Jonathan Rowson - Who owns information: The defining battle of our time?

I am HUGE proponent of open access/Creative Commons publishing, especially for news and research (in all fields). If we are ever to have a true cultural commons, then we should have access to the information for which (many times) our tax dollars pays.

As the quote from Alan Swartz (below) makes clear, knowledge is power, but it is only power by keeping access controlled tightly so that others cannot have that same knowledge, thereby neutralizing the power.

This excellent article comes from Jonathan Rowson at The RSA.

Who owns information: The defining battle of our time?
January 22, 2013 by Jonathan Rowson

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. - George Bernard Shaw

Could our major problems have a discernible ‘form’ that is somehow more fundamental than their content? If there is some sort of pattern, wouldn’t it make sense to target the pattern as a whole, rather than individual issues piecemeal? Marxists might say that Capitalism as such is the underlying problem, but I don’t think we have to endorse that view to look for what Bateson once called “the pattern that connects“.

We will shortly be publishing a report examining Iain McGilchrist’s work that argues there is a discernible pattern relating to the distinctive phenomenologies of the two brain hemispheres. The claim is that many of our major problems relate to the fact that the ‘inferior’ (though definitely important) left hemisphere is slowly usurping the (wiser but more tentative) right hemisphere at a cultural level, with the consequence that we live increasingly virtual and instrumental lives, and may not even realise what we are losing. The details of that discussion are coming soon to a screen near you, but there are other ways to conceive the form of the problem.

Who controls information?

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” – Alan Swartz.

When you start to think deeply about our major challenges – including climate change – you quickly run into various vested interests that get in the way of solutions, and many such vested interests are preserved through unequal access to information – academic, technological, legal, environmental, political, financial and so forth. Information should be a public good, and benefits larger numbers when it is shared, but perhaps the main way that vested interests perpetuate their power is through the control and protection of information. For instance what do Shell tell us about their research into drilling in the Arctic, and how can we know it represents full disclosure? What if a doctor prescribes you medicine and you can’t access the relevant primary research because you run into a pay wall? What if the most promising components needed for a technological breakthrough on clean energy are patented by a small group, and therefore thousands of scientists can’t follow that path of inquiry?

“(American) politics is filled with easy cases that we get wrong. The scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming, but we abandon the Kyoto Protocol. Nutritionists are clear that sugar is unhealthy, but the sugar lobby gets it into dietary recommendations. Retroactive copyright extensions do nothing for society, but Congress passes them over and over.Such control of information is deeply related to financial dependency. Those who control information are supported in their control by law and lawyers. An excerpt from a talk by Harvard academic and activist Lawrence Lessig captures the centrality of this point.

Similar errors are made in other fields that have the public trust. Studies of new drugs are biased towards the drug companies. Law professors and other scholars write papers biased towards the clients they consult for.

Why? Because the trusted people in each case are acting as dependants. The politicians are dependent on fundraising money. They are good people, but they need to spend a quarter of their time making fundraising calls. So most of the people they speak to our lobbyists and they never even hear from the other side. If they were freed from this dependence they would gladly do the right thing.

The scientists get paid to sign on to studies done by the drug companies. The law professors get paid to consult.

How do we solve it? We need to free people from dependency. But this is too hard. We should fight for it, but politicians will never endorse a system of public funding of campaigns when they have so much invested in the current system. Instead, we need norms of independence. People need to start saying that independence is important to them and that they won’t support respected figures who act as dependants. And we can use the Internet to figure out who’s acting as dependants.”

At the risk of simplification, the underlying problem is that the inequality in power is perpetuated by the unequal access to information, and this is a self-perpetuating problem because those with power based on information use it to create dependants, and these dependants thereby develop a vested interest in protecting the information that forms their livelihood.

Why did nobody tell me about Aaron Swartz?

I started to think about this when I realised, sadly, that I never knew the pioneering cyber activist Alan Swartz while he was alive. He recently ended his own life at the age of 26 under enormous legal and political pressure, but is viewed by many as a hero of our times who was driven over the edge by an excessively zealous witch hunt. He was known for being prodigious and hyper-intelligent, but is perhaps best known and admired for the way he swiftly conjured enormous political capital to prevent the SOPA (Stop online piracy act) law in the US which he speaks about so clearly and compellingly here (highly recommended viewing). In essence he prevented the passing of a law that would have radically undermined people’s capacity to connect and share information online, and the way he did so is inspiring, because it looked like he was facing impossible odds.

A friend and former RSA colleague Jamie Young remarked that if I was going to write about Alan Swartz, I should also mention the UK’s Chris Lightfoot who was a similar character fighting a similar kind of battle – a broadly political fight about who rightfully controls information- and also took his life at a young age. The RSA has raised similar questions before, for instance by hosting Evgeny Mozorov who’s talk on why Dictators love the internet was turned into an RSAnimate.

What follows?

What all these thinkers share is a belief that the access to information has much wider implications that people typically realise. As Professor Shamad Basheer puts it in the Spicy IP Blog We live in “a world where the powers that be conspire time and again to reassert hegemony and re-establish control in a digital world whose essential DNA is one of openness and sharing.”

The main take-home point for me lies in the gap between the social norms of sharing and openness online, with the economic and legal norms relating to the perpetuation of property rights and power that have been formed before the digital age. In Aaron Swartz’s case, this battle unfolded in his heart and mind to a tragic extent, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like an enormously important battle between the public good and private ownership that will be defined largely by the political will of the relevant institutions – which in turn is shaped by us (that’s what Lessig was getting at above about the need to shape social norms).

