Pascale Soleil: humanAnimal

Self-segregating

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 13:38:15 GMT

Ask yourself how many of the weblogs you read regularly voiced attitudes different from your own about the outcome of the US elections Tuesday. Several of the sites I visit that rarely comment on politics nevertheless had something to say about the elections. And in 98% of the cases, it was something I agreed with. Birds of a feather flock together. And when they don't, they often flame the heck out of each other, which is most unpleasant. Still, I'm trying to get out and about a bit more, because it's valuable to be exposed to well-written and intelligent ideas that you're inclined to disagree with. Now, if I could only find some. (Just kidding.)

Why are they happy?

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 02:39:02 GMT

Dave Rogers of Time's Shadow calls our attention to this NY Times article about irrationality and choice. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics for understanding that people fear loss much more than they value gain, is trying to establish a true measurement of quality of life.

We're attempting to measure it not by asking people, but by actually trying to measure the quality of their daily lives. For example, we are studying one day in the lives of 1,000 working women in Texas. We have people reconstruct the day in successive episodes, as recalled a day later, and we have a technique that recovers the emotions and the feelings. We know who they were with and what they were doing. They also tell us how satisfied they are with various aspects of their lives. We know a lot about these ladies. Q. What are you finding out?
A. I'll give you a striking finding. Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they're actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day. The other thing is the huge importance of friends. People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child. Q. Why would divorced women be more cheerful?
A. So far, I don't understand it, but that's what the data says.

I'm at a loss to see why this is mysterious. Here's the syllogism: 1. People are happier with their friends than with their families.
2. Divorced women spend more time in the company of friends than married women.
Ergo:
3. Divorced women are more cheerful. They also describe themselves as less satisfied. This doesn't surprise me either. Satisfaction is a very different matter from mood emotions (such as happiness or unhappiness, cheerfulness or gloom). Satisfaction is the sensation of having perceived meets met adequately. If you've been enculturated your entire life to believe that having a successful marriage is important, then of course you're going to be dissatisfied if your marriage fails. But the demise of your marriage might nonetheless significantly improve the quality your life on a day to day basis (even if you have a hard time perceiving it cognitively).

Nature AND Nurture

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 01:34:48 GMT

Ignore the stupid title on this New York Times article.

Humans are born with temperaments arising from genetic variations in brain chemicals called neuromodulators, Dr. Quartz said. These differences may lead one baby to avoid novelty and another to seek it. But the experiences that result help construct the growing brain. Humans are also born with a very large prefrontal cortex, a higher brain region involved in planning that taps into an ancient system for predicting what is rewarding and making decisions to maximize rewards and avoid punishments. Neuroscientists are finding that this circuit, which fully matures in late adolescence, is an internal guidance system that fills each person's world with values, meaning and emotional tone, taking shape according to a person's culture. In other words, culture contributes not just to the brain's contents but to its wiring as well, Dr. Quartz said.

Freud Revisited

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 18:53:05 GMT

One of the most creative thinkers of all time is getting another look in the light of recent neuroscience research:

The work of the past half-century in psychology and neuroscience has been to downplay the role of unconscious universal drives, focusing instead on rational processes in conscious life. Meanwhile, dreams were downgraded to a kind of mental static, random scraps of memory flickering through the sleeping brain. But researchers have found evidence that Freud's drives really do exist, and they have their roots in the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain that operates mostly below the horizon of consciousness. Now more commonly referred to as emotions, the modern suite of drives comprises five: rage, panic, separation distress, lust and a variation on libido sometimes called seeking. Freud presaged this finding in 1915, when he wrote that drives originate "from within the organism" in response to demands placed on the mind "in consequence of its connection with the body." Drives, in other words, are primitive brain circuits that control how we respond to our environment ~ foraging when we're hungry, running when we're scared and lusting for a mate.

