Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election

Scientific American (Sheldon Solomon and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters) takes a look at how our feelings about - and fear of - death can shape our political choices.

Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election

A psychology professor explains how thoughts of death influence how we vote or make other decisions

Sheldon Solomon is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College. He has spent the last few decades studying how thoughts of death can powerfully influence our decisions and judgments. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what this phenomenon can teach us about the upcoming election.

LEHRER: What is terror management theory?

SOLOMON: Terror management theory (TMT) is derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s efforts to explain the motivational underpinnings of human behavior. According to TMT, one defining characteristic of human beings is self-awareness: we’re alive and we know it. Although self-awareness gives rise to unbridled awe and joy, it can also lead to the potentially overwhelming dread engendered by the realization that death is inevitable, that it can occur for reasons that can never be anticipated or controlled, and that humans are corporeal creatures—breathing pieces of defecating meat no more significant or enduring than porcupines or peaches.

TMT posits that humans ingeniously, but quite unconsciously, solved this existential dilemma by developing cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about reality shared by individuals in a group that serve to “manage” the potentially paralyzing terror resulting from the awareness of death. All cultures provide a sense of meaning by offering an account of the origin of the universe, a blueprint for acceptable conduct on Earth, and a promise of immortality (symbolically, by creation of large monuments, great works of art or science, amassing great fortunes, having children; and literally, through the various kinds of afterlives that are a central feature of organized religions) to those who live up to culturally prescribed standards.

Thus, although cultures vary considerably, they share in common the same defensive psychological function: to provide meaning and value and in so doing bestow psychological equanimity in the face of death.

LEHRER: What first got you interested in TMT?

SOLOMON: I stumbled on Becker’s books in 1980 wandering around the library in my first year as a professor at Skidmore College. I found Becker’s ideas compelling and provocative. So did my graduate school colleagues Jeff Greenberg (now at the University of Arizona) and Tom Pyszczynski (now at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs). Most academics at the time rejected these ideas on the grounds that, having been derived from an existential psychodynamic perspective, they could not be tested. Jeff, Tom and I consequently developed TMT to frame Becker’s ideas in a manner that enabled them to be subjected to empirical scrutiny.

LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what's an experimental example of mortality salience at work?

SOLOMON: A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that MS increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Our first experiment was conducted with 22 municipal court judges in Tucson, Ariz. We told the judges we were studying the relation between personality traits, attitudes and bond decisions. A bond is a sum of money a defendant pays prior to trial to be released from prison in the interim. The judges completed a set of questionnaires consisting of some standard personality assessment instruments. Embedded in the personality assessments were two questions designed to trigger mortality salience: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” Only half of the judges were randomly given these questions to answer.

The judges were then given a legal case brief virtually identical to one they would typically see before a trial. The brief stated the arresting charge, which was prostitution, and the defendant's address, employment record and length of residency. A copy of the citation issued to the defendant when she was arrested was also included. Finally, the judges were given a form to set bond for the defendant. We chose judges for the study because they are rigorously trained to make rational and uniform decisions based solely on evidence relative to existing laws. And we had them pass judgment on an alleged prostitute because prostitution offends the moral sensibilities of the average American. To the extent that cultural worldviews serve to mitigate mortal terror, we hypothesized that judges who thought about death would set higher bonds than those in the control condition. The results were striking. Judges in the control condition set an average bond of $50, which was typical for this charge in actual cases at the time. However, judges who thought about their death set an average bond of $455.

Since then, more than 300 studies by independent researchers in approximately 20 countries have found support for hypotheses derived from TMT. And it’s not just direct questions about death: mortality salience has also been induced by interviewing people in front of a funeral home or subliminal exposure to the word “dead” or “death.”

LEHRER: Do you think this effect comes into play during election season[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=voters-fear-death]?

SOLOMON: Yes, we think so. In his 1998 book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, based on Max Weber’s study of charismatic leadership, proposed that in times of crisis, when fears of death are aroused, people are more likely to embrace leaders who provide psychological security by making their citizens feel like they are valued contributors to a great mission to eradicate evil.

To test this hypothesis, we had participants read campaign statements purportedly written by three gubernatorial candidates after a MS or control induction. The candidates varied in leadership style: charismatic, task-oriented and relationship-oriented. For example, the charismatic leader stated: “You are not just an ordinary citizen, you are part of a special state and a special nation . . . .” The task-oriented leader stated: “I can accomplish all the goals that I set out to do. I am very careful in laying out a detailed blueprint of what needs to be done so that there is no ambiguity.” The relationship-oriented leader stated: “I encourage all citizens to take an active role in improving their state. I know that each individual can make a difference . . . .” Participants then selected the candidate they would vote for. In the control condition, only four of 95 participants voted for the charismatic candidate, with the rest of the votes split evenly between the task and relationship oriented leaders. However, following MS, there was almost an 800 percent increase in votes for the charismatic leader; votes for the task-oriented leader were unaffected, but the relationship-oriented leader’s votes significantly declined.

Go read the whole interview.

