Integral Options Cafe

Michael Gazzaniga - What We Are (Neuroscience of What Makes Us Human)

2009-11-20T15:17:00.004-07:00

Michael Gazzaniga is author of Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. In this video he offers a "modern, secular view" of what it is to be human. He is one of the leading neuroscientists in the public sphere, making the science available and understandable to lay readers.

Found this video courtesy of Channel N, the video arm of Psych Central.

Neurevolution - Cingulate Cortex and the Evolution of Human Uniqueness

2009-11-20T09:33:00.002-07:00

Cool, geeky brain science stuff.

Cingulate Cortex and the Evolution of Human Uniqueness

Figuring out how the brain decides between two options is difficult. This is especially true for the human brain, whose activity is typically accessible only via the small and occasionally distorted window provided by new imaging technologies (such as functional MRI (fMRI)).

In contrast, it is typically more accurate to observe monkey brains since the skull can be opened and brain activity recorded directly.

Despite this, if you were to look just at the human research, you would consider it a fact that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) increases its activity during response conflict. The thought is that this brain region detects that you are having trouble making decisions, and signals other brain regions to pay more attention.

If you were to only look at research with monkeys, however, you would think otherwise. No research with macaque monkeys (the ‘non-human primate’ typically used in neuroscience research) has found conflict activity in ACC.

My most recent publication looks at two possible explanations for this discrepancy: 1) Differences in methods used to study these two species, and 2) Fundamental evolutionary differences between the species.

Initially, the methods difference seems like the obvious explanation. After all, directly recording brain activity with electrodes should be more accurate than recording blood flow caused by brain activity (like with fMRI).

There’s a twist to this story, however: Measuring blood flow may actually be more accurate than recording single-unit activity in some cases.

For instance, fMRI may be more sensitive to activity in interneurons (the small neurons usually ignored by single-unit recording). As it turns out, conflict activity in ACC is thought to involve exactly these sorts of interneurons. The idea is that populations of these small cells compete for dominance between the two decision outcomes. This would cause more blood flow in ACC for fMRI to pick up (in humans), but relatively little change in the large output neurons (recorded in monkeys).

This could completely explain the discrepancy between the species, except for three things that cast doubt on it: First, local field potentials, which detect interneuron activity, yielded no results in monkeys (Emeric et al., 2008). Second, cutting out the ACC of monkeys did not change monkeys’ decision-making behaviors (Mansouri et al., 2007). Finally, single-unit recording and local field potential recording in humans undergoing surgery found conflict activity in ACC (Wang et al., 2005; Davis et al. 2005), just as with fMRI.

These findings suggest another possibility: The discrepancy is explained by a fundamental difference in the brains of the two species.

Read the rest of the post.

Peter Strong - Online Mindfulness Meditation Therapy for Stress Management

2009-11-20T05:09:00.002-07:00

Peter Strong is a specialist in mindfulness based psychotherapy working in Boulder, CO. He is also one of the many bloggers writing at Psychology Today.

Online Mindfulness Meditation Therapy for Stress Management

Manage your emotional stress with Mindfulness Meditation Therapy Online

The single major cause of emotional suffering and stress in our lives comes from the accumulated habitual emotional reactions to life events that we acquire through unconscious learning. We become victims of recurrent negative thoughts and patterns of emotional reactivity that operate automatically in the mind, and that operate outside the sphere of conscious choice. We become prisoners of our habitual thinking and suffer accordingly. Therefore, it stands to reason that if we want to reduce our level of emotional stress and suffering, we must learn new strategies to counteract and neutralize our conditioned habitual reactivity, and regain freedom and choice in how to respond to the demands of life.
Mindfulness Meditation Therapy teaches you how to work with your habitual reactivity through a series of exercises designed to help you recognize reactivity and then defuse this reactivity through mindfulness. Mindfulness is empowering, restoring freedom and choice, while creating the right inner space that allows emotions to unfold and resolve at the core level. Mindfulness training stops you from being the victim of conditioned stress reactions, and puts you back in the driving seat, allowing you to control how you want to feel, rather than simply falling under the spell of your habitual reactivity. The approach is relatively easy to learn and can be communicated very well through email correspondence and webcam sessions.

Stress
It is 8am and you wake up after a difficult night's sleep only to discover that the alarm didn't go off. This makes you very agitated as you realize that you will be late for work and your boss told you off for being late only last week. You tumble out of bed and rush down stairs for breakfast. No coffee. You become flustered at the prospect of starting the day without coffee, and you lose your temper with your partner for forgetting to turn on the coffee maker. Then you feel guilty about being angry, and that weighs heavily on your mind as you climb into your car. The car won't start. Now you are furious, because you recently paid a lot of money to have the car serviced. Being late, you hit rush hour and have to deal with all the frustrations of slow traffic, which increases your stress level to boiling point. Things are made even worse when a car cuts in front of you, and you explode with anger and yell at the driver. The driver turns out to be an old lady, and you feel embarrassed and guilty for your inappropriate reactions. Eventually you make it to the office, but there is nowhere to park, since you are late and you become even more dejected. Exhausted, you finally make it to the office, sit down at your work and begin a day doing a job that you don't enjoy in an environment that you hate and with people who do not seem to appreciate how hard you try. The boss says he wants to see you and panic sets in.
Does this sound familiar?
For much of the time we live as slaves to the negative habitual emotional reactions of agitation, disappointment, frustration, anger, guilt, stress, anxiety and fear. The emotional suffering is not caused by being late or the difficult drive to work. These may be a source of pain, but are not sufficient to cause mental suffering. Suffering is always a product of the way we react to such events and these subjective reactions are something that we have learned unconsciously. As the saying goes,
"Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional."

Read the whole article.

Cato Unbound - The Bright Side of Modernity: Pluralism, Freedom, and Equality

2009-11-20T05:02:00.003-07:00

Cool article - this reads like it could be one of Ken Wilber's defenses of modernity. When conservatives - not all, but some - are bemoaning modernity, they are partly rejecting the very things we take for granted now: pluralism, freedom, and equality. These values do not exist as part of the cultural worldview of the far right, and one need look no further than the fight against gay rights to see that this is true.

The Bright Side of Modernity: Pluralism, Freedom, and Equality

by Jack Goldstone
The Conversation
November 18th, 2009

One of the great accomplishments of modernity is the institutionalization of pluralism and religious tolerance. While not unknown in antiquity or pre-modern times, pluralism and tolerance usually meant no more than the official state religious order granting a protected but clearly second-class status to adherents of other faiths. Thus in Rome up to the 4th century, the gods of conquered peoples were given lesser places in the polytheistic pantheon, but their worship was still allowed as long as it was joined to recognition of the divinity of the emperor (peoples who refused the latter, like the Jews of Palestine, lost that toleration in a hurry!).

In the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Jews could flourish and play important professional roles, but were excluded from government and had to pay special taxes. A similar status held for non-Anglicans in Britain, even after the Toleration Act; they could openly practice their religions but were barred from state offices, while Anglican bishops still had reserved places in the House of Lords. It was really only with the American and French Revolutions of the 18th century that it became official state policy not to promulgate any special restrictions or privileges on the basis of religion, but leave that a matter of individual conscience.

This has sometimes been confused with a different aspect of modernity, namely the reduction of formal religion and worship in everyday life, and its replacement by secularism or humanism. It is true that in many parts of Europe, governments seek to act as if religion had no place in deciding moral or policy issues, and many people have withdrawn from religious participation and commitment. It is also true that on matters of studying nature, objective science has replaced religion as the basis for seeking truth. In these respects, secularism has grown. Yet in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and most of the Middle East and much of Asia, secularism is mild or in retreat. Commitment to both religious worship and religious belief, including the formation of policy (e.g. abortion) based on such beliefs, remains strong. What makes these countries ‘modern’ is not the absence of religion, but the absence of a state-chosen and state-enforced religion that relegates adherents of other faiths to less than full citizenship. What is distinctively modern is the sharp separation of religion and citizenship, so that the latter can be enjoyed fully regardless of which religion (or no religion at all) a person follows.

This needs to be kept in mind when considering the ‘dark side’ of modernity. Jihadists — even with automatic weapons and plastic explosives — are pursuing a very anti-modern goal in seeking to purge their societies of non-believers, and not merely to make religion a factor in shaping policy but to impose a particular religion’s law as the uniform law of the land for all. Christians of course did the same thing in Europe for many centuries, but that was in a pre-modern era.

While there is an appealing tendency to think of ‘modern’ societies as being prone to be especially evil, because nationalism and technical-rationality seem to be devoid of traditional morality (think Naziism and the Holocaust), which at least was woven into traditional religio-political states, this is an illusion. Vast piles of skulls, mass rapine, rivers turned red with blood — these are familiar aspects of human conquest from biblical times through the Mongol conquests. Efforts to massacre people and create genocides are carried out more widely with machetes than with gas chambers. A lack of respect for the basic human rights of other societies, or lower classes in one’s own society, is rooted in the pre-modern mentality of identity-groups, dynastic loyalties, and an innate hierarchy of people (with male rulers on top, and females and slaves on the bottom, as part of the natural order). The modern view of the individual — egalitarian, endowed with universal rights, free to practice a religion of choice and express her beliefs, free to enter into agreements of marriage and work or not — is a much more moral view than the pre-modern view rooted in particularistic identities and hierarchies (racial, ethnic, or otherwise.)

