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.

Interview: David Chalmers and Andy Clark (NewPhilosopher Magazine)

Interesting discussion with and between two of the brightest minds in consciousness studies. Chalmers and Clark wrote the seminal essay on the extended mind in 1998.

Interview: David Chalmers and Andy Clark

February 27, 2014 | Issue#2:mind 

Interview conducted by Signe Cane in Riga, Latvia, during the 9th International Symposium of Logic, Communication and Cognition, hosted by the University of Latvia.

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Andy Clark is a Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Andy’s interests span not just philosophy of mind, but also artificial intelligence, including robotics, artificial life and embodied cognition.

David Chalmers is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. David is best known for his work on consciousness, but is also interested in metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science.

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While you were colleagues at Washington university in the mid-nineties, you came together to publish “The Extended Mind” (1988), in which you proposed to look at the mind in a different way — as “not just in the head”. What exactly does that mean?

DC The idea of the extended mind was to look for a closer integration between the mind and the environment, getting it right into the loop, so to speak.

AC I think the real attraction of the extended mind story is that the activity upon which mindfulness depends is much more spread out than we thought. Maybe our ongoing use of things like [smartphones] and other sorts of external structures is really part of creating a web of activity, where mind is what happens when that web happens. The paper itself is about the possible role of external structures in establishing that you can hold what philosophers call a ‘dispositional belief’. It’s the kind of stuff that you don’t have to be rehearsing in your mental life. For example, my belief that it’s May doesn’t require me to be forever rehearsing that it’s May — it’s a dispositional belief of mine.

DC We actually had two central examples. In the paper, there is the case of playing Tetris and rotating things in the environment and making the analogy between that and mental rotation. The idea is that it doesn’t really matter either way whether it’s physical rotation or mental rotation. If it’s a way of figuring out whether the Tetris tile fits into the rack, it doesn’t matter whether it’s outside or inside the brain. Now that, I guess, is actually a current activity rather than dispositional state.

AC That’s right, yes.

DC And then we had the case of belief. Inga believes that the museum is on 53rd St and therefore walks there. Otto, on the other hand, has Alzheimer’s and keeps a notebook where he writes everything down. He’s previously written down that the museum is on 53rd St, looks it up, and walks there. We argued that the case of Otto is completely analogous to the case of Inga. Ordinarily we’d say that Inga believes the museum is on 53rd St because she had the disposition to do this. Otto is exactly the same, only the memory, rather than being stored in the biology of his brain, is in his notebook. The notebook is serving as part of Otto’s memory constituting his cognitive states. As Andy said, that’s a case of a dispositional belief — once he reads it and it comes into his consciousness, then it’s also affecting his brain. The special point here is, even before that happens, it’s part of the broad infrastructure of his mind.

How did you come to collaborate on the idea?

DC This has been a perpetual theme of Andy’s for years. It was more of a side interest for me. Andy came to me with an article called something like “The Mind and World Breaching the Plastic Frontier, First Draft”.

AC Yes, I had a little first draft. I think it was called “Mind and World: The Plastic Frontier”. I think part of the genealogy is like this — when the paper only had the Tetris case, you might very well think, “we’ll be excited by that.” But philosophers may not be that excited, because they could re-describe that case as just input and output to the real system upon which “mental stuff” depends. And that’s all going on in the head. The idea that Dave had with Otto and Inga case was to create something philosophers couldn’t ignore. Where something that they already care about — these states of dispositional believing — now seemed to depend on a more widespread structure. Of course, it wasn’t even called extended mind at that stage.

DC I was a big fan of the book by Richard Dawkins called The Extended Phenotype, and thought, ah, we’re kind of trying to do the same thing here for the mind, so let’s call it “The Extended Mind”! Someone might have said about the Tetris case that it is just an extended process, or extended cognition in some sense — the processing goes on outside, the leap from state to state is outside, but all the real mental stuff is inside. We thought, well, let’s try and do this for a paradigmatic mental state, the state of belief.

Would you say the basic concept of the extended mind has changed since?