Tags: Fear, Death, Politics, What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election, Scientific American, Psychology, Sheldon Solomon, Jonah Lehrer, Mind Matters, voting, decisions

Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages

Scientific American - or more specifically, Michael Shermer - debunks Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief.

Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages

From the stages of grief to the stages of moral development, stage theories have little evidentiary support

By Michael Shermer

Matt Collins

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication.

There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif. (www.grief-recovery.com), and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss.... No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”

Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001): “At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”

Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.

Why stages? We are pattern-seeking, storytelling primates trying to make sense of an often chaotic and unpredictable world. A stage theory works in a manner similar to a species-classification heuristic or an evolutionary-sequence schema. Stages also fit well into a chronological sequence where stories have set narrative patterns. Stage theories “impose order on chaos, offer predictability over uncertainty, and optimism over despair,” explained social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman (Touchstone, 1993) and co-author, with Elliot Aronson, of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007), in an interview with me. “One appeal of stage theories is that they tell a story—they give us a narrative to live by (‘you feel this now, but soon ...’). In cognitive psychology and also in ‘narrative psychotherapy,’ there has been a lot of work on the importance of storytelling. Some therapists now make this idea explicit, helping clients change a negative, self-defeating narrative (‘look at all I suffered’) into a positive one (‘I not only survived but triumphed’).”

What’s wrong with stages? First, Tavris noted, “in developmental psychology, the notion of predictable life stages is toast. Those stage theories reflected a time when most people marched through life predictably: marrying at an early age; then having children when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife crisis; then retirement; then death. Those ‘passages’ theories evaporated with changing social and economic conditions that blew the predictability of our lives to hell.”

Second, Tavris continued, “is the guilt and pressure the theories impose on people who are not feeling what they think they should. This is why consumers of any kind of psychotherapy or posttraumatic intervention that promulgates the notion of ‘inevitable’ stages should be skeptical and cautious.”

Stages are stories that may be true for the storyteller, but that does not make them valid for the narrative known as science.

Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "Stage Fright".

True, but partial. Stage theories do simplifiy things sometimes, but that doesn't mean they are invalid. Many years of research have verified most of the major stage theory models in psychology (especially those based in brain development).

The stage model of grief seems to be one that needs revison, but Kohlberg's moral stages, Piaget's cognitive stages, and most of Erikson's conflictual stage still hold up, no matter what Shermer thinks.

Tags: Five Fallacies of Grief, Debunking Psychological Stages, Psychology, grief, developmental stages, Piaget, Kohlberg, Erikson

Your Brain Is a Pharmacy

A cool article on the neuroscience of the placebo effect from Utne Reader, posted last month.

Your Brain Is a Pharmacy

The placebo effect yields real neurological results

September-October 2008

by Julie Hanus

For a long time, doctors and researchers believed, like most of us, that the placebo effect is the mental by-product of an overactive imagination, a case of reverse hypochondria. Now, armed with brain-scan technology, the scientific community is discovering that there’s more to placebos than the power of suggestion. It seems that sincere belief triggers bona fide reactions in the brain, and we’re only just beginning to harness the effect.

In one study, participants were given two glasses of wine. (No, vino isn’t quite the same as a sugar pill, but hold on—we’ll get there.) Both glasses contained the same cabernet sauvignon, explains Psychotherapy Networker (May-June 2008), but the would-be connoisseurs were told that one cup contained a more costly pour. Unsurprisingly, the participants gave the “pricier” wine higher marks. But this wasn’t just a case of slick marketing: Brain scans revealed that the areas of the mind associated with pleasure burned brighter even before participants tasted the “more expensive” wine. “They expected pleasure, and their brains delivered it,” the psychotherapists’ journal reports.

This finding jibes with the work of Tor Wager, a professor of psychology at Columbia University in New York. When Wager was interviewed on Radiolab, a documentary show produced by public radio station WNYC, he described an experiment in which he applies an uncomfortably hot heating pad to participants’ arms.

One by one, research subjects are loaded into an MRI scanner. After testing how their brains respond to pain, Wager offers his participants some Vaseline but calls it Lidocaine salve. “We say, ‘This is going to be really effective; this is going to block pain,’ ” he says. Then he takes another picture of what’s happening in their brains.

As soon as participants anticipate relief, their temple region lights up with activity, and then the commotion shifts inward to the midbrain, which is responsible for releasing pain-killing opioids. In every case, the heating-pad pain was gone after the Vaseline was administered. It’s a mind game, but the results are real. As Wager explains it, all the drugs in the world are already in our brains; that’s why we have receptors that are able to make sense of synthetic or artificially introduced versions. The real trick is figuring out how to prompt our brains to release the right stuff at the right time.

Unlocking those secrets could revolutionize how we treat physical pain, mental disorders, and other medical complications. Another scientist who appeared on Radiolab is experimenting with intermittent substitution of placebos in a morphine regimen. So far, he’s been able to administer 50 percent less morphine, with no reduction in pain relief—halving his patients’ exposure to the addictive, side effect–laden pharmaceutical.