The truly great evils of the modern world have arisen when modern science and technology were placed in the service of such pre-modern beliefs. Nazi racial science speciously classified the races on their worthiness (aryan to mongol, with Jews at the bottom) and thus justified its actions to purify Europe’s population. European colonialism became most abhorrent when it saw regions and peoples as entitled to different levels of rights and respect depending on their level of “civilization” as measured by a European pseudo-scientific yardstick.

In short, an appreciation of what is truly modern can allow one to be optimistic about a future with less cruelty and evil; what is important is that we recognize that individual freedom and social equality are no less vital innovations, and no less critical components of modern societies, than are planes, trains, and missiles.

Google Tech Talks - Mainstreaming Psychedelics: From FDA to Harvard to Burning Man

2009-11-19T16:51:00.005-07:00

I am a big supporter of research into hallucinogens and other psychotropic substances for therapeutic purposes. There is great potential in some of these drugs to heal a variety of issues from alcoholism to PTSD.

Leave it to Google to host a cool talk like this one.

ABSTRACT

Presented by Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Executive Director MAPS.

We're now in the midst of a worldwide renaissance in psychedelic research, after decades of political suppression. Scientists from around the world will present their new findings at the largest psychedelic conference to take place in the US in 17 years, on April 15-18, 2010, in San Jose, CA (http://www.maps.org/conference/). Even media reports, which usually mention in passing the widespread use of psychedelics by the counterculture in the 1960s, are more hopeful than alarming. In this talk, we'll review the factors which led to the backlash and the lessons to be learned, discuss how the FDA opened the door to research around the world, how the ghost of Timothy Leary was buried at Harvard, and how Burning Man struggles to respond to people who have difficult psychedelic experiences. We'll conclude by explaining how non-profit drug development, initially of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), can transform psychedelics into FDA-approved prescription medicines and can lay the groundwork for the successful, long-term integration of psychedelics into the mainstream of medicine, religion, art, creativity, and celebration.

Rick founded MAPS in 1986. His dissertation [http://www.maps.org/dissertation/] (Public Policy, Harvards Kennedy School of Government) was on "The Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana," and his masters thesis [http://www.maps.org/docs/doblin-mt.html ] (Harvard) focused on the attitudes and experiences of oncologists concerning the medical use of marijuana. His undergraduate thesis [http://www.maps.org/research/cluster/ps ilo-lsd/goodfriday.pdf] (New College of Florida) was a twenty-five year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment [http://www.maps.org/books/pahnke/index.html], which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He has also conducted a thirty-four year follow-up study to Tim Learys Concord Prison experiment [http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n4/ 09410con.html].

Rick studied with Stan Grof, M.D., and was in the first group to become certified as holotropic breathwork practitioners. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise "healthy" people, and to also become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

Empathy and Stress Levels May be Coded Into Our Genes

2009-11-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting report on new research - from US News and World Report. So much for the idea of original sin . . . . We are not born heathens who need to be saved, we are born loving and need to be nurtured.

Empathy and Stress Levels May be Coded Into Our Genes

Posted: November 18, 2009

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers have discovered a genetic variation that may contribute to how empathetic a human is, and how that person reacts to stress. In the first study of its kind, a variation in the hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin’s receptor was linked to a person’s ability to infer the mental state of others.

Interestingly, this same genetic variation also related to stress reactivity. These findings could have a significant impact in adding to the body of knowledge about the importance of oxytocin, and its link to conditions such as autism and unhealthy levels of stress.

Sarina Rodrigues, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University, and Laura Saslow, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, published their findings in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Rodrigues said oxytocin has already been significantly linked with social affiliation and reduction in stress. It is a peptide secreted by the pituitary gland and regulated by the hypothalamus of the brain and is best known for its role in female reproduction (it is important for labor and breastfeeding, for instance). It is also associated with social recognition, pair bonding, dampening negative emotional responses, trust, and love.

Rodrigues, who studies stress in humans, studied 200 college students, of diverse ethnicities and balanced gender. The students filled out self-reported questionnaires, as well as participated in laboratory-based sessions.

Individuals can have one of three combinations of this particular naturally occurring genetic variation of the oxytocin receptor. All humans get one copy of this gene from each parent, thus the three possible combinations, labeled in the paper as AA, AG or GG allele. The AA and AG gene group were not statistically different, so they were grouped together and compared in all tests with the GG group.

Rodrigues said the tests included a standard stress reactivity test involving white noise blasts directed in headphones after countdowns presented on the screen. Heart rate was monitored through sensors throughout the laboratory session. In general, they found that women were overall more sensitive to the stress tests, but that both men and women in the GG allele group displayed a lower increase heart rate during this task, as compared to baseline heart rate measured at the beginning of the laboratory session.

One of the tests used to measure empathy included the “Reading the Mind in Eyes” test, created by Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of actor/comedian Sacha Baron Cohen). Rodrigues said that this test is commonly used to discern how individuals can put themselves into the mind of another person, which overlaps with empathy, because it tests how well the participant can infer someone’s emotional state by their eyes.

“In general, women do better on this test than men,” Rodrigues said. “But we found a stark difference in both sexes based on the genetic variation.” Those with the GG genetic variation were 22.7 percent less likely to make a mistake on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test than the other individuals.

Rodrigues said previous research has shown that people with autism display lower scores on behavioral and dispositional empathy measures, and that a nasal spray with oxytocin increases scores in these areas.

“Our data lends credence to the claim that this genetic variation of oxytocin influences emotional processing and other-oriented behavior,” she said.

However, Rodrigues cautioned against drawing too many conclusions just yet from the study’s findings. She said these population trends should not be translated to individuals, meaning there are plenty of people in the AA or AG gene pool who are empathetic, caring individuals.

“I tested myself and while I am not in the GG group, I’d like to think that I am a very caring person with empathy for others,” she said. “These findings can help us understand that some of us are born with a tendency to be more empathic and stress reactive than others, and that we should reach out to those who may be naturally closed-off from people because social connectivity and belongingness benefits everyone.”

Natalia Garcia, Oliver P. John and Dacher Keltner, all with University of California, Berkeley, also contributed to the research, which was funded by the Metanexus Institute and the Greater Good Science Center. The studies were conducted in the laboratory of Dacher Keltner.

Introducing "Your Brain On Us" - The neuroscience of social interactions

2009-11-19T06:34:00.001-07:00

Psychology Today offers up yet another new blog, this one by Jamil Zaki and called Your Brain On Us: The neuroscience of social interactions. Here is his introductory entry:

The two human natures

"Selfish" doesn't have to mean antisocial

Immediately following the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraqi government collapsed and Baghdad was engulfed by widespread looting and violence. Medical equipment was stolen from major hospitals and many of the world's oldest cultural artifacts--housed at Iraq's National Museum--were stolen or destroyed. The damage caused by civilians rivaled the effects of 3 weeks of steady US bombing.
When asked about the pervasive destruction, Donald Rumsfeld famously replied, "stuff happens." What did he mean by that? One popular interpretation is that he was suggesting that people who are released from social responsibilities, for example by the fall of their government, revert to their "natural state," acting out of unadulterated, primal self-interest. They are, as Rumsfeld said, "free to... commit crimes and do bad things." In other words, human nature is savage and antisocial, waiting to erupt whenever the lights go out and the law is interrupted.
As it turns out, this view--common to philosophers, social theorists, and action movie villains--has a long history, described brilliantly by the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins in a recent book. Sahlins chronicles the way that everyone from Thucydides to Thomas Hobbes to John Adams wrote their histories and social theories following a common assumption: government is the necessary restraint on people who--without it--would tear each other apart. Importantly, it was also at the heart of Freud's belief that individuals contained a core driven entirely by selfish, often antisocial desires (the Id) that could only be contained through the internalization of social norms (the Super-ego). This idea caught on, and dominated the early decades of clinical psychology.

Does human nature deserve all this bad press? Of course people (and their genes) are selfish in one way: they are interested in survival, and strive to optimize their own. But does that require them to be selfish in the other way: acting with indifference or malice towards others? Many concepts of human nature treat these two types of selfishness as identical, but they are powerfully different. We evolved not as antisocial, isolated individuals, but in deeply interdependent families and social groups. This suggests a "human nature" starkly different from Rumsfeld's: one in which our interests, emotions, and survival are intimately tied with those of the people around us, so much so that many civilizations describe each person as not only existing in their own body, but also in the bodies of others. On this view, even being "selfish" can lead people to act generously and empathically towards others. As Sahlins put it, "what means ‘self-interest' when both ‘self' and ‘interest' are transpersonal?"
In the last 50 years or so, this more optimistic view has received a boost from research in psychological science. This work has shown, time and again, that the human mind is driven by social realities, and deeply affected by other individuals. More recently, neuroscience research has demonstrated ways that the social world gets under our skin, permeating the way our brains process information.
This blog aims to help readers recapture a sense of human nature as social instead of antisocial. To this end, I will describe research on the social mind, with an eye towards tying work in experimental psychology to non-scientific concepts of human nature and society. Some of the ideas I'll focus most on are:
(1) The many ways that our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions are tied to those of other people, and the ways this psychological interconnectedness drives prosocial behaviors such as altruism and cooperation.
(2) The incredible amount of mental resources people devote to understanding other minds, and ways that individuals' psychological and physical well-being is intimately tied to their ability to connect with others.
(3) Circumstances that can alter, shut off, or reverse people's sense of interdependence with each other, leading to the antisocial behavior we saw during the Baghdad riots, the Rwandan genocide, and other humanitarian catastrophes.
(4) Reconciling the (distant, often-electronic) social connections available in contemporary life with the much more direct interpersonal contact for which our social instincts likely evolved.
I am, most of all, excited to hear your thoughts on society and human nature. Any ideas or questions you have about social interactions in the mind and brain are always of interest to me, and I look forward to having a dialogue with you on these topics.

Talking to Ourselves: How Consumers Navigate Choices and Inner Conflict

2009-11-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Fascinating - a new way of looking at parts theory, but not really at that new at all. I love it when science confirms intuition.

Unfortunately, a bunch of marketing folks have figured this out, so expect commercials and advertisements to be targeted to your anxious and socially conscious parts, among others.

Talking to Ourselves: How Consumers Navigate Choices and Inner Conflict

ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2009) — From simple decisions like "Should I eat this brownie?" to bigger questions such as "Should my next car be a hybrid?" consumers are involved in an inner dialogue that reflects thoughts and perspectives of their different selves, according to the authors of a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Shalini Bahl (iAM Business Consulting) and George R. Milne (University of Massachusetts) studied the multiple perspectives that exist within consumers and explored the ways they navigate inconsistent preferences to make consumption decisions.

The authors conducted a study combining in-depth interviews, multi-dimensional scaling, and metaphors to identify some of the voices that engage consumers' minds. They used "dialogic self theory," which differentiates between the "Meta-self" and multiple selves. According to the authors, multiple selves have unique perspectives and speak from different positions with relatively independent voices, while the Meta-self reflects a distanced neutral perspective.

"In our analysis of relationships between two selves with different worldviews and consumption preferences, we discovered a unique relationship in which one self offers a non-judgmental acceptance of another self's opposing views and behavior, and in doing so brings peace and equanimity in a situation involving opposing preferences," the authors write.

At other times, one self will take over and dominate, which can lead to inner conflict. One finding exposed a "desirable self," which can promote positive consumption behaviors like exercise and hard work. However, when allowed free reign, this self can push consumers to overstretch their limits and end up with physical injuries or burnout.

The authors believe this study can help marketers and other agencies that are trying to promote more mindful consumption choices. "By understanding the different voices in consumers they can promote communications that model consumers' inner conflicts and present different dialogical strategies like negotiation, coalition, compassion, and compartmentalization that will help them navigate conflicts to make better choices."
Journal Reference:

Shalini Bahl and George R. Milne. Can Talking to Ourselves Help Us Navigate Inner Conflicts? Journal of Consumer Research:, June 2010
University of Chicago Press Journals (2009, November 17). Talking to ourselves: How consumers navigate choices and inner conflict. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 17, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/11/091117161210.htm

Scientific American Mind - The Will to Power: Is "Free Will" All in Your Head?

2009-11-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

Interesting - and of course this research becomes another way to suggest that humans are at the mercy of their brain cells. Anyway, this is interesting and important research into understanding how the brain functions.

The Will to Power--Is "Free Will" All in Your Head?

Neurosurgeons evoke an intention to act during brain surgery

By Christof Koch
Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior.

Although such dualistic accounts are emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying, they break down as soon as one digs a bit deeper. How can this ghost, made out of some kind of metaphysical ectoplasm, influence brain matter without being detected? What sort of laws does Casper follow? Science has abandoned strong dualistic explanations in favor of natural accounts that assign causes and responsibility to specific actors and mechanisms that can be further studied. And so it is with the notion of the will.

Sensation and Action
Over the past decade psychologists such as Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard University amassed experimental evidence for a number of conscious sensations that accompany any willful action. The two most important are intention and agency. Prior to voluntary behavior lies a conscious intention. When you decide to lift your hand, this intention is followed by planning of the detailed movement and its execution. Subjectively, you experience a sensation of agency. You feel that you, not the person next to you, initiated this action and saw it through. If a friend were to take your hand and pull it above your head, you would feel your arm being dragged up, but you would not feel any sense of being responsible for it. The important insight here is that the consciously experienced feelings of intention and agency are no different, in principle, from any other consciously experienced sensations, such as the briny taste of chicken soup or the red color of a Ferrari.

And as a plethora of books on visual illusions illustrate, often our senses can be fooled—we see something that is not there. So it is with the sensation of intentionality and agency. Decades of psychology experiments—as well as careful observation of human nature that comes from a lifetime of living—reveal many instances where we think we caused something to happen, although we bear no responsibility for it; the converse also occurs, where we did do something but feel that something or somebody else must have been responsible. Think about the CEO of a company who takes credit—and bonuses worth many millions—if the stock market price of his company rises but who blames anonymous market forces when it tanks. It is a general human failing to overestimate the import of our own actions when things go well for us.

Lest there by any misunderstanding: the sensations of the intention to act and of agency do not speak to the metaphysical debate about whether will is truly free and whether that even is a meaningful statement. Whether free will has some ontological reality or is entirely an illusion, as asserted forcefully by Wegner’s masterful monograph, does not invalidate the observation that voluntary actions are usually accompanied by subjective, ephemeral feelings that are nonetheless as real as anything else to the person who experiences them.

Telling Clues from Surgeries
The quiddity of these sensations has been strengthened considerably by neurosurgeons. During certain types of brain surgery, neural tissue must be removed, either because it is tumorous or because it gives rise to epileptic seizures. How much tissue to remove is a balancing act between the Scylla of leaving remnants of cancerous or seizure-prone material and the Charybdis of removing regions that are critical for speech or other near-essential operations. To probe the function of nearby tissue, the neurosurgeon stimulates it with an electrode that passes pulses of current while the patient—who is awake and under local anesthesia to minimize discomfort—is asked to touch each finger successively with the thumb, count backwards or do some other simple task.
During the course of such explorations in 1991, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues stimulated the presupplementary motor area, part of the vast expanse of cerebral cortex that lies in front of the primary motor cortex. Activation of different parts of the motor cortex usually triggers movements in different parts on the opposite side of the body, for example, the foot, leg, hip, and so on. The medical team discovered that electrical stimulation of this adjacent region of cortex can, on occasion, give rise to an urge to move a limb. The patient reports that he or she feels a need to move the leg, elbow or arm.
This classical account was elaborated on by a recent study from Michel Desmurget and his colleagues at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Bron, France, that was published in the international journal Science. Here it was electrical stimulation of the posterior parietal cortex, gray matter involved in the transformation of visual information into motor commands—as when your eyes scan the scene in front of you and come to rest on the movie marquee—that could produce pure intentions to act. Patients made comments (in French) such as “It felt like I wanted to move my foot. Not sure how to explain,” “I had a desire to move my right hand,” or “I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth.” In none of these cases did they actually carry out the movement to which they referred. But the external stimulation caused an unambiguous conscious feeling of wanting to move. And this feeling arose from within, without any prompting by the examiner and not during sham stimulation.

This was different from the cortical sector explored by the earlier Fried study. One difference between the two stimulated regions was that, at higher current levels, the patient actually moved the limb when the target site was the presupplementary motor area. Parietal stimulation, on the other hand, could trigger a sensation that actual movement had occurred, yet without any motion actually occurring (illusion of movement).

The take-home lesson is that the brain has specific cortical circuits that, when triggered, are associated with sensations that arise in the course of wanting to initiate and then carry out a voluntary action. Once these circuits are delimited and their molecular and synaptic signatures identified, they constitute the neuronal correlates of consciousness for intention and agency. If these circuits are destroyed by a stroke or some other calamity, the patient might act without feeling that it is she who is willing the acting!

In the debate concerning the meaning of personal freedom, these discoveries represent true progress, beyond the eternal metaphysical question of free will that will never be answered.

CHRISTOF KOCH is Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He serves on Scientific American Mind's board of advisers.

Daily Om - Owning Your Emotions: Name It and Claim It

2009-11-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

I linked to this article the other day in my Friendfeed/Twitter feeds, but I like it, so I am posting the whole thing. Too many people do NOT own their emotions and then project the ones they are not comfortable with onto others.

Owning Your Emotions
Name It and Claim It
Our feelings can sometimes present a very challenging aspect of our lives. We experience intense emotions without understanding precisely why and consequently find it difficult to identify the solutions that will soothe our distressed minds and hearts. Yet it is only when we are capable of naming our feelings that we can tame them by finding an appropriate resolution. We retake control of our personal power by becoming courageous enough to articulate, out loud and concisely, the essence of our emotions. Our assuming ownership of the challenges before us in this way empowers us to shift from one emotional state to another—we can let go of pain and upset because we have defined it, examined the effect it had on our lives, and then exerted our authority over it by making it our own. By naming our feelings, we claim the right to divest ourselves of them at will.

As you prepare to acknowledge your feelings aloud, gently remind yourself that being specific is an important part of exercising control. Whatever the nature of your feelings, carefully define the reaction taking place within you. If you are afraid of a situation or intimidated by an individual, try not to mince words while giving voice to your anxiety. The precision with which you express yourself is indicative of your overall willingness to stare your feelings in the face without flinching. Naming and claiming cannot always work in the vacuum of the soul. There may be times in which you will find the release you desire only by admitting your feelings before others. When this is the case, your ability to outline your feelings explicitly can help you ask for the support, aid, or guidance you need without becoming mired in the feelings that led you to make such an admission in the first place.

When you have moved past the apprehension associated with expressing your distressing feelings out loud, you may be surprised to discover that you feel liberated and lightened. This is because the act of making a clear connection between your circumstances and your feelings unravels the mystery that previously kept you from being in complete control of your emotional state. To give voice to your feelings, you must necessarily let them go. In the process, you naturally relax and rediscover your emotional equilibrium.

Dale Wright - Is Self-Cultivation Inherently Selfish? A Buddhist Perspective

2009-11-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

[image source]

Another good article from the Psychology Today blogs. This is specifically from Six Perfections: Buddhism and the cultivation of character, by Dale Wright.

Is Self-Cultivation Inherently Selfish? A Buddhist Perspective

"Buddhist ethical practices aim at taking the self out of self-cultivation."

One common criticism of the topic of self-cultivation is the extent of focus on the "self." The idea of self-cultivation is itself inappropriate because it is essentially self-absorbed and fails to acknowledge the more fundamental communal or social dimension of human life. This is an important criticism, one that Buddhists have faced as directly and as responsibly as anyone in other traditions. The overall Buddhist response to this critique entails two primary points. First, and most important, Buddhists maintain that the beneficiary of your practice of self-cultivation is not just you but others around you, ultimately, the whole of humanity. Early in the career of Mahayana Buddhists who are serious about engagement in self-cultivation, a vow is taken--the bodhisattva vow--in which practitioners vow to seek enlightenment not just for themselves but globally on behalf of everyone. It is the whole of society that needs to be enlightened, not just certain individuals, even if individuals are the catalyst through which such enlightenment might become a reality. In effect, the vow is just to seek enlightenment, at whatever level and to whatever degree that can be accomplished, and not be possessive about it--enlightenment not simply for oneself but on behalf of greater vision for everyone and everything.

The second point follows from the first. We have no choice but to begin this quest wherever we happen to be. If, like most people, we attend primarily to our own well-being, then our interest in enlightenment or self-cultivation or anything else extends only so far as the good we think it will do for us as individuals. If the range of our interest and concern doesn't extend far beyond our own lives, then that is where we must begin, imagining our ethical practices of enlightenment as beneficial for us as individuals, which, of course, they are. Nevertheless, ethical practice, Buddhist or otherwise, functions as a system of training to overcome the narrow and myopic sense of self that we all have in immature stages of development.

Read the whole post.

Gladwell Responds to Pinker's Review of His New Book

2009-11-17T14:04:00.003-07:00

Steven Pinker shredded Malcolm Gladwell's new book - and Gladwell himself - this weekend in the New York Times Book Review. Here is a snippet of the review:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy.

After reading this, I sensed a potential feud brewing, not unlike Pinker and George Lakoff a couple of years ago (hmmm . . . notice a trend here?). So when Gladwell posted a response to Pinker this morning, I expected a fierce defense of his own work. Not so much.

Pinker on "What the Dog Saw."

Steven Pinker reviewed my new book "What the Dog Saw," in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday. I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Stephen Pinker, even if—in his comments on “What the Dog Saw” (Nov. 15)—he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism. But since football has been on my mind these days, I do want to make one small observation about his comments.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by someone who runs a pre-employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate—as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long)—the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called “Niners Nation." I have enormous respect for Professor Pinker, and his description of me as “minor genius” made even my mother blush. But maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks, we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.

That was much more civil and measured than Pinker's review was, for which I applaud Gladwell. Looks like we might have to wait until Pinker dislikes some other author's work to get a new feud brewing - but I have no doubt Pinker's fundamentalism will eventually find a new target.

Stanford's Robert Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture)

2009-11-17T05:26:00.001-07:00

Good lecture in many ways.

Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky, posits that depression is the most damaging disease that you can experience. Right now it is the number four cause of disability in the US and it is becoming more common. Sapolsky states that depression is as real of a biological disease as is diabetes.

Today's newest research article on depression and psychotherapy supports Sapolsky's stance that depression, or at least severe depression, is a biological disorder that responds best to drugs, not to brief supportive psychotherapy (BSP) or cognitive behavioral analysis system of psychotherapy (CBASP). As always, more time consuming (psychoanalysis) or less well-known forms of therapy (Internal Family Systems/Ego States) are not included in the research.

My guess on this study (aside from the fact that the lead author has taken money from every major pharmaceutical company on the planet) is that they weeded out any comorbid patients (those with trauma, PTSD, anxiety disorders, or anything that we are likely to see in the consulting room), which is about as realistic as studying diabetes in people who are not obese/overweight and who do not have a poor diet (those people do not exist in any meaningful way).

Anyway, here is Sapolsky.

Todd L. Duncan - Untangling the Hard Problem of Consciousness

2009-11-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

Nice article from The Global Spiral (Metanexus Institute). His main argument seems to be that we have confused our model of reality with reality itself - in order to comprehend subjective experience and its place in reality, we will need new models of what reality is.

Untangling the Hard Problem of Consciousness
By Todd L. Duncan

A feeling of alienation is a common reaction to modern scientific descriptions of the cosmos. As journalist Bryan Appleyard (1992) expresses it, “On the maps provided by science, we find everything except ourselves.” At the core of this reaction is the discrepancy between the inner world of our awareness and the outer world of our objective scientific description of reality. This disconnect between two dominant aspects of our experience is a significant hurdle on the path toward what Weislogel (2007) calls a “whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person.” Thus a key step along the path toward wholeness is to find a comfortable home for our inner world of subjective experience within the framework of a scientific map of physical reality.

Ancient History, 11x14x.25", mixed media image mounted on white foam core,
floats on black matboard, © 2009 B. Ragalyi. www.ragalyiart.com
This challenge is often referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness: How can it be that subjective experience arises from physical processes in the brain? (The topic has a long history, but see, e.g., Chalmers 1995, 2002a, b.) Why is it that certain physical brain states are accompanied by the experience that there is “something it is like” to be in those states? (Nagel, 1974) After all, subjective experience seems extraneous to the physical description, and most physical states (rocks, ice, pencils, cell phones, etc.) are apparently not accompanied by such experiences.
My aim here is to describe a way to untangle the difficulty by clarifying the origin of the problem. Using the framework suggested by Harrison (2003), I argue that the hard problem is a byproduct of the models we create to describe different aspects of the universe we experience. The aspects we label with the category “physical processes” or “physical reality”—including physical brain processes—constitute a model that captures some aspects of the deeper underlying reality very well, but ignores other aspects of reality. Similarly, those aspects we label as “subjective experience” or “consciousness” also provide only an incomplete description of the underlying reality. In a vague sense we are certainly aware that each category is only an incomplete model, but in an immediate sense it’s easy to forget this basic fact and find ourselves tangled in confusion as a result.
When we view the hard problem from this perspective, our earlier phrasing is revealed as misleading. Subjective experience does not arise (in a derivative sense) from physical processes in the brain. In fact it would make no sense if experience did arise from physical processes, because physical processes constitute a model of reality that specifically focuses on the functional aspects and filters out and excludes the aspects of reality that constitute conscious experience. Rather, subjective experience arises as part of the deeper substrate of reality that also produces the aspects we model and describe as “physical” processes in the brain. The incompatibility of our constructed categories need not imply an incompatibility in the underlying reality these categories were invented to partially describe. The rest of this paper is devoted to clarifying and solidifying this essential point.

Read the rest of the article.

Buddhist Geeks - Episode 147: Freestyle Awakening (Martin Aylward)

2009-11-17T04:43:00.000-07:00

This week's dose of the Geeks.

Buddhist Geeks - Episode 147: Freestyle Awakening

The theme of distinguishing between the Buddhist teachings and forms which lead to awakening, and those forms that are culturally inherited and perhaps unsuited for our current Western context, is an ongoing one on Buddhist Geeks. This week, we continue this exploration with Dharma teacher, Martin Aylward.

Martin, who lives in southern France, where he runs and teaches as Le Moulin Meditation Centre, has been actively exploring what it means to translate Dharma to the West. He recognizes that we're still quite early in that process, but is a pioneer when it comes to adapting the forms of Buddhism to the West. His use of technology and emphasis on relational dharma, as well as what calls "Freestyle or DIY Awakening" is a striking attempt at making Dharma more relevant for the lives of Western, engaged, lay practitioners.

This is part 1 of a two part series. Listen to part 2, Work, Sex, Money, Dharma (airing next week!)

Related Links:

Become a Buddhist Geeks Micropatron
Free AudioBook Offer for Buddhist Geeks Listeners
The Official Buddhist Geeks Newsletter
Ajahn Buddhadasa
Introducing Freestyle Awakening
Le Moulin Meditation Centre
Work, Sex, Money, Dharma

Tara McKelvey - God, the Army, and PTSD

2009-11-16T16:14:00.003-07:00

In the current Boston Review, Tara McKelvey asks if religion is an obstacle to treatment.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them.

That is a little surprising to me - I might have thought they could weather experience easier because of their faith. But, they are also more likely to seek treatment, too.

The bottom line, however, is that the military (and conservatives) hate the PTSD diagnosis and not want to pay to treat the soldiers suffering from it.

God, the Army, and PTSD
Is religion an obstacle to treatment?

Tara McKelvey
When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

Of course, not all veterans with mental health concerns are led to VA hospitals by a loss of faith: many simply want to get a night’s sleep without being terrorized by nightmares. Whatever kind of assistance they are seeking, it has been in increasingly short supply. The decline in resources for veterans’ mental health services started in the 1980s, as part of a nationwide effort to move psychiatric patients into outpatient treatment. The number of inpatient psychiatric beds fell from 9,000 in the late ’80s to 3,000 by 2008.

During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.

The story of the mistreatment of returning veterans from Iraq is well known and shocking. But the role of religious ideology in that mistreatment—how, inside the government, it was a potent tool in the betrayal of an overwhelmingly Christian Army—is much less known.

“I couldn’t stand to hear that phrase any longer—‘God was watching over me,’” Benimoff wrote.
He wasn’t watching over the good men I knew in Iraq. Faith was the center of my life yet it failed to explain why I came home and those soldiers did not. The phrase was a Christian nicety, a cliché that when put to the test didn’t fit reality.

• • •

Things had already begun to change dramatically at the VA by early 2005, shortly after Roger Benimoff left for his second deployment to Iraq. Many appointees at the agency were disturbed that so many Iraq veterans showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part the concern grew from skepticism about the diagnosis itself, which some believed to be a legacy of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Whatever the merits of the diagnosis, it was clearly widespread and, moreover, staggeringly expensive to treat. In 2008 the RAND Corporation put a number on the problem, reporting that one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered some form of mental illness, mostly PTSD and depression.

“God doesn’t like ugly,” one political appointee told Paul Sullivan, an analyst in the VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration, in a clumsy attempt to reduce the cost of caring for psychologically traumatized veterans. “You need to make the numbers lower.” Sullivan left the VA in 2006 and became head of Veterans for Common Sense, a group that filed a class-action lawsuit against the secretary of the VA for the shoddy treatment of veterans. It was dismissed in 2008 and is now being appealed.

PTSD, along with its diagnosis and treatment, has been a charged subject in the United States since the term was introduced nearly three decades ago. Studying returning veterans and working with a group of psychiatrists and others in the 1970s, former Air Force psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton pushed to create an entry for “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Lifton and his colleagues believed that the kind of horror induced by the experience of war and other comparably catastrophic shocks needed a special category that would distinguish it from lesser kinds of trauma. A definition appeared in the DSM-III in 1980. The DSM-IV, published in 1994, included revised diagnostic criteria that reduced the severity of the external shock required to induce PTSD. From the start, conservatives charged that the disorder was created by anti-war activists with a political agenda. The debate about it has been marked by passion, rhetoric, politics, and religion, all of which have only made things worse for the individuals who have suffered from the disorder.

Tens of thousands of soldiers, including Benimoff, have been diagnosed with PTSD, which occurs when an individual responds to a traumatic event with “intense fear” and feelings of helplessness. For PTSD sufferers, that experience is followed by horrifying nightmares, hyper-vigilance, sleeplessness, and other potentially debilitating symptoms. Some of those diagnosed with the disorder never recover, and for this reason skeptics say that the DSM definition has turned ordinary men and women into chronic sufferers, dependent on government assistance and relieved of responsibility for their own lives. It is true that some Iraq veterans with full-blown PTSD diagnoses have been granted government benefits—usually between $200 and $2,600 per month—even though they might be able to support themselves. (I have met several of them while traveling across the country.) Nonetheless, far more suffer either with poor care or no care at all.

Read the whole article.

Oh, wait, here is one more quote that needs to be shared - this is our fu*ked government in action, screwing the soldiers they sent to fight for them.

Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.

Effing weasel.

Metanexus Conference - Call for Papers and Posters - The Whole Story: Philosophy, Theology, Science, and Other Stories of Everything

2009-11-16T07:35:00.002-07:00

Come on integral folk, represent the cause at this very cool conference.

Call for Papers and Posters

The Whole Story: Philosophy, Theology, Science, and Other Stories of Everything
Deadline for Abstracts: January 30, 2010

Conference Thematic

We say at Metanexus that we are after something like “the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person.” We are “after” it, because we do not have it. What we do have are the stories told to us and by us in our various academic fields and intellectual areas of expertise. We have the stories told to us and by us in our diverse faith traditions and our various cultural contexts. We have the stories told to us and by us in the very formation and structure of our institutions–educational and commercial, religious and political.

Submissions

Click here to submit a paper abstract

Click here to submit a poster abstract

We should not deny the validity or value of any of these partial, constituent, “regional,” stories that we’ve worked so hard together to construct, that we’ve become so invested in, usually with very strong reasons for being so. But what we want—what we need—is the “whole” story, the story of our stories, the story of how all these stories hang together.

We sense that the stories we have and hold dear can never be fully satisfying unless there is a whole story that gives an ultimate account of them. Though each of us has a story—many stories, really—if the stories should conflict with one another we worry that at best we can only say, “I simply prefer my story to yours.” But personal preference, when it comes to the stories that order and regulate our lives, just isn’t good enough. We need to know: Is our story the true story? Is our story good? Is it beautiful? And that, it would seem, would take the whole story, the story of the whole.

But it would seem that such a story is impossible. It’s not just that we do not happen to have the whole story, that we could get it if only we worked long enough and hard enough. No. The whole story—the story of the whole—is impossible. The whole story is impossible because it would require a complete speech, and as we human beings are beings in time, we can never get to completeness.

So the whole story is impossible—yet we are after it. In fact, perhaps paradoxically, that is why we are after it. We are after it because we have not attained it…we cannot attain it, so we are after it. As we seek knowledge, the disciplines (our intellectual stories) are formed and multiply. Interdisciplinary studies are developed to try to leverage the successes of the disciplines and get at a “whole” story. But interdisciplinary studies quickly become new disciplines (new stories). So we try to move to transdisciplinary work to get ourselves some purchase, some vantage point to try to see what it is we know now that we know so many disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily distinct things. But if we let transdisciplinary studies become the next discipline, we will still come up short of our goal—the whole story. Because that is impossible.

Thus our work rests in a space between idolatry and foolishness, between thinking we already have the whole story and thinking there is no point to seeking the whole story at all (another way of saying nihilism). To remain in this space, this difficult but not impossible space requires extreme discipline (it will be nothing, if not rigorous). It requires humility (so to avoid reductionism to some specific partial story, and to avoid attempts to “overcome” or to homogenize all existing disciplines). It requires openness (an ear for the call of the impossible that drives us and prevents us from resting satisfied).

In short, to undertake the transdisciplinary work we do, to find the means for the constructive engagement of science and religion, philosophy and theology, to develop new notions of rigor and methodologies and non-standard logics, is difficult and demanding. It can be no easy mish-mash of half-digested theories and awkwardly blended vocabularies. No. It is hard—but honest—work. It doesn’t fit in neatly with the way our educational and academic institutions are structured. It is not measured in just the same way as our disciplinary work. But it is real work, and, in the end, the most important work. So long as we are persistent enough in our thinking and envisioning to remain in the tension of the space between idolatry and foolishness.

Join us for the 11th international Metanexus Conference when philosophers, biologists, physicists, cosmologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, theologians, scholars in religious studies, and other researchers and educators will discuss what it means to seek a whole story in a rapidly evolving and complex world.

Among the attendees will be representatives of the Metanexus Global Network of multidisciplinary Local Societies from more than 40 countries.

Some speakers at past Metanexus conferences include:

Nancy Ellen Abrams Walter Truett Anderson Mahmoud Ayoub

Ian G Barbour Stephen Barr Mario Beauregard

Arthur Caplan John D. Caputo Bruce Chilton

Philip Clayton Roy Clouser John DiIulio

George F. R. Ellis Ursula Goodenough Aubrey de Grey

John F. Haught Philip Hefner Gail Ironson

Antje Jackelén Byron Johnson Robert Kane

Robert Lawrence Kuhn Timur Kuran Max More

Nancey Murphy Meera Nanda Jacob Neusner

Andrew Newberg Basarab Nicolescu Ronald L. Numbers

Robert Pollack Stephen Post Joel Primack

Robert D. Putnam Tariq Ramadan Holmes Rolston III

Pauline Rudd Norbert M. Samuelson Jeffrey P. Schloss

Martin Seligman Bülent Senay Magda Stavinschi

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Esther Sternberg Marijan Sunjic

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Charles Hard Townes George E. Vaillant

J. Wentzel van Huyssteen David Sloan Wilson Amos Yong

Additional Themes

Papers are invited that address the broad themes listed above, but the conference is open to critically rigorous, scientifically-, theologically-, and philosophically-informed papers on any topics that touch on profound questions of a transdisciplinary nature concerning the related themes below.

Presentations by interdisciplinary or inter-institutional teams are especially welcome.
Proposals for special sessions and panel discussions will be considered.

• meta-THEMES: Transdisciplinary Theories, Methodologies, and Approaches:

Is it possible to articulate the “whole” story? Is it even good to seek it? Is this effort fraught with dangers? Is metaphysics the way to tell the whole story? Is the whole story narratival? Can it be conveyed by mappings instead of narratives? Are non-standard logics required? Is systems theory? Is complexity theory? Network theory? Is Big History? Is Social Ecology? What do we even mean by transdisciplinarity? Will it require new institutional forms (i.e., are our current institutional forms obstacles to our seeking/finding something like the “whole” story?)

• nexus-THEMES: Profound Questions, Pressing Issues:

Writing our own big history while we’re in the midst of it? How big can it get?
Non-atomistic ontologies/non-monotonic logics—tools for getting at the “big picture”?
Wholeness and Wisdom.
What are the prospects for a Grand Unified Theory (Theory of Everything)?
What is the relation between mapping the whole and coming again to feel whole?
Religion, Theology, and the Big Picture.
Networks and Meshworks, Theories and Maps.
The narratival nature of science.
Identity and Narrative: the stories we live and the stories that live through us.
The Social Construction of Reality—or Reality’s Construction of the Social?
Issues in emergence and complexity.
Prospects for the unity of knowledge.
Scientific and metaphysical realism.
Infinity—logic, mathematics, cosmology, theology.
Pan(en)theism and natural science.
Metascience, or the possibility of post-postmodern metaphysics.
Exploring levels of reality.
Religion/Science as narrative: the stories of who we are and where we’re going.
The alpha and the omega—stories of creation and apocalypse.
How do we tell our stories?

Paper submission guidelines are at their site.

Daniel R. Hawes - Beyond Happiness: Other-Praising Emotions

2009-11-16T07:22:00.005-07:00

A nice article from the Psychology Today blogs, specifically from Daniel Hawes Evolved Primate: "Identity, decision making and human behavior from an integrated social science perspective."

Beyond Happiness: Other-Praising Emotions

by Daniel R. Hawes

Happiness is the most widely studied positive emotion in Psychology (and not quite coincidentally the topic of one of the most read blog posts on psychologytoday.com for October). The benefits of experiencing happiness go far beyond merely "feeling good", and include a range of physiological and behavioral responses. For example, happiness energizes, motivates, and keeps us healthy by positively influencing our immune system.
While happiness comes in many shades and flavors, and despite the fact that we often use happiness as a catch-all term for all good feelings, happiness is in fact not the only game in town, when it comes to positive emotions. There exist other positive emotions that similar to happiness supply us with good feelings of their own, and cause behavioral responses that are quite distinct from happiness. One class of such emotions are the "other praising" emotions.

Other-praising emotions are emotions that are caused when we witness or interact with excellent individuals, or experience gratitude. The feeling you get when you read about the charity and sacrifice of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King is an other-praising emotion. So is the feeling you get when you watch tapes of Michael Jordan playing basketball, Usain Bolt shattering world records, or the young Michael Jackson performing the moonwalk. The feeling you get when a stranger returns the wallet that you unknowingly left behind is also an other-praising emotion. These emotions, as a recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology points out, are very distinct to happiness, and also very distinct from each other.
***
The way that positive emotions, and in particular other-praising emotions differ, is in regards to the specific type of behavior they elicit, or what exactly they motivate us to in response to our positive emotions.
The three major other-praising emotions that are currently being studied more intensively are "Elevation", "Admiration", and "Gratitude".

Jeffrey Hopkins - Everyone as a Friend

2009-11-16T07:09:00.003-07:00

Great article from the Tricycle archives.

Everyone as a Friend

Jeffrey Hopkins explains the Buddhist logic of embracing our enemies as our friends.

By Jeffrey Hopkins

So how should we view sentient beings? If they have all been in every possible relationship with us from time without beginning (and time has no beginning in Buddhism), should we consider them to be enemies? Everyone has indeed been the enemy—the person who wants me to trip, fall down the stairs, break a leg. My first teacher, Geshe Wangyal, said that one problem with this outlook would be that you’d have to go out and kill everybody.

Difficult to do. Everyone has also been neutral, like the many people we pass on the streets; we may even know some faces, but we don’t have any open relationship with them. They are just people working here or there; we may see them often, but there is neither desire nor hatred. Should we consider them to be neutral? Or should we consider these people to be friends?

The answer given by popular early twentieth-century Tibetan lama Pabongka is provocative. It is not an abstract principle, but refers to common experience. To render it in my own words: If your close friend became crazed and attacked you with a knife, you would attempt to relieve him of the knife and get his mind back in its natural state; you would use the appropriate means to take the knife, but you wouldn’t then kick him in the head.

Pabongka himself uses the example of one’s own mother: If your mother became crazed and attacked you with a knife, you would relieve her of the knife. You would not then proceed to beat her up. That’s his appeal: Once there’s a profoundly close relationship, the close relationship predominates. Why is a friend acting so terribly? Why is she turning against you and attacking you? It’s due to a counterproductive attitude—a distortion—in the person’s mind.

Indeed, if your own best friend went mad and came at you with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker in whatever way you could—you might even have to hit the person in order to disarm him, but once you had managed to disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because he is close to you. If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the same relationship to you as your very best friend, and if you saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend gone mad, you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred.

He would be too dear to you.

Therefore, in teaching compassion, Buddhists do not choose a neutral person as the example of all sentient beings; they choose the strongest of all examples, their best friend. Your feeling for that person is the feeling you should ideally have for every sentient being. You cannot go up to the police officer on the corner and hug her. But you can, inwardly, value her, as well as all sentient beings, as your best friend.

So if everyone in the past has been close, then there is good reason that closeness should predominate. And this becomes a reason—in addition to the similarity between oneself and others—for meditatively cultivating love and compassion, rather than hatred and distance, with respect to everyone. It is not sufficient merely to see that sentient beings are suffering. You must also develop a sense of closeness with them, a sense that they are dear. With that combination—seeing that people suffer and thinking of them as dear—you can develop compassion. So, after meditatively transforming your attitude toward friends, enemies, and neutral persons such that you have gained progress in becoming even-minded toward all of them, the next step is to meditate on everyone as friends, to feel that they have been profoundly close.
In meditation, take individual persons to mind, starting with your friends. Reflect on how close your best friend is—recognize your attitude, for example, when your friend needs your concern, like when she’s ill. This is an appeal to common experience—to how we already naturally react to close friends. Then, in meditation, extend this feeling to more beings.

First you need to recognize people as having been friend, enemy, and neutral person countless times over countless lifetimes— or at least you can’t say that there isn’t anyone who hasn’t been a friend, or you can’t say there isn’t anyone who hasn’t been an enemy, or you can’t say with surety that there’s anyone who hasn’t been neutral. Once you recognize this, it’s possible to begin to recognize everyone as friends.

To consider ourselves dear we usually do not have to enter into meditation. We cherish ourselves greatly. When we see ourselves suffering, we have no problem in wishing to escape that suffering. The problem lies in not cherishing others. The ability to cherish others has to be cultivated. In meditation:

1. Visualize someone you like very much and then superimpose the image of someone toward whom you are neutral. Alternate between the two images until you value the person toward whom you are neutral as much as the friend.

2. Then superimpose, in succession, the images of a number of people toward whom you are neutral, until you value each of them as much as the greatest of friends.

3. When you have developed facility with those two steps, it is possible to extend the meditation to enemies.

For me, it’s much more disruptive to think about my friends as having been enemies than it is to think about my enemies as having been friends. No matter how difficult it is to think of a hated enemy as having been a close friend in a recent lifetime, it’s more disruptive to think of my close friend as having been an enemy. With regard to neutral people, it’s shocking, a whole new perspective, to think, “Just two lifetimes ago, we were very close friends, and now by the force of our own actions we don’t even know each other, don’t even care about each other, we neglect each other, we’re indifferent.”

Is it convincing to base subsequent practices on this notion of cross-positioning over the course of lives? I think it is, but success in changing attitudes certainly isn’t easy to achieve, since it depends on either a belief in rebirth or a willingness to play out the rebirth perspective. Nevertheless, both of these provide a strong foundation, whereas if the appeal were to an abstract principle or because Buddha said so, it would be all right for a day or two but would not be profoundly moving.

The other approach—that doesn’t rely on rebirth—is merely that we’re all equal in wanting happiness and not wanting suffering. And if it’s worthwhile for me to gain happiness, then it’s worthwhile for everyone else to gain happiness. Noticing this similarity makes us close. The late-fourteenth-century yogi-scholar Tsongkhapa says that in order to generate compassion, it is necessary to understand how beings suffer and to have a sense of closeness to them. He says that otherwise, when you understand how they suffer, you’ll take delight in it. For example, so-and-so enemy just got liver disease, and you think, “Good riddance. She’s getting what she deserves.”

Thus, in order to care for other beings, it’s not sufficient merely to know that they suffer, because knowledge that a person is suffering this way might make you happy, especially if that person is an enemy. “May this person be run over.” We all have such thoughts due to a lack of intimacy. Not only must we know the depths of their suffering, but they must be dear to us.

In short, for compassion to develop toward a wide range of persons, mere knowledge of how beings suffer is not sufficient; there has to be a sense of closeness with regard to every being. That intimacy is established either through merely reflecting that everyone equally wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering, or through reflecting on the implications of rebirth, or both, with the one reinforcing the other. Both techniques rely on noticing our own common experience and extending its implications to others.

Jeffrey Hopkins served for a decade as the interpreter to the Dalai Lama. He is Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia. From Cultivating Compassion, © 2001 by Jeffrey Hopkins. Reprinted with permission of Broadway Books.

Tags: Jeffrey Hopkins, Everyone as a Friend, Buddhism, Tricycle, embracing our enemies, compassion

BBC - Professor of Genetics Steve Jones challenges evolutionary psychology

2009-11-15T09:38:00.003-07:00

Interesting . . . . I have never been a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, yet there is some partial truth in what it has to offer. We should not dismiss the whole field because some people take it too far.

Aping Evolution

Episode One - Listen:

Listen now (30 minutes)

Availability:

Available to listen.

Last broadcast on Mon, 2 Nov 2009, 21:00 on BBC Radio 4.

Synopsis

Professor of Genetics Steve Jones challenges evolutionary psychology, the controversial new science of how our brains and minds developed.

Girls like pink better because in Stone Age times they needed to be good at picking berries and women have better sex with rich men - or so some evolutionary psychologists would have us believe. Critics say this isn't science, but conjecture.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain human behaviour from the hunter-gatherers or our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, and has some seductively simple theories. One argument is that we have Stone Age brains in 21st-century skulls, from which we can account for everything from the violence that men show to their stepchildren to why racism exists. Is evolutionary psychology a truly useful addition to the canon of ideas to come out of Darwinian evolution or a just-so science that can be adjusted to suit the researchers' prejudices?

Steve Jones examines the history of the new science, the methods used and asks if it can explain the human drive to language, religion and culture.

Episode 2 - Listen:

Listen now (30 minutes)

Availability:

Available to listen.

Last broadcast on Monday, 21:00 on BBC Radio 4.

Synopsis

Professor of Genetics Steve Jones challenges the controversial science of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychologists say human behaviour, such as who we marry, when we have children and even the quality of our sex lives, can be explained by having a Stone Age brain in a 21st century body.

Professor Jones examines the scientific evidence for such claims and asks if we should be worried if contentious theories escape the world of science and enter the arena of social policy.

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week - On Dzogchen

2009-11-15T09:19:00.002-07:00

DZOGCHEN: The Heart Essence
of the Great Perfection,
Dzogchen Teachings Given in the West
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa and
Richard Barron (Chokyi Nyima),
edited by Patrick Gaffney
more...
Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

Question: How can Dzogchen help us in our daily jobs and careers?

Dalai Lama: ...it is quite difficult to have an experience of Dzogchen, but once you do have that experience, it can be extremely beneficial in dealing with your day to day life, your job, and your career. This is because that kind of experience will give you the ability to prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by circumstances, good or bad. You will not fall into extreme states of mind: you will not get over-excited or depressed. Your attitude toward circumstances and events will be as if you were someone observing the mind, without being drawn away by circumstances.

For example, when you see a reflection of a form in a mirror, the reflection appears within the mirror but it is not projected from within. In the same way, when you confront the situations of life, or deal with others, your attitude too will be mirror-like.

Also, when a reflection appears in the mirror, the mirror does not have to go after the object that is reflected: it simply reflects, spontaneously, on the surface. The same with you: since there is no attachment or agitation at having these 'reflections' in your mind, you will feel tremendous ease and relief. You are not preoccupied by what arises in the mind, nor does it cause you any distress. You are free from conceptuality or any form of objectifying. And so it really does help you, in allowing you to be free from being caught up in the play of emotions like hatred, attachment, and the like.

--from Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translated by Thupten Jinpa and Richard Barron, Foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche, edited by Patrick Gaffney, published by Snow Lion Publications

Dharma Quote of the Week - The Oceans of Suffering

2009-11-15T09:16:00.002-07:00

MUSIC IN THE SKY:
The Life, Art and Teachings of
the Seventeenth Karmapa,
Ogyen Trinley Dorje
by Michele Martin
more...
The Oceans of Suffering
April 6, 2000

Most of the time it is suffering that makes us cry; our tears are salty and not very pleasant to taste. If we consider the whole world, the oceans are salty, too, and it is mainly the solid land where people live and work that is most useful and pleasant. It is also true that the salty oceans are bigger than the land-masses, and in the same way, beings know more suffering than happiness. Perhaps this is a child's view, but I think that the four great oceans of our planet are like the four main sufferings of sentient beings: birth, old age, sickness, and death. Every living being in the world wishes happiness and wants to avoid suffering. How can they attain this happiness? Through the practice of genuine Dharma in all its various forms: meditation on the yidam deities and the nature of mind, the recitation of mantras, and the development of bodhichitta, the awakened mind. Developing faith and devotion is the preliminary for genuine Dharma practice. If these two are strong and uncontrived, we will ultimately attain the level of awakening, or buddhahood. This is my genuine wish for all of you.

--from Music in the Sky: The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje by Michele Martin, published by Snow Lion Publications

Tags: Dharma Quote, The Oceans of Suffering, Snow Lion Publications, Buddhism, suffering, Music in the Sky, The Life Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, Michele Martin

Steven Pinker Reviews Malcolm Gladwell

2009-11-14T08:39:00.004-07:00

One "all knowing" social scientist reviews another - partial truths all around. Pinke ris not kind his assessment - a smell a feud brewing.

WHAT THE DOG SAW
And Other Adventures
By Malcolm Gladwell
410 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99

Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective

Todd Heisler/The New York Times -Malcolm Gladwell

By STEVEN PINKER

Published: November 7, 2009

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”?
Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The familiar jacket design, with its tiny graphic on a spare background, reminds us that Gladwell has become a brand. He is the author of the mega-best sellers “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Outliers”; a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit; and a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, where the 19 articles in “What the Dog Saw” were originally published. This volume includes prequels to those books and other examples of Gladwell’s stock in trade: counterintuitive findings from little-known experts.
A third of the essays are portraits of “minor geniuses” — impassioned oddballs loosely connected to cultural trends. We meet the feuding clan of speed-talking pitchmen who gave us the Pocket Fisherman, Hair in a Can, and other it-slices!-it-dices! contraptions. There is the woman who came up with the slogan “Does she or doesn’t she?” and made hair coloring (and, Gladwell suggests, self-invention) respectable to millions of American women. The investor Nassim Taleb explains how markets can be blindsided by improbable but consequential events. A gourmet ketchup entrepreneur provides Gladwell the opportunity to explain the psychology of taste and to recount the history of condiments.
Another third are on the hazards of statistical prediction, especially when it comes to spectacular failures like Enron, 9/11, the fatal flight of John F. Kennedy Jr., the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the persistence of homelessness and the unsuccessful targeting of Scud missile launchers during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. For each debacle, Gladwell tries to single out a fallacy of reasoning behind it, such as that more information is always better, that pictures offer certainty, that events are distributed in a bell curve around typical cases, that clues available in hindsight should have been obvious before the fact and that the risk of failure in a complex system can be reduced to zero.
The final third are also about augury, this time about individuals rather than events. Why, he asks, is it so hard to prognosticate the performance of artists, teachers, quarterbacks, executives, serial killers and breeds of dogs?
The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.
Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, “Gee, that’s interesting!” He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay. I particularly liked “Something Borrowed,” a moving examination of the elusive line between artistic influence and plagiarism, and “Dangerous Minds,” a suspenseful tale of criminal profiling that shows how self-anointed experts can delude their clients and themselves with elastic predictions.
An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.
The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings. For example, in many cases of uncertainty, a decision maker has to act on an observation that may be either a signal from a target or noise from a distractor (a blip on a screen may be a missile or static; a blob on an X-ray may be a tumor or a harmless thickening). Improving the ability of your detection technology to discriminate signals from noise is always a good thing, because it lowers the chance you’ll mistake a target for a distractor or vice versa. But given the technology you have, there is an optimal threshold for a decision, which depends on the relative costs of missing a target and issuing a false alarm. By failing to identify this trade-off, Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes about the limitations of pictures and the downside of precise information.
Another example of an inherent trade-off in decision-making is the one that pits the accuracy of predictive information against the cost and complexity of acquiring it. Gladwell notes that I.Q. scores, teaching certificates and performance in college athletics are imperfect predictors of professional success. This sets up a “we” who is “used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors.” Instead, Gladwell argues, “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”
But this “solution” misses the whole point of assessment, which is not clairvoyance but cost-effectiveness. To hire teachers indiscriminately and judge them on the job is an example of “going back and looking for better predictors”: the first year of a career is being used to predict the remainder. It’s simply the predictor that’s most expensive (in dollars and poorly taught students) along the accuracy-cost trade-off. Nor does the absurdity of this solution for professional athletics (should every college quarterback play in the N.F.L.?) give Gladwell doubts about his misleading analogy between hiring teachers (where the goal is to weed out the bottom 15 percent) and drafting quarterbacks (where the goal is to discover the sliver of a percentage point at the top).
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.
The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Talking About My Generation

2009-11-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Gen X has gotten a bad rap, says this author - and I agree.

Pete Peterson

More Than Zero

Often derided as cynical and disengaged, Generation Xers have plenty of public spirit.

13 November 2009

Pity Generation X, the Americans born between 1965 and 1981 who have been described for years as “apathetic,” “cynical,” and “disengaged.” The greatness of the Greatest Generation is clear in its very name. Much laudatory ink has been spilled on the Baby Boomers—usually by Boomers themselves. As for the “Millennials,” those born between 1982 and 1998, the quantity of reportage lauding their public-spiritedness has quickly become tiresome. But a new report casts doubt on the widely accepted stereotype of Gen Xers as inferior to these other groups.

Sociologists Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, offer a good example of the usual attitude. “Millennials are sharply distinctive from the divided, moralistic Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) and the cynical, individualistic Gen-Xers (born 1965–1981), the two generations that preceded them and who are their parents,” they write. “Millennials have a deep commitment to community and helping others, putting this belief into action with community service activities.” In a Boston Globe op-ed prior to last year’s presidential election, Harvard’s Robert Putnam took things a step further, comparing Millennials to the earlier cohort that survived the Depression and fought World War II: “The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving.” Would it be unseemly at this point to groan, “Gag me with a spoon”?

All of this stereotyping might be more bearable if it were true, but the latest Civic Health Index study from the congressionally chartered National Conference on Citizenship (NCOC) puts both the Millennials and Generation X in a different light. The report, entitled Civic Health in Hard Times, focuses on the impact of the economic downturn on nationwide civic participation. From the NCOC’s survey results, organized by generational cohort, it appears that much of the derision heaped on Generation X’s withdrawal from the public square has been misplaced.

While Gen Xers fall slightly behind Millennials in volunteering (42.6 percent to 43 percent), the narrowness of the gap is surprising, given the vastly greater number of volunteering opportunities available to (and sometimes mandated for) Millennials in high school and college. Gen Xers far outdistance Baby Boomers (35 percent) in volunteering and even outperform the real “Greatest Generation” of retired seniors (42 percent). And when asked whether they had increased their participation in the past year, Gen-X respondents scored highest, with 39 percent answering yes. This far surpassed Millennials (29 percent), Boomers (26), and seniors (25).

Certainly this outcome might partly reflect small changes in already low engagement levels among Gen Xers, but a deeper look reveals that they flex considerable civic muscle. Boomer respondents took the top spot when asked whether they “had given food or money to someone who isn’t a relative” in the last year, with 52.9 percent responding affirmatively, but Gen Xers finished second (51.2 percent), followed by seniors, with Millennials placing last. When asked about a range of civic involvement activities, from “giving money, food, shelter” to more direct “volunteering,” Gen Xers finished second to seniors in stating that they had done “all of the above”—ahead of both Boomers and Millennials.

As for more general political participation, recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that while Millennials had a statistically significant uptick in voter participation in the November 2008 elections, they still trailed every other generation in percentage turnout. In fact, 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds voted at the lowest percentages of any age surveyed—39.8 percent, 40.1 percent, and 43 percent, respectively. Gen Xers far surpassed Millennials in percentage voting in 2008, 52.1 percent to 44.5. And the voter turnout for Millennials in 2008 was less than 1 percentage point higher than Gen-Xer turnout figures for 1992—the comparable election, age-wise, for the older cohort. These are hardly numbers befitting a “new Greatest Generation.”

Moving from participation to trust in our largest governing institutions, the NCOC survey shows that there is some truth to the characterization of Gen Xers as cynical. When asked, “Do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right?,” Gen Xers were the most dubious of all generations, with only 20.7 percent responding that they trusted the feds either “most of the time” or “just about always.” Compare this with Millennials (27.9 percent), Boomers (27.8), and seniors (26.2). The same trends pertain to questions about state government, though Gen Xers’ level of trust in their local government was higher. Thirty-six percent of Gen Xers viewed these governments positively—exactly the same fraction as Millennials, and just a percentage point behind seniors.

This divergence between trust and participation makes sense when understood as a rational civic reaction to what are perceived as broken or distant political institutions. Gen Xers, cautious about whether our politics can ameliorate significant societal ills, are nonetheless “voting” with their money and time to address these challenges. We may be skeptical, but we’re not apathetic.

So why all the gushing about the Millennials? Part of the reason is the necessary examination of a new (and very large) generation’s coming of age and of its participation in a democratic society. But it’s also difficult not to see a partisan element. In 2007, as researchers Winograd and Hais point out, Millennials self-identified as Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 52 percent to 30 percent. But Winograd—a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore—uses this snapshot to forecast a Democratic “historic opportunity to become the majority party for at least four more decades.” Michael Connery, author of the recent Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority, recently suggested: “If a ‘post-partisan’ politics is going to be ushered in on a wave of Millennial support, it will have a distinctly progressive character.” Connery concludes that it is “this optimism and belief in their own power to make positive change in country—reflected in many polls and surveys of Millennials taken in the past few years—more than anything that accounts for the incredible surge in youth participation that we are seeing today.” These pundits should be careful, though, for while Millennials have registered predominantly Democratic, they’ve also shown a libertarian streak, expressing significant support for fiscally conservative policies.

Winograd, Connery, and others (like the Center for American Progress’s Ruy Teixeira) seem less interested in touting the Millennials’ civic engagement than in celebrating their political leanings and what these might mean for the Democratic Party. In contrast, Gen Xers began to participate politically as the youngest members of the Reagan Revolution, with most research finding us (to this day) more politically conservative than our Boomer parents. One wonders how much applause we would hear for Millennials if their current affiliation were reversed.

As this year’s Civic Health Index demonstrates, Gen Xers are proving deeply involved in civil society, even as they continue to be suspicious of big government. So while pundits keep handing out participation trophies to the Millennials, maybe this year they should save a few for the enlightened skeptics of Generation X.

Pete Peterson is executive director of Common Sense California, a multipartisan organization that supports citizen participation in policymaking (his views do not necessarily represent those of CSC). He also lectures on State and Local Governance at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.

Steve Hagen - Looking for Meaning

2009-11-13T20:00:00.001-07:00

Mining the treasures of the Tricycle archive.

Looking for Meaning

A reader from Woodstock, New York, writes: “Is it possible to have a meaningful meditation practice in the absence of a living teacher?”

By Steve Hagen

Sure. Why not? We can find meaning in anything. But no matter what meaning we look for or find, it’s delusion - and the surest way to implant feelings of meaninglessness deep within our minds. As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, sure. Why not? We can find meaning in anything. But no matter what meaning we look for or find, it’s delusion—and the surest way to implant feelings of meaninglessness deep within our minds.

As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, we believe, if we meditate long enough, and in just the right way, it might even bring us to enlightenment.

All of this is delusion.

As my teacher (and many teachers before him) used to say, zazen is useless. By the same token, it’s also meaningless.

I sit in meditation every day. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years. I have no reason to do it, and I feel no need to justify or explain to anyone why I do it, because I know that whatever I would say would be false.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. I had plenty of reasons to meditate when I began this practice back in the mid-sixties. But then I met a good teacher, and with his help I was able to learn the more subtle and profound aspects of this practice. Until I met Katagiri Roshi in 1975, it never occurred to me to look at the mind with which I approached meditation practice. I didn’t notice how greedy it was, or that it was the antithesis of the mind I thought I was seeking. Nor did it occur to me that such a mind was already the very source of the dissatisfaction and confusion I sought to free myself from through meditation.

So why meditate? If it’s not to get some benefit, what’s the point?

We have to look at the mind we bring to this practice. Though we go through the motions of sitting in meditation, generally it’s not the mind of meditation at all. It’s the mind of getting somewhere - which is obviously not the mind of enlightenment. It’s the mind of ego, the mind that seeks gain and keeps coming up short.

This is why zazen is useless and without meaning: meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire something new or different.

If you’re sitting in meditation to get something—whether it’s peace, tranquility, low blood pressure, concentration, psychic powers, meaningfulness, or even enlightenment—you’re not here. You’re off in a world of your own mental fabrication, a world of distraction, daydreaming, confusion, and preoccupation. It’s anything but meditation.

It’s probably true, for the most part, that certain health benefits can be found through meditation. But if you’re doing this for that - for some reason, purpose, end, or goal—then you are not actually doing this. You’re distracted and divided.

Meditation is just to be here. This can mean doing the dishes, writing a letter, driving a car, or having a conversation - if we’re fully engaged in this activity of the moment, there is no plotting or scheming or ulterior purpose. This full engagement is meditation. It doesn’t mean anything but itself.

To look for meaning is to look for a model, a representation, an explanation, a justification for something other than this, what’s immediately at hand. Meditation is releasing whatever reasons and justifications we might have, and taking up this moment with no thought that this can or should be something other than just this.

It’s only because we look for meaning—for what we think we can hold in our hands, or in our minds—that we feel dissatisfaction and meaninglessness.

So, is it possible to have a meaningful meditation practice in the absence of a living teacher?

A teacher who truly understands meditation would make every effort to disabuse us of all such gaining ideas.

Steve Hagen is head teacher at Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center (www.dharmafield.org) in Minneapolis. His new book, Buddhism Is Not What You Think, will be published in September.

Nancy Ellen Abrams	Walter Truett Anderson	Mahmoud Ayoub
Ian G Barbour	Stephen Barr	Mario Beauregard
Arthur Caplan	John D. Caputo	Bruce Chilton
Philip Clayton	Roy Clouser	John DiIulio
George F. R. Ellis	Ursula Goodenough	Aubrey de Grey
John F. Haught	Philip Hefner	Gail Ironson
Antje Jackelén	Byron Johnson	Robert Kane
Robert Lawrence Kuhn	Timur Kuran	Max More
Nancey Murphy	Meera Nanda	Jacob Neusner
Andrew Newberg	Basarab Nicolescu	Ronald L. Numbers
Robert Pollack	Stephen Post	Joel Primack
Robert D. Putnam	Tariq Ramadan	Holmes Rolston III
Pauline Rudd	Norbert M. Samuelson	Jeffrey P. Schloss
Martin Seligman	Bülent Senay	Magda Stavinschi
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz	Esther Sternberg	Marijan Sunjic
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson	Charles Hard Townes	George E. Vaillant
J. Wentzel van Huyssteen	David Sloan Wilson	Amos Yong