other Western democracies are facing crises in governance. Into this void steps Larry Fink (the chief of BlackRock and the world's biggest investor) whose annual letter lectures corporations that it is now their duty to look beyond profits, and contribute to society, serving a social purpose. The mega-corporations that dominate the U.S. and international capital flows are now a more stable buffer against chaos that any individual governments. BUT, ultimately who do these titans serve? Not the top 0.1%, but, as matthew stewart documents in excruciating detail, a more broad aristocracy, in America the top 9.9%. His article presents a mind-numbing list of the hundreds  of ways, both through legal and social customs, that the meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people's children.

The bacteria in your gut reveal your true age.

Galkin et al. find that the composition of our gut microbiota can approximately reveal our age. Some microbes become more abundant with aging while others decrease. Their abstract:

The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that both affects and is affected by its host status. Previous analyses of gut microflora revealed associations between specific microbes and host health and disease status, genotype and diet. Here, we developed a method of predicting the biological age of the host based on the microbiological profiles of gut microbiota using a curated dataset of 1,165 healthy individuals (1,663 microbiome samples). Our predictive model, a human microbiome clock, has an architecture of a deep neural network and achieves the accuracy of 3.94 years mean absolute error in cross-validation. The performance of the deep microbiome clock was also evaluated on several additional populations. We further introduce a platform for biological interpretation of individual microbial features used in age models, which relies on permutation feature importance and accumulated local effects. This approach has allowed us to define two lists of 95 intestinal biomarkers of human aging. We further show that this list can be reduced to 39 taxa that convey the most information on their host's aging. Overall, we show that (a) microbiological profiles can be used to predict human age; and (b) microbial features selected by models are age-related.

Upstairs/ Downstairs in our Brain - Who (or what) is running our show?

I want to pass on to MindBlog readers the lecture notes and slides from a talk I gave yesterday to "NOVA" - one of five senior learning programs hosted by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the Univ. of Texas. The talk has the title of this post. Here is a final summary slide from the talk:

Upstairs/Downstairs - Who or what is running our show?

I.  What is happening as our “I” acts and senses in the world?

  A. Our subjective “I” is predictions that are late to sensing and acting.

  B.  What we experience is our prediction of what is out there, or what the sensory consequence of our actions will be

  C. We can place our experienced body inside or outside our actual one.

  D. The “I” or self that we experience is an illusion, a virtual avatar in our brain.

II.  What behaviors are coming from upstairs and downstairs?

   A. Downstairs dominates rapid actions and judgements.

   B. Upstairs modulates this with slower reasoned responses.

   C. Reasons and emotions cause each other.

   D. Different personality types have different upstairs profiles.

III.  What is happening in paying attention versus mind wandering?

  A. Mind wandering is a transient loss of mental autonomy.

  B. Mind wandering and default mode networks stabilize our self model. 

  C. Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation.

  D. A wandering mind can be an unhappy mind.

IV. How might we observe and influence what our brains are doing?

  A.  Attention can be trained by meditation-like activities

  B.  Attention training, like training for other skills, causes brain changes. 

  C.  Attention training can allow more autonomy in choosing actions and emotions, making us more pilot than passenger of our ship.  

Why 2018 was the best year in human history.

Nicholas Kristof provides an antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding national and international politics in his Op-Ed piece, which is essentially an update of Pinker's recent book "Enlightenment Now," which I made the subject of several MindBlog posts starting last March 1st.  News media thrive on reporting wars, massacres and famines but are less focused on progress. Meanwhile, in the background, a lot of boring good stuff is happening which is ignored by the press. Clips on what happened in 2018:

 - Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time...another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time...an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time...86 percent of all 1-year-olds have been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis

-about 4 percent of children worldwide now die by the age of 5. That’s still horrifying, but it’s down from 19 percent in 1960 and 7 percent in 2003.

 -nine out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty is worsening or staying the same, when in fact the most important trend in the world is arguably a huge reduction in poverty... in the early 1980s, 44 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (defined as less than about $2 a person per day). Now, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, as adjusted for inflation.

Different meditation practices differently buffer from stress.

