Are You Emotionally Free?
Steps to freeing yourself.Our society is in the midst of an emotional meltdown. People are restless, volatile, our tempers about to blow. In the past year, Prozac was prescribed for over thirty million people. Domestic violence occurs in one out of six of households. Half of our marriages end in divorce.
None of this is how we want life to be. Our pressure cooker society pushes us to our emotional limits. We deserve relief from getting crucified by daily stresses. This book empowers you to attain this high quality of life and to handle stress artfully. I'm excited to present practical new tools for mastering your emotions in our hyper-tense world. It's lunacy to put up with being chronically anxious, fatigued, or depressed as so many of us have. I rebel against that cheerless status quo, and hope you will too.
Emotional Freedom offers the answer to reclaiming your happiness and heart. What is emotional freedom? It means increasing your ability to love by cultivating positive emotions and compassionately witnessing and transforming negative ones. It means keeping your center without absorbing the negativity of others. These fundamental living skills liberate you from fear and let you navigate adversity without attacking, losing your cool, or being derailed by it.
I wrote this book because, as an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCLA, I work in a mainstream medical system where the spiritual/intuitive aspects of emotions aren't understood. During my UCLA psychiatric training, we treated depression and anxiety, as biochemical imbalances requiring medication. I'd meet with patients for fifteen minutes every few weeks, write a prescription, then send them home. Though I never saw medications as the whole solution, I saw many patients experience at least partial "symptom relief," an undeniable relief of suffering. However, in the next two decades of medical practice, I've learned that emotional freedom involves much, much more.
The intellect, stunning as it may be, has restricted vision when it comes to emotions. This is why bringing intuition to the feeling-realm is so liberating. Intuition is a potent wisdom not mediated by the linear mind--a practical, smart, decision-making aid. Intuition can be a hunch, a dream, a "knowing," specific guidance, a gut feeling, or a warning of danger.
Emotions also have an intuitive language that begs to be decoded in our bodies--"subtle energies" that move through us that can be sensed. These are what Chinese medicine calls "chi," our vital life force. We feel emotions internally, while their energy expands beyond our bodies. Similarly, other people's emotional energy impacts us.
Today, I am a woman who travels many worlds. My approach to emotional freedom blends traditional and nontraditional realms. In this book, I'll discuss the four major components of emotions that shape your health and mood: biology, subtle energy, psychology, and spirituality. It's impossible to grasp how we tick emotionally without a cosmic perspective; everything about us, including our biology, is an expression of the divine.A first step towards achieving emotional freedom is to know where you currently stand. Here is a sample from "The Emotional Freedom Test" in my book.
1. If I'm angry with someone, I'll breathe and
center myself before I react.2. When I'm filled with self-doubt or fear
I treat myself lovingly.3. When stuck in traffic or if something
doesn't happen on my timetable, I
have patience.4. After a hard day, I focus on what I'm
grateful for rather than beating myself up
for what has gone wrong.5. I have empathy for others but I don't
become their therapist or absorb their
emotional pain.Answering "yes" to 4-5 questions means you are experiencing emotional freedom. "2-3"yeses indicates some emotional freedom. 1-2 "yeses" indicate a low level. Zero "yeses" indicates you are not enjoying a lot of emotional freedom but you can start to make change now
* * *
Adapted from Dr. Judith Orloff's new book "Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life" (Harmony Books, 2009)
Judith Orloff, MD, is the author of Emotional Freedom. Check out this book and free articles on her website drjudithorloff.com. Dr. Orloff is a UCLA psychiatrist who synthesizes the pearls of traditional medicine with cutting edge knowledge of intuition, energy. and spirituality.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Judith Orloff - Are You Emotionally Free?
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
TED Talks - Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities
How can a struggling country break out of poverty if it's trapped in a system of bad rules? Economist Paul Romer unveils a bold idea: "charter cities," city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. (Could Guantánamo Bay become the next Hong Kong?)
About Paul Romer
Paul Romer is developing a radical new model of growth and governance, which calls for the establishment of city-scale special administrative zones. Full bio and more links
Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness
The authors propose a term, ipseity, for the state of human beings beneath all of the programming, habits, our Buddhanature - but they look at it from a neuroscience perspective. Very cool.
Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Antoine Lutz, John D. Dunne, and Richard J. Davidson
[In press in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness. Edited by P. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch and E. Thompson.]