Placebo research is also destined to force a reevaluation of faith healers, shamans, religious rituals, positive thoughts, and the concept of belief in our healing process. Our brains are off and running even before we’re consciously aware of the activity, according to ScienceNOW Daily News (April 14, 2008). Ten seconds before you think you’ve made a choice, your brain already has the answer. If someone truly, deeply trusts that holy water has the power to heal her, and if that belief triggers the release of healing or pain-relieving chemicals, would it be any less of a miracle?

Tags: Your Brain Is a Pharmacy, Utne Reader, brain, Psychology, Health, placebo effect, Julie Hanus, neuroscience

Treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Neuroscientists have been looking for a way to short-circuit the progression of traumatic events into PTSD. While we are beginning to understand the mechanisms at work, we haven't yet figured out how to disrupt the system. Until now. Maybe. In some situations.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, released when we are under various forms of stress, both physical and psychological. Much of the time, cortisol is a hormone we want to limit as much as possible, since one of its actions is to increase muscle wasting and blood glucose levels (fight, flight, or freeze response). But when trauma occurs, more cortisol might be exactly what the brain needs to prevent PTSD from developing.

High-Dose Hormone Treatment Might Reduce Risk For Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2008) — Cortisol helps our bodies cope with stress, but what about its effects on the brain? A new study by Cohen and colleagues, appearing in the October 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggests that the answer to this question is complex. In an animal model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), high doses of a cortisol-related substance, corticosterone, prevented negative consequences of stress exposure, including increased startle response and behavioral freezing when exposed to reminders of the stress.

However, low-dose corticosterone potentiated these responses. This finding suggests that corticosterone levels may influence both vulnerability and resilience in a dose-dependent manner through its involvement in memory processes.

One of the complexities in understanding PTSD is the context-dependency of adaptation. In some situations, for example following a car accident in an otherwise secure community, one objective of treatment is to restore a sense of normalcy and control of one’s life. Within this context, the high-dose corticosterone would seem to be the indicated treatment. However, one could imagine scenarios where hypervigilance and heightened emotional reactivity could be adaptive, perhaps in a combat zone. In that case, the lower and more typical corticosterone levels might help soldiers adapt to the continuing risks of combat.

But, people do not spend their lives in a single context. “In the case of helping soldiers adjust to the stress of war, we have to think both short-term and long-term, to help soldiers adjust to combat, but also to help them return from combat to resume peacetime life. Thus, we need further guidance from animal research about how to help soldiers adjust flexibly across contexts, from the battlefield to the breakfast table,” as explained by John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System.

Corresponding author Dr. Hagit Cohen concludes that, “single high-dose corticosteroid treatment may thus be worthy of clinical investigation as a possible avenue for early pharmacotherapeutic intervention in the acute phase, aimed at prevention of chronic stress-related disorders, such as PTSD. In this sense, it brings treatment of PTSD to a new era – an era of secondary prevention.”

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Adapted from materials provided by Elsevier, via AlphaGalileo.

Tags: Treating, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Science Daily, brain, Psychology, Cortisol, Hagit Cohen

The New Yorker - That Which is Not Socialism

Contrary to John McCain's feeble attacks, Barack Obama is not a socialist (although it seems Bush has socialized the US banking system), and the The New Yorker explains why he isn't a socialist. The more important topic is that the media enables this rather ignorant and misleading line of attack by the McCain camp. Why is that?

That Which is Not Socialism

I flew to California Monday, on Virgin America, a snappy airline that is so modern and young in its aesthetics that it makes a person of a certain generation feel that he may be culturally unqualified to be a passenger. One of the airline’s selling points, however, is that it allows you to watch live satellite television; I had CNN on without sound while I read and worked, and when I glanced up I saw that the network was running its campaign coverage above a big banner that read, “Share the Wealth? McCain Slams Socialism.”

How did socialism become a notional subject of this Presidential campaign? The use of the term originated with the dubious Joe the Plumber episode, subject of my Comment in the magazine this week. But just to be clear, headline writers of the world: socialism is not language that Obama ever used or even remotely implied in describing the principles of progressive taxation in his (and everyone else’s, including President George W. Bush’s) tax plan.

Instead, socialism is the term that McCain and his campaign advisers have now decided to ride in a last desperate push to regain ground in their campaign—because past Republican-led polling of terms such as “socialized medicine” shows that the language raises hackles and has unusually negative connotations for many Americans. Allowing McCain’s campaign to control headline and media language in this way is analogous to running a banner that reads “Tough on Russia? Obama Slams Nuclear War Threats.” Headline writers would know that such a take would be unfair to the essence of McCain’s statements about Russia; why do they not display the same judgment here?