A group at the University of Wisconsin lead by my colleague Richard Davidson looks a the effects of different styles of brief contemplative practices:

Mindfulness practices are increasingly being utilized as a method for cultivating well-being. The term mindfulness is often used as an umbrella for a variety of different practices and many mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) contain multiple styles of practice. Despite the diversity of practices within MBIs, few studies have investigated whether constituent practices produce specific effects. We randomized 156 undergraduates to one of four brief practices: breath awareness, loving-kindness, gratitude, or to an attention control condition. We assessed practice effects on affect following brief training, and effects on affect and behavior after provocation with a stressor (i.e., Cold pressor test). Results indicate that gratitude training significantly improved positive affect compared to breath awareness (d = 0.58) and loving-kindness led to significantly greater reductions in implicit negative affect compared to the control condition (d = 0.59) immediately after brief practice. In spite of gains in positive affect, the gratitude group demonstrated increased reactivity to the stressor, reporting the CPT as significantly more aversive than the control condition (d = 0.46) and showing significantly greater increases in negative affect compared to the breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = 0.55, 0.60, 0.65, respectively). Greater gains in implicit positive affect following gratitude training predicted decreased post-stressor likability ratings of novel neutral faces compared to breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = - 0.39, -0.40, -0.33, respectively) as well. Moreover, the gratitude group was significantly less likely to donate time than the loving-kindness group in an ecologically valid opportunity to provide unrewarded support. These data suggest that different styles of contemplative practice may produce different effects in the context of brief, introductory practice and these differences may be heightened by stress. Implications for the study of contemplative practices are discussed.

Does meditation provide the only way to survive our brain-dissolving technological and political environment?

Both the last chapter of Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (abstracted in MindBlog here) and a recent Op-Ed piece by NYTimes tech columnist Farhad Manjoo suggest that the only means of maintaining sanity in the face of the overwhelmingly complex technological and political environment we face is to turn inwards -  away from all the input competing for our attention - and cultivate some insight into our internal body environments and mental practices that provide the basic foundation from which we proceed to experience our outer world...in other words, to practice some form of meditation.  For Harari meditation is:

...not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality…Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus…Over the millennia humans have developed hundreds of meditation techniques, which differ in their principles and effectiveness….but in principle meditation is any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind…Serious meditation demands a tremendous amount of discipline…If we are willing to make efforts to understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us…For a few more years or decades, we still have a choice. If we make the effort, we can still investigate who we really are. But if we want to make use of this opportunity, we had better do it now.

From Manjoo, meditation is:

...the subject of countless books, podcasts, conferences, a million-dollar app war. It’s extolled by C.E.O.s and entertainers and even taught in my kids’ elementary school (again, it’s Northern California). The fad is backed by reams of scientific research showing the benefits of mindfulness for your physical and mental health — how even short-term stints improve your attention span and your ability to focus, your memory, and other cognitive functions.

After decades of swimming in the frenetic digital waters, I found that my mind was often too scrambled to accommodate much focus. Sitting calmly, quietly and attempting to sharpen my thoughts on the present moment was excruciating...about four months ago, I brute-forced it: I made meditation part of my morning routine and made myself stick with it. I started with 10 minutes a day, then built up to 15, 20, then 30. Eventually, something clicked, and the benefits became noticeable, and then remarkable.

The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind...Now, even without app blockers, I can stay away from mindless online haunts without worrying that I’m missing out. I can better distinguish what’s important from what’s trivial, and I’m more gracious and empathetic with others online...I hope you give it a try. I hope everyone does. (The Times’s David Gelles has written a great guide for getting started.)

The illusion of multitasking improves performance.

From Srna et al.:

With technological advancements, the desire, ability, and often necessity to multitask are pervasive. Although multitasking refers to the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks, most activities that require active attention cannot actually be done simultaneously. Therefore, whether a certain activity is considered multitasking is often a matter of perception. This article demonstrates the malleability of what people perceive as multitasking, showing that the same activity may or may not be construed as multitasking. Importantly, although engaging in multiple tasks may diminish performance, we found that, holding the activity constant, the mere perception of multitasking in fact improves performance. Across 32 studies (30 of which had performance-based incentives) containing a total of 8,242 participants, we found that individuals who perceived an activity as multitasking were more engaged and consequently outperformed those who perceived that same activity as single tasking.

