First LSD Study in 40 Years Finds Therapeutic Potential (Discover)

Wow, imagine that?!! I'm glad to see that research has finally been unfrozen and we will be able to identify the best hallucinogens for various psycho-spiritual issues.

First LSD Study in 40 Years Finds Therapeutic Potential

By Carl Engelking | March 5, 2014


Scientific study often opens new doors of discovery—but sometimes it reopens doors closed long ago. On Tuesday, experimental psychiatrists in Santa Cruz, California published results from the first controlled medical trial of LSD in over 40 years.

The study, published in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease [pdf], found evidence that LSD, when administered in a medically-based therapeutic environment, lowers the anxiety experienced by individuals facing life-threatening illnesses. Although the sample size—just 12 people—was small, the findings offer compelling rationale for further study of the illegal, often stigmatized drug.

“This study is historic and marks a rebirth of investigation into LSD-assisted psychotherapy,” said Rick Doblin in a news release, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which sponsored the study. “The positive results and evidence of safety clearly show why additional, larger studies are needed.”

When Research Came to a Halt

That LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—can be therapeutically beneficial has been known for decades. Studies of the chemical substance began back in 1949 as a way to simulate mental illness. But researchers soon discovered beneficial effects of the drug.

By 1965, over 1,000 studies were published that heralded the therapeutic efficacy of LSD. The substance was used to treat alcoholism, and in several studies from the 60s, the drug was found to reduce anxiety, depression and pain—when used in conjunction with counseling—in cancer patients. Similar benefits were also discovered from other psychedelics such as hallucinogenic mushrooms.

However, despite its promise, LSD research ground to a standstill after the substance was outlawed in the United States in 1966 in response to soaring recreational use.

Revisiting the Past

The new study reaffirms many of the findings from 40 years ago.

Researchers recruited 12 patients who were coping with anxiety associated with life-threatening illnesses. Eight patients were then randomly selected to receive drug-free psychotherapy sessions as well as two LSD-assisted sessions 2 to 3 weeks apart. Four participants were given a placebo during therapy and they served as the control. LSD helped stimulate a deep psychedelic state, allowing the participants to reach what they described as an emotionally intensified dream-like state.

“My LSD experience brought back some lost emotions and ability to trust, lots of psychological insights, and a timeless moment when the universe didn’t seem like a trap, but like a revelation of utter beauty,” said Peter, an Austrian subject who participated in the study.

In a follow-up two months later, researchers noted a statistically significant reduction in state anxiety—heightened emotions that develop in response to a fear or danger—faced by patients who were given LSD therapy. In contrast, state anxiety actually increased for patients in the placebo group. Further, the reductions in anxiety were sustained for a full year in the group given LSD.

A Future for LSD

The study’s authors are clear that this is just a preliminary investigation with a very small sample size. The results are far from conclusive.

Rather, when combined with the findings from other decades-old studies, the study’s authors hope to encourage other researchers to look beyond the stigma associated with LSD and explore other possible medical applications of the drug.

Photo credit: mikeledray/Shutterstock

The Tragedy of America’s Dog - A Brief History of the Vilification of the Pit Bull

This is for all the pit bull lovers out there. I have had the pleasure of having two different Pit Bulls as canine buddies in my life, and both of them have been the most gentle, loving, loyal, affectionate dogs I have known. The picture above is Mogli, a Pit Bull and Dalmatian mix - the sweetest dog I have ever known (he's not so skinny now).

The Tragedy of America’s Dog

A brief history of the vilification of the pit bull.

By Jake Flanagin • February 28, 2014


(Photo: dogboxstudio/Shutterstock)

In decades past, the American pit bull was a canine icon. Nicknamed “America’s dog,” and favored for its remarkable loyalty and affability, images of the breed were everywhere. A pit bull named Sergeant Stubby won 13 decorations for his service in the trenches of the First World War. Nipper, the dog from the classic RCA Victor advertisements, was a pit bull. So was Pete the Pup, canine companion to The Little Rascals. Their affinity and gentleness toward children was so widely known and appreciated it inspired a second nickname: “the nanny dog.”

That perception profoundly changed in the 1980s. Dogfighting enjoyed a major resurgence in America in that decade, says John Goodwin, director of animal cruelty policy at the Humane Society of the United States. “In that time there were people who took an interest in romanticizing the horrors of dogfighting … living through the accomplishments of the dog.”

The pit bull’s trademark loyalty combined with its muscular physique made it a prime candidate for exploitation. The breed quickly came to represent aggression and a perverse idea of machismo, thus becoming the preferred guard dog cum status symbol for drug dealers and gangsters.

Popularity for the breed in low-income, urban areas exploded. Consequently, there were (and still are) a large number of un-spayed and un-neutered pit bulls living in extremely close proximity to one another. It was the perfect recipe for an epic puppy-boom. According to Mid-American Bully Breed Rescue, a non-profit that takes pit bull breeds out of high-kill animal shelters around the Midwest, there are approximately five million registered pit bulls in the United States today: a combination of breeds which includes Staffordshire bull terriers, American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, or any mix thereof. This figure does not include the substantial number of pit bulls circulating the shelter system and living on the streets. The ASPCA reports that 35 percent of American shelters receive at least one pit bull a day. And in Detroit, where the stray problem borders on epidemical, pit bulls and pit mixes compose 90 percent of the homeless dog population.

Where pit bulls were once ubiquitous in American pop culture, they are now ubiquitous in actuality. And because the overpopulation centers predominantly on low-income areas, the pit bull is arguably one of the least-responsibly cared for breeds in the country.

THE RESULT IS A documented number of pit bull attacks that, upon superficial inspection, appears quite sizable. MABBR reports that, between 1965 and 2001, there have been 60 lethal dog-attacks in the United States involving a pit bull. Compared to most breeds, that figure is indeed quite high. There were only 14 lethal attacks involving Dobermans, for instance. But taking into account the overall populations of each breed measured, the rate of aggression among pit bulls is comparatively quite normal. Even low. During that 36-year period, only 0.0012 percent of the estimated pit bull population was involved in a fatal attack. Compare that to the purebred Chow Chow, which has a fatal-attack rate of 0.005 percent, and consistently ranks as the least child-friendly dog breed on the market. Why don’t media reports of attacks involving Chows eclipse those involving pit bulls? Because there are only 240,000 registered Chow Chows currently residing in the United States. And frankly, the broad-skulled, wide-mouthed pit bull makes for a more convincing monster than the comically puffy Chow.

Also worth noting is the pit’s comparatively large and potentially intimidating physiology. “I don’t think pits bite more than other breeds,” says Dr. Sandi Sawchuk, a small-animal veterinarian and clinical instructor at the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Teaching Center in Madison. “It’s just that when they do, they cause more damage. If someone did the same research on Chihuahuas, they would probably find that there are more bites, but they’re less reported due to insignificant damage.”

A study carried out by veterinary researchers at the University of Pennsylvania confirms as much. Dr. James Serpell and his colleagues found that smaller breeds, such as Chihuahuas, Dachshunds, and Jack Russell terriers, generally exhibit higher tendencies for indiscriminate aggression (toward humans and other dogs). They also found that breeds often vilified in the media as being “inherently aggressive,” such as pit bulls and Akitas, are generally more aggressive toward other dogs, but don’t necessarily exhibit abnormally high aggression toward humans.

This widespread mischaracterization of pit bulls, coupled with the understandably strong emotions of bite victims and their loved ones, has resulted in a number of local ordinances categorized as “breed-specific legislation.” BSL is the banning or restricting of ownership of certain breeds deemed especially dangerous or unpredictable. And it almost always targets pits.

As a strategy for decreasing dog attacks, BSL has been largely debunked. The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association released a special report in September of 2000, republished by the CDC, which read, “Breed-specific legislation does not address the fact that a dog of any breed can become dangerous when bred or trained to be aggressive. … An alternative to breed-specific legislation is to regulate individual dogs and owners on the basis of their behavior.” The National Canine Research Council claims, “There is no scientific evidence that one kind of dog is more likely than any other to injure a human being. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary.” They point to a 2008 study by animal behaviorists at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany. It compares the general temperament of golden retrievers (frequently cited as a behaviorally ideal breed) to that of breeds typically targeted by BSL (read: pit bulls). It concludes: “No significant difference was found.”

“BSL is not the panacea that communities hope it will be,” says KC Theisen, director of pet care issues at HSUS. “It fails to address the root causes of dog bites: spay-neutering, whether a dog is chained up or properly contained.”