AC I think in the extended mind debate since then there have been lots of questions raised about to what extent it depends on taking the stuff that goes on internally as already somehow privileged.

DC We don’t want to fall into the trap of brain chauvinism, where the brain defines the properties of cognition and the stuff out there has to be just like it in order to be mental. Maybe this could be broadly analogous to it in the way that a Martian with a very different cognitive system could still be analogous enough to a brain to count as having cognition.

AC It still leaves the question, could it be totally different from the thing that goes on in the head, but just because of the way that it gets together, it’s analogous? I actually think this question doesn’t have an answer. I think that the concept of the mind we started with doesn’t deliver an answer to whether it’s a case of extended mind or a case of something else that’s interesting and important.

DC I think dialectically and rhetorically it makes sense to start with the easiest. For the purposes of the paper we tried to take a case that was as closely analogous as possible, this case of Otto with the notebook and Inga. We said that we don’t propose to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for being a case of extended cognition, just pointed out — here are some relevant factors. Ever since people have been saying “but what’s the mark of the cognitive, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions,” and I think that in general that’s pretty hopeless.

AC We did get lots of that. I don’t think the internalist needs a “mark of the cognitive” to recognise some states as being cognitive, so why should the extended mind theory?

DC My colleague Ned Block liked to say: “When you wrote the article, the thesis was false, but since then it’s become true!” I think what he probably means is the advent of things like the [smartphone, search engines]… people using this kind of stuff all the time. Although I’m not sure whether he says that because now there are cases of doing extended cognition, or whether he thinks that the concept of the mind has actually changed in our technological world.

When it comes to the biggest objections that have come up over the past 15 years or so, how do you think the thesis has fared?

DC When we published the article, I saw the attractions of the thesis but had some reservations. We had this footnote saying “Authors are listed in order of the degree of their belief in the central thesis”. Andy was very confident, I was on the fence. It’s probably still true that I go back and forth on it a bit more than Andy. But one thing that has made me much more confident over the years has been looking at all the objections that people have come up with. I have to say, they’re really not that strong. You go through the best of them and the most well-known ones, and they all strike me as quite easy to requite. If that’s the best they can come up with to reject the thesis, it’s starting to look quite good to me.

AC I agree. I haven’t actually seen anything that strikes me as a convincing objection yet. In fact, I think, most of the things that are put forward as objections, we more or less anticipated in the paper. There are tricky cases, you know. Some of the things that might give you pause, is for example, the role of perception in the cases of the extended mind. It always seems like in all of these cases there’s something perceptual going on.

DC To say it’s got to be bound by the skin or the skull, it seems unprincipled to me. If you want to look for something principled, argue that perception and action are the boundaries of the mind. When Otto reads the notebook he’s doing it via perception, and the mind is what happens on the other side. And sometimes I can come to feel moved by that, but then why can’t we redescribe what’s going on in the Otto case? Viewed through one lens, it’s perception, viewed through another, it’s memory retrieval.

AC Here’s an example that I quite like for this one. It’s the ‘memory glasses’ experiment at MIT. These glasses were developed to help people with Alzheimer’s or visual form agnosia (where people can’t recognise objects in front of them). The glasses have a little camera that’s taking input from the surroundings. In the case of someone with mild Alzheimer’s, the system that they’re wearing “knows stuff,” if you like it. As it recognises a face, it will give you a very quick flash of information — that’s your wife, uncle, dog. Interestingly, that information can be flashed so quickly that you don’t experience it, but nonetheless it helps these patients to do better.

DC Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando has one illustration of the extended mind — glasses that provide you with all kinds of information. People become totally reliant on them, so when this one guy’s glasses are stolen, he becomes a “gibbering wreck” in the same way one would if a part of their frontal cortex was removed. Now, [a new product like this] has just been released, so maybe we’re moving into the era where this thesis becomes truer for all of us in everyday life.

How has your work diverged since you were colleagues?

AC Quite a bit, I think. It had diverged already, and it just so happened that we came together on this one issue.

DC It was around the same time when I was doing work on consciousness. That’s continued to be my central theme among many other issues, I guess. For Andy, maybe extended cognition’s been his central thesis?

AC Yeah, it’s likely.

DC Every now and then I try to get Andy to write something on consciousness. In general, I fall closer to the Cartesian side of things than Andy does. A lot of my intuitions and approaches in philosophy are fairly internalist. Still, I think there’s room for certain kinds of externalism. The nice thing about this project was to try and accommodate some externalist insights about the role of the environment.

What about extended consciousness, then?

AC I have been quite sceptical about it, but I’m slightly less sceptical today. There’s only one argument I’ve seen that’s pushed me a little bit to wonder about that. Suppose a conscious experience depended on moving through a set of neural states in a certain way, and it’s only because of a certain influence of the external world that you can move through those states in that way. That’s where one might say that the inner stuff isn’t sufficient. That might actually be true, but I don’t think it gives you anything much like the extended mind, because it’s simply what it would take to perceive the external world at all.

DC I think both of us would certainly want to allow that, in principle, there can be extended consciousness that arises through interactions with the environment. I’m still dubious that connections to the environment like a notebook or calculator will extend consciousness in that way. The environmental stuff certainly affects one’s consciousness, though. It does so by affecting one’s brain.

AC I suppose, if there were group conscious states, that might be the case of something like extended consciousness, but you don’t see the evidence for that. If a group of people could somehow have, depending upon their interaction at a certain time time, some sort of communal state that is only available because they’re there in that group…

DC That’s not, obviously, quite like the extended mind. I think that’s more like a “collective mind.” In extended mind, roughly the same person is somehow extended, whereas in collective mind, who knows — is it a whole new person?

AC Yeah, it is different.

People have taken to the extended mind idea and have tried to apply it to different things. What has been the most surprising development to you?

AC I was surprised and interested in some developments in cognitive archaeology. Some archaeologists were arguing that the extended mind provided a framework in which to reconceptualise archaeology as involved in dealing with things that have been parts of people’s minds, almost like a fossil trace.

DC In traditional philosophy it’s beginning to have some impact. Andy’s colleagues at Edinburgh in the epistemology department proposed the extended knowledge project, where you start thinking of knowledge as this extended process that involves interaction with the environment. I think that reconfigures some issues on “how we know” about the world. A few years ago I went to a talk by Joel Anderson on the extended will. It was about the role of things like environmental cues in increasing your willpower. When you get up from your desk, there’s a sign saying “go back to work, you idiot”. That is a mechanism of the extended will — it constitutes your willpower. Here the extended mind actually feeds into self-help, and has some practical use.

AC A real-life application! I think that’s a good case.

Do you think you might collaborate on something again?

AC I wouldn’t rule it out.

DC To be fair, we have pretty different interests. I’ve been going off the last few years doing stuff on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, which Andy doesn’t have a strong interest in. Although he is a philosopher, so he’s interested in everything, and so am I. There are a few issues where we meet in the middle in philosophy of mind and have some overlaps. Who knows.

David, you published a book last year, titled Constructing the World. Can you tell us a little about it?

DC The basic idea is building blocks. If you want to build a model of the world, what are the basic building blocks going to be? Rudolf Carnap wrote a book back in 1928 called Logical construction of the world where he basically said that from a few simple ‘primitives’ you can define every expression in a language, like English, and build up every concept that we need to describe the world. He did it with a very limited vocabulary, and tried to build everything up from there. And people said that it’s a wonderful project, but it doesn’t work. It’s seen as a “noble failure”. What I’ve tried to do is see if you can take a version of Carnap’s project, tweak it a little bit and see if something like it can be made to work. Ultimately we get a kind of blueprint for the world in terms of five or ten basic concepts — such that all truths about the world can be derived from there. I’ve tried to argue that has consequences for thinking about a lot of issues. Not just philosophy of mind, but philosophy of language, thinking about meaning, epistemology, knowledge, metaphysics, about the character of reality.

AC I haven’t gotten to grips with it yet…

DC It’s a long book!