Real world demonstration of how tribes determine opinions.

From Satherley et al.:

Real-world tests of the impact of partisan cues on voters are scarce because they require assessing how citizens’ attitudes changed toward an issue from before to after it became politically divisive. During the 2015–2016 New Zealand flag referendums, the leader of the (center-right) National Party and then–Prime Minister, John Key, championed changing the flag—a move strongly contested by the (center-left) Labour Party. Accordingly, we measured New Zealanders’ attitudes toward changing the flag using national longitudinal panel data collected in 2013, before the change was proposed, and again in 2016 at the height of the debate (Ns = 6,793–6,806). Registered voters who supported the National Party were more likely to shift from opposing to supporting the flag change, whereas those who supported the Labour Party were more likely to shift from supporting to opposing the change. These data demonstrate the powerful impact of partisan cues on political attitudes in a real-world setting.

People use less information than they think to make up their minds

Klein and O'Brien (open access, ) note another of our psychological biases or shortcomings. We perform Manichean good or bad characterizations with much less information than we imagine:

Significance

People readily categorize things as good or bad, a welcome adaptation that enables action and reduces information overload. The present research reveals an unforeseen consequence: People do not fully appreciate this immediacy of judgment, instead assuming that they and others will consider more information before forming conclusions than they and others actually do. This discrepancy in perceived versus actual information use reveals a general psychological bias that bears particular relevance in today’s information age. Presumably, one hopes that easy access to abundant information fosters uniformly more-informed opinions and perspectives. The present research suggests mere access is not enough: Even after paying costs to acquire and share ever-more information, people then stop short and do not incorporate it into their judgments.

Abstract

A world where information is abundant promises unprecedented opportunities for information exchange. Seven studies suggest these opportunities work better in theory than in practice: People fail to anticipate how quickly minds change, believing that they and others will evaluate more evidence before making up their minds than they and others actually do. From evaluating peers, marriage prospects, and political candidates to evaluating novel foods, goods, and services, people consume far less information than expected before deeming things good or bad. Accordingly, people acquire and share too much information in impression-formation contexts: People overvalue long-term trials, overpay for decision aids, and overwork to impress others, neglecting the speed at which conclusions will form. In today’s information age, people may intuitively believe that exchanging ever-more information will foster better-informed opinions and perspectives—but much of this information may be lost on minds long made up.

Stimulating creativity with alternating current transcranial brain stimulation

So... the actual title of the article by Di Bernardi et al. is "Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations" - but as you see from the abstract, this translates to describing a brain stimulation procedure for inhibiting habitual thinking and associations to enhance novel thinking. The trick is to induce right temporal lobe alpha (10 HZ) oscillations. I'm sure DIY kits to perform the procedure will be on the market soon. Entering 'alpha wave stimulator' in google search points to crude alpha enhancing devices that work through electrodes attached to the ears, claimed to relieve pain, control anxiety, fight depression, or treat insomnia.

Significance

“Taking a less-traveled path” is often considered an effective approach to creativity (i.e., creative thinking calls for a break from habitual thinking and associations), yet little is known about its underlying neural mechanism. In a series of four independent experiments involving electrophysiological and brain stimulation methods we provide evidence that this process is mediated by the right temporal alpha oscillations. Alpha oscillations are known to represent a process of active inhibition to suppress irrelevant information, such as inhibiting distractions during visual search. Through monitoring the brain’s electrical activity during different creativity tasks and by stimulating the right temporal brain region at the alpha frequency we show that a similar process of active inhibition is also key to creative thinking.

Abstract

Creative cognition requires mental exploration of remotely connected concepts while suppressing dominant ones. Across four experiments using different samples of participants, we provide evidence that right temporal alpha oscillations play a crucial role in inhibiting habitual thinking modes, thereby paving the way for accessing more remote ideas. In the first experiment, participants completed the compound remote associate task (RAT) in three separate sessions: during right temporal alpha (10 Hz) transcranial alternating current brain stimulation (tACS), left temporal alpha tACS, and sham tACS. Participants performed better under right tACS only on RAT items in which two of the three words shared misleading semantic associations. In the second experiment, we measured EEG while the participants solved RAT items with or without shared misleading associations. We observed an increase in right temporal alpha power when participants correctly solved RAT items with misleading semantic associations. The third experiment demonstrated that while solving divergent thinking tasks participants came up with more remote ideas when stimulated by right temporal alpha tACS. In the fourth experiment, we found that participants showed higher right temporal alpha power when generating more remote uses for common objects. These studies altogether indicate that right temporal alpha oscillations may support creativity by acting as a neural mechanism for an active inhibition of obvious semantic associations.

