Tech Nation - Antonio Damasio: The Conscious Brain

Nice podcast discussion with Antonio Damasio about his recent book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.

Antonio Damasio: The Conscious Brain

Author and USC professor

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Tech Nation

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with USC professor and author, Antonio Damasio, about the connection between mind and body and how they related to consciousness.

42 minutes, 19.5mb, recorded 2010-12-14

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Tags: NPR, Antonio Dimasio, The Conscious Brain, Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn, books, Psychology, mind, consciousness, Self, Self Comes to Mind, Constructing the Conscious Brain, emotion, body, neuroscience

Jay Earley, Ph.D. - Introduction to Internal Family Systems Therapy

Internal Family Systems Therapy (developed by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.) is the best "parts" work system I have ever used - and I have used all of the major ones. This brief introduction comes from Jay Earley, one of the most experienced IFS therapist, and one who is also versed in integral theory. This is a very simplified explanation - if you are interested in the model, I suggests getting the IFS book, which is down to the right on the sidebar in the list of recommended books.

Introduction to Internal Family Systems Therapy

Jay Earley, Ph.D.

IFS recognizes that our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. You can think of them as little people inside us. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, goals, and motivations. For example, one part of you might be trying to lose weight and another part might want to eat whatever you want. We all have parts like the inner critic, the abandoned child, the pleaser, the angry part, and the loving caretaker.

IFS has discovered that every part has a positive intent for you, no matter how problematic it might be. For example, Sally has a part that says, “You couldn’t be successful at your ambitious goals. Who do you think you are?” This is hurtful to her and prevents her from taking action in her life, but when she got to know this part in her IFS work, she discovered that it was actually afraid she would be punished if she stuck her neck out, and it was trying to stop her to protect her from that pain.

Bill has a part that is judgmental and competitive with other people in a way that is not consistent with his true values. However, when he really got to know that part, he discovered that it was just trying to help him feel OK about himself in the only way it knew—by feeling superior to others.

When you understand that a part has a positive intent, it doesn’t mean that you give the part power. Sally doesn’t want her part to prevent her from taking action, and Bill doesn’t want his part to act out being judgmental and competitive. However, using the IFS approach, Sally and Bill can relate to their parts with understanding and appreciation while taking the steps to heal them.

This is fundamentally different from the way we ordinarily relate to our parts. Usually when we become aware of a part, the first thing we do is evaluate it. Is it good or bad for us? If we decide it is good, we embrace it and give it power. We act from it. If we decide it is bad, we try to suppress it or get rid of it. We tell it to go away. However, this doesn’t work. You can’t get rid of a part. You can only push it into your unconscious, where it will continue to affect you, but without your awareness.

In IFS, we do something altogether different and radical. We welcome all our parts with curiosity and compassion. We seek to understand them and appreciate their efforts to help us. But we don’t lose sight of the ways they may be causing us problems. We develop a relationship of caring and trust with each part, and then take the steps to release it from its burdens so it can function in a healthy way.

In the IFS system, there are three kinds of parts—managers, firefighters, and exiles. The managers are the parts you usually encounter first in exploring yourself. Their job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of the exiles. Exiles are young child parts that hold pain from the past. (We won’t get into firefighters in this short article.)

For example, John has one manager that tries to know everything about any organization he might work with and tries to do everything perfectly. This is an incredible burden for him and prevents him from being light and flexible in his work life. When he started to get to know this manager part, he learned that it was trying to protect him from being betrayed by people or projects he might put his heart and soul into. He also realized he had another manager part that was very suspicious of people. This part checks out people carefully to see how they might betray him. Both managers are trying to protect John from feeling the pain of an exile part that felt hurt and betrayed, first by his mother and then by an organization he was part of.

In the above example Sally had a manager that said, “Who do you think you are?” Although this message has prevented Sally from taking action as she would like, it is trying to protect Sally from the pain of an exile part who felt crushed and frightened of punishment. It turned out that Sally (and other children) had been punished by the nuns in her Catholic school whenever they became too visible, so from then on in her life, she had a terrified exile and a manager who tried to keep Sally invisible.

Parts take on extreme roles because of what has happened to them in the past. Exiles take on pain and burdens from what they experienced as children (or occasionally at other times). Managers take on extreme roles in order to protect you from the pain of the exiles. IFS has a method of understanding and working with these parts to release the burdens and heal the system, so you can function in healthy ways.

The IFS Process

So how does IFS work with our parts? IFS recognizes that each of us has a spiritual center, a true Self. This Self is naturally compassionate and curious about people, and especially about our own parts. The Self wants to connect with each part and get to know and understand it. The Self feels compassion for the pain of the exiles and also for the burdens that drives managers to act the way they do. The Self is also able to stay calm and centered despite the sometimes intense emotions that parts may feel. Everyone has a Self, even though in some people it may not be very accessible because of the activity of their parts.

The Self is the agent of healing. An IFS therapist or group leader will coach the Self in how to relate to the parts, but the Self is the true leader of the internal system and can love and heal each part, so you become free of extreme feelings and behavior.