It may not make sense to ‘take sides’ as such, and there are certainly ways to protect intellectual property that are more canny and proportionate. (As an author of three books, all of which have been PDFed and sold cheaply by Xerox merchants online, I am also a kind of ‘dependant’ with a vested interest here).

Whatever you think, I would ask you to reflect on the opening quotation by George Bernard Shaw. Ideas need each other to flourish, but they can’t meet when they are help in captivity, and they will ultimately need some form of power to free them.

David Brooks on President Obama's Inaugural Speech

If you have not yet read or seen the President Obama's 2013 Inaugural Speech from Monday, you can watch it below or read it here.


There has been a lot said about this speech, much of which demonstrates that President Obama's desire to create more unity, a "We, the People" foundation for his second term, is not likely to get very far - liberals mostly applaud the speech and conservatives largely reject it.

However, one of the best commentaries came this morning from the New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks. As his interests have shifted more and more toward social sciences (he reads a LOT in the realms of psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology), his columns have become thoughtful and nuanced (with some notable exceptions), and this one exemplifies that tendency in him.

The Collective Turn

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 21, 2013

The best Inaugural Addresses make an argument for something. President Obama’s second one, which surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century, makes an argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism.

His critics have sometimes accused him of being an outsider, but Obama wove his vision from deep strands in the nation’s past. He told an American story that began with the Declaration and then touched upon the railroad legislation, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the highway legislation, the Great Society, Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall.

Turning to the present, Obama argued that America has to change its approach if it wants to continue its progress. Modern problems like globalization, technological change, widening inequality and wage stagnation compel us to take new collective measures if we’re to pursue the old goals of equality and opportunity.

Obama wasn’t explicit about why we have failed to meet these challenges. But his critique was implicit. There has been too much “me” — too much individualism and narcissism, too much retreating into the private sphere. There hasn’t been enough “us,” not enough communal action for the common good.

The president then described some of the places where collective action is necessary: to address global warming, to fortify the middle class, to defend Medicare and Social Security, to guarantee equal pay for women and equal rights for gays and lesbians.

During his first term, Obama was inhibited by his desire to be postpartisan, by the need to not offend the Republicans with whom he was negotiating. Now he is liberated. Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display. He argued for it in a way that was unapologetic. Those who agree, those who disagree and those of us who partly agree now have to raise our game. We have to engage his core narrative and his core arguments for a collective turn.

I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.

When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.

America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.

I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

I also think Obama misunderstands this moment. The Progressive Era, New Deal and Great Society laws were enacted when America was still a young and growing nation. They were enacted in a nation that was vibrant, raw, underinstitutionalized and needed taming.

We are no longer that nation. We are now a mature nation with an aging population. Far from being underinstitutionalized, we are bogged down with a bloated political system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code and a crushing debt.

The task of reinvigorating a mature nation is fundamentally different than the task of civilizing a young and boisterous one. It does require some collective action: investing in human capital. But, in other areas, it also involves stripping away — streamlining the special interest sinecures that have built up over the years and liberating private daring.

Reinvigorating a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively to sacrifice the future to the past.

Obama made his case beautifully. He came across as a prudent, nonpopulist progressive. But I’m not sure he rescrambled the debate. We still have one party that talks the language of government and one that talks the language of the market. We have no party that is comfortable with civil society, no party that understands the ways government and the market can both crush and nurture community, no party with new ideas about how these things might blend together.

But at least the debate is started. Maybe that new wind will come.

Teilhard de Chardin's 'Planetary Mind' and Our Spiritual Evolution

This is a cool podcast from On Being is devoted to the thought of French philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was trained as a paleontologist and geologist but is best known for his idea of the Omega Point ("a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving") and for developing Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of the Noosphere.

His best known book is The Phenomenon of Man, in which he outlined a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos. He is in many ways an early example of integral thought in spirituality.

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN'S 'PLANETARY MIND' AND OUR SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION
December 20, 2012

The coming stage of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin said, won't be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit. We visit with his biographer Ursula King, and we experience his ideas energizing New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson.

Listen

Radio Show/Podcast (mp3, 51:09)

Unedited Interviews:

Ursula King (mp3, 1:30:34)
David Sloan Wilson (mp3, 1:41:35)
Andrew Revkin (mp3, 37:24)

Learn

Books + Music
Transcript
Links + Resources

Voices on the Radio

Ursula King is Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol.

David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York.

Andrew Revkin is Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. His blog at The New York Times is called Dot Earth.

“The Value of Culture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

Via Open Culture, this is a cool 5-part series on the value of culture, including the power of culture to create change (1), the two cultures debate between science and art (3), the rise of mass culture (4), and the value and meaning of culture today (5) - links to the five available episodes are below.

“The Value of Culture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

January 8th, 2013

Your presence here indicates that you have an interest in culture. But what, exactly is culture? I’ve long addressed that perhaps too-broad question with a simple working definition: if Melvyn Bragg broadcasts about it, it’s probably culture. You may remember the English writer, presenter, and House of Lords member from our posts on his documentaries on Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, or from the mention of his long-running BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time. But while that show certainly has covered scientific topics — evolutionary psychology, genetic mutation, the neutrino — Bragg and his panels of experts spend even more airtime discussing subjects claimed by the humanities. Some of its most interesting moments happen at the crossover, with scientific angles on the humanistic and vice versa; “Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment” comes to mind, to name but one example. Where conversations like those can arise, I daresay we have culture at its most robust.