The return of paganism

Continuing in the thread of the 12/28/18 post below, I want to point to a piece by Ross Douthat that suggests the return (or emergence) of a new spirituality that returns humans to their more fundamental roots of being a part of the natural order rather than its master. Some clips:

Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s...The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.

...the secularization story — in which modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science and reason...is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening”

...perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about a fragmentation and personalization of Christianity...in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs.

Might there be

...a genuinely post-Christian future for America...the return of a pagan religious conception...A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

...What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

...you can build a plausible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which takes two major forms...First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club...Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse.

These do not offer

...a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism..However, there are forms of modern paganism that do promise this help...the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise...To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America...the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." abstracted - Part 5 - Resilience

This is the fifth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part V. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part V Resilience - How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

Chapter 19 - Education - Change is the only constant

A baby born today will be thirtysomething in 2050…What kind of skills will he or she need in order to … navigate the maze of life?…At present, too many schools focus on cramming information into kids’ brains...the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. .. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information…to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world...Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity…In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again…From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working…accelerating change plus longer life spans will make this traditional model obsolete…you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty…To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life…you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you… you and your organic operating system… we are living in the era of hacking humans…if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them… Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms… If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Chapter 20 - Meaning - Life is not a story.

In almost all cases, when people ask about the meaning of life, they expect to be told a story…To give meaning to my life, a story …must give me some role to play….it must extend beyond my horizons…Given everything we know about the universe, it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of [any particular nation's nationalism]. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics, and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth… a good story .. need not be true… yet [can] provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions, and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer…How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real…in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite…We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Overlooking this difference has been a matter of survival for us. If you nevertheless want to know the difference, the place to start is with suffering. Because as noted earlier, the realest thing in the world is suffering…Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words. Be particularly careful about the following four words: “sacrifice,” “eternity,” “purity,” “redemption.”…always try to translate such hogwash into real terms: a soldier crying out in agony, a woman beaten and brutalized, a child shaking in fear…If you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is. The answer isn’t a story.

Chapter 21 - Meditation - Just observe.

Now that I have criticized so many stories, religions, and ideologies, it is only fair that I put myself in the firing line too, and explain how somebody so skeptical can still manage to wake up cheerful in the morning…When I began studying at university, I thought it would be the ideal place to find answers. But I was disappointed….my good friend Ron suggested that I try putting aside all the books and intellectual discussions for a few days and take a Vipassana meditation course. … after a year of patient nudging, in April 2000 he convinced me to go to a ten-day Vipassana retreat…The first thing I learned by observing my breath was that .. I knew almost nothing about my mind, and I had very little control over it…If you try to objectively observe your sensations, the first thing you’ll notice is how wild and impatient the mind is, and how difficult it is to focus it even on a relatively distinct sensation such as breath…I think I learned more about myself and about humans in general by observing my sensations for those ten days than I had learned in my whole life up to that point… I just had to observe reality as it is. Since that first course in 2000, I began meditating for two hours every day, and each year I take a long meditation retreat of a month or two. It is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality…Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus…Over the millennia humans have developed hundreds of meditation techniques, which differ in their principles and effectiveness….but in principle meditation is any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind…Serious meditation demands a tremendous amount of discipline…If we are willing to make efforts to understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us…For a few more years or decades, we still have a choice. If we make the effort, we can still investigate who we really are. But if we want to make use of this opportunity, we had better do it now.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." abstracted - Part 4 - Truth

This is the fourth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part IV. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part IV - Truth - If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the global predicament, you are on the right track. Global processes have become too complicated for any single person to understand. How then can you know the truth about the world, and avoid falling victim to propaganda and misinformation?

Chapter 15 - Ignorance - You know less than you think.