AC The request that I would have is that I would want to know what these ‘conceptual primitives’ have to do with processes that actually do construct mental spaces in humans and other animals, because it doesn’t seem likely to me that the primitives that they start from will look like the primitives that you’re talking about. Instead, I think the primitives you’re talking about are actually quite advanced accomplishments.

DC It’s not intended as a contribution to cognitive psychology or to the empirical theory of the mind in the first instance. There are a whole bunch of interesting questions on how exactly one connects this to the question of whether there are primitives of the mind and primitive concepts. There is a lot of debate about that in psychology and elsewhere.

What are you working on right now, Andy?

AC I’m working on something that is quite internalist in one way and definitely hugely empirical and computational. It’s an interesting question where these things might meet. I’m working on predictive processing as I’ll call it, which is just a particular model of how you build up models to get to grips with the world as a living creature. The basic idea is that we try to predict our own sensory flow using a multi-layered structure. What I think is interesting about it is that internal processes deliver perception and action as being computationally built in just the same way. They sort of squeeze cognition out because you don’t need it any more, it’s all done by the stuff that is doing perception and action. And that stuff, precisely because it’s doing perception and action, rolls the world in at any point in which that’s going to be a useful strategy.

DC It’s a wonderful framework, ridiculously ambitious. And like all of these ridiculously ambitious ideas, my suspicion is that at the end of the day it’s only going to be a part of the story. Usually the advocates of these ideas want it to be the whole story or at least a huge part of it. I’m suspicious that the process of predicting the next sensory signal will explain everything about the mind or everything about cognition. But I do think it’s a useful and interesting mechanism, and it’s a bold hypothesis that by building world models that are good at predicting the next sensory signal, it will also be good at doing all these other things that we need the mind to do. My suspicion is that at the end of the day that’s a very strong constraint. If evolution is resourceful, it’s going to help itself to all kinds of other mechanisms that you don’t get out of predictive coding which will go a little bit further.

You both have opinions on each other’s philosophical views, perhaps there is even disagreement?

AC I suppose, one of the views that Dave has pursued is the fairly hard line with respect to conscious experience. He says that even when we finish telling the full story functionally, using contemporary or near future science, explaining all the responses of the organism, we wouldn’t actually have done the work to understand how conscious experience is possible. I’ve always thought that actually we would.

DC We do disagree about the case of consciousness. I’m inclined to think that the modern computational paradigm, although it’s explained many wonderful things about the mind, has significant limitations when it comes to explaining conscious experience, how things feel from the inside of having a mind and being a subject. I’ve argued that the standard methods of neuroscience and computational science at least have to be augmented to bring consciousness into the picture. I think Andy is much more deflationary about consciousness than I am. I’ve always been encouraging him to write more about it. I think he’s got some interesting views on the matter. I think, one of these days — Andy writes a book every few years — one of these days it’s got to be a book on consciousness. Maybe connecting it to the extended mind?

AC More likely I’d end up connecting it to predictive processing.

Sarah Estes and Jesse Graham - Getting Liberals to Agree Really Is Like Herding Cats (Scientific American)

Yep . . . sounds about right. Disenchanted liberals have been making this argument for a couple of decades now. The GOP has a very small group of issues about which they care (guns, abortion, immigration, and taxes), while the Democrats are more like the humanities department at a major university, filled with various forms of identity politics and all thinking their issue is the most important issue.

I have no problem with the individual efforts of these diverse groups - whether we are talking about equal pay for equal work, racial disparities in crime sentencing (crack uses, mostly black, tend to be sentenced 10x as long as cocaine users, mostly white), or various forms of social injustice, to name just a few, all of these issues are important. Perhaps if they could unite under the banner of social injustice and attempt to make broad changes rather than micro-changes, they might be more effective.

But hell, I'm an independent who wants a multiparty system, so I would not mind seeing the GOP break up into evangelicals and fiscal conservatives, nor the Dems breaking up into smaller groups. But then we would probably have complete and total chaos and even less (if that is possible) would get done in Congress.