But I merely circle around the issue. Bragg’s five-part Radio 4 series The Value of the Culture deals with the question of culture’s nature head-on. Need we call culture anything more specific than the body of things that mankind makes? Does culture work as a force for good? What does culture look like from an anthropological perspective? Must works reach a certain standard, or display certain qualities, to count as culture? What does the gap between the sciences and the humanities mean for culture? How did “mass culture” come about, as opposed to “high culture”? And what does all this say about the culture we have today? Assembling his typically impressive range of luminaries from across the British intellectual landscape, Bragg asks these questions and many more besides, using as a point of departure ninetheenth-century poet, critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold’s description of culture as “the best which has been thought and said” which provides life its “sweetness and light.” But much has changed in how we regard culture since the nineteenth century, and here we have just the program to get us thinking harder than ever about it.

All episodes of The Value of Culture: Culture and Anarchy (above),Culture and the Anthropologists, Two Cultures, Mass Culture, What’s the Value of Culture Today?

Related content:

• Watch Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock, the 1987 Documentary Narrated by Melvyn Bragg
• Francis Bacon on the South Bank Show: A Singular Profile of the Singular Painter

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

1. Culture and Anarchy
1/5 Melvyn Bragg explores Matthew Arnold's ideas about culture being a powerful force for good
FIRST BROADCAST: 31 Dec 2012 

Listen now

2. Culture and the Anthropologists
2/5 Melvyn Bragg considers the importance of culture to the discipline of anthropology.
FIRST BROADCAST: 01 Jan 2013

Listen now

3. Two Cultures
3/5 Melvyn Bragg looks back at 150 years of dialogue between the arts and sciences.
FIRST BROADCAST: 02 Jan 2013

Listen now

4. Mass Culture
4/5 Melvyn Bragg charts the rise of mass culture in the 20th century.
FIRST BROADCAST: 03 Jan 2013

Listen now

5. What's the Value of Culture Today?
5/5 Melvyn Bragg and his guests debate the meaning and value of culture today.
FIRST BROADCAST: 04 Jan 2013

Listen now

Scientists Turn One Form of Neuron Into Another in Mouse Brain

This is another huge breakthrough in cell biology, especially since this was done with live mice. The possible implications in treating neurodegenerative disorders is monumental.

Full Citation:
Caroline Rouaux, Paola Arlotta. Direct lineage reprogramming of post-mitotic callosal neurons into corticofugal neurons in vivo. Nature Cell Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ncb2660

One Form of Neuron Turned Into Another in Brain

Jan. 20, 2013 — A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head -- demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated neuron into another within the brain.

The discovery by Paola Arlotta and Caroline Rouaux "tells you that maybe the brain is not as immutable as we always thought, because at least during an early window of time one can reprogram the identity of one neuronal class into another," said Arlotta, an Associate Professor in Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB).

The principle of direct lineage reprogramming of differentiated cells within the body was first proven by SCRB co-chair and Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) co-director Doug Melton and colleagues five years ago, when they reprogrammed exocrine pancreatic cells directly into insulin producing beta cells.

Arlotta and Rouaux now have proven that neurons too can change their mind. The work is being published on-line Jan. 20 by the journal Nature Cell Biology.

In their experiments, Arlotta targeted callosal projection neurons, which connect the two hemispheres of the brain, and turned them into neurons similar to corticospinal motor neurons, one of two populations of neurons destroyed in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. To achieve such reprogramming of neuronal identity, the researchers used a transcription factor called Fezf2, which long as been known for playing a central role in the development of corticospinal neurons in the embryo.

What makes the finding even more significant is that the work was done in the brains of living mice, rather than in collections of cells in laboratory dishes. The mice were young, so researchers still do not know if neuronal reprogramming will be possible in older laboratory animals -- and humans. If it is possible, this has enormous implications for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

"Neurodegenerative diseases typically effect a specific population of neurons, leaving many others untouched. For example, in ALS it is corticospinal motor neurons in the brain and motor neurons in the spinal cord, among the many neurons of the nervous system, that selectively die," Arlotta said. "What if one could take neurons that are spared in a given disease and turn them directly into the neurons that die off? In ALS, if you could generate even a small percentage of corticospinal motor neurons, it would likely be sufficient to recover basic functioning," she said.

The experiments that led to the new finding began five years ago, when "we wondered: in nature you never seen a neuron change identity; are we just not seeing it, or is this the reality? Can we take one type of neuron and turn it into another?" Arlotta and Rouaux asked themselves.

Over the course of the five years, the researchers analyzed "thousands and thousands of neurons, looking for many molecular markers as well as new connectivity that would indicate that reprogramming was occurring," Arlotta said. "We could have had this two years ago, but while this was a conceptually very simple set of experiments, it was technically difficult. The work was meant to test important dogmas on the irreversible nature of neurons in vivo. We had to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was happening."

The work in Arlotta's lab is focused on the cerebral cortex, but "it opens the door to reprogramming in other areas of the central nervous system," she said.

Arlotta, an HSCI principal faculty member, is now working with colleague Takao Hensch, of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, to explicate the physiology of the reprogrammed neurons, and learn how they communicate within pre-existing neuronal networks.

"My hope is that this will facilitate work in a new field of neurobiology that explores the boundaries and power of neuronal reprogramming to re-engineer circuits relevant to disease," said Paola Arlotta.