In 1989, Denver was one of the first major metropolitan areas to enact BSL specifically banning the ownership of pit bulls. The NCRC reported that, following the law’s passage, Denver County hospital workers indeed saw a decrease in admitted injuries caused by the breed. Yet, to this day, as the law still stands, Denver “continues to have significantly higher dog bite-related hospitalization rates than other counties.”

Further problematic is BSL’s dependence on sight identification. Dogs that simply “look” like a pit bull can be detained or euthanized based on little more than a law enforcement officer’s perception of “pit bullishness.” A 2012 article in JAVMA indicated that a heretofore unprecedented 44 percent of American dogs are of mixed-breed ancestry, and there are few surefire ways of determining exact pedigree, even with advanced DNA testing techniques. “The discrepancy between breed identifications based on opinion and DNA analysis, as well as concerns about the reliability of data collected based on media reports, draws into question the validity and enforcement of public and private policies pertaining to dog breeds,” writes Dr. Victoria Lea Voith, a professor of animal behavior at Western University of Health Sciences’ College of Veterinary Medicine.

Evidently, the pit bull problem isn’t really a pit bull problem. It’s a human problem—like most “animal problems” upon closer inspection. And BSL is a cop-out. It shifts culpability from the truly responsible parties—irresponsible owners—and unfairly manipulates the image of an already exploited breed. The Dodo’s Jenny Kutner reports that 93 percent of sheltered pit bulls are euthanized before being put up for adoption. These dogs, which experts have proven to be essentially no different than any other breed, are in dire need of caring, stable homes. BSL stands in the way of that.

THANKFULLY, IT APPEARS THE tide against pit bulls may be turning. Seventeen states now prohibit BSL in any form. Six more (Maryland, Vermont, South Dakota, Missouri, Utah, and Washington) may be heading in the same direction. Even the White House has come out in opposition to BSL. An official response to an anti-BSL petition posted to WhiteHouse.gov reads:

We don’t support breed-specific legislation—research shows that bans on certain types of dogs are largely ineffective and often a waste of public resources…. As an alternative to breed-specific policies, the CDC recommends a community approach to prevent dog bites. And ultimately, we think it’s a much more promising way to build stronger communities of pets and pet owners.

The Obamas have it right: the solution to curtailing dog attacks, and simultaneously controlling the pit bull population, is a combination of community and owner education. Spreading awareness about the importance and wide accessibility of spaying and neutering is especially necessary. (The ASPCA offers special, low-cost surgical packages at facilities across the country.)

Besides the surgery’s obvious necessity to population control, it can actually have a distinct effect on the disposition of individual dogs. According to the American Humane Association, 94 percent of reported pit bull attacks involve an un-neutered male canine. It’s simple biology. High testosterone levels in mammals produce heightened aggression (evidence: bar fights, the NHL). Fix your pit bull, and the benefits are dual: decreased aggression in individual dogs, and a smaller, healthier overall population. Other benefits? An eliminated risk of testicular cancer (duh), less territorial “urine-marking,” and, ahem, a decreased libido. (No more “inappropriate mounting.”)



At this point, I should probably admit some journalistic bias. My family rescued a dog we believe to be a pit bull, at least partially, in the spring of 2012. No doubt, in the eyes of BSL proponents, this disqualifies me from writing anything of substance on the condition and temperament of the breed—but I maintain what the facts support: Pit bulls are no different than any other dog. Other than having the deck stacked overwhelmingly against them.

In any case, does this look like the face of a monster?


To comment on this post, or anything else on Pacific Standard, visit our Facebook or Google+ page, or send a message to us on Twitter.

****

Jake Flanagin is a researcher at The Atlantic. Follow him on Twitter @jakeflanagin.

More From Jake Flanagin

• Culture Creep: How and Why We Separate the Artist From the Art
• Why the Oscars Should Be Segregated by Gender
• Diversity, Demographics, and 'Saturday Night Live'

This is so effed up I am nearly speechless. The children being raised by people who follow this ass-backward book by Michael and Debi Pearl are destined for years of therapy, assuming they don't wake up one morning in their teen years and decide that the only solution to their suffering is to shoot their parents while they sleep.

The Pearls should be charged and tried as accessories to these murders.

Another couple found guilty of murder for parenting by "To Train Up a Child"

Alicia Bayer

Mankato Attachment Parenting Examiner

November 15, 2013

SEATTLE – Carri Williams was found guilty of homicidal abuse of a child and first-degree assault of a child in the death of her adopted daughter, Hana. Carri’s husband, Larry Williams, was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter and assault of a child...

Two parents in Washington state have been found guilty of murder after allegedly following the abusive parenting techniques advocated in the parenting book "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl.

Larry and Carri Williams received the maximum prison sentences allowable under the law after being found guilty of beating and starving their adopted daughter Hana to death. The methods they used to "discipline" their daughter were advocated in the controversial Christian book.

The New York Times reported:

Late one night in May this year, the adopted girl, Hana, was found face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard; her death was caused by hypothermia and malnutrition, officials determined. According to the sheriff’s report, the parents had deprived her of food for days at a time and had made her sleep in a cold barn or a closet and shower outside with a hose. And they often whipped her, leaving marks on her legs. The mother had praised the Pearls’ book and given a copy to a friend, the sheriff’s report said. Hana had been beaten the day of her death, the report said, with the 15-inch plastic tube recommended by Mr. Pearl.

Some of the discipline techniques the Pearls teach include:

• Using plastic plumbing tubing to beat children
• Wearing the plastic tubing around the parent's neck as a constant reminder to obey
• "Swatting" babies as young as six months old with instruments such as "a 12-inch willowy branch," thinner plastic tubing or a wooden spoon
• "Blanket training" babies by hitting them with an instrument if they try to crawl off a blanket on the floor
• Beating older children with rulers, paddles, belts and larger tree branches
• "Training" children with pain before they even disobey, in order to teach total obedience
• Giving cold water baths, putting children outside in cold weather and withholding meals as discipline
• Hosing off children who have potty training accidents
• Inflicting punishment until a child is "without breath to complain"

Michael Pearl tells one mother on his website, "I could break his anger in two days. He would be too scared to get angry. On the third day he would draw into a quiet shell and obey."

Despite Pearl's claim that plumbing line is too light to cause damage to muscle or bone, it caused the death of seven year-old Lydia Schatz in 2010. Officials ruled that she died of severe tissue damage.

The Pearls and their ministry, No Greater Joy, make an estimated $1.7 million a year.

The couple is the third set of parents to be found guilty of killing their children who were said to be followers of the Pearls, whose books are commonly given out in some churches and sent for free to military families. It is unknown how many other children's deaths could be tied to the books.

I have written extensively about the Pearls in the past, including:

• Another child's death linked to Pearls and "To Train Up a Child"
• Michael Pearl writes that he is laughing at his critics after child's death
• Child's death leads Christians to speak out against Michael and Debi Pearl
• Web site provides chilling quotes from "To Train Up a Child"
• Petition against "To Train Up a Child" nears 90,000 signatures

After the death of 7 year-old Lydia Schatz, family friend Paul Mathers wrote on his blog:

"The Schatzes followed, to a "t", a system of child rearing which came from Michael and Debi Pearl... The Pearls are not professionally trained or educated in child development. They came up with this darkness out of the abundance of their hearts... It is one of the most hate-filled, wicked and evil systems I've encountered in my life, all with a sheen of 'Christian' and 'happy families.'"

Mathers told Salon.com:

"I would love to see the people rise up and say no to the Pearls, that this will not stand. I would love to see the Pearl system become anathema, disgusting, and shunned by the world. I would love to see the Pearls out of a job. Before another child dies."

Sadly, this was not the case.

Please use your voice, both online and off, to speak up against abusive practices like those advocated in To Train Up a Child. Put a banner on your blog. Post to your Facebook page. Speak up in your church. Sign the petition asking Amazon.com to stop selling these books. Give better books and resources to new parents you know.

Children need love, safety and guidance. The best way to raise good children is to be good to them. Let's do all we can to protect all children from anybody who says otherwise.

Want to stay in the loop? Be sure to subscribe to my column to be updated when I post articles. You can also find me on Pinterest and on examiner.com on the topics of homeschooling, green living and my national attachment parenting column.