Abstract
The overall goal of this essay is to explore the initial findings of neuroscientific research on meditation; in doing so, the essay also suggests potential avenues of further inquiry. The essay consists of three sections that, while integral to the essay as a whole, may also be read independently. The first section, “Defining Meditation,” notes the need for a more precise understanding of meditation as a scientific explanandum. Arguing for the importance of distinguishing the particularities of various traditions, the section presents the theory of meditation from the paradigmatic perspective of Buddhism, and it discusses the difficulties encountered when working with such theories. The section includes an overview of three practices that have been the subject of research, and it ends with a strategy for developing a questionnaire to more precisely define a practice under examination. The second section, “the Intersection of Neuroscience and Meditation,” explores some scientific motivations for the neuroscientific examination of meditation in terms of its potential impact on the brain and body of long-term practitioners. After an overview of the mechanisms of mind-body interaction, this section addresses the use of first-person expertise, especially in relation to the potential for research on the neural counterpart of subjective experience. In general terms, the section thus points to the possible contributions of research on meditation to the neuroscience of consciousness. The final section, “Neuroelectric and Neuroimaging Correlates of Meditation,” reviews the most relevant neuroelectric and neuroimaging findings of research conducted to date, including some preliminary correlates of the previously discussed Buddhist practices.
Chronic Stress Restructures the Brain
How Chronic Stress Leads to Bad Choices - By Restructuring the Brain
By Catarina Amorim
Every day we make a multitude of decisions based on the consequences of our actions; goal-orientated responses.
In an always changing environment this capacity is crucial but, because it is complex, it also requires a lot from the brain. So repeated actions, like to press the elevator button to our floor, become linked to other type of neural responses, which are automatic and so less demanding. And if necessary it is always possible to switch back to the first kind of response.
New research by Portuguese scientists in the July 31st of Science reveals that chronic stress – too many times a feature of modern life - interferes with this switching capacity, by freezing individuals into automatic/habit responses mode. This effect is associated with morphological changes in the brain, where areas linked to habitual responses are enlarged and have thus potentially better neural connectivity, and the opposite – atrophy and less connections - occurs in those areas mediating goal-orientated responses.
The discovery of these stress effects have important implications: to understand better the pathology of stress-related disorders and how the brain works in general but also to a variety of more “real” issues from understanding the impact of modern life styles or how to prevent bad choices in situations where constant stress seems to be unavoidable.
Chronic stress is major issue in today’s society and is known to lead to a variety of health problems from ulcers to hypertension. We all also have experienced how our decision making can become affected by stress and how many wrong choices we have made as result. How exactly this occurs is the question behind the work now published by Eduardo Dias-Ferreira, Nuno Sousa and colleagues from the University of Minho in Portugal and the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA.
The researchers looked into goal-orientated decisions (so those where consequences are taken into account) and automatic decisions (so those resulting from habit) as well as the switch between the two, and how this was affected by chronic stress.
To answer that Ferreira and colleagues used rats exposed to chronic stress and, together with normal control rats, put them through training to learn to press a lever in order to obtain food rewards. Both stressed and control rats responded very similarly, rising the number of pressings with time as they learned that this would increase the rewards obtained.
But when the situation was changed by feeding the animals on the side, so making the food rewards less appealing, while control rats were able to re-evaluate the situation and diminish the number of pressings, stressed rats continued to push the lever constantly despite the effort this required. This suggested that once a habit was established stressed animals were no longer capable of switching the response back.
To assure that these results were not simply a consequence of a particular predilection for the food supplied, other rats were instead trained to press different levers to achieve different rewards but the same conclusion was reached: chronic stress predisposes animals to switch rapidly from goal-orientated to automatic kind of responses and make them incapable of switching back when new conditions required it.
Ferreira, Sousa and colleagues also looked into the stressed rats brain to access if this behavioural dysfunctionality could be associated with changes in this organ. For that the researchers analysed the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), which are brain areas previously associated to goal-orientated actions and habit formation respectively.
And in fact major changes were found with the stressed brain showing an atrophied DMS with a reduced number of connections between neurons, and an enlarged DLS with increased neural connectivity when compared with the brain of non-stressed control mice.
