BBC Health - Recreating the caveman diet

I like the caveman diet, or Paleo Diet - I don't quite follow it exactly, since I eat dairy - but the principle of avoiding processed foods, building a diet around veggies, nuts, meats, eggs, fruit and completely unprocessed grains (not milled) is a great approach to health and fat loss.

It's nice to see the BBC taking it seriously and not dismissing as a silly fad. This is a good article, but it makes wonder what the hell Unilever wants with the Paleo approach.

Recreating the caveman diet

By Philippa Roxby Health reporter, BBC News

Palaeolithic man cooked and ate a huge range of plants

A team of scientists has begun exploring what can be learned from the diet of cavemen who lived more than two million years ago.

Research will focus on how the food eaten by hunter-gatherers could enhance modern day nutrition.

Our ancestors in the palaeolithic period, which covers 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago, are thought to have had a diet based on vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat.

Cereals, potatoes, bread and milk did not feature at all. It was only with the dawn of agriculture (around 10,000 years ago) that our diets evolved to include what we think of as staple foods now.

So are we programmed to eat what we do today - or are we better suited to the diet of our ancestors?

Global brand giant Unilever has brought scientists and experts from fields as diverse as evolutionary genetics, anthropology, food science and botany together to find out the answer.

Plant diversity

Dr Mark Berry, who is in charge of the research at Unilever, says the aim is to create a healthier diet for people today, drawing inspiration from that period.

"Palaeolithic man may have died earlier than we do now, but he didn't die of bad nutrition...” ~ Prof Mark Thomas, University College London

"The main hallmark of the palaeolithic diet was a huge diversity of plants. Nowadays we try our best to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day. They ate 20 to 25 plant-based foods a day," said Dr Berry.

So contrary to common belief, palaeolithic man was not a raging carnivore. He was an omnivore who loved his greens.

He would have gathered seeds to eat, used plants and herbs for flavouring and preserving fish and meat, and collected wild berries.

Their need for other essential nutrients would have been found in fish while pulses provided additional proteins.

In contrast to the cereal crops we rely on now for the basis of our food, the pre-farming diet contained fewer carbohydrates, less fat and more vegetables. So was it a healthier diet?

"It seems so," said Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London. "Palaeolithic man may have died earlier than we do now, but he didn't die of bad nutrition."

Previous research has shown that the diet and lifestyle of hunter-gatherers was characterised by a lower incidence of "diseases of affluence" such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

Adapted to milk

Although we have adapted to a very different diet over thousands of years, Professor Thomas says: "There is a mismatch between the diet we've evolved for and the one that we have."

He cites milk as an example of something humans have adapted to over time.

"Ten thousand years ago, humans had access to milk but couldn't drink it. We couldn't digest it. Now we're 100% adapted to a milk-rich diet."

But the plants eaten by our palaeolithic ancestors were entirely different.

They bear little relation to the vegetables, plant and cereal products we see on our supermarket shelves today.

Professor Monique Simmonds, head of the sustainable uses of plants group at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who is an expert in this area, explained why.

"The development of agriculture meant crops were grown on a large scale to make money. Instead of growing indigenous material, farming encouraged the production of crops like wheat, which have an international market."

And so our diets began to shrink and crops became more and more refined until, in 2010, only a few varieties of wheat and maize remain.

At Kew, Prof Simmonds is trying to find out what was in those original plants before we started to play with them.

"We need to decrease our reliance on refined sugar and a heavy carbohydrate diet, and replace some of the things we have lost," she says.

"The natural genes of plants species we collect at Kew will give us an insight into the wild relatives of the crop plants we know today."

By looking into the past, we may just discover how to lead healthier lives.

Tags: BBC, Recreating the caveman diet, Paleolithic, Paleo Diet, Mark Berry, Unilever, Mark Thomas, omnivore, lower incidence, diseases of affluence, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, Monique Simmonds, milk, Philippa Roxby

The Mirror of the Cosmos - Is cosmology a form of theology for a secular age?

Cool article from Big Questions Online - mostly I like the painting of Albertus Magnus.
:)

The Mirror of the Cosmos

Is cosmology a form of theology for a secular age?

De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Getty

Albertus Magnus, On the Nature of Things

By Mark Vernon

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Why is cosmology so popular? Books by writers such as Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking on fine-tuning or the multiverse routinely become bestsellers. They’re good writers, of course. And there’s the aesthetic appeal of cosmology too, offering a ceaseless stream of heavenly images at which to wonder and gaze. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

After all, many other branches of physics are progressing as fast, and arguably have a bigger impact upon our daily lives. But when did you last pick up a paperback on solid state physics, one of the largest contemporary research fields? Or who would choose a book about optics over one about the Big Bang? Chaos theory gets a look in, as does quantum theory — though that’s very close to cosmology, as the history of universe turns on the physics of the very small.

So here’s a possibility. Cosmology is so popular, not just because of the science, but because it allows us to ask the big questions — where we come from, who we are, where we’re going. It’s metaphysics by other means. If the Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages liked to speculate about the number of angels on the heads of pins, we today like to speculate about the number of dimensions wrapped up in string theory. The activities are similar insofar as they feed the delight we find in awe-inspiring wonder.

The most obvious example of “theophysics” concerns the so-called God particle. This is the Higgs boson, required by the standard model in particle physics to account for the observation that many particles have mass. But why should an esoteric entity to do with mass gain such a weighty theological ascription?