Want to learn a gentler way to deal with discipline issues? To see some of my advice on issues such as children talking back, hitting, drawing on walls, toothbrushing battles and fighting with siblings, see my Attachment Parenting archives here.

Omnivore - This Is What Happiness Looks Like

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog at the end of February, here is a jolly collection of links on the topics of happiness, work, freedom, pleasure, and contentment.

This is what happiness looks like

Feb 25 2014  

9:00AM

• Anne Brunon-Ernst (Pantheon-Assas): Jeremy Bentham's Definition of Happiness. 
• Valentine Ibeka (Copenhagen): Should Public Pursuance of Happiness Be Discredited? 
• Roisin Timmins (Edinburgh): Fear of Crime, Fear of Control: How Structuring Freedoms Can Increase Happiness. 
• Yvan I. Russell (Gottingen) and Steve Phelps (Essex): How Do You Measure Pleasure? A Discussion About Intrinsic Costs and Benefits in Primate Allogrooming. 
• Viviana Ramirez (Bath): Ranking by Happiness: A New World Order? (2011). 
• Finn Janning (TBS): The Happiness of Burnout. 
• Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning; how do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one? Roy F. Baumeister wants to know. 
• Why is a dedication to work, no matter how physically destructive and ultimately pointless, considered a virtue? Jenny Diski urges you to down tools while you can. 
• Happiness finds its way to print: Samir Husni interviews with Live Happy magazine editor in chief Karol DeWulf Nickell. 
• Tim Adams interviews Robert Skidelsky: “Why don't more people aspire to living a good life?” 
• This is what happiness looks like: It's possible to isolate what sustained contentment is — and it's more attainable than you might think. 
• I know what will cheer you up: Emotion-detecting advertising is coming — beware. 
• Can putting your child before yourself make you a happier person? 
• Kameron St.Clare on happiness as resistance: Moral obligations of the oppressed. 
• Research suggests a happy life may not be a meaningful life: Tasks that seem mundane, or even difficult, can bring a sense of meaning over time. 
• Noise makes people unhappy, cancer may not. 
• Want a happier life? Act your age.

Self-Trolling Is Symptomatic of Dissociative Experience

As I read this article, I was continually reminded of trauma survivors, especially those with developmental trauma, and the parts of them who criticize, ridicule, shame, and essentially hate them. These parts once served a role - they exposed every possible flaw and weakness before it could be seen by others and possibly be targeted by others.

The thinking is this: If I can shame myself for my weight before anyone else does, it won't hurt so bad when someone else does it; or this: If I am aware of every flaw I have then I will work extra hard not to let anyone else see them, which would make me the target of shaming and ridicule.

These are examples of the inner critic, a very common and difficult part in many of us, but in trauma survivors that part can be brutal and debilitating.

No healthy person would ever even think of doing this ("self-trolling") - but a trauma survivor with an inner critic that is partially or wholly dissociated sure would. The internet provides a public venue for what has traditionally happened in private. I have seen people with Dissociative Identity Disorder carve insults into their flesh with razors - now they can make the self-shaming even more obvious (and potentially deadly) through "self-trolling."

Hidden hatred: What makes people assassinate their own character online, sometimes driving themselves to suicide?

Phillip Hodson examines a form of self-harming for the internet age

Philip Hodson
Thursday 20 February 2014

Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website? And then complain that they are the victims of bullying? Could it be a form of research? Self-hatred? Or a perverse effort to find love? If this self-abuse is the "answer", then what on earth's the question?

We can't ask 14-year-old Hannah Smith because it may have been precisely this exercise that killed her. During a pre-inquest review into her death last week, it emerged that there was no evidence she was the victim of trolling, with her father revealing that police believe she sent the anonymous messages to herself. If true, Hannah killed herself last August in the ultimate act of self-criticism.

And then there was 24-year-old Michelle Chapman repeatedly posting self-slanders – of a "very unpleasant sexual nature" – from false Facebook accounts in the name of her father and step-mother before having them both arrested. After a legal investigation, Michelle found herself in jail for 20 months.

What is the profit in pretending that people hate you when they don't? In the Chapman case, it was possibly some sort of response to a family fracture but these don't usually involve assassinating your own character as a means of redress. Statistics are scant help. One research study from the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Centre found that 9 per cent of 617 students might be tempted to bully themselves online falsely. When asked about potential motives, they came up with "cries for help", "gaining adult attention" or "forcing peers to support them".

Read more: Woman is jailed for 'trolling herself'

In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving. There are possible parallels with Münchausen's syndrome where patients typically fake illness to gain care. Even Hilaire Belloc's poem "Matilda" (who "told such dreadful lies it made one gasp") may be relevant because the child crying wolf – rather than asking for what is wanted – seems to be an underlying mechanism.

So in the absence of data or definitions, what to make of it? As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.

Michelle Chapman was sentenced to 20 months in prison for setting up fake Facebook profiles to send herself offensive messages

It's no help that the inner world of emotionally damaged children already contains its own bully. Starve children of enough affection and stability and they're too terrified to decide that the world is mad; instead, they invent a fantasy of themselves as evil. I think it's quite a simple step to graduate from such a mindset to active self-trolling. Better to self-blame aloud in four-letter tirades than conclude that nobody cares. Bad attention is always better than none.

And yet despite feeling hopeless, the child is also angry enough to act. Self-trolling differs from self-harming by being more exhibitionistic than secret. All of us when disappointed in love tend to seek power as an alternative. The self-troller is masochistically gratified up to the moment their self-abuse causes social disaster.

Is this type of behaviour new? No. Every town in history has probably contained someone who sent a poison-pen letter to themselves and basked in the resultant outrage. But it is probably no help that ours is an era of digital delusion. First, with a computer you can transmit much bigger messages. Second, we already suffer from the misconception that happiness is a Twitter following. Think @MsSallyBercow (5,508 followers) over her various tweeting mishaps. The result is that we are slow to perceive that the internet is both illusory and lethal.

This subject of cyber self-harm matters because children die. We need to remember that when young people say one thing it may often mean the opposite.

Phillip Hodson is from the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (psychotherapy.org.uk). His views are personal.

The Science of Lucid Dreaming - Big Think

Interesting . . . .

The Science of Lucid Dreaming

by Big Think Editors
March 3, 2014

Think you don't dream? Everyone has 3 to 7 dreams a night on average. Lucid dreaming means that you can control your dreams--with a little practice. AsapSCIENCE provides a helpful overview on the research into lucid dreaming and how you can turn your nightmares into a choose-your-own-adventure film.


Image credit: 2493/Flickr

Exchanges: Ideas and Argument - BBC - 6 Episodes

A.C. Grayling is the author of about 30 books on philosophy, including  The Meaning of Things (2001), Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness (2007), The Good Book: A Humanist Bible (2011), Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century (2012), and The God Argument (2013).

He is a director and contributor at Prospect Magazine. His main academic interests lie in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophical logic. He has described himself as "a man of the left" and is associated in Britain with the new atheism movement, and is sometimes described as the 'Fifth Horseman of New Atheism'. He frequently appears in the British media discussing philosophy, as in this series from BBC World Service.

In these six episodes, Grayling speaks with Kay Redfield Jamison, Iain Couzin, Henry Markram, Bonnie Bassler, Daniel Cohen, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Exchanges - Ideas and Argument

The world's leading figures in science, economics, politics and architecture join an audience to discuss their ideas.

Recent episodes

• Exchanges at the Frontier: 01 Mar 14 - Kay Redfield Jamison

  Sat, 1 Mar 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  The Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison is a world leading specialist in bipolar disorder, and suffers from the condition herself. She shares her unique perspective with A.C.Grayling and an audience at Wellcome Collection, London.
  
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• Exchanges at the Frontier: 22 Feb 14 - Iain Couzin

  Sat, 22 Feb 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  Why do locusts swarm? How do ants manage their traffic flow so much better than humans? Iain Couzin talks to Matthew Sweet about what we can learn from collective animal behaviour.
  
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• Exchanges at the Frontier: 15 Feb 14 - Henry Markram

  Sat, 15 Feb 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  Henry Markram has received the biggest personal grant in the history of science. He has a billion euros to build a super computer which will replicate the human brain. He tells A.C.Grayling and an audience at Wellcome Collection how the virtual brain will reveal revolutionise the treatment of mental disorders.
  