Let’s see how this works. First you learn how to access the Self. IFS has many powerful ways of doing this which are beyond the scope of this article. Then the Self chooses a part to focus on. For example, let’s look at Bill, who has a manager who is judgmental and competitive. This is distressing to Bill because he believes in being cooperative and accepting and inclusive, and to some extent he is. But his judgmental manager crops up in situations where Bill feels threatened. Often he is able to hide his judgments, but sometimes they leak out and cause problems. This makes Bill considerably less effective at work and causes dissension in his organization. It also causes problems for him in his marriage.

Bill started out his IFS work by focusing on his Judgmental Part. It wasn’t easy for Bill to be in Self because he felt disgusted with the Judgmental Part for not living up to his ideals. (The Self is never disgusted, so this was really another part of Bill.) However, with some work, he was able to be genuinely in his Self so that he was interested in getting to know the Judgmental Part. He found out that it was trying to protect an exile part of him that felt inadequate. Bill had a learning problem as a child even though he is quite intelligent and competent. So there was a young part of Bill that had felt inadequate in school. The Judgmental Part was trying to compensate for this inadequacy by feeling superior to people. Bill had grown up in a judgmental, competitive home, so that was the primary model this part knew. As Bill got to know the Judgmental Part, he understood why this part acted as it did and appreciated its efforts in his behalf.

He then contacted the exile who felt inadequate. He listened and watched as this part showed him scenes from his childhood where it felt ashamed and inadequate because of his learning problem, and he responded to it with compassion and caring. The young part responded to this by feeling cherished and valuable for the first time. Up until then, it had been hidden away in Bill’s unconscious, which only increased its feelings of worthlessness. With love from Bill’s Self and direction from the IFS therapist, this young part was able to release the burden of inadequacy it had been carrying and feel good about itself. This allowed the Judgmental manager to relax. It no longer needed to judge people to compensate for the exile’s pain. This enabled Bill to respond to people in the way he always wanted, with openness and acceptance and a cooperative attitude. As a result, he became much more effective at work, and he stopped having so many fights with his wife.

This description of the IFS process is greatly simplified for the sake of this short article. It doesn’t discuss many of the difficulties and complexities that IFS knows how to handle in order to accomplish this kind of healing.

Tags: Jay Earley, Introduction, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Richard Schwartz, parts, parts work, subpersonalities, Psychology, therapy, self concept, psychotherapy, IFS, managers, firefighters, exiles, child parts, inner child, protectors, perfectionist, inner critic

Mark Vernon - Physics as Metaphysics: Is there a quantum spirituality?

Writing at Big Questions Online, Mark Vernon takes a critical look at the often well-intentioned but misguided attempts at combing quantum mechanics (QM) and spirituality. In general, whenever someone starts using QM to justify, explicate, or contextualize their spiritual ideas, you can be pretty sure they are cherry-picking ideas to support their own.

The field of QM is so vast and so often in flux that it's easy to pick and choose ideas and theories to support almost any nonsense. One of the most obvious examples of this was the recent "debate" between Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on one side and Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on the other (part of ABC Nightline's Faceoff series, scroll down to the middle of the page). When confronted with actual science by actual scientists, the spiritual gurus did not fare very well.

Vernon is a little less harsh in this article. He is more gentle in his critique, but he names the elephant in the room in most of these "theories" - the anthropic principle - positing human beings and human consciousness as the pinnacle or center of the universe.

Physics as Metaphysics

Is there a quantum spirituality?

photo: US Dept. of Energy: Researcher Matthew Pelt tries to connect the quantum dots

By Mark Vernon

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The notion that physics might have metaphysical meaning for human beings is as old as physics itself. The ancient Greeks did natural philosophy not only to learn about the cosmos but also to learn about how to live. In the medieval period, Aristotelian cosmology became tightly knitted to Scholastic theology, causing all sorts of problems for Galileo when he sought to challenge it. And then in the early modern period, Newton’s discoveries led again to a reassessment of what it is to be human.

No less a figure than Einstein invoked the notion of what he called “cosmic religion.” It would need to ask questions such as whether the universe is friendly towards us, the father of the new physics mused. And the new physics of the 20th century has certainly sparked a welter of speculation as to whether the meaning of life is written in the stars. Are the laws of nature transcendent, like God? Does the fine-tuning of various fundamental constants suggest that the universe is right for life, for us? Is consciousness as basic a feature of things as quarks and photons?

One of the best-known of the spiritualities that draw on the new physics was penned by physicist Fritjof Capra. In his 1975 popular classic The Tao of Physics, Capra relates a vision he had in the summer of 1969, as he stared out to sea from the beach of Santa Cruz. “I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance,” he recalls.

His use of the metaphor of dance stemmed from his knowledge of particle physics, which views matter as a flux of possibilities across fields of energy. Capra draws on one of the most familiar features of quantum physics: the wave-particle duality of light. If you look at it one way, light behaves like a wave. If you look at it another way, it is a particle. The suggestion is that we, as observers, are deeply implicated in the nature of things.

Further, as nothing can be both a wave and a particle, it looks as if the fundamental nature of things lies behind what the Templeton Prize-winning physicist Bernard d’Espagnat has called a “veiled reality.” This conclusion seems to offer a way of synthesizing the activities of science and religion. As Capra continues: “Physicists explore levels of matter, mystics levels of mind. What their explorations have in common is that these levels, in both cases, lie beyond ordinary sense perception.”

Such ideas are very influential, and similar moves have been made by other figures seeking new kinds of spirituality, like the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently, the Episcopal priest Matthew Fox. You can get a feel for it from this remark by Teilhard: “The history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.”

