RSA - Mental Complexity and ‘The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers’

Jonathan Rowson and some others at the RSA have offered up an integrally-informed (Robert Kegan version) policy statement - it's a follow-up to the recent report Beyond the Big Society.

Beyond the Big Society

The idea of the Big Society is at its weakest when it is presented as a partisan technical solution to acute socio-economic problems, and at its strongest when viewed as a non-partisan long term challenge to enrich our social and human capital. At the core of this challenge are the demands we place on people when we ask them to be, for instance, responsible, autonomous, or to show greater solidarity with their fellow citizens. Such demands are grounded in implicit assumptions about human nature and adult competencies that need to be made more explicit if the Big Society is going to survive as a viable idea.

We introduce a perspective on public participation that is rarely considered by policymakers, namely mental complexity in the adult population - our varied capacity to understand competing motivations and values in ourselves and others, to ‘get things in perspective’, and to act appropriately in uncertain or ambiguous situations. Rather than theories of ‘personality’ and ‘interpersonal skills’ that only pay lip service to the complexity of human capital, we believe this perspective helps us to deepen the discussion on public participation, with greater explanatory power and clearer practical implications.

Here is the new article.

Mental Complexity and ‘The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers’

January 6, 2012 by Jonathan Rowson
Filed under: Social Brain  

Those who have read ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ by E.F Schumacher (better known for Small is Beautiful) will recall his excellent analysis of what he called ‘the loss of the vertical dimension’. He feared that a purely utilitarian view of the world would strip it of reverence, and remove the path-quality of life, in which primitive life forms evolve in complexity, not only across centuries, but in the space of a single human life. He wanted to keep alive is the idea that human beings not only change, but also grow and develop in some meaningful way.

Speaking at the Davos Economic Forum in 2006, Bill Clinton made a similar point. He alluded to the importance of mental complexity when he argued that the challenge of integrating all our best ideas to solve planetary problems was that we needed a ‘higher level of consciousness’ to make sense of how they inter-relate, and he referred to the work of Ken Wilber, a major theorist on the growth of mental complexity.

And yet the danger is that theories of adult development that speak of how mental complexity develops can look like the worst kind of elitism, suggesting there is a form of hierarchy that determines our worth, and worse- that the basis of this hierarchy is obscure, and subject only to expert judgment. In the first RSA event I chaired, I asked Adam Kahane about levels of consciousness, and he reponsded that he was wary of such ideas, because the people propounding them always tended to assume they were on the higher levels.

However, perhaps the only thing worse than an elite and obscure form of hierarchy is flatland, i.e. a complete denial of a vertical dimension, for this seems to amount to a loss of aspiration for progress in our emotional and mental lives, and the development of our character and our will.

Following on from yesterday’s post on our new report on the Big Society, I wanted to share extracts from a couple of sections that I found most difficult to write. We wanted to do what we could to carefully apply the perspective of adult development to a current live issue in the hope that it would stimulate interest among people who may not otherwise come across it. (starting on p 28 of report; slightly abridged, full references can be found there, while a few links have been added here).

Beyond ‘Flatland’
While the idea that we grow in mental complexity is familiar from childhood development, and informs education policy, in adulthood policymakers typically focus on the need to acquire skills, while organisations are more likely to focus on psychometric testing, resulting in personality measures like Myers-Briggs.

Despite a considerable literature on adult development and post-formal thinking (i.e. beyond the mental development of an eighteen year old) public policy appears to operate in what the American Philosopher Ken Wilber calls ‘flatland’: the view that all adults operate at the same level of mental complexity, and differ only in horizontal skills, intelligence, knowledge and proclivities.

We are not saying that the Big Society calls upon people to be nicer, or cleverer, or more informed, much as these things might help. Our point is that a growth in social productivity requires people to be able to disembed themselves from certain social and psychological influences that undermine autonomy, responsibility and solidarity, so that they can relate to those influences more flexibly and constructively. 

This distinction between horizontal and vertical dimensions of human development is important, because our argument is quite specific. We are not saying that the Big Society calls upon people to be nicer, or cleverer, or more informed, much as these things might help. Our point is that a growth in social productivity requires people to be able to disembed themselves from certain social and psychological influences that undermine autonomy, responsibility and solidarity, so that they can relate to those influences more flexibly and constructively.

This kind of growth is ‘vertical’ in the sense that it changes how we know the world rather than ‘horizontal’ in the sense of changing what we know about the world. And such vertical growth is progressive in the sense that it transcends and includes our prior ways of knowing the world. Moreover, such models of mental complexity are theoretically highly developed, and amenable to empirical measurement.

In light of the explanatory power of this perspective, when policy makers try to change behaviour through incentive structures, environmental influences and choice architectures, they show, as Kegan puts it, “an astonishingly naïve sense of how important a factor is the level of mental complexity”.

The use of ‘astonishing’ is worth emphasising. In a context where ‘people’ are presented as the solution rather than the problem, mental complexity is perhaps the single most important variable to understand, and is required to inform how people are likely to respond to the behavioural demands of the Big Society agenda.

In light of the explanatory power of this perspective, when policy makers try to change behaviour through incentive structures, environmental influences and choice architectures, they show, as Kegan puts it, “an astonishingly naïve sense of how important a factor is the level of mental complexity”.

Kegan’s emphasis on the importance of mental complexity has parallels with the method of psychographic segmentation known as ‘Values Modes’ derived from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which we move from subsistence to social to existential needs. Values are viewed as motivational constructs that underpin emotions, perceptions and behaviours, so they provide good proxy measures for mental complexity, which is useful because data on values is relatively easy to collect. This kind of progression in values has parallels with Kegan’s theory of development, and although the underlying mechanism of change is different, both models highlight that the range of values that gives rise to this segmentation is not ‘flat’.

(…) See report for relationship between mental complexity and values modes(…)

Fear of Hierarchy
The neglect of this kind of perspective may be because it is an uncomfortable notion for a liberal democracy. Developmental differences represents a form of hierarchy, and, at first blush, appears to raise similar political issues to IQ scores. This is a valid objection, but is attenuated by at least four factors.

First, In Kegan’s model in particular measures of development are complex constructs based on qualitative data, not psychometric measures producing single composite scores that can be readily compared.

Second, unlike traditional views of IQ, levels of mental complexity are not static and evolve in relation to challenges within one’s lifespan.

Third, more complex does not necessarily mean ‘better’. An adult’s mind is not necessarily better than a child’s, but it is typically more developed. The values of security and belonging are not less important than the values of self-efficacy and personal development, indeed they may be necessary conditions for them to arise.

Kegan uses the example of a driver who can only drive an automatic not being a worse driver than one who can drive both an automatic and a manual car. This difference is one of ‘fit’ rather than skill, and will only be felt in situations where there are no automatics available. The hierarchy in question is about one relatively basic way of knowing giving rise to and growing into another that is relatively complex, not about something better subsuming something worse in absolute terms.

Even with those three points in mind, the root metaphor of higher as better is difficult to shake. The fourth point is therefore important, and particularly relevant in the context of the Big Society. Simply stated, according to Kegan, more than half of the adult population (c. 58%) share a broadly similar level of mental complexity (‘the socialised mind’- see below). This large group therefore experience similar challenges in the mismatch between the cultural demands and their capacity to fully address them. Moreover, it makes it more credible to say that developing mental complexity in the general population is a viable public goal.”

Thanks for reading this far. Does this make sense? Is it still a bit scary?

NPR Science Friday - One Scholar's Take On The Power of The Placebo

The other day I posted an article from Edge by Nicholas Humphrey that looked at the placebo effect as a jumping off point for a brain-based "health management system." So it was interesting, in light of that, to listen to this NPR Science Friday discussion about the placebo effect.

One Scholar's Take On The Power of The Placebo

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January 6, 2012
 

A placebo can take the form of a sugar pill or even a fake surgery. It's often used to test the effectiveness of a trial drug. Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard University's Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, discusses potential applications for the healing power of placebos.

IRA FLATOW, HOST: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. It's a story we've heard before: A doctor prescribes a fake pill to a patient after other medications have failed. The patient begins to feel better after taking what she thinks is a real drug, but is only a placebo.

The story is not fictitious. It's rooted in real data. One study estimates 50 percent of U.S. physicians who believe in the benefits of placebos and the placebo effect secretly give dummy pills to unsuspecting patients. The ethical, questionable practice led researchers at Harvard University to explore whether the power of placebos can be harnessed honestly, and what they found was the placebos work even when patients are in on the secret that it is a sham secret. They know that they're taking a placebo, and it still works.

Ted Kaptchuk is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Med School, director of the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The program was created last summer and is wholly dedicated to the study of placebos. He joins us from Cambridge, Mass. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

TED KAPTCHUK: Ira, thanks for inviting me.

FLATOW: How do you define a placebo?

KAPTCHUK: Well, a placebo is a sugar pill or inert substance that's used to hide the genuine treatment in a clinical trial. A placebo effect is the effect of a sugar pill. The problem with that common definition is that it's an oxymoron: An inert pill can't have an effect. So what our team says is that the placebo is also hiding a very important phenomena: the clinical encounter. We think the placebo effect is the - a surrogate marker, or a way of measuring the effect of just caring for a person, the act of caring for a person.

We think that it's - the placebo is about the words, the gestures, eye contact, warmth, empathy, compassion that a physician exchanges with a patient, a doctor-patient relationship. We think the placebo is about medical symbols, white coats, diplomas, prescription pads.

We think the placebo is about medical rituals, the ritual procedures in medicine: waiting, talking, disrobing, being examined and being treated by pills or surgery. Ultimately, we think the placebo is about the power of the imagination, trust and hope in the medical encounter.

FLATOW: Can you quantify any of this, then?

KAPTCHUK: Well, that's what my work is, and that's what our program at the Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School is trying to do, is that this is usually considered the art of medicine. It's the in background. People are mostly concerned about drugs, procedures and surgery, and our job is to quantify what's been hidden in the background and move it to the foreground, to make the human aspects of health care more prominent and optimalize them once we understand what they can do and how they work.

FLATOW: Because we hear that the placebo effect works about 30 percent of the time, correct?

KAPTCHUK: No, that's more of a medical myth. Sometimes sugar pills will not shrink a tumor, will not lower cholesterols, don't lower hypertension. Placebo effects work in some conditions much better than others. Placebo treatments will work in things like pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety, functional bowel disorders, functional urinary disorders. So that 30 percent is really a myth that was created a long time ago.

FLATOW: And you've discovered - let me see if this is correct - that even when the patients know they're taking a placebo, it still works?

KAPTCHUK: Well, discovery is a big word. We - what we did was we randomized patients with irritable bowel syndrome, half of whom went - we gave them placebos. We told them it was placebos. The bottle said they were placebos. We told them that the study was about placebos. This is an inert pill they were taking. And half of them we randomized to no-treatment control wait-list to make sure that if they changed and got better, it wasn't the normal, natural waxing and waning of diseases or spontaneous remission.

And we found, after three weeks, that people who were taking placebos did much better than those in the comparison group. Our study was small. It needs to be replicated. It's more proof of principle. But it certainly changes the conventional wisdom, which was if you know you're taking a placebo, you're not going to get better.

And what we - I think many other teams have to replicate this and other diseases, and we hope that that will happen down the line.

FLATOW: But you're saying, if I heard you correctly, just to go back on your original statement, is that the placebo basically masks, or it's really the encounter with the doctor and all the trappings of the office and being taken care of that - the action that is actually helping the patient and making the patient feel better.

KAPTCHUK: I think that's what I meant to say. I'm glad you said it that way. Yeah, a sugar pill doesn't do anything. What does something is the context of healing. It's the ritual of healing. It's being in a healing relationship. And that's what we study.

But the placebo pill is a wonderful tool, or a saline injection is a wonderful tool to isolate what is usually in the background, take it away from the medications and procedures that medicine does, and actually study just the act of caring. That's, I think, what we're measuring when we study placebo effects.

FLATOW: And how did you get involved in this, in Harvard opening up this center?

KAPTCHUK: I was originally hired at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in 1990 to help do research in Asian medicine. And when I got there - my original training was in Asia - they talked about we have to find out whether this intervention, be it acupuncture, herbs or other kinds of alternative therapies, is more than placebo.

And I would ask: So what does it mean that it's more than placebo? And they say: Well, it's more than placebo. And I have a background in civil rights when I was a young person. And I said, boy, they're treating this placebo effect like it's really some kind of disgusting phenomena. And what is it exactly? So I would ask, and I realized there wasn't a lot known. And I thought this would be a better way of doing my career.

Luckily, at that time, the NIH created a National Center for Complimentary and Alternate Medicine, which has a deep interest in investigating the placebo effect. And I've been able to receive funding for many, many experiments, which hopefully have contributed to understanding this phenomenon better.

Read the whole transcript.

FORA.tv - The Power of Choice (Jared Diamond and Daniel McFadden)

FORA.tv posted this short video discussion with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) and Daniel McFadden from the National Geographic Weekend Live gathering.

The Power of Choice

Why do humans make decisions the way they do? And what does that mean in the context of the current threats to our species’ survival? Daniel McFadden, the 2000 Laureate in Economics Studies, whose work focuses on how people make choices and sort themselves into groups, will discuss questions of human choice and their repercussions with Nat Geo Explorer-in-Residence Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestseller Collapse, which analyzed the phenomenon of societal failure. The conversation will be moderated by National Geographic Weekend host Boyd Matson.

 The Power of Choice from National Geographic Live on FORA.tv

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award); research prizes and grants from the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies—National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Diamond's field experience includes 22 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and evolution of birds; the rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost golden fronted bowerbird; and other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist, he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology and a member of the board of directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA and Conservation International.

Daniel McFadden

Daniel Little McFadden is an econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He was the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In January 2011, Dr. McFadden was appointed the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at theUniversity of Southern California (USC), and the announcement of this appointment was published on January 10, 2011. Professor McFadden will have joint appointments at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the Department of Economics at USC College to examine fundamental problems facing the health care sector, looking specifically at how consumers make choices about health insurance and medical services.

Bookforum - Philosophy as an expression

A few days ago, Bookforum offered up a collection of philosophy links. One of the interesting - or strange - articles is from a lawyer talking about attachment. Seriously. The author is using a very general definition of attachments:

I am using the term in a common, non-technical way. It is not confined to any specific emotion, or range of emotions, nor is it confined to happy, or willing attachments. There are ones we have in spite of ourselves. And there are ones we struggle to free ourselves from, or are ambivalent about. But they are connections we have to people, or objects, places, or groups of which we are aware. -- I will not be concerned with attachments to ideas, or theories. To simplify I will not consider complex and multifaceted attachments, such as religious ones, and will spend more time on attachments to people than to other objects.

Here is the abstract:


Attachments and Associated Reasons

Joseph Raz
Columbia University - Law School; University of Oxford - Faculty of Law

November 7, 2011

Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 11-287
Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 59/2011

Abstract:
The paper will unfold in 5 parts dealing with five questions: first, does the partiality of attachments present an obstacle to their being or giving practical reasons? Second, given a value-based approach to practical reasons, can universal values generate reasons that are specific to their subjects, reasons – say – towards my friends that only I have? Third, do attachments affect what we do independently of any reasons that they provide? Fourth, in what ways do attachments constitute or provide normative reasons, and briefly, how do attachment-related reasons relate to other practical reasons? Finally, I turn to the question of the nature of and justification for partiality to oneself.

Anyway, that was a strange little article - here are the rest of them.

Philosophy as an expression

Jan 2 2012   3:00PM

A new issue of Annales Philosophici is out, including Danielle Macbeth (Haverford): Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan. From Purlieu, a special issue on Philosophy and the University. J. David Velleman (NYU): Time for Action. Joseph Raz (Columbia): Attachments and Associated Reasons. Neil Sinhababu (NUS): The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality. Albert H. Y. Chen (Hong Kong): The Concept of "Datong" in Chinese Philosophy as an Expression of the Idea of the Common Good. Brian Ribeiro (Tennessee): Philosophy and Disagreement. From The Philosopher's Eye, a series on the future of philosophy, with contributions by Robert Stern, Vincent F. Hendricks, Tim Mulgan, Matti Eklund, and Luciano Floridi. Metaphysics is the philosophical study of reality — but what does that mean in pratice, and what are the limits of what it can reveal? Kit Fine addresses the question. Thomas Nagel reviews Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value by Barry Stroud. How we (should) decide: Philosopher Caspar Hare aims to develop theories of practical rationality that may just help us make real-world decisions. Ethical pluralism: Ian Pollock on the ugly theory that could. Ethics matter: A conversation with Peter Singer. An interview with Peter Ludlow, author of The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics. Simon Blackburn on Hume and bondage: Why is the idea that desire is the master of reason still causing fear and loathing in philosophy? A review of Wittgenstein by William Child. Could David Hume have known about Buddhism? From The Chronicle, Lee McIntyre on making philosophy matter — or else; and Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman on a new philosophy for the 21st century. Is there a useful distinction to be made between analytic and continental philosophy? Brian Leiter thinks not (and an interview at 3:AM).

The Optimism Bias: An Interview with Tali Sharot

This interview with Tali Sharot comes from the blog for Being Human 2012, a one-day conference this spring in San Francisco - and they lifted it from The Guardian UK. The book was released last summer in the U.S. as The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

The optimism bias: reasons to be cheerful

Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Saturday 31 December 2011

Tali Sharot: 'There’s a saying that you have expect the gold in order to get the silver.' Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

What exactly is the optimism bias?

The Optimism Bias: Why we're wired to look on the bright side
by Tali Sharot

Expecting the future to be slightly better than it ends up being. People tend to overestimate positive events – having a long-lasting relationship, or a certain salary, professional success – and underestimate the likelihood of negative events such as cancer, being in an accident, getting divorced. So it's this difference between your expectations and the outcome, where the former are slightly better than the latter.

How did you stumble across it?
I was looking at whether the neural mechanisms involved in remembering the past are involved in imagining the future. My work on memory is mostly about traumatic negative events, so I was interested in imagining negative traumatic events, but had to compare that with people just imagining everyday boring events. But when I asked people to imagine boring events, they usually imagined some kind of magnificent scenario, which I found very surprising.

Were you so surprised because you're actually a pessimist? You hadn't expected such surprising results.
Not at all. And you might say I was optimistic because I was looking for something specific. It wasn't because I was or am a pessimist. But neither do I think people can classify themselves accurately as pessimistic or optimistic.

How optimistic would you say you are?
I don't think people can know their own level of optimism. The only way to do it is to be tested; I know all of these experiments so I can't test myself. My guess is I would probably be average. That's the best statistical guess you can always make, right? The average person is mildly optimistic; 80% of the population will be on the optimistic side.

In some countries – for example, Britain –it is more culturally acceptable to be pessimistic. In the US, being optimistic is considered a good thing, so I suspect people there would usually say they are optimistic; here, people might say not. But there is no actual difference.

People who are pessimists actually seem to have a more realistic vision of the future, but this does them no good.
In general, you have to have positive expectation to reach your goals.

Does that mean Olympic athletes are victims of false cognitive biases? They can't all win gold, but they have to believe they can to propel them through years of training.
I don't know if athletes are more optimistic – maybe because you can say that about many professions. Look at mine. People always think that their next paper will be the one that changes everything. But they can't all be. And I actually encourage my students to think like that because it could be true and it motivates them to do things.

You give the example of the law students who are told there is a divorce rate of 50% but still believe their relationships will last for ever. Has it made you take a more realistic view of human relationships?
Yes, I suspect I do.

Does that mean you are less of a romantic than you were before?
Possibly. But it may be because I am older.

But in the book you say that being older doesn't necessarily make you wiser.
That's true, though research shows that happiness goes down to middle age, then starts going back up. So when you get to your 70s and 80s, you seem to be in quite a good place. We are looking at the optimism bias across the lifespan. It seems like there is not much difference but there hasn't been a very good investigation.

You talk about the introspection illusion. It seems that the harder you try to think about yourself, the less self-knowledge you seem to accrue.
It's not the harder you try, but that you end up attending to the wrong kind of things, not those that will matter. I give an example where people try to decide between two paintings to put on the wall. They try to think about which one will make them happier, but attend to elements which are not actually important for an emotional reaction.

Why are we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy?
First, because when we think about the future we rely on our memories – and they are biased as well. So we don't remember everything and don't remember everything accurately. Emotion changes how we remember things and that is really where I started my research, looking at memories from 9/11, which are vivid but not necessarily accurate. If you try to predict how you are going to feel on your next vacation, for example, what you remember from your previous vacations are the highlights so you don't remember all of the boring bits.

Second, we focus on specific elements rather than look at the whole. So you think how you are going to feel when you are sitting on the beach but not how you are going to feel while getting there.

You say that the financial crisis in 2008 is essentially a result of optimism bias.
Yes. It's a simple example, where most people, from individuals to financial analysts to government officials, all thought that the market would go up and up and up and ignored evidence to the contrary. Research we have done lately shows that people take into account more about information that indicates things will be positive in the future.

You studied at Tel Aviv University. Do you think that Israel is an example of a nation with an optimism bias?
I definitely think Israelis are. I make the point that a lot of times in very difficult circumstances people are actually more optimistic. Such as in the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Depression in the 1930s, because in those instances you need it even more. And I think that's quite often true of Israel.

You seem to say we are all engaged in making predictions, but the only people who seem to be any good at it are the ones who are a bit depressed.
It's not they are good at it, just that their prediction is more like the outcome.

So they're more accurate at it?
They are more accurate at predicting, but also their prediction is affecting the outcome so there's a circular thing.

Does this mean fortune favours the deluded?
Definitely. It's not only when you predict the future, it's also when you think about yourself. Most people have a positive illusion about themselves. It doesn't mean we think we are extremely good-looking and intelligent, but we think we're a little bit more than what some objective measure would show. It's good that we have this bias. It keeps us happier.

One of the most wonderful tricks you talk about is how we believe we've always made the best choice.
That's true. Depressed individuals don't do that, so they ruminate. One of the symptoms of depression is ruminating. People go back and say: "Why did I do that? I could have done this" rather than say: "This was the best decision at the time" and move on. It's the same with decisions. I often tell people who are having problems making a decision: "You know, it doesn't matter what you choose. You're probably going to think it's the right decision."

What are you researching next?
We're looking at altering optimism using biological measures and ways to try and enhance or reduce it.

William Irwin Thompson Interview: Consciousness, Occupy Movement and Planetary Culture

Very cool interview that Jeremy got with William Irwin Thompson for his new project, EvoLandscapes.

William Irwin Thompson Interview: Consciousness, Occupy Movement and Planetary Culture

Jeremy Johnson of EL interviews cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for a fascinating discussion about the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, digital culture and planetary crisis.

Thompson is the author of many books including The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, and Self and Society.

He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, a fellowship of scientists, economists, poets and scholars dedicated to articulating the emerging planetary human society.

Lindisfarne Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Association

Check out his column at Wild River Review, Thinking Otherwise: http://www.wildriverreview.com/user/63

The RSA - The Power of Networks: Knowledge in an age of infinite interconnectedness

Interesting . . . from the RSA.

The Power of Networks: Knowledge in an age of infinite interconnectedness

Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, explores the power of network visualisation to help navigate our complex modern world.

Listen to the full audio.

Secular Buddhist Podcast - Episode 97 :: Adam Tebbe :: Sweeping Zen

Here is a recent Secular Buddhist Podcast - Episode 97 :: Adam Tebbe :: Sweeping Zen.This is an interesting discussion on contemporary issues in Western Buddhism.

Episode 97 :: Adam Tebbe :: Sweeping Zen

Dec 30, 2011

The Secular Buddhist Podcast

Adam Tebbe

Sweeping Zen founder Adam Tebbe joins us to speak about contemporary issues in Buddhism.

Many of you have heard me say in the past, “Question with confidence.” That is, we should foster the development of an environment to have open and free inquiry into our beliefs, even those deeply cherished. That idea, question with confidence, was put very well long ago by Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

Few people have represented the idea of free inquiry in our Buddhist practice as today’s guest. Adam Tebbe is senior editor at The Buddhist Dispatch. He is also the founder of Sweeping Zen and Kannonji Zen Retreat in Second Life, a sangha which hosts events from Buddhist clergy using the virtual technology of Second Life. He trained to become a licensed chemical dependency counselor but found that he enjoys this work far better. He generally keeps his opining to his blog at Sweeping Zen. Adam also does some news gathering for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, owned by the Shambhala Sun Foundation.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Dr. Pepper. How long has that been?

Podcast: Download

:: Discuss this episode ::

Thanissaro Bhikkhu - What Do Buddhists Mean When They Talk About Emptiness?

Nice bit of dharma from Tricycle's "Back to Basics" special edition.

Back to Basics: What Do Buddhists Mean When They Talk About Emptiness?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it: the stories and worldviews we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that the questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

Say, for instance, that you're meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind's reaction is to identify the anger as "my" anger, or to say that "I'm" angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother or to your general views about when and where anger toward one's mother can be justified. The problem with all this, from the Buddha's perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of "I" and "mine" that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can't find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.

If, however, you adopt the emptiness mode—by not acting on or reacting to the anger but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves—you can see that the anger is empty of anything to identify with or possess. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the most subtle events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of "I" and "mine" are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that's totally free.

To master the emptiness mode of perception requires firm training in virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind stays in the mode that keeps creating stories and worldviews. And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or worldview with new ground rules. In terms of the story of your relationship to your mother it seems to be saying that there's really no mother, no you. In terms of your worldview, it seems to be saying either that the world doesn't really exist, or else that emptiness is the great undifferentiated ground of being from which we all came and to which someday we'll all return.

These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the people in the story of your life don't really exist, then all the actions and reactions in that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there's any point in practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being to which we're all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in concentration and discernment, since we're all going to get there anyway? And even if we need training to get back to our ground of being, what's to keep us from coming out of it and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode.

Now, stories and worldviews do serve a purpose. The Buddha employed them when teaching people, but he never used the word emptiness when speaking in these modes. He recounted the stories of people's lives to show how suffering comes from the unskillful perceptions behind their actions, and how freedom from suffering can come from being more perceptive. And he described the basic principles that underlie the round of rebirth to show how bad intentional actions lead to pain within that round, good ones lead to pleasure, while really skillful actions can rake you beyond the round altogether. In all these cases, these teachings were aimed at getting people to focus on the quality of the perceptions and intentions in their minds in the present—in other words, to get them into the emptiness mode. Once there, they could use the teachings on emptiness for their intended purpose: to loosen all attachments to views, stories, and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all the greed, anger; and delusion, and thus empty of suffering and stress. And when you come right down to it, that's the emptiness that really counts.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu is the abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, California. His most recent book is The Wings to Awakening (Dhamma Dana Publications).

 

 

Face to face with Carl Jung - An Interview

 Jung in 1910

Here is a rare interview with Carl Jung - I found this at TheSpiritConnect YouTube channel. Jung, along with Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, and others, were all students of Freud at one point or another - and all broke away to elaborate their own models or theories of the psyche.  


Of these, Adler and Jung have probably had the most influence on contemporary thinking in therapeutic practice, but only Jung has developed a distinct model that stands as an alternative to Freud in the more traditional approaches to therapy. [I believe Adler's model is equally important, but it is not as well known - see Individual Psychology.]


Follow the link for more on Jung's Analytical Psychology. Here is a brief introduction to Jung from his Wikipedia page:

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration.^[1] Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and symbolization. While he was a fully involved and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts.

Jung considered individuation, a psychological process of integrating the opposites including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy, necessary for a person to become whole.^[2] Individuation is the central concept of analytical psychology.^[3]

Many psychological concepts were first proposed by Jung, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. A popular psychometric instrument, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has been principally developed from Jung's theories.

His interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic although Jung's ambition was to be seen as a man of science.^[4]

And now the videos.

Part One:



Part Two:



Part Three:



Part Four:

Nicholas Humphrey - The Evolved Self-Management System

This is a nice article from Edge . . . . Nicholas Humphrey seeks to explain the placebo effect and "a whole range of other priming effects by invoking the existence of an 'evolved self-management system.'" Geoffrey Miller replies.

Using the placebo effect as a foundation, Humphrey wonders if it is possible to co-opt that system, which is partly based in "permission" given by the cultural environment, to release other capabilities that are generally considered beyond our control.

The Evolved Self-Management System

Nicholas Humphrey [12.5.11]

I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY has held posts at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is now School Professor Emeritus at the LSE. He is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His most recent book is Soul Dust.

Nicholas Humphrey's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Geoffrey Miller

---

THE EVOLVED SELF-MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY: I was asked to write an essay recently for "Current Biology" on the evolution of human health. It's not really my subject, I should say, but it certainly got me thinking. One of the more provocative thoughts I had is about the role of medicine. If human health has changed for the better in the late stages of evolution, this has surely had a lot to do with the possibility of consulting doctors, and the use of drugs. But the surprising thing is that, until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked". That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo medicine people came to feel less pain, to experience less fever, their inflammations receded, and so on.

Now, when people are cured by placebo medicine, they are in reality curing themselves. But why should this have become an available option late in human evolution, when it wasn't in the past.

I realized it must be the result of a trick that has been played by human culture. The trick is to persuade sick people that they have a "license" to get better, because they're in the hands of supposed specialists who know what's best for them and can offer practical help and reinforcements. And the reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard. So health has improved because of a cultural subterfuge. It's been a pretty remarkable development.

I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

Go back 10 or 20,000 years ago. Eccentricity would not have been tolerated. Unusual intelligence would not have been tolerated. Even behaving "out of character" would not have been tolerated. People were expected to conform, and they did conform, because they picked up the cues from their environment about the right and proper—the adaptive—way to behave. In response to cultural signals people were in effect policing their own personality.

And they still are. In fact we now have plenty of experimental evidence about the operation of "sub-conscious primes", how signals from the local environment get to people without their knowing it and, by changing their character and attitudes, regulate the face they present to the world. It can be a change for the worse (at least as we'd see it today). But so too it can be a change for the better. People become, let's say, more pro-social, more generous.

Let's take this particular example. What cues might people pick up on that would turn them into nicer people? Well, remarkably enough just seeing something out of the corner of one's eye which suggests that other people are behaving nicely can do it. There's a wonderful experiment I heard described at a conference in Kyoto a few months ago. What the Japanese scientists did was to get their subjects to play a cooperation game, a prisoner's dilemma game, online. Subjects could choose to act generously, trust the opponent, or mistrust and default on the exchange.

Now, to one side of the computer on which subjects were playing this game, the experimenters had set up another computer with a screen-saver on it. There were two conditions. In one the screen-saver showed a little animation of two balls, one of which was helping another one over a barrier, coming up underneath it and giving it a shove-over; in the other, one of the balls was hindering another from getting over the barrier by getting in its way.

Astonishingly, the subjects of this experiment who had the cooperative animation running on the screen to one side were twice as likely to cooperate in their game with another player online, even though they didn't acknowledge that they'd noticed anything on the secondary screen. And even if they had noticed it, so what? I mean why should they copy something which is just going on a screen-saver?

But this is just one example. Now almost every month's issue of Psychological Science, for instance, reports some striking new finding about how cues from the surroundings can change people's nature. Moral judgments, reasoning skills, personal hygiene, political attitudes —you name it—are all proving to be unexpectedly malleable, as people respond to the social and physical weather signals that their brains (if not their conscious minds) pick up on.

It's been a tremendous surprise for experimental psychology and social psychology, because until now it's been widely assumed that people's characters are in fact pretty much fixed. People don't blow with the wind, they don't become a different kind of person depending on local and apparently irrelevant cues . . . But after all, it seems they do.

So what's going on? We need a theory.

You'll have guessed the way I want to take it. I began with the placebo effect. To explain placebos I think we need to invoke the existence of an "evolved health management system". The placebo effect is a particular kind of priming effect. And what I want to do now is to explain a whole range of other priming effects by invoking the existence of an "evolved self-management system".

Let's start over again with placebos. Some years ago I drew attention to the "paradox of placebos", a paradox that must strike any evolutionary biologist who thinks about it. It's this. When a person's health improves under the influence of placebo medication, then, as we've noted already, this has to be a case of "self-cure". But if people have the capacity to heal themselves by their own efforts, why not get on with it as soon as needed? Why wait for permission—from a sugar pill, a witch doctor—that it's time to get better?

Presumably the explanation must be that self-cure has costs as well as benefits. What kind of costs are these? Well, actually they're fairly obvious. Many of the illnesses we experience, like pain, fever and so on, are actually defenses which are designed to stop us from getting into more trouble than we're already in. So "curing" ourselves of these defenses can indeed cost us down the line. Pain reduces our mobility, for example, and stops us from harming ourselves further; so, relieving ourselves of pain is actually quite risky. Fever helps kill bacterial parasites by raising body temperature to a level they can't tolerate; so again, curing ourselves of fever is risky. Vomiting gets rid of toxins; so suppressing vomiting is risky.

The same goes for the deployment of the immune system. Mounting an immune response is energetically expensive. Our metabolic rate rises 15 percent or so, even if we're just responding to a common cold. What's more, when we make antibodies we use up rare nutrients that will later have to be replaced.

Given these costs, it becomes clear that immediate self-cure from an occurrent illness is not always a wise thing to do. In fact there will be circumstances when it would be best to hold back from deploying particular healing measures because the anticipated benefits are not likely to exceed the anticipated costs. In general it will be wise to err on side of caution, to play safe, not to let down our defenses such as pain or fever until we see signs that the danger has passed, not to use up our stock of ammunition against parasites until we know we're in relatively good shape and there's not still worse to come. Healing ourselves involves—or ought to involve—a judgment call.

It makes sense that our brains should have come to play a crucial part in the top-down management of bodily health. As I see it, what the health management system has evolved to do is to perform a kind of economic analysis of what the opportunities and the costs of cure will be: what resources we've got in reserve, how dangerous the situation is right now, what predictions we can make of what the future holds. In effect the system acts like a good hospital manager who has to decide just what resources to keep in store, how quickly to treat a patient, how long before discharging them, etc., overall trying to produce an optimal outcome on the basis of a forecast about what's coming down the road: whether there's another epidemic looming, for example, or whether we're entering a season where there won't be enough food available.

There's plenty of evidence that we have just such a system at work overseeing our health. For example, in winter, we are cautious about deploying our immune resources. That's why a cold lasts much longer in winter than it does in summer. It's not because we're cold, it's because our bodies, based on deep evolutionary history reckon that it's not so safe to use our immune resources in winter, as it would be in summer. There's experimental confirmation of this in animals. Suppose a hamster is injected with bacteria which makes it sick—but in one case the hamster is on an artificial day/night cycle that suggests it's summer; in the other case it's on a cycle that suggests it's winter. If the hamster is tricked into thinking it's summer, it throws everything it has got against the infection and recovers completely. If it thinks it's winter then it just mounts a holding operation, as if it's waiting until it knows it's safe to mount a full-scale response. The hamster "thinks" this or that?? No, of course it doesn't think it consciously—the light cycle acts as a subconscious prime to the hamster's health management system.

So now, where does the placebo effect fit in? Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. Just like the artificial summer light cycle for the hamster, placebos give people fake information that it's safe to cure them. Whereupon they do just that.

This suggests we should see the placebo effect as part of a much larger picture of homeostasis and bodily self-control. But now I'm ready to expand on this much further still. If this is the way humans and animals manage their physical health, there must surely be a similar story to be told about mental health. And if mental health, then—at least with humans—it should apply to personality and character as well. So I've come round to the idea that humans have in fact evolved a full-blown self management system, with the job of managing all their psychological resources put together, so as to optimise the persona they present to the world.

You may ask: why should the self need any such "economic managing"? Are there really aspects of the self that should be kept in reserve? Do psychological traits have costs as well as benefits? But I'd say it's easy to see how it is so. Emotions such as anxiety, anger, joy will be counterproductive if they are not appropriately graded. Personality traits—assertiveness, neuroticism, and friendliness—have both down- and up-sides. Sexual attractiveness carries obvious risks. Pride comes before a fall. Even high intelligence can be a disadvantage (we can be "too clever by half", as they say). What's more—and this may be the area where economic management is most relevant of all— as people go through life they build up social psychological capital of various kinds that they need to husband carefully. Reputation is precious, love should not be wasted indiscriminately, secrets have to be guarded, favors must be returned.

So, I think humans must have come under strong selection pressure in the course of evolution to get these calculations right. Our ancestors needed to develop a system for managing the face they present to the world: how they came across to other people, when to flirt, when to hold back, when to be generous, when to be mean, when to fall in love, when to reject, when to reciprocate, when to punish, when to take the lead, when to retire, and so on. . . All these aspects had to be very carefully balanced if they were going to maximize their chances of success in the social world.

Fortunately our ancestors already had a template for doing these calculations, namely the pre-existing health system. In fact I believe the self management system evolved on the back of the health system. But this new system goes much further than the older one: it's job is to read the local signs and signs and forecast the psychological weather we are heading into, enabling us to prejudge what we can get away with, what's politic, what's expected of us. Not surprisingly, it's turned out to be a very complex system. That's why psychologists working on priming are discovering so many cues, which are relevant to it. For there are of course so many things that are relevant to managing our personal lives and coming across in the most effective and self-promoting ways we can.

---

Once we have a theoretical understanding of how all this works, can we exploit it in practical ways to change people's lives for the better? Does it offer us tools for social engineering? 

Read the rest of the article and Miller's reply.

 This was a bit of geeky but interesting research. This press release was posted at . . . .

The world's independent source of research news

It seems that consciousness is not even required for the integration of new information - nearly all processing, including integration, is done at sub-conscious or pre-conscious levels.

Once again, however, I would argue that the brain can be trained to do things differently. What would the study look like if the subjects were Buddhists with 10, 20, or 30 years of mindfulness practice?

New research distinguishes roles of conscious and sub-conscious awareness in information processing

30 November 2011 Hebrew University of Jerusalem

What distinguishes information processing with conscious awareness from processing occurring without awareness? And, is there any role for conscious awareness in information processing, or is it just a byproduct, like the steam from the chimney of a train engine, which is significant, but has no functional role?

 These questions - which have long puzzled psychologists, philosophers, and neurobiologists - were recently addressed in a study by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers and published by the journal Psychological Science.

The study was headed by Prof. Leon Deouell from the Hebrew University’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) and Department of Psychology and Prof. Dominique Lamy from the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, and conducted by research student Liad Mudirk of Tel Aviv University with collaboration of research student Assaf Breska from the Hebrew University.

We are not consciously aware of most of the input that hits upon our sensory systems.  Yet subjectively, conscious awareness dominates our mental activity. “One of the dominant theories in cognitive sciences and psychology posits that parts of the information perceived without awareness may be processed to a certain extent,” says Prof. Deouell. “Yet to bind the different parts of a
complex input into something meaningful and coherent requires conscious awareness.

To test this theory, the research team ran a study in which they presented participants with pictures of natural scenes including some human action, like a picture of basketball players jumping to reach a ball.

In other tests, the same scenes were presented -- except that the central object was replaced by another, unlikely object. For example, the basketball was replaced by a watermelon.

The participants viewed the pictures through a mirror stereoscope, a simple device that allowed the research team to present the pictures to only one eye. At the same time, the other eye viewed rapidly flickering patterns of colors which drew the subjects' attention, so that the participants were not aware for many seconds that anything was presented to their other eye. This allowed the researchers to measure how long it takes normal and unusual scenes to “win the competition” against the flickering pattern and break into awareness.

"We found that participants became aware of the unusual scenes earlier than to the usual scenes," commented Deouell. "The conclusion was that even before the participants were aware of the existence of the picture, the semantic relationships between parts of the scene were interpreted."

The study shows that, counter to previous theories, integration is not the prerogative of conscious awareness but is achieved even without awareness. When and why then do we need conscious awareness?

The findings of this research suggest that when the results of the integration between parts of the input are incompatible with expectations or prior knowledge, awareness is required in order to account for the conundrum. Thus, the study expands the realm of unaware processes, yet shows that conscious awareness is not a meaningful luxury - it allows us to deal with novel and unexpected situations.

Prof. Leon Deouel

 

Full bibliographic information
Liad Mudrik, Assaf Breska, Dominique Lamy and Leon Y. Deouell, Integration Without Awareness - Expanding the Limits of Unconscious Processing," Psychological Science, June 2011; vol. 22, 6: pp. 764-770., first published on May 9, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0956797611408736.

TEDxPittsburgh - Kiesha Lalama-White and Andy Ostrowski - Chaos

An interdisciplinary movement, examination, exploration, and investigation of power

Dancers from the Point Park Conservancy of Performing Arts Dance Department collaborate with professional musicians, an interdisciplinary art maker, and lighting designer to create a work that provokes questions surrounding power and the chaotic state of our world.

Choreographer and educator, Kiesha Lalama-White has created more than 30 works for theatre, film, and Broadway; has been named one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch"; and has been awarded the Leo Award for her work at the Jazz Dance World Congress and the Outstanding Choreography Award from the Youth American Grand Prix. As an educator, Kiesha is an Assistant Professor at Point Park University, Education Director for the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, and has taught master classes for Cirque Du Soleil and dance companies throughout the nation.

Lighting Director Andy Ostrowski has lighted the theatre world. Credits include productions throughout Europe and the United States. He has worked with every major, and most of the smaller, arts and theatre groups in Pittsburgh and is the recipient of the National Merit Award from the Kennedy Center and the 2011 Frankel Award for making a significant impact on Western Pennsylvania Arts.

C-SPAN In-Depth with Chris Hedges

Truthout columnist Chris Hedges went In-Depth this weekend on C-SPAN. Over three hours, they got into almost every part of his writing career. For me, Hedges can sometimes be a little too strident, but he generally is on the right track with his analyses.

There is no embedding, so follow the link to the C-SPAN site.

C-SPAN In-Depth with Chris Hedges
Washington, DC
Sunday, January 1, 2012

On Book TV’s In Depth, author and journalist, Chris Hedges. The Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent spends three hours taking viewers’ calls, emails and tweets on topics such as terrorism, religion and politics.

The National Book Critics Circle Award nominee has a Masters degree in Divinity and is the author of nine books. His works include, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “Empire of Illusion,” and his latest release “The World As It Is.”

Joseph Gelfer - 2012 – Entheogenic Awakening?

Joseph Glefer posted this audio of the Entheogenesis Australis panel discussion on which he was a participant. It's about an hour long, but it's interesting - in the U.S., at least, I am less than optimistic, despite increases in research approvals.

2012 – Entheogenic Awakening?

This is one of the panels from Entheogenesis Australis last month in which I tried my very best to be optimistic about 2012.

Experiential journalist Rak Razam hosts a panel discussion at Entheogenesis Australis on the 2012 date and the implications for entheogenic culture in the year ahead. Is there a ‘strange attractor’ at the End of Time that entheogens have been presaging? What do the plants and indigenous cultures say about this critical juncture in time? Can we #Occupy our Hearts and lend that energy to the social movements transforming the world? Should we prepare for the apocalypse, or awakening? Are we a culture ready to step forward into our local communities and facilitate change, and can we make a difference? If in plants we trust, how can we not? Ambient recording at the outdoor conference on Dec 4, 2011, with guests Steve Macdonald, Mitch Schultz, Margaret Cross, Joseph Gelfer, Dan Gooden and Dan Schreiber.

55: 2012 – Entheogenic Awakening?

Kurzweil AI - More than glue: Glia cells found to regulate synapses

This research summary was posted at Ray Kurzweil's site. Glia cells have been a little bit of a mystery, but that seems to be changing.

More than glue: Glia cells found to regulate synapses

December 30, 2011 by Editor

Glia cells: the brain's supervisors (credit: Gray's anatomy/Wikimedia Commons)

Glia cells are central to the brain’s plasticity, Tel Aviv University researchers have found, controlling how the brain adapts, learns, and stores information — and their design can be implemented in neuromorphic computer chips.

Glia cells (Greek for “glue,” also known as glial) hold the brain’s neurons together and protect the cells that determine our thoughts and behaviors. But glia cells have now been found to do much more: a mechanism within the glia cells also regulate the synapses, sorting information for learning purposes, according to Ph.D. student Maurizio De Pittà of TAU’s Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering.

“Glia cells are like the brain’s supervisors. They control the transfer of information between neurons, affecting how the brain processes information and learns.”

De Pittà’s research, led by his TAU supervisor Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob, along with Vladislav Volman of The Salk Institute and the University of California at San Diego and Hugues Berry of the Université de Lyon in France, has developed the first computer model that incorporates the influence of glia cells on synaptic information transfer.

The model can also be implemented in technologies based on brain networks such as microchips and computer software, Prof. Ben-Jacob says, and can aid in research on brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy.

Regulating the brain’s “social network”
The brain is constituted of two main types of cells: neurons and glia. Neurons fire off signals that dictate how we think and behave, using synapses to pass along the message from one neuron to another. Scientists theorize that memory and learning are dictated by synaptic activity because they are “plastic,” with the ability to adapt to different stimuli.

But Ben-Jacob and colleagues suspected that glia cells were even more central to how the brain works, particularly the astrocytes (a form of glia cells) in the hippocampus. Glia cells are abundant in the brain’s hippocampus and the cortex, the two parts of the brain that have the most control over the brain’s ability to process information, learn and memorize. In fact, for every neuron cell, there are two to five glia cells.

Read the whole article.

My Review of Best Buddhist Writing 2011

Bodhipaksa has just posted my review of the annual edition of Best Buddhist Writing, 2011, over at Wildmind Buddhist Meditation. Check it out at the link below.

The Best Buddhist Writing 2011

Big Think - 2011: The Year in Ideas

Nice summary of the major ideas from 2011, by Daniel Honan of Big Think.

2011, The Year in Ideas

Daniel Honan on December 31, 2011, 12:00 AM 

What's the Big Idea?

Was 2011 a good year for ideas? In other words, did mankind advance knowledge through scientific discoveries or other breakthroughs in thinking in the past 12 months? This is a question we are obsessed with at Big Think. While the answer may be nearly impossible to quantify, we have compiled a concise survey below of the most significant and relevant ideas that rose to light on Big Think in 2011. Please feel free to offer your suggestions in the comment thread below.

Demography
One of the most alarming milestones this year was the human population hitting 7 billion. The current rate of human population growth, which Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson called "more bacterial than primate," will put us over 9 billion by 2050.

How many people can the Earth sustain? It depends who you ask, but even the most optimistic scientists have stated that we are well past the point where we can sustain our current levels of consumption, especially if everyone on the planet consumed like North Americans. We would need perhaps 4 Earths to support that kind of consumption of resources. For anyone interested in learning more about this challenge, watch this excerpt from Great Big Ideas, a new online course offered by The Floating University, multiple-award-winning mathematical biologist Joel Cohen explains that population interacts with environment, economics, and culture to shape our world. 

So what's the solution? One of the books we are most looking forward to in the New Year is Abundance (due out in February, 2012) by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which takes the contrarian view that "we will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet," the authors write. "Abundance for all is within our grasp." When seen through the lens of technology, "few resources are truly scarce; they're mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview." Stay tuned to Big Think to learn more about this in the New Year. 

Energy

In 2011, we finally came to grasp the awesome potential of solar power, and to put this potential in its proper context. While solar accounts for less than 1 percent of the world's energy needs, according to Ray Kurzweil, "driven by exponentially-increasing nanotechnology, solar will satisfy the entire world's energy needs in 16 years."

Space

"The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space" was one of my favorite headlines of 2011, and the idea comes from, once again, space enthusiast and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis. 

Twenty trillion USD is the estimated market value of a relatively small metallic asteroid that was first calculated by John S. Lewis in his book Mining The Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets. Lewis argued that "using presently available or readily foreseeable technologies, we can relieve Earth of its energy problem, make astronomical amounts of raw materials available, and raise the living standard of people worldwide." Diamandis notes that everything we hold of value, "the things we fight wars over," such as metals, minerals and real estate, exist "in infinite quantities in space."

While NASA's space shuttle era drew to a close this year, the incentives are there for private companies and private teams like those started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and space entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Read the whole article.