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• Exchanges at the Frontier: 08 Feb 14 - Bonnie Bassler

  Fri, 7 Feb 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  Bonnie Bassler is the world specialist in how bacteria communicate within the human body. She explains to A.C.Grayling and pupils at Haverstock School, that this process holds the key to solving the problem of failing antibiotics.
  
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• Exchanges: The Global Economy 18 Jan 14: Daniel Cohen

  Sat, 18 Jan 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  Why doesn’t money make us happy? French economist Daniel Cohen explores the paradox of why growing economies do not lead to growing satisfaction with life. He tells Justin Rowlatt, and an audience at Paris Dauphine University that economics focusses us on competition while it’s cooperation and free-giving that makes us happy.
  
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• Exchanges: The Global Economy 11 Jan 14: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Sat, 11 Jan 14
  Duration: 50 mins
  He has been described as a ‘super hero of the mind’ and ‘the hottest thinker in the world; the one-time business trader and full-time philosopher of randomness Nassim Nicholas Taleb joins Justin Rowlatt and an audience at the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris for a special event staged in partnership with Paris Dauphine University.
  
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The Mind Report - Philosopher Joshua Knobe Speaks with Michael Norton (Harvard Business School)

Cool discussion between philosopher Joshua Knobe and Michael Norton, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. Norton is the co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn) of Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending (2013).

The Mind Report

The Mind Report | Mar 2, 2014 | Joshua Knobe & Michael Norton


Joshua Knobe (Yale University) and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School)

Americans have no idea how unequal America is 6:35 Psychological effects of income inequality 4:48 The embarrassment of riches 4:00 When economic growth leads to less happiness 4:51 What to buy to make you happy (hint: it’s not stuff) 8:45 The “warm glow” of giving money away 6:13
Play entire video
Recorded: Feb 25 |  Posted: Mar 2, 2014
Download: wmv | mp4 | mp3 | fast mp3

Links Mentioned

• Michael’s paper, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time” (PDF)
• Michael’s book, with Elizabeth Dunn, “Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending”

Rick Hanson - The Mind, the Brain, and God

In a great three-part series from his blog, Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (2013), Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time (2011), and Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (2009), among other works, offers a clear and concise argument for why the debate about god's existence or non-existence is never going to be solved by neuroscience.

Hanson says:

I am not asserting that there is or is not God; nor am I asserting that, if God exists, he/she/it/none-of-the-above plays a role in mind, consciousness, or morality. I am asserting that attempts to draw inferences from neuropsychology about God’s existence or role in human affairs are usually a waste of time.

I could not be more in agreement.

More importantly, at least in my opinion, he also asserts the importance of a top-down model of mind and consciousness. Much of contemporary neuroscience works in a bottom-up model, which makes it much easier to dismiss consciousness as a by-product of brain activity (essentially discarding agency and free will).

A top-down model, which is also advocated for by Dr. Daniel Siegel, recognizes that the mind changes the brain:

[W]hen your mind changes, your brain changes. Temporary changes include the activation of different neural circuits or regions when you have different kinds of thoughts, feelings, moods, attention, or even sense of self. For example, the anterior (frontal) cingulate cortex gets relatively busy (thus consuming more oxygen) when people meditate; the caudate nucleus in the reward centers of the brain lights up when college students see a photo of their sweetheart; and stressful experiences trigger flows of cortisol into the brain, sensitizing the amygdala (the brain’s alarm bell). 

And this . . .

As Dan Siegel puts it, the mind uses the brain to make the mind. In a basic sense, it would be just as accurate to say that “the brain is just the mind writ in neural tissues.”

These are great posts and definitely worth your time to read.

RICK HANSON, Ph.D.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and New York Times best-selling author. His books include Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha's Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, and on the Advisory Board of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide. He has several audio programs and his free Just One Thing newsletter has over 100,000 subscribers.

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The Mind, the Brain, and God – Part I

posted on: February 7th, 2014

With all the research on mind/brain connections these days – Your brain in lust or love! While gambling or feeling envious! While meditating, praying, or having an out-of-body experience! – it’s natural to wonder about Big Questions about the relationships among the mind, the brain, and God.For instance, some people have taken the findings that some spiritual experiences have neural correlates to mean that the hand of God is at work in the brain. Others have interpreted the same research to mean that spiritual experiences are “just” neural, and thus evidence against the existence of God or other supernatural forces. These debates are updated versions of longstanding philosophical and religious wrestlings with how God and nature might or might not intertwine.What’s your own gut view, right now, as a kind of snapshot: Do you think that God is involved in some way in your thoughts and feelings? In your most intimate sense of being?In this essay, we’ll explore what mind, brain, and God could be, how they might interact, and what studies on the neuropsychology of spiritual experiences can – and cannot – tell us.

What the Words Mean

The more profound the subject, the murkier the discussion. There’s a lot of fog and illogic in books, articles, and blogs about the potential relationships among the mind, the brain, and God. In this territory, it’s particularly important to be clear about key terms – like mind, brain, and God.

So – by mind, I mean the information represented by the nervous system (which has its headquarters in the brain – the three pounds of tofu – like tissue between the ears). This information includes incoming signals about the oxygen saturation in the blood and outgoing instructions to the lungs to take a bigger breath, motor sequences for brushing one’s teeth, tendencies toward anxiety, memories of childhood, knowing how to make pancakes, and the feeling of open spacious mindfulness. Most of mind is outside the field of awareness either temporarily or permanently. Conscious experience – sensations, emotions, wants, images, inner language, etc. – is just the tip of the iceberg of mental activity. The nervous system holds information much like a computer hard drive holds the information in a document, song, or picture. Hardware represents software.

Immaterial information is categorically distinct from its material substrate. For example, often the same information (such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony) can be represented by a variety of suitable material substrates (e.g., sound waves, music score, CD, iPod). Therefore, at one level of analysis, Descartian dualism is correct: information and matter, mind and body, are two different things. Nonetheless – as we will see – at another, higher level of analysis, it is clear that the mind and the nervous system arise interdependently, shaping each other, as one integrated process. (And perhaps at a lower level of analysis – that of quantum phenomena – information and materiality are inextricably woven together; but I’m not going there in this essay!)

Mind, as I define it here, occurs in any creature with a nervous system. Humans have a mind – and so do monkeys, squirrels, lizards, worms, and dust mites. More complex nervous systems can produce more complex minds. But just as there is a spectrum of complexity of the nervous system, from the simplest jellyfish 600 million years ago to a modern human, there is a similar spectrum of complexity in the mind. Or to put it bluntly, there is no categorical distinction between the mind of a millipede and a mathematician. The difference is one of degree, not kind. (And how many mathematicians – or anyone, for that matter – could move dozens of limbs together in undulating harmony?)

By God, I mean a transcendental Something (being, force, ground, mystery, question mark) that is outside the frame of materiality; materiality includes matter and energy since E=mc2, plus dark matter/energy, plus other wild stuff that scientists will discover in the future. God is generally described in two major ways: as an omniscient and omnipotent being “who knows when a sparrow falls,” or as a kind of Ground from and as which everything arises – with many variations on these two view, plus syntheses and divergences.

By definition, while God may intersect or interact with the material universe, it is in some sense other than that universe – otherwise we don’t need another word than “universe.” For example, if someone says that God is the same thing as nature, that begs the question of whether God exists, distinct from nature.

The Interdependent Mind and Brain

Let’s review three facts about the mind and the brain.

First, when your brain changes, your mind changes. Everyday examples include the effects of caffeine, antidepressants, lack of sleep, and having a cold. More extreme examples: concussion, stroke, brain damage, and dementia.

Without a brain, you can’t have a mind. The brain is a necessary condition for the mind. And apart from the hypothetical influence of God – which we’ll be discussing further on – the brain is a sufficient condition for the mind. Or more exactly, a proximally sufficient condition for the mind, since the brain intertwines with the nervous system and other bodily systems, which in turn intertwine with nature, both here and now, and over evolutionary time; and as you’ll see in the next paragraph, the brain also depends on the mind.

Second, when your mind changes, your brain changes. Temporary changes include the activation of different neural circuits or regions when you have different kinds of thoughts, feelings, moods, attention, or even sense of self. For example, the anterior (frontal) cingulate cortex gets relatively busy (thus consuming more oxygen) when people meditate; the caudate nucleus in the reward centers of the brain lights up when college students see a photo of their sweetheart; and stressful experiences trigger flows of cortisol into the brain, sensitizing the amygdala (the brain’s alarm bell).

Mental activity also sculpts neural structure, so changes in your mind can lead to lasting changes in your brain. This is learning and memory (as well as lots of other alterations in neural structure below the waterline of conscious awareness): in other words, neuroplasticity, most of which is humdrum, like remembering what you had for breakfast, or getting more skillful at chopsticks with practice.

Examples of neuroplasticity include:

• Meditators have a thicker anterior cingulate cortex and insula (a part of the brain that tracks the internal state of the body); a thicker cortex means more synapses, capillaries (bringing blood), and support cells.
• Cab drivers have a thicker hippocampus (which is central to visual spatial memory) at the end of their training, memorizing the spaghetti snarl of streets in London.
• Pianists have thicker motor cortices in the areas responsible for fine finger movements.

Within science, it has been long presumed that mental activity changed neural structure – how else in the world could any animal, including humans, learn anything? – so the idea of neuroplasticity is not news (though it’s often erroneously described as a breakthrough). What is news is the emerging detail in our understanding of the mechanisms of neuroplasticity, which include increasing blood flow to busy neurons, altering gene expression (epigenetics), strengthening existing synapses (the connections between neurons), and building new ones. This growing understanding creates opportunities for self-directed neuroplasticity, for using the mind in targeted ways to change the brain to change the mind for the better. Some of these ways are dramatic, such as stroke victims drawing on undamaged parts of the brain to regain function. But most of them are the stuff of everyday life, such as building up the neural substrate of well – controlled attention through meditative practice. Or deliberately savoring positive experiences several times a day to increase their storage in implicit memory, thus defeating the brain’s innate negativity bias, which makes it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. (You can learn more about self-directed neuroplasticity in Buddha’s Brain.) Third, the mind and brain co-arise interdependently. The brain makes the mind while the mind makes the brain while the brain makes the mind . . . They are thus properly understood as one unified system.

Stay tuned for parts II and III in this series where we’ll discuss the proofs and disproofs for God, the co-dependance of the mind and the brain, and neuropsychology’s role in understanding the existence of God.

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The Mind, the Brain and God – Part II

posted on: February 10th, 2014



In the last blog post we discussed the meaning of the words mind, brain and God and saw how the mind and the brain are interdependent.

In this segment we’ll go into the popular arguments for and against God and further into the link between the mind and the brain.

Proofs and Disproofs

Lately, numerous authors have tried to rebut beliefs in God (e.g., The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins), while others have tried to rebut the rebuttals (e.g., Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case against God). The intensity of these debates is often startling; people commonly talk past each other, arguing at different levels; and the “evidence” marshaled for one view or another is often hollow. (A delightful exception is the dialogue between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris.)

For example, it’s an error to conflate religion and God. Whether religions are wonderful or horrible or both is not evidence for or against the existence of God. Critiques of religion (e.g., the Crusades, fundamentalism) are not disproofs of God. It’s also an error to think that biological evolution is evidence for the nonexistence of God. Just because a creation story developed thousands of years ago turns out to be inaccurate does not mean that God does not exist. Evolution does not need to be attacked in order to have faith in God.

Then there are so-called proofs of the existence of God within the material universe (e.g., burning bushes, miracles, visions, psychic phenomena). But that “evidence” must be experienced via the brain and mind. Therefore, in principle, that experience could simply be produced by the mind/brain alone, without divine intervention. (You could assert that God is known by some transcendental faculty outside of materiality, but then you’d still have to explain how the knowing achieved by that transcendental faculty is communicated to the material brain, so you are back to the original problem, that the ordinary brain could be making up information purportedly derived from a transcendental source.) So you can’t prove the existence of the transcendental through material evidence.

On the other hand, since any God by definition extends beyond the frame of materiality, nothing in the material universe can disprove its existence. You could endlessly rebut apparent evidence for the existence of God, but those rebuttals can not in themselves demonstrate that God is a fiction. At most, they can only eliminate a piece of apparent evidence, but in terms of ultimate conclusions, so what? As scientists say, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Further, a God outside the frame of materiality (particularly a playful one) could amuse herself by fostering rebuttals of seeming evidence for her existence in order to bug some people and test the faith of others: who knows? Most anything could be possible for a transcendental being, ground, something-or-other.

Bottom-line: You can’t prove or disprove the existence of God. So the fundamentally scientific attitude is to acknowledge the possibility of God, and then move on to working within the frame of science, which is plenty fertile as is, without resorting to God.

Let’s explore an illustration of how these issues often play out in the media.

Is the Mind “Just” the Brain?

Recently a friend sent me an article on the National Public Radio (NPR) website, titled “Study Narrows Gap between Mind and Brain,” about some new research. The investigators had found that suppressing neural activity in a part of the brain (on the right side, near where the temporal and parietal lobes come together) changed the way that subjects made moral judgments: they became less able to take the intentions of others into account.

The study itself is interesting, and takes its place in a growing body of research on the neuropsychology of moral reasoning and behavior. But the article about it on the NPR site contains comments from a scholar from a leading university that are worth examining. He is initially quoted as saying: “Moral judgment is just a brain process.” Hmm. What does the “just” mean? He could have said something like, “Moral judgment involves processes in the brain,” but instead he seemed to assert that the psychological subtleties of ethics, altruism, hypocrisy, and integrity, are just epiphenomena of the brain. Whether this is exactly what he meant or not, let’s consider this idea in its own right: that our thoughts and feelings, longings and fears, and subtle moral or spiritual intimations are “just” the movements of the meat, to put it bluntly,between the ears. This is a common notion these days, but there are numerous problems with it.

First, neural processes certainly do underlie mental processes. For example, as the study showed, normal right temporal-parietal function underlies reflections about the intentions of others in moral reasoning. But those neural activities are in the service of mental ones. That’s their point. We evolved neural structures and processes in order to further psychological adaptations that conferred reproductive advantages, which is the engine of biological evolution. Mind is not an epiphenomenon of brain: mind is the function of the brain, its reason for existence.

Second, mental processes pattern neural structure. Morality-related information – in other words, mental activity – has shaped the brain of each person since early childhood. As Dan Siegel puts it, the mind uses the brain to make the mind. In a basic sense, it would be just as accurate to say that “the brain is just the mind writ in neural tissues.”

Third, the neural substrates of conscious mental activity are continually changing in their physical details (e.g., neurons involved in a substrate, connections among them, and neurochemical flows). This means that the thought “2 + 2 = 4” on Monday maps to a different neural substrate than it does on Tuesday; in fact, that math fact would have a different substrate if you re-thought it only a few seconds later on Monday! Similarly, reflections on the Golden Rule on Monday will have a different neural substrate than on Tuesday. Consequently, it is the meaning of the thought that is fundamental, not its neural substrate. Taking this a step further, the ideas that two and two are four, or that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, can be represented in many sorts of physical substrates, including marks on a page, patterns of sound waves, and magnetic charges on a computer hard drive. Here, too, it is the information, the meaning, that is the key matter, and the physical substrate, whether brain or something else, recedes in significance.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, the mind and the brain co-dependently arise. It’s kind of silly to make one causally senior to the other. Psychology shapes neurology shapes psychology shapes neurology, and so on. These two are distinct – immaterial information is not material neural tissues – but they are also interdependent and cannot be understood apart from each other. There is indeed a dualism between mind and matter, but they also form one coherent system. When people try to de-link mind and brain, and then argue that one rather than the other is primary – The mind is really just the brain at work! or The brain is really just the mind at work! – there is usually some sort of agenda going on: typically either an attempt to argue a strongly materialist, even atheist view, or to argue a fundamentalist spiritual view. But arguments about the primacy of either mind or brain are just not productive: all they produce is smoke and heat, but no light.

In the last part of this series we’ll discuss neural correlates and morality and summarize this discussion.

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The Mind, the Brain, and God – Part III

posted on: February 13th, 2014



In Part I and Part II of this blog series, we discussed the meaning of the words: mind; brain and God, and looked at the interdependence between the mind and the brain.

In this last part of the discussion we’ll examine the neural correlates and morality and summarize the discussion.

Do Neural Correlates Mean There’s No Soul?

The last sentence in the article on the NPR site really caught my eye: “If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, [the scholar said], it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.”

First, to repeat the point made in the previous blog post, it’s simplistic to claim that morality has a “mechanical explanation”– in other words, that morality boils down to “just” the operations of the material (= mechanical) brain – simply because there are neural correlates to moral experience and action.

Second, to the heart of the matter, the closing sentence refers to the view, held by different religions and philosophies, that the fundamental source of morality – and by extension, human goodness, compassion, altruism, kindness, etc. – is transcendental, such as a proposed soul, divine spark, or Mind of God. In the culture wars of the last few decades, studies on the neural substrates of the loftier realms of experience and behavior (including the one discussed here, on moral judgment) have been taken as evidence by some that we don’t need transcendental factors to account for those aspects of a human life – and by extension, that such transcendental factors do not exist: in other words, that “people do not have or need a soul.” Let’s try to unpack this.

Human psychology alone – without reference to transcendental factors – can fully account for morality, or it cannot. (And as we’ve seen, that psychology is inextricably intertwined with our neurology.) Separately, either there are transcendental factors or there are not. If we do not make the assumption that morality is based on God, then evidence that morality requires only a mind and brain is not evidence against the existence of God.

You see a similar fallacy in the cultural conflicts over the implications of biological evolution. If one believes that “God created Man,” then evidence that modern humans gradually evolved from hominid and primate ancestors sounds like an argument against the existence or importance of God. Those who think that evolution would somehow eliminate God consider evidence for it to be a kind of blasphemy, so some school boards have tried to slip creationism into science textbooks.

Yes, the evolutionary account of life on this planet does undermine the story of God the Creator in the book of Genesis, but that’s just one portrayal of the nature of God. Setting aside that particular portrayal leaves plenty of other ways that God could work in the world. Evidence that God did not create Man is not evidence that there is no God: in principle, God could exist and not have created Man. In other words, a reasonable person could believe both that evolution has unfolded without being guided by the hand of God and that God exists – and similarly believe that morality does not require God and that God exists. It is a category error, and a deeply unscientific one, to think that evidence for the neuropsychological substrates of morality is evidence against a soul (or against other transcendental factors).

In this light, one does not need to resist evidence for evolution, or for the neuropsychology of morality or spiritual experiences. This point has significant social implications, because the resistance to scientific findings out of a fear that they somehow challenge faith has dramatically lowered scientific literacy in America. For example, in the 2008, biannual survey by the National Science Board of scientific understanding, only 45% of respondents agreed that, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” Th is percentage is much lower than in Japan (78%) , Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). Similarly, only 33% of those surveyed agreed that, “The universe began with a big explosion.”

Summing Up

To be clear: I am not asserting that there is or is not God; nor am I asserting that, if God exists, he/she/it/none-of-the-above plays a role in mind, consciousness, or morality. I am asserting that attempts to draw inferences from neuropsychology about God’s existence or role in human affairs are usually a waste of time. At most such inferences can refute a particular theory about God’s role in life – such as God is necessary for human morality, or for the existence of our species altogether. But that leaves all sorts of other theories about God that are not yet disproved – as well as the fundamental matter that God is by definition categorically outside the realm of proofs or disproofs within the material universe.

God may or may not exist. You have to find your own beliefs in that regard – and brain science will not help you.

Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens - Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies (Mother Jones)

Another article from Gary Taubes on the poison that is sugar - this time from Mother Jones and co-written with Cristin Kearns Couzens.

Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies

How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?

—By Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens 
November/December 2012 Issue


Illustration: Chris Buzelli

ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.

Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years."

The story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by "opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public." Over the subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New York Times in 1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. So effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus exists about sugar's potential dangers. The industry's PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled. (The chart below uses sugar "availability" numbers rather than the USDA's speculative new consumption figures.)


Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy. They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar's health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.

This decades-long effort to stack the scientific deck is why, today, the USDA's dietary guidelines only speak of sugar in vague generalities. ("Reduce the intake of calories from solid fats and added sugars.") It's why the FDA insists that sugar is "generally recognized as safe" despite considerable evidence suggesting otherwise. It's why some scientists' urgent calls for regulation of sugary products have been dead on arrival, and it's why—absent any federal leadership—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt compelled to propose a ban on oversized sugary drinks that passed in September.

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that sugar and its nearly chemically identical cousin, HFCS, may very well cause diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, and that these chronic conditions would be far less prevalent if we significantly dialed back our consumption of added sugars. Robert Lustig, a leading authority on pediatric obesity at the University of California-San Francisco (whose arguments Gary explored in a 2011 New York Times Magazine cover story), made this case last February in the prestigious journal Nature. In an article titled "The Toxic Truth About Sugar," Lustig and two colleagues observed that sucrose and HFCS are addictive in much the same way as cigarettes and alcohol, and that overconsumption of them is driving worldwide epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes (the type associated with obesity). Sugar-related diseases are costing America around $150 billion a year, the authors estimated, so federal health officials need to step up and consider regulating the stuff.

The Sugar Association dusted off what has become its stock response: The Lustig paper, it said, "lacks the scientific evidence or consensus" to support its claims, and its authors were irresponsible not to point out that the full body of science "is inconclusive at best." This inconclusiveness, of course, is precisely what the Sugar Association has worked so assiduously to maintain. "In confronting our critics," Tatem explained to his board of directors back in 1976, "we try never to lose sight of the fact that no confirmed scientific evidence links sugar to the death-dealing diseases. This crucial point is the lifeblood of the association."

THE SUGAR ASSOCIATIONS's earliest incarnation dates back to 1943, when growers and refiners created the Sugar Research Foundation to counter World War II sugar-rationing propaganda—"How Much Sugar Do You Need? None!" declared one government pamphlet. In 1947, producers rechristened their group the Sugar Association and launched a new PR division, Sugar Information Inc., which before long was touting sugar as a "sensible new approach to weight control." In 1968, in the hope of enlisting foreign sugar companies to help defray costs, the Sugar Association spun off its research division as the International Sugar Research Foundation. "Misconceptions concerning the causes of tooth decay, diabetes, and heart problems exist on a worldwide basis," explained a 1969 ISRF recruiting brochure.

As early as 1962, internal Sugar Association memos had acknowledged the potential links between sugar and chronic diseases, but at the time sugar executives had a more pressing problem: Weight-conscious Americans were switching in droves to diet sodas—particularly Diet Rite and Tab—sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin. From 1963 through 1968, diet soda's share of the soft-drink market shot from 4 percent to 15 percent. "A dollar's worth of sugar," ISRF vice president and research director John Hickson warned in an internal review, "could be replaced with a dime's worth" of sugar alternatives. "If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10," Hickson told the New York Times in 1969, "you'd better find some brickbat you can throw at him."

By then, the sugar industry had doled out more than $600,000 (about $4 million today) to study every conceivable harmful effect of cyclamate sweeteners, which are still sold around the world under names like Sugar Twin and Sucaryl. In 1969, the FDA banned cyclamates in the United States based on a study suggesting they could cause bladder cancer in rats. Not long after, Hickson left the ISRF to work for the Cigar Research Council. He was described in a confidential tobacco industry memo as a "supreme scientific politician who had been successful in condemning cyclamates, on behalf of the [sugar industry], on somewhat shaky evidence." It later emerged that the evidence suggesting that cyclamates caused cancer in rodents was not relevant to humans, but by then the case was officially closed. In 1977, saccharin, too, was nearly banned on the basis of animal results that would turn out to be meaningless in people.

Meanwhile, researchers had been reporting that blood lipids—cholesterol and triglycerides in particular—were a risk factor in heart disease. Some people had high cholesterol but normal triglycerides, prompting health experts to recommend that they avoid animal fats. Other people were deemed "carbohydrate sensitive," with normal cholesterol but markedly increased triglyceride levels. In these individuals, even moderate sugar consumption could cause a spike in triglycerides. John Yudkin, the United Kingdom's leading nutritionist, was making headlines with claims that sugar, not fat, was the primary cause of heart disease.

In 1967, the Sugar Association's research division began considering "the rising tide of implications of sucrose in atherosclerosis." Before long, according to a confidential 1970 review of industry-funded studies, the newly formed ISRF was spending 10 percent of its research budget on the link between diet and heart disease. Hickson, the ISRF's vice president, urged his member corporations to keep the results of the review under wraps. Of particular concern was the work of a University of Pennsylvania researcher on "sucrose sensitivity," which sugar executives feared was "likely to reveal evidence of harmful effects." One ISRF consultant recommended that sugar companies get to the truth of the matter by sponsoring a full-on study. In what would become a pattern, the ISRF opted not to follow his advice. Another ISRF-sponsored study, by biochemist Walter Pover of the University of Birmingham, in England, had uncovered a possible mechanism to explain how sugar raises triglyceride levels. Pover believed he was on the verge of demonstrating this mechanism "conclusively" and that 18 more weeks of work would nail it down. But instead of providing the funds, the ISRF nixed the project, assessing its value as "nil."

The industry followed a similar strategy when it came to diabetes. By 1973, links between sugar, diabetes, and heart disease were sufficiently troubling that Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota convened a hearing of his Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to address the issue. An international panel of experts—including Yudkin and Walter Mertz, head of the Human Nutrition Institute at the Department of Agriculture—testified that variations in sugar consumption were the best explanation for the differences in diabetes rates between populations, and that research by the USDA and others supported the notion that eating too much sugar promotes dramatic population-wide increases in the disease. One panelist, South African diabetes specialist George Campbell, suggested that anything more than 70 pounds per person per year—about half of what is sold in America today—would spark epidemics.

In the face of such hostile news from independent scientists, the ISRF hosted its own conference the following March, focusing exclusively on the work of researchers who were skeptical of a sugar/diabetes connection. "All those present agreed that a large amount of research is still necessary before a firm conclusion can be arrived at," according to a conference review published in a prominent diabetes journal. In 1975, the foundation reconvened in Montreal to discuss research priorities with its consulting scientists. Sales were sinking, Tatem reminded the gathered sugar execs, and a major factor was "the impact of consumer advocates who link sugar consumption with certain diseases."

Following the Montreal conference, the ISRF disseminated a memo quoting Errol Marliss, a University of Toronto diabetes specialist, recommending that the industry pursue "well-designed research programs" to establish sugar's role in the course of diabetes and other diseases. "Such research programs might produce an answer that sucrose is bad in certain individuals," he warned. But the studies "should be undertaken in a sufficiently comprehensive way as to produce results. A gesture rather than full support is unlikely to produce the sought-after answers."

A gesture, however, is what the industry would offer. Rather than approve a serious investigation of the purported links between sucrose and disease, American sugar companies quit supporting the ISRF's research projects. Instead, via the Sugar Association proper, they would spend roughly $655,000 between 1975 and 1980 on 17 studies designed, as internal documents put it, "to maintain research as a main prop of the industry's defense." Each proposal was vetted by a panel of industry-friendly scientists and a second committee staffed by representatives from sugar companies and "contributing research members" such as Coca-Cola, Hershey's, General Mills, and Nabisco. Most of the cash was awarded to researchers whose studies seemed explicitly designed to exonerate sugar. One even proposed to explore whether sugar could be shown to boost serotonin levels in rats' brains, and thus "prove of therapeutic value, as in the relief of depression," an internal document noted.

At best, the studies seemed a token effort. Harvard Medical School professor Ron Arky, for example, received money from the Sugar Association to determine whether sucrose has a different effect on blood sugar and other diabetes indicators if eaten alongside complex carbohydrates like pectin and psyllium. The project went nowhere, Arky told us recently. But the Sugar Association "didn't care."


In short, rather than do definitive research to learn the truth about its product, good or bad, the association stuck to a PR scheme designed to "establish with the broadest possible audience—virtually everyone is a consumer—the safety of sugar as a food." One of its first acts was to establish a Food & Nutrition Advisory Council consisting of a half-dozen physicians and two dentists willing to defend sugar's place in a healthy diet, and set aside roughly $60,000 per year (more than $220,000 today) to cover its cost.

Working to the industry's recruiting advantage was the rising notion that cholesterol and dietary fat—especially saturated fat—were the likely causes of heart disease. (Tatem even suggested, in a letter to the Times Magazine, that some "sugar critics" were motivated merely by wanting "to keep the heat off saturated fats.") This was the brainchild of nutritionist Ancel Keys, whose University of Minnesota laboratory had received financial support from the sugar industry as early as 1944. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Keys remained the most outspoken proponent of the fat hypothesis, often clashing publicly with Yudkin, the most vocal supporter of the sugar hypothesis—the two men "shared a good deal of loathing," recalled one of Yudkin's colleagues.

So when the Sugar Association needed a heart disease expert for its Food & Nutrition Advisory Council, it approached Francisco Grande, one of Keys' closest colleagues. Another panelist was University of Oregon nutritionist William Connor, the leading purveyor of the notion that it is dietary cholesterol that causes heart disease. As its top diabetes expert, the industry recruited Edwin Bierman of the University of Washington, who believed that diabetics need not pay strict attention to their sugar intake so long as they maintained a healthy weight by burning off the calories they consumed. Bierman also professed an apparently unconditional faith that it was dietary fat (and being fat) that caused heart disease, with sugar having no meaningful effect.

It is hard to overestimate Bierman's role in shifting the diabetes conversation away from sugar. It was primarily Bierman who convinced the American Diabetes Association to liberalize the amount of carbohydrates (including sugar) it recommended in the diets of diabetics, and focus more on urging diabetics to lower their fat intake, since diabetics are particularly likely to die from heart disease. Bierman also presented industry-funded studies when he coauthored a section on potential causes for a National Commission on Diabetes report in 1976; the document influences the federal diabetes research agenda to this day. Some researchers, he acknowledged, had "argued eloquently" that consumption of refined carbohydrates (such as sugar) is a precipitating factor in diabetes. But then Bierman cited five studies—two of them bankrolled by the ISRF—that were "inconsistent" with that hypothesis. "A review of all available laboratory and epidemiologic evidence," he concluded, "suggests that the most important dietary factor in increasing the risk of diabetes is total calorie intake, irrespective of source."

The point man on the industry's food and nutrition panel was Frederick Stare, founder and chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Stare and his department had a long history of ties to Big Sugar. An ISRF internal research review credited the sugar industry with funding some 30 papers in his department from 1952 through 1956 alone. In 1960, the department broke ground on a new $5 million building funded largely by private donations, including a $1 million gift from General Foods, the maker of Kool-Aid and Tang.

By the early 1970s, Stare ranked among the industry's most reliable advocates, testifying in Congress about the wholesomeness of sugar even as his department kept raking in funding from sugar producers and food and beverage giants such as Carnation, Coca-Cola, Gerber, Kellogg, and Oscar Mayer. His name also appears in tobacco documents, which show that he procured industry funding for a study aimed at exonerating cigarettes as a cause of heart disease.

The first act of the Food & Nutrition Advisory Council was to compile "Sugar in the Diet of Man," an 88-page white paper edited by Stare and published in 1975 to "organize existing scientific facts concerning sugar." It was a compilation of historical evidence and arguments that sugar companies could use to counter the claims of Yudkin, Stare's Harvard colleague Jean Mayer, and other researchers whom Tatem called "enemies of sugar." The document was sent to reporters—the Sugar Association circulated 25,000 copies—along with a press release headlined "Scientists dispel sugar fears." The report neglected to mention that it was funded by the sugar industry, but internal documents confirm that it was.

The Sugar Association also relied on Stare to take its message to the people: "Place Dr. Stare on the AM America Show" and "Do a 3 ½ minute interview with Dr. Stare for 200 radio stations," note the association's meeting minutes. Using Stare as a proxy, internal documents explained, would help the association "make friends with the networks" and "keep the sugar industry in the background." By the time Stare's copious conflicts of interest were finally revealed—in "Professors on the Take," a 1976 exposé by the Center for Science in the Public Interest—Big Sugar no longer needed his assistance. The industry could turn to an FDA document to continue where he'd left off.

While Stare and his colleagues had been drafting "Sugar in the Diet of Man," the FDA was launching its first review of whether sugar was, in the official jargon, generally recognized as safe (GRAS), part of a series of food-additive reviews the Nixon administration had requested of the agency. The FDA subcontracted the task to the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, which created an 11-member committee to vet hundreds of food additives from acacia to zinc sulfate. While the mission of the GRAS committee was to conduct unbiased reviews of the existing science for each additive, it was led by biochemist George W. Irving Jr., who had previously served two years as chairman of the scientific advisory board of the International Sugar Research Foundation. Industry documents show that another committee member, Samuel Fomon, had received sugar-industry funding for three of the five years prior to the sugar review.

The FDA's instructions were clear: To label a substance as a potential health hazard, there had to be "credible evidence of, or reasonable grounds to suspect, adverse biological effects"—which certainly existed for sugar at the time. But the GRAS committee's review would depend heavily on "Sugar in the Diet of Man" and other work by its authors. In the section on heart disease, committee members cited 14 studies whose results were "conflicting," but 6 of those bore industry fingerprints, including Francisco Grande's chapter from "Sugar in the Diet of Man" and 5 others that came from Grande's lab or were otherwise funded by the sugar industry.