It was named by Leon Lederman, a former director of Fermilab. He thought the divine reference was suitable because the particle is so crucial to contemporary physics, and yet simultaneously so elusive. And is that not a bit like God? If God does exist, then God would be the ground of everything, and also never quite seen — only detected in the after effects of the divine wake, like traces in a particle collider. Ponder the Higgs boson and you ponder something of the concept of God.

Physicists profess to hate the title. But the media love it. And that surely reflects a wider public consciousness, sparked by physicists like Stephen Hawking, who are in search of a “theory of everything.” Again, there’s metaphysics in that dream, because a theory of everything would have many divine properties. It would be a unity — one entity from which flows the diversity of all that exists. It would be flawless — a complete and beautiful truth that could not be added to in any way. It would be necessary, which is to say it could not be otherwise and is entirely self-sufficient. God, if God is, is like that.

The links between cosmology and metaphysics can be drawn in other ways. Consider speculations about extra-terrestrial life. The interesting feature of this subject is that we constantly and regularly return to it — in books and newspaper articles — although precisely nothing of ET has been discovered. SETI has been operational for 50 years with no positive results. But we never cease to be fascinated by the search, not only because we’re fascinated by the possibility of ET, but also because we are fascinated by ourselves.

Thinking about what intelligence might be like elsewhere is a way of musing on our own nature. Again, it’s metaphysics. Is it (are we) massively rare, and that’s why the vast cosmos is apparently so silent? Is it (are we) violently destructive, so that intelligence wipes itself out before it gains the technology required to span the distance between the stars? Is intelligence so extraordinary that once it emerges it evolves startlingly rapidly — and that’s our destination too? Is it that we don’t detect alien intelligence because it outstrips our own, just as the cognitive powers of bacteria are outstripped by us? Or is the universe too enormous, and we’ll never know whether there is intelligent life out there, which is to say that our cosmic state mirrors our existential loneliness? Whatever speculative scenario you prefer, there will be a reflection on what it is to be human implicit in it.

There’s a historical take on this too. Extra-terrestrial life has been entertained for centuries. In the 17^th century, the poet Thomas Traherne imagined the experience of a “celestial stranger” coming to Earth. What would this alien find? The thought experiment provides Traherne with a chance to express the wonder of being alive. He imagines that the visitor from the azure sky would cry out, “How blessed are they holy people, how divine, how highly exalted! … Verily this star is a nest of angels!” That’s Traherne 350 years ago. It’s striking that, in our speculations today, we tend not to cast ourselves in so lovely a light.

There’s a fascinating psychological angle too, drawn out by Carl Gustav Jung. He developed an interest in alchemy, not because he sought to change base metals into gold, but because he believed alchemy was actually a metaphysical discipline. Individuals like Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon lambasted alchemists who pursued a crude desire for gold, arguing that true adepts see their craft as a spiritual quest. The properties of materials like mercury and gold were mysterious to these early scientists. And so, to use Jung’s language, they provided a focus upon which to project great questions. As the alchemist stared into the retort, so they gazed into themselves. Do not the heavens provide the same function for us now?

Many would balk at the suggestion that cosmology is the new alchemy. Jung spent many hours discussing it with the leading quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The two eventually published on the matter. So, it’s an association that can be justified, and helps to explain the deep interest that is so evident today. It’s not just the physics. The biggest questions themselves are embedded in the subject too.

Mark Vernon is a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest. His books include The Meaning of Friendship, Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living, and After Atheism: Science, Religion, and the Meaning of Life. He blogs at www.markvernon.com.

Tags: theology, cosmology, Science, secularism, Religion, Big Questions Online, Mirror of the Cosmos, Is cosmology a form of theology for a secular age?, Mark Vernon, Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, physics, Big Bang, Chaos theory, quantum theory, metaphysics

Ellen Langer - The Mindfulness Chronicles: On “the psychology of possibility”

Cool article from Harvard Magazine, on the mindfulness work of Ellen Langer - the PLoS Blogs also has a look at the article and at Dr. Langer.

The Mindfulness Chronicles: On “the psychology of possibility”

by Cara Feinberg

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Ellen Langer at home, with her dogs and her own painting of a dog.

On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity (2005). (Photograph by Jim Harrison)">

Extra Read more: In a collaboration with Thich Nhat Hanh, another scholar applies ancient Buddhist mindfulness techniques to modern eating.

In 1981, early in her career at Harvard, Ellen Langer and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off 22 years earlier, in 1959. The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, once again living in the 1950s. The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era. Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters. There was entertainment (a screening of the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder with Jimmy Stewart) and spirited discussions of such 1950s sports greats as Mickey Mantle and Floyd Patterson. One night, the men sat glued to the radio, listening as Royal Orbit won the 1959 Preakness. For the second group it brought back a flood of memories; for the other group, it was a race being run for the first time.

As a young professor of psychology, Langer hoped to document through these men what she had long suspected: that our fixed ideas, internalized in childhood, can affect the way we age. In studies she had conducted with colleagues at Yale, Langer had already shown that memory loss—a problem often blamed on aging—could be reversed by giving elderly people more reasons to remember facts; when success was rewarded with small gifts, or when researchers made efforts to create personal relationships with their subjects, elderly memory performance improved. In another study (now taught in nearly every introductory psychology course in the country), she and Yale colleague Judith Rodin found that simply giving nursing-home residents plants to take care of, as well as control over certain decisions—where they would meet guests, what activities to do—not only improved their subjects’ psychological and physical health, but also their longevity: a year and a half later, fewer of those residents had died.