Thus, today, it’s quite common to hear people reflecting that we’re all somehow connected, just like entangled quantum particles that remain linked even when they’re on opposites sides of the universe. Alternatively, there’s the growing spread of what has been called the Universe Story. It tells of the emergence of energy from the Big Bang, that formed the fundamental particles, that coalesced into the elements, that became the building block of the stars, that formed alongside planets, that are nurseries for life, which itself became consciousness, and then self-aware: in us, the universe can contemplate itself.

But does this quantum spirituality add up? A number of critiques can be pressed upon it.

For one thing, the science is itself in a state of flux. The Big Bang, out of which this extraordinary experiment in emergence supposedly came, is itself now widely questioned by physicists. Some prefer a “mega-verse” that continuously gives rise to new universes in a process called “eternal inflation.” Others are asking whether there’s actually a multiverse: our universe is just the one out of the billions that is right for life, and so the fine-tuning is a delusion. Others again, are developing models of a pulsating universe, which expands over the eons to such an extent that it “forgets” its size, and so begins all over again.

Quantum spiritualities can accommodate such developments in science — though a skeptic might observe that they are so nebulous, they could accommodate just about anything. Then again, Capra himself notes, “Many concepts we hold today will be replaced by a different set of concepts tomorrow.” But he believes the basic link between the scientific and the mystical traditions will be enforced, not diminished.

Another critique is the pick-and-choose nature of this cosmic religiosity. It emerges in a number of ways. For example, the entangled nature of quantum particles is highlighted to celebrate our connectedness. What’s overlooked, though, is the colossally destructive power of quantum particles too — the fissions and fusions that release the energy of nuclear weapons. The quantum world is not just a strange place. It’s a hideously violent place too. Spiritualities are wary of celebrating that.

The pickiness appears in other ways. Some advocates, for example, don’t actually like references to fine-tuning and human consciousness because they perceive it as anthropocentric — what is sometimes referred to as the anthropic principle, that the cosmos was designed for us. The fear is that this is a way of reasserting human dominance in the order of things, by declaring we are at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being. Ecologically-minded quantum writers seek something different: a spirituality that puts the planet first. They tend to overlook the priority some interpretations of quantum mechanics give to us observers.

The conclusion would seem to be that quantum spiritualities represent an à la carte approach to the science. It’s not the science that’s driving the spirituality. Rather, the science is being mined and filleted for metaphors and analogies that fit a pre-existing sense of things.

In fact, it ever was thus. When Isaac Newton published his theory of gravity, it was not just astronomers that grew excited. Astrologers did too. The theory of gravity said that bodies act upon one another over vast distances. Isn’t this precisely what astrology had long taught — that the alignment of the planets and stars at your birth had a profound and subtle effect upon the body of the newborn? Newton was saying no such thing, of course. But that did not stop quacks running away with his ideas.

So, I don’t think there is such a thing as quantum spirituality. Instead, there’s quantum physics and then there’s the human quest for meaning. They are distinct enterprises. We gain from both. But throwing them together in a spiritual mash-up creates a spiritual mess. Spirituality is not only about the search for rich metaphors. It’s also about the struggle for fine discernment. The bizarre world of quantum physics teaches us that, too: it is extraordinarily hard to interpret the cosmos aright.

Mark Vernon is a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest. His books include The Meaning of Friendship, Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living, and After Atheism: Science, Religion, and the Meaning of Life. He blogs at www.markvernon.com.

Tags: physics, Science, Spirituality, New Age, Mark Vernon, Big Questions Online, Physics as Metaphysics, Is there a quantum spirituality?, Quantum mechanics, quantum physics, Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Einstein, wave-particle duality, light, energy, Bernard d’Espagnat, multiverse, anthropic principle

Chonyi Taylor - Just noting what happened

ENOUGH!
A Buddhist Approach to Finding
Release from Addictive Patterns
by Chönyi Taylor
more...

Dharma Quote of the Week

The object of meditation this time is emotion. In other words, we specifically focus on the emotions that arise from our feelings of good, bad, and indifferent. In the first of the equanimity meditations, we made the choice to not follow up these emotions. This time we make the choice to meditate on them. We might choose to meditate on sensations and feelings that arise in our immediate, present environment. We might also choose to meditate on an event or person that sets off strong sensations, feelings, and emotions.

Let's say you choose to base your meditation on an event such as a family argument. This time you contemplate an aspect of that event and try to disentangle the sensations, feelings, and emotions. Sensations are what you feel with your body. Feelings assess whether that sensation is nice, nasty, or neutral. What emotions arise as a result of those sensations and feelings?

As we now know, equanimity means not getting caught in further exaggerations: "Oh, I am so bad because this is what I did," "Look how good I am," "How could anyone love someone like me?" and so on. In this meditation, equanimity means not judging whether we are good or bad people, but just noting what happened.

--from Enough! A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release from Addictive Patterns by Chonyi Taylor, published by Snow Lion Publications

Enough! • Now at 5O% off
(Good through January 14th, 2011).

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Coming soon...
Watch for the latest edition of
Snow Lion: The Buddhist Magazine and Catalog
in the next few weeks.

Tags: just noting what happened, Enough!, A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release from Addictive Patterns, Chonyi Taylor, Snow Lion Publications, Buddhism, equanimity, books, dharma, addictions

Rick Hanson - How Did Humans Evolve the Most Loving Brain on Earth?