The diabetes chapter of the review acknowledged studies suggesting that "long term consumption of sucrose can result in a functional change in the capacity to metabolize carbohydrates and thus lead to diabetes mellitus," but it went on to cite five reports contradicting that notion. All had industry ties, and three were authored by Ed Bierman, including his chapter in "Sugar in the Diet of Man."

In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a "hazard to the public." The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as "circumstantial" and called the connection to cardiovascular disease "less than clear," with fat playing a greater role. The only cautionary note, besides cavities, was that all bets were off if sugar consumption were to increase significantly. The committee then thanked the Sugar Association for contributing "information and data." (Tatem would later remark that while he was "proud of the credit line...we would probably be better off without it.")

The committee's perspective was shared by many researchers, but certainly not all. For a public hearing on the draft review, scientists from the USDA's Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory submitted what they considered "abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease." As they later explained in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, some portion of the public—perhaps 15 million Americans at that time—clearly could not tolerate a diet rich in sugar and other carbohydrates. Sugar consumption, they said, should come down by "a minimum of 60 percent," and the government should launch a national campaign "to inform the populace of the hazards of excessive sugar consumption." But the committee stood by its conclusions in the final version of its report presented to the FDA in October 1976.

For the sugar industry, the report was gospel. The findings "should be memorized" by the staff of every company associated with the sugar industry, Tatem told his membership. "In the long run," he said, the document "cannot be sidetracked, and you may be sure we will push its exposure to all corners of the country."

The association promptly produced an ad for newspapers and magazines exclaiming "Sugar is Safe!" It "does not cause death-dealing diseases," the ad declared, and "there is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease or any other malady...The next time you hear a promoter attacking sugar, beware the ripoff. Remember he can't substantiate his charges. Ask yourself what he's promoting or what he is seeking to cover up. If you get a chance, ask him about the GRAS Review Report. Odds are you won't get an answer. Nothing stings a nutritional liar like scientific facts."

THE SUGAR ASSOCIATION would soon get its chance to put the committee's sugar review to the test. In 1977, McGovern's select committee—the one that had held the 1973 hearings on sugar and diabetes—blindsided the industry with a report titled "Dietary Goals for the United States," recommending that Americans lower their sugar intake by 40 percent (PDF). The association "hammered away" at the McGovern report using the GRAS review "as our scientific Bible," Tatem told sugar executives.

McGovern held fast, but Big Sugar would prevail in the end. In 1980, when the USDA first published its own set of dietary guidelines, it relied heavily on a review written for the American Society of Clinical Nutrition by none other than Bierman, who used the GRAS committee's findings to bolster his own. "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes," the USDA guidelines concluded. They went on to counsel that people should "avoid too much sugar," without bothering to explain what that meant.

In 1982, the FDA once again took up the GRAS committee's conclusion that sugar was safe, proposing to make it official. The announcement resulted in a swarm of public criticism, prompting the agency to reopen its case. Four years later, an agency task force concluded, again leaning on industry-sponsored studies, that "there is no conclusive evidence...that demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current." (Walter Glinsmann, the task force's lead administrator, would later become a consultant to the Corn Refiners Association, which represents producers of high-fructose corn syrup.)

The USDA, meanwhile, had updated its own dietary guidelines. With Fred Stare now on the advisory committee, the 1985 guidelines retained the previous edition's vague recommendation to "avoid too much" sugar but stated unambiguously that "too much sugar in your diet does not cause diabetes." At the time, the USDA's own Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory was still generating evidence to the contrary and supporting the notion that "even low sucrose intake" might be contributing to heart disease in 10 percent of Americans.

By the early 1990s, the USDA's research into sugar's health effects had ceased, and the FDA's take on sugar had become conventional wisdom, influencing a generation's worth of key publications on diet and health. Reports from the surgeon general and the National Academy of Sciences repeated the mantra that the evidence linking sugar to chronic disease was inconclusive, and then went on to equate "inconclusive" with "nonexistent." They also ignored a crucial caveat: The FDA reviewers had deemed added sugars—those in excess of what occurs naturally in our diets—safe at "current" 1986 consumption levels. But the FDA's consumption estimate was 43 percent lower than that of its sister agency, the USDA. By 1999, the average American would be eating more than double the amount the FDA had deemed safe­—although we have cut back by 13 percent since then.

ASKED TO COMMENT on some of the documents described in this article, a Sugar Association spokeswoman responded that they are "at this point historical in nature and do not necessarily reflect the current mission or function" of the association. But it is clear enough that the industry still operates behind the scenes to make sure regulators never officially set a limit on the amount of sugar Americans can safely consume. The authors of the 2010 USDA dietary guidelines, for instance, cited two scientific reviews as evidence that sugary drinks don't make adults fat. The first was written by Sigrid Gibson, a nutrition consultant whose clients included the Sugar Bureau (England's version of the Sugar Association) and the World Sugar Research Organization (formerly the ISRF). The second review was authored by Carrie Ruxton, who served as research manager of the Sugar Bureau from 1995 to 2000.

The Sugar Association has also worked its connections to assure that the government panels making dietary recommendations—the USDA's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, for instance—include researchers sympathetic to its position. One internal newsletter boasted in 2003 that for the USDA panel, the association had "worked diligently to achieve the nomination of another expert wholly through third-party endorsements."

In the few instances when governmental authorities have sought to reduce people's sugar consumption, the industry has attacked openly. In 2003, after an expert panel convened by the World Health Organization recommended that no more than 10 percent of all calories in people's diets should come from added sugars—nearly 40 percent less than the USDA's estimate for the average American—current Sugar Association president Andrew Briscoe wrote the WHO's director general warning that the association would "exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the report and urge "congressional appropriators to challenge future funding" for the WHO. Larry Craig (R-Idaho, sugar beets) and John Breaux (D-La., sugarcane), then co-chairs of the Senate Sweetener Caucus, wrote a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, urging his "prompt and favorable attention" to prevent the report from becoming official WHO policy. (Craig had received more than $36,000 in sugar industry contributions in the previous election cycle.) Thompson's people responded with a 28-page letter detailing "where the US Government's policy recommendations and interpretation of the science differ" with the WHO report. Not surprisingly, the organization left its experts' recommendation on sugar intake out of its official dietary strategy.

In recent years the scientific tide has begun to turn against sugar. Despite the industry's best efforts, researchers and public health authorities have come to accept that the primary risk factor for both heart disease and type 2 diabetes is a condition called metabolic syndrome, which now affects more than 75 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Metabolic syndrome is characterized by a cluster of abnormalities—some of which Yudkin and others associated with sugar almost 50 years ago—including weight gain, increased insulin levels, and elevated triglycerides. It also has been linked to cancer and Alzheimer's disease. "Scientists have now established causation," Lustig said recently. "Sugar causes metabolic syndrome."

Newer studies from the University of California-Davis have even reported that LDL cholesterol, the classic risk factor for heart disease, can be raised significantly in just two weeks by drinking sugary beverages at a rate well within the upper range of what Americans consume—four 12-ounce glasses a day of beverages like soda, Snapple, or Red Bull. The result is a new wave of researchers coming out publicly against Big Sugar.

During the battle over the 2005 USDA guidelines, an internal Sugar Association newsletter described its strategy toward anyone who had the temerity to link sugar consumption with chronic disease and premature death: "Any disparagement of sugar," it read, "will be met with forceful, strategic public comments and the supporting science." But since the latest science is anything but supportive of the industry, what happens next?

"At present," Lustig ventures, "they have absolutely no reason to alter any of their practices. The science is in—the medical and economic problems with excessive sugar consumption are clear. But the industry is going to fight tooth and nail to prevent that science from translating into public policy."

Like the tobacco industry before it, the sugar industry may be facing the inexorable exposure of its product as a killer—science will ultimately settle the matter one way or the other—but as Big Tobacco learned a long time ago, even the inexorable can be held up for a very long time.

About the Authors

Gary Taubes, author of the 2011 best-seller Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, has written for Discover, Science, and the New York Times Magazine. He is currently writing a book about sugar.

Cristin Kearns Couzens took a two-year break from her career in dental health administration to pursue independent research on the sugar industry.