As Langer points out in one of her published accounts of the monastery study, because an experiment like this had never been run before, “any positive results would be meaningful…old age is taken to be a one-way street to incapacitation.” What she found, however, surprised even her own team of researchers. Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis. But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.

The physiological results provided evidence for a simple but invaluable fact: the aging process is indeed less fixed than most people think. But the study also helped launch Langer’s next 30 years of research and a slew of seemingly simple concepts that have changed the field of social psychology and made their way into the realms of medicine, education, business, law, and the arts. “Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow,” she told an audience of nearly 400 at a recent lecture. Her results, she knows, can push the limits of credibility, but she revels in that space: “At the end of the [monastery] study, I was playing football—touch, but still football—with these men, some of whom gave up their canes,” she tells the audience. “It is not our physical state that limits us,” she explains—it is our mindset about our own limits, our perceptions, that draws the lines in the sand.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Ellen Langer, The Mindfulness Chronicles, psychology of possibility, meditation, books, mind, Psychology, consciousness, Harvard Magazine, PLoS Blogs

5 Minute TED Talk - Gary Wolf: The Quantified Self

Interesting - I used be neurotic like that, but I'm feeling much better now.

Gary Wolf: The quantified self

At TED@Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in gloriously geeky detail.

About Gary Wolf

Gary Wolf is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes regularly about the culture of science and technology (as well as many other topics). He is also the co-founder, with Wired colleague Kevin Kelly, of The Quantified Self, a blog about "selfknowledge through numbers."

He was an early editor at Hotwired / Wired Digital, and helped push the technical and editorial limits of the early web. His books include Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (with Joey Anuff) and Wired: A Romance, and he’s working on a book called (for now) The Quantified Self.

Tags: technology, self concept, body, Psychology, 5 Minute TED Talk, Gary Wolf, The quantified self, self knowledge, self awareness

THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY - An Edge Conference and Consensus Statement

Very interesting stuff - After just a quick reading, I find myself pretty much in agreement, but I need to read it more carefully. I certainly applaud the idea and the discussion.

THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY
An Edge Conference

CONSENSUS STATEMENT

A statement of consensus reached among participants at
the Edge The New Science of Morality Conference
Washington, CT, June 20-22, 2010

In the last ten years, morality has become a major convergence zone for scholars in the sciences and humanities. The volume of research has increased rapidly, as has the diversity of methods employed. In an effort to take stock of this rapidly changing field, Edge convened a conference in Washington, CT, on June 20-22, 2010. The participants in the conference described their own work, and then attempted to draft a list of points on which all could agree. They reached consensus on the eight points listed below.

This Consensus Statement is not intended to speak for all who study morality, nor is it intended to be a definitive pronouncement about morality. Rather, the statement is intended to be a starting point for an Edge Reality Club conversation. It is proposed as a first draft of a partial description of the state of the art, submitted to the research community for commentary and editing.

In addition, a forthcoming set of individual statements will highlight areas of disagreement among this statements signatories.

Signed by:

Roy Baumeister, Florida State University
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Joshua Greene, Harvard University
Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia
Sam Harris, Project Reason
Joshua Knobe, Yale University
David Pizarro, Cornell University

THE REALITY CLUB: Liane Young, Robert Kurzban, Jonathan Baron, Linda J. Skitka, Kees van den Bos, Daniel R. Kelly, Peter Ditto, Alison Gopnik, Randolph Nesse, M.D.

Here is the full statement:

CONSENSUS STATEMENT

1) Morality is a natural phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon
Like language, sexuality, or music, morality emerges from the interaction of multiple psychological building blocks within each person, and from the interactions of many people within a society. These building blocks are the products of evolution, with natural selection playing a critical role. They are assembled into coherent moralities as individuals mature within a cultural context. The scientific study of morality therefore requires the combined efforts of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

2) Many of the psychological building blocks of morality are innate
The word "innate," as we use it in the context of moral cognition, does not mean immutable, operational at birth, or visible in every known culture. It means "organized in advance of experience," although experience can revise that organization to produce variation within and across cultures.

Many of the building blocks of morality can be found, in some form, in other primates, including sympathy, friendship, hierarchical relationships, and coalition-building. Many of the building blocks of morality are visible in all human culture, including sympathy, friendship, reciprocity, and the ability to represent others' beliefs and intentions.

Some of the building blocks of morality become operational quite early in childhood, such as the capacity to respond with empathy to human suffering, to act altruistically, and to punish those who harm others.

3) Moral judgments are often made intuitively, with little deliberation or conscious weighing of evidence and alternatives
Like judgments about the grammaticality of sentences, moral judgments are often experienced as occurring rapidly, effortlessly, and automatically. They occur even when a person cannot articulate reasons for them.

4) Conscious moral reasoning plays multiple roles in our moral lives
People often apply moral principles and engage in moral reasoning. For example, people use reasoning to detect moral inconsistencies in others and in themselves, or when moral intuitions conflict, or are absent. Moral reasoning often serves an argumentative function; it is often a preparation for social interaction and persuasion, rather than an open-minded search for the truth. In line with its persuasive function, moral reasoning can have important causal effects interpersonally. Reasons and arguments can establish new principles (e.g., racial equality, animal rights) and produce moral change in a society.