Interesting new post from Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom.

How Did Humans Evolve the Most Loving Brain on Earth?

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. - Neuropsychologist, Author

Posted: December 31, 2010

How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet?

Humans are the most sociable species on earth -- for better and for worse.

On the one hand, we have the greatest capacities for empathy, communication, friendship, romance, complex social structures and altruism. On the other, we have the greatest capacities for shaming, emotional cruelty, sadism, envy, jealousy, discrimination and other forms of dehumanization, and wholesale slaughter of our fellow humans.

In other words, to paraphrase a Native American teaching, a wolf of love and a wolf of hate live in the heart of every person.

Many factors shape each of these two wolves, including biological evolution, culture, economics and personal history. Here, I'd like to comment on key elements of the neural substrate of bonding and love; in my next blog, I'll write about the evolution of aggression and hate; then, in the next several posts, we'll explore the crucial skill of empathy, perhaps the premier way to feed the wolf of love.

These are complex subjects, so I hope you'll forgive some simplifications. Here we go.

Evolution

The growing length of childhood coevolved with the enlarging of the brain -- which has tripled in size over the last 2.5 million years, since the time of the first tool-making hominids -- and with the development of complex bonding, which includes friendship, romantic love, parent-child attachment and loyalty to a group.

As the brain grew bigger, childhood needed to be longer, because there was so much to learn. To keep a vulnerable child alive for many years, we evolved strong bonds between parents and children, between mates, within extended family groups and within bands as a whole -- all in order to sustain "the village it takes to raise a child." Bands with better teamwork outcompeted other bands for scarce resources; because breeding occurred primarily within bands, genes for bonding, cooperation, and altruism proliferated within the human genome.

Numerous physical, social and psychological factors promote bonding. Let's focus on physical factors and then drill down further to examine two chemicals inside your brain: dopamine and oxytocin. Both are neurotransmitters, and oxytocin also functions as a hormone when it acts outside the nervous system.

(By the way, dopamine and oxytocin, like many other biochemical factors, are present in other mammals, too, but as with most things human, their effects are much more nuanced and elaborated with us.)

Dopamine

It's an error to reduce love to chemicals, since so many other factors are at work in the brain and mind as well, so let's hold this material in perspective.

That said, it appears that when people are in love, among other neurological activities, two parts of their brain really get activated. They are called the caudate nucleus and the tegmentum. The caudate is a reward center of the brain, and the tegmentum is a region of the brain stem that sends dopamine to it; dopamine tracks how rewarding something is.

In effect, being in love rewards the pleasure centers in your brain, which then crave whatever it was that was so rewarding -- in other words, your beloved. Those reward centers are the same ones that light up when people win the lottery. Or use cocaine.

And being rejected in love activates a part of the brain called the insula, which is the same region that lights up when we are in physical pain.

So we are doubly motivated to hold fast to the object of our love: feel the pleasure, and avoid the pain.

Interestingly, when people are in lust, rather than in love, different systems of the brain get activated, notably the hypothalamus and the amygdala.

The hypothalamus regulates drives like hunger and thirst. Interestingly, the word in the early records of the teachings of the Buddha that is translated in English as the "desire" or "attachment" or "clinging" that is the root of suffering has the fundamental meaning of "thirst," so it's pretty likely that the hypothalamus is involved in much of the clinging that leads to suffering.

The amygdala handles emotional reactivity, and both it and the hypothalamus are involved in arousal of the organism and readiness for action. (While these systems are centrally involved in fight-or-flight responses to stress, they also get engaged in energizing activities that feel emotionally positive, like cheering on your favorite team, or fantasizing about your sweetheart.)

These neural components may shed some light on the subjective experience of being in love, which commonly feels softer, more "Aaaaahh, how sweet!" than the "Rawwrh, gotta have it!" intensity of lust.

That said, dopamine -- increased in love -- triggers testosterone production, which is a major factor in the sex drive of both men and women.

So, in short, we fall in love, among other neural circuits and psychological complexities, the same reward chemicals involved in drug addiction lead us to crave our beloved and want sex with him or her. Sorry to be mechanistic here, but you get the idea.

The intended result, in the evolutionary playbook, is, of course, babies.

Then what?

Oxytocin

Oxytocin promotes bonding between mothers and children, and between mates so that they work together to keep those kids alive.

For example, in women, oxytocin triggers the let-down reflex in nursing and is involved in that blissful, oceanic feeling of peace and comfort and love experienced by many women while breastfeeding.

It also seems to be part of the female response to stress (more than in men, as women have much more oxytocin than men do), in part by encouraging what Shelley Taylor at UCLA has termed "tend-and-befriend" behaviors in women when they are stressed.

(Of course, men, too, will often reach out to others and be friendly during tough times, whether it's crunch quarter at the office, or somewhere in a dusty war -- another example of how there are many pathways in the brain to important functional results.)

The experiential qualities of oxytocin are pleasurable feelings of relaxation and rightness, so it is an internal reward for all bonding behaviors -- not just with mates.

Oxytocin encourages sociability; for example, when oxytocin capabilities are knocked out in laboratory mice, their relationships with other mice are very disturbed.