In particular, the "seeking" drive is proving especially interesting:

Since the 1970s, neurologists have known that dreaming takes place during a particular form of sleep known as REM ~ rapid eye movement ~ which is associated with a primitive part of the brain known as the pons. Accordingly, they regarded dreaming as a low-level phenomenon of no great psychological interest. When Solms looked into it, though, it turned out that the key structure involved in dreaming was actually the ventral tegmental, the same structure that Panksepp had identified as the seat of the "seeking" emotion. Dreams, it seemed, originate with the libido ~ which is just what Freud had believed.

Read the whole Newsweek article. [via MyAppleMenu]

For the Record, Revisited

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 18:53:23 GMT

Like everyone, I found it necessary to propound my theories about the Washington area shooter (see "For the Record, My Theory" and "Sniper Theory Redux". And like everyone, if John Allen Williams/Mohammed and John Lee Malvo are the culprits as I assume for the purposes of this post, I was much more wrong than right. Here with my accounting. 1. White-supremacist. That's the biggie. Uhh..... NO. Not unless we've got the most self-hating black persons ever. 2. Weekend custody of the kids. Apparently NOT. Apparently the "kid" was traveling with him. 3. Tarot card as prank. Nope. It looks as if this was part of the duo (the letters are in a different handwriting.) Maybe the teenager was responsible for this more "flashy" calling card. And maybe the youngster shot the student. 4. Job allows travel. What job? On the other hand, I seem to have gotten a few things right. Not that it matters. 1. Divorced, late thirties - early forties (4 children by 2 marriages). Yes ~ and his ex-wife lives in the area. No idea whether there's a Michael's store connection. 2. No white van/box truck. 3. Anti-government bias. Maybe. 4. Break in the case from insider tipster. It looks as if the Alabama murder connection was key ~ and that came from a tipster (relationship still unknown). At least I'm not the only person with egg on the face. Another racial stereotype bites the dust ~ and, a whole bunch of "profilers" are going to have to do some serious revision. Williams/Muhammed's conversion to Islam (of the Nation of Islam flavor, apparently) seems to have taken place 17 years ago, around the time he joined the Army. It doesn't look like there's any direct al-Qaeda connection there. The relationship between Williams/Muhammed and his step-son Malvo is likely to be the focus of a lot of research and speculation. One report I heard said that John Lee was restricted to a diet of crackers and honey (diet for his son was also a source of contention between Williams/Muhammed and his ex-wife).

"You have indicated that you want us to do and say certain things. You asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.' We understand that hearing us say this is important to you," Moose said.

This whole story is looking more and more perverse. I can't help but be very curious about it, even as my heart grieves for the victims and their families, and for the twisted souls of the perpetrators.

You learn something every day...

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 05:33:22 GMT

...but it's not every day that I learn something from my late local news. WJLA (Channel 7 here in the DC area) just reported on Rome's first official gay marriage. Typical late-night news fluff. But why "official"? Well, apparently it's a legal marriage because one of the men is French, and France recognizes same sex marriages. Did you know that? I sure didn't. Vive la France!

Well Endowed?

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:20:12 GMT

Okay gents, I know this is a touchy subject. But it keeps coming up (*ahem*), and so I would like to spread a little light (where did you think I was going?) on the subject from a female perspective. As reported by Reuters and called to my attention by boing boing:

On the heels of a previous report that debunked the notion that a man's shoe size could be used to estimate the length of his penis, a new study now claims that those with inquiring minds need merely take a gander at a man's forefinger... Dr. Evangelos Spyropoulos and colleagues from the Naval and Veterans Hospital of Athens, Greece say they conducted their investigation to gather more information on the relationship between body measurements and male genitalia size. They argue that such information--as well as a clearer definition of "normal penile size"--will help doctors counsel and treat the many men who are concerned about perceived inadequacies relating to their genitals. The "lack of standardized metric data and the absence of widely acceptable criteria on the proper size of the external genitalia poses major difficulties in the counseling and/or treatment of young adult men with worries of sexual inadequacy," the authors write.

Okay. So let me be as clear about this as possible. Within reasonably normal parameters (let's say, a standard deviation), we women JUST DON'T CARE how long your penis is. There may be a certain occular thrill associated with length, but I'm here to tell you that it's trivial, temporary, and nothing to get yerself in a twist over. As it were. But. (You knew there was going to be a "but," didn't you?) If we care about your proportions at all, what we care about is girth. There are good anatomical reasons for this, the technical details of which I will spare you. Double-but. (Urrrk. That didn't come out quite right.) Surely by now, you enlightened fellows you, you realize that anatomy is not destiny, right? You do realize that the "endowment" of the guy that all the girls whisper about to one another with misty eyes ultimately has nothing whatsoever to do with the meatpacking industry and everything to do with what's between his ears and in his heart, right? You know that it's about what he pays attention to, and how, and why, and what kind of attention, no? That's the gift that keeps on giving. Granted, it would be easier for everybody if we could just say: Hoo-boy, that's a sure fire winner there, no question, let's get right on that! Aren't you (admit it!) glad that's not the way it actually works? Okay. So could we quit it with the size correlation articles already????

Politically Incorrect

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 19:11:46 GMT

For some of you, this may well come under the heading of "Too Much Information" ~ in which case, please feel free to skip this post in its entireity. In a long-repressed fit of pique, I posted a rant entitled "The Curse" at BlogSisters. I fully expected to get pounded into the pavement by irate women scolding me for letting down the side (which only goes to show that I have my own set of knee-jerk assumptions I ought to root out). To my surprise, so far the reaction has mostly been the moral equivalent of "You go, girl!" or "What you said!" There've also been follow-on posts and comments that suggest that many of us have tales we'd like to tell. There was one brave male voice in the comments who expressed the wish that the women in his life would be more forthcoming on these topics. So it's for the Jasons out there that I've posted the link.

Will you? Really?

Sun, 20 Oct 2002 20:41:51 GMT

Touch your nose with your left forefinger. Go ahead. It's not a trick. I'll wait... Okay. That was easy, right? You decided to touch your nose, and then you touched your nose. A simple, voluntary motion. Asked and answered.

[T]he new neuro-flavored debate over free will goes more like this: Is the feeling of will an illusion, a wily trick of the brain, an after-the-fact construct? Is much of our volition based on automatic, unconscious processes rather than conscious ones? ... [T]he debate is still on, and near its center is an 86-year-old University of California professor emeritus of physiology, Benjamin Libet... What Libet did was to measure electrical changes in people's brains as they flicked their wrists. And what he found was that a subject's ''readiness potential'' - the brain signal that precedes voluntary actions - showed up about one-third of a second before the subject felt the conscious urge to act. The result was so surprising that it still had the power to elicit an exclamation point from him in a 1999 paper: ''The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!'' But, though controversial, the Libet experiments still stand and have been replicated. And they have been joined by a growing body of research that indicates, at the very least, that the feeling of will is fallible.... Among that research is the following experiment by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A subject, he said, would be repeatedly prompted to choose to move either his right or his left hand. Normally, right-handed people would move their right hands about 60 percent of the time. Then the experimenters would use magnetic stimulation in certain parts of the brain just at the moment when the subject was prompted to make the choice. They found that the magnets, which influence electrical activity in the brain, had an enormous effect: On average, subjects whose brains were stimulated on their right-hand side started choosing their left hands 80 percent of the time. And, in the spookiest aspect of the experiment, the subjects still felt as if they were choosing freely. ''What is clear is that our brain has the interpretive capacity to call free will things that weren't,'' he said.

Confabulation, or the tendency of the brain to fill in details where conscious data is missing, is a well-known phenomenon. Obviously, where we can, we prefer to believe that we did things on purpose rather than randomly, under duress, or like automata. We cherish our sense of autonomy, purposefulness, and self-direction. There are all sorts of ways of reading the information coming out of this area of research. If the "decision" lags the potentiation, why does that make it any less an act of will? The persons who flicked their wrists (or touched their noses!) still indisputedly did it at their own discretion. They may not have been able to mentally articulate the decision-making process ~ at the time that it took place ~ but that certainly doesn't mean they weren't deciding. These are fascinating questions, at the very heart of the mind/body debate that has kept philosophers busy for a long, long time. I look forward with keen interest to more scientific research in this arena. Read more of the Boston Globe article. [via boing boing]

On the subway

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 07:24:41 GMT

I know things I shouldn't know, sometimes. I know things that people don't want other people to know, that they don't tell anybody. Most of the time I can't say anything about it, or do anything about it, because I'm not supposed to know this stuff, and I can't account for how I know it anyway. This is a really awkward subject. One of the reasons I don't usually talk about it is because it can make me sound like a raving lunatic. I may be a lunatic, but I'm not a raving lunatic, okay? Trust me on this. In today's edition of the Wayback Journal, I witness a pick-up on the subway. In my gut I know there's something really, really wrong with it, and it scares me badly. I wasn't just grossed out, I was frightened, and not for myself. Now on the face of it, this is a no-brainer, the guy sounds like a nut-job. But how do you tell the difference between the harmless nut-jobs and the ones who are dangerous? And how do you know when a victim is really a victim? Sometimes I know. And I can't say how.

My cousin the cat

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 04:33:52 GMT

Can this be true?

I read in a recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine that, outside of the Primate Order, the animal whose DNA most closely resembles our own is the domestic house cat.

I have to research this a bit... [via Pax Nortona] Update: Here you go...

But perhaps the most unexpected genome sweepstakes so far is the probe of the house cat. The impetus for the work is an underappreciated genetic similarity between people and cats. Not that it's in our nature to chase mice or purr when scratched behind the ears, but scientists have found that when it comes to the arrangement of genes on our chromosomes, we're closer to cats than to any other animal group studied so far except primates.

[From the Smithsonian Magazine]

For the Record, My Theory

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 05:12:23 GMT

Everyone has a sniper theory. The current common assumption is that the killings are opportunistic and entirely random. I don't think so ~ at least not all of them. Here are my speculations. 1) This is the work of a divorced man in his mid-to-late thirties or early forties. 2) He has weekend custody of children, which is why he takes Saturday and Sunday off. 3) His ex-wife has some connection with Michaels Craft Stores. 4) The man may or may not have a military history. It's irrelevant, because his marksmanship is not so extraordinary that it could not be achieved by a patient person with basic coordination, sufficient motivation, and decent equipment (a properly callibrated scope, easy to obtain). It's irrelevant whether or not he's a gun fanatic/enthusiast. It's important to note that there is NOTHING PARTICULARLY SPECIAL about his skills or equipment. These days, it is easy to come by and master the tools needed to kill at a distance. Easy. (See this Washington Post article.) 5) His job allows him to travel reasonably freely without accounting for his exact whereabouts. I'm thinking along the lines of skilled technician, construction, repair, something like that. 6) The Tarot card is either a prank by some citizen-jerk or a deliberate red herring left by the sniper. 7) And here I go out on the longest limb: I suspect this man is a racist, probably of the White supremacist stripe. To-date, as far as I know from information released, he has shot 4 "Anglos" out of 10 victims. The first, James D. Martin, worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a diversity coordinator (might the sniper have actually known his first victim?). Another, "Sonny" Buchanan, could ~ from his photograph at least ~ easily be taken for being of mixed race. The third, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, is a blonde woman. BUT she was married to a Hispanic man. I think it's entirely possible that the sniper saw her in the company of her husband or other friends or relatives of color. The dyed-in-the-wool White supremacist considers "Whites" who marry people of color to be "race traitors" ~ more than sufficient "justification" in their twisted ideology for murder. The fourth, Dean Harold Meyers, a civil engineer and Vietnam Vet, was a 53 year old cat-collecting bachelor. On the face of it, he doesn't fit my theory... unless he was gay, and his killer had some way of knowing it. I think law enforcement have deliberately chosen not to speculate about the White supremacist angle, as feelings are already running very high and airing this theory publicly would certainly serve only to raise tensions further. 8) Everyone is looking for a white truck and/or van. There are about a billion of these vehicles on the road. If the sniper was using a white vehicle like those we've heard of, I guarantee he is no longer doing so. 9) I don't think we'll see more gas station shootings. Three of a kind seems to be this guy's max, which is smart. 10) Unless we have a heroic family tipster like David Koszinsky, this could go on for a very long time. Hardly the most cheerful line of thought. But you can't live around here and not have these conversations three times a day. So I thought I'd get this off my chest. [Update: My bad. Apparently there have been 4 gas station shootings. I still think we've seen the last of that. I'd look at the first or last of each of the different "venues" to possibly be of someone the sniper has been stalking, rather than someone random.] [Another update (10/14): A woman is dead outside a Home Depot in Falls Church. There is a Michael's store in this Seven Corner's complex (on the opposite end of the shopping strip from the Home Depot). One shot. Here we go again. Massive road blocks. I hope to God they catch this man, but I'm not optimistic.] [Updating again (10/15): The woman (Anglo) is an FBI employee. Are people going to actually buy the "random" theory here? Sounds like a stalked victim to me.]

May I just say how thoroughly this sucks?

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:28:17 GMT

One of the great joys of living in the DC area is that it is a magnet for psychos (and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible, that's how pissed off I am). Tonight, there's this. Is it the sniper? They don't know yet. In any case, another person is dead. And that just sucks.

The Rabbit Talks Relationships

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:06:48 GMT

In her own inimitable, slightly cranky way, the Rabbit speaks sooth:

Then people say: Seek to understand first, and then you'll be understood. Give first, and you'll receive. I'm not so sure. There are people who you can seek to understand, seek to give to, and they just take and take and they still don't give a shit about understanding you in return. They're not bad or mean, they're just screwy, or they don't like you very much, or they don't like themselves that much. Who cares? Find someone who's mellow and appreciative, that's what I say, preferably far more mellow and appreciative than you are. Find someone you want to emulate, not someone you want to help.

Read the wider context for these words of wisdom here. Is it good to understand? Of course. Is it good to behave well to one another even when you don't understand? Absolutely.

Jealousy

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 05:34:16 GMT

Men are jealous because they're worried they'll be raising another man's offspring (sexual jealousy); women are afraid that a man will fall in love with another woman, and thereafter not support her children (emotional jealousy). Evolutionary pressure caused this difference ~ it's hard-wired. Classic argument from nature. It's gotten lots of play in our "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" culture. Sounds pretty persuasive. Except maybe it's completely wrong. Read this article in the New York Times. And note the unbelievably catty tone these guys take in disagreeing with one another. Experiment design is critical (maybe women think they're supposed to be forgiving of sexual peccadilloes, but that their femininity is comprised if they don't express deep dismay at an emotional betrayal; perhaps men are acculturated to see any sexual betrayal as a slight to their masculinity, but that it would be wussy to say that having their feelings hurt would be worse ~ how would you design an experiment to tell what their unmediated response would be?). And then, well, then there's how you interpret the data. Evolutionary psychology is a fascinating and deeply dodgy field. And unbiased, pan-cultural scientific evidence is extremely difficult to come by. It sure is entertaining watching them try, though! Proceed with caution, though: there be dragons. When people start developing laws, educational curricula, and social policy based on this kind of science the consequences can be far reaching and deeply problematic (viz: Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man). We don't know enough to be making decisions in this arena. Maybe we will one day, and then we'll have to decide which is more important (which should be weighted in what proportion), the factors of human evolution or the way we want to encourage or expect people to behave. [Update: Oh, and skull morphology is useless in determining "racial" characteristics or "continent of origin" because environment has a much more prominent role in shaping noggins. Right? Umm. Maybe not. Another piece of received wisdom is in question again... and wouldn't you know it, it's because somebody or somebodies had axes to grind (in this case, a noble goal of ending racial policies). Another reason to be very very careful when appealing to "scientific evidence" about human nature as a basis for social policy. If the science turns out to be wrong, the baby may get thrown out with the bathwater. See this article in the New York Times.]

Oh yes...

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 21:09:22 GMT

Halley Suitt of Halley's Comment pulls out a terrific quotation:

...In another domain, research on resilience, both physical and mental, reveals that rich authentic connection is one of the most salient factors in continued good health, outweighting such decisive forces as nutrition, exercise, even the absence of smoking. We enter life whole and connected and we operate best when richly attached. Intimacy is our natural state as a species, our birthright. And yet, while the push away from genuine closeness occurs at different points in their development, and in critically different ways, neither boys nor girls are allowed to maintain healthy relatedness for very long. ... Instead of cultivating intimacy, turning nascent aptitudes into mature skills, we teach boys and girls, in complimentary ways, to bury their deepest selves, to stop speaking, or attending to, the truth, to hold in mistrust, or even in disdain, the state of closeness we all, by our natures, most crave... We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them.

This comes from Terance Real's How Can I Get Through to You: Reconnecting Men and Women. I don't know the book, so I can't say more about it, but this observation seems right on point to me.

Masturbation

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 18:25:47 GMT

That got your attention. :) Over at Time's Shadow, Dave Rogers talks about trying to get a grip on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (hehe, great oxymoronic image!). Like me, he's fascinated by physics. Neither of us is ever going to push the frontiers of subatomic physics back, nor expand the limits of cosmology, but we think the ideas are neat and we like to learn and think about them. Is this "mental masturbation"? Well, so what if it is? First of all, let's all take a deep breath and get over the idea that masturbation is a bad, shameful thing. Masturbation ~ mental or otherwise ~ has a lot going for it. But, title notwithstanding (can you say "bait & switch"?), that's a topic for another day. All knowledge needn't be sought purely for immediate and practical purposes. There is such a thing as intellectual play. Learning for learning's sake. Stretching ye olde grey matter. Thinking big thoughts because big thoughts feel cool inside the brain pan. Because one idea leads to another. Because everybody could always use another item in the potential analogy/metaphor file. We are already professionally specialized almost to the point of extinction. It's a Good Thing to know a little something about fields beyond our own, to be able to sling the lingo about a bit (while not pretending that we actually KNOW what we're talking about in any truly professional way). But most of all it's FUN. And we all need more actual, genuine fun in our lives. Fun keeps us from crusting up and becoming tedious pucker-butted fuddy-duddies. Fun is a surefire way to retain a sense of humor and some good-natured humility. And forget the virtues of fun, the key thing about fun is that it's fun. And sometimes that, right there, is enough. Kinda like masturbation. [Update: Okay, one other thought. Masturbation ~ of any kind ~ should in general be done in private. Unless you've got an eager audience for it. After all, no one forced you to visit this site.]

Letting Go

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 16:17:39 GMT

The mind is its own place, and can itself
Make a heav'n of hell or a hell of heaven.

Milton's Satan knew whereof he spoke. We're starting to get it too. Chewing over stressful situations is itself stressful.

Which has the greatest effect on your heart's health: arguing with a spouse or running a marathon? Arguing could have closer links to later heart disease, but for an unusual reason. Just thinking about the fight appears to lead to high blood pressure and later health problems, according to a UC Irvine-led study. Both tasks raise blood pressure and cause some stress on the body, but arguments have an emotional side that creates longer recovery times in the body than non-emotional -- yet stressful -- events like running. The study appears in the Sept./Oct. issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

[via Time's Shadow]

Another book I need to read

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 05:07:31 GMT

Although I haven't mentioned it recently, I did finally finish working my way through A New Kind of Science a few weeks ago (I confess I didn't read all the Notes). More on that another time. So next up at bat in the must-read science/idea book category will be Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The New York Times describes some of the book's agenda:

Dr. Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem. Dr. Pinker has little time for two other doctrines often allied with the Blank Slate. One is "the Ghost in the Machine," the assumption of an immaterial soul that lies beyond the reach of neuroscience, and he criticizes the religious right for thwarting research with embryonic stem cells on the ground that a soul is lurking within. The third member of Dr. Pinker's unholy trinity is "the Noble Savage," the idea that the default state of human nature is mild, pacific and unacquisitive. Dr. Pinker believes, to the contrary, that dominance and violence are universal; that human societies are more given to an ethos of reciprocity than to communal sharing; that intelligence and character are in part inherited, meaning that "some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems," and that all societies are ethnocentric and easily roused to racial hatred.