5) Moral judgments and values are often at odds with actual behavior
People often fail to live up to their consciously-endorsed values. One of the many reasons for the disconnect is that moral action often depends on self-control, which is a fluctuating and limited resource. Doing what is morally right, especially when contrary to selfish desires, often depends on an effortful inner struggle with an uncertain outcome.

6) Many areas of the brain are recruited for moral cognition, yet there is no "moral center" in the brain
Moral judgments depend on the operation of multiple neural systems that are distinct but that interact with one another, sometimes in a competitive fashion. Many of these systems play comparable roles in non-moral contexts. For example, there are systems that support the implementation of cognitive control, the representation of mental states, and the affective representation of value in both moral and non-moral contexts.

7) Morality varies across individuals and cultures
People within each culture vary in their moral judgments and behaviors. Some of this variation is due to heritable differences in temperament (for example, agreeableness or conscientiousness) or in morally-relevant capacities (such as one’s ability to take the perspective of others). Some of this difference is due to variations in childhood experiences; some is due to the roles and contexts influencing a person at the moment of judgment or action.

Morality varies across cultures in many ways, including the overall moral domain (what kinds of things get regulated), as well as specific moral norms, practices, values, and institutions. Moral virtues and values are strongly influenced by local and historical circumstances, such as the nature of economic activity, form of government, frequency of warfare, and strength of institutions for dispute resolution.

8) Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees
The emergence of morality allowed much larger groups of people to live together and reap the benefits of trust, trade, shared security, long term planning, and a variety of other non-zero-sum interactions. Some moral systems do this better than others, and therefore it is possible to make some comparative judgments.

The existence of moral diversity as an empirical fact does not support an "anything-goes" version of moral relativism in which all moral systems must be judged to be equally good. We note, however, that moral evaluations across cultures must be made cautiously because there are multiple justifiable visions of flourishing and wellbeing, even within Western societies. Furthermore, because of the power of moral intuitions to influence reasoning, social scientists studying morality are at risk of being biased by their own culturally shaped values and desires.

Signed by:

Roy Baumeister, Florida State University
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Joshua Greene, Harvard University
Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia
Sam Harris, Project Reason
Joshua Knobe, Yale University
David Pizarro, Cornell University

Tags: Brain, morality, Science, humanism, Psychology, Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Joshua Knobe, David Pizarro, Liane Young, Robert Kurzban, Jonathan Baron, Linda J. Skitka, Kees van den Bos, Daniel R. Kelly, Peter Ditto, Alison Gopnik, Randolph Nesse, THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY, Edge Conference, Consensus Statement

Milton Chen - Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools

Cool look at educational innovation - presented by the MIT Learning International Networks Consortium. It's pretty clear our current educational system is failing - we seriously need some new ideas that work.

Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools

About the Lecture

The daily news is full of stories about failing schools, as well as those undergoing miraculous rescues. But there are also schools that have devised innovative and constructive practices that are worth studying and emulating, according to Milton Chen of The George Lucas Educational Foundation. The Foundation has been documenting new educational approaches across the U.S that might serve as constructive reforms for other schools.

The Foundation website Edutopia is home to scores of videos demonstrating “schools that work” -- case studies intended to disseminate successful practices to systems nationwide. Chen plays a video segment showcasing the Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago, which exemplifies several approaches the Foundation deems most crucial for 21st century education. Payton, with a racially and economically diverse student body, defines itself as a math, science and world language academy. This means that kids coming from predominantly Spanish-speaking homes may be learning Mandarin Chinese as well as English at school, and digging into the history of China, Latin America and other related cultures. Students also engage in project-based, interdisciplinary coursework, so core subjects like physics and biology can be investigated meaningfully over extended periods of time. Chen notes as well Payton’s emphasis on technology: classes conduct video conferences with experts (such as surgeons performing open heart surgery); and with fellow students in sister schools in Casablanca and Durban.

Chen acknowledges that Payton is remarkable, but that school districts can emulate at least some of its successes by “looking to the edges” of their own educational systems for new angles on teaching and learning. Chen enumerates some “leading edges of innovation” that schools may want to consider: First, technology should play an important role. Chen notes that iPods are very useful for language learning and reading, and so supports the use of personal digital devices – “weapons of mass instruction” -- for each student. In addition, he suggests educators rethink what is appropriate for students to learn at different grade levels, and be more flexible about who, or what, teaches students; the entire curriculum must become globalized, from math and science to literature and history, and learning should center around projects, not textbooks; with digital technology, students no longer need be “prisoners of time,” and may now learn 24/7, and in places other than schools; parents should be recognized as “co-educators,” with home education linked more fluidly to schools; and, finally, Chen thinks students should assume a major role in redefining their own education.

About the Speaker

Milton Chen

Senior Fellow, The George Lucas Educational Foundation

Prior to 2010, Milton Chen was executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He previously served as the director of research at Sesame Workshop; assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and education director of KQED-San Francisco. He is working on a book, Education Nation: Seven Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools.

Chen received an A.B. in social studies from Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in communication research from Stanford University.