And oxytocin dampens the stress response of the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis -- besides having functional benefits, this is another pathway for rewarding, and thus encouraging, bonding behaviors.

What triggers this warm-and-fuzzy, let's-get-together-now chemical?

Oxytocin is released in both women and men:

• When nipples are stimulated (such as through nursing)
• During orgasm, promoting the afterglow of warm affection (and a tendency, sometimes annoying in a partner, to fall asleep!)
• During extended physical contact, especially "skin-to-skin" contact (e.g., cuddling children, long hugs with friends, teens forming packs on the couch, lovers caressing after sex)
• When moving together harmoniously, like dancing
• When there are warm feelings of rapport or love; a strong sense of compassion and kindness probably entails releases of oxytocin, though I haven't seen a study on that specific subject (a great Ph.D. dissertation for someone).
• Probably during devotional experiences, such as in prayer, or while in the presence of certain kinds of spiritual teachers

Probably, oxytocin can also be released just by imagining -- the more vividly, the better -- the activities just mentioned, particularly when combined with warm feelings.

Of course, dopamine and oxytocin are just two of the many factors at work in our relationships. For example, philosophical values or ideals of universal compassion, such as in the major religions of the world, can also influence a person's behavior greatly, with or without any measurable surges of dopamine or oxytocin.

Nonetheless, appreciating the biochemical factors at work on Valentine's Day, or at any time we experience bonding or love, can help a person not get quite so swept away by the ups and downs of relationships.

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For more on the topic of love, see part three of my book (chapters 8, 9 and 10), "Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom."

Tags: Altruism, Biological Evolution, Buddha's Brain, Child Attachment, Evolution, Family Groups, Friendship, Romance, Love, Neuroscience, Parents And Children, Rick Hanson, Social Structures, Huffington Post, How Did Humans Evolve the Most Loving Brain on Earth?, neuropsychologist, Psychology, brain, community, interconnected

Marcelo Gleiser - Cosmos Vs. Chaos: Entropic Thoughts For A New Year

Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who blogs at NPR's 13.7 Culture & Cosmos group blog, had some thoughts on the end of 2010 and the arrival of another new year.

He muses that part of the impact of order in nature is to create disorder - which feels to me like the scared dance of chaos.

Cosmos Vs. Chaos: Entropic Thoughts For A New Year

December 29, 2010

by Marcelo Gleiser

It happened again, the year is gone. Some people think it went too fast, others too slow. We want to learn from our experiences, avoid repeating mistakes, start doing new things, activities that now make sense, that recently became compelling: a new diet, a new exercise routine, a new blog, volunteering for a charity. We do it to make the new year new, to separate it from the one that just finished, to make it better and, in the process, to make us better.

We are busy creatures, trying to undo Nature’s trend of undoing. We try to bring order, some measure of control over the disorder around us: cosmos vs. chaos.

Einstein once remarked that of all theories of physics, the one that he’d bet wouldn’t change is thermodynamics, the study of heat and disorder. Gravity could change, quantum mechanics could change, even electromagnetism could change. But the three laws of thermodynamics are here to stay. The first says that energy is conserved. The second that in an isolated system (that is, a system that doesn’t exchange energy with the outside world) disorder — entropy — grows. The third says that you can’t cool a system below “absolute zero,” equivalent to a temperature of -459 Fahrenheit. The reason is simple: you can’t take away heat from something that has none left.

Some may object to what I said above, that Nature has a trend of undoing things, and state that Nature creates all the time, that we see order all around us, in flowers, rainbows and, of course, in ourselves. Well, we are not a closed system: we, animals, plants, Earth, exchange energy with each other and, most importantly, with the Sun. We are solar creatures, completely dependent on the Sun for our existence. In fact, the balance is precarious; if the Sun misbehaved a bit we would be toast.

But none of this stuff today.

A lot of the order that we see around us, from hurricanes to waves to storms — like the one that just hit the Northeast (see Adam’s post yesterday), living creatures big and small, all can be interpreted as mechanisms to increase disorder, degrading the luminous energy coming from the Sun into amorphous infrared radiation that the Earth exhales back into outer space. The second law says it in a gloomy way: the structures that exist now are bumps on the road to an inexorable end where disorder will triumph. This kind of thinking made many people unhappy in the 19^th Century. It still does today. Maybe it’s time to shift our focus. Something else to do this coming year.

To obsess over what will happen in the “end” is to miss what goes on now. What matters is what happens in between.

We and all other living creatures (and hurricanes and rainbows) are the spurts of order that makes it all worthwhile. The wonder is in the richness of forms that do emerge en route to disorder, the holdouts against decay. To look at things from a one-dimensional perspective tends to lead us into a very distorted view of reality. This is John Keats’ (mistaken) critique of science that we find in his poem Lamia, that reason “unweaves the rainbow,” that to use it to interpret reality is to take away the beauty of Nature. I’d say that to use only reason is the mistake: There are many ways to look at a rainbow and they all serve different purposes and have useful meanings.

A rainbow should be looked at in many different ways. Only then can we admire it fully.

Science and scientists are not one-dimensional; we don’t look at Nature only from the light of reason. To look for explanations behind natural phenomena is, as Einstein remarked, akin to an act of devotion. To admire a flower or a rainbow for their beauty and to then try to understand their function within a wider natural landscape only adds to their beauty. In this sense, there is a religious aspect to science. The word religion comes from “religare,” to reconnect. But reconnect with what? Different choices for different religions. As we search for the laws that describe Nature and its creations, we are reconnecting with our cosmic origins. This is my religare, the one that brings meaning to my life and makes me whole. If life is a struggle against the inexorable mandate of entropic growth and material decay, it is even more beautiful for it.