If you are left with the nagging feeling that this is too much, that you cannot process it all, you are absolutely right. No person can…In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual…[which] may well be a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of upper-class white men…behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis…woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age… We think we know a lot (“the knowledge illusion.”), even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own…People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged…The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets …also presidents and CEOs…great power inevitably distorts the truth. Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.

Chapter 16 - Justice - Our sense of justice might be out of date.

Like all our other senses, our sense of justice also has ancient evolutionary roots. Human morality was shaped over the course of millions of years of evolution to deal with the social and ethical dilemmas that cropped up in the lives of small hunter-gatherer bands…Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases…In previous eras …you weren’t responsible for the plight of people halfway across the world. If you made an effort to sympathize with your less fortunate neighbors, that was usually enough. But today major global debates about things such as climate change and artificial intelligence have an impact on everybody—whether in Tasmania, Hangzhou, or Baltimore—so we need to take into account all viewpoints. Yet how can anyone do that? How can anyone understand the web of relations among thousands of intersecting groups across the world?…we now suffer from global problems, without having a global community.

Chapter 17 - Post-Truth - Some fake news lasts forever.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree.…humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions…Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath)… For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible.you cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology… We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency…Instead of accepting fake news as the norm, we should recognize it is a far more difficult problem than we tend to assume, and we should strive even harder to distinguish reality from fiction.

Chapter 18 Science Fiction - The future is not what you see in movies.

…perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness. As a result, it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens…[Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is]… the most prophetic science-fiction book of the twentieth century…Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions…The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realize that they are already trapped inside a box—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix…According to the best scientific theories and the most up-to-date technological tools, the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell. Since your brain and your “self” are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." - abstracted - Part 3 - Despair and Hope

This is the third installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part III. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part III - Despair and Hope - Though the challenges are unprecedented, and though the disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

Chapter 10 Terrorism - Don’t panic.

Terrorists are masters of mind control. They kill very few people but nevertheless manage to terrify billions and rattle huge political structures such as the European Union or the United States… the terrorists hope that even though they can barely make a dent in the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact.that he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. …States find it difficult to withstand these provocations because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence…The success or failure of terrorism depends on us. If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists and then we overreact to our own fears, terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists and then we react in a balanced and cool way, terrorism will fail.

Chapter 11 War - Never underestimate human stupidity.

The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. … in a world now filling up with saber-rattling and bad vibes, perhaps our best guarantee of peace is that major powers aren’t familiar with recent examples of successful wars…even if it remains impossible to wage successful wars in the twenty-first century, that would not give us an absolute guarantee of peace. We should never underestimate human stupidity…One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world— and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole.

Chapter 12 Humility - You are not the center of the world.

Most people tend to believe they are the center of the world, and their culture is the linchpin of human history…I will leave it to readers around the world to puncture the hot-air balloons inflated by their own tribes…morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years…It makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality…the birth of bigotry…What about monotheism, then? Doesn’t Judaism at least deserve special praise for pioneering the belief in a single God, which was unparalleled anywhere else in the world…From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history…What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars…among all forms of humility, perhaps the most important is to have humility before God. Whenever they talk of God, humans all too often profess abject self-effacement, but then use the name of God to lord it over their brethren.

Chapter 13 God - Don’t take the name of God in vain.

Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver? The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly lawgiver is usually provided through some holy book. The book is full of the most trifling regulations but is nevertheless attributed to the cosmic mystery…unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades—who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name—the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

Chapter 14 Secularism - Acknowledge your shadow

…secularism is a very positive and active worldview, defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion. Unlike some sects that insist they have a monopoly over all wisdom and goodness, one of the chief characteristics of secular people is that they claim no such monopoly. … Rather, they view morality and wisdom as the natural legacy of all humans. ..secular people are comfortable with multiple, hybrid identities…The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief…secular movements repeatedly mutate into dogmatic creeds…Many capitalists keep repeating the mantra “free markets and economic growth” irrespective of realities on the ground, no matter what awful consequences occasionally result from modernization, industrialization, or privatization…Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naive reassurance that “it cannot happen to us.” Secular science has at least one big advantage over most traditional religions—namely, that it is not inherently terrified of its shadow, and it is in principle willing to admit its mistakes and blind spots.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")