Tags: education, society, innovation, school, Milton Chen, Education Nation, Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools, MIT, Learning International Networks Consortium, George Lucas Educational Foundation, Edutopia, school reform

Big Think - Joseph LeDoux and the Neuroscience of Fear

Another of my favorite neuroscientists - Joseph LeDoux is author of the very excellent Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.

Joseph LeDoux and the Neuroscience of Fear

Big Think Editors on September 23, 2010

"Brain imaging is not a very good way to test subtle distinctions [in the brain]...it's like trying to find out something about New York City by studying New York State," says NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, one of the pioneers of neuroscientific animal research back in the 1970s. "Animal research is so important because we can go in and study individual cells and individual synapses on those cells," he says. But can we take the information we learn about the brains of rats and apply that knowledge to the endlessly complex human brain?

In his second Big Think interview, LeDoux told us that, yes, we can learn much from studying rats' brains, even about things like emotion, which we often attribute solely to humans. "Through the history of psychology, there's been a struggle between what can we learn about psychological states in humans and animals, what can we learn about psychological states by studying conscious states in people and unconscious states," LeDoux explains. In the 1930s and '40s, the behaviorists threw out the idea of consciousness because it is a subjective pehnomenon that cannot be measured. Then the cognitive revolution of the '50s and '60s brought the mind back to psychology, "but it didn't bring back the mind that the behaviorists got rid of," says LeDoux. "When I got interested in emotion in the '70s, emotion was still being thought of in terms of subjective conscious experiences, whereas other aspects of psychology, like perception and memory were thought of as information processing functions." LeDoux revolutionized the study of emotion, especially of fear, by thinking about it in terms of observable behavior. "All animals have to be able to detect danger and respond to danger in order to stay alive, including humans." And because this is such a basic evolutionary adaptation, it functions quite similarly between animals and humans.

The hub of all emotional processing in both human and animal brains is the amygdala, says LeDoux, also the frontman of a rock group called The Amygdaloids. He has spent his career studying this almond-shaped structure, and he gave us a five minute primer on everything we should know about it. "What the amygdala is doing is forming associations between random or neutral external stimuli and the kinds of reinforcing events that will stamp in those experiences in a stronger way," he says. "So its creating what's called Pavlovian associations: you know, stimulus one plus stimulus two; if one of those is a biologically significant stimulus, then the other one will acquire some kind of biological significance itself, whether it’s positive or negative."

LeDoux also talked to us about some of the groundbreaking research to have come out of his his lab in recent years. One discovery dealt with a process called "reconsolidation" of memory. "When you retrieve a memory it becomes unstable and new information can be incorporated into the memory at that point," he says. "It also means that when the memory is unstable, its restabilization process can be blocked. And if you block that, the memory is weakened or dampened. So that's how we've been using reconsolidation to help people with traumatic memories to try and dampen their memories of those traumatic situations."

LeDoux also told us about his current studies of rats with extreme fear. "We can compare animals that are really afraid and those that are not afraid and look in their brains and see if there area any, for example, structural differences in the amygdala."

Transcript is at the Big Think site.

Tags: Psychology, brain, fear, consciousness, Big Think, Joseph LeDoux, Neuroscience of Fear, neuroscience, amygdala, memory, hippocampus

The Dalai Lama - Solving the question of human survival

THE DALAI LAMA'S LITTLE BOOK
OF INNER PEACE:
The Essential Life and Teachings
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
more...

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

An exalting task for all humankind

The West is fascinated by efficiency. And there is no doubt that in many areas its efficiency is quite admirable. That is why I would like to ask this question, which seems natural to me: why not apply this technical efficiency to protect all forms of life? This would be an exalting task for all humankind, especially as we seem to lack a truly large-scale project or ideal. It is difficult, yet it is absolutely necessary. If the question of human survival is not solved, there will be nobody left to solve the problem. And Buddhism can help here.

--from The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace • 2O% off • for this week only
(Good through October 1st).

Emory University in Atlanta Georgia is hosting the first
International Conference on Tibetan Buddhism
October 18-20, 2010
Participants include: H.H. the Dalai Lama, Ganden Tri Rizong Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, Gehlek Rinpoche, Thupten Jinpa, Matthieu Ricard, and 34 other notable participants.
For more information and registration please visit
www.dalailama.emory.edu.
Article on the Conference

Tags: The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace, The Essential Life and Teachings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Snow Lion Publications, exalting task, all humankind, efficiency, human survival, dharma, quote, Buddhism, books

Electing Obama Made the "Culture War" Even Worse, Not Better

From The American Prospect, Ann Friedman looks at how the election of Barack Obama, who many (including Andrew Sullivan) could be a symbolic end to the culture wars, has actually made them more intense and more radical (witness the tea party folks).

As always, it's a clash of worldviews an perspectives. The authoritarian, absolutist perspective cannot tolerate Obama's moral relativism, nor can they tolerate his egalitarian vision for government. It is not going to get better any time soon.

The Forever Culture War

Even as we make progress on specific issues, the broader culture war seems to get uglier and uglier.

Ann Friedman | September 13, 2010

Protesters celebrating California's gay-marriage ban at the state Capitol in Sacramento. (Flickr/Fritz Liess)

In a long and often-cited Atlantic cover story published during the 2008 presidential race, Andrew Sullivan announced that he was supporting Barack Obama because his election would put an end to "the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying ... a war about war -- and about culture and about religion and about race." Like Sullivan, voters were receptive to Obama's promises to be a post-ideological president who would defuse America's most explosive political elements.