Why not call it sacred?

Tags: Theoretical physics, Marcelo Gleiser, NPR, 13.7: Culture & Cosmos, cosmology, chaos, change, perspectives, Nature, Cosmos Vs. Chaos, Entropic Thoughts, New Year, creation, decay, destruction, science

Davie Yoon - Do Infants Possess a Social Sense (Encoding others beliefs)?

This is an interesting research review from Davie Yoon's blog at the International Cognition and Culture Institute. There have been several studies now that examine how infants are quite capable of making sense of their environment - including forming a cognitive sense their primary caregivers - and this one seems to add to that material.

The study (full text is not available without subscription):

The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others’ Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults

1. Ágnes Melinda Kovács
2. Ernő Téglás
3. Ansgar Denis Endress

Abstract

Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others’ beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others’ beliefs have similar effects as the participants’ own beliefs. In a visual object detection task, participants’ beliefs and the beliefs of an agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults’ reaction times and infants’ looking times. Moreover, the agent’s beliefs influenced participants’ behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent’s beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent’s behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a “social sense” crucial to human societies.

Full Citation:

Kovács, A.M., Téglás, E. & Endress, A.D. (2010, Dec. 24). The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults. Science, Vol. 330 no. 6012: pp. 1830-1834. DOI: 10.1126/science.1190792

Yoon asks some good questions about the study. Are these skills innate (I suspect they are, a way to enhance survival chances)? Is this human-specific or does it reflect other primates or other mammals?

The Smurf Studies: Do 7-month-olds have a "social sense"?
Davie Yoon's blog
Written by Davie Yoon
Sunday, 02 January 2011

In a recent paper published in Science (24 December 2010) and entitled "The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults", Agnes Kovacs, Ernő Téglás and Ansgar Denis Endress describe a striking set of experiments that may be of interest to ICCI readers, and suggest that "adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others' beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others' beliefs have similar effects as the participants' own beliefs." These studies add to a growing empirical literature that started with Onishi & Baillargeon 2005 and that stands in contrast to Sally-Ann-style studies of false belief (which rely on explicit predictions and suggest it is not until 4 or 5 years that children can represent others' false beliefs). Here, the authors argue that representing an agent's beliefs -- even when they contradict one's own beliefs, and even when that agent has left the scene -- is triggered automatically and may be part of an innate human "social sense."

Around the Department of Cognitive Science at the CEU in Budapest, these are known as the "smurf studies", because they all feature a movie with different smurf dolls and a ball that rolls behind an occluder (Figure 1).

The main measure for adults is reaction time after the occluder is removed to detect whether a ball is present or absent. Adults are faster to detect the presence of a ball behind the occluder if they and the smurf both know that the ball should be there (true belief) AND are similarly quick even if they know the ball shouldn't be there, but the smurf would think it is there (false belief). To get at the question of whether this sort of automatic agent-belief representation is present early in life and thus possibly innate or at the very least pre-verbal, they tested 7 month olds in a looking time version of the adult experiments. Here they measure looking time to the "no ball" outcome, as an index of how surprised the infant is that the ball isn't there. The infant looks longer if the ball should have been there and is gone vs. the ball shouldn't be there, and it's gone (true belief). They ALSO look longer if they knew the ball shouldn't be there, but the smurf would think it IS there (false belief)! Hence both adults and infants are influenced in their expectations not only by their own beliefs but also by that of another agent, even if the agents beliefs are in contradiction with their own!

Aside from the relevancy of these results for theory of mind and social cognitive developmental research -- these studies also raise questions about the nature of mental representation and memory across delay. It's also a very meaty paper. There is a lot of data and a lot of ideas and hypotheses to sink our teeth into.

As Gyorgi would say, three cheers to Kovacs and colleagues for this exciting contribution to the social cognition literature. I only hope that they and others in the field will next address the crucial question of how it all happens!

Further questions - Davie Yoon
03-January-2011

How human-specific is the phenomenon described in this paper? What about other primates, or human-domesticated species, or other non-human-domesticated yet socially-complex species?

Is the capacity for such mental representation innate? Will we find the same pattern of behavior in newborn infants? What about dark-reared or otherwise visually naive animals?

Does an individual's aptitude with this class of mental representations have important consequences for other aspects of that individual's social life? For example, would the quality of these representations predict an individual's language learning trajectory, risk for social communicative disorders like autism, etc?

How are neural representations for unseen objects that do and do not match reality stored differently? How about one's own versus another's representation of such objects?

Are the behavioral effects described in the paper consistent with an advantage or interference effect? This would require comparing the current results with measures of adult RT and infant looking time to a baseline event in which no information about the presence of absence of the ball is provided prior to the inclusion event.

Apologies to the authors if I have missed discussion of these issues that appear already in the manuscript or supplementary materials.