My Review - Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality

I recently reviewed Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality, a product of the 2002 Mind and Life Conference, the tenth (X) in the series that has just recently reached its 26th iteration. I reviewed the book for Wildmind Buddhist Meditation, where I review a book or two each year.

Here is just a little taste of the beginning of the review, offering a little background on the conference:

The Mind and Life Institute emerged as “a bold experiment” in 1987 from the efforts of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Adam Engle, and Francisco Varela. Between ML IX and X, co-founder and visionary scholar Francisco Varela passed away, a tremendous loss for all of us who seek knowledge in the realm of consciousness studies. Varela has been ably replaced by Richard Davidson (author, most recently, of The Emotional Life of Your Brain).

Among the luminaries attending past conversations are neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, philosopher Owen Flanagan, psychologist Daniel Goleman, anthropologist and Zen priest Roshi Joan Halifax, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, Cistercian monk and founder of the Centering Prayer movement Father Thomas Keating, cellular geneticist and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, and philosopher Evan Thompson, among many, many others.

The Scientific Coordinator at ML X was:

• Arthur Zajonc, Ph.D., Professor of Physics at Amherst College

Participants were:

• Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness, the XIVth Dalai Lama of Tibet

• Michel Bitbol, M.D., Ph.D., Directeur de recherché at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, France

• Steven Chu, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University
• 
Ursula Goodenough, Ph.D., Professor of Biology at Washington University

• Eric Lander, Ph.D., geneticist, molecular biologist, mathematician, and the founder and director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research

• Prof. Dr. Pier Luigi Luisi, Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
• Matthieu Ricard, Ph.D., Author and Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu and French interpreter since 1989 for His Holiness the Dalai Lama
• Arthur Zajonc, Ph.D., Professor of Physics at Amherst College

The interpreters were:

• Geshe Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D., President and chief editor for The Classics of Tibet Series produced by the Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montreal, Canada
.
• B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D., Visiting Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

When I began reading this book, my expectations, based on watching videos of the last several Mind and Life Conferences, no doubt skewed my experience of the book at first. Having seen those videos of recent conferences, I kept waiting for the book to get into the dharma, but that is not the book’s purpose, although there is certainly some Buddhist philosophy later in the book.

Read the whole review.

Possession Trance Disorder - Who Knew?

I found this fascinating article at The Neurocritic, a very cool blog "deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology." The blog is posted with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, so here is the whole very interesting article.

The post begins with a small discussion of exorcism based on an episode of American Horror Story: Asylum, a series on FX. From there, however, he goes into a discussion of the available information Possession Trance Disorder, which I am saddened to see will not be in the DSM-5 (yet another of its flaws).

I am a little saddened, seriously, as a rational person who does not believe in spirit possession, to see this piece of cultural sensitivity removed from the DSM. I have actually had a client (Latina/Mexican/Catholic) who was "exorcised" by a woman working in a thrift store (not on the sale floor). The client was borderline DID at the time, with one very destructive (self-harm, suicide attempts) and the "exorcism" silenced the voices for several weeks, although they did eventually return.

As a therapist, it seems important to honor some aspects of other cultures and other belief systems. We do not have to believe them, but we can work within their worldview employing interventions we feel address the core issue(s).

Possession Trance Disorder in DSM-5

American Horror Story: Asylum takes place in 1964 at Briarcliff Manor, a terrifying mental institution for the criminally insane. The show uses every over-the-top stereotype in the book — straightjackets, isolation cells, shock treatment, the chronic masturbator, the nymphomaniac, the sadistic nun, the evil mad doctor, unethical experimentation, wrongful commitment, alien abduction, demonic possession, you name it — yet it still manages to be scary and stylish and suspenseful.

The episode about a poor soul possessed by the devil naturally includes an exorcism by Catholic priests. The afflicted boy becomes ugly and deformed by the demon, who spews out lewd words and exerts its supernatural telekinetic powers by throwing objects (and priests) across the room.

Regarding exorcism, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

Exorcism is (1) the act of driving out, or warding off, demons, or evil spirits, from persons, places, or things, which are believed to be possessed or infested by them, or are liable to become victims or instruments of their malice; (2) the means employed for this purpose, especially the solemn and authoritative adjuration of the demon, in the name of God, or any of the higher power in which he is subject.

Religious belief in the existence of demons is a sincere part of the Catholic faith, so demonic possession can be a particularly frightening Hollywood trope for devout Catholics (and former Catholics). Walking out of the theater into the dark parking lot and entering your empty apartment after a midnight showing of The Exorcist can be creepy for the believer and the agnostic alike. Even if Satan isn't lurking in your shower, a serial killer like "Bloody Face" could be under your bed. Indoctrination into a belief system where devils are real can haunt a young child into adulthood.

In contrast, the rationalist perspective presents historical and medically-based views of possession phenomena in terms of epilepsy, schizophrenia, and possession trance disorder (PTD), a possible variant of dissociative identity disorder. Nothing evil or supernatural takes over the identity of the person with PTD. Nonetheless, exorcisms performed on mentally ill people continue to this day.

For example, Tajima-Pozo and colleagues (2011) reported on the case of a 28 yr old woman in Spain who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Over the course of 5 yrs she had been treated with the antipsychotic drugs clozapine, risperidone, ziprasidone and onlanzapine, without complete remission. She was an inpatient on a psychosis ward, and yet some diabolical priests managed to get in and convince her that she was possessed by demons. Some of the priests had knowledge of the patient's psychiatric history and should have known better. But they performed multiple exorcisms anyway, which disrupted her clinical treatment (1).