Yet in many ways, the opposite has happened. Today a particularly nasty strain of right-wing extremism is flourishing: draconian immigration policies, heated opposition to the establishment of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, the Tea Party movement, claims that the president is a Muslim. As the sun set on the Bush years, it seemed like this brand of conservatism was becoming extinct -- despite the persistence of talk-radio hate speech and the occasional right-wing crackpot politician. Now it's back, and it's more mainstream than ever.

What happened? The bottom fell out of the economy. Sure, economic indicators didn't look great back when Obama was campaigning, either. But one of the reasons why I found Sullivan's thesis almost persuasive is that, against all odds, Obama's "change" narrative was resonating positively at a time when the only changes most voters had experienced in recent years were negative. In the months since his inauguration, as Americans have continued to lose their jobs and houses in droves -- and don't expect to get either back any time soon -- there is a palpable feeling of fear. This, coupled with long-simmering anxiety about demographic change, is driving the extremism we now see gaining traction beyond Fox News and virtually taking over the Republican Party.

In other words, it's an appropriate moment to re-evaluate Sullivan's election thesis. Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin argued in Politico recently that Obama actually ended one culture war -- the one over gay rights and abortion -- and stepped into another. Now, they write, the fight is over "the role of government and the very meaning of America." But really, this is nothing new. For women, people of color, LGBT people, poor people -- those of us whose very lives were on the line in what Smith and Martin define as the "old" culture war -- it has always been about who is a "real American."

"Real Americans are defined as much as [by] what they're not as [by] what they are," writes Amanda Marcotte on her blog, Pandagon. "The enemies list is long: racial minorities (especially non-compliant ones), immigrants, foreigners in general, feminists, liberals, poor people -- yes, especially poor people, who haven't known their place in like 100 years at least -- men who aren't completely wrapped up in nonstop demonstrations of proof they're Real Men, gay people, college professors, activists who try to improve people's lives, honestly you could go on."

Economic strife doesn't just restart the culture war. It reorders the conflict, shifting both the issues at stake and the targets of the moment. One of the great errors of defining the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s as primarily about women's and gay rights is that liberals got the idea that this was a war we could win. Just give it time, and Americans would become more LGBT-friendly and more accepting of abortion rights, and we would have somehow mended America's deepest ideological rifts. In some ways, that is proving true. Affirmative action, welfare, women in the workforce, "political correctness" -- these were all once battles in the culture war. Today we have a biracial president. Women's right to work and be compensated fairly is generally accepted. Each poll on marriage equality is more encouraging than the last. These particular issues are falling off the agenda.

Even as we make progress on specific issues, however, the broader culture war seems to get uglier and uglier. The underlying sentiment that has fueled this conflict from the start -- that only certain Americans are "real Americans" who deserve rights and respect -- has not gone away.

The issues at the forefront of the culture war change with America's economy, demographics, and leaders. But much like the war on terrorism, this war is perpetual. And it's high time we at least realize that progress on a set of issues -- or the election of a pathbreaking president -- does not mean we have won. Until we live in a just society that treats all Americans with dignity, there's always more work to do.

Tags: culture, perspectives, values, Politics, The Forever Culture War, Ann Friedman, The American Prospect, Barack Obama, Andrew Sullivan, real Americans

Should Science Have a Soul? TEDTalks Playlist

This is kind of cool - I wasn't aware the TED folks were putting together themed talks into a single post. Good idea. This is a rather interesting collect of people - Michael Specter, Billy Graham, and Sam Harris.

Should Science Have a Soul? TEDTalks Playlist

Today’s playlist is about the relationship between science and morality. These speakers question whether or not they can and should live in the same space. Their differing and provocative opinions are sure to incite thought, uncertainty, and passion.

If Michael Specter could travel through time, he would travel into the future to witness the marvels of technology and progress that inevitably lay upon the horizon. What he fears is the restriction of science and progress by a morality that believes itself to be superior to proof.

Reverend Billy Graham asserts that despite its good intentions, technology cannot solve all of our problems: namely human evil, human suffering, and death.

Sam Harris believes that scientific reasoning can provide moral compass rooted in fact, and describes the need for a standard universal morality to guarantee human well being.

Here are some other talks you might be interested in that discuss the intersection of science, technology, morality and religion:

• Richard Dawkins on militant atheism
• Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives — or read his blog post about the moral reasoning behind the healthcare debate
• Lee Smolin on science and democracy
• Bob Thurman says we can be Buddhas

We’d love to hear more of your favorite TEDTalks about Science and Morality. Add your suggestions to the comments below, join the conversation on Facebook, or email contact@ted.com with the subject PLAYLIST: SCIENCE & MORALITY. (Jog your memory with the TEDTalks spreadsheet.)

Curator of this playlist: Rachel Tobias

Tags: Should Science Have a Soul?, TED Talks, Playlist, Michael Specter, Billy Graham, Sam Harris, Science, Religion, faith, morality, culture, technology, scientific reasoning, moral compass, suffering, humanism, Rachel Tobias

All in the Mind - On the Couch: Perminder Sachdev and Norman Doidge

All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell speaks with Perminder Sachdev and Norman Doidge in this week's podcast. I am not familiar with Sachdev, but I have read Doidge's book, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from Frontiers of Brain Science. Good book.

Great discussion.

On the Couch: Perminder Sachdev and Norman Doidge

Listen Now - 2010-09-25 |Download Audio - 25092010

Two world renowned psychiatrists, Perminder Sachdev and Norman Doidge, join Natasha Mitchell on the All in the Mind couch, prepared to be asked anything. Are you normal? What is alien hand syndrome? The ticks of Tourette syndrome -- what causes them? Do stories of broken brains generate little more than a cabinet of neurological curiosities?

Show Transcript | Hide Transcript

Transcripts are available on Wednesdays. Audio directly after broadcast on Saturdays.

Guests

Dr Norman Doidge
Psychiatrist and author
Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
Columbia University, New York
& Department of Psychiatry
University of Toronto, Canada
http://www.normandoidge.com/

Professor Perminder Sachdev
Director of Neuropsychiatric Institute
Prince of Wales Hospital
& Scientia Professor
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
http://www.med.unsw.edu.au/medweb.nsf/page/resinterestsshowperson?OpenDocument&StaffID=8700122

Further Information

Slow TV video presentation of this forum

Melbourne Writers Festival, 2010 - details of this forum

Stem cells and brain tales
Interview with Professor Fred Gage, broadcast on All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, 2010

Part 1 of 2: The Power of Plasticity
Broadcast on All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, 2008

Part 2 of 2: The Power of Plasticity
Broadcast on All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, 2008

Publications

Title: The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from Frontiers of Brain Science
Author: Norman Doidge, M.D
Publisher: Scribe, 2007 (ISBN: 978192125827)

Title: The Yipping Tiger and other tales from the neuropsychiatric clinic
Author: Perminder Sachdev, M.D
Publisher: UNSW Press, August 2009 (ISBN: 9781742230849)

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Tags: Psychology, brain, mental health, Natasha Mitchell, All in the Mind, On the Couch, Perminder Sachdev, Norman Doidge, normal, alien hand syndrome, Tourette syndrome, neuroscience, psychiatrists

Big Questions Online - Is human uniqueness really nothing more than a neurological phenomenon?

This is an interesting piece by Roger Scruton, from Big Questions Online - Raymond Tallis coined the term neurotrash, a word that refers to all the neuro-[fill in the blank] things:

neuro-ethics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-art history, neuro-law, neuro-economics, neuro-politics, neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-marketing, neuro-musicology, neuro-poetics, neuro-philosophy, and even neuro-theology

None of these really mean anything, though - what little we know about neuro-anything is minimal and incomplete - we're just making stuff up from little pieces of knowledge. That's dangerous.

Against Neurotrash

Is human uniqueness really nothing more than a neurological phenomenon?

image: David Ridley/Getty Images

By Roger Scruton

Friday, September 3, 2010

Genuine science and true religion cannot conflict. Science discovers truths, religion reveals them. But no truth contradicts another, and all truths have a place in the scheme of things, bound each to each in a web of mutual implications. Pope John Paul II believed this, and made a point of emphasizing that the Church has neither the right nor the power to contradict the findings of science. Moreover, if science and religion conflict over some matter, then it is religion, not science that must give way. Of course the Church has not always obeyed that rule. But it is a rule dictated by the laws of thought.

Averroës and Aquinas wrote of faith and reason, rather than religion and science. But their concern was essentially the same: to reconcile human discovery and divine revelation. This concern has been central to Western civilization from its beginnings in the city-states of Greece. We are shocked by Plato, when he defends the “noble lie,” inviting us to propagate unbelievable myths for the sake of social order. We are shocked by Dostoevsky, when he writes that “if I must choose between Christ and Truth, it is Christ that I shall choose.” We are shocked by the person who protects his sacred texts from scientific examination, lest their status as “revelations” be put in doubt. We accept that there are falsehoods that it might be dangerous or impolitic to question. But we hope always for another and purer kind of religion, purged of superstition and pious fairy tales.

Since the Enlightenment, science has been capturing territory from religion, explaining the cosmos and our tiny corner of it in ways that make no mention of a supernatural plan. And for two centuries religion has been gradually giving way, accepting that now this feature of our world, now that one, could be accounted for without reference to God’s purpose. But our situation has begun to change. In recent years a new kind of science has arisen, one with a more aggressive face. It wishes to seize territory in advance of any negotiation, and which often lays waste to the place that it conquers.

I am thinking of the science that for a while described itself as “sociobiology” before changing its name to “evolutionary psychology” and joining forces with that ubiquitous thing called “neuroscience.” Quite suddenly it seems as though the whole remaining territory of religion has been confiscated. Free choice? Just a story we tell ourselves, after the brain has “set things in motion.” Neighbor-love? Just an “evolutionally stable strategy,” no different in principle from the altruism of ants and bears. The moral imperative? Just the voice of “group selection” resounding in our genes. Beauty? Just the call of sexual selection, the wonder of the peahen at the peacock’s ludicrous tail. Take any feature of the human condition that has suggested our special significance in the eyes of God, dress it up as an “adaptation,” and if possible do a few fMRI scans so as to locate it in some region of the brain and — Hey! Presto! — what looked like a revelation of the supernatural is turned into a piece of neural circuitry.