A proper response to a constant changing environment gives individuals an important advantage in life. But the elaborated brain response that this demands requires a lot of energy to maintain, so to switch to automatic responses when possible, helps to save time and brain resources and can always be switched back if necessary. Chronic stress is here shown to affect this capability of switching the responses according to need by restructuring the neural connectivities of the brain areas linked to the two responses. It is known that inactivation of DMS or DLS can bias behaviour towards the other type of response which suggests that the behavioural effects of stress result from a competition between the two areas, with the enlarged, better connected, DLS “winning”.
Ferreira, Sousa and colleagues’ study has several implications as it can, for example, help to explain why so many times stress-related diseases are associated with addictive or compulsive behaviour. But also, in a stress-dominated society like ours, to understand how constant stress can directly affect our choices can help to develop mechanism to deal with it, a particularly important issue, for example, for army personnel in war zones
And in fact Nuno Sousa, the head to the research group involved in the work says when asked about future work “We are now focusing our research efforts in unravelling the molecular and functional mechanisms underlying these findings, in order to develop in the future new strategies that can revert these stress-induced bias in decision-making processes”
Article: “Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making”, Science 31 July 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5940, pp. 621 – 625 DOI: 10.1126/science.1171203
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Robert Augustus Masters - EXCITEMENT IN DRAG: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FEAR
If you are looking for genuine transformation, you need
look no further than your fear.
In it there exists not only an abundance of trapped
energy, but also the very testing and challenge which we
need in order to live a deeper, more authentic life.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it...
EXCITEMENT IN DRAG:
AN INSIDE LOOK AT FEAR
As simplistic as it may sound, fear often is just excitement in endarkened
drag. If we are excited and then we contract, fear arises; if we are fearful
and then expand, excitement arises. Same energy, different context.
This is not all that difficult to recognize when we consider our fear
in its physical/physiological dimensions, but not so easy to recognize
when we consider our fear in its mental dimensions (chronic doubt, for
example).
One form that excitement can take (for better or for worse) is anger.
Not surprisingly, fear and anger are biochemically all but identical. Same
adrenaline, different directionality — fear retreats, anger moves forward.
Same adrenaline, different intentionality — fear avoids, anger engages.
Fear disempowers, whereas anger empowers, so long as it is not allowed
to mutate into aggression. When the fearful get truly angry, they are not
afraid any more, but just angry. Not that getting angry is the solution
for fearfulness — but the arising of anger can really empower us, in
contrast to the arising of fear.
Fear comes in many forms — worry, anxiety, panic, paranoia, angst,
terror, dread, doubt — but fundamentally is just apprehensive selfconstriction,
a contractile aversion that takes shape as a mildly to deeply
unpleasant gripping feeling that announces, compellingly and viscerally:
I am not safe; or I am threatened; or I am in danger.
This message — scrawled in our own blood — may often be impervious
to cognitive intervention. Consider the following example: If we suffered
a particularly difficult birth, with our vital signs having accelerated for a
significant amount of time into zones of extreme danger — so that our
biological survival was clearly at stake — we obviously didn’t mentally
reflect on our situation (our brain not being developmentally capable of
doing so), but rather automatically reacted by “doing” whatever most
quickly and effectively reduced the danger, like going neurologically
limp or “depressing” our vital signs.
Later in life, when in the presence of danger (real or imagined), we may
then not only get afraid, but may also revert, beyond any mental countereffort,
to what originally had “worked” to save our life — withdrawing,
shutting down, turning off, getting depressed, whatever does the job.
Many relationships are ruined or kept in the shallows by such reversion
(which is not always a result of birth trauma!) — the “depressing” of our
vitals signs both “saves” and debilitates us, making us all but incapable
of sustained intimacy.
However it manifests, fear very easily undercuts our rationality. Fear
that’s allowed to infiltrate our mind doesn’t waste any time generating
thoughts that support and amplify it.
Animals get afraid — demonstrating the physiology and characteristic
behaviors of fear — when actual danger is present and registers; the
electrifying biochemistry of fear immediately enables them to flee or,
less commonly, to freeze.
Humans, however, are usually far less practically inclined, at least after
infancy, getting afraid not only in the present, but also projecting
fearfulness into the past (as in guilt, which is shame injected with enough
fear to keep us small) and the future (as in worry or anxiety), generally
keeping ourselves not only chronically afraid, but also overcommitted or
enslaved to whatever most successfully keeps us sufficiently distanced
from our fear.