In DSM-IV, spirit possession falls under the category of Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, with more specific research criteria (but not an official diagnosis) fitting Dissociative Trance Disorder (possession trance):

This category [DDNOS] is included for disorders in which the predominant feature is a dissociative symptom (i.e., a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment) that does not meet the criteria for any specific dissociative disorder.
. . . 

Dissociative trance disorder: single or episodic disturbances in the state of consciousness, identity, or memory that are indigenous to particular locations and cultures. Dissociative trance involves narrowing of awareness of immediate surroundings or stereotyped behaviors or movements that are experienced as being beyond one's control. Possession trance involves replacement of the customary sense of personal identity by a new identity, attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, deity, or other person and associated with stereotyped involuntary movements or amnesia, and is perhaps the most common dissociative disorder in Asia. Examples include amok (Indonesia), bebainan (Indonesia), latah (Malaysia), pibloktoq (Arctic), ataque de nervios (Latin America), and possession (India). The dissociative or trance disorder is not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice.

Note the culture-specific aspect of the disorder, which shows substantial heterogeneity in its expression. Dr. Romeo Vitelli at the blog Providentia has written about some of these phenomena. For instance, Amok is an aggressive trance-like state in Malay culture, whereas Pibloktoq is an acute dissociative reaction in the Inuit tradition, caused by evil spirits possessing the living. In two previousposts here at The Neurocritic, we also learned about cen in Uganda, ghosts that replace the identity of the afflicted individual.

Dissociative Disorders in DSM-5

Will there be changes for Dissociative Trance Disorder (DTD) in DSM-5? The new (and already reviled) psychiatric manual makes its debut in May 2013 (2). A 2011 paper by Spiegel et al. described some of the proposed changes to the dissociative disorders. The Pathological Possession Trance (PPT) component of DTD is claimed to be be similar to dissociative identity disorder (DID, or the diagnosis formerly known as "multiple personality disorder"):

It is a disorder of identity alteration that occurs during an altered state of consciousness. Of course, unlike DID, the alternate identity or identities in PPT are attributed to possession (by an external spirit, power, deity, or other person) rather than to internal personality states. Associated symptoms of PPT include stereotyped or culturally determined behaviors or movements that are experienced as being controlled by the possessing agent and/or full or partial amnesia for the event.So pathological possession trance would be included under DID, while dissociative trance without possession would remain under dissociative disorders NOS. Or...

Alternatively, DSM-5 could (a) retain all of DTD in DDNOS (and an appendix), or (b) incorporate DTD (or only PPT) as a new disorder.

“Possession” is a broader construct than PPT because it may be used as a nonspecific attribution for explaining events (e.g. illness, misfortune) that go beyond pathological identity alteration. By contrast, in PPT we focus only on the subset of possession experiences–(1) an alteration of consciousness wherein the person experiences his/her the identity as being replaced by an ancestor, spirit, or other entity (i.e. possession trance), and (2) these alterations are involuntary, distressing, uncontrollable, often chronic, and involve conflict between the individual and his/her surrounding social or work milieu (i.e. the possession trance is a pathological one).

Ultimately, the recommendation was to include PPT under the DID umbrella. The phrase “an experience of possession” would be added to Criterion A of DID.

Kibuuka Kigaanira (R) with a priestly assistant.

Photo Courtesy of Euginia Bonabana, from The Sunday Monitor [Uganda]

Alternate activism: From Kibuuka Kigaanira in the mid-19th century to Kalondoozi in the present, possession practices provide important political space for citizens to negotiate power and authority, while appointed leaders are held to account. 

-from Spirit possession and power play since pre-colonial times

Pathological Possession Trance: Perspectives from Uganda

Previously, I wrote about Spirit Possession as a Trauma-Related Disorder in Uganda and quoted from a personal narrative of spirit possession from Christine, a former child soldier. How well will the new DSM-5 criteria fit cen phenomena in Northern Uganda? The diagnosis for possession trance would now be DID. However, a recent paper by van Duijl et al. (2012) suggests this might be a nosological disaster for the classification of spirit possession in Uganda.

In their study, the authors collected narratives from 119 spirit possessed individuals. They also developed a checklist for locally relevant dissociative and possession symptoms.

The CDS-Ug is a locally designed checklist based on information obtained in focus group discussions with traditional healers, religious leaders, health professionals, and people of the community. It covers common and typical symptoms of dissociation and spirit possession, including:

• Okukangarana: described as being shocked by a situation in such a way that later on one cannot remember the situation (amnesia)

• Okurogwa: described as talking in a different voice, which others recognize as the voice of an (ancestral) spirit (possession trance)

• Eibugane: feeling influenced by unidentified forcescausing behavior different from one’s usual behavior

• Okukyekyera: traveling outside one’s home without remembering (fugues or ‘night dances’)

• Okusharara: feeling as if something from outside holds one’s body or mind so that one cannot move, think, or speak, which is attributed to an outer force (feeling paralyzed)

• Okugwa: shaking of the head or body, seen as an expression of spirits (involuntary repetitive movements)

• Okugamba endimi: speaking in tongues (glossolalia)

• Okwehindura: making sounds and movements as if one has become an animal, for example, a cock, monkey, or goat, without remembering this behavior afterward (possession by animal)Spirit possessed patients were asked whether and how these eight features applied to themselves.

The data were analyzed to examine possible clusters of symptoms, merged with a checklist developed from the personal narratives, and then compared to the old DSM-IV DTD criteria and the new DSM-5 DID criteria.