Tags: Davie Yoon, Do Infants Possess a Social Sense, Encoding others beliefs, The Smurf Studies, Do 7-month-olds have a "social sense"?, Psychology, social sense, interpersonal, intersubjective, International Cognition and Culture Institute, The Social Sense, Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs, Human, Infants, Adults, Agnes Kovacs, Ernő Téglás, Ansgar Denis Endress, theory of mind, social cognitive developmental research

Buddhist Geeks 202: Resolving the Questions that Drive Us (Ken McLeod)

Part two of this cool discussion.

BG 202: Resolving the Questions that Drive Us

03. Jan, 2011 by Ken McLeod

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Episode Description:

We finish up our discussion with meditation teacher Ken McLeod, touching on a number of fascinating and challenging topics. Ken speaks about the distinction between answering the questions that drive us, as opposed to simply understanding “what the Buddha taught.” He gets into where he thinks these questions originate from, and also what meaning evolution might have on our personal stories.

Ken also explores the dichotomy of lay vs. monastic practice, and uses several analogies to illustrate the differences, including from both music and sports. Vincent and Ken get into a spirited and philosophical discussion as to how far one can take these analogies and how accurate they might be when applied to Buddhist theory and practice.

This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Pragmatic Buddhism.

Episode Links:

• Unfettered Mind
• Buddhism Without Beliefs
• Malcolm Gladwell
• Khyungpo Naljor

Transcript

One of the senior Western teachers of Buddhism today, Ken McLeod is also one of the most innovative. Known for his ability to explain difficult and subtle teachings, "he distills the nature and purpose of Buddhism to make it accessible for any newcomer without dumbing it down." (Phil Catalfo, Yoga Journal, July 2001).

Website: Unfettered Mind
Twitter: @KenMcLeod

Tags: Buddhist Geeks, 202, Resolving the Questions that Drive Us, Ken McLeod, Vince Horn, Buddhism, dharma, theory, practice, Pragmatic Buddhism, Unfettered Mind, Western Buddhism

Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier - Your Brain, Behind the Scenes

Cool podcast - new to me. Hope you like it, too.

Your Brain, Behind the Scenes

Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier discusses the incredible calculations your brain performs to plan even the simplest movements.

Ways of listening to the audio podcast

1. Listen to the podcast in your browser

2. Download the podcast (right-click or option-click)

By Jai Ranganathan

(istockphoto)

We are always moving objects around us. But the seemingly trivial movements that we do all day (reaching for a coffee cup, grabbing a jacket, etc.) turn out to be not so simple after all. Behind the scenes and totally unconsciously, our brains are doing a tremendous number of calculations to establish where we are in relation to objects around us. As our vision is such a primary sense, it had been thought that the first step for the brain in planning movement was to create a visually based map of objects around us — even for objects that we couldn’t see. But in a recent paper in the journal Neuron, Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier demonstrates that the method the brain uses for planning movement completely changes depending on the sensory inputs that the brain has to work with. Dr. Bernier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses how the brain plans even very simple movements — like pointing — totally differently depending on whether the lights are on or off.

Tags: Pierre-Michel Bernier, Your Brain, Behind the Scenes, Jai Ranganathan, Curiouser and Curiouser Podcast, Psychology, brain, cognition, mind, consciousness, planning, movement, calculations, unconscious activity, Neuron

Jonah Lehrer - In Defense Of Therapy

Cool to see a neuroscientist defend therapy. Following this article from Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex), I want to include a look inside the battle over the DSM-5, also from Wired. We may never know the truth about what happened behind the scenes in the making of the new DSM because of a very restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign. That sucks.

If the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have their way, we will not be doing psychotherapy, but rather, clinical neuroscience.

In Defense Of Therapy

• By Jonah Lehrer
• December 14, 2010
  

Every period has its signature disorder. We live in the age of depression. Consider a brand new survey published in the Archives of General Psychiatry: Between 1998 and 2007, the percentage of Americans being treated for depression increased by more than 20 percent. Other studies estimate that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of American adults will suffer from depression at some point in their life.

Obviously, there’s a dizzying array of forces that are causing this rise. Part of the problem is diagnosis, as people like Alan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield have argued. Thanks to changes in the DSM, Horwitz and Wakefield insist that we’ve medicalized sadness, transforming anguish and its synonyms into a clinical condition.

But it remains unknown how much of the rise in depression is accounted for by changes in diagnosis. And I think it’s extremely important to not dismiss the likely possibility that, even if our diagnostic standards had remained constant, there would still be a rise in depression. In other words, is there something about the way we live now that’s making us extremely sad? Are these intensely negative feelings symptoms of a larger societal problem?

Hard questions, no easy answers. In this blog post, I’d like to focus instead on one of the troubling data points in this most recent medical survey, which is that the percentage of depressed subjects seeking psychotherapy for treatment declined dramatically between 1998 and 2007, from 53.6 percent to 43.1 percent. (This drop has come despite the fact that a majority of subjects say talk therapy is their preferred method of treatment.) Needless to say, pills have taken the place of therapists, as more than 75 percent of depressed patients are now treated with anti-depressants, which has led to a dramatic increase in medical spending on the disorder. Between 1998 and 2007, Medicare expenditures for depression increased from $0.52 billion (1998) to $2.25 billion (2007).