Fear can be adaptive or maladaptive. The rush of fear we feel when we
are getting too close to a precipice is useful, immediately alerting and
readying us for needed action (like stepping back). Worry, on the other
hand, is far from useful — when we permit it to gnaw at us, and to enlist
our cognition in its service, we’re only keeping ourselves off track, bound
up in a too narrowly framed view. Worry — which is socially acceptable
anxiety — keeps us spinning in a cranial cramp, until we leave for more
life-giving territory (perhaps after having “worried our head off ”).
To journey into, unguardedly feel, and directly relate to our fear (instead
of from it) requires that our usual distancing strategies, cognitive and
otherwise, be exposed and disarmed — assuming, of course, that it
is timely to do so. Our fear can then be touched and known from the
inside, and eventually divested of its power to shrink, misguide, or
intimidate us.
Our smaller fears, unpleasant as they might be, are not usually very
difficult to temporarily escape or sedate — we know what we are afraid
of; we are perhaps even oddly comforted by its uncomfortable or edgy
familiarity; and we know when to throw it a piece of meat and when
not to. We know it well enough to know how to take the edge off it,
through positive thinking, sex, food, drugs, intense exercise, electronic
fixes, and other such distracting preoccupations — such strategies give
us some sense of control, regardless of what they cost us.
That is, when our fear has a concrete, everyday object upon which to
focus or fixate, we are on miserable yet dependably familiar ground,
seemingly far from the quicksands of our deeper fears. Thus do we
tend to prefer the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of
the deep.
And so thus do we tend to cling, however indirectly, to our everyday
fearfulness, focusing on its mental content much more than the raw
feeling itself. We then leave the nature of fear out of our inquiry,
settling instead for explanations for why we are afraid. It’s easy to use
our reasoning powers to distance ourselves from our fearfulness, yet
even from the loftiest and most seemingly safe neocortical towers we
are not entirely out of the reach of our core fears.
Until we move toward our fear, we will be bound by it.
The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.
This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge
of all the ways in which we have learned to get away from fear, so that
when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it — rather than
through its eyes — and, to whatever degree, saying no thanks. Getting
inside fear means getting past its periphery, past its defining thoughts,
past its propagandizing sentinels. Entering the dragon’s cave.
Once we’re within fear, under its skin, with our attention scanning our
surroundings like a miner’s headlamp, we can begin acquainting ourselves
with its features, particularly those sensations and beliefs that together
make it into a something we label “fear.” The closer we get to it, the
better we can see it. However, we need to learn not to get close too
quickly, not to move so fast that we can’t keep digesting and integrating
what we’re experiencing.
When we remain outside our fear, we remain trapped in it.
When we, however, consciously get inside our fear, it’s as if it turns
inside out. Getting inside our fear with wakeful attention and compassion
actually expands our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness at
the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels and dissipates,
terminating its occupancy of us.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.
Jonah Lehrer - The truth about grit
Read the rest of the article.The truth about grit
Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success
By Jonah Lehrer August 2, 2009
(Boston Globe / Greg Klee)
It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall - it took Newton to explain why.
Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.”
Although biographers have long celebrated Newton’s intellect - he also pioneered calculus - it’s clear that his achievements aren’t solely a byproduct of his piercing intelligence. Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles, to stick with the same stubborn mystery - why did the apple fall, but the moon remain in the sky? - until he found the answer.
While stories of grit have long been associated with self-help manuals and life coaches - Samuel Smiles, the author of the influential Victorian text “Self-Help” preached the virtue of perseverance - these new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they’re able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. Although this field of study is only a few years old, it’s already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit. Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new - “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked - the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.
“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”
The hope among scientists is that a better understanding of grit will allow educators to teach the skill in schools and lead to a generation of grittier children. Parents, of course, have a big role to play as well, since there’s evidence that even offhand comments - such as how a child is praised - can significantly influence the manner in which kids respond to challenges. And it’s not just educators and parents who are interested in grit: the United States Army has supported much of the research, as it searches for new methods of identifying who is best suited for the stress of the battlefield.
