Integral Options Cafe

No Evidence that a Serotonin Imbalance Causes Depression, or that Antidepressants Improve Depressive Symptoms

2012-01-27T13:44:00.001-07:00

There has never been a single study that conclusively links serotonin levels (low, high, or normal) with depression, so using drugs to increases serotonin is completely unrelated to the subjective experience and the objective brain chemistry of the patient. This is not new information - I've presented this argument before.

In 2006, Joanna Moncrieff and David Cohen wrote an editorial essay for PLoS Medicine, Do Antidepressants Cure or Create Abnormal Brain States? The gist of their article is articulated in the summary:

Antidepressants are assumed to work on the specific neurobiology of depressive disorders according to a “disease-centred” model of drug action. However, little evidence supports this idea. An alternative, “drug-centred,” model suggests that psychotropic drugs create abnormal states that may coincidentally relieve symptoms. Drug-induced effects of antidepressants vary widely according to their chemical class—from sedation and cognitive impairment to mild stimulation and occasionally frank agitation. Results of clinical trials may be explained by drug-induced effects and placebo amplification. No evidence shows that antidepressants or any other drugs produce long-term elevation of mood or other effects that are particularly useful in treating depression.

Reference:

Moncrieff J, Cohen D. (2006). Do antidepressants cure or create abnormal brain states? PLoS Med 3(7): e240. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030240

The recent discussion of this topic began with an NPR Morning Edition segment, When It Comes To Depression, Serotonin Isn't The Whole Story, that examined the "chemical imbalance theory." Nearly all of the psychiatrists they spoke with admitted that there was never any real evidence that supported the "low serotonin causes depression" hypothesis.

Many listeners were outraged that these same doctors still tell patients that their depression is caused by low serotonin levels and that drugs correct that imbalance.

Jonathan Leo, Ph.D. and Jeffrey Lacasse, Ph.D. at Mad in America, a very cool new site run by Robert Whitaker (see his article, The chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders was disproven long ago — as well as Marcia Angell (former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine), whose pieces in the New York Review of Books mentions that the chemical imbalance story didn’t appear to have merit), fired off a nice post in response:

Psychiatry’s Grand Confession

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Jonathan Leo, Ph.D. / Jeffrey Lacasse, Ph.D.
The psychiatry profession has finally come clean and confessed on a national media outlet that there is no evidence to support the Serotonin Theory of Depression. Today, on NPR’s Morning Edition there is a segment about the chemical imbalance theory, and virtually all the psychiatrists who are interviewed acknowledge that the there was never any evidence in support of the idea that low serotonin causes depression. But then, amazingly, they go on to say that it is perfectly fine to tell patients that serotonin imbalance causes depression even though they know this isn’t the case.

Several years ago in PLoS Medicine we wrote a long piece about the serotonin theory and the disconnect between what research psychiatrists say in professional journals and textbooks and what the advertisements say. While the advertisements presented the theory as scientific fact, the scientific sources clearly did not. Given the enormous marketing programs that pushed this theory combined with the media’s lack of skepticism, we were sympathetic to the general public who could hardly be faulted for thinking that theory had some foundation in fact. Following the publication of our piece a reporter contacted us and suggested that we were attacking a well accepted theory. We pointed out to the reporter that we weren’t attacking a sacred cow but that instead we were pointing out the mainstream psychiatry didn’t even accept this theory. We urged the reporter to contact the FDA, NIMH, APA, etc and ask them about the science behind the advertisements. He did, and as expected, an expert from the FDA explained that the theory was really just a metaphor. The problem is that patients who heard their physician explain the serotonin theory thought they were hearing real science. They weren’t told it was a metaphor and hence thought it was a fact. When a doctor talks about high cholesterol, diabetes, or hypothyroidism, they are talking about scientific measurement, not a metaphor. How is a patient with high cholesterol and depression who listens to their doctor’s explanation of their conditions supposed to know when the doctor has moved from science to metaphor?

Several months ago Ronald Pies published an interesting article in Psychiatric Times entitled, “Psychiatry’s New Brain-Mind and the Legend of the Chemical Imbalance.” Pies, just like the experts on NPR, acknowledges that the Chemical Imbalance theory is not true. However, according to Pies, it was the pharmaceutical companies who espoused the theory, and not well-informed, practicing clinicians, because the psychiatry community has known all along that the theory is not true.

But if the Psychiatry Community knew all along that the theory was not true, then why did they not clarify this issue for the general public? Shouldn’t they have pointed out to the general public and patients that what the pharmaceutical companies were saying about psychological stress was not true? Why did the professional societies not publicly set the record straight?

Read the whole article.

Some of the most consistent work in this realm has been posted at Beyond Meds - check out these articles:

Chemical imbalance myth takes a big public fall (no, antidepressants do NOT correct an imbalance of serotonin, nor do other psychiatric drugs correct anything at all) January 25, 2012 By giannakali
The chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders was disproven long ago August 5, 2011 By giannakali
The chemical imbalance myth (mental health): by Chris Kresser November 10, 2009 By giannakali

INTEGRALES FORUM - A Statement on Sexual Ethics

2012-01-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

The INTEGRALES FORUM issued a statement a little while back on their choice not to work with Marc Gafni any longer. They had reservations about working with Gafni in the first place, but were persuaded (I have heard coerced by some) by Ken Wilber to work with him. But like Integral Life, they have chosen to sever ties with Gafni. Ken Wilber applauds their decision in a note he allowed them to post on their site.

Integral blogger Joe Perez called their statement sexual fascism - but one of the members of the Integrales Forum offered his own response to Perez. For once, an argument about Gafni in which I am not involved.

For what it's worth, I also applaud the statement by IF - they have shown the highest integral ethics and the moral spine to make their position public.

Here is the post from Integrales Forum (including their original statement, dated in September of last year):

Ken Wilber's response to the IF statement from January
My statement asked that each and every person—and organization—search their conscience and come to their own decision about Marc and CWS. I am deeply gratified that that individuals connected with IF have done exactly that, and although we came to somewhat different conclusions, I deeply respect and honor the decision reached by IF and its members. This is exactly the type of personal decision that I hoped individuals would indeed come to. The fact that they did shows a strong Integral ethics and conscience that bodes well for the future of Integral. Allow me to congratulate all the members of IF for reaching this deeply ethical conclusion. I am very proud of each and every one of you.

-- All love, Ken Wilber 2012-01-17

Postscript 1: Ken Wilber agreed to publish this statement.

Postscript 2: We (the IF board) are aware, that our statement is not a statement for all IF members, but is rather a reflection of our own position. We respect and honor if people come to different conclusions and decisions. Nevertheless, our statement is also the result of ten years of co-creation of and within the integral movement, as well as the continual discussion with a lot of people. That is why we would like to thank all the participants here, who further integral theory and practice, inside and outside of the IF. In this way we understand the congratulation by Ken Wilber as including all, even if we are not of the same opinion, and are very grateful for it.

-- The IF board 2012-01-17

Integrales Forum Statement Concerning Further Cooperation with Marc Gafni

After renewed allegations were presented against the spiritual teacher Marc Gafni in the fall of 2011, Ken Wilber took a three month period of time for reflection in order to state his own opinion in the matter. This statement (end of December) is now available [link]. In the statement Ken Wilber explains his further support and cooperation with Marc Gafni in the continuing development of the Center for World Spirituality (CWS) which was founded and is being led by Marc. At the same time Ken Wilber noted that this is his own personal decision and each and every individual should develop his own responsible position with respect to the situation. All members of the board of Integral Forum, including the working group for Integral Spirituality, have done just that.

After intensive discussions with members of the Integral Forum, partners, friends and also critics of Marc Gafni, we have come to a different decision than Ken Wilber. Until further notice, IF as an organization as well as individual members of the board will not take part in CWS and IF will not work together with Marc Gafni as a spiritual teacher. The main reason for our decision is our conviction that the leader of such an organization as CWS should exhibit a high degree of integrational capabilities in order to bring different religious and spiritual movements and personalities of the world together.

In a current statement, Marc Gafni confirmed that he does not exclude the possibility of sexual relationships with students of his circle in the future.

"Let me state formally that if in the future I enter into a monogamous commitment, then I will honor it and live in it to the fullest. If that is the right path for me then I will enter into it with full delight and even ecstasy. If I do not enter into that path, and choose to love from a different place, then I will enter into that path with full delight and even ecstasy. If that is the case then it is not impossible that at some point I will date women who are in my circle. If that feels uncomfortable to someone in principle that it might not be wise to join my circle of teaching."

We do not see this position as commensurate with the expectations for someone in such a prominent role as the leader of CWS, particularly in view of the many years of critical discussions with respect to his person and behavior [link]. Against the background of the existing spectrum of cultural values, Marc Gafni polarizes people and opinions and for this reason does not meet the criteria we expect in a personality with the ability to lead and integrate such a meaningful global project.

This polarization could also be seen within IF in view of the reaction to the most recent events. Many of us still hold him in high esteem as before, others view him very critically as a person. We are however unanimously of the same opinion that Marc Gafni, as author and integral thinker for the further development of the integral theory with concepts such as the unique self, provides an important contribution and we will continue to provide access to his contributions in our media.

The subject of world spirituality remains on our agenda. We will further promote this within the framework of the School for Integral Spirituality (SIS) in connection with the development of principles and ethical basics of this school.

Our wish is that a constructive and responsible interaction with differences of opinion concerning theory, individuals, methods, and paths will lead to the realization of a truly integral and integrative spirituality.

Integrales Forum, January 2012

Michael Habecker, Sonja Student, Dennis Wittrock, Hilde Weckmann, Rolf Lutterbeck, Erich Carl Derks, Stefan Schoch und Helmut Dörmann

- IF Board and working group School for Integral Spirituality (SIS) in the IF
A Statement of IF concerning Marc Gafni

Since its foundation, Integrales Forum has made an effort to develop an independent integral perspective in the German speaking countries, while also continuously looking for contact with the American integral scene around Ken Wilber. During the past years, several occasions for fruitful contact and cooperation have emerged, including with Marc Gafni, who together with co-teacher Diane Hamilton offered a contribution at the IF conference 2010 in Berlin and was a main contributor at this year's annual conference in Nuremberg.

A few years before this cooperation there were indications of Marc's ethical misconduct in connection with female students. At the time, this lead to a break between Marc and the Integral Institute. In this context Ken Wilber composed a critical text, which we have published in German language in the „Integrale Bibliothek“(integral library), which has now been incorporated in the general website of the Integral Forum. A few years later, Marc was officially rehabilitated by Integral Life (the CEO Robb Smith). This was the basis for the ensuing cooperation between Integrales Forum and Marc, after thoroughly checking the reasons for the rehabilitation, which had been supported by many teachers. Now (September 2011), new accusations of misconduct have been made against Marc, which we from Integrales Forum take very seriously and which have shaken the trust which we had shown in him after his rehabilitation. We have entered a new process of information and clarification. We will bring this process of clarification to a temporary conclusion from our side by the middle of October at the latest, and then make a statement. During this time we will put our cooperation with Marc as a spiritual teacher and in the context of the project of world spirituality on halt.

The IF aims to contribute to a more integral understanding in a variety of fields, including business, education, ecology, politics, etc. This also includes the very sensitive field of spirituality that we want to help evolve from an integral perspective with the help of many other spiritual teachers. We will continue working on the subjects such as world spirituality, a new concept of self and an evolutionary-integral understanding of love. In this, we will also take into account Marc's contributions, such as the ones we are publishing in the new edition of our magazine Integrale Perspektiven and the Online Journal. We’ve started this public discussion about spiritual standards already last year with our position paper (also discussing the role of spiritual teachers) and we will definitely continue to deepen it in the future.

The Integrales Forum Board and the DIA-Team:
Dennis Wittrock, Sonja Student, Hilde Weckmann, Michael Habecker, Rolf Lutterbeck

September 15th, 2011

Lucia Mann - Free the Slaves – A Call to Action for Modern Society

2012-01-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

This article was provided by Ginny Grimsley - and I thought it worth sharing, even though it is promotion for Lucia Mann's book, Rise Above Hate & Anger.

Free the Slaves – A Call to Action for Modern Society
Advocate Offers Tools to End Horrific Practice

In January, MSNBC.com posted a report of its four-month investigation into a slavery network emanating in Eastern Europe. Every year, it says, some 200,000 women and girls are smuggled out of impoverished former Soviet countries and sent to the Middle East, Western Europe and the United States, where they’re held captive.

In Haiti, UNICEF reported thousands of children were illegally trafficked out of the country following the devastating earthquakes two years ago. Selling orphaned children as slaves is a common problem following natural disasters, it says.

“Modern-day slavery is an even bigger problem than it was during the years of legalized slave trade from Africa to the Americas,” says Lucia Mann, the daughter of a woman who was held as a sex slave in South Africa in the 1940s. Mann, a former journalist, tells a slightly fictionalized version of her family’s story in Rise Above Hate & Anger (www.luciamann.com).

There are ways individuals can help end the suffering and reach out a hand to victims, says Mann, who created the Modern-Day Slave Reporting Centre as a tool to address the problem. Here are details about the reporting center and other resources.
• At The Modern-Day Slave Reporting Centre, www.mdsrc.org, anyone who suspects a person is being held captive, or any person who is being held their will, can file a report. The information will be reported to law enforcement officers and the person filing can request they remain a confidential source. The Web site also includes links to relevant law-enforcement agencies in Canada and the United States.

• At www.slaveryfootprint.org, people can take a short online survey that calculates the number of slaves working for you around the world based on the clothes, cars, electronic items and other consumer goods you own. The number is calculated according to what’s known about slave labor in the regions where the raw materials are produced and the goods are manufactured. (Google Chrome is required to take the survey.)

• At www.chainstorereaction.com, are email prepared letters and surveys to any of 1,566 companies asking what steps they’re taking to ensure no slave labor is used in their supply chains. Companies who complete the survey and go out of their way to describe ongoing and current efforts are tagged with a “Thank You.” Companies that complete the survey are tagged with “View Response.” As of mid-January, 70 companies ranging from Fruit of the Loom to Campbell’s Soup had earned a “Thank You.” Another 25, including Avon and Best Buy, had completed the survey. Most, though, had not responded despite numerous emails. Duracell, for instance, was sent 432 emails and Bounty was sent 221.

• In California, the Transparency in Supply Chains Act became effective Jan. 1. It requires retailers and manufacturers with gross receipts of $100 million to disclose what they’ve done – or haven’t done – to eliminate slavery in their supply chains. While there are no punitive consequences, advocates say the law will raise awareness and allow consumers to reward or punish companies with their shopping choices. Residents of other states can lobby legislators for a similar law.
“There is nowhere in the world now where slavery is legal, and yet more than 27 million people are held captive as forced laborers or sex slaves,” Mann says. “That’s more than twice the number enslaved during 400 years of trans-Atlantic trading.

Raising Americans’ awareness and concern is the first step to ending slavery, Mann says.

“If there is no money to be made from enslaving people, it will end.”

About Lucia Mann: Lucia Mann was born in British colonial South Africa in the wake of World War II and lives in British Columbia, Canada. She retired from freelance journalism in 1998 and wrote Rise Above Hate & Anger to give voice to those who suffered brutalities and captivity decades ago.

Minessence Group - Nothing Will Ever Change Until There's a Change of Worldview

2012-01-26T07:35:00.001-07:00

Good post . . . here is a taste.

Minessence Group - Nothing Will Ever Change Until There's a Change of Worldview

For change to occur, people need to make different choices in familiar situations. Since values lie behind all our choices, this means people need to undergo a values shift. For a values shift to occur, people's world-view must change. The diagram below shows the main things which shape a person's world-view:

Two of the most powerful influencers of worldview are emotion and the media:
Emotion
The fastest way of shifting people's world-view is through deliberately provoking a "significant emotive event"--brain washing techniques are an extreme example of this. If you think people would never resort to these techniques, think again! The question we must ask is, are techniques which deliberately provoke "significant emotive events", ethical?

Read the whole article.

Diane Rehm - Language, Music and the Brain

2012-01-26T07:01:00.001-07:00

I listened to this yesterday in the car on my way to work - it's a nice discussion worth listening to. Learning languages or how to play a musical instrument can slow cognitive decline and make other forms of learning much easier.

The Diane Rehm Show - Language, Music and the Brain

Listen
Transcript

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

This undated handout photo provided by P. K. Kuhl, Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and the LIFE Center, University of Washington, shows a nine-month-old Finnish girl listening to the sounds of English, Finnish and Mandarin Chinese while in a MEG machine.

Learning new skills in adulthood may seem like a daunting task. Over time there is a gradual decline of the brain’s ability to absorb new information. But experts say, with the right tools and a few tricks, we can continue to grasp and retain information as we age. The process of learning a language or how to play a new instrument offers interesting insights into the challenge. Two experts join us to talk about how mastering new and complex skills differs as we age and what it takes to become a lifelong learner.

Guests

Gary Marcus - Professor of psychology, the director of the New York University Center for Language and Music, and author of "Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning."

Michael Erard - author of "Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners"

Mo Costandi - Magic mushrooms in the neuropsychoanalytical framework

2012-01-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

The Guardian (UK) recently posted this article by Mo Costandi in his Neurophilosophy column on the most recent research into the use of psilocybe mushrooms in neuropsychoanalysis. Costandi highlights some recent research from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and from the British Journal of Psychiatry.

One of the interesting findings is that the psychoactive chemicals seem to dampen the parts of the brain associated with executive function, what the Freudian model might think of as the ego. This likely results in the diminishing of personal identity and the expansion of worldcentric and cosmocentric consciousness.

Magic mushrooms in the neuropsychoanalytical framework

Psilocybe cubensis on sale in north London. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

This week, researchers from Imperial College London publish two separate studies of the effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient of magic mushrooms. The first appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, and I've written a news story about it for Nature. It's one of a small number of studies using brain scanning to examine the neurological effects of the drug. The second, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, examines the effects of the drug on the quality of recalled memories.

The past decade has seen a resurgence in psychedelic research, not least because psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs have potential therapeutic value for various psychiatric conditions. Here, I'd like to focus on another aspect of the new studies. Robin Carhart-Harris, lead author on both of the papers, interprets the findings within the framework of neuropsychoanalysis. I briefly describe this emerging movement, and how it might be used to explain the psychological effects of psilocybin.

According to Freud, the self consists of three components – the Id, which is driven by instincts and the pleasure principle, and seeks immediate gratification; the Ego, which is driven by the reality principle, and is concerned with making rational decisions; and the Superego, which is driven by perfection and makes moral judgements. The Ego is torn between the demands of the Id and those of the Superego, and uses various defence mechanisms, such as repression and neuroses, to resolve these conflicts.

Freud also distinguished between two different modes of thought, which he referred to as the primary and secondary processes. The primary process occurs during abnormal states such as dreaming and psychosis, and is characterised by an excess of neuronal or psychical energy as a result of the Id's actions. The secondary process, by contrast, equates to 'normal' consciousness, and involves the efforts of the Ego to minimize the psychical energy generated by the Id.

As Carhart-Harris explains in this talk at the 2010 MAPS Psychedelic Science conference, neuropsychoanalysis attempts to link some of these concepts to large-scale brain networks and their organizational principles. The Ego, for example, equates to the default mode network, a diffuse brain system which comes online during wakeful rest periods, but whose activity is suppressed when the brain engages in a task.

Incorporated into this framework is Karl Friston's free-energy principle of brain function. According to this, the brain is an inference machine which makes predictions about the world and modifies them depending on actual experience. It acts to minimize the errors in its predictions, so that they are as accurate as possible. Free energy is thus a measure of the brain's prediction errors, and equates to Freud's concept of psychical energy.

In their neuroimaging study, Carhart-Harris and his colleagues found that psilocybin produces widespread decreases in brain activity. "The decreases in activity were in specific regions that belong to… the default network," he told TIME Magazine's Maia Szalavitz. "There's a lot of evidence that it's associated with our sense of self — our ego or personality." He goes on to say that psychedelic drugs often produce "a temporary dissolution of [the] ego or sense of being an independent agent with a particular personality."

From the neuropsychoanalytical perspective, then, the effects of psilocybin and other psychedelics may be explained as follows. The psychedelic state is an abnormal state of consciousness, and so can be thought of as akin to Freud's concept of the primary process. Psychedelic drugs act directly on the ego by inhibiting activity in the default mode network, leading to the commonly reported dissolution of the self. By doing so, they unleash free energy that the brain normally tries to keep to a minimum, leading to intense sensory impressions that are not normally perceived, and to uncontrolled thought process.

This is, of course, all entirely theoretical and highly speculative, and it's up to proponents of neuropsychoanalysis to show that the framework is more than just a set of metaphors for brain function. What's more, it's still not clear if these new brain scanning data will hold up. As discussed in my news story, Franz Vollenweider and his colleagues at the University of Zürich have just completed a number of similar studies, in which they obtained completely different results, so my neuropsychoanalytical explanation of the effects of psychedelics may be completely wrong.

Reference: Carhart-Harris, R. L. & Friston, K. J. (2010). The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas. Brain, 133: 1265–1283. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awq01

The Integral Trollz Join the Marc Gafni Defense Team

2012-01-25T15:59:00.001-07:00

The Integral Trollz (Kaine DeBoer and Hokyo Joshua Routhier) have adopted the personas of Robin Koki Lawson and Bonnitta Roy to create an animated defense of Marc Gafni's right to boink his students, as if that were ever the real issue. The two original trolls are fans of Gafni, so their efforts to "exonerate a non-predator" make perfect, though misguided, sense. I don't know Lawson, but I had not thought Roy to be so dim as these trollz.

Aside from completely misunderstanding everything I have written on Gafni's abuses, and mocking me as "Sir William," they also miss many of the relevant facts (for example, Gafni was having affairs with one or both of the women while holding up his monogamous marriage as an example to his community). Oops. Then there are all the other lies. Oops.

Since I am the only person who is named in the video (they mention Joe Perez but do not comment on him), I'll offer a very weak defense because, really, who gives a fuck anymore? Gafni is essentially isolated, with Sally Kempton the only big supporter left at his side, and well . . . enough said.

It's funny that they attack me, oh so gently, for supposedly thinking that this whole issue was about a sexually aggressive man and weak women in need of [my] defense. I have no doubt that both women willingly entered into relationship with Gafni, and even seduced him, but that does not negate his lies and manipulations.

One of Gafni's criticisms of those who have called him out has been that we fail to grasp the complexity of an integral, all quadrants perspective, yet his whole defense (and that of his defenders) is to simplify his actions to "adults having consensual sex" and, with that, sometimes people have their feelings hurt.

The trollz also try to compare this to the Denis Merzel affair - they claim Merzel got off easy in comparison. But in the Zen community, Merzel was ostracized and there has been a concerted effort by leaders in the Zen community to prevent him from teaching as a Zen Buddhist.

To their credit, Robb Smith, Diane Hamilton, John Dupuy, and even Elliott Ingersoll (in a Facebook thread) made public statements about Gafni's misconduct. Too bad more integral teachers also did not step up.

You can watch the video for yourself. I realize they were just having fun - but if they did not have an agenda, they would have poked at Perez and Gafni, as well.

Sounds True - Bruce Tift: Being and Becoming

2012-01-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Sounds True presents periodic Director's Picks, an interview with one of the people who has produced an audio or book program for Sounds True, someone who has made an impact on Tami Simon or other staff members. Recently, that person was Bruce Tift, a Buddhist psychotherapist - thus my interest.

Bruce Tift: Being and Becoming

Buddhism and psychotherapy both share the same ultimate goal: the alleviation of human suffering. Yet it can be puzzling for therapists and practitioners alike to try to integrate these two very different approaches. When Tami Simon was recording the new audio learning program Already Free with Bruce Tift, she was impressed by the depth of Bruce’s understanding of these two paths and their inherent contradictions. Tami says that Bruce’s inquiry opened her mind to resting with paradox in an open and accepting way—and that this skill of accepting paradox instead of struggling to resolve it may be a key to happiness. In this excerpt, Bruce talks about the key ideas of “being” and “becoming,” and how they are expressed in Western and Eastern traditions.

more from Bruce Tift

NPR - First Listen: Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas'

2012-01-25T07:45:00.001-07:00

NPR has made Leonard Cohen's new album, "Old Ideas," available in its entirety for streaming, but only for a limited time - so go listen now.

First Listen: Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas'

by Ann Powers

Listen To 'Old Ideas' In Its Entirety
[41 min 44 sec]

Leonard Cohen's new album, Old Ideas, comes out Jan. 31.

January 22, 2012

In a recent public conversation with fellow rock bard Jarvis Cocker about the new recording Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen answered the younger man's suggestion that his songs are "penitential hymns" (a phrase Cohen himself employs in his new song "Come Healing") with jocular humility. "I'm not sure what that means, to be honest," Cohen reportedly replied. He continued, "Who's to blame in this catastrophe? I never figured that out."

The catastrophe he mentions is life itself — a description Cohen probably picked up from a fictional character he admires, Zorba the Greek, who embraced the "full catastrophe" of a well-connected, joyfully physical existence. The Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn has also borrowed it for a book title, which is relevant, since Cohen's writing is famously philosophical, connecting his Jewish heritage to years of Zen meditation and an enduring existentialist bent.

But this spiritual master is a sensualist, too: His artistry is grounded in the careful examination of how the body and the soul interact. Old Ideas, his 12th studio album, was recorded after a triumphant world tour that had Cohen performing three-hour shows night after night — no mean feat for a man in his late 70s. It throbs with that life, its verses rife with zingers and painful confessions, and its music sounds more richly varied than anything Cohen has done in years.

Its depth comes in the tenderness and refined passion Cohen brings to his thorough descriptions of being human — a state in which pain and failure dance with transcendence and bliss, as he growls in harmony with his angelic backup singers in the beautiful "Come Healing," "The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above."

Old Ideas provides plenty of new lines like that, worthy of a Quotable Cohen anthology. (My favorite right now is from the folksy waltz "Crazy to Love You": "Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than any goodbye.") But what makes this album special is its sound, which steps back from the synthesizer-heavy arrangements dominant on Cohen's other late-period work and explores a range of styles, from countrypolitan twang to gypsy jazz to Dylanesque blues.

Bobby Zimmerman, in fact, is a clear reference point throughout Old Ideas. At times, it seems like a response to Time Out of Mind, the 1997 release that marked the beginning of Dylan's epic lion-in-winter phase. (That he was only 57 when he made it shows how long a pop star's old age can last.) Like that album, Old Ideas contemplates mortality in the bitter light of failed romance; it fearlessly broaches emotional extremes while still dropping the wisdom of an elder who should know better. "The Darkness," with its funky undertow, and "Banjo," an easy talking blues, are especially Dylanesque, with Cohen adding tartness to his own gravelly growl and his band getting into a loose Americana groove.

In the end, of course, Leonard Cohen remains his own man, with a unique sound that brings the temple to the cabaret and a sensibility balancing humor and profundity on the crystal stem of a glass filled with red wine of an ideal vintage. In "Going Home," whose words were recently featured in The New Yorker by poetry editor Paul Muldoon, Cohen's inner spirit pokes fun at his pop-star self: "He's a lazy bastard living in a suit," the enlightened voice says. But you know what? That suit still fits, and the cut is perfection.

First Listen: Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas'

Going Home

Amen

Show Me the Place

Darkness

Anyhow

Crazy to Love You

Come Healing

Banjo

Lullaby

Different Sides

Discover - Culture evolves our bodies!

2012-01-24T07:00:00.001-07:00

Part of the integral model of human evolution is that culture acts as an engine for physical and psychological evolution, and likewise, physical evolution contributes to psychological and cultural evolution. Until recently, there was little evidence for this model - but with epigenetics, all of that has changed.

The authors of the article are cautious to see this evidence as an important new element of evolution that Darwin did not account for. There is a name for this field - sociobiology, and it's leading proponent is no less a mind that E.O. Wilson.

Culture evolves our bodies!

Human cultural diversity
One of the most annoying aspects of talking about human evolution is the rather misguided idea that cultural evolutionary processes operate in a zero-sum environment in relation to biological evolutionary processes. The colloquial rendering of this idea is that because humans are a highly cultural plastic species, we are “beyond” biological evolution. Many researchers though suspect that on the contrary, because of cultural variation and plasticity we may be buffeted by even greater evolutionary pressures than is the norm for a relatively slow-breeding species with a small effective population size. Probably the best example of this is the ability of adults in several human populations to digest lactose sugar. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, a freak ability. Why would a mammal need to digest milk sugar as an adult after all? Well, you know why, the human mammal is wont to consume the milk of other mammals, which it has taken into bondage. Viewed from the outside the whole process is rather weird and Frankenstein-like, but we’ve been habituated to the normalcy of this sort of thing because of the diversity of cultural forms on evidence in H. sapiens (though in some societies the initial exposure to the fact that Europeans, for example, consume milk and milk products into adulthood was perceived to be highly strange).

A new paper in PNAS implicitly makes this point, Cultural diversification promotes rapid phenotypic evolution in Xavánte Indians. To be sure, I think it does set up some strawmen as well. For example, the authors suggest that their results depart “from the classic view that human evolution is the sole result of adaptation to the external environment.” “Classic” is the wrong word. Outmoded is perhaps better. I doubt any evolutionary minded anthropologist would espouse this viewpoint. Rather, the idea that culture drives evolution is I believe a null hypothesis (this may not be the case for cultural anthropologists). In other words, this paper supports and adds detail to our prior expectations, it does not shift a paradigm.

All that being said, what did they do? The authors used a set of variables amongst groups of indigenous Amazonian populations, and analyzed how the variables related to each other. In particular, they found that one tribe seems to have undergone a great deal of phenotypic divergence from a genetically and linguistically related population (last common ancestors ~1,500 years B.P.). The phenotypic variables were head circumference, facial height, nasal height, nasal breadth, and glabello-occipital length. They also constructed a phylogeny using mtDNA, and related that and the phenotype to geography, and climatic 6 × 6 distance matrix. One assumes that variables like phylogeny, geography and climate should be robust predictors of phenotypic divergence (i.e., in a random drift model phenotypic divergence would be proportional to genetic distance).

The primary descriptive result in illustrated to the left. The Xavánte are outliers in both genotype and phenotype. But, they do cluster with the Kayapó on genotype. The phenotypic and genotypic pattern simply does not align. Why? One rationale would be local adaptation, which drives between group divergence out of sync with total genome genetic distance. But recall that the authors attempted to take into account these particular exogenous variables into their model. In other words, the phenotypic distance can not be explained by variation in genetic distance, or conventional exogenous variables such as geography and climate. By a process of elimination one is then left with the position that endogenous cultural factors are driving the phenotypic separation of the outgroup.

First, how plausible are these results? I have little to say about the geographic, climatic, or phenotypic variables. But, as the authors observe mtDNA is a single locus. That’s the only genetic data they had, but it may not be very reflective of the average phylogeny when you draw at random from the broader genome, which would be a much better reflection of population genetic history. One can easily imagine this sort of study being subject to false positive bias. Many researchers have databases of mtDNA genetic distance, as well as other variables, and the only ones which get published are those which show the statistically significant deviation noted above. So replication of the same sort of result in other populations is essential when it comes to lending credit to the plausible model of culture-driven evolution.

A bigger issue for me is the theoretical assumption that between society gene flow will rapidly eliminate differences sans very strong cultural pressures. Hostile neighbors still tend to exchange genes (e.g., kidnapping of women for brides, or slaves which are eventually assimilated into the enslaving tribe). Only a small amount of gene flow is necessary to prevent the accumulation of group-level differences. So you need strong between group selection to maintain those differences.

In contrast, cultural differences can easily manifest in large between group variation, and little within group variation. An accent is the most obvious illustration. A tribe can easily have a distinctive accent which immediately separates it from its neighbors, and only manifests modest within group variation (e.g., along generational lines). The model posited here is that these between group cultural differences are powerful enough to driven biological differences. Are they? I am not sure that they are at this fine a scale, but am open to the proposition.

What we need are cultural forms which are resistant to stochastic forces. In other words, something which is not a fad or fashion, but will be maintained for generations. In a literate society one can imagine such a thing (e.g., Jewish circumcision has persisted over 2,000 years, while the Zulu only gave up the practice during the time of Shaka). But what about pre-literate societies? I’m not so sure.

On the other hand, I also expect that between group differences and hostilities are greater amongst pre-literate groups, so that works in favor of the model (societies characterized by literate elites and elaborated ideologies generally have systems and justifications for assimilation and absorption of outsiders in a coherent and systematic manner; those without may not, though often they do as well). In the final sum: more study needed!

Citation: Cultural diversification promotes rapid phenotypic evolution in Xavánte Indians, doi:10.1073/pnas.1118967109

Image credit: Wikipedia

The Secular Buddhist - Episode 100 :: Stephen Batchelor :: The Awakening of the West

2012-01-24T06:42:00.001-07:00

My favorite secular Buddhist is featured on this episode of The Secular Buddhist Podcast - Stephen Batchelor talks about his newest book, The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture.

Episode 100 :: Stephen Batchelor :: The Awakening of the West

Stephen Batchelor
Hi, everyone. Welcome to this milestone in The Secular Buddhist podcast, as we expand into our third digit of Episode 100. We would not have reached this point without you, our growing listener community. And it is growing, as of this recording each episode is getting over 1200 downloads with over 142,000 total. The Secular Buddhist is usually if not always listed in the top 36 on iTunes for Buddhist podcasts, the FaceBook page has over 2000 Likes, and even our Twitter feed is seeing a constant stream of new Followers. We have a new website for the Secular Buddhist Association, designed for the development of community, with new sites springing up in other countries (more on that next week!). And our sincerest thanks to the many wonderful guests it has been a great joy to speak with. If not for you, this podcast would not have gained the attention it has.

Part of the reason for this steady increase in the interest of a secular way of engaging with a traditional practice is our culture, both in terms of our becoming a more secular society, and the technological tools I mentioned that foster that growth. Far from being a “watering down” of the teaching and practice of Buddhism, this is a watering of those seeds planted in new and rich soil, that of our contemporary culture. Conveniently, tracing the evolution of Buddhism in the West is the subject of the book we’re discussing today.

Stephen Batchelor is a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Buddhism. Stephen considers Buddhism to be a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system based on immutable dogmas and beliefs. In particular, he regards the doctrines of karma and rebirth to be features of ancient Indian civilisation and not intrinsic to what the Buddha taught. Buddhism has survived for the past 2,500 years because of its capacity to reinvent itself in accord with the needs of the different Asian societies with which it has creatively interacted throughout its history. As Buddhism encounters modernity, it enters a vital new phase of its development. Through his writings, translations and teaching, Stephen engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world, which has earned him both condemnation as a heretic and praise as a reformer.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice French Lemon Ginger tea.

Podcast: Download

:: Discuss this episode ::
Quotes
“To suggest that traditional Buddhism is just as impermanent and as contingent and as imperfect as everything else, is not going to sit very happily with beliefs that are held regarding the truth of our particular doctrines, the authority of our lineage — all of these things are very much threatened by historical awareness of the actual state of affairs. But frankly I find that historical awareness of Buddhism is a wonderful way of illustrating the core teachings of Buddhism itself, namely that Buddhism is not somehow excluded from being contingently arisen, nor is it excluded from being impermanent, nor is it excluded from being dukkha, from being dissatisfactory and imperfect.” — Stephen Batchelor
Web Links
Martine and Stephen Batchelor — Official Website
Buddhist Geeks Podcast — Interview with Stephen Batchelor
Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
Music for This Episode

Documentary - The Real Bonnie and Clyde

2012-01-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting - maybe you will, too. It's fascinating how history can become myth - in this case it seems the subjects were heavily invested in creating the myth.

The Real Bonnie and Clyde

Hollywood portrayed them as the most glamorous outlaws in American history, but the reality of life on the run for Bonnie and Clyde was one of violence, hardship and danger.

With unprecedented access to gang members’ memoirs, family archives and recently released police records, Timewatch takes an epic road trip through the heart of depression-era America, in search of the true story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were well-known outlaws, robbers, and criminals who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression.

Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the public enemy era between 1931 and 1934.

Though known today for his dozen-or-so bank robberies, Barrow in fact preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations.

The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and committed several civilian murders.

The couple themselves were eventually ambushed and killed in Louisiana by law officers. Their reputation was cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Watch the full documentary now

BBC Radio 4 - Freud vs Jung

2012-01-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

With the most recent David Cronenberg film in theaters now, called A Dangerous Method, being about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, this BBC Radio 4 episode is highly relevant. Even without the film, it's very interesting.

Programme information

Freud vs Jung
Lisa Appignanesi explores the intense relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the two dominant figures in the world of psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's names may be linked in the public imagination but the two men were friends and collaborators for only a few short years. In 1912 they had a final, catastrophic split and never worked together again. Lisa Appignanesi tells the story of the titanic struggle which shaped our map of the unconscious. Did the bisected science fail to fulfill its promise and how much can be laid at the door of the primal argument between its dominant father and rebellious son?

Is there a real you? Julian Baggini on TED.com

2012-01-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

I think this video of philosopher Julian Baggini falls into the category of a TED's Greatest Hits. They posted it this weekend on the Editors' Blog, which is where they generally highlight their best or most popular videos.

Is there a real you? Julian Baggini on TED.com
What makes you, you? Is it how you think of yourself, how others think of you, or something else entirely? At TEDxYouth@Manchester, Julian Baggini draws from philosophy and neuroscience to give a surprising answer. (Recorded at TEDxYouth@Manchester, August 2011, in Miami Beach, Florida. Duration: 12:14)

Watch Julian Baggini’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind

2012-01-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

Upaya Zen Center recently hosted another Zen Brain series (all twelve parts are below). This years speakers were Evan Thompson, John Dunne, Rebecca Todd, Al Kaszniak, Richie Davidson, George Chrousos, and Joan Halifax. This year's topic is Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind.

I have included the audio player for the first two segments, then all of the rest are linked back to the Upaya Zen Center podcast page. I have been listening as these were posted - and enjoying them a lot. Evan Thompson and Richie Davidson are among my favorite people in this realm, and the topic is embodied mind, one of my favorite topics.

Evan Thompson & John Dunne & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Richie Davidson & George Chrousos & Joan Halifax: 01-12-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 1)
Speakers: Evan Thompson & John Dunne & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Richie Davidson & George Chrousos & Joan Halifax

Recorded: Friday Jan 13, 2012

In this opening session of the Zen Brain Retreat, the presenters introduce themselves and the presentations they will make in the coming days.

SERIES DESCRIPTION

In recent years, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have contributed new observations and insights into the brain and bodily processes involved in those states we call emotions and their relationships to our perceptions and actions. These observations support the conclusion that bodily changes and the experience of the body are inextricable aspects of emotions, and of most other aspects of mind. These disciplines have also provided frameworks for understanding how emotions are initiated and regulated in the mind/brain/body that are resonant with Buddhist perspectives and practices.

Well known scientists and scholars will explore emotions, equanimity, and the embodied mind from the perspectives of Buddhist theory and practice, neuroscience/neuroendocrinology, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Special consideration will be given to recent studies of emotion response and regulation in meditation practitioners.

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007), and the co-editor (with P. Zelazo and M. Moscovitch) of The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2007) He is also the co-author with F.J. Varela and E. Rosch of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991) and the author of Color Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is currently working on a new book, titled Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Revelations about the Self from Neuroscience and Meditation.

John Dunne is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he is Co-Director of the Encyclopedia of Contemplative Practices and the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies. He was educated at the Amherst College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of Religion in 1999.   His work focuses on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice. In Foundations of Dharmakirti’s Philosophy (2004), he examines the most prominent Buddhist theories of perception, language, inference and justification. His current research includes an inquiry into the notion of “mindfulness” in both classical Buddhist and contemporary contexts, and he is also engaged in a study of Candrakirti’s “Prasannapada”, a major Buddhist philosophical work on the metaphysics of “emptiness” and “selflessness.” His recently published work includes an essay on neuroscience and meditation co-authored with Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz. He frequently serves as a translator for Tibetan scholars, and as a consultant, he appears on the roster of several ongoing scientific studies of Buddhist contemplative practices.

Rebecca Todd received her Ph.D. in Developmental Science and Neuroscience from the University of Toronto Her doctoral work focused on mapping neural activation patterns underlying affective processing as well as cognition/emotion interactions associated with individual differences and normative development of self-regulation in childhood. Current research interests include investigating the effects of emotional arousal on the subjective experience of perceptual vividness and its link with memory vividness in healthy young adults and in post-traumatic stress disorder. She is also interested in the influence of emotional state on perceptual processing and higher-order cognitive processes, and the neural mechanisms underlying such influences.

Richie Davidson received his Ph.D. in Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychophysiology from Harvard University. He is currently Director for the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience as well as the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research is focused on cortical and subcortical substrates of emotion and affective disorders, including depression and anxiety, using quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to make inferences about patterns of regional brain function. A major focus of his current work is on interactions between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in the regulation of emotion in both normal subjects and patients with affective and anxiety disorders.

Dr. George Chrousos has earned an esteemed reputation for his tireless research in not only pediatrics, but endocrinology, psychiatry, rheumatology, allergies, surgery, oncology, and reproductive medicine. According to his ISI, he is one of the world’s pre-eminent pediatric physicians and endocrinologists and is the UNESCO chair in adolescent care. His expertise in stress in large part can be linked to his work in endocrinology. The interrelationships between the nervous system and the endocrine systems have a significant impact on mood and sleep disorders, pain perception, and immune Dr. Chrousos is among the 250 most prominent clinical investigators in the world. In his illustrious career as a medical researcher and educator, he has authored more than 1100 scientific publications, has edited 26 books and his work has been cited over 52,000 times.

Al Kaszniak received his Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976, and completed an internship in clinical neuropsychology at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. He is currently Head of the Department of Psychology, Director of Clinical Neuropsychology, Director of the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium Education Core, and a professor in the departments of psychology, neurology, and psychiatry at The University of Arizona. His research, published in over 150 journal articles, chapters and books (including edited volumes on consciousness and science), has been supported by grants from the NIH, NIMH, and several private foundations. His work has focused on the neuropsychology of Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related neurological disorders, memory self-monitoring, the biological bases of emotion, and emotion response and regulation in long-term Zen and mindfulness meditators.

Joan Halifax Roshi is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D in medical anthropology in 1973. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions, including Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, Duke University Medical School, University of Connecticut Medical School, among many others.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Evan Thompson: 01-13-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 2)
Speaker: Evan Thompson

Recorded: Friday Jan 13, 2012

Episode Description: In this presentation, Evan explores Life, Mind, Sociality and Empathy.

For the Series Description and the Bio for the entire faculty please click Zen Brain Jan 2012 Series Part 1.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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John Dunne & Evan Thompson: 01-13-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 3)
Speakers: John Dunne & Evan Thompson

Recorded: Friday Jan 13, 2012

Episode Description: In his presentation, John discusses why we notice some things and not others, how we notice, affective frameworks and the connection to action. This is followed by a period of questions and answers with Evan and John and then a brief guided meditation.

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George Chrousos: 01-13-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity and the Embodied Mind (Part 4)
Speaker: George Chrousos
Recorded: Friday Jan 13, 2012

Episode Description: In this informative presentation, Dr. Chrousos presents the scientific knowledge on stress. He addresses stress concepts, stress mechanisms, the effects of stress on body and mind and what is known scientifically about coping with stress.

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Richie Davidson & Evan Thompson & George Chrousos & John Dunne & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax: 01-13-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity and the Embodied Mind (Part 5)
Speakers: Richie Davidson & Evan Thompson & George Chrousos & John Dunne & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax
Recorded: Friday Jan 13, 2012

Description: In this session, the Zen Brain faculty answer questions which were submitted earlier in the afternoon. Themes range from “the nature of consciousness” to “what is beneficial about a Mediterranean diet.”

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Rebecca Todd: 01-14-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 6)
Speaker: Rebecca Todd

Recorded: Saturday Jan 14, 2012

Episode Description: In this presentation Rebecca Todd presents the research on affective salience, emotional valence, how selective attention is attuned, developmental changes in tuning ourselves to what is important to our well being, individual differences in selective attention to affectively salient events, and evidence for its trainability.

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Rebecca Todd & Ritchie Davidson & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax: 01-14-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 7)
Speakers: Rebecca Todd & Ritchie Davidson & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax
Recorded: Saturday Jan 14, 2012

Episode Description: This session contains the conclusion of Rebecca’s presentation, a questions and answer period and a Koan offered by Roshi Joan.

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Richie Davidson: 01-14-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 8)
Speaker: Richie Davidson
Recorded: Saturday Jan 14, 2012
Note: The Jan 11, 2012 dharma talk by Al Kaszniak is a prelude episode, #548.0 or pre-548, to this series.
Episode Description: In this presentation Richie Davidson gives us a number of insights relative to the theme of this Zen Brain retreat. He presents psychological and neuroscience research concerned with embodiment and key questions that motivate it, and then some findings on contemplative neuroscience and embodiment.

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Richie Davidson:: 01-14-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 9)
Speaker: Richie Davidson:
Recorded: Saturday Jan 14, 2012

Episode Description: In this presentation Richie Davidson gives us a number of insights relative to the theme of this Zen Brain retreat. He presents psychological and neuroscience research concerned with embodiment and key questions that motivate it, and then some findings on contemplative neuroscience and embodiment.

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Evan Thompson & John Dunne & Richie Davidson & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax: 01-14-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 10)
Speakers: Evan Thompson & John Dunne & Richie Davidson & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax
Recorded: Saturday Jan 14, 2012

Episode Description: In this session, the Zen Brain Faculty respond to questions which were submitted earlier in the day.

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Evan Thompson & John Dunne & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax: 01-15-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 11)
Speakers: Evan Thompson & John Dunne & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax
Recorded: Sunday Jan 15, 2012

Episode Description: In this part 1 of Zen Brain final session, the faculty answer questions from the floor.

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Evan Thompson & John Dunne & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax: 01-15-12: Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind (Part 12)
Speakers: Evan Thompson & John Dunne & George Chrousos & Rebecca Todd & Al Kaszniak & Joan Halifax

Recorded: Sunday Jan 15, 2012

Episode Description: In this concluding part of Zen Brain final session, the faculty answer questions from the floor.

TEDxCambridge - June Gruber - The Dark Side of Happiness

2012-01-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Yale psychologist June Gruber asks whether, in a culture obsessed with pursuing happiness, it's possible to have too much of a good thing.

TEDxCambridge - June Gruber - The Dark Side of Happiness

New Light on Dark Energy

2012-01-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

From UCTelevision, filmed at the Berkeley Cosmology Lab.

New Light on Dark Energy

Is dark energy really accelerating the universe? Join Andrew Fraknoi and three Berkeley Lab cosmologists as they delve into nature's greatest mystery. Greg Aldering explores type 1 supernovae. Shirley Ho measures the cosmos through baryon oscillation and Eric Linder asks out of the box questions about the cosmos; could it be something even stranger than dark energy driving the universe? Series: "Science at the Theater" [2/2012]

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

2012-01-22T08:39:00.001-07:00

From Common Dreams . . . . I'm not sure that there is much we can do about the Citizen's United decision. We need Congress to overturn the decision with legislation, and they will NEVER do that (they are the only people who benefit from the decision). The Court will not - and probably is not able to - reverse their own decision in the absence of a case that justifies the reversal.

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts
“Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines"
- Common Dreams staff

The coalition Move to Amend has called for a day of action today to occupy federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling.

CNN reports on the timing of the action:
The event is being held around the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed many limits to corporate spending in federal political campaigns, organizers say.
The 2010 ruling made it legal for groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for a candidate, as long as the group does not coordinate with the candidate or contributed directly to his or her campaign.
It allowed for the rise of Super PACs, which can raise unlimited funds from corporations.
Politico reports:
“Why the courts? Because frankly folks, that’s the scene of the crime,” said David Cobb, an organizer of Friday’s protests. “Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines. We the people never decided it; our elected representatives didn’t decide it; ordinary people like me and you never decided it. The court created these doctrines and it’s going to take a movement to overturn it.”
One tweeter's picture this morning shows barricades going up around the Supreme Court building.

Helen Vendler - Wallace Stevens as an American Poet

2012-01-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

From Stanford University, Helen Vendler (one of our greatest living literary critics) speaks about Wallace Stevens, one of our greatest poets.

Wallace Stevens as an American Poet

January 17, 2012 - Helen Vendler, one of the leading American poetry critics, as well as a distinguished professor in Harvard University's Department of English, discusses Wallace Stevens, the poet. She dives into some of his work in order to show why he is one of the finest American poets to set ink to paper. Wallace Stevens was born in 1879 and died in 1955 and was awarded a Pulitzer prize that same year.

Alva Noë - Story Telling And The 'Uncanny Valley'

2012-01-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

In this most recent entry at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë looks at animation, narrative, and psychological reality.

Storytelling And The 'Uncanny Valley'
January 20, 2012

by Alva Noë

Warner Brothers: Hero Boy — played by Tom Hanks — in The Polar Express

Many an animated character wouldn't seem so unreal and dead if it didn't seem so real and alive!
This is a puzzle that has long troubled animators. If you saw Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, you know what I'm talking about. Remember the dead eyes of the characters, their zombie-like vacancy?

Animators do an excellent job bringing the nonhuman to life on the screen — think of WALL-E, or the enchanted broomsticks in Fantasia, not to mention Mickey Mouse himself — but they falter with the more realistically human. And isn't hard to see why.
As Lawrence Weschler, who takes up this topic in the lead essay of his excellent new book Uncanny Valley: Adventures in Narrative, puts it:
"When a replicant's almost completely human, the slightest variance, the 1 percent that's not quite right, suddenly looms up enormously rendering the entire effect somehow creepy and monstrously alien (no longer, that is, an incredibly lifelike machine but rather a human being with something inexplicably wrong ..."

This precipitous drop off in psychological reality, or in normalcy, as you get close to verisimilitude, but not close enough, was first dubbed "the uncanny valley" in 1970 by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.

As Weschler suggests, good story telling (supported by effective sound and music) is enough to make even the dumbest doorstop think and feel on the screen. So maybe the uncanny valley has something to do with storytelling?

This is certainly not the preferred approach, which targets technology and the human perceptual system, rather than art, to explain the uncanny valley. The preferred approach goes like this:

What makes animation possible in the first place is our evolved tendency to see mind where there is none (on a sock puppet, or in a line drawing). This tendency runs counter to another basic cognitive trait, our natural hyper-sensitivity to even the most subtle inflections of face, posture, movement. The uncanny valley opens up because these two dispositions collide: we experience the mind behind the animated humanlike face — just as we can project mind onto a teddy bear — but we can't help but experience it as in some way deviant; as "a human being with something inexplicably wrong."

Two interesting upshots. First, on this approach, if animators want to bridge the uncanny valley, they'd better find a way to cover that last 1 percent; they'd better find ways more effectively to replicate that complex choreography of eyes, skin, bone, mouth and muscle that is the genuine, animate human face.

Second, there's no obstacle in principle to bridging the valley. It's just a matter of time, money and research collaboration between animators and cognitive scientists.

Now I find the suggestion that our experience of a narrative work of art could be the result of the blind operation of the visual system highly implausible. Remember, we aren't talking about real face perception here. We're talking about animated movies. We're talking about story telling! Maybe Weschler is right that story telling is the key.

Consider this: the story-telling art forms — here, for the sake of brevity, I consider only film, writing and animated film — are each driven by and capitalize on different feelings, different stances, different kinds of desires on the part of the audience.

The basic impulse driving film as a storytelling art is the impulse to look, see, and watch; when it comes to film, we like to peep and spy. Film is the voyeuristic art. Of course we know, intellectually, that what we see, when we watch a film, is the work of directors, producers, technicians, etc. But the thrill, the magic, the excitement of the movies comes from the feeling that we have a transparent window onto the lives of others. Our primitive stance is that of the witness.

Fiction writing is altogether different. We may read fiction with voracious appetites, but when we do so we do not take up the stance of the voyeur, at least not typically. No, fiction is an act of telling and what we encounter, or seem to encounter, when we read a novel, is the story teller. I don't mean the author, or even, necessarily, the narrator. Exactly who or what we encounter is very often in no way self-evident and the fun may stem from working it out. It remains the case, though, that what is revealed to us, exposed, in works of fiction, is not worlds that we seem directly to experience, as in the case of film, but, rather, the mind of the teller. Fiction is a testimonial art (and whereas film is a cult of the actor, fiction is a cult of the writer).

Now we come to cartoons. They occupy a third position still. The underlying impulse behind our fascination with animation is not the impulse to watch, nor is it the impulse to understand the story or the story teller; it is, rather, the impulse to play. Cartoons put us in the mood for play, and we do not so much watch as we participate. Cartoons are the playful art.

Back to the uncanny valley. A movie like The Polar Express traps us in a kind of rhetorical contradiction. In so far as the characters resemble living human beings, we are invited to take an interest in them; we feel the impulse to watch them; we are invited to take up the stance to them that would be appropriate to live-action movies. But in so far as we are watching what is manifestly an animated film, then we are at one and the same time pulled to take up the altogether opposed attitude appropriate to animation, that namely of viewing the characters as mere play things. We're caught in a rhetorical contradiction: real living human beings are not play things; toys are not the sort of thing we are thrilled to watch.

Cartoons don't give us glimpses of worlds, they give us worlds to play in and toys to play with. Live-action movies, in contrast, don't give us opportunities to play; they give us access to hidden worlds. Here, then, is what I propose: the uncanny valley yawns not when animators fall short in their rendering of the human body — even if in fact they do — but rather when they get confused about what kinds of stories they are telling: Are they inviting audiences to play, or giving them an opportunity to watch? In this confusion, the story dies, and with it, the light in the eyes of the characters.
You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

Bookforum - What Has Happened to Occupy Wall Street?

2012-01-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street, and all its local manifestations, has fallen off the media radar in recent weeks and months. America's short attention span is partly to blame (or at least the media's encouragement of it), but there was also the movement's own tendency toward hippie extravagance (hacky sack, Frisbee, drugs, and other nonsense).

But the people who really care about change, who want to make a more equitable system, have been continuing the work behind the scenes. This collection of articles - assembled by Bookforum - checks in with where the movement is now.

What has happened to Occupy Wall Street?

JAN 19 2012 9:00AM

From The Nation, a special section on Occupying the Safety Net, including Frances Fox Piven on what the Occupy movement could do for poor people — and vice versa.
Occupy the Cloud: What Occupy Wall Street can take from Gov 2.0.
From Jacobin, Mike Beggs on Occupy economics.
Wealthy financiers are trying to turn the Occupy movement into a rich vs. poor debate — what they still don't understand is that Americans don't hate the rich, they hate the rich in finance.
At Occupy Wall Street, an unlikely mix of students, vets, bankers, regulators and academics are planning alternative financial institutions — including an Occupy bank (and more).
Is Occupy Wall Street strapped for cash?
Louis Rene Beres on Occupy Wall Street, Adam Smith, and the Wealth of Nations.
From The Awl, Lauren Kirchner on Occupy Scandinavia's long winter.
From Counterpunch, what if Occupiers armed themselves?
In the year of protests, is it really fair to compare the grievances of the Occupy movement to the courage of the Arab Spring?
Occupy Wall Street has been quiet since the November evictions, but the 2012 elections will give it a chance to have a lasting impact.
What has happened to Occupy Wall Street?

Be Here Now - How Is the Popular Mix of Meditation and Psychotherapy Changing the Way We See the World?

2012-01-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Today on NPR's Science Friday, Ira Flatow spoke with clinical psychologist Mark William about his new book, Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (written with Danny Penman and Jon Kabat-Zinn).

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the month, Psychotherapy Networker published an article by Ronald Siegel on the explosion of interest in the influence of Buddhist teachings on psychotherapeutic practice.

First up the NPR piece, then the Ron Siegel article below.

Be Here Now: Meditation For The Body And Brain

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Talk of the Nation
[21 min 58 sec]
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January 20, 2012

In his book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Oxford University clinical psychologist Mark Williams talks about the brain and body benefits of mindfulness meditation, a cognitive behavioral therapy that can be as effective as drugs at staving off recurring bouts of depression.

There was no transcript for the segment, so you'll have to listen to it. Meanwhile, here is the Ron Siegel article.

How Is the Popular Mix of Meditation and Psychotherapy Changing the Way We See the World?
There's been an explosion of interest in the influence of Buddhist teachings on psychotherapeutic practice.

January 4, 2012 | Psychotherapy Networker | Ronald Siegel

Twenty-five years ago, when our small group of Boston therapists began meeting to discuss how we might apply ancient Buddhist meditation practices in our work, we didn’t often mention it to our colleagues. Most of us had trained or were working in Harvard Medical School facilities, and the atmosphere there was heavily psychoanalytic. None of us wanted our supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness—Sigmund Freud’s view of the meditation enterprise.

At that time, Buddhist meditation was becoming more popular in America, and intensive meditative retreat centers were multiplying. The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers, many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East. Some of our group had studied in Asia; others had been trained by these newly minted Western teachers. Regardless of our backgrounds, what we shared was that we’d all experienced how radically meditation practices could transform the mind.

Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional value. Meditation teachers had their own biases toward psychotherapy, typically regarding it as a “lesser practice,” which might prepare someone for meditation but couldn’t really liberate the mind. So those of us who were involved in both domains, and viewed them as complementary, largely kept to ourselves.

During the subsequent decade, while the therapy and meditation communities continued to show little interest in each other, mindfulness meditation was making inroads into the medical community. This was largely through the efforts of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, beginning in 1979, had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. This standardized, 8-week course couched meditation practices in Western, scientific terms. Their working definition of mindfulness—“the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment”—made the concept readily accessible.

In its early years, MBSR was used primarily to augment the treatment of stress-related medical disorders, and was of particular interest to clinicians working in behavioral medicine. It wasn’t considered a form of psychotherapy, and MBSR teachers weren’t necessarily psychotherapists. In Boston and other psychoanalytically oriented cities, therapists were finding other developments more compelling. The zeitgeist was shifting toward biological psychiatry and short-term treatment. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) began to gain traction, along with a variety of systemic and humanistic approaches. Meditation practices received little attention.

Mindfulness Meets Psychotherapy
The first use of mindfulness in psychotherapy to capture widespread attention among clinicians was Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), introduced in the early 1990s to treat suicidal individuals with complex disorders for which little else seemed to work. The central dialectic in DBT is the tension between acceptance and change. In searching for a means of helping therapists and their clients to experience what she called “radical acceptance”—fully embracing helplessness, terror, losses, and other painful facts of life—Linehan drew on a number of mindfulness practices from Zen traditions and Christian teachings. Because she empirically demonstrated that DBT could help challenging and volatile patients, the method rapidly became popular. Interest in it grew throughout the 1990s, but even though mindfulness skills were a core part of its approach, mindfulness practices still didn’t gain much acceptance within the wider therapy community.

The next big development came from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, cognitive psychologists in the tradition of Aaron Beck, who were working on treatments for depression in the 1990s. They came across mindfulness practice through Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR, and were struck by its power. This led them to formulate a treatment, eventually called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which combined elements of an 8-week MBSR course with cognitive therapy interventions designed to help patients gain perspective on their thinking and not identify with their depressive thoughts. The first results of their work, published in 2000, were dramatic: for patients who’d suffered three or more major depressive episodes, attending an MBCT group cut their relapse rate by 50 percent over the next year. Since not many interventions in our field cut anything in half, this caught the attention of the CBT community and piqued interest in mindfulness practices.

Around the same time, Steven Hayes and his colleagues had been developing behavior therapies based on a radical philosophical orientation that they called “relational frame theory.” They didn’t initially describe their work as mindfulness-oriented, but as the word began to be used in behavioral-research circles, they started to adopt it. Their treatment is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which they describe as a psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. ACT doesn’t teach many formal meditation practices, but uses imagery, metaphor, and brief exercises to cultivate awareness of the present, loosen identification with thought, and increase openness to the experience of moment-to-moment change. Beyond these more traditional mindfulness practices, ACT encourages clients to identify and pursue activities that give life meaning.

Read the whole article.

Bookforum - Why is religion still alive?

2012-01-20T08:34:00.001-07:00

This interesting collection of links was posted by Bookforum on January 9th, so I am more than a little behind in my reading.

I especially enjoyed the Elaine Pagels Edge Master Class (from 2011) and the Julian Baggini article, as well as the review of the new Jesse Bering book.

Why is religion still alive?

Jan 9 2012 9:00AM

Brian Ribeiro (Tennessee): The Problem of Heaven.
From Review of Biblical Literature, a review of The Gospel "According to Homer and Virgil": Cento and Canon by Karl Olav Sandnes; and a review of The Bible in/and Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter.
Is the Bible a reliable moral guide? (and a response).
No Christian should ever have a least favorite book of the Bible — all Scripture is God-breathed — but it is perfectly permissible, and even desirable, to have a favorite book of the Bible.
An interview with John Shelby Spong, author of Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.
Why did Jesus talk in parables? What Jesus' unique (and often confusing) ministry shows us about our own stories.
Fringe view: James F. McGrath on the world of Jesus mythicism.
An interview with Miguel De La Torre, author of The Quest for the Historical Satan.
Ronald Dworkin on Einstein’s worship, faith and physics, and religion without God.
From The Pomegranate, a review of Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen by Douglas E. Cowan.
Why is religion still alive? Elaine Pangels investigates.
Julian Baggini sets out on a pilgrimage towards the truth, picking his way past the noisome swamp of New Atheist controversies, and skirting the forbidding crags of fundamentalism.
A review of Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga.
From New Humanist, a review of The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering; some secularists believe that any communication with believers amounts to collaboration — Paul Sims isn’t so sure; and social scientist Olivier Roy has been tracking religion for three decades — Caspar Melville talks to him about his new book Holy Ignorance.

Hana Owen - BAKHTINIAN THOUGHT AND THE DEFENCE OF NARRATIVE: OVERCOMING UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM

2012-01-20T04:49:00.000-07:00

Very interesting article from Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011. Bakhtin's narrative theory is one of the foundational ideas beneath Dialogic Self Theory as developed by Hermans, so it has been of particular interest to me. For some reason, I never really paid much attention to this material in my literary theories classes in my first go-round of grad school.

BAKHTINIAN THOUGHT AND THE DEFENCE OF NARRATIVE: OVERCOMING UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM.

Hana M. Owen

ABTRACT: In light of recalcitrant global problems such as the prevalence of various levels and forms of inequality and increased environmental destruction, there is a growing recognition of the limitations, epistemological, political, social, cultural, ethical and ecological, of the modes of thought that have dominantly governed and continue to govern our worldview. The modernist project, despite various attempts to give voice to those previously denied, has come under criticism for tendencies to totalise experience and overlook or exclude differences. On the other hand, the postmodernist glorification of difference and tendency to isolate and fragment has generated a kind of debilitating uncertainty in the form of absolute relativism rendering any pursuit of meaning meaningless. Alongside the recognition of these limitations are attempts to overcome the negative effects of these modes of understanding and to create new ways of understanding ourselves, our relationship to others, human and non-human and to the larger world process in which we find ourselves. Despite the supposed opposition between the modern and postmodern projects, the two share in common the tendency to undermine another mode of understanding that by its very nature both precludes and succeeds them. The mode of understanding referred to is narrative understanding which has the potential to pave a middle way between modernity’s totalising exclusions and postmodernity’s fragmenting nihilism, furthermore when the narrative approach is seriously undertaken it becomes clear that the formerly polarised dominant modes of thought are part of a wider, more heterogeneous process. The following article examines and highlights in detail some of the problems surrounding the modern and postmodern modes of thought in order to demonstrate the usefulness of narrative theory in overcoming these problems. In order to augment the defence of narrative theory this article also draws considerably from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin whose philosophy, it will be argued, both compliments and enhances narrative understanding and has considerable potential for generating a more inclusive and creative understanding of humanity, its relationships to others and to the world in which it is inextricably linked.

The following essay examines and highlights in detail some of the problems surrounding the modern and post-modern modes of thought in order to demonstrate the usefulness of narrative theory in overcoming these problems. In particular, it argues that the abstract theories of both modernism and postmodernism are unfruitful for understanding humans as a process of becoming and tend to either limit humans to egoistic individuals or hinder the development of identity through fragmentation and relativism. It will be argued that modernity, through its tendency to totalise, excludes other modes of understanding and the postmodern response to this totalisation, an utter respect for and celebration of difference, has rendered the search for any kind of meaning unintelligible. In order to overcome these limitations and to augment the defence of narrative theory this article draws considerably from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin whose philosophy both compliments and enhances narrative understanding and has considerable potential in generating a more inclusive and creative understanding of humanity, our relationships to others and to the world in which we are inextricably linked. Through recognition of the dialogism inherent in the world, this article seeks neither to discredit nor destroy the two modes of thought in question, but to overcome their limitations and to recognise these modes of thought as apart of a wider process of interactive, intersubjective and creative becoming. Rather than accepting the modern dogmatism of absolute truths or the postmodern scepticism towards truth, it will be argued that narrative understanding, alongside Bakhtin’s dialogism, allow for truth to be provisional and alterable in light of an ever expanding horizon of understanding.

In light of continuing global issues including the prevalence of various levels and forms of inequality and increased environmental destruction, there is a growing recognition of the limitations, epistemological, political, social, cultural, ethical and ecological, of the modes of thought that have dominantly governed and continue to govern our worldview. Alongside the recognition of these limitations are attempts to overcome the negative affects of these modes of understanding and to create new ways of understanding ourselves, our relationship to others, human and non-human and to the larger world process in which we find ourselves.

The modernist project, despite various attempts to give voice to those previously denied, has come under criticism for tendencies to totalise experience and overlook or exclude differences. The orthodox Marxist movement for example aimed to defend the proletariat from exploitation but failed to include women in the emancipatory endeavour. Similarly, the first wave feminist movement to some extent sought to overcome inequality by extending suffrage to women, however their own endeavours were limited to white western women and failed to represent women of other cultures.

On the other hand, the post-modern attack on all things modern, its glorification of difference and its tendency to isolate and fragment, has generated a kind of debilitating uncertainty in the form of absolute relativism rendering any pursuit of meaning meaningless.

Despite the supposed opposition between the modern and postmodern projects, the two share the tendency to undermine another mode of understanding that by its very nature both precludes and succeeds them. The mode of understanding referred to is narrative understanding which has the potential to pave a middle way between modernity’s totalising exclusions and post-modernity’s fragmenting nihilism. Furthermore, when the narrative approach is seriously undertaken, it becomes clear that the formerly polarised dominant modes of thought are both are part of a wider more heterogeneous process.

Read the whole article.

The Nour Foundation - The Contingent Nature of Reality

2012-01-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

Another collection of videos from a Nour Foundation conference, this one was on the contingent nature of reality (2010) and featured Merlin Donald and James Giordano, among others.

The first video features psychologist and author Merlin Donald.

Merlin W. Donald, PhD
Human Cognitive Evolution: How the Modern Mind Came into Being

Is it possible to apply a rational, scientific methodology to the study, development and articulation of personal character and the self? Can we approach morality and ethics in an objective, experimental, and systematic fashion?

Here is the full description of the conference.

Shifting Realities: Myths, Models & Morality
The Contingent Nature of Reality

To approach and understand any reality involves balancing what is known, unknown, and perhaps unknowable, a task that we undertake through both reason and personal myths or explanatory narratives. Logos (reason) and mythos (myths) could thus be said to define two different aspects of the world and our experience within it: the knowable and the unknowable. Both comprise tools that offer explanatory methods with which to better understand and interpret the world and its phenomena as explananda.

To understand the nature of the phenomena and realities of our universe—including those that we are unable to physically study due to the limitations of our senses and the lack of adequate instrumentation—science has gradually adopted a rational, objective, and systematic methodology. When we refer to science as a monolithic discipline, we are in fact referring to the objective and systematic methods employed by science to understand and explain both the perceptible and imperceptible events of nature.

A survey of the history of our scientific progress provides a perfect window into the indispensable role that the use of models has played in advancing our knowledge. In many ways, these models have provided the test bed through which mythos and logos become reciprocal and complementary links in our chains of understanding. Such models employ and rely upon the available technology to develop, test, and utilize explanatory narratives, and in so doing shape our mythos through the most current implements of logos.

When confronted with the underlying nature of any reality, including perennial questions about the origin and purpose of our existence, we thus find it necessary to engage both logos and mythos to intuit the answers that we seek. For while myths provide a steppingstone for the advancement of rationality, the ongoing discovery of new evidence allows us to continually adapt and refine the mythic with the tools of logic. Some have argued that the ultimate bridge between these seemingly diametrical realms is "practice," which provides the observer with the necessary level of insight and understanding about the inherently contingent nature of the realities that one perceives.

Featured Speakers

Merlin W. Donald, PhD, F.R.S.C., Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology & Faculty of Education, Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario.

J.A. Scott Kelso, PhD, Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science; Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University.

Coordination and the Complimentary Nature

Is it possible to apply a rational, scientific methodology to the study, development and articulation of personal character and the self? Can we approach morality and ethics in an objective, experimental, and systematic fashion?

Peter A. Moskovitz, MD, Clinical Professor of Orthopaedic and Neurological Surgery, George Washington University Medical Center, Washington DC.

Medicine: Metrics, Myths and Models

Is it possible to apply a rational, scientific methodology to the study, development and articulation of personal character and the self? Can we approach morality and ethics in an objective, experimental, and systematic fashion?

James Giordano, PhD, Director, Center for Neurotechnology Studies; Senior Research Associate, Wellcome Centre for Neuroethics, Oxford University.

J.A. Scott Kelso, Merlin Donald, Peter A. Moskovitz and James Giordano take questions from the audience.

Is it possible to apply a rational, scientific methodology to the study, development and articulation of personal character and the self? Can we approach morality and ethics in an objective, experimental, and systematic fashion?

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. - Step Into The Cloud

2012-01-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

A little mid-day wisdom from Rick Hanson.

Step Into The Cloud
Rick Hanson, Ph.D. - Neuropsychologist and author of Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time

I had a lightbulb moment recently: I was feeling stressed about all the stuff I had to do (you probably know the feeling). After this went on for a while, I stepped back and kind of watched my mind and could see that I was thinking of these various tasks as things, like big rocks that were rolling down a hill toward me and which needed to be handled, lifted, moved, fended off or broken into pebbles. As soon as I dealt with one boulder, another one was rolling toward me. Shades of Sisyphus.

Seen as brick-like entities, no wonder these tasks felt heavy, oppressive, burdensome. Yuck!

But then I realized that in fact the tasks I needed to do were more like clouds than things. Clouds are made up of lots of vaporous little bits, those bits come together for a time due to many swirling causes, and then they swirl away again. Meanwhile, the edge or boundary of a cloud blurs into other clouds or the sky itself. There is a kind of insubstantiality to clouds, and a softness, a yielding.

For example, take writing an email message: It has lots of little parts to it (the points you need to take into account, and the words and sentences), it is nested in a larger context -- your relationship to the receiver, the needs that prompted the email -- that (in a sense) calls it forth, and it emerges and passes away. This email, this task, links to other tasks, sort of blurs into them. Fundamentally, the email is a kind of process, an event, rather than a thing. It's like you could put your hand through it.

When I considered my tasks in this way, I immediately felt better: relieved, relaxed. Tasks felt fluid, like streams or eddies I was stepping into and influencing or contributing to as best I could before they swirled on and became something else. Not so weighty or full of inertia. Not so resistant, so controlling of me. Not bearing down on me, but instead, something I was flowing into. Then I didn't feel weary dealing with them. They became fun, lighter -- there was more freedom in moving through them.

And it's not just tasks that are clouds. In a way, everything is a cloud. Everything is made of parts ("compounded"), everything arises due to causes (so nothing has absolute self-existence -- even "I"), and everything passes away eventually. Everything in your experience and everything "out there" in the universe is a cloud: every sensation, thought, object, body, job, career, activity, relationship, rock, raindrop, planet, galaxy and moment.

This doesn't mean that clouds are meaningless or that they don't have consequences. In fact, when you relate to the world in this way, you feel more connected to it, more a part of it, more tender toward it, and more responsible for it. You love the cloud!

How?
Start by noticing how everything is continually changing: both what's in your inner world of thoughts and feelings and in your outer world of people, tasks and physical stuff. Pay attention to endings and beginnings. And even if something persists, know that this is only temporary. Your own body is a cloud, continually changing.

Also recognize how everything is made up of parts. For example, our reactions have parts (e.g., body sensations, emotions, viewpoints, wants), kitchen tables have parts, relationships have parts (e.g., history, aspects in different situations), and tasks have parts.

Appreciate how these changing parts arise and pass away due to many causes. Everything really is an eddy in the river of reality, emerging and changing and ending because of 10,000 causes upstream.

Try to feel these facts -- impermanence, compoundedness, interdependence -- and the fundamental cloudiness of everything intuitively, emotionally and in your body, not just conceptualize them with your mind.

Then consider a task or situation that weighs on you in this light. Reflect on its many parts, on some of the causes that brought it into being, and on its inherent transience (even if it's a painfully long transience!). Try to see it more as a cloud than a brick.

Notice how your mind tries to turn clouds into bricks. To help us survive, the brain continually tries to make fluid processes (hard for lizards, mice and monkeys to deal with) appear to be static entities (much more manageable). It does this through forming labels, categories and concepts -- and through presuming that everything is a thing in itself rather than only passing frothy foam on a transient wave in our ocean of a universe.

Enjoy the clouds. Relax. Flow into the clouds of your responsibilities, relationships and roles. A cloud yourself, flow into them, through them, beyond them.

For more by Rick Hanson, Ph.D., click here.
For more on mindfulness, click here.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of the bestselling Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 20 languages) - and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers worldwide. His work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report and he has several audio programs. His blog - Just One Thing - has over 30,000 subscribers and suggests a simple practice each week that will bring you more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind and heart. If you wish, you can subscribe to Just One Thing here.

Nour Foundation - Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness

2012-01-19T06:42:00.001-07:00

This collection of clips is from a 2008 conference hosted by the Nour Foundation at the U.N. on going beyond the mind-body problem in the study of consciousness. Dr. Sam Parnia, Andrew Newberg, Henry Stapp, and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz are among the speakers.

This playlist below contains 14 videos for nearly 3 hours of material. The first segment is Dr. Sam Parnia's keynote lecture "Unraveling the Mystery of the Self: From Descartes to the Human Consciousness Project."

Dr. Parnia briefly chronicles the major schools of thought on the nature of the self, and announces the establishment of The Human Consciousness Project, a major new scientific initiative that aims to unravel the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Beyond the Mind-Body Problem:New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness
September 11th, 2008, United Nations, New YorkAn International U.N. Symposium Featuring

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D.

Elie During, Ph.D.

Ebrahim Elahi, M.D., FACS

Bruce Greyson, M.D.

Andrew B. Newberg, M.D.

Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D.

Christina M. Puchalski, M.D., FACP

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D.

Henry P. Stapp, Ph.D.

Esther M. Sternberg, M.D.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of physicians and neuroscientists have sought to uncover the complex relationship between mind, brain, and consciousness as they continue to search for a more comprehensive perspective on the "self" and the workings of the human mind. Though much remains to be done, their findings to date have shed a more holistic light on our understanding of the elusive mind-body problem. Join our panel of renowned experts as they explain how new paradigms fueled by the latest scientific research are beginning to fundamentally alter how we perceive and relate to the physical world.

The symposium will also serve as the occasion for the formal launch of The Human Consciousness Project—a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain. Led by Dr. Sam Parnia, The Human Consciousness Project will conduct the world's first large-scale multicenter studies at major U.S. and European medical centers on the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death. The results of these studies may not only revolutionize the medical care of critically ill patients and the scientific study of the mind and brain, but may also bear profound universal implications for our understanding of death and what happens when we die.

As human beings, we are inherently driven by the quest to understand and attribute meaning to our existence, our environment, and the events that shape and influence our lives. The rise of every great civilization throughout history and the thread of discovery and progress that runs through each is perhaps the greatest testament to this unquenchable desire for meaning and purpose.

Prior to the age of reason, mysticism and revelation served as the primary source of knowledge and wisdom in the western world. With the advent of the Enlightenment, however, a schism would emerge between the comprehension of physical realities through religious thinking and the drive to understand the material universe through empirical reasoning. Though the tension between these contrasting approaches has taken on many different forms since then, it has essentially continued to this day.

One of the barriers to reconciling these dichotomous positions has been the relative lack of reliable scientific data to explain the nature of the “self” and the phenomenon of consciousness. Where, for instance, does the “self” originate? Does our consciousness have an objective reality, or is it purely an epiphenomenon of our neurobiological processes? And is it indeed plausible to speak of an atemporal, nonlocalized mind that exists independently of the physical body?

Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman - A New Philosophy for the 21st Century

2012-01-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle Review posted this article a while back by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman on the need for a new philosophy for the 21st century - and they offers a series of reasons for this. They also offer three broad suggestions for reform and a new model for philosophy in the future, a return to a public role that philosophers once held:

By the beginning of the 20th century, we had abandoned the public role. Like biologists or economists, we embraced expertise. We burrowed down into ever-smaller niches, coming to know more and more about less and less.

It was a model that became self-justifying, by defining its own goals and standards and creating a closed market for the supply and demand for philosophy. Decrying this development in his 1906 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, William James argued for the recognition of both technical and general roles for philosophers. James lost that battle. Yes, 20th-century philosophy dealt with issues of perennial importance. But this work came at the cost of increasing cultural insignificance. The specialist's task was not counterbalanced by an equal emphasis on the public role of the philosopher.

It is time to reclaim the public role of philosophy.

I think they would like to see a more interdisciplinarity model for philosophy, although they do not spell that out very well.

Here is an excerpt from the much longer article, A New Philosophy for the 21st Century, by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman.

Areas of reform: We see three broad, interrelated areas in need of reform.

First, we need to reconsider what counts as expertise, rigor, and excellence—the single-minded model of specialization that keeps us writing philosophy papers for each other. We should develop new, more interactive models of rigor that take account of the need for timeliness, sensitivity to context, and rhetorical skill in communicating with multiple audiences. And we should rank philosophy departments on measures other than publication counts in philosophy journals; other factors would include grants, for instance, or mentions in the press.

Second, a new philosophy calls for new types of philosophers trained with the skills necessary for being successful "interactional" experts. Interactional expertise means knowing enough about another field so that one can engage others in conversation and raise penetrating questions. The pedagogical challenge before us consists in educating students so that philosophy is understood not as an isolated body of ideas, but as indistinguishable from human existence and interwoven throughout contemporary social issues.

Students need to learn how to identify and create opportunities for integrating philosophy outside of the discipline. Undergraduate students need courses that draw out the philosophical dimensions of everyday life—what a colleague of ours has called "found philosophy." Graduate students need training in grant writing and multimedia communication; policy and budgets; and rhetorical skills in how to make ethical theory relevant to different audiences within severe budgetary, time, or political constraints.

Third, the case for reform made here involves an appeal to prudential self-interest—devising ways to survive in a harried, impatient, and increasingly market-driven age. Philosophers have broad social responsibilities that require directly engaging social problems. This can mean activism, but in a bureaucratic age it is more likely to mean working at the project level with scientists, engineers, and policy makers. Rather than philosopher kings, our future is more likely to lie in becoming philosopher bureaucrats.

Of course, everyone hates bureaucrats. But they serve us well in keeping the trucks and trains and planes running on time and our food and medicine safe. As philosopher bureaucrats the two of us have helped the U.S. Geological Survey think about acid mine drainage; the city of Denton, Tex., rewrite its ordinance governing natural-gas drilling and production; and the European Commission devise better criteria for peer review of research grants.

Such work raises the worry that philosophy may compromise its essential function as social critique and become captured by powerful interests. In seeking to adapt, might philosophy risk selling its soul? Or, in speaking truth to power, might we be forced to drink hemlock?

These are real concerns. But such concerns simply highlight the need and opportunity for serious philosophic work. We must recognize that clinging to the status quo in the name of academic freedom is not just unsustainable but also irresponsible. Philosophers, like any professional group, have a moral responsibility to serve the community. We need to embody our own professional code of ethics.

New models: What new approaches to philosophy should we develop? Fortunately, we need not start from scratch, as alternative models are springing up daily. Individual philosophers, and occasionally whole departments, are striking out in new directions. The recent launch of the Public Philosophy Network is one indication of the growing interest in bucking the status quo. This past October, PPN hosted a conference on "Advancing Publicly Engaged Philosophy" in Washington.

Read the whole article.

FORA.tv - Jeffrey Alexander & Gordon Lynch: The Power of the Sacred

2012-01-18T10:27:00.001-07:00

FORA.tv presented this brief but interesting discussion with Jeffrey Alexander & Gordon Lynch - this was originally taped in October of 2011 at the RSA in England.

The Power of the Sacred

Jeffrey Alexander & Gordon Lynch: The Power of the Sacred from The RSA on FORA.tv

It may be true that we live in more secular times, but the sacred still retains its power in social life. Public debate and policy is still infused with sacred discourse of the norms that must be upheld to preserve society, as well as visions of various kind of evil that threaten to profane and pollute it, whether paedophiles, tyrants or terrorists. Attempts to find the ‘sacred centre’ of British-ness continue to pre-occupy policy-makers.

Sociologists Jeffrey C. Alexander and Gordon Lynch visit the RSA to explore the idea that modern society remains deeply influenced by visions of the sacred and the profane, using this to explore political power and the symbolic role of contemporary media.

Jeffrey Alexander has played a pioneering role in the development of the ‘strong program’ of cultural sociology, which argues for the importance of taking seriously the role of cultural meaning in shaping social life. In particular, Alexander argues that societies are organised around symbolic representations of the sacred and the profane which have the power to shape political life and public identity, exploring these processes in cases ranging from public reactions to 9/11 and the changing meanings of the Holocaust.

More recently, he has developed a substantial argument that public life is constituted around a code of sacred and profane meanings which political actors, amongst others, must negotiate if they are to maintain public credibility and the moral authority to lead powerful public institutions (The Civil Sphere, 2006). In his most recent book (The Performance of Politics, 2010), he argues that it was the successful and unsuccessful attempts by political actors to present themselves in terms of these sacred codes that determined the outcome of the 2008 American Presidential election, rather than purely economic or demographic factors.
***
Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent, and has previously served as the chair for study groups on media and culture within the American Academy of Religion, and religion within the British Sociological Association.

For the past ten years, he has been making the case for the study of religion to turn its attention to key sources of meaning and value in contemporary society that go beyond traditional religious institutions. An advocate of the ‘strong program’ of cultural sociology, he is shortly to publish books by Oxford University Press and Acumen which explore how the concept of the sacred can support the social and cultural analysis of modern life. Specific cases on which he has written include the public scandal over the systemic abuse and neglect of children in the Irish industrial school system, and the significance of the controversy over the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the DEC humanitarian appeal for Gaza in January 2009.

TED Talks - Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

2012-01-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

The other day I shared Terry Eagleton's less than positive review of Alain de Botton's new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (March, 2012). Here is de Botton's TED Talk about his new book and his position toward religion

What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a "religion for atheists" -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.

There is more from the TED Blog.

FAQ with Alain de Botton on ‘religion for atheists’

As a companion to today’s TEDTalk from Alain de Botton, he sent us this FAQ, a brief introduction to the thinking behind Atheism 2.0:

What do you think of the aggressive atheism we have seen in the past few years?
I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don’t feel the need to mock anyone who believes. I really disagree with the hard tone of some atheists who approach religion like a silly fairy tale. I am deeply respectful of religion, but I believe in none of its supernatural aspects. So my position is perhaps unusual: I am at once very respectful and completely impious.

What is it you’re most interested in in religion?
The secular world believes that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them just when it matters. Religions don’t agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us, that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too.

You propose to reform schools and universities to teach humans how to deal with the most important existential problems; loneliness, pain and death for example. Why? Can existential lessons be taught at school?
The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.

Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

Don’t you think that, in order to truly appreciate religious music and art, you have to be a believer – or, at least, don’t you think that non-believers miss something important in the experience?
I am interested in the modern claim that we have now found a way to replace religion: with art. You often hear people say, ‘Museums are our new churches’. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not true, and it’s principally not true because of the way that museums are laid out and present art. They prevent anyone from having an emotional relationship with the works on display. They encourage an academic interest, but prevent a more didactic and therapeutic kind of contact. I recommend that even if we don’t believe, we learn to use art (even secular art) as a resource for comfort, identification, guidance and edification, very much what religions do with art.

More Responses to the 2012 Edge Annual Question

2012-01-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

The other day I posted a preliminary response to the 2012 Edge Question: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?.

Here are a few more of my favorite responses.

Emily Pronin
Associate Professor of Psychology, Princeton University

Seeing Oneself in a Positive Light

Is there a single explanation that can account for all of human behavior? Of course not. But, I think there is one that does darn well. Human beings are motivated to see themselves in a positive light. We want, and need, to see ourselves as good, worthwhile, capable people. And fulfilling this motive can come at the expense of our being "rational actors." The motive to see oneself in a positive light is powerful, pervasive, and automatic. It can blind us to truths that would otherwise be obvious. For example, while we can readily recognize who among our friends and neighbors are bad drivers, and who among us is occasionally sexist or racist, most of us are deluded about the quality of our own driving and about our own susceptibility to sexist or racist behavior.

The motive to see oneself in a positive light can have profound effects. The work of Claude Steele and others shows that this motive can lead children who underperform in school to decide that academics are unimportant and not worth the effort, a conclusion that protects self-esteem but at a heavy price for the individual and society. More generally, when people fail to achieve on a certain dimension, they often disidentify from it in order to preserve a positive sense of self. That response can come at the expense of meeting one's rational best interest. It can cause some to drop out of school (after deciding that there are better things to do than "be a nerd"), and it can cause others to ignore morbid obesity (after deciding that other things are more important than "being skinny").

Another serious consequence of this motive involves prejudice and discrimination. A wide array of experiments in social psychology have demonstrated how members of different ethnic groups, different races, and even different bunks at summer camp see their "own kind" as better and more deserving than "outsiders" who belong to other groups—a perception that leads not only to ingroup favoritism but also to blatant discrimination against members of other groups. And, people are especially likely to discriminate when their own self-esteem has been threatened. For example, one study found that college students were especially likely to discriminate against a Jewish job applicant after they themselves had suffered a blow to their self-esteem; notably, their self-esteem recovered fully after the discrimination.

The motive to see oneself in a positive light is so fundamental to human psychology that it is a hallmark of mental health. Shelley Taylor and others have noted that mentally healthy people are "deluded" by positive illusions of themselves (and depressed people are sometimes more "realistic"). But, how many of us truly believe that this motive drives us? It is difficult to spot in ourselves because it operates quickly and automatically, covering its tracks before we detect it.

As soon as we miss a shot in tennis, it is almost instantaneous that we generate a self-serving thought about the sun having been in our eyes. The automatic nature of this motive is perhaps best captured by the fact that we unconsciously prefer things that start with the same letter as our first initial (so people named Paul are likely to prefer pizza more than people named Harry, whereas Harrys are more likely to prefer hamburgers). Herein, though, lies the rub. I know a Lee who hates lettuce, and a Wendy who will not eat wheat. Both of them are better at tennis than they realize, and both take responsibility for a bad serve. Simple and elegant explanations only go so far when it comes to the complex and messy problem of human behavior.

* * * * * * *

Ernst Pöppel

Neuroscientist; Chairman, Board of Directors Human Science Center

Trusting Trust

After many years
A little gift to Edge
From the first culture.

Using the Haiku
Five seven five syllables
To express a thought.

Searching for beauty
To explain the unexplained
Why should I do this?

What is my problem?
I don't need explanations!
I'm happy without!

A new morning comes
I wake up leaving my dreams
And I don't know why.

I don't understand
Why I can trust my body
In day and in night.

Looking at the moon
Always showing the same face
But I don't know why!

Must I explain this?
Some people certainly can.
Beyond my power!

I look at a tree.
But is there in fact a tree?
I trust in my eyes.

But why do I trust?
Not understanding my brain
Being too complex.

Looking for answers
Searching for explanations
But living without.

Trust in my percepts
And trust in my memories
Trust in my feelings.

Where does it come from
This absolute certainty
This trust in the world?

Trusting in the future
Making plans for tomorrow,
Why do I believe?

I have no answer!
Knowledge is not sufficient.
Only questions count.

What is a question?
That is the real challenge!
Finding a new path.

But trust is required
Believing the new answers
Hiding in a shadow.

Deep explanations
Rest in the trust of answers
Which is unexplained.

Is there a way out?
Evading the paradox?
This answer is no!

The greatest challenge:
Accepting the present,
Giving no answers!

* * * * * * *

Douglas Rushkoff
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Program or Be Programmed; Life, Inc.

The Precession of the Simulacra

Having discovered much too late in life that the many things I had taken for granted as pre-existing conditions of the universe were, in fact, creations and ideas of people, I found Baudrillard's "precession of the simulacra" to be an immensely valuable way of understanding just how disconnected from anything to do with reality we can become.

The main idea is that there's the real world, there's the maps we use to describe that world, and then all this other activity that occurs on the map—sometimes with little regard for the territory it is supposed to represent. There's the real world, there's the representation of the world, and there's the mistaking of this simulation for reality.

This idea came back into vogue when virtual reality was hitting the scene, and writers called up Baudrillard as if we needed to be warned about escaping into our virtual worlds and leaving the brick and mortar, flesh and blood one behind. But I never saw computer simulations as so very dangerous. If anything, the obvious fakeness of computer simulations—from arcade games to Facebook—not only kept us aware of their simulated nature, but called into question the reality of everything else.

So there's the land—this real stuff we walk around on. Then there's territory— the maps and lines we use to define the land. But then there are wars fought over where those map lines are drawn.

The levels can keep building on one another, bringing people to further abstractions and disconnection from the real world. Land becomes territory; territory then becomes property that is owned. Property itself can be represented by a deed, and the deed can be mortgaged. The mortgage is itself an investment, that can be bet against with a derivative, which can be secured with a credit default swap.

The computer algorithm trading credit default swaps—as well as the programmers trying to follow that algorithms actions in order to devise competing algorithms—this level of interaction is real. And, financially speaking, it has more influence over who gets to live in your house than almost any other factor. A credit default swap crisis can bankrupt a nation as big as the United States—without changing anything about the real land it refers to.

Or take money: there's the thing of value—the labor, the chicken, the shoe. Then there's the thing we use to represent that value—say gold, grain receipts, or gold certificates. But once we get so used to using those receipts and notes as the equivalent of a thing with value, we can go one step further: the federal reserve note, or "fiat" currency, which has no connection to gold, grain, or the labor, chickens and shoes. Three main steps: there's value, the representation of value, and then the disconnection from what has value.

But that last disconnection is the important one—the sad one, in many respects. Because that's the moment that we forget where things came from—when we forget what they represent. The simulation is put forth as reality. The invented landscape is naturalized, and then mistaken for nature.

And it's when we become so particularly vulnerable to illusion, abuse, and fantasy. For once we're living in a world of created symbols and simulations, whoever has control of the map has control of our reality.

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Al Kaszniak: Emotion, Equanimity and Zen Practice

2012-01-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

This dharma talk by Al Kaszniak was a prelude to the Zen Brain Retreat, at which he is a participant, along with Evan Thompson, John Dunne, Rebecca Todd, Richie Davidson, George Chrousos, and of course, Roshi Joan Halifax. I'll be posting the podcasts for this retreat as they become available.

Al Kaszniak: 01-11-12: Emotion, Equanimity and Zen Practice
Speaker: Al Kaszniak

Recorded: Wednesday Jan 11, 2012

This Dharma talk is a prelude to the Zen Brain retreat which begins on 1/12/12. In this interesting presentation Dr. Kaszniak explores the components of emotion and how they relate to our practice.

Al Kaszniak, received his Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976, and completed an internship in clinical neuropsychology at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. He is currently Head of the Department of Psychology, Director of Clinical Neuropsychology, Director of the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium Education Core, and a professor in the departments of psychology, neurology, and psychiatry at The University of Arizona. His research, published in over 150 journal articles, chapters and books (including edited volumes on consciousness and science), has been supported by grants from the NIH, NIMH, and several private foundations. His work has focused on the neuropsychology of Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related neurological disorders, memory self-monitoring, the biological bases of emotion, and emotion response and regulation in long-term Zen and mindfulness meditators.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Research - Influence of meditation on anti-correlated networks in the brain

2012-01-17T05:21:00.001-07:00

I have posted work from Zoran Josipovic before - he is looking at meditation and the brain from a variety of perspectives. This new article published in the open access Frontiers in Human Neuroscience looks at the impact of various forms of attentional awareness on the normal competition between intrinsic (internal and self-related) and extrinsic (external and environment-related) brain functions. Focused awareness increases that competition while nondual awareness decreases it, compared to baseline fixated attention states.

The whole study can be read online for free, or downloaded as a PDF.

Influence of meditation on anti-correlated networks in the brain
Zoran Josipovic¹*, Ilan Dinstein², Jochen Weber³ and David J. Heeger¹
¹Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA
²Neurobiology Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
³Department of Psychology and SCAN, Columbia University, New York, USA
Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that are internal and self-related. The cerebral cortex appears to be divided into two corresponding systems: an “extrinsic” system composed of brain areas that respond more to external stimuli and tasks and an “intrinsic” system composed of brain areas that respond less to external stimuli and tasks. These two broad brain systems seem to compete with each other, such that their activity levels over time is usually anti-correlated, even when subjects are “at rest” and not performing any task. This study used meditation as an experimental manipulation to test whether this competition (anti-correlation) can be modulated by cognitive strategy. Participants either fixated without meditation (fixation), or engaged in non-dual awareness (NDA) or focused attention (FA) meditations. We computed inter-area correlations (“functional connectivity”) between pairs of brain regions within each system, and between the entire extrinsic and intrinsic systems. Anti-correlation between extrinsic vs. intrinsic systems was stronger during FA meditation and weaker during NDA meditation in comparison to fixation (without mediation). However, correlation between areas within each system did not change across conditions. These results suggest that the anti-correlation found between extrinsic and intrinsic systems is not an immutable property of brain organization and that practicing different forms of meditation can modulate this gross functional organization in profoundly different ways.

Citation: Josipovic Z, Dinstein I, Weber J and Heeger DJ. (2012). Influence of meditation on anticorrelated networks in the brain. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 5:183. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00183

What Has Become of the Wider Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.?

2012-01-16T18:29:00.001-07:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream of racial equality and freedom for all people. But he also had a dream of a better nation, a better world, where social justice and caring for the poorest among us were more important than military spending and political games.

On the surface it seems there is more racial equality than there was when he marched on Selma, Alabama. But there is still discrimination and bigotry, it's just more subtle and covert.

The other dream he held, well, I think he would be seriously discouraged to see the America we now have, where government budget cuts impact the poor, the homeless, the hungry, and the mentally ill first, and military spending is a sacred cow that can never be touched - where partisanship on both sides is more important than solving our problems.

In memory of Dr. King, here are a few of his quotes about the nation he hoped we might become.

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self Lecture at Berkeley

2012-01-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

This old video of Michel Foucault lecturing at UC Berkeley on the Culture of the Self was posted at Posthuman Destinies - so a serious Thank You to Abdul Lateef for sharing this there. I posted the talk once before, but this time we also have the question and answer session that followed.

Here is a little of the introduction to the lectures offered by Lateef.

These are the classic lectures on Care of the Self given in Berkeley CA April 12/13 1983 that traces the history of the cultivation of Self-Knowledge and Soul-Making within the Western (Greco-Roman) tradition. He concludes his lecture on this note:. The self is not so much something hidden and therefore something to be excavated but as a correlate of the technologies of self that it co-evolves with over millennium.

For more on Foucault, check out his entry at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Part 1 of 7

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Q and A, Part 1 of 7

Open Culture - A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

2012-01-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

Open Culture posted this cool video of Martin Scorsese (1995) in a three-part documentary that formed the American part of The Century of Cinema series sponsored by the British Film Institute. Few people know film like Scorsese does, so this is quite a treat.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese (1995) by BFIfilms

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
in Film | January 13th, 2012

Note: If you’re having problems viewing the film, you can access it on YouTube here, here, and here.

In his 1998 essay, “Scorsese Learns From Those Who Went Before Him,” Roger Ebert writes, “There is no greater American filmmaker right now than Martin Scorsese, and hasn’t been for some time, perhaps since Welles and Hitchcock and Ford died, and yet to talk with him is like meeting this guy who hangs out all the time at the film society.”

Scorsese is a highly prolific filmmaker, but even while pressing ahead he is always looking back, revisiting the films that have inspired him since he was an asthmatic child haunting the theaters of New York City. In A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the great director says:

I’m often asked by younger filmmakers, Why do I need to look at old movies? I’ve made a number of pictures in the past 20 years. And the response I find that I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I made in the last 20 years, the more I realized that I really don’t know. And I’m always looking for something or someone that I can learn from. I tell the younger filmmakers to do it like painters do. Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There’s always so much more to learn.

A Personal Journey was completed in 1995. The three-part documentary formed the American part of The Century of Cinema series sponsored by the British Film Institute. The film was co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson, features a title sequence by Saul Bass and was cut by Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. In Scorsese on Scorsese, Wilson talked with Schoonmaker about the grueling experience of editing A Personal Journey at the same time she was racing to complete the three-hour Casino. Schoonmaker said:

It was too much! At one point, Marty asked me to abandon the documentary. He was terribly worried that I’d be slowed down by A Personal Journey, another monumental job, and that we wouldn’t be able to deliver Casino on time. I told him it was impossible to stop and he agreed. He even said that in the long term, A Journey would perhaps be more important than Casino.

You can watch a 133-minute version of A Personal Journey above, courtesy of the BFI. (Be patient and allow an extra moment for the film to load.) A deluxe edition of the original 225-minute documentary is available for purchase on DVD. The version above can be permanently found in our collection of 450 Free Movies Online.

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

2012-01-16T06:15:00.000-07:00

This is a review (from The Spectator) of The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard, a book that I was looking forward to reading (once I am out of school and have time to read stuff for fun), but not so much after this review (and I'm not sure when this will be published in the States).

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard
12 November 2011
Anthony Daniels

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky, by Bryan Appleyard
Weidenfeld, 271pp, £20

Some years ago I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, unskilled workers like himself, had developed an electronic thought-scanner whose antennae they could, and did, direct at him in order to know his thoughts as and when he had them. He heard them laughing and jeering at the banalities with which, inevitably, his mind was filled most of the time. Needless to say, he found this intrusive and oppressive, and it made him murderously angry.

As life follows art, science follows delusion. It seems to be the ambition of neuroscientists to reach a level of understanding in which such a thought-scanner might be possible, and many claim that we are on the verge of understanding ourselves so completely that we shall no longer be mysteries to ourselves.

In this book, whose title is derived from a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson, Bryan Appleyard contests such claims. He interviews prominent neuroscientists, and even subjects himself to experiments in a MRI machine, to explore them further. He comes to the conclusion that was his starting point, namely that we are no nearer self-comprehension than ever we were, and that we shall never be any nearer to it. The nature, quality and wealth of our inner life will never be fully explicable by or translatable into physical terms, and — furthermore — it would be horrific if it could.

I share his opinion. For all our astonishing advances, it does not seem to me that, taken as a whole, we have plucked out the heart of our mystery. The most advanced neuroscientist does not necessarily live better than his fellow beings, and there is still no uniquely compelling scientific guidance as to the nature of the good life.

Yet I am also aware of the dangers of proclaiming in advance of all experience that science can get no further, that there are questions that it cannot answer. Lord Kelvin said this of physics immediately before the greatest advances for a century; Sir John Erichsen said it of surgery immediately before the development of antisepsis expanded the field almost exponentially, and another famous surgeon, Lord Moynihan, repeated this bêtise half a century later. A certain modesty is therefore in order.

Appleyard’s book is rather diffuse and its central theme, which perhaps was not altogether clear even to the author, has to be deduced by the reader. It is, in effect, scientific and rationalist hubris (a word he does not use), first to believe that we can fully understand ourselves by means of scientific method, second that technological advance in electronic gadgetry will necessarily improve the quality of our lives, and third that we can descriptively capture and therefore control infinitely complex systems for our own ends.

As an example of the latter, he cites the current financial crisis, brought about (so he says) by mathematically gifted young men who mistook their sophisticated equations for an understanding of the way in which infinitely complex markets work. Certainly the hubris existed: I remember being told in New York at the height of the boom that such young men had devised ways in which to invest in derivatives so that only large and continual profits, and no losses, could be made by everyone who followed them. I was sceptical: I did not see how bad loans could be turned into good by being pooled, unless all eventualities could be foreseen and defaults occurred at random rather than together, which reason and the most elementary reflection on economic history suggested was a distinct possibility. I was overruled and, being no mathematician, was as dumbstruck as Diderot at the court of Catherine the Great when Euler, the greatest mathematician of the century, proved the existence of God by a mathematical formula. But I was right: and false presuppositions undermine any amount of technical sophistication.

Of course, there is the question of whether any equations could adequately describe the operation of the market, and whether this can be known for certain in advance of attempts to find them. It is the nature of Man’s Promethean bargain that he is constantly engaged upon the search for what was previously regarded as impossible, the flight of machines heavier than air, for example, and which might indeed be impossible. The Promethean bargain guarantees neither success nor failure, neither triumph nor tragedy; but there seems no going back on it.

Appleyard is more hostile than friendly towards new electronic gadgetry that keeps us constantly connected in virtual fashion to the whole world. True enough, the revolutions in the Arab countries could not have occurred without the constant connection, but it is surely too early to say whether or not those revolutions were unequivocally an advance for human freedom and happiness. I don’t want to sound like Chou En-Lai, who said it was too soon to estimate the effects of the French Revolution, but not all the auguries are favourable.

The author is surely right (though not original) in drawing attention to the possibility that constant electronic contact with people may inhibit real contact between them, and thus hollow out human relations and eventually character. How many times nowadays does one see in cafés or restaurants people talking not to people present, but text-messaging to people absent? Even I, who am no technophile, begin to feel anxious if I am separated too long from my e-mail or my mobile phone. Yet earlier in my life I was perfectly content to go months in remote locations without any possible contact with my friends, certain in the knowledge that the friendships would persist through the silence. Technology (as well, perhaps, as time) changes character, but not necessarily in the direction of depth.

Are laments, such as Appleyard’s, over the deleterious effects of new inventions merely those of ageing people unable to keep pace with a world that they no longer understand, that they fear and dislike? Such lamentations are nothing new; and the world has been going to the dogs in this fashion ever since I can remember. But false alarms do not mean that there are no true alarms; and just because neuroscience fails to pluck out the heart of our mystery, it does not mean that the presuppositions upon which it is based, and its actual findings, will have no serious effect upon us.

Though each individual chapter is clear enough, Appleyard’s book does not fully cohere. The author is a philosophical gadfly whose sting is capable of irritating those whom scientism renders as complacent as any evangelical preacher.

Alan Kirby - The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond

2012-01-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

From the current issue of Philosophy Now - Alan Kirby thinks that postmodernism has been pronounced dead and laid to rest. Strange, though, that much of the Western world (not to mention the other 3/4 of the planet) have not even reached a postmodern awareness. But this paper is looking at cultural manifestations (literature, music, and so on) more than a full developmental stage.

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.

And this . . .

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressedin postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argumentthat postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentiallyasserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’regoing to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy,on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – andmany academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist]than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism isdead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

For the most part, postmodernism never got far outside the academy with the exception of some poets (Ann Lauterbach, Leslie Scalapino, John Ashbery, Charles Olson, and others), novelists (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Kathy Acker, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, and others), and especially in painting (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jannis Kounellis, Jeff Koons, Emma Amos, and others), and performance art (Carolee Schneemann, to name only one). But postmodernism means nothing to most people in the U.S., except maybe as some kind of boogeyman in the culture wars.

Anyway . . . . .

Here is one section of the longer paper, The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond.

What’s Post Postmodernism?
I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural fashion. The terms by whichauthority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever.There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem fromany profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened,to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and Tothe Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere inthe late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever,the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importanceon] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But theculture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partialor whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will pointto the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individualsat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised thetelevision or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes theindividual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includesall television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose contentand dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latterterms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning BigBrother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewingor listening).

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenesphysically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not.Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘materialtextuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings,how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitutionwere decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only themeaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-moderncultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting isthus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programmethemselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would thenuncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talkingaimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, isthe viewer’s act of phoning in.

Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consistsof emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ isequally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writesa segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includescomputer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content,within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies accordingto the particular player.

The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act isthat of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated,inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. Thisis a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and givesthe undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/herinvolvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense thatanyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work,like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedbackon, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easilymake up pages yourself (eg blogs).

If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also seen the revampingof older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game.Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and editedtogether by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasinglycreated through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossibleappear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in muchof Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals havereally happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, butto the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term),but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in thehope of winning money. It also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan thenew situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievementsinstead of the vacuity currently evident. It is important here to see that whereas the form maychange (Big Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to theirtelevision screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly changed. The purely ‘spectacular’ functionof television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active,forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feelspowerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegatedto the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant,unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and byits instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – youwouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well,and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, realityTV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, andwithout the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefaxtext dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is becausethe pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficultto keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, likea letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – theirshelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainlynot the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism.Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions inthe present moment with no sense of either past or future.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. Thecontent of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerileprimitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’stechnical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educationallevels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, atleast so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt themfor meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may nolonger be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothingof any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look atagain and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.

The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism. Dancemusic and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral,to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock).They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, pornis not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion ofparticipation. In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic textby the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener,was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. Buta shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitiveway of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integratedmeaning, obsolete.

To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centreof something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishisedas it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and otherperforming arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes haveparticipation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, fromcarnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dweltin the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, withall its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today,although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatisedas ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening,watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-moderntext-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well asa domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’sgiants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony.Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual,but ephemeral.

Tom Albright - Perception and the Beholder's Share

2012-01-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

This is a cool and geeky video from The Science Network. Visual perception is one of the ways scientists delve into how we construct reality as a visual field. One of the interesting discoveries is that the Buddhists, in a way, have had it right all along, we create an image of reality in our brains that is only a rough hologram of the external "reality," whatever that may be (since our machines are only extensions of our own senses, this can become an infinite regress).

Perception and the Beholder's Share
Tom Albright
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Tom Albright talks with Roger Bingham about visual perception, his research into how cortex represents features from images, what schizophrenia can teach us about perception, and his interest in art and architecture.

Tom Albright is Professor and Director of the Vision Center Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological studies. His laboratory focuses on the neural structures and events underlying the perception of motion, form, and color.

The Edge Question 2012: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

2012-01-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again . . . the time when Edge poses a single question to great thinkers from a variety of fields and shares their answers with us. This year's question is . . . .

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Here is the post from Edge.

"The World's Smartest Website."
— John Naughton, The Observer

Scientists' greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called "beautiful" or "elegant". Historical examples are Kepler's explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr's explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick's double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it "was so beautiful it had to be true."

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Since this question is about explanation, answers may embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, including other fields of inquiry such as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, political theory, literary theory, or the human spirit. The only requirement is that some simple and non-obvious idea explain some diverse and complicated set of phenomena. [Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson for their ongoing advice and support.]

188 CONTRIBUTORS (126,700 words): Emanuel Derman, Nicholas Humphrey, Dylan Evans, Howard Gardner, Jeremy Berstein, Rudy Rucker, Michael Shermer, Nicholas Carr, Susam Blackmore, Scott Atran, David Christian, Andy Clark, Donald Hoffman, Derek Lowe, Roger Schank, Arnold Trehub, Timothy Taylor, Cliff Pickover, Ed Regis, Jared Diamond, Robert Provine, Richard Nisbett, Peter Woit, Haim Harari, Satyajit Das, Juan Enriquez, Jamshed Bharucha, Richard Foreman, Scott D. Sampson, Jonathan Gotschall, Keith Devlin, Clay Shirky, Steven Pinker, Gloria Origgi, Sean Carroll, Irene Pepperberg, Tor Nørretranders, Alan Alda, Jennifer Jacquet, George Dyson, Nigel Goldenfeld, Aubrey De Grey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, George Church, Kevin Kelly, Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg, Lawrence M. Krauss, James Croak, Armand Marie Leroi, Leonard Susskind, Douglas Rushkoff, Victoria Stodden, Daniel C. Dennett, Shing-tung Yau, Philip Campbell, Freeman Dyson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Martin Rees, Stanislas Dehaene, Samuel Arbesman, David Gelernter, Timothy D. Wilson, Judith Rich Harris, Samuel Barondes, Peter Atkins, Robert Kurzban, Todd C. Sacktor, Gerald Holton, Frank Wilczek, Elizabeth Dunn, Eric J. Topol, Lee Smolin, Roger Highfield, Michael I. Norton, Richard Dawkins, Carl Zimmer, Neil Gershenfeld, Alison Gopnik, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Rodney Brooks, Philip Zimbardo, Nicholas A. Christakis, Marcel Kinsbourne, Thomas A. Bass, Randolph Nesse, Sherry Turkle, Gino Segre, Eric R. Kandel, Hugo Mercier, Beatrice Golomb, Benjamin Bergen, Alun Anderson, Alvy Ray Smith, Katinka Matson, Steve Giddings, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gerd Gigerenzer , Gerald Smallberg, Paul Steinhardt, Adam Alter, Karl Sabbagh, David G. Myers, Lica DiBiase, Stuart Pimm, James J. O'Donnell, Albert-László Barabási, Simon Baron-Cohen, Charles Seife, Patrick Bateson, Carlo Rovelli, Jordan Pollack, Robert Sapolsky, Frank Tipler, Bruce Parker, Marcelo Gleiser, Gary Klein, Ernst Pöppel, Evgeny Morozov, Gregory Benford, S. Abbas Raza, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Thomas Metzinger, David Haig, Melanie Swan, Laurence C. Smith, John C. Mather, Seth Lloyd, P. Murali Doriaswamy, Marti Hearst, Jon Kleinberg, Kai Krause, Joel Gold, Simone Schnall, Paul Saffo, Lisa Randall, Brian Eno, Giulio Boccaletti, Paul Bloom, Timo Hannay, Anthony Grayling, Matt Ridley, Doug Coupland, Amanda Gefter, Bruce Hood, Gregory Paul, Stephon Alexander, Bart Kosko, John Tooby, Stuart Kauffman, Barry C. Smith, John Naughton, Helen Fisher, Virginia Heffernan, Dimitar Sasselov, Eric Weinstein, Max Tegmark, PZ Myers, Andrew Lih, Christine Finn, Gregory Cochran, John McWhorter, Marco Iacoboni, Raphael Bousso, David Dalrymple, Emily Pronin, Dave Winer, Alanna Conner & Hazel Rose Markus, David Pizarro, Andrian Kreye, David Buss, Carolyn Porco, Dan Sperber, V.S. Ramachandran, Nathan Myhrvold, Charles Simonyi, Richard Thaler, Andrei Linde [C ontinue to responses.]

Since there are many people on this list who I deeply respect, I generally tend to post some of their responses to the question - I'm sure other readers may favor other responses, so have fun with the list.

One interesting note (and I have read less than half of the responses) is that Paul Bloom (psychologist) and P.Z. Myers (biologist) both chose the same answer: Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way.

The three responses shared below are not necessarily people whose work I am familiar with (although Iacoboni is very familiar), but they are responses that resonate with me.

Marco Iacoboni

Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People

Like Attracts Like
The beauty of this explanation is twofold. First, it accounts for the complex organization of the cerebral cortex (the most recent evolutionary component of the brain) using a very simple rule. Second, it deals with scaling issues very well, and indeed it also accounts for a specific phenomenon in a widespread human behavior, imitation. It explains how neurons packed themselves in the cerebral cortex and how humans relate to each other. Not a small feat.

Let's start from the brain. The idea that neurons with similar properties cluster together is theoretically appealing, because it minimizes costs associated with transmission of information. This idea is also supported by empirical evidence (it does not always happen that a theoretically appealing idea is supported by empirical data, sadly). Indeed, more than a century of a variety of brain mapping techniques demonstrated the existence of 'visual cortex' (here we find neurons that respond to visual stimuli), 'auditory cortex' (here we find neurons that respond to sounds), 'somatosensory cortex' (here we find neurons that respond to touch), and so forth. When we zoom in and look in detail at each type of cortex, we also find that the 'like attracts like' principle works well. The brain forms topographic maps. For instance, let's look at the 'motor cortex' (here we find neurons that send signals to our muscles so that we can move our body, walk, grasp things, move the eyes and explore the space surrounding us, speak, and obviously type on a keyboard, as I am doing now). In the motor cortex there is a map of the body, with neurons sending signals to hand muscles clustering together and being separate from neurons sending signals to feet or face muscles. So far, so good.

In the motor cortex, however, we also find multiple maps for the same body part (for instance, the hand). Furthermore, these multiple maps are not adjacent. What is going here? It turns out that body parts are only one of the variables that are mapped by the motor cortex. Other important variables are, for instance, different types of coordinated actions and the space sector in which the action ends. The coordinated actions that are mapped by the motor cortex belong to a number of categories, most notably defensive actions (that is, actions to defend one's own body) hand to mouth actions (important to eat and drink!), manipulative actions (using skilled finger movements to manipulate objects). The problem here is that there are multiple dimensions that are mapped onto a two-dimensional entity (we can flatten the cerebral cortex and visualize it as a surface area). This problem needs to be solved with a process of dimensionality reduction. Computational studies have shown that algorithms that do dimensionality reduction while optimizing the similarity of neighboring points (our 'like attracts like' principle) produce maps that reproduce well the complex, somewhat fractured maps described by empirical studies of the motor cortex. Thus, the principle of 'like attracts like' seems working well even when multiple dimensions must be mapped onto a two-dimensional entity (our cerebral cortex).

Let's move to human behavior. Imitation in humans is widespread and often automatic. It is important for learning and transmission of culture. We tend to align our movements (and even words!) during social interactions without even realizing it. However, we don't imitate other people in an equal way. Perhaps not surprisingly, we tend to imitate more people that are like us. Soon after birth, infants prefer faces of their own race and respond more receptively to strangers of their own race. Adults make education and even career choices that are influenced by models of their own race. This is a phenomenon called self similarity bias. Since imitation increases liking, the self similarity bias most likely influences our social preferences too. We tend to imitate others that are like us, and by doing that, we tend to like those people even more. From neurons to people, the very simple principle of 'like attracts like' has a remarkable explanatory power. This is what an elegant scientific explanation is supposed to do. To explain a lot in a simple way.

Amanda Gefter

Consultant, New Scientist; Founding Editor, CultureLab"

Structural Realism
Structural realism—in its metaphysical version, championed by the philosopher of science James Ladyman—is the deepest explanation I know, because it serves as a kind of meta-explanation, one that explains the nature of reality and the nature of scientific explanations.

The idea behind structural realism is pretty simple: the world isn't made of things, it's made of mathematical relationships, or structure. A mathematical structure is a set of isomorphic elements, each of which can be perfectly mapped onto the next. To give a trivial example, the numbers 25 and 5² share the same mathematical structure.

When the philosopher John Worrall first introduced structural realism (though he attributes it to physicist Henri Poincaré), he was trying to explain something puzzling: how was it possible that a scientific theory that would later turn out to be wrong could still manage to make accurate predictions? Take Newtonian gravity. Newton said that gravity was a force that masses exert on one another from a distance. That idea was overthrown by Einstein, who showed that gravity was the curvature of spacetime. Given how wrong Newton was about gravity, it seems almost miraculous that he was able to accurately predict the motions of the planets.

Thankfully, we don't have to resort to miracles. Newton may have gotten the physical interpretation of gravity wrong, but he got a piece of the math right. That's why, at weak masses and small velocities, Einstein's equations reduce to Newton's. The problem, Worrall pointed out, was that we mistook an interpretation of the theory for the theory itself. The fact is, in physics, theories are sets of equations, and nothing more. "Quantum field theory" is a group of mathematical structures. "Electrons" are little stories we tell ourselves.

These days, believing in the reality of objects—of physical things like particles, fields, forces, even spacetime geometries—can quickly lead to profound existential crises.

Quantum theory, for instance, strips particles of any sense of "thingness". One electron is not merely similar to another, all electrons are exactly the same. Electrons have no inherent identity—a fact that makes quantum statistics drastically different from the classical kind. Anyone who believes that an electron is a "thing" in its own right is bound to lose big in a quantum casino.

Meanwhile, all of nature's fundamental forces, including electromagnetism and the nuclear forces that operate deep in the cores of atoms, are described by gauge theory, which shows that forces aren't physical things in the world, but discrepancies in different descriptions of the world, in different observers' points of view. Gravity is a gauge force too, which means you can make it blink out of existence just by changing your frame of reference. In fact, that was Einstein's "happiest thought": a person in freefall can't feel their weight. It's often said that you can't disobey the law of gravity, but the truth is you can take it out with a simple coordinate change.

Recent advances in theoretical physics have only made the situation worse. The holographic principle tells us that our four-dimensional spacetime and everything in it is exactly equivalent to physics taking place on the two-dimensional boundary of the universe. Neither description is more "real" than the other—one can be perfectly mapped onto the other with no loss of information. When we try to believe that spacetime is really four-dimensional or really has a particular geometry, the holographic principle pulls the rug out from under us.

The physical nature of reality has been further eroded by M-theory, the theory that many physicists believe can unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. M-theory encompasses five versions of string theory (plus one non-stringy theory known as supergravity) all of which are related by mathematical maps called dualities. What looks like a strong interaction in one theory looks like a weak interaction in another. What look like eleven dimensions in one theory look like ten in another. Big can look like small, strings can look like particles. Virtually any object you can think of will be transformed into something totally different as you move from one theory to the next—and yet, somehow, all of the theories are equally true.

This reality crisis has grown so dire that Stephen Hawking has called for a kind of philosophical surrender, a white flag he terms "model-dependent realism", which basically says that while our theoretical models offer possible descriptions of the world, we'll simply never know the true reality that lies beneath. Perhaps there is no reality at all.

But structural realism offers a way out. An explanation. A reality. The only catch is that it's not made of physical objects. Then again, our theories never said it was. Electrons aren't real, but the mathematical structure of quantum field theory is. Gauge forces aren't real, but the symmetry groups that describe them are. The dimensions, geometries and even strings described by any given string theory aren't real—what's real are the mathematical maps that transform one string theory into another.

Of course, it's only human to want to interpret mathematical structure. There's a reason that "42" is hardly a satisfying answer to life, the universe and everything. We want to know what the world is really like, but we want it in a form that fits our intuitions. A form that means something. And for our narrative-driven brains, meaning comes in the form of stories, stories about things. I doubt we'll ever stop telling stories about how the universe works, and I, for one, am glad. We just have to remember not to mistake the stories for reality.

Structural realism forces us to radically revise the way we think about the universe. But it also provides a powerful explanation for some of the most mystifying aspects of physics. Without it, we'd have to give up on the notion that scientific theories can ever tell us how the world really is. And that, in my humble opinion, makes it a pretty beautiful explanation.

Simone Schnall

Director, Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory; University Lecturer, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology Cambridge

Embodied Metaphors Unify Perception, Cognition and Action
Philosophers and psychologists grappled with a fundamental question for quite some time: How does the brain derive meaning? If thoughts consist of the manipulation of abstract symbols, just like computers are processing 0s and 1s, then how are such abstract symbols translated into meaningful cognitive representations? This so-called "symbol grounding problem" has now been largely overcome because many findings from cognitive science suggest that the brain does not really translate incoming information into abstract symbols in the first place. Instead, sensory and perceptual inputs from every-day experience are taken in their modality-specific form, and they provide the building blocks of thoughts.

British empiricists such as Locke and Berkeley long ago recognized that cognition is inherently perceptual. But following the cognitive revolution in the 1950ies psychology treated the computer as the most appropriate model to study the mind. Now we know that a brain does not work like a computer. Its job is not to store or process information; instead, its job is to drive and control the actions of the brain's large appendage, the body. A new revolution is taking shape, considered by some to bring an end to cognitivism, and giving way to a transformed kind of cognitive science, namely an embodied cognitive science.

The basic claim is thatthe mind thinks in embodied metaphors. Early proponents of this idea were linguists such as George Lakoff, and in recent years social psychologists have been conducting the relevant experiments, providing compelling evidence. But it does not stop here; there is also a reverse pathway: Because thinking is for doing, many bodily processes feed back into the mind to drive action.

Consider the following recent findings that relate to the very basic spatial concept of verticality. Because moving around in space is a common physical experience, concepts such as "up" or "down" are immediately meaningful relative to one's own body. The concrete experience of verticality serves as a perfect scaffold for comprehending abstract concepts, such as morality: Virtue is up, whereas depravity is down: Good people are "high minded" and "upstanding" citizens, whereas bad people are "underhanded" and the "low life" of society. Recent research by Brian Meier, Martin Sellbom and Dustin Wygant illustrated that research participants are faster to categorize moral words when they are presented in an up location, and immoral words when they are presented in a down location. Thus, people intuitively relate the moral domain to verticality; however, Meier and colleagues also found that peoplewho do not recognize moral norms, namely psychopaths, fail to do so, and do not show this effect.

People not only think of all things good and moral as up, but they also think of God as up, and the Devil as down. Further, those in power are conceptualized as being high up relative to those down below over whom they hover and exert control, as shown by Thomas Schubert.All the empirical evidence suggests that there is indeed a conceptual dimension that leads up, both literally and metaphorically. This vertical dimension that pulls the mind up to considering what higher power there might be is deeply rooted in the very basic physical experience of verticality.

However, verticality not only influences people's representation of what is good, moral and divine, but movement through space along the vertical dimension can even change their moral actions. Larry Sanna, Edward Chang, Paul Miceli and Kristjen Lundberg recently demonstrated that manipulating people's location along the vertical dimension can actually turn them into more "high minded" and "upstanding" citizens. They found that people in a shopping mall who had just moved up an escalator were more likely to contribute to a charity donation box than people who had moved down on the escalator. Similarly, research participants who had watched a film depicting a view from high above, namely flying over clouds seen from an airplane window subsequently showed more cooperative behaviour than participants who had watched a more ordinary, and less "elevating" view from a car window. Thus, being physically elevated induced people to act on "higher" moral values.

The growing recognition that embodied metaphors provide one common language of the mind has lead to fundamentally different ways of studying how people think. For example, under the assumption that the mind functions like a computer psychologists hoped to figure out how people think by observing how they play chess, or memorize lists of random words. From an embodied perspective it is evident that such scientific attempts were hopelessly doomed to fail. Instead, it is increasingly clear that cognitive operations of any creature, including humans, have to solve certain adaptive challenges of the physical environment. In the process, embodied metaphors are the building blocks of perception, cognition, and action. It doesn't get much more simple and elegant than that.

That's enough for now - I'll likely post some more of these as I have time.

James Cresswell & Allison Hawn - Drawing on Bakhtin and Goffman: Toward an Epistemology that Makes Lived Experience Visible

2012-01-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is some seriously geeky philosophy - from FORUM: QUALITATIVE SOCIAL RESEARCH, Volume 13, No. 1, Art. 20; January 2012 - that brings together two very different perspectives. Goffman was a very influential sociologist and Bakhtin was best known as a semiotician and philosopher of language, but together their theories do make a certain amount of sense.

Drawing on Bakhtin and Goffman: Toward an Epistemology that Makes Lived Experience Visible
James Cresswell & Allison Hawn

Abstract: This article seeks to enrich qualitative analysis by way of showing how Erving GOFFMAN's work can be enhanced by interfacing it with Mikhail BAKHTIN. The goal is to inspire an approach to the interpretation of human action that highlights phenomenologically immediate experience, thereby enhancing current work. BAKHTIN's later work focused on the interpretation of such experience but it was left incomplete at the time of his death. Fortunately, this latter work is reminiscent of his early work on the interpretation of poetics. The article addresses BAKHTIN's discussion of content, form, and material in art and how this discussion can enlighten our epistemological praxis with persons. By way of a demonstration, our proposed approach is applied to an online interaction between the second author and an anonymous online gamer.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Orientation: GOFFMAN and BAKHTIN
2.1 GOFFMAN and frame analysis
2.2 BAKHTIN and epistemology
3. Content
3.1 BAKHTIN's discussion of content
3.2 Implications for extending GOFFMAN
3.2.1 Interpretive Principle 1
3.2.2 Interpretive Principle 2
3.2.3 Interpretive Principle 3
4. Material and Form
4.1 BAKHTIN's discussion of material and form
4.2 Implications for extending GOFFMAN
4.2.1 Interpretive Principle 4
5. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Authors
Citation

This is a passage from the introduction that sets up their thesis for this paper.

Erving GOFFMAN (1959, 1961, 1963a, 1963b, 1969, 1974) inspires qualitative methods that are often set forth as alternative approaches to a natural-scientific "cookbook" approach that attempts to apply a "recipe" to produce objectively verified results (POLKINGHORNE, 1983, p.3). His approach often rejected the standardization inherent in naturalscientific approaches, but, even though he touched on experience, he still bypassed the deeply experiential character of such realities. In particular, it will be discussed how his work, and the analyses inspired by it, tends to treat these realities as resources that can be rhetorically manipulated. That is, GOFFMAN's theories and practices were symptomatic of a potential problem in qualitative research: the treatment of experiential realities as rhetorically controllable when their verisimilar objectivity is such that they cannot be so manipulated. We will discuss how such experiential realities have a compelling quality such that they cannot be changed on such whim and our concern is that treating them as such can result in missing their deeply compelling quality. The experience of the nightclub, for example, is not something that one can just change. Understanding such a participant would require apprehending this experiential depth. It is thereby possible to extend GOFFMAN's work by illustrating this bypass and how it could be rectified. In the broader scheme of qualitative research, this discussion can serve as an illustration of how experiential realities are so compelling that researchers cannot afford to treat them as rhetorical resources, lest researchers bypass these important phenomena. [2]

We turn to Mikhail BAKHTIN because he inspires an approach that both illuminates the potential to enhance GOFFMAN and provides a way to improve on qualitative methods. He has been described by HOLQUIST, an editor and translator of much of BAKHTIN's work, as "epistemic" (2002, p.15-17). It is this largely unexplored epistemic side of BAKHTIN that we explicate in this paper. This epistemic feature of BAKHTIN had roots in his early career where he drew on the phenomenology of Max SCHELER (1970 [1913]; see CRESSWELL & TEUCHER, 2011) to address the techniques that can be used to interpret art (BAKHTIN 1990a [1979])1. Such early work on aesthetics revolved around interpreting socially constituted lived realities as they are expressed in art and so speaks to contemporary movements that draw on aesthetics beyond the realm of art to address the fundamental structure of human-constituted reality (c.f. WELSCH, 1997, pp.4-8, 48, 90-98). BAKHTIN's epistemology in regards to art was about making visible experiential realities (CRESSWELL & BAERVELDT, 2011). His later work drew on similar ideas but focused directly on the interpretation of human action (BAKHTIN, 1986a [1979]). Taking this early and later work together enables a view into his epistemology that makes visible lived realities. We will outline GOFFMAN's claims insofar as they overlap with BAKHTIN and show how points of non-coincidence illustrate the potential to enrich the former's work, shortcomings illustrative of the way that qualitative research in general can be enriched. [3]

After providing a brief orientation to the ideas of GOFFMAN and BAKHTIN, we outline a BAKHTIN-inspired epistemology. By articulating this epistemology through a discussion of BAKHTIN's early work, we can distill four principles that make visible the experienced realities that people take for granted. Each of these principles will be illustrated with an interpretation of the lived experiential reality of an on-line interaction that contrasts the results to those that would emerge from a GOFFMAN-inspired analysis. By discussing these principles in light of Erving GOFFMAN the proposal herein attempts to clarify how taken-for-granted realities that constitute experiences cannot be used rhetorically—mostly because they are deep part of how reality is experienced as-if given. [4]

Introduction to Attachment - Conference Lectures

2012-01-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

The first lecture is useful as an introduction to the basic ideas of attachment theory - too bad the whole conference was not videoed or made available online. However, there is audio and PDFs of the lectures and/or Powerpoints (see below).

The conference was hosted by the Shenandoah Anabaptist Science Society - as part of Eastern Mennonite University's counseling program - it's good to see at least some sects of Christianity looking to science to make us better human beings and better parents.

Introduction to Attachment

Dr. Annmarie Early, associate professor in the MA in Counseling program, gave EMU faculty and staff an introduction to attachment theory and a preview of the upcoming conference, "Conversations on Attachment: Integrating the Science of Love and Spirituality," to be held at EMU March 31-April 2, 2011.

For more information on the conference, visit http://www.emu.edu/sass/conference/

But wait, there's more . . . .

November 20, 2009
“Molecular Neurobiology of Attachment and Social Bonding”
Dr. Larry Young
Professor of Psychiatry
Emory University, Atlanta, GA

January 22, 2010
“Caring: How We Become Attached”
Nel Noddings, Ph.D.
Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita
Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Follow up to the conference
Thanks to the more than 1,000 people who gathered at EMU March 31 through April 2, 2011 for the Conversations on Attachment conference! We’re delighted if the conversation continues long beyond the campus gathering.

Without love, we’re dead is a summary article about the entire conference. You can comment on that article and forward it via Facebook and Twitter.

Other follow up materials are below, including posting by each speaker with blogging option to continue the conversation.
Blogs
EMU’s official Attachment Blog is up and running with a follow up post dedicated to each conference speaker. All follow up materials for each keynote address will be published at the Attachment Blog as they become available.

Integrating Heart and Soul: The New Science of Attachment & EFT by Sue Johnson
The Social Regulation of Emotion by James Coan
Mindsight, Mindfulness and the Journey from Me to We by Dan Siegel
Narratives of Care: The Social Echo of Community Transformation by John Paul Lederach
Emotion, Attachment, and Theology: How Do They Fit in the Hierarchy of the Sciences? by Nancey Murphy

Others at EMU are blogging about the attachment conference as well!

CJP Faculty Reflect on the EMU Attachment Conference // Peacebuilder Online (Center for Justice and Peacebuilding)
Relationships Matter // Restorative Justice Blog by Howard Zehr
PowerPoint presentations
The conference presentations are now available to be downloaded. Please note that slides that contain videos were removed to minimize download time.

Integrating Heart and Soul: The New Science of Attachment & EFT Dr. Sue Johnson
The Social Regulation of Emotion Dr. James Coan
Mindsight, Mindfulness and the Journey from Me to We Dan Siegel, M.D.
Narratives of Care: The Social Echo of Community Transformation John Paul Lederach
Podcasts
Sue Johnson’s training day on emotion-focused couples therapy

Carl Jung - The Wisdom of the Dream

2012-01-13T21:05:00.001-07:00

The Wisdom of the Dream is a three-part PBS documentary on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, student and one-time heir of Freud and founder of Analytical Psychology. Joseph Campbell and James Hillman are probably two of the best known students of Jung, along with Hillman's student Thomas Moore (Care of Soul).

This film is one of a three-part series of films produced by PBS, on the life and works of the great thinker and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Born on July 26, 1875, in Switzerland, Jung became interested in psychiatry during his medical studies. He saw that the minds of mentally deranged persons had similar contents, much of which he recognized from his own interior life, described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. His lifelong quest to understand the workings of the psyche led him to develop the analytical method of psychiatry. He proceeded by looking at the role in his patients' lives of what he termed the personal and collective unconscious, as expressed through dreams, myths, and outer events.

Vol 1 - A Life of Dreams

Vol 2 - Inheritance of Dreams

Vol 3 - A World of Dreams

On Point - The Importance Of Forgetting

2012-01-13T04:43:00.000-07:00

This week's episode of On Point with Tom Ashbrook looks at memory, forgetting, and when forgetting may be a good thing. It's a good discussion.

The Importance Of Forgetting

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

“Just put it out of your mind,” may be better advice than you think: We’ll look at memory and the scientific importance of forgetting.

This rendered 3-D computed tomography (CT) scan looking down the human head shows the complicated arteries and veins (in blue) supplying the brain above the base of the skull (in green). (Kai-hung Fung/National Science Foundation)

We talk so much about memory. Not losing it. Enhancing it. Diving into it. Working through it. Sometimes, says a raft of new science, it’s better to just forget. Forgetting, it turns out, may be a key part of mental health, mental hygiene.

Sigmund Freud said deal with it. Dive into that repressed stuff. Work it out. Work it through. Tony Soprano said “fuggetaboutit.” Tony Soprano may have been right. Remember and you’ll ruminate. Ruminate, and you’re bummed. The brain is also built to forget.

This hour, On Point: memory and forgetting, and when forgetting may be for the best.
-Tom Ashbrook

Guests
Ingrid Wickelgren, an editor at Scientific American Mind and the author of the Streams of Consciousness blog at ScientificAmerican.com. Her special report in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind, titled Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind.

Michael Anderson, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a member of their Memory Research Group.

Alison Winter, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. She’s the author of the forthcoming book Memory: Fragments of a Modern History.
From Tom’s Reading List
Scientific American Mind “Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables. The traces of these sequences were so durably etched in his brain that he could reproduce them years later, according to Russian psychologist Alexander R. Luria, who wrote about the man he called, simply, “S” in The Mind of a Mnemonist.”

Salon “One of the most tenacious themes of 20th-century memory research was the idea that people tormented by the memories of terrible experiences could benefit from remembering them, and from remembering them better. The assumption — broadly indebted to psychoanalysis — was that psychological records of traumatic events often failed to be fully “integrated” into conscious memories. ”

RSA - Robert Trivers: Why Do We Deceive Ourselves?

2012-01-13T04:42:00.000-07:00

FORA.tv posted this video from the RSA - One of the world’s most influential evolutionary theorists Robert Trivers asks: Why do we lie to ourselves?

According to Wikipedia, Steven Pinker considers Trivers to be "one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.". Says Pinker, Robert Trivers has:

inspired an astonishing amount of research and commentary in psychology and biology—the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian social science, and behavioral ecology are in large part attempt to test and flesh out Trivers' ideas. It is no coincidence that E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene were published in 1975 and 1976 respectively, just a few years after Trivers' seminal papers. Both bestselling authors openly acknowledged that they were popularizing Trivers' ideas and the research they spawned. Likewise for the much-talked-about books on evolutionary psychology in the 1990s—The Adapted Mind, The Red Queen, Born to Rebel, The Origins of Virtue, The Moral Animal, and my own How the Mind Works. Each of these books is based in large part on Trivers' ideas and the explosion of research they inspired (involving dozens of animal species, mathematical and computer modeling, and human social and cognitive psychology).

The video is brief, but cool.
Robert Trivers: Why Do We Deceive Ourselves?

Robert Trivers: Why Do We Deceive Ourselves? from The RSA on FORA.tv

Robert L. Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist and Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. Trivers is most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism, parental investment, facultative sex ratiodetermination, and parent-offspring conflict. Other areas in which he has made influential contributions include an adaptive view of self-deception and intragenomic conflict.

January, 2012 Issue of the Integral Leadership Review Is Online

2012-01-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

The new issue of the Integral Leadership Review is out and online, with a special supplement on Integral in Africa.

January 2012 Table of Contents

Leading Comments
Nicholas Shannon - Leading Comments: Some British Contributions to Integral Leadership

Leadership Coaching Tips
Graham Ward - Leadership Coaching Tip

Fresh Perspective
Nicholas Shannon - Fresh Perspective: Anthony Grayling on Educating for Leadership

Russ Volckmann - Fresh Perspective: James O’Dea – Peace and Sanity

Feature Articles
Simon Western - Analytic-Network Coaching©: Coaching for Distributed ‘Eco’ Leadership and Organizational Change

Nick Ross - Epoch of Transformation: An Interpersonal Leadership Model for the 21st Century–Part 1

John Tuite - Getting Back to the Body: Leadership Lessons on Power from the Martial Arts and Somatic Tradition

Andrew Munro - Leadership Wisdom and the Perspective of Time

Donna Ladkin - Perception, Reversibility, “Flesh”: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Leadership as Embodied Practice

Scott Lichtenstein The Role of Values in Leadership: How Leaders’ Values Shape Value Creation

Maretha Prinsloo - Towards an Integrated Assessment of Leadership Potential

Retrospective
Keith Rice - Retrospective: Summit on the Future of Great Britain – 2009

Book Reviews
Nicholas Shannon - Book Review: Buffalo Maps

John Rowan - Book Review: Integral Psychotherapy and With a Commentary on Ken Wilber’s AQAL and Types

Column
Mark McCaslin - Column: Journeys into the Integral North

Supplement
Etim Omini African Integral Development Network (AIDEN) with a New Approach to Effective Leadership for Africa

Lillian Enyang Oyama - Integral Life Practice

Oliver Ngodo - International Leadership Conference and Integral Leadership Education Program in Nigeria

Notes from the Field
Alexander Savkin and Philipp Guzenuk - International Integral Journey with Coach Institute, Russia

Robin Reinach and Barbara Larisch - Martin Ucik, Author of Integral Relationships, in Discourse with Integral New York

Dmitry Baranov - Russian December: The Layers of Protests in Russia

David Holzmer - The 13th Annual International Leadership Association Global Conference, October 2011 in London, England

Ola Solawe - The 4th Integral Meeting: Mindful Mind, Conscious Life – Gdańsk, Poland

Michael Stern - The Spiral Dance of Spiritual Growth: Navigating the Whitewater of Individuation and Belonging

Leadership Emerging
Russ Volckmann - Leadership Emerging

Coda
Russ Volckmann - Coda: Change is on My Mind

Dr. Jean Decety, Editor - Empathy: From Bench to Bedside

2012-01-12T09:29:00.001-07:00

Dr. Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was kind enough to send me a copy of the new book he edited and to which he also contributes, Empathy: From Bench to Bedside (from the MIT Press Social Neuroscience series).

Among the other books he he has written or edited include The Social Neuroscience of Empathy by Jean Decety and William Ickes (this book is excellent - my first introduction to the neuroscience side of empathy studies), The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience (Oxford Library of Psychology) by Jean Decety and John T. Cacioppo, and Interpersonal Sensitivity: Entering Others' Worlds: A Special Issue of Social Neuroscience (Special Issues of Social Neuroscience) by Jean Decety and Dan Batson.

A great collection of his papers is available through his Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory page at the University of Chicago.

Here is the MIT Press description of this new book:

Empathy: From Bench to Bedside
Edited by Jean Decety

There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient-physician interactions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. he contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy.

Taken together, the contributions significantly broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on current knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical educiation.

I have only just started this book, but it is an excellent resource on empathy from the research and philosophical sides to the clinical practice realm (which is my real interest).

Open Culture - George Orwell’s Animal Farm & 1984: Watch the Films Online

2012-01-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

Very cool . . . . via Open Culture, of course.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm & 1984: Watch the Films Online
January 11th, 2012

George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novella, Animal Farm, almost never saw the light of day. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book, partly for political reasons. Eventually Animal Farm came out in print in 1945 (download it via our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections) and the now-famous text became an animated film in 1954.

Produced by Halas and Batchelor (and funded by the CIA, although the animators didn’t know it), Animal Farm was the first British animated feature released worldwide, and the animation style — dubbed “Disney-turned-serious” — received critical praise. The film runs 80 minutes, and you can watch it above or here.

Orwell’s 1984 hardly needs an introduction (although Christopher Hitchens, author of Why Orwell Matters, does a nice job contextualizing the novel in this radio appearance). Originally published in 1949, the novel came to television in 1954, courtesy of the BBC. The live production, featuring scenes considered “horrific” and “subversive” at the time, shocked viewers across England. One viewer reportedly collapsed and died while watching the program. A wave of controversy followed, and, amidst it all, the BBC decided to air a second live performance and record it to 35mm film. (Watch above or here.) Years later, the British Film Institute ranked the production 73rd on its list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century.

Like Animal Farm, Orwell’s 1984 appears in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections. Plus you’ll find both movies listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.

Chuck Stevens - A Neuroscientist's Neuroscientist Talks Science

2012-01-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

Cool video from The Science Network.

Chuck Stevens - A Neuroscientist's Neuroscientist Talks Science

"Neuroscientist's Neuroscientist" Chuck Stevens talks with Roger Bingham about his trajectory through research science, his interest in scaling relations in the brain and the design principles that allow them, and the subtleties of consciousness.

For more Chuck Stevens on the scalable architecture of the brain, check out his lecture for UCSD's CogSci 200 course.

Charles "Chuck" Stevens is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, adjunct professor at UCSD, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research currently focuses on the mechanisms responsible for synaptic transmission and the design principles underlying the scalable architecture of neural circuits.

TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht - Liane Young - The Brain on Intention

2012-01-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

Via TEDx Talks:

Liane Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College. Young studies the cognitive and neural basis of human moral judgment. Her current research focuses on the role of theory of mind and emotions in moral judgment and moral behavior, as well as individual and cultural differences in moral cognition.

Perspectives on the Self - Nour Foundation

2012-01-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

This collection of short videos comes from Nour Foundation . . . . Some of the people featured in these conversations include Thomas Metzinger on the phenomenal self, Even Thompson on the embodied self, Timothy Wilson on the adaptive unconscious, and many others.

Perspectives on the Self: Conversations on Identity & Consciousness

"Who am I?" This question lies at the heart of our deeply rooted need to understand our experience of consciousness known as the Self. This six-part series brings together experts from the sciences and the humanities for interdisciplinary conversations on the evolving meaning of the Self.

The Nour Foundation explores meaning and commonality in human experience by adopting a multidisciplinary and integrative approach to the study of principles and values that universally engender greater understanding, tolerance, and unity among human beings worldwide.

The Lost Gospels with Pete Owen (Anglican Priest)

2012-01-11T06:38:00.000-07:00

I have always found the Gospels that did not survive the canonization process to be much more interesting than those that did. Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels was my introduction to this body of literature, but this documentary is also quite interesting.

Father Owen (are Anglican priests called Father?) argues at one point that the inclusion of some of these texts, particularly the Gospel of Mary, may have doomed Christianity as we know it to the archives of history, as little more than a footnote. And I am forced to wonder if that would be a bad thing or not.

There is much to be said for the force of religion in shaping our distinctly Western culture - but how might it have better if it gone differently?

The Lost Gospels

Documentary presented by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones which explores the huge number of ancient Christian texts that didn’t make it into the New Testament. Shocking and challenging, these were works in which Jesus didn’t die, took revenge on his enemies and kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth – a Jesus unrecognizable from that found in the traditional books of the New Testament.

Pete travels through Egypt and the former Roman Empire looking at the emerging evidence of a Christian world that’s very different to the one we know, and discovers that aside from the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, there were over seventy gospels, acts, letters and apocalypses, all circulating in the early Church.

Through these lost Gospels, Pete reconstructs the intense intellectual and political struggles for orthodoxy that was fought in the early centuries of Christianity, a battle involving different Christian sects, each convinced that their gospels were true and sacred.

The worldwide success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code sparked new interest, as well as wild and misguided speculation about the origins of the Christian faith. Owen Jones sets out the context in which heretical texts like the Gospel of Mary emerged. He also strikes a cautionary note – if these lost gospels had been allowed to flourish, Christianity may well have faced an uncertain future, or perhaps not survived at all.

Watch the full documentary now

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Mario Beauregard, Ph.D.	Elie During, Ph.D.
Ebrahim Elahi, M.D., FACS	Bruce Greyson, M.D.
Andrew B. Newberg, M.D.	Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D.
Christina M. Puchalski, M.D., FACP	Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D.
Henry P. Stapp, Ph.D.	Esther M. Sternberg, M.D.

Integrating Heart and Soul: The New Science of Attachment & EFT by Sue Johnson
The Social Regulation of Emotion by James Coan
Mindsight, Mindfulness and the Journey from Me to We by Dan Siegel
Narratives of Care: The Social Echo of Community Transformation by John Paul Lederach
Emotion, Attachment, and Theology: How Do They Fit in the Hierarchy of the Sciences? by Nancey Murphy

Integrating Heart and Soul: The New Science of Attachment & EFT	Dr. Sue Johnson
The Social Regulation of Emotion	Dr. James Coan
Mindsight, Mindfulness and the Journey from Me to We	Dan Siegel, M.D.
Narratives of Care: The Social Echo of Community Transformation	John Paul Lederach

Integral Options Cafe

No Evidence that a Serotonin Imbalance Causes Depression, or that Antidepressants Improve Depressive Symptoms

INTEGRALES FORUM - A Statement on Sexual Ethics

Ken Wilber's response to the IF statement from January

Integrales Forum Statement Concerning Further Cooperation with Marc Gafni

A Statement of IF concerning Marc Gafni

Lucia Mann - Free the Slaves – A Call to Action for Modern Society

Minessence Group - Nothing Will Ever Change Until There's a Change of Worldview

Diane Rehm - Language, Music and the Brain

Guests

Related Links

Mo Costandi - Magic mushrooms in the neuropsychoanalytical framework

The Integral Trollz Join the Marc Gafni Defense Team

Sounds True - Bruce Tift: Being and Becoming

NPR - First Listen: Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas'

First Listen: Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas'

Discover - Culture evolves our bodies!

The Secular Buddhist - Episode 100 :: Stephen Batchelor :: The Awakening of the West

Stephen Batchelor

Quotes

Web Links

Music for This Episode

Documentary - The Real Bonnie and Clyde

BBC Radio 4 - Freud vs Jung

Freud vs Jung

Is there a real you? Julian Baggini on TED.com

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Zen Brain: Emotions, Equanimity, and the Embodied Mind

TEDxCambridge - June Gruber - The Dark Side of Happiness

New Light on Dark Energy

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

“Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines"

Helen Vendler - Wallace Stevens as an American Poet

Alva Noë - Story Telling And The 'Uncanny Valley'

Bookforum - What Has Happened to Occupy Wall Street?

Be Here Now - How Is the Popular Mix of Meditation and Psychotherapy Changing the Way We See the World?

Bookforum - Why is religion still alive?

Hana Owen - BAKHTINIAN THOUGHT AND THE DEFENCE OF NARRATIVE: OVERCOMING UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM

The Nour Foundation - The Contingent Nature of Reality

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. - Step Into The Cloud

Nour Foundation - Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness

Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman - A New Philosophy for the 21st Century

FORA.tv - Jeffrey Alexander & Gordon Lynch: The Power of the Sacred

***

TED Talks - Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

More Responses to the 2012 Edge Annual Question

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Al Kaszniak: Emotion, Equanimity and Zen Practice

Research - Influence of meditation on anti-correlated networks in the brain

What Has Become of the Wider Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self Lecture at Berkeley

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Part 1 of 7

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Q and A, Part 1 of 7

Open Culture - A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

Alan Kirby - The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond

What’s Post Postmodernism?

Tom Albright - Perception and the Beholder's Share

Tom Albright

The Edge Question 2012: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

James Cresswell & Allison Hawn - Drawing on Bakhtin and Goffman: Toward an Epistemology that Makes Lived Experience Visible

Introduction to Attachment - Conference Lectures

“Molecular Neurobiology of Attachment and Social Bonding”Dr. Larry YoungProfessor of PsychiatryEmory University, Atlanta, GA

“Caring: How We Become Attached” Nel Noddings, Ph.D.Lee Jacks Professor of Education EmeritaStanford University, Stanford, CA

Blogs

PowerPoint presentations

Podcasts

Carl Jung - The Wisdom of the Dream

On Point - The Importance Of Forgetting

Guests

From Tom’s Reading List

RSA - Robert Trivers: Why Do We Deceive Ourselves?

January, 2012 Issue of the Integral Leadership Review Is Online

Dr. Jean Decety, Editor - Empathy: From Bench to Bedside

Open Culture - George Orwell’s Animal Farm & 1984: Watch the Films Online

Chuck Stevens - A Neuroscientist's Neuroscientist Talks Science

TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht - Liane Young - The Brain on Intention

Perspectives on the Self - Nour Foundation

The Lost Gospels with Pete Owen (Anglican Priest)

“Molecular Neurobiology of Attachment and Social Bonding”
Dr. Larry Young
Professor of Psychiatry
Emory University, Atlanta, GA

“Caring: How We Become Attached”
Nel Noddings, Ph.D.
Lee Jacks Professor of Education Emerita
Stanford University, Stanford, CA