Two distinctive clusters emerged (3). One cluster included shaking, stereotyped movements, and speaking in voices of spirits ("active symptoms"). The second cluster included amnesia, fugues, and feeling paralyzed ("passive symptoms"). The passive symptoms were a better fit with DID, but the active symptoms were more like DTD. Furthermore, many symptoms fell outside either diagnosis:

...experiences such as hearing voices (e.g., of spirits or deceased), strange dreams, feeling influenced or held by powers from outside, feeling paralyzed, or moving around in fugue-like states are not explicitly covered by the experimental DSM-IV research criteria nor by proposed criteria for DID in DSM-5.

Overall, the authors felt the DSM-IV experimental criteria for dissociative trance and possession trance disorders encompassed the experience of spirit possession to a greater extent than the DSM-5 DID criteria. They do not think possession trance disorder should be subsumed under dissociative identity disorder, nor do they think dissociative trance and possession trance should be separate categories, as they occurred on a continuum in this Ugandan population. Instead, a more culturally-inclusive mindset might have prevented some of the DSM-5 changes from moving forward.

Although the presentation of DID and PTD considerably overlaps and both are covered by the criteria outlined in Table 3, we are not in full support of this approach. Ranking PTD (described in over 360 societies) under DID (described in considerably fewer societies) expresses a Western ethnocentric approach. Ranking characteristic symptoms of PTD such as stereotyped uncontrolled movements as ‘non-epileptic seizures or other sensory-motor (functional neurological) symptoms’ in DSM-5 also heavily imposes a medical descriptive framework and disregards emic attributions. In addition to this, DID is strongly associated with early childhood sexual abuse and neglect, whereas stressors associated with PTD are more broadly framed and require a culturally sensitive approach. 

In DSM-5, Possession Trance Disorder no longer exists.

Footnotes

1 Besides being backwards and barbaric, exorcisms can be deadly, as this case of Fatal Hypernatraemia from Excessive Salt Ingestion During Exorcism shows. Ingestion of salt or salt water is part of the ritual.

2 If you want to know why it's already reviled, start here and follow links. Or Google DSM-5 controversy. I don't feel a need to offer my opinion at the present time.

3 These two clusters could account for ~46 % of the variance.

References

Duijl, M., Kleijn, W., & Jong, J. (2012). Are symptoms of spirit possessed patients covered by the DSM-IV or DSM-5 criteria for possession trance disorder? A mixed-method explorative study in Uganda. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology DOI:10.1007/s00127-012-0635-1

Spiegel, D., Loewenstein, R., Lewis-Fernández, R., Sar, V., Simeon, D., Vermetten, E., Cardeña, E., & Dell, P. (2011). Dissociative disorders in DSM-5. Depression and Anxiety, 28 (9), 824-852 DOI:10.1002/da.20874

Tajima-Pozo, K., Zambrano-Enriquez, D., de Anta, L., Moron, M., Carrasco, J., Lopez-Ibor, J., & Diaz-Marsa, M. (2011). Practicing exorcism in schizophrenia Case Reports, 2011 (feb15 1) DOI:10.1136/bcr.10.2009.2350

Mark Leonard - Mindfulness: Not Solving Difficult Problems

From Mark Leonard at The RSA, on the role of mindfulness in creating a happier, healthier world. I like his definition of mindfulness: "mindfulness is learning to ‘not-do’ anything at all, with purpose."

Mindfulness: Not solving difficult problems

By Mark Leonard on Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

There is currently an explosion of interest in mindfulness, crudely put, the paying of attention to the moment. Mark Leonard argues that simple but powerful mindfulness exercises and broader access to training in the workplace could help us harness the power of our demons for good.

We are a problem solving species. We can make handheld communication devices that do everything apart from wash the dishes; we make dishwashers to do that. However, there is a limit to the problems we can solve. We may be able to make a world where increasing numbers of us have all we could possibly need, but for all our ingenuity, it seems we have unleashed demons we cannot control.

Homo sapiens evolved around a quarter of a million years ago. Seven billion of us now live in a very different world, one in which our society and economy and even the planet itself are under threat.

If you are reading this, you are most probably one of those of us who are fortunate enough to have a roof overhead, comfortable clothing, enough food to eat and a whole load of other stuff. Yet, even amongst those who have these things and more, stress and depression have reached epidemic proportions. What role could mindfulness play in making a better, happier world?

Solving problems is great for all kinds of things, but we are beginning to understand that our minds do not work like machines. Like social groups and the ecosystem that supports life on the planet, our minds are complex systems that are difficult to control but have the remarkable ability to self-organise if given the chance. If placed under stress, our minds can buffer it up to a point but if adverse conditions continue they will reach a tipping point and can fail, often catastrophically.

The current renewed interest in mindfulness has sprung from recent scientific work on depression. For some people a bad day can trigger a downward spiral into the depths of depression; others can acknowledge that they are just having a bad day and sooner or later the fog lifts all of itself. People who suffer from depression notice a low mood and begin to worry that things are going to get worse and sure enough they do. Part of the reason for this is because they ask themselves the question: ‘Why do I feel so bad?’ They treat a bad day like a problem that they need to solve and sure enough they can’t.

By practicing mindfulness exercises we learn to ‘not-do’ anything at all, with purpose. Mindfulness training teaches people who suffer from depression to give themselves a break from using problem solving strategies inappropriately on their emotions. With greater self-acceptance that comes with ‘not-doing’ anything, things tend to get better on their own.