So great has been the excitement generated by this trick that whole new disciplines have arisen, incorporating the prefix “neuro” in their names, and offering to explore the real truth of the human being by making pictures of his brain. We now have neuro-ethics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-art history and neuro-law; we have neuro-economics, neuro-politics, neuro-jurisprudence and neuro-marketing. There is neuro-musicology, neuro-poetics, neuro-philosophy and even neuro-theology, a marvelous discipline that parachutes itself right into the enemy camp, in order to explain away our religious illusions by locating the place in the hypothalamus that pumps them out.

This neurotrash, as the philosopher and neurosurgeon Raymond Tallis calls it, feeds into the “selfish gene” philosophy that has caused such a stir since Richard Dawkins’s book of that title. The Selfish Gene excited people for the same reason as the new disciplines excite them, namely, because it seemed to “bring us down to size,” to rewrite the human condition as nothing special, and to lift the great moral burden that arises from the thought that we are the goal of creation, and that our lives will be judged. Unlike the theories of Dawkins, however, which are serious and vindicated science, the neuro-theories are essentially improvised. Explanandum and explanans are both described in question-begging terms, the one as a form of behavior that could be exhibited as well by a baboon as by a person, the other as a neural process that can be picked up, after the event, by a brain scan. This “science without theory” and “observation without concepts” has little or nothing in common with the patient collecting of evidence, and the tentative formulation of causal laws, that we observe in the work of Darwin. And the result is seized upon precisely because it seems to shoot us forward to a predetermined goal, which is that of reducing the human being to a biological computer.

Brain science is undeniably making important discoveries, as it maps the workings of the mind onto the wrinkles of the cortex. The problem is not with the science, but with its hasty and motivated application. The brain is an important part of the human being, but it is not the whole human being. And it is not the part that we relate to, when we address each other I to I. Religion arose from the attempt to make sense of our condition as responsible and self-conscious individuals: it claimed the territory of human relations and built its great castles there, in the open terrain of rational dialogue. Neurotrash has invaded that terrain and knocked down the castles. But it has also laid waste the land. What it tells us about the terrain of thought and emotion is not more true than religion but less true.

Take the case of erotic love. The Bible succinctly explains the deep significance for each other of Adam and Eve. What it tells us is beautifully amplified by Milton in Paradise Lost. But the truths so finely discerned by Milton and by the author of Genesis are not captured by brain science. That science has made great progress in understanding the mechanism of pair-bonding, induced by the release of oxytocin into the cortex during intercourse. The theory shows what is common to people and laboratory rats. But it says nothing about what distinguishes them, which is the I-to-I relation of lovers, as revealed in the smile and the kiss. That is why the conflict between religion and science endures, even now, when biology has dispelled so many of the mysteries of the human condition. People hold on to their religion because it protects and endorses the belief that science might appear to steal from us, but which it can never steal in fact: the belief in human uniqueness.

Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher living in England. His many books include Beauty and The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope. Learn more about him at www.roger-scruton.com.

Tags: brain, Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Big Questions Online, human uniqueness, neurological phenomenon, Against Neurotrash, Roger Scruton, philosophy

Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche - Whatever meditation experience arises, you must continue

POINTING OUT THE DHARMAKAYA
by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche
foreword by the Dalai Lama
introduction by Lama Tashi Namgyal
more...

Dharma Quote of the Week

If you continue to practice meditation, then your experience will gradually increase and there will be greater and greater stability and greater and greater lucidity. However, the experiences that can arise in meditation can take various different forms. And in spite of the fact that the person has a real recognition of the mind's nature, there is still the possibility or probability of fluctuation in experience even after that.

Sometimes you may feel that you have amazing, tremendous meditation, and at other times you may feel that you have no meditation at all. This characterizes meditation experience, which fluctuates a great deal. Realization, which is distinct from experience, does not change, but experiences can fluctuate a great deal or alternate between good and bad. There will still be times when you will have what you regard as good experiences and, in contrast, what you regard as bad experiences. When that occurs, just keep on looking. Don't get distracted or sidetracked by the experience. Whatever meditation experience arises, you should recognize that it is transitory. As is said, "meditation experience is like mist, it will surely vanish."

Experiences are different from the actual fact of the recognition itself. Because they are ephemeral experiences, they aren't worth investing in. So if you have a bad meditation experience, do not be alarmed, because it too will vanish. If you have a good meditation experience, you need to continue; if you have a bad meditation experience, you need to continue. In either case, you simply need to continue to rest in this recognition of the mind's nature.

--from Pointing Out the Dharmakaya by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, foreword by the Dalai Lama, introduction by Lama Tashi Namgyal, published by Snow Lion Publications

Pointing Out the Dharmakaya • Now at 5O% off
(Good through October 1st).

Emory University in Atlanta Georgia is hosting the first
International Conference on Tibetan Buddhism
October 18-20, 2010
Participants include: H.H. the Dalai Lama, Ganden Tri Rizong Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, Gehlek Rinpoche, Thupten Jinpa, Matthieu Ricard, and 34 other notable participants.
For more information and registration please visit
www.dalailama.emory.edu.
Article on the Conference

Tags: Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, meditation experience, you must continue, Buddhism, books, meditation, Dharma quote, Pointing Out the Dharmakaya, Dalai Lama, Lama Tashi Namgyal, Snow Lion Publications