The new focus on grit is part of a larger scientific attempt to study the personality traits that best predict achievement in the real world. While researchers have long focused on measurements of intelligence, such as the IQ test, as the crucial marker of future success, these scientists point out that most of the variation in individual achievement - what makes one person successful, while another might struggle - has nothing to do with being smart. Instead, it largely depends on personality traits such as grit and conscientiousness. It’s not that intelligence isn’t really important - Newton was clearly a genius - but that having a high IQ is not nearly enough.
In 1869, Francis Galton published “Hereditary Genius,” his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement. Galton’s method was straightforward: he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with “very high reputations,” including poets, politicians, and scientists. That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising: success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent. Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when “ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.”Consider, for instance, a recent study led by Duckworth that measured the grittiness of cadets at West Point, the elite military academy. Although West Point is highly selective, approximately 5 percent of cadets drop out after the first summer of training, which is known as “Beast Barracks.” The Army has long searched for the variables that best predict whether or not cadets will graduate, using everything from SAT scores to physical fitness. But none of those variables were particularly useful. In fact, it wasn’t until Duckworth tested the cadets of the 2008 West Point class using a questionnaire - the test consists of statements such as “Setbacks don’t discourage me” - that the Army found a measurement that actually worked. Duckworth has since repeated the survey with subsequent West Point classes, and the result is always the same : the cadets that remain are those with grit.
Ajahn Sumedho - Sense of the Sacred
Read the whole article.
I spent six months in India this year [2003]. And as soon as we arrived in Bombay I felt this sense of being at home. In countries like India and Thailand, monks, sadhus or holy men, or whatever you want to call them, are so much part of the culture that you feel unquestionably accepted there. Even though most people in India don’t know much about Buddhism, they know you are someone who is trying to live the holy life, and you feel this incredible acceptance. In India everything fits in, no matter how weird, diseased, strange or eccentric it might be. The fact that you are there means you belong. So I found it to be a very pleasant country to be in.
I spent two months in Benares, which is a holy city for the Hindus, and I always find it one of the most interesting cities in the world. I was staying right on the ghats, right near the main ghat, in fact, just watching life going on; you see marriages taking place, corpses burning, pujas, and people bathing. The Hindus love to bathe in the river Ganges, and they go by their thousands to do it; the cows and water buffaloes also bathe in the river, and the sewage goes into it, and human and animal corpses are thrown into it, and they also wash their clothes in it ― it takes everything.
So, India is an interesting place to be ― once you get over the initial shock that it gives Westerners; it is a culture in which the sense of the sacred is still very much alive, still active and functioning; and Benares in particular is a city where everything is sacred, no matter how good or bad, clean or dirty, or right or wrong. The sense of sacredness is palpable in that place; in fact the whole city is like a puja to the great river Ganges, and there is this powerful devotion to the various deities ― Shiva, usually, or Kali or Ganesha ― and there is this sense of recognising something beyond just the material world and individual needs.
What it Means to Be Human
Drawing on a range of disciplines, this provocative program looked at how discoveries in areas like fundamental physics, anthropology, and genomics are influencing our understanding of uniquely human characteristics. As science increasingly tests these boundaries — from the roots of morality and our capacity to contemplate our own existence to the emergence of artificial intelligence — what will it mean to be human?Part One:
The event was moderated by Charlie Rose. Participants include philosopher Daniel Dennett, artist Jonathan Harris, anthropologist Ian Tattersall, geneticist Francis Collins, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, philosopher Patricia Churchland, sociologist Nikolas Rose, embryonic stem cell biologist Renee Reijo Pera, and Nobel Laureates Harold Varmus and Paul Nurse.
World Science Festival 2008: What It Means To Be Human. Part 1 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Part Two:
World Science Festival 2008: What It Means To Be Human. Part 1 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Part Three:
World Science Festival 2008: What It Means to Be Human, Part 3 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Part Four:
World Science Festival 2008: What it Means to be Human, Part 4 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Part Five:
World Science Festival 2008: What it Means to be Human, Part 5 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Buddhist Geeks - Episode 132: Buddhist Chaplaincy, Buddhist Youth
Buddhist Geeks - Episode 132: Buddhist Chaplaincy, Buddhist Youth
This week we're joined by Reverend Danny Fisher--a Buddhist Chaplain and author. Danny shares with us his reasons for becoming chaplain, where the notion of chaplaincy or service to others comes from in the Buddhist tradition, and what it's like to undertake a Buddhist-based divinity program.
In the 2nd half of our conversation we ask him about his take on the challenges and opportunities that young Buddhists encounter. Being an emerging voice for young Buddhists, and a popular Buddhist blogger, Danny shares with us some of his thoughts on what it's like being a young Buddhist today.Related Links:
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Our 'caveman logic' embraces ESP over evolution
Our 'caveman logic' embraces ESP over evolution
Psychologist urges critical thinking to cure 'primitive' notions
IMAGE: "Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World " is published by Prometheus Books.
Click here for more information. We see the face of the Virgin Mary staring up at us from a grilled cheese sandwich and sell the uneaten portion of our meal for $37,000 on eBay. We believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels over the scientific theory of evolution. While science offers a wealth of rational explanations for natural phenomena, we often prefer to embrace the fantasies that reassured our distant ancestors. And we'll even go to war to protect our delusions against those who do not share them.
These are examples of what evolutionary psychologist Hank Davis calls "Caveman Logic." Although some examples are funny, the condition itself is no laughing matter. In CAVEMAN LOGIC: THE PERSISTENCE OF PRIMITIVE THINKING IN A MODERN WORLD (Prometheus Books, $19.98), Davis encourages us to transcend the mental default settings and tribal loyalties that worked well for our ancestors back in the Pleistocene age. Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although he argues that religion, itself, is not the problem but "an inevitable by-product of how our minds misperform."
"Caveman Logic is a whirlwind tour through the deeper recesses of our evolved mind. Hank Davis brings to bear cutting edge research from the cognitive sciences to reveal how mental tools designed to serve the needs of our ancient ancestors continue to exert an influence, both subtle and powerful, on human thought and behavior today," said John Teehan, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University and author of In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence.
Davis says CAVEMAN LOGIC: THE PERSISTENCE OF PRIMITIVE THINKING IN A MODERN WORLD is the product of more than two decades of pondering, teaching and writing about "the powerful influence of irrational, delusional thinking that is anchored to our Pleistocene-era brain circuitry." He asserts that much of this primitive thinking is supported by modern social institutions. For example, a 2007 poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe angels and demons are active forces in the world, while a 2009 survey concluded that only 39 percent believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. Even non-religious persons often thank God or "the heavens" in response to good news.
Click here for more information. "Ways of thinking that were both reasonable and advantageous in caveman days become illogical—and potentially destructive—when they are overextended to modern times," says Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.
Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age adds, "Hank Davis reveals the deep roots of humanity's weakness for superstitions, blind assumptions and primitive thinking, and shows how we can start to overcome 'caveman logic.'"
Davis advocates a world in which "spirituality" is viewed as a dangerous rather than an admirable quality, and suggests ways in which we can overcome our innate predisposition toward irrationality. Davis points out that, "biology is not destiny." Just as some of us succeed in watching our diets, resisting violent impulses, and engaging in unselfish behavior, we can learn to use critical thinking and the insights of science to guide individual effort and social action in the service of our whole species.
###About the Author: Hank Davis (Guelph, Ontario, Canada) is an award-winning professor of psychology who teaches at the University of Guelph. He is the author of several books and more than one hundred scientific papers.
Brain's Potential Explained by Big New Idea
Brain's Potential Explained by Big New Idea
By Rachael Rettner, LiveScience Staff
posted: 28 July 2009 10:13 am ET
Different species and individuals have limits as to what they can learn. For instance, you can't teach your dog to read. But what sets these boundaries?
According to a new hypothesis, components of an organism's brain cortex may help determine how well that organism — be it dog, monkey or human — learns and improves its cognitive skills.
The cortex is your brain's outer layer — the exterior part you can see if you look at a picture of the whole organ.
The new idea posits that small sets of neuronal cells in the cortex, called cortical modules, determine our "cognitive plasticity," that is, our capacity to learn new ways of thinking, or improve upon old ones.
"What [constrains] an individual organisms' ability to learn cognitive skills is essentially the diversity and number of [cortical] modules they have," said Eduardo Mercado III, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. "So, if you think about it like a set of Legos, if you have more Legos, you can build a wider variety of things."
Quality, not size, matters
These cortical modules are very spatially distinct, like circles in a honeycomb-pattern layered over a brain, Mercado said.