Psychologists: Getting Liberals to Agree Really Is Like Herding Cats

Liberals tend to underestimate what they have in common with other liberals

Jan 22, 2014 |By Sarah Estes and Jesse Graham

When he was President, Bill Clinton famously (and perhaps apocryphally) complained that getting Democrats to agree on a course of action was like herding cats, while the Republicans didn’t seem to have this problem. All political parties are large coalitions of people with varied interests and beliefs, but is it possible that ideological differences between the parties could play a decisive role here?

A new paper by researchers at New York University, in press at Psychological Science, suggests that the answer is yes. A large body of psychological research has shown that people tend to overestimate how much others share their beliefs, feelings, and practices. But this new research suggests that this is not the case for those on the left end of the political spectrum – in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Conservatives and moderates overestimated the degree to which other conservatives and moderates were like them, while liberals assumed they were more unique among party peers than they actually were. This “liberal uniqueness” perceptive bias could help to explain why it’s harder to get Democrats to fall in line than it is for Republicans.

Led by Chadly Stern, the scientists begin by contrasting the conservative Tea Party movement, which has successfully organized its own congressional caucus, with the liberal Occupy Wall Street movement, which was hobbled by its inability to reach consensus on issues both large (what’s our agenda?) and small (how should we respond to the NYPD’s request to take down signs?). While group member similarities (in goals, beliefs, preferences, and personalities) are crucial for organizational success, the authors wondered whether perceptions of in-group similarities were just as important. In other words, maybe if group members only thought they were the same, the group would function better.

In the first study, hundreds of people online answered forty questions about preferences and beliefs, half of them political (“America should strive to strengthen its military”) and half non-political (“I like poetry”). They then estimated what percentage of study participants who share their political beliefs (political in-group members) would agree with them on each item – in other words, if you’re a conservative, and you indicated that you liked poetry, you then estimated what percentage of other conservatives in the study liked poetry as well. Stern and colleagues then compared those estimateswith the actual figues to determine whether each participant overestimated their similarity to their political in-group (false consensus) or underestimated it (false uniqueness).

Conservatives overestimated how similar their preferences were to those of other conservatives (false consensus), while liberals underestimated how similar their preferences were to those of other liberals (false uniqueness). Political moderates also overestimated their similarity to other moderates, in line with previous findings that people in general overestimate how much other people share their preferences and beliefs. This was the case for both political (e.g., military spending) and non-political (e.g., poetry) preferences.

The second study replicated the design of the first, with one twist: everyone also filled out the Need for Uniqueness scale, with questions like “If I must die let it be an unusual death rather than an ordinary death in bed.” Again, conservatives and moderates overestimated how similar they were to their political in-group, while liberals underestimated their similarity to their political in-group. Further, these ideological differences were in part accounted for by people’s need for uniqueness – the more you expressed the desire to be different from those around you, the more you underestimated how similar you were. This suggests that liberals think they’re unique among liberals in part because they want to be unique.

Anyone who’s ever been part of a liberal counter-cultural clique will recognize this pressure to be unique, which can easily turn into an arms race. You’ve got a tattoo? Well, my skin is nothing but tattoos. You make artisanal pickles? Well, I make artisanal horseradish. You have a pet ferret? Well, I have a pet camel. And so on. But it’s this motivation to be unique – even among other liberals – that makes liberals alike. It’s a bit like the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where a crowd of hundreds chants in unison: “Yes, we are all individuals! Yes, we are all different!”

While the findings make sense in light of ideological stereotypes like the gotta-be-different liberal hipster, or the conformist conservative soldier, they might not apply as well to contemporary American politics. These days you’re more likely to hear the “herding cats” phrase in reference to John Boehner’s attempts to reconcile the Tea Party faction with the rest of the Republicans in the House. It remains to be seen whether the conservative false consensus effect can lead to any real consensus in the GOP.


Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular contributor to NewYorker.com. Gareth is also the series editor of Best American Infographics, and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

• Sarah Estes is a science writer, poet and essayist. She has written for Atlantic.com, Psychologytoday.com, New Scientist and numerous literary publications.
• Jesse Graham is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, where he hovers menacingly over the Values, Ideology, and Morality Lab.