Obama and McCain disagree about what the top federal-tax rates on individual income, corporate profits, and capital gains should be. The two candidates do not disagree on the principle of progressive taxation—McCain might be sympathetic to a flat tax, but he has not come out for one; presumably, he is influenced by the fact that a progressive system, in which the rich pay proportionately more than the poor, is more popular politically than a flat tax would be. Within the progressive system that they agree on, Obama thinks the top rates should be higher than McCain thinks they should be. In the case of the top federal-income-tax rate, the difference between them is not very large—Obama wants to go up from Bush’s thirty-five per cent top rate to Clinton’s top rate, a little over thirty-nine per cent. This is the change Obama was discussing with Joe Wurzelbacher, the unlicensed contractor who has become known as Joe the Plumber. Obama’s plan means that even for the richest of filers, the difference between his tax system and McCain’s concerns approximately $45,000 in additional taxes for every $1 million wealthy filers earn in income after they reach the highest possible bracket. That’s enough to buy a small B.M.W., yes, but in the great scheme of things, this does not seem to qualify as an argument about socialism.

If it did, then Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford would be Bolsheviks. In 1975, when Gerald Ford was President, the top U.S. federal-income-tax rate was seventy per cent—that’s right, almost twice what it was under Bill Clinton. In Sweden, the top rate in 1975 was eighty-seven per cent; in Britain, eighty-three per cent; in Japan seventy-five per cent; in Australia, sixty-five per cent; and in go-go capitalist Canada, it was forty-seven per cent (it went up to about sixty per cent a few years later.) It is difficult to compare these top rates precisely because state and city taxes in the U.S. can add another ten per cent or more, and the deductibility and income-qualification rules in each country are different—but the top line provides a generally accurate sense of how much income governments in industrialized countries took from their wealthiest filers during the nineteen-seventies: a lot.

The Reagan and Thatcher years did produce a major change in consensus thinking about the politics and economics of top marginal tax rates. The top rates—and all rates—in both America and Britain fell dramatically by the end of the nineteen-eighties. (My colleague Sam Sherraden, using comparative data assembled by economists at the University of Michigan, put together this spreadsheet tracking the evolution—or devolution—of top rates in the G-8 countries since the nineteen-seventies.) This big change in top tax rates was not limited, however, to the Anglo-Saxon economies with traditions of greater individual liberty and more freewheeling markets. It spread gradually across continental Europe and industrialized Asia and the Pacific as global economic competition after the Cold War facilitated the free flow of capital and threatened to punish any country that kept its tax system too far out of alignment with the American-led norm. The consensus also affirmed the potential of lower tax rates, in a balanced and transparent regulatory system, to spur economic innovation and economic growth, just as Reagan and Thatcher had argued. The fierce disagreements about taxation that prevailed when the world really was full of socialists subsided by the mid nineteen-nineties into debates about nuance and technocratic mechanisms—not principle.

So we come back to the essential falsity of this moment in the 2008 campaign. The principle of progressive taxation is agreed between the two candidates. They also agree that, in principle, lower taxes can spur economic growth and innovation. They disagree about which of these two principles should be emphasized over the other at this time of economic crisis and rising income inequality. They also disagree about small fiddles on the tax-rate dial. In historical (and even economic) terms, the differences between them concerning both economic principles and specific tax-rate policies are trivial. To allow the poll-savvy advisers of the McCain camp to make this a debate about “socialism” is to capitulate to their manipulation.

Tags: Barak Obama, George Bush, Joe the Plumber, John McCain, Steve Coll, progressive taxation, socialism, The New Yorker

USC Vists Arizona in Key Pac-10 Clash

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As a six-year Tucsonan, and a long-time fan of Pac-10 football, I can't recall the last time Arizona (the U of A) was involved in a key Pac-10 clash that didn't involve a round ball. Kind of cool. I'm sure USC is favored by a fairly wide margin, but stranger things have happened.

Two of the top teams in the Pac-10 are set to clash in Tucson this weekend, as the sixth-ranked USC Trojans tangle with the Arizona Wildcats in a key showdown.

The Trojans enter the contest off one of their most impressive wins of the season, a 69-0 blanking of Washington State last weekend. It marked the program's largest shutout victory since posting an identical 69-0 win over Montana in 1931. The shutout was also the second in a row, a feat USC last accomplished in 1971. Winners of three straight, the Trojans are currently tied with three others teams for first place in the Pac-10 standings at 3-1.

"This is a championship matchup for sure, and we are going to try to take the momentum that we're building here out of the first half of the season and take it to Tucson and see if we can get ourselves a win," said head coach Pete Carroll of this weekend's important bout.

One of those teams is Arizona, which upset then 25th-ranked California 42-27 last weekend. It was a nice rebound for the Wildcats, as they were handed their first league loss at Stanford (24-23) the prior weekend. At 5-2 overall, Arizona is certainly a team to be aware of, especially at home, where it has gone a unblemished 4-0 this season.

Saturday's game will mark the 32nd all-time meeting between the two programs, with USC holding a commanding 25-6 lead in the series. The Trojans have won the last six meetings versus Arizona, including a 20-13 triumph a year ago.

I have to cheer for the hometown kids in this one. Go Cats!

Tags: USC, Arizona, Pac-10 clash, football, sports

Creationists Declare War Over the Brain

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Creationists are a nutty lot. They have a nearly pathological distrust of science, which makes them an easy target for ridicule. But when respected scientists join their ranks - for whatever reason - it's worth taking notice of. [Some thoughts below the article.]

Creationists declare war over the brain

• 22 October 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Amanda Gefter

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

But William Dembski, one of ID's founding fathers and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, praised Schwartz's work as providing "theoretical support for the irreducibility of mind to brain". Dembski's website shows that he is currently co-editing The End of Materialism with Schwartz and Beauregard.

Meanwhile, Schwartz has been working with Henry Stapp, a physicist at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who also spoke at the symposium. They have been developing non-standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to explain how the "non-material mind" affects the physical brain.

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: "This is real and dangerous and coming our way."

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. "Progress in science is slow on many fronts," says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn't mean cancer has spiritual causes."

And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, "it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn't currently explained doesn't mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics."

The attack on materialism proposes to do just that, but it all turns on definitions. "At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism," says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina. "Now we have a new understanding of physics. What counts as material has changed. Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness. These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call 'material', and we haven't discovered everything about nature yet. But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural."

And as Clark observes: "This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

That is the voice of mainstream academia. Public perception, however, is a different story. If people can be swayed by ID, despite the vast amount of solid evidence for evolution, how hard will it be when the science appears fuzzier?

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the "God of the gaps".

Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.

Amanda Gefter is an editor with the Opinion section of New Scientist

These scientists are on the right track, but going in the wrong direction. The mind is more than likely a non-material thing, but that does not mean that religious views (in the traditional sense) are correct and that Darwin is wrong. They are trapped in the pre-trans fallacy identified by Ken Wilber.

What the non-material nature of mind more likely means is that the mind transcends and includes the brain in a holonic fashion. The mind is greater than anything conceived of in religion, aside from the Buddhist point-of-view, which is the only truly spiritual psychology aside from Vendanta. If we try to equate the mind with the Christian concept of the soul, we are also missing the reality of mind as being capable of transcending our individual human nature. Why would we want to place that kind of limitation on ourselves?

Tags: Creationists Declare War Over the Brain, New Scientist, Amanda Gefter, Religion, Psychology, brain, evolution, culture, Jeffrey Schwartz, Mario Beauregard, neuroscience, Darwin, non-material neuroscience, Discovery Institute, mind, soul

EXTENDED TRAILER FOR AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHIC: THE MOVIE

Gotta love McSweeney's.

EXTENDED TRAILER FOR AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHIC: THE MOVIE.

BY PETE REYNOLDS

- - - -

(Scene opens at a roadside gas station somewhere in Swing State. SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER is inside, balancing his books behind the counter. Enter JOE SIX-PACK, who heads straight for the refrigerated section.)

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: Hello, stranger. I'm Small-Business Owner. I'm concerned about the rising cost of health insurance for my employees. Welcome to my small business.

JOE SIX-PACK: Thanks. I'm Joe Six-Pack. True to my name, I'd like to purchase six cans of domestic beer from your small business, and I'd like them to be connected by a subdivided plastic holder. I'm sort of racist, though no one ever comes out and directly says this.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: That'll be $5.99. I may or may not get a tax break under either Barack Obama's or John McCain's tax plan.

JOE SIX-PACK: Put it on my tab. I'll pay for this beer with easy credit, which will eventually lead to an economic crisis.

(The door dings as it opens, and HOCKEY MOM enters.)

HOCKEY MOM: Oh, jeez, how are ya? I'm Hockey Mom. I'm like Soccer Mom, only colder. I'm up in arms over the risin' cost of gas.

JOE SIX-PACK: I, too, am feeling squeezed at the pump.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: Enjoy your six-pack. My entrepreneurial spirit is the backbone of the American economy.

JOE SIX-PACK: Thank you. I'll spend the rest of the afternoon watching football and drinking with my friends, Working-Class White, Nascar Dad, and Those Without College Degrees. I do not care for the gays.

(JOE SIX-PACK exits.)

HOCKEY MOM: How much do I owe ya for gas? I'm bitter about Hillary Clinton losing.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: Seven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars.

HOCKEY MOM: Oh, jeez. Thankfully, I married Those Making Over $100,000 Per Year.

(HOCKEY MOM pays. We hear another ding as SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER opens the door for HOCKEY MOM on her way out. Outside, LATTE-SIPPING CROWD pulls up but doesn't get out of the car. SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER remains in the doorway.)

LATTE-SIPPING CROWD: Excuse me, sir? I drive a hybrid automobile, so I don't need gas at this time. However, I wish to purchase a fair-trade latte from your independent, locally owned business. In exchange, I'll blog about this experience on my Mac.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: I'm sorry, sir, but we only have Sanka. You'll have to go to the Starbucks up the street.

LATTE-SIPPING CROWD: That's OK. I was really just being ironic. Or was I? No, I was. Sarah Palin is less intelligent than my 3-year-old son, Windward.

(LATTE-SIPPING CROWD speeds off. SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER returns to the counter and resumes balancing his books with a concerned look on his face. Shortly, JOE THE PLUMBER emerges from the bathroom holding a diamond-encrusted plunger and a basin wrench made of solid gold.)

JOE THE PLUMBER: Hello, fellow small-business owner. I'm Joe the Plumber, and I've successfully plumbed your bathroom. I'm relevant to national politics for some reason.

SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER: What do I owe you?

JOE THE PLUMBER: More than $250,000 a year. Despite my name and salary, I'm neither a Mafia boss nor a porn star.

Read the rest.

Tags: EXTENDED TRAILER FOR AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHIC, THE MOVIE, McSweeney's, humor, Politics, PETE REYNOLDS. satire

Christopher Buckley on The Daily Show

Jon Stewart talks with Christopher Buckley, who discusses his new novel, his resignation, and his continued endorsement of Barack Obama.

Tags: Christopher Buckley, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Politics, humor, Obama, National Review

Steven Pinker - Freedom’s Curse

Steven Pinker has a cool article in The Atlantic on why Washington’s crusade against swearing on the airwaves is f*cked up. In case you are unfamiliar with his thinking, Pinker likes swearing, seeing in it our evolutionary heritage. Bur he also likes to puncture the idea that any word is anything more than a symbol -- words will not and cannot "corrupt the moral order."

Freedom’s Curse

by Steven Pinker

A word is an arbitrary label—that’s the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don’t snicker: Would you ever say “Nothing has gone wrong yet” without looking for wood to knock?

Swearing is another kind of word magic. People believe, contrary to logic, that certain words can corrupt the moral order—that piss and Shit! and fucking are dangerous in a way that pee and Shoot! and freakin’ are not. This quirk in our psychology lies in the ability of taboo words to activate primitive emotional circuits in the brain.

My interest in swearing is (I swear) scientific. But swearing is not just a puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. It has figured in the most-famous free-speech cases of the past century, from Ulysses and Lady Chatterley to those of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Over the decades, the courts have steadily driven government censors into a precarious redoubt. In 1978, the Supreme Court, ruling on a daytime broadcast of Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue, allowed the Federal Communications Commission to regulate “indecency” on broadcast radio and television during the hours when children were likely to be listening. The rationale, based on rather quaint notions of childhood and of modern media, was that over-the-air broadcasts are uninvited intruders into the home and can expose children to indecent language, harming their psychological and moral development.

George Carlin expounds upon the seven words you can't say on TV.

In practice, the FCC recognized that the impact of taboo words depended on their context. So in 2003, when Bono said in a televised acceptance speech, “This is really, really fucking brilliant,” the FCC did not punish the network. Bono, they noted, did not use fucking to “describe sexual or excretory organs or activities.” He used it as an “adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.” This usage differed from Carlin’s “patently offensive” routine, with its “repeated use, for shock value,” of taboo words.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Steven Pinker, Freedom’s Curse, The Atlantic, language, Psychology, culture, swearing, George Carlin, free speech, Supreme Court, obsenity

Worldviews - Inevitable Choices

This article from Mercatornet contends that today's college students (and people in general) have four choices in worldviews that they can identify with and adopt. Seems like a limited choice to me, but probably pretty close to being true for the majority of students.

The argument, flawed though it is, states that we ALL must choose between Mohammed, Descartes, Nietzsche, or the Pope.

Hmmm . . . I pick Buddha.

Inevitable choices

University students face four competing world views as they navigate their way through modern culture. They can only choose one of them.

Richard Bastien is director of the Catholic Civil Rights League for the National Capital Area and a regular contributor to Égards, a French-language quarterly journal of ideas.

I would like to set out four world views which people, and especially university students, encounter today and to show how each of them has developed on the basis of a particular understanding of the role of faith and reason in the quest for truth. More specifically, I intend to show that these worldviews are mutually exclusive and that any person living in the West is bound to choose one of them. I conclude that the choice now facing each of us is between Mohammed, Descartes, Nietzsche and the Pope.

The four worldviews are:

1) Fideism, which says that faith is the sole means at our disposal in the quest for truth; we can therefore refer to it as the philosophy of sola fides;

2) Modernism, also known as rationalism, scientism or positivism, which says that reason is the sole means we have in our quest for truth; we can refer to it as the philosophy of sola ratio;

3) Postmodernism, also known as cultural or moral relativism, or nihilism, which says there is no such thing as objective truth and that, therefore, faith and reason are of no use; we can call this philosophy that of nec ratio, nec fides; and

4) Catholicism, which says that the search for truth requires both faith and reason; we can thus refer to it as being based on fides et ratio.

Before describing these worldviews in greater detail, one must specify what is meant by "truth", "faith" and "reason". By truth is meant an agreement or concordance between intellect and objective reality. Faith means believing in something to be true, as opposed to knowing it to be true. There is faith when a truth claim is accepted, not on the basis of solid evidence, but rather on the basis of the testimony of someone else. We believe something because we believe someone. This does not mean, however, that faith is "blind" to evidence. Indeed, faith is usually reinforced by some experience which it cannot fully explain, as when I trust my doctor that his medical prescription will relieve my pain, although I can’t explain how it does so.

Reason means knowing something to be true on the basis of either what our senses tell us or what our mind or intellect tells us. Knowledge acquired though our senses is sense knowledge, also known as empirical knowledge, ie, knowledge of things material and measurable. Knowledge acquired through our intellect is knowledge of abstract truths, like logic and mathematics. Logical and mathematical truths are sometimes referred to as necessary truths because the formulation of truth claims is impossible without them.

What this means is that faith and reason are quite different. Faith requires a free assent of the will, while reason calls for compelling evidence or self-evident truth. However, the two serve a common purpose, which is to serve as foundations in our quest for truth. Put another way, both make sense only in relation to truth. Reason is a way of understanding truth, discovering it or proving it. Faith is a way of discovering it. Without this relationship to truth, faith and reason make no sense. Both are roads to truth with respect to religious as well as non-religious matters.

For an explanation of each of the worldviews, go read the article.

Here is his conclusion:

Fideism proclaims not simply the autonomy, but the self-sufficiency, of faith. It is self-contradictory in that it requires reason to argue against the use of reason. Modernism proclaims not simply the autonomy, but the self-sufficiency, of reason. It cannot meet its own criteria for truth claims and leads to nihilism, which negates both faith and reason and exalts the will. Catholicism proclaims the need for both faith and reason in the search for truth. It has built up an intellectual, moral and spiritual heritage unlike any other in the history of mankind. Thus, the choice facing us today is between Mohammed, Descartes, Nietzsche and the Pope.

I disagree that these are our choices, but it might seem that way for a Catholic trying to make sense of a world that is finally starting to outgrow the mythic worldview of the Church -- even the Church is becoming more rational (contra the current Pope).

We have many more choices, and many more subtleties within these categories. Beyond faith in a mythic God is trans-rational gnosis of a world far more complex than reason or faith can intuit.

Tags: Worldviews, Inevitable Choices, Mercatornet, Religion, culture, Philosophy, Richard Bastien, Mohammed, Descartes, Nietzsche, the Pope, Fideism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Catholicism

Economics Concept Explains Brain Mystery

[image source]

This article appeared in Live Science a few days back. It's always interesting when one discipline reveals something unknown about another -- in this case economics explaining a brain mystery. Strange that a statistics concept from economics explains how information moves from neuron to neuron in the brain -- and also very cool.

Economics Concept Explains Brain Mystery

By Amelia Tomas, LiveScience Staff

posted: 17 October 2008 09:37 am ET

Using a concept from economics, researchers have figured out how information gets pulled through a series of regions in the brain.

The economics approach, called Granger causality, now has been applied to neuroscience to suggest that neural wires physically stimulate each other, charging up networks in sequence. The result shows that materials are drawn from one specialized part of the brain to the next.

In economics, scholars use Granger causality as a statistical concept that is based on prediction. Add a twist of neuroscience, and Granger causality is a useful tool, says Chad Sylvester, a graduate student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The Granger concept supports evidence for neuron-to-neuron triggering by measuring them in a direct, but non-invasive way, he said.

For years, scientists could see which brain regions were contributing to specific mental tasks by viewing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, however getting those scans fast enough to trace the brain’s informational pull was difficult.

In Sylvester’s experiment, volunteers were asked to attune their gaze to a portion of a screen, looking for a specific cue. Previous research revealed that this task activated two brain areas: the frontoparietal cortex, which is involved in the direction of the attention; and the visual cortex, which becomes more active in the area where volunteers expected the stimulus to appear.

The researchers were able to show that as volunteers waited for the stimulus to appear, the frontoparietal cortex was specifically influencing the visual cortex, not the reverse. Sylvester’s use of Granger causality supported the finding of specific interactions between brain regions and their wired relay of information during a particular mental assignment.

Down the line, researchers plan to look into applying these insights into questions about brain organization and function, such as our capacity to pay attention and how memory retrieval areas interact with visual processing regions. Trauma studies will also explore how the brain can adapt to a simple injury, or how the presence of such an injury can hinder information flow to other extremely important areas of the brain.

The results of the new study are detailed in the Oct. 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

(For super-geeks reading this, according to Granger causality, if a signal X₁ "Granger-causes" a signal X₂, then past values of X₁ should contain information that helps predict X₂ above and beyond the information contained in past values of X₂ alone.)

• Video: Brain-Healing Nanotechnology
• 5 Ways to Beef Up Your Brain
• The Science Behind Our Economy

Tags: Economics Concept Explains Brain Mystery, Live Science, Science, economics, brain, Psychology, Granger causality, neuron-to-neuron triggering, neuroscience

Walter Shapiro - Why is Barack Obama now electable?

Interesting article over at Salon, by Walter Shapiro - Why is Barack Obama now electable?

Why is Barack Obama now electable?

From the youth vote to Sarah Palin's outdated embrace of the rural mystique, Salon's panel of demographers and consumer trend experts talks about how America is changing.

Editor's note: Listen to a podcast of this conversation here.

By Walter Shapiro

Oct. 21, 2008 | Cable TV and newspaper Op-Ed pages are full of pundits and campaign strategists using the latest election polls to opine glibly on the mood of America. Bored with this kind of bloviating, Salon decided to do the exact opposite — and use the mood of America as a way to generalize about the election. We assembled three leading demographers and trend analysts to talk about which major nonpolitical factors are shaping the electoral environment — from population shifts to major changes in public attitudes. We asked them about the state of America on the eve of one of the most epochal elections in modern history.

Demographer Cheryl Russell is the former editor in chief of American Demographics magazine, the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the author of the just-published "Bet You Didn't Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts About Living in the USA."

Consumer-behavior guru Ann Clurman is the executive vice president for trends and futures consulting at the Futures Company, the firm produced by the merger of two other forecasting firms, Henley Centre HeadlightVision and Yankelovich. She is the coauthor of the 2007 book "Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... and They're Just Getting Started."

Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics magazine, is an expert on demographics and consumer marketing. He serves as demographic trends analyst for the advertising agency Oglivy & Mather.

I spoke with Francese, Clurman and Russell by phone. The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

—Walter Shapiro

Salon: Welcome to you all. The whole idea of this conversation is, instead of generalizing about the country from the election, we have brought together three demographics experts and trend analysts to talk about how to generalize about the election from what they know about the country.

So where to start? Leaving the Wall Street meltdown aside for a few minutes, how would each of you say the country was different than it was four years ago?

Peter Francese: My feeling is what's different than four years ago, and it's only a little bit different, is the continuing concentration of income at the top of the income scale. Before the financial meltdown, there was enormous concentration of income in the top 20 percent, top 10 percent, top 5 percent of the income scale. And that distorted the picture of really what America is when the top 20 percent of households in America take home half of all the income earned. And I think there's been an increasing bitterness and anger about that, but I do think that the top 20 percent has suffered rather mightily over the last several weeks.

Salon: I want to come back to that in a second because I want to talk about how life has changed in the last four to six weeks because of the financial meltdown. But I was just curious, Ann and Cheryl, what leaps out at you about how the country has been changing in the last four years?

Ann Clurman: There has been a very well-known shift in power from marketers to consumers. Consumers have been really good at celebrating how smart they are, how empowered they are. We've been picking that up for at least a decade. What I think is really significant is what we're calling "personal authenticity." And what that was, that kind of reached a critical mass in 2004, it was a coming together of a number of values and trends that we described as consumers really working on internal clarity of their values. Not only were they kind of trying to understand what was really important to them, they began to develop the courage to act on [those things]. And part of that meant moving out of your comfort zone — and I think that is very important to what's happening today. But also, this desire to get life right became a passion. What we're seeing today is a massive shift beginning to surface and that shift is not just being caused the last four or five weeks.

Salon: I'm curious what Cheryl has to say to the same question.

Cheryl Russell: I want to put a word in here for the demographics. There is this slow, inexorable change in our country towards much greater diversity. You might not be able to bank on the stock market, but you can bank on demographic change. And that change means that the United States is going to be a minority majority country according to the Census Bureau by 2042. And what's happening is that every year we become more and more diverse and the voices of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities are becoming more powerful. And in this election I think this is playing out big time.

Francese: That is an absolute fact.

Salon: I’m going to put the financial crisis on hold for a minute and ask, Could the America of 2000 or 2004 embrace a Barack Obama for president? Was America ready four or eight years ago for a mixed-race presidential candidate or was it just that Obama happened to come along in 2008? Is he a lagging indicator that America is changing or is this the first year where it’s possible to imagine someone like Barack Obama being elected?

Clurman: Let me take the first crack at that. I know that demographics are critical and I'm going to leave that to the other experts. I've been thinking long and hard about this and my answer would be no, it wouldn't have happened in 2000 and 2004. First of all, critically, the changing demographics. Secondly, we have to look at the last eight years. I don't know what word you want to use for it — I was going to say "heinous." Thirdly, the youth vote. That's a huge demographic shift, the coming of age of the millennials or the Gen Ys, or whatever you want to call them, and their feelings about all of this. I also want to go back to what I said earlier, which is, people are much more willing to move outside their comfort zone. And while I do believe unfortunately a lot of people are still uncomfortable with Sen. Obama's candidacy, they're going to go for him because they understand it's time to change the discussion.

One of the things we are telling our marketing clients and one of the things I think Obama's people understand really well, is stop talking about what doesn't work, stop yearning for a time that was, stop talking about, "Gee, I wish we could still do this." With the new realities, we can't. That's old language. The language we need to use is changing the discussion entirely and to ask new questions. We tell everyone, "Think outside the box," and my argument would be, "Change the box in general." Apropos of this, I just got one of those breaking news e-mails, and apparently Advertising Age has named Obama the marketer of the year.

Russell: I agree with Ann. The times create a candidate. What we see playing out in the election today, it's really a long-simmering battle between the generations. It's the battle between the way things used to be and the way things will be. And everybody thought for a long time that the boomers would be the warriors in this battle. But in fact, boomers are actually, or many boomers are, conservative, so that battle never really played out fully. But now, it is their children, the millennial generation, that is on the front line of this battle.

Read the rest of the discussion.

Tags: Walter Shapiro, Why is Barack Obama now electable?, Salon, Politics, culture, society