In general, I've found that when anyone, even scientists, make sweeping statements about human beings, they're generally subsequently shown to be wrong. So the straw man that describes human beings as blank slates is of course due for debunking. But I believe it's safe to say that it will also eventually be shown that parental behavior and example is NOT to be excluded as a significant influence upon the lives and personalities of children. Also, doesn't it seem a bit incoherent to say that character is determined primarily by genetics and then say the parents don't count? Or that peers or random events can be an influence, but parents somehow can't? The "Ghost in the Machine" (soul) theories ~ and it seems inappropriate to lump them all together (if Pinker does) and ascribe them to the religious right ~ and the "Noble Savage" myth also come in for a clobbering. I'm not entirely convinced that they must also stand or fall together, or that the historical linkage between them is as tight as Pinker claims. All of this is basically to say that I think there are very few of these Big Questions that can be answered with Black or White, Yes or No, Up or Down, Nature or Nurture. Please to note the name of my page here: both2and (I had to use the "2" because you can't have a "/" in a domain name. Maybe I should have just called it "all of the above"! ). And I don't mean to imply that we should accept sloppy thinking, or throw our hands up and say there are no answers, just that it's unlikely that the answers will be in one syllable rather than sentences or paragraphs. According to the New York Times, Pinker decouples the factual questions from the moral or ethical (and, I presume, political) questions. If true, I can refrain from training the Argument-From-Nature booby slingshot at him straightaway.

The Great Chewing Gum Mystery

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 07:22:23 GMT

Horst Prillinger has posted a groundbreaking photo-essay on the chewing gum infestation of urban sidewalks. However, as I commented to him, I am profoundly skeptical about this so-called chewing gum:

Funny you should be writing about this. I was recently commenting to a friend about the so-called chewing-gum blotches found all over EVERYWHERE on urban sidewalks. I asked her: When was the last time you saw someone on the street chewing gum? I couldn't remember ever seeing anyone even chew gum while walking down the street, never mind spitting it out in public. And if you consider the mass quantities of the so-called chewing gum blotches, statistically speaking you ought to see it all the time! I hardly know anybody who chews gum, but of those who do, not one of them would ever just toss it onto the sidewalk. Who are these purported barbarians, anyway? In short, I don't believe it's chewing gum. That's the official government explanation for what is probably either some top secret program or an alien invasion. Or maybe it's some kind of nocturnal bird poop. Whatever. I just don't buy the chewing gum explanation.

Seriously now, how do we account for this? Have you, or has anyone you know, or anyone you've ever seen spit chewing gum onto the sidewalk? Think about it ~ that's a LOT of chewing gum! I think exactly once in my life have I stepped in a freshly discarded piece of gum. You'd think that would happen a lot more often too. I know that there are special cleaning services who will remove the "chewing gum" from the sidewalk in front of your commercial establishment (not only have I read about them, I actually saw one of them at work outside a local Starbucks). My best theory now is that these people go around planting the chewing gum so that they can stay in business.

Seat of the Soul?

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 19:45:58 GMT

The reports are as old as storytelling: a person in great physical or emotional distress or in spiritual ecstasy leaves the body. The patient in the ER floats above his body, seeing and hearing everything as the doctors work to revive him. A woman lying in bed at three in the morning suddenly find herself detached from her corporeal self, and wanders through the window and out into the nighttime meadow. The shaman leaves the flesh and enters the spirit world to do battle with forces threatening the souls of the people. An epilepctic in Geneva undergoes a procedure to locate the source of her seizures. Electrodes are implanted in her brain, and then stimulated one by one for a few seconds at a time, while she remains conscious to report on her experience. The doctors stimulate an electrode buried in the angular gyrus in the right cortex. The patient reports that she had an out-of-body experience. The doctors try a bunch of other electrodes. Each time they return to the angular gyrus she reports the same thing, and only then. Clearly more research is called for here, as this is essentially a sample of one. Furthermore, epilectics sometimes experience an out-of-body sensation before the onset of a seizure. But if this finding is confirmed, does that mean that the out-of-body experience is a purely neurological anomaly?