How much better could things be if we could tackle the challenges we face everyday by learning to diffuse stress more effectively? Mindfulness exercises help us to do this in a similar way to the way they help prevent the recurrence of depression. They can give us the tools to uncouple the feedback of over-thinking from our emotions, reducing stress, enabling us to think about things more clearly when it’s useful and to know when it is not.

Of course increasing levels of stress and depression cannot all be put down to applying problem-solving strategies inappropriately. But when we use them on our emotions they tend to backfire and when applied to other people, without taking proper account of the way they feel, the impact can be damaging.

For example, if management strategies are implemented without making sure that employees feel fairly treated, we risk creating a vicious circle of reduced motivation, poor performance and further management intervention. A bit like depression in an individual, this ends up in a destructive spiral of stress and disengagement in an organisation.

What might happen if a significant percentage of people in an organisation were able to break this vicious cycle caused by the stress of over-thinking by practicing mindfulness exercises? Not only would people be less stressed but they would be more aware of the impact of their behaviour on others. Their engagement and happiness would be less dependent on the conditions they experience. They would act as a social buffer to stress in the organisation.

If, individually and collectively, we can be more mindful of the way we employ problem-solving strategies, we could release a great deal of human potential from the damaging effects of stress. If mindfulness training in the workplace became more widely available, organisational cultures would be more likely to emerge from a virtuous circle of employee engagement, collaborative working styles and outstanding performance.

However, releasing human potential from the ravages of stress is not just about improved individual and collective performance. An organisation, which emerges from a culture where employees understand themselves and others around them better, will be more likely to express similar characteristics. When ethical behavior is the norm within an organisation, it will be more likely to take its corporate social responsibility more seriously and behave more ethically with all its stakeholders and society in general.

David Kaufman - President Obama Should Embrace His Bi-Racial Heritage

President Barack Obama's Parents

Writing at The Daily Beast, David Kaufman argues that Barack Obama should begin talking about his bi-racial, bi-cultural background during his second term, something that has been largely ignored by the media and has not been addressed by Obama himself.

I think I agree with this proposition, but for different reasons than Kaufman outlines here.

I believe it's understandable that he has identified as black. He grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia, and the United States, nearly always being the darkest person in his school and in his community. From an early age he was more aware of his skin color (especially living most of his life with his white mother and, later, her parents) than most people from single-race families. In almost every way, aside from adopting his mother's religion, he has seemingly identified more with his father than his mother.

However, being bi-racial and bi-cultural gives Obama a platform to discuss the divisiveness that currently is dividing the country along partisan lines. He represents the merging of two races, two cultures (American and Kenyan), and two religions (Christianity from his mother and Islam from his father). Obama has spoken about his childhood:

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[9] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[22] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[23]

He is the embodiment of a multicultural worldview and he can use that experience as a platform to speak in a way no other President has been able about what America has always struggle to embody itself - the great melting pot of the world.

Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

Jan 20, 2013
By David Kaufman

The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he’ll also discuss his biracial heritage.

Four years after he first entered the White House, there’s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama—America’s first black president—a “transformational” leader. Yet the full extent of Obama’s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.

A woman has her picture taken in front of Chuck Close portraits of Barack Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty)

Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from my Father makes clear that his identity was influenced as much—if not more—by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational—and much-needed—African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.

“To a certain extent, I think it’s been an act,” San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Jolivette—editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor, a collection of essays—says of the president’s mono-racial messaging. “The President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.”

Indeed, both blacks and whites seem equally uneasy with more complex views of Obama’s ethnic origins. Cornel West and Jesse Jackson, for instance, have both suggested that Obama is somehow not black enough. And with African-American voters perceived as hostile to the Obama-as-biracial narrative, touting the President’s Caucasian other half could easily have cost him crucial election support. “There’s a political constituency for African-American voters, which is why Obama wanted to present himself as a black candidate,” says Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks, author of Is Marriage for White People?. “There’s not much of a political constituency for a biracial candidate.”

Yet whites, too—particularly the mostly white mainstream media—have been noticeably quiet on this topic. Back in 2008, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof raised the issue, asking, “Should we call Obama ‘black’ or ‘biracial’?” Though he declined to answer the question himself, he observed that “the convention in America has been that someone who is biracial is considered black, and that’s the standard that we in the news media generally hew to.”

With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he’s so publicly—and repeatedly—identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. “Some might suggest he’s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,” suggests Michele Elam, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. “I don’t think he’s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the ‘one-drop’ rule,” Elam continues. “For Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood ... He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.”

“There’s a feeling among some mixed people that they’ve been cheated out of a hero.”

But whether or not Obama continues to struggle with his identity, it remains an important topic for many Americans. Last summer, Morgan Freeman said that Obama is “not America’s first black president—he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” More recently, several stories have struck hard at the racial amnesia that has mostly defined our perception of the President.

More than 1.8 million Americans identified as mixed black/white in the 2010 census—an increase of 134 percent over the previous decade. Overall, more than 9 million Americans identified as biracial—up 34 percent from 2000. As this cohort matures in both age and influence, Jolivette suggests that they could more aggressively claim the president as their own. “There’s a feeling among some mixed people that they’ve been cheated out of a hero,” he says.

Obama, too, has been cheated in the process—robbed by political necessity of the opportunity to speak to the multi-racial reality increasingly defining America. Nonetheless, the President’s biracial origins and cosmopolitan, culture-rich past seem to inform much of his upcoming agenda—from immigration reform to economic equality. Which arguably makes now the perfect time for Obama to finally realize his transformational potential on this topic by speaking more about it.