Past studies have shown that, in general, the larger the cortex, the higher an organism's intellectual level will be. However, with Mercado's hypothesis, it is not necessarily the size, but rather, the variety and quantity of cortical modules that matter. A larger cortex simply provides space for lots of diverse modules.
His idea may explain why rats are thought to have a greater cognitive plasticity than cows, even though cows have a larger cortex. Mercado predicts that if you compared the brains of these animals in a very detailed way, the rat would have more variety, and perhaps a larger number, of cortical modules.
So what controls the amount and diversity of these modules? They are influenced by both genetics and the environment, Mercado said.
"From birth you have genetic codes that are determining essentially the gross number that you have ... so that's sort of a rough guide," he said.
Later, developmental and learning experiences can increase or decrease the variety or the number of cortical modules, he said. Changes in these modules may also explain why people have different learning capacities as they grow older.
What about humans?If you looked at two people's brains, you couldn't necessarily tell which one would have a higher intellectual capacity, Mercado said. Even if one person has a wider variety of cortical modules than someone else, experiences may still determine whether or not he or she meets their full potential.
"Imagine someone who would be a really capable mathematician, but they were never exposed to math," Mercado said. "They may have more diverse modules than someone who's a professional mathematician who has less potential, but has been training their whole lives. So [the mathematician's] capacity would still be greater, even though they had less [module] diversity [initially]," he said.
Mercado notes that cognitive plasticity is not the same thing as intelligence. "One's about learning and one's about performance. Intelligence is a measure of what you can do, and cognitive plasticity is a measure of what your potential is," he said.
Right now, comparing the cortical modules in two people's brains would be almost impossible because there is not an easy way to view them in live people. Scientists study these modules either by slicing the brain and examining the individual cells, or by using brain electrodes.
Growing your cortex
Mercado's hypothesis is based on correlations, rather than direct evidence. Across species, having a larger number and variety of these modules is correlated with an increased intellectual capacity. And, in people, learning new skills leads to changes in brain circuitry that may mean you've increased the number of cortical modules.
"The region of the cortex that's being involved in that skill, it tends to enlarge, which suggests that there are more modules involved," Mercado explained.
While past studies have suggested that the size of the cortex is related to intelligence, Mercado is one of the first to suggest that cortical modules may be tied to our learning capacity.
Learning more about how cortical modules influence our cognitive plasticity could help educators tailor their teaching methods to allow students to reach their full potential.
However, more knowledge about what allows us to learn is not without dangers, Mercado said. Much like athletes use steroids to enhance their muscle fiber strength, it's possible that one day people may try and abuse drugs meant to improve cognition.
"New technologies for increasing cognitive plasticity have ethical implications far beyond those raised by doping in sports" and would give new meaning to the phrase 'changing your mind,'" Mercado said.
His hypothesis was published in the June issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
SciAm - Skeptic's Take on the Life and Argued Works of Shakespeare
Who was Shakespeare, and did he write all the amazing plays and poetry attributed to him? Those questions have been raging for years in the academic world of Shakespeare studies. Scientific American takes a look at the issue.
Skeptic's Take on the Life and Argued Works of Shakespeare
The anti-Stratfordian skeptics are back, and this time they have a Supreme Court justice on their side
For centuries, Shakespeare skeptics have doubted the authorship of the Stratfordian Bard's literary corpus, proffering no fewer than 50 alternative candidates, including Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe and the leading contender among the "anti-Stratfordians," Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. And for nearly as long, the Shakespeare skeptics have toiled in relative obscurity, holding conferences in tiny gatherings and dreaming of the day their campaign would make front-page news. On April 18, 2009, the Wall Street Journal granted their wish with a feature story on how U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens came to believe (and throw his judicial weight behind) the skeptics.
Stevens's argument retreads a well-worn syllogism: Shakespeare's plays are so culturally rich that they could only have been written by a noble or scholar of great learning. The historical William Shakespeare was a commoner with no more than a grammar school education. Ergo, Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare. For example, Stevens asks, "Where are the books? You can't be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home. He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event—the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt."
But reasonable doubt should not cost an author his claim, at least not if we treat history as a science instead of as a legal debate. In science, a reigning theory is presumed provisionally true and continues to hold sway unless and until a challenging theory explains the current data as well and also accounts for anomalies that the prevailing one cannot. Applying that principle here, we should grant that Shakespeare wrote the plays unless and until the anti-Stratfordians can make their case for a challenger who fits more of the literary and historical data.