Dr. Blanke is hopeful that many different experts will be able to work together in using this unexpected information from his patient. He says there's even some value in what's often viewed as the "paranormal." "Lots of people try to explain something away which is for many people, an amazing experience that has transformed their lives. I hope we can add some precise neuroscience and try to collaborate with people in many fields," said Blanke.

The debate on mind/body/spirit is far from over. I look for it to keep getting more and more interesting. Read more in this CNN article. [via Fury]

Being the Normal One

Sun, 15 Sep 2002 04:31:18 GMT

Jeanne Safer has written a book called The Normal One about the effects of a troubled sibling on other siblings in the family. I read about it in this review in the New York Times.

Her analysis of the ''Caliban syndrome,'' as she calls the psychological condition affecting normal siblings in families with damaged children, is supported with some 60 interviews with siblings of impaired family members. The syndrome, named for the Miranda-Caliban relationship in ''The Tempest,'' has four distinct elements: ''premature maturity,'' ''survivor guilt,'' ''compulsion to achieve'' and ''fear of contagion.'' Normal siblings are characterized this way: ''Cheerful caretakers, mature before their time, they are supposed to consider themselves lucky to be normal. They feel tormented by the compulsion to compensate for their parents' disappointments by having no problems and making no demands, and they are often unaware of the massive external and internal pressure to pretend that nothing is amiss.''

Gulp. Just a bit of a recognition factor there...

You can pick your nose, and you can pick your children, and now you can pick your children's nose...

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 01:11:21 GMT

In a review of Redesigning Humans the NY Times quotes the author, Gregory Stock:

Stock's overarching claim is that germ-line modifications will ''write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to seize control of our evolutionary future,'' an echo of the classic eugenicist dream. New technologies will allow humans to make fundamental alterations to their individual genetic compositions and those of their children. The net effect, he says, will be to draw ''reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional sexual competition and mate selection.'' In the future, he claims, we will be ''much more than simply human.'

I fail to see how anyone can argue with a straight face that allowing rich people loose in the human genome is going to improve the species at an accelerated rate. What, pray tell, counts as "successful" to those folks? Big breasts? Height? Intelligence? Alpha-instincts? What? With luck, natural selection will just have a bunch more mutations to choose from. Without luck, we'll all end up with snub noses because Richy Rich thinks they look better, and you know what a trend-setter he is. The good news is also that I think we're a long way away from really understanding what does what at a fine level in the genome. The bad news is that our ignorance won't prevent a whole bunch of people from mucking about with it anyway. The results are bound to be messy much of the time. (Can anybody say "thalidomide"?) I do agree with Stock that this change is coming. I hope that, initially, we can find a way to legislate that it be used only to cure genetic diseases, not to "enhance" or "tinker," at least for some appropriate moratorium period, while we try to get a grip on what it is we're actually doing.

Do Both

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:16:22 GMT

An article in today's New York Times discusses the similarity of results between some forms of "talk therapy" and certain psychotropic drugs. I, for one, am not surprised that both conversation and pills can change the way the brain works. The brain clearly operates on a "use it or lose it" principle ~ all good reasons to keep learning, keep growing, and to keep an open mind.

I Can See It In Your Face

Fri, 16 Aug 2002 18:55:28 GMT

Where does our intuition about others come from? Why are some people so much more able to intuit what's on others' minds? We are born face-readers. We have to be able to understand basic human expressions in order to survive. But the face gives away much more than we usually assume, and we either never learn the whole array of interpretive strategies ~ or we are trained to discount and overlook them because sometimes it's equally dangerous (socially, emotionally) to know too much. Read this article: The Naked Face. I promise you it's fascinating. [via kottke.org]