“Overlooking or ignoring the fullness and complexity of Obama’s ethnicity keeps this conversation stagnant and very 20th century,” says Jolivette. “And Obama wants nothing more than to truly be a 21st century president.”


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~ David Kaufman is a New York-based writer who regularly contributes to publications such as Monocle, Time, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

TED Talk - Ze Frank's Web Playroom

I had not seen this Ze Frank TED Talk until last night - it's both funny and touching. Enjoy.

Ze Frank's Web Playroom

On the web, a new "Friend" may be just a click away, but true connection is harder to find and express. Ze Frank presents a medley of zany Internet toys that require deep participation -- and reward it with something more nourishing. You're invited, if you promise you'll share.

Loneliness = Inflammation = Compromised Immune System

For many years, there have been correlational studies suggesting that loneliness and social isolation are related to poorer health and poorer outcomes when disease strikes. Additional studies have shown that the sense of loneliness is the important factor, not the number of relationships, meaning that a person can have a lot of relationships but if few (or none) of them are experienced as high-quality relationships (supportive, reciprocal, etc.) then the person will feel lonely.

Now we know more about how this works. In a recent pair of studies, the more lonely people felt the more inflammation they experienced, when compared to less lonely people. Loneliness was associated with the activation of pro-inflammatory stress hormones:

In both groups, those who were lonelier produced significantly higher levels of a cytokine called interleukin-6, or IL-6, in response to acute stress, the researchers report. Levels of another cytokine, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, also rose more dramatically in lonelier participants than in less lonely participants, but the findings were significant by statistical standards in only one study group, the healthy adults, researchers add. 

These specific hormones are known to create a more favorable environment in the body for disease. This information is important in designing secondary prevention programs for serious diseases such as cancer, where the levels of inflammation promote cancer growth.

Loneliness Taxes the Immune System

By JANICE WOOD Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 19, 2013

New research has linked loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health.

Researchers found that people who were more lonely showed signs of elevated latent herpes virus reactivation and produced more inflammation-related proteins in response to acute stress than people who felt more socially connected.

Chronic inflammation is linked to a number of dire health conditions, including coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the frailty and functional decline that can accompany aging, researchers note.

“It is clear from previous research that poor-quality relationships are linked to a number of health problems, including premature mortality and all sorts of other very serious health conditions — and people who are lonely clearly feel like they are in poor-quality relationships,” said Lisa Jaremka, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University and lead author of the research.

“One reason this type of research is important is to understand how loneliness and relationships broadly affect health,” she continued. “The more we understand about the process, the more potential there is to counter those negative effects — to perhaps intervene. If we don’t know the physiological processes, what are we going to do to change them?”

The researchers, who conducted a series of experiments on a group of 200 breast cancer survivors and a group of 134 overweight middle-aged and older adults with no major health problems, measured loneliness using the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a questionnaire that assesses perceptions of social isolation and loneliness.

The researchers then analyzed the blood of the breast cancer survivors — who were between two months and three years past completion of cancer treatment with an average age of 51 — for the presence of antibodies against Epstein-Barr virus and cytomegalovirus.

Both are herpes viruses that infect a majority of Americans, the researchers said. About half of infections do not produce illness, but once a person is infected, the viruses remain dormant in the body and can be reactivated, resulting in elevated antibody levels, the researchers noted. While the reactivated virus produces no symptoms, they hint at problems in the cellular immune system, the researchers explained.

The researchers found that lonelier participants had higher levels of antibodies against cytomegalovirus than less lonely participants. Higher antibody levels were also related to more pain, depression and fatigue symptoms.

No difference was seen in Epstein-Barr virus antibody levels, possibly because this reactivation is linked to age and many of these participants were somewhat older, meaning reactivation related to loneliness would be difficult to detect, Jaremka said.

“The same processes involved in stress and reactivation of these viruses is probably also relevant to the loneliness findings,” Jaremka said. “Loneliness has been thought of in many ways as a chronic stressor — a socially painful situation that can last for quite a long time.”

The researchers also sought to determine how loneliness affected the production of proinflammatory proteins, or cytokines, in response to stress. These studies were conducted with 144 women from the same group of breast cancer survivors and the group of overweight middle-aged and older adults with no major health problems.

Baseline blood samples were taken from all participants, who were then subjected to stress by being asked to deliver an impromptu five-minute speech and perform a mental arithmetic task in front of a video camera and three panelists. Researchers then stimulated their immune systems with lipopolysaccharide, a compound found on bacterial cell walls that is known to trigger an immune response.

In both groups, those who were lonelier produced significantly higher levels of a cytokine called interleukin-6, or IL-6, in response to acute stress, the researchers report. Levels of another cytokine, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, also rose more dramatically in lonelier participants than in less lonely participants, but the findings were significant by statistical standards in only one study group, the healthy adults, researchers add.

In the study with breast cancer survivors, researchers said they also tested for levels of the cytokine interleukin 1-beta, which was produced at higher levels in lonelier participants.

When the scientists controlled for a number of factors, including sleep quality, age and general health measures, the results were the same, they reported.

“We saw consistency in the sense that more lonely people in both studies had more inflammation than less lonely people,” Jaremka said. “It’s also important to remember the flip side, which is that people who feel very socially connected are experiencing more positive outcomes.”

Source: Ohio State University

Lonely woman thinking photo by shutterstock.