I explained this to John M. Shahan, chair of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (www.DoubtAboutWill.org), who insisted that although most skeptics hold that the true playwright was the earl of Oxford, their mission has merely been to sow the seeds of doubt. I understood why when I examined the case for de Vere. For example, de Vere’s partisans exalt his education at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford and believe that the plays could only have been penned by someone of such erudition. Yet the plays make many allusions to the grammar school education that Shakespeare had and not to that university life held so dear by the skeptics: instead of Cambridge masters and Oxford dons, Shakespeare routinely references schoolmasters, schoolboys and schoolbooks.
As for Shakespeare’s humble upbringing, his father was a middle-class landowner whose estate was valued at the then respectable sum of £500 (you could purchase a modest home for £50) and whose social standing was as high as or higher than that of either Marlowe or Ben Jonson, who were themselves sons of a shoemaker and bricklayer, respectively, and somehow managed to master the belles lettres.
In the end, it’s not enough merely to plant doubts about Will. Some anti-Stratfordians question Shakespeare’s existence, but the number of references to him from his own time could only be accounted for by a playwright of that name (unless de Vere used Shakespeare as a nom de plume, for which there is zero evidence). And although Shakespeare’s skeptics note that there are no manuscripts, receipts, diaries or letters from him, they neglect to mention that we have none of these for Marlowe, either.
In other words, reasonable doubt is not enough to dethrone the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, and to date, no overwhelming case has been made for any other author. In contrast, hundreds of examples of historical and literary consilience have been compiled by Purchase College theatre professor and playwright Scott McCrea in his aptly titled book The Case for Shakespeare (Praeger, 2008), which demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that, in the Bard’s own words from Julius Caesar, Shakespeare was not just a man but the man: “the elements / So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up, / And say to all the world, This was a man!”
Buddhism in the Weekly World News
From The Worst Horse’s Mouth: Warning! This blogpost is “for entertainment purposes only”
If irreverence isn’t your thing, you might want to skip this look at coverage of Buddhism as “reported” by the once-ubiquitous tabloid, The Weekly World News. Otherwise, step right this way and meet the Chinese monk who can raise the dead! All you’ll need is a sense of humor. (A lousy one might even be an advantage.) Nothing heavy here — just some weekend silliness for those who want it.
Pop-culture stars and comedians used to say that you knew you’d “made it” when MAD magazine saw fit to parody you. (When I had a letter published in its pages at age 22, I immediately understood that I was then as famous as I’d ever be.) Likewise, if you somehow found yourself having a televised chat with Johnny Carson, that meant something — if you cared about such things. But one point of entry into pop-culture usually goes overlooked: The Weekly World News.
The resolutely black-and-white tabloid lived from 1979 until 2007, and probably saw its heyday in the 80s and 90s, having jumped from National Enquirer sister and sort-of competitor to full-on, unabashed purveyor of absurdity. Most of the stories were expertly matched with staged, doctored photos of an alternate Earth full of US senators who were actually aliens, still-living Elvises, and animal/human hybrids. It was bizarre and essentially full of lies (though
near its end it began printing a disclaimer that “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.”). But it looked at and even contributed to pop-culture in a real, if highly skewed, way. If you made it into the WWN, you’d made it — at least to those readers who believed it all, and to those who didn’t but loved it anyway. (Basically, hipster doofuses like me.)
So when I recently saw Bat Boy Lives!, a WWN “best of” that came out before the tabloid’s death, I had to grab it. It was only $12.95 (Cheap!), but even as I was paying for it — because this is how my sad mind works — I wondered: would there be any Buddhism in it? It seems you can find references to Buddhism in the weirdest places if you look hard enough, and the Weekly World News remains just about the “weirdest place” I can think of.
I checked the index. “Buddhism” only had one entry listed. I flipped to page 135:
Okay, a frog guarding a relic of the historical Buddha. That’s sorta cute. (Though reading that the poor frog was being almost killed by people harassing it for winning lotto numbers was less cute.) But I was disappointed: too tame! Where was the craziness? (When I later googled “Buddha’s footprint” and “frog,” I was stunned to learn that the story seems to be corroborated by more legit sources!) But a little more flipping around delivered some craziness, to be sure.