When anti-depressants work, they are little blue miracles. But they often don’t work, at least not at rates higher significantly higher than placebo. (Plus, they often have unpleasant side-effects, which leads more than half of patients to stop taking the drugs shortly after the worst symptoms disappear. And then they relapse, which helps explain why patients treated with SSRI’s have relapse rates above 75 percent.) And that’s why I’m troubled by the drop in talk therapy, as most studies demonstrate that the most effective treatment for depression is pharmaceuticals coupled with a good therapist. Furthermore, many different kinds of therapy can be effective. For instance, the same December 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry also contains an interesting comparative study of anti-depressants and mindfulness therapy in preventing relapse following an extended depressive episode. The mindfulness therapy itself was straightforward stuff, if time intensive. There were eight weekly group sessions of two hours each, plus a full day retreat and optional one-hour meditation classes. The subjects learned how to reflect upon their feelings with “non-judgmental awareness” and “self-compassion.” They were urged to apply their new mindfulness skills to everyday life challenges.

The results were stark. Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of anti-depressants, and then stopped taking the drugs, relapsed about 70 percent of the time. The chemical boost was temporary. However, during the 18 month follow-up period, only 28 percent of patients in mindfulness therapy slipped back into the mental illness.

What we often forget is that therapy alters the chemical brain, just like a pill. It’s easy to dismiss words as airy nothings and talk therapy as mere talk. Sitting on a couch can seem like such an antiquated form of treatment. But the right kind of talk can fix our broken mind, helping us escape from the recursive loop of stress and negative emotion that’s making us depressed. Changing our thoughts is never easy and, in severe cases, might seem virtually impossible. We live busy lives and therapy requires hours of work and constant practice; our cortex can be so damn stubborn. But the data is clear: If we are seeking a long-lasting cure for depression, then it’s typically our most effective treatment.

There has been more bickering and more behind-the-scenes chaos in the making of the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) than most people who have not been following this process could ever imagine.

In my opinion, as a distant observer of the whole process over the past many years, I see two issues at the heart of most of the conflict - money and worldview.

The money issues comes from Big Pharma and their influence over the process - the more things that they can find a way to pathologize and treat with drugs, the more money they make. For example, depression is no more responsive to Paxil than to sugar pills (and has a lot of serious side effects) but its maker brings in billions of dollars a year. So why not treat sadness as part of the depression spectrum, then they can throw some pills at it and make even more money (except that withdrawal from Paxil is sometimes life-threatening).

They other issue in my perspective is worldviews - the mechanistic, objective view that sees mind and consciousness (and anything we might consider a self) as a function of the brain. On the other side are those who value subjective experience as important and possibly prior to brain states (i.e., experience shapes brain chemistry) so that talk therapy can change the brain and make it function better.

In reality, for most of us out here, it's both/and, not either/or - but in the DSM process there seems to be a pissing war. And we, the therapists (and you, the patients) are the real losers.

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

By Gary Greenberg
December 27, 2010 | Wired January 2011

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.

But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.

One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal.

As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”

Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”

At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.

Allen Frances is worried that the DSM-5 will "take psychiatry off a cliff."
Photo: Susanna Howe; photographed at Café Sabarsky, Neue Galerie, NYC

This is hardly the first time that defining mental illness has led to rancor within the profession. It happened in 1993, when feminists denounced Frances for considering the inclusion of “late luteal phase dysphoric disorder” (formerly known as premenstrual syndrome) as a possible diagnosis for DSM-IV. It happened in 1980, when psychoanalysts objected to the removal of the word neurosis—their bread and butter—from the DSM-III. It happened in 1973, when gay psychiatrists, after years of loud protest, finally forced a reluctant APA to acknowledge that homosexuality was not and never had been an illness. Indeed, it’s been happening since at least 1922, when two prominent psychiatrists warned that a planned change to the nomenclature would be tantamount to declaring that “the whole world is, or has been, insane.”

Some of this disputatiousness is the hazard of any professional specialty. But when psychiatrists say, as they have during each of these fights, that the success or failure of their efforts could sink the whole profession, they aren’t just scoring rhetorical points. The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”

Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM’s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.

The DSM-5 battle comes at a time when psychiatry’s authority seems more tenuous than ever. In terms of both research dollars and public attention, molecular biology—neuroscience and genetics—has come to dominate inquiries into what makes us tick. And indeed, a few tantalizing results from these disciplines have cast serious doubt on long-held psychiatric ideas. Take schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: For more than a century, those two illnesses have occupied separate branches of the psychiatric taxonomy. But research suggests that the same genetic factors predispose people to both illnesses, a discovery that casts doubt on whether this fundamental division exists in nature or only in the minds of psychiatrists. Other results suggest new diagnostic criteria for diseases: Depressed patients, for example, tend to have cell loss in the hippocampal regions, areas normally rich in serotonin. Certain mental illnesses are alleviated by brain therapies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, even as the reasons why are not entirely understood.

Some mental health researchers are convinced that the DSM might soon be completely revolutionized or even rendered obsolete. In recent years, the National Institute of Mental Health has launched an effort to transform psychiatry into what its director, Thomas Insel, calls clinical neuroscience.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Alan Horwitz, Depression, Health and Fitness, Jerome Wakefield, Meditation, Mindfulness, Mental Health, Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex, In Defense Of Therapy, Wired, Psychology, DSM, therapy, Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness, Gary Greenberg, mental illness, mental health, Allen Frances, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, DSM-5, psychotherapy, American Psychiatric Association, clinical neuroscience, APA, National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH