My Nominee for World’s Wisest Brain: Edward O. Wilson, Who Knows a Bottleneck in an Ant Colony When He Sees One

I think I had my gallbladder removed the other day. My surgeon says he took it out but instead of bringing it to the office afterwards as “proof of extraction,” he says he sent it to the lab. I don’t know what the lab did with it. But then where gallbladders are concerned, it doesn’t appear to matter because it is hard to document that gallbladders matter at all. At least, I’m not wearing a gall collection sack on my belt now that it is gone. I told the surgeon, “If there is an Almighty and if I ever get to have a one-on-one with her, my first question will be, “Why a gallbladder?’”

He replied, “My first question will be, ‘Why an appendix?’”

Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist, ant expert and polymath on many other topics, would probably not be pleased with our flippancy on such matters.

In an interview by Psychology Today’s Jill Neimark that I turned up on a New York University web site, Dr. Wilson was characteristically blunt when talking about the paucity of “accidents” in nature.

He observed, “One thing is that natural selection is brutal. It is brutal to see strong, beautiful ant queens and males go forth and realize that they’re all going to be devastated, that one out of 10,000 queens will make it into the ground to start a new colony. Every little advantage that an organism has can make an enormous difference. The other thing is that natural selection grinds exceedingly small. Natural selection doesn’t allow for foul-ups in an ant colony any more than in a hunter-gatherer society. Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function.”

Please consider E.O. Wilson to be one of today’s greatest living minds. In my opinion, his might just be the wisest one. Maybe it’s the richness of his background combined the reach of his curiosity and, of course, that world-class intellect. Raised a Southern Baptist, he’s now a self-described secular humanist—with a surviving great respect for Southern Baptists. Reared in the South, he quickly wowed them in the Ivy League (tenured Harvard professor at age 26). Impeccable scientific credentials but one of the popular writing world’s most gifted scribes (two Pulitzer Prizes). Listen to him for a couple of minutes and you would wish every child could have him for a grandfather—and every university student for a professor.

I went looking for other interviews with Dr. Wilson on the Web and offer this collection of his wisdom and witticisms:

On what big evolutionary trigger produced the human brain: “That’s the mother of all questions. The paleoanthropologists put a lot of emphasis on climate change. I don’t believe that for a minute, because geological history is full of vast climactic changes, and large numbers of animal species that lived through them unchanged. I think evolution came up with a fairly big animal, primates, with a fairly big brain, and then this animal somehow got on its hind legs. And once it were erect, it had the freedom of hands. It could carry things. It could try out tools. This was the takeoff point. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Climactic change could have speeded the process, but was not critical.”

On how the brain creates a sense of self: I’m aware of you, you’re aware of me. There’s a sense of self. But there is no transcendental center of the brain somewhere that is in control of the machinery, pulling the levers and possessed of the capacity to float free of our mortal coil when that moment comes. You’ll hear the voice of the neurobiologist emerging from me on this. It’s natural we feel there’s a self because of the body that we’re in. The brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input. The brain is organized heavily around sensations coming from the body, and that is so intense, so much at the center of conscious experience, including all the input coming from our body, and so it’s seen as the principal protagonist. That’s what the self is.”

On what Wilson meant in his book, The Future of Life, when he spoke of a bottleneck for the human species: The bottleneck is what I believe humanity’s in right now. We all, or most all, realize that humanity has pushed its population growth pretty close to the limit. We really are at risk of using up natural resources and developing shortages in them that will be extremely difficult to overcome, and yet we have this bright prospect down the line that humanity is not going to keep on growing much more in population, that it is likely, if we can use the United Nation’s projections at this stage, to top out at perhaps nine to ten billion, fifty percent more people than exist today, and then begin to decline.”

On what the result will be if humanity doesn’t get “through the bottleneck” in reasonably good shape: “Impoverished, biologically. I mean in the sense of having wiped out a large part of the rest of life. I think that if we continue to encroach on the natural ecosystems, you know, the dwindling rain forest, the rivers that contain around the world so much diversity, as we are doing and continue present trends, then we will have without abatement, we keep this and this rate, we will have eliminated as many as half the species of plants and animals on earth.”

On what humans will lose if they allow mass destruction of the remaining species: “Here's an easy way to remember it. We get from nature scot-free—so long as we don't screw it up and destroy it—approximately the same amount of services as far as you can measure them in dollars as we ourselves produce each year. It [is] about $30 trillion a year. T. Trillion. And these creatures, they have built in them, in their genes and then in their physiology an endless array of defenses, many of which we could use and we have used, like producing antibiotics we never heard of using chemicals that we never even dreamed existed. And so we have already benefited immensely from wild species in that way. But, you know, let me get to the bottom line as far as I'm concerned. Isn’t it morally wrong to destroy the rest of life, you know, in any way you look at it—for what it's going to do to human spirit and aesthetics?”

On why he thinks humans deserve to be called “the crown jewel of creation”:
Well, you know, I sort of think we are, in one sense. That is to say we are the brain of the biosphere. We are the ones that finally, after 4 1/2 billion years of evolution—that's what it took to get to where we are—actually developed enough power, reasoning power, to see what's happening, to understand the history that created us and to realize almost too late what we're doing. So in the sense that we are something new under the sun and on the Earth…we have an enormous…we're the ones that can destroy the world. No other single species ever had anything like that power. We have the power to destroy the world, the living world. And we also have the knowledge to avoid doing it. And it's sort of a race, a race to the finish line that we will develop the intelligence and the policies and the decency to bring it to a halt, not just for life itself but for future generations before, you know, the juggernaut takes us over.”

If I ever get into a one-on-one conversation with Edward O. Wilson, my first question will be, “Why a gallbladder?”

The above quotes were taken from these interviews with Dr. Wilson:

By Jill Neimark of Psychology Today: Edward O. Wilson is On Top of the World

By Ben Wattenberg on PBS: Edward O. Wilson and The Future of Life

By Bill Moyers on PBS: Bill Moyers talks with E.O. Wilson

Posted on August 20, 2007

Of Course, the Brain Can Change Itself. But It’s Going to Take Some Time to Figure Out How to Talk About the Fact ... And Which "Facts" Are Really Facts

Before we wade into the topic that “we each create our own realities, ergo, we can each recreate the actual working materials of our brain,” you need to know a bit about my own self-created reality.

Basically, I’m a skeptic on most matters in the so-called “woo-woo” department of human inquiry, ranging from religion to UFOs to telekinesis to, yes, even the chiropractic theory. But I’m not a ragin’ Cajun on such topics. It’s true that I once refused to permit a renter of our conference center to do a firewalk because I feared liability for injury to her participants. But I also defied advice from friends in the medical community for years and chose as my personal physician a Doctor of Osteopathy over an M.D. because (1) I thought him to be a better healer than any M.D. I’d ever sought out and (2) he was a whiz at “popping” the pain out of my back with his hands-on manipulative techniques.

Thus when a dear friend insisted the other day that the wife and I just had to watch a movie called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? (also variously known as What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, What the Bleep Do We Know! or WTFDWK?) with her because the flick had literally reordered her personal reality, my reaction was, “What the heck—why not?"

My viewing of WTFDWK? lasted approximately four minutes, and then I had to bail before I barfed. This is definitely woo-woo stuff, and in my opinion, nowhere near very good woo-woo stuff. I apologized to our friend and mumbled something about a long-standing pathological need for structure, especially in the story lines of films I’m viewing.

But then no sooner was WTFDWK? receding in my memory than another of my favorite people urged a new book on me called Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind by Joe Dispenza. A quick check of Dr. Dispenza’s credentials (he’s a chiropractor) indicated that he was one of the interviewees in WTFDWK?. With that discovery, I surrendered. It appeared that God was sending me a sign that I ought to take a closer look at this, and I have.

Now, the idea that we each create our own reality is at least as old as the first onlooker to report a miracle, but it is an idea that seems to wax and wane, cycle-like, in human affairs.

If we were doing an documentary called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? and not the psycho-spiritual propaganda piece that WTFDWK? is, the story line for this latest recycling could very well begin with an invitation made by the Dalai Lama in 1992 to a Harvard-trained neuroscientist named Richard Davidson. When Davidson got a close look at the renowned Buddhist spiritual leader’s monks at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, he quickly invited them to his own digs—the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior in Madison, WI.

Davidson was soon reporting that the Dalai’s monks, each of whom had meditated on compassion and love for more than 10,000 hours, were demonstrably and permanently altering their brain when given meditative assignments. (A control group also altered their brains—or at least their brain waves—while meditating but only temporarily.)

Davidson published his research findings in 1994 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and by 2006, TIME was naming him one of the ten most influential people of the year because of his research.

But research into what?

Neuroplasticity!!! That’s really what all this is about. Finally, after nearly a century, we have Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the run, Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize. This Spanish neuroanatomist froze reality in brain research labs for much of a century with this sentence: “In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable.” Translation: the adult brain is hardwired and not susceptible to change. Ever.

Now, we know that’s nonsense. New discoveries are being made every day of just how neuronally plastic the brain really can be. The Dalai Lama is so excited by evidence that the mind can change the brain to some extent that he’s now apparently sponsoring yearly meetings of Buddhist monks and leading neuroscientists to discuss the latest changes in neuroplasticity. The Dharamsala conferences so excited Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley that she’s now written two books on how the mind and the brain interact. Her latest—Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselve—barely made it out before an even better book by New York research psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.”

So can the mind actually do things like “will” the brain to grow new nerve cells when old ones get damaged? The sources we consulted say the current evidence for neurogenesis is restricted to the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. While I’m not a brain scientist or even a science writer who follows this field closely, I suspect that the field of neuroplasticity is just now taking baby steps. There are some wonderful anecdotal triumphs, as book writers like Begley and Doidge recount, often inspiringly. People with damaged inner ear nerves getting relief from dizziness. A stroke victim again able to walk. People rechanneling serious compulsive urges by actually altering their brains’ neuronal circuitry.

Throw them a little evidence, and you just had to know that the people featured in WTFDWK? would not be able to resist mixing in quantum mechanics, transcendental meditation, alternative realities, water crystals and channeling with the 35,000-year-old warrior spirit Ramtha. (Dr. Dispenza, the chiropractor, incidentally, is a teacher at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.)

Baby-step times are nearly always heady times. (In our Brain Technologies seminars, we usually call this the “naïve enthusiasm” stage of the discovery process.) There is absolutely nowhere near enough evidence to suggest, as a New York Times’ book reviewer (an M.D., no less!) put it, “the electronic circuits in a small lump of grayish tissue are perfectly accessible, it turns out, to any passing handyman with the right tools.” That's simply far too great a leap to be made at this point.

And the claims made in WTFDWK?—judging from numerous reports by film watchers with less sensitive barf calibrations than mine—are even more outlandish. But this much is believable: one more time, the brain, and nature, and the reality of all realities has proven much more interesting and much less limited than we have imagined for most of history, modern scientific history included.

Go here to check out various titles on brain neuroplasticity and related topics:

By Norman Doidge The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

By Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley
The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

By Sharon Begley
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves

By B. Alan Wallace Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

By Joe Dispenza. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on the WTFDWK? movie: What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Here is Wikipedia’s entry on the new science of “brain malleability”: Neuroplasticity

Posted on July 20, 2007

The Brain’s Problem with Information Overload Is Prompting Calls for Changes in How Laws, Policies and Rules Are Written. Sometimes, All It Takes is a Nudge

In the world of ideas, there’s a battle currently underway between, No. 1, forces that believe the brain is often best left with a minimum of interference to figure out what’s in its own best interest and, No. 2, forces that believe the brain needs to experiment with better ways to intervene and shape what is being decided.

If you know where to look and what to look for, the blogosphere has been ablaze with this discussion for some time. What’s new is that support for view No. 2 is now coming from some of the strangest places. Like, for example, The University of Chicago’s business and law schools.

For decades, The U. of Chicago has been a stronghold for academics defending laizze-faire capitalism. Until his death last year, it was the hangout for the world’s most influential modern spokesperson for marketplace-dominated economics, Nobel-Prize-winner Milton Friedman. Dr. Friedman was a forceful believer in viewpoint No. 1. He had an unshakable faith in the marketplace’s ability to decide what people want and how best to give it to them.

Here’s a sample of Friedman’s bias on the subject: "What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself."

Bingo! The battle is joined! Do guns kill people or do people kill people?

Now come two U. of Chicago faculty members—one from the B-school and the other from law—who are insistent that policymakers, both public and private, acknowledge that humans are imperfect decision-makers. And that in many instances and in large numbers, humans need a little nudge, without coercion, to make decisions that will leave them or people they are charged with helping better off.

“Nudge” is really the operative word here. Cass Sunstein (the law professor) and Richard Thaler (the business professor) are now writing a book with the title of Nudge, which will be about their idea of “libertarian paternalism” and the economics of nudging.

On his blog, Sunstein has explained “libertarian paternalism” this way: “The basic idea is that private and public institutions might nudge people in directions that will make their lives go better, without eliminating freedom of choice. The paternalism consists in the nudge; the libertarianism consists in the insistence on freedom, and on imposing little or no cost on those who seek to go their own way.”

Two examples often cited by Sunstein and and Thaler involve ways to help people increase savings. As Thaler wrote on a Wall Street Journal blog recently, “The first [approach] is to enroll people, automatically, into savings plans—while allowing them to opt out. The second is the Save More Tomorrow plan, which allows employees to commit themselves now to increasing their savings rates later, when they get raises. Both approaches have been remarkably successful.”

In his column, “Economix,” New York Times writer David Leonhardt has said he sees two big ways that “libertarian paternalism” can work its nudging magic on human brains.

One is to help the brain cut through the confusion of complexity and information overload. He cites an experiment in North Carolina’s largest school district. Parents in the district were confused by all the information available in a school choice program as they sought to decide where they wanted their children to be enrolled. Aided by three Yale University researchers, the district offered parents a little nudge. Thousands of parents were given a sheet listing a single test score—the average of the math and reading scores—for each available school. Immediately, parents began enrolling their school in the schools with the highest scores, which is the whole point of school choice.

Leonhardt’s other expectation is that libertarian paternalism will help the brain remember to do what’s best. He tells about Dr. Michael Gropper’s nudging rule at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco.

It’s common knowledge that patients on ventilators need to spend most of their time sitting up. Otherwise, it’s much too easy for germs to migrate from their stomachs up to their mouths and breathing tubes and into their lungs. But because so many activities involving critical ill patients require that they be lying down, nurses and aides often forget to elevate a patient when they are finished. So Dr. Gropper made a new nudging rule: unless there is a doctor’s order to the contrary, every patient on a ventilator must be sitting up.

The result: the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia at the hospital has fallen more than 40 percent since 2005.

In a perfect decision-making world, say Sustein and Thaler, the brain would have complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and no lack of willpower. In the real world, people must use brains that have limited information-processing abilities, willpower, memory and attention spans. Therefore, a little non-coercive nudge at the right time can make a huge difference, sometimes immediately, sometimes a long ways down the road.

Sustein writes, “Libertarian paternalism is hardly a panacea, and a lot of work remains to be done. But it might be worth thinking about how the basic approach can be applied to such diverse problems as savings, prescription drug plans, social security reform, obesity, school choice, preparation for natural disasters, and safety on the highways.”

I’d have to say that the proof is in the results, and the early returns for nudging look good. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise would appear, or so it seems to me, to have a rampant case of ideology.

Carl Sustein and Richard Thaler first published their ideas on libertarian paternalism in a working paper in April, 2003: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron

Go here for David Leonhardt’s article: Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge

Dr. Sustein writes about his nudging ideas on the University of Chicago Law School’s faculty blog: Libertarian Paternalism

Dr. Thaler debates libertarian paternalism with Mario Rizzo, professor of economics at New York University, on the Online Wall Street Journal: Should Politics Nudge People To Make Certain Choices?

A writer for The Economist and its readers discuss libertarian paternalism: I'm your new legislator, but you can call me "Daddy"

Jim Holt writes about libertarian paternalism in The New York Times Magazine : The New, Soft Paternalism"

Posted on June 23, 2007

Winning Elections May Not Exactly Be Brain Surgery, but Progressives Are Paying a Lot of Attention to These Days to a Brain-Framing Expert

Not for nothing is it called neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP” to the cognoscenti). And while he isn't necessarily viewed as one of NLP's gurus, one of the leading postmodern brain-oriented linguists came to Texas the other day to remind us just how practical some of the suppositions of the brain-as-spokesperson inquiry have become.

George Lakoff has been a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley since 1972. He is a genuine academic political wonk. The Democratic Party has viewed him as one of its favorite brainiacs ever since party chairman Howard Dean christened him "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement." Since the 1980s, Lakoff has been hard at work seeking to remake much of the theory about language. In the 21st Century, he has also been striving to redo much of American politics.

Press reports from Austin said Lakoff was a bit giddy that Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards had just cautioned (on national TV, no less), “Don't use 'war on terror.' It's a bad metaphor." Lakoff has been saying as much for several years. And Lakoff is very much the metaphor expert. Ever since his book (with Mark Johnson), Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980, Lakoff has been arguing that metaphors are more than just something we think up and give expression to. His belief is that metaphors are something vital that we must begin to think with before we can say much of anything at all.

Such a thought was bound to get him in trouble with his original mentor, MIT's famed and controversial linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has argued—loudly and at length—that language skills are innate, that they are something best studied logically, not something learned. Lakoff and others who have joined him in the so-called “linguistics wars” have argued that language, since it is learned, is best studied empirically, not logically.

To understand why Lakoff would think that “war on terrior” is a bad metaphor, you must first understand a little bit about his theory of mind. “The embodied mind,” as he calls it. He dispenses with any “dualism” problem in thinking separately about mind and matter (or mind and body) by insisting that you can't have one without the other. The most abstract kinds of higher mind thinking, he says, depend in finality on the most basic of low-level body facilities, such as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Such a viewpoint does more than elevate the importance of metaphors when it comes to thinking and speaking. It also pretty much suggests that many traditional viewpoints about human reason should be tossed onto the trash heap of once-thought-to-be-solid-ideas turned mushy.

"We are neural beings," Lakoff has said, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything—only what our embodied brains permit."

So much for steely-minded reason, equally assessible to one and all.

From that foundational viewpoint, it is only a hop, skip and jump to Lakos' assertion that everything but purely physical reality must be described using metaphor. Why don't we realize this? Because we just don't see what's happening, says Lakoff. The reason for that, he says, is that most of the metaphors underlying the “archeology” of a concept or phrase or word are so ancient as to be invisible.

The concept of “intellectual debate” provides an easy example of how a metaphor shapes language and meaning, he says.

When talking about this subject, Lakoff notes that we think and say such things as:
He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments.
His criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.

It is quickly obvious that an important metaphor underlying the idea of "intellectual debate" is this one: argument is war.

But metaphors are often not that black and white. The more abstract a concept or idea is, the less likely it is that the underlying metaphors (Lakoff calls them "deep metaphors") are obvious. Usually, like the human body itself, the underpinings of a "surface metaphor" are complicated and messy.

In an era when TV's extreme truncation of time and attention spans have made sound bites so important for spinmeisters like ad writers, preachers and, yes, politicians, it was only a matter of time before Lakoff got around to applying his theories of language to the languaging of political ideas. He has established a progressive think-tank called the Rockridge Institute to help progressives counter the highly effective use of metaphors by conservatives. He's written two books on “framing” ideas politically: Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think and Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. And he consults widely, which explained that recent trip to Austin, where Democrats have shown signs of mounting a post-Gov.-George-W.-Bush comeback in Texas.

Any political discussion with Lakoff quickly turns into a discussion of ideas like these:

The use of the language frames created by metaphors is largely unconscious. This is why independent journalists and progressive political thinkers themselves have used GOP-spawned metaphors like “war on terrior,” “tax relief,” and “illegals” without realizing that their doing so undermines their own views.

Frames define what is viewed as “common sense.” “Common sense” frames differ widely in people. But in getting their party's common sense frames accepted by the media and in common discourse as the predominant frames, conservatives have been literally changing common sense, and progressives have been letting them get away with it, Lakoff says.

Repetition “embeds” frames in the brain. President Bush's habit of repeating himself in speeches and press conferences is not accidental. His handlers are acutely aware that repeating surface frames causes the brain to latch onto and activate deeper frames. And that repeating the surface frames over and over strengthens neural connections in listeners. Says Lakoff, “The activation of conservative deep frames—the conservative moral system and the political and economic principles that follow from that—then inhibits the progressive moral system and principles.”

You don't change deep frames overnight. That's because brains ususally don't change swiftly. It takes time to influence deep frames, so persistence, repetition and a good, persuasive, connected-to-real-life narrative underlying all your frames are essential.

The brain can harbor inconsistent frames or larger worldviews. This is one way of describing “swing voters,” or what Lakeoff calls “biconceptuals.” Voters in the middle have both conservative worldviews (which Lakoff says are based on a “strict father” deep frame that promotes the idea of knowing right from wrong and having a strong morality and calls for individuals to be personal responsible and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps) and progressive worldviews (based on a “nurturant parent” deep frame which encourages the viewing of problems in systemic, collective ways and encourages people to be nurturers of those around them by strengthening their competence and endurance and abilities of empathy and responsibility). As they speak to their base, Lakoff urges that progressives also remember to speak to the biconceptuals.

Facts alone will not win arguments or elections. The brain warms up to facts only if it has a frame to receive them. Says Lakoff, “The consequence is that arguing simply in terms of facts—how many people have no health insurance, how many degrees Earth has warmed in the last decade, how long it’s been since the last raise in the minimum wage—will likely fall on deaf ears.”

You can't defuse the impact of the other side's frames by negating them. In fact, in doing so, you run a serious risk of reinforcing them. Think of Richard Nixon's famous line “I am not a crook.” Or Senator Joe Lieberman's “I am not George Bush.” Or Bill Clinton's “I did not have sex with that woman.” Sometimes, though, you can turn your opponents' frames against them. When the GOP rolled out its Contract with America in the 1990s, some Democrats scored points by urging that voters read the fine print.

So what does Lakoff want progressives to do? Start taking back metaphors or frames that they once had a monopoly on. Words and concepts and frames and metaphors like liberal, conservative, patriotism, rule of law, national security, family values and life.

For example, he says conservatives have managed to put this spin on patriotism: “Patriots do not question the president or his war policies. To do so undermines our nation and its troops. Revealing secret, even illegal, government programs is treasonous. The Constitution should be amended to criminalize political dissent in the form of flag desecration.”

To counter this, at every opportunity, progressives need to hammer home this framing of patriotism: “The greatest testament to one’s love of country is when one works to improve it. This includes principled dissent against policies one disagrees with and against leaders who promote those policies. Times of war are no exception. Our first loyalty is to the principles of our democracy that are embedded in our Constitution, not to any political leader.”

You can see why the short, stocky, grey-bearded Dr. Lakoff was a hit on his Austin visit. Progressives in Texas and elsewhere have awakened to the fact that they are often their own worst enemies because of how they talk. And George Lakoff has a fascinating take on what they've been doing wrong and how to fix it.

He also has a fascinating take on why Barack Obama has proven so captivating both to progressives and biconceptuals. Lakof said (as quoted by The Dallas Morning News), "[Obama's] a progressive and he never uses the word. He talks about American values. He always starts by giving the conservative argument and then he says, 'But traditional American values require us to do something different.'”

He thinks that is great brain framing for your base and for biconceptuals!

Click on the titles below to order Lakoff's books:
Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
Metaphors We Live By
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being
Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

For a review of Lakoff's Whose Freedom and Geoffrey Nunberg's Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, go here: Linguists on George W. Bush

For general inform on Lakoff, his writings, ideas and career: George Lakoff

For information on Lakoff's progressive think-tank: Rockridge Institute

For article on Lakoff's Austin appearance: Democrats refine their vocabulary

Posted on June 01, 2007

When Confronted by the Bully, the Mugger, the Rapist, the Carjacker Or Anyone Else Who Sees You as Prey, Your Safely May Come Down to Brain-Oneupsmanship

Read this morning that increasing numbers of women are keeping a Beretta in the glove box or the nightstand. Or packing a concealed weapon. Learning how to shoot them, too.

I can appreciate the sentiment. The world feels less safe than it used to. But most of the time, when life and limb are suddenly imperiled by those who would treat us violently or otherwise see us as victims, I believe that—all things considered—there’s a better all-around weapon: our brain.

How to Be Safe in an Unsafe World, published in the late 1990s, is, in fact, a great guidebook for using our thinking organ expressly for the purpose of thwarting those who see us as prey and put us in their crosshairs, perhaps with predatory stares or hostile words or, worse, rape attempts, street attacks or car-jackings.

I still take this self-defense-minded work off the shelves periodically and refresh myself on its insights and tactics. Knock on wood, I’ve only needed to use its approaches all these years with panhandlers who seemed potentially dangerous and an overly obnoxious salesperson or two. But merely having a familiarity with them offers an extra degree of confidence when I’m faced with or surrounded by unsettling strangers or strangeness.

The authors of How to Be Safe are Harold Bloomfield, M.D., and Robert Cooper, Ph.D. Both are psychologists, which is probably why the word “brain” keeps coming up page after page. And why the authors would prefer to see you and me outthink, outwit and outmaneuver those intent on abusing or attacking us rather than outshoot them.

It’s not just your own brain that is at issue here. These personal safety experts have plenty to say about what’s happening in the brains of those doing the accosting, too. In fact, their central purpose is in equipping you to utilize what’s happening in the brain of your aggressor to your own best advantage.

To begin with, your would-be aggressor’s brain is trying to decide if you will make easy prey. They are looking for someone likely to be submissive. A researcher, Dr. Betty Grayson, has discovered what aggressors most often look for: someone who takes exaggerated strides, long or short; walks whole-footedly (instead of toe to heel) like they are walking on eggshells; moves the arm and leg on each side in concert instead of the normal left-leg/right arm and vice versa; moves their upper bodies at cross purposes to their lower bodies so that their two halves seem disconnected; and move as through their arm and leg movements are coming from outside their bodies, not from within.

Next, the aggressor’s brain is looking to activate a magnet-like psychological tie called a holding mechanism. When this clicks in, your brain is, in effect, captured; its attention has been directed toward those approaching you. Full-blown, this holding mechanism will freeze your brain so that it concludes that it has no choice but to be a victim—captured prey.

Helping your brain realized that a holding mechanism trap may be unfolding and showing it how to take diversionary action is Bloomfield’s and Cooper’s No. 1 safety technique. They’ve even reduced it to a formula so that a brain under duress or attack stands the best chance of remembering what to do. I can’t begin to explain in a short space what all is going on, but I can repeat the formula and offer a compelling brain-science-backed example into why they have boiled their anti-aggression strategies down to this:

A. Split-second PAUSE
B. Focused Emotional Energy
C. TWO+ Responses:
• Use two or more de-escalating phrases
• Take two or more unexpected physical actions

Look for a moment at why they recommend using two or more responses “within a half second.” It is because such a response puts your aggressor’s brain in instant sensory overload. If while his brain is working on your first sudden, unexpected word or motion, you follow immediately with another sudden, unexpected word or movement, it makes it nearly impossible for your aggressor to follow through on his intent to “capture” you as prey. This presents you with your best chance to de-escalate the situation or escape, or so these authors contend.

How to Be Safe in an Unsafe World provides numerous “how to do it” tips and even complete scenarios for using the above formula for personal safety. Like when to yell (probably at the moment of confrontation is best). How to yell (suddenly and forcefully except when you are already at the point of a gun, when yelling might cause the aggressor to pull the trigger in surprise). And what to yell (a wordless, full-blown war cry like “RAAAHH!” or “KEYAIEE!” is recommended by some experts or simply “Fire!” but not “Help!” since evidence has shown that the brains of more bystanders will turn away from “Help” than, say, “Fire!”).

None of this guarantees the outcome, of course. But it likely will improve your chances of escaping serious harm. Percentage-wise, it truly pays to be the brain on top in these kinds of circumstances. Bloomfield and Cooper point out that 85 percent of the people who are ordered into a car at gunpoint or knifepoint by a hijacker are killed, not released unharmed if they’ll just follow orders, as is typically the aggressor’s promise.

In such circumstances and many others, brain-oneupsmanship may be your one and only chance.

The book can be ordered here: How to Be Safe in an Unsafe World: The Only Guide to Inner Peace and Outer Security

Posted on May 14, 2007

Was One Side of Moses’ Brain Talking to the Other Side at the Burning Bush? New Questions, New Possibilities…But Few Answers As Yet

It has happened to me only twice. Each time, only a single word was spoken. But the impact of hearing someone who isn’t there speak to you is profoundly unsettling, even if it is only single word. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to have this kind of thing happening to me constantly, unrelentingly.

People who say they frequently hear voices from nonexistent people talking to them from outside their head say this takes away peace of mind, self-confidence and any semblance of a “normal” life. It causes them to withdraw from a world that simply doesn’t understand what is happening to them or why—and, of course, they don’t know why it’s happening to them either. Only that it involves years and years of hearing disembodied, “outside the head” voices, sometimes for hours daily—and sometimes multiple voices, each with its own distinctive vocal characteristics. It surely must be like, and those who experience it, say that it is, a severe pain for which there is no alleviation and which can literally rob you of your health and sometimes your sanity.

Both of my experiences involved children whom I love dearly.

One morning in the mid-70s I was working at home when I suddenly heard my second-grade daughter shout, “Daddy!” I erupted in goose bumps, thought about it for a moment and then ran, not walked, to my car. Her school was three blocks away, and I was there in less than a minute. Not until I could look through a window in her classroom door and actually see her peaceful and safe could I begin to shake off the effects of my auditory hallucination.

The second experience was much more recent. One night last year, shortly after switching off the light in my motel room in Oklahoma City, I heard my three-year-old grandson call out, “Pappaw!” Lunging for the lamp switch, I could immediately see that I was still the room’s only occupant. And I knew that this grandchild was 1,100 miles away. Did he need me? Remembering the previous incident, I decided not. But once again, it took a while for my heartbeat to calm.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about such auditory hallucinations. The main reason is the release last month of Daniel B. Smith’s book, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination.

Here’s some revealing insights on hearing voices from his book, from an interview with him by the Boston NPR station WBUR and from other sources:

• A lot of people hear voices from outside their heads. Smith estimates those who have had vivid auditory hallucinations at from 3 to 5 percent. One survey reported 39 percent of so-called healthy folks had heard their own thoughts aloud. Smith told WBUR’s Tom Ashbrook, “It’s hard to say but I would guess that it’s a lot more common than people recognize or realize or perhaps want to think.”

• While the brain science on this subject “is actually not very advanced,” Smith says there’s already some very intriguing stuff. For example, one study suggests hallucinators may be processing words on the wrong side of the brain. Brain scans show schizophrenic patients activating language-massaging areas of the right brain when reading whereas non-voice-hearing persons use the left brain for such a task. This, researchers speculate, could cause hallucinators to generate speech they don’t associate with themselves.

• There is a huge benefit to those who frequently experience auditory hallucinations in taking this whole subject out of the shadows. In believing that people who hear voices really do. Letting them know you believe them. And letting them talk about what it’s like. Much of the credit for removing the stigma, mystery and avoidance long associated with such hallucinations goes to the founders of the Hearing Voices Movement. They are a Dutch psychology professor, Marius Romme, and a science journalist, Sandra Escher. In the early 90s, Romme was challenged by a patient, Patsy Haig, to believe the voices causing her such distress were real. The pair went on a TV chat show and the shows was flooded with callers saying, “Me, too!”

• Evidence grows that hearing the voices is often a consequence of psychological trauma. A divorce, an accident, a pregnancy, the death of a spouse, and much too often, emotional and/or physical abuse. Romme and Escher developed a method called “Making sense of voices.” Some hallucinators benefit from drug treatments, others from having magnetic fields aimed at parts of their brains. But a great many benefit simply from listening to others talk about how they took control of the voices. A British rugby player told listeners to an Australian radio show, “All in the Mind,” how he came to realize his six (soon to be seven) voices were real, not imaginary as he’d been told. He then realized that “this experience is real so you have to do something about it, there’s no point waiting for other people to do something for you.” He took control of his voices, married, had children, "got on with my life.”

• What about all those often influential people in history, especially in religion, who claimed to have heard the voice of God? As occupants of a scientific age, should we assume that, as Smith puts it, antipsychotic medication might have helped Moses understand that God’s speaking to him from the burning bush as actually “his dopamine system playing tricks on him”? Smith isn’t sure. Questions of faith remain tricky. For certain, the new evidence on auditory hallucinations complicates the debate over “religious inspiration.” From one point of view, the controversial bicameral hypothesis of the late psychologist Julian Jaynes—that one side of the brain appears to be speaking and the other side listens and obeys—is looking better and better as our knowledge of the brain increases. Jaynes argued that this was normal for humans as recently as 3,000 years ago. In taking auditory hallucination out of the shadows, we are now seeing that it is still all-too-normal for many people 3,000 years later.

I know it can happen because, as I said, on a very small scale, it has happened to me twice.

To order Smith’s book, go here: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination

For WBUR’s interview with Smith, go here: Tom Ashbrooks’ Hearing Voices interview

For information on the Hearing Voices movement, go here: Hearing Voices Movement

For the Australian Broadcasting Company’s program, go here: Hearing Voices: The Invisible Intruder

For information about Julian Jaynes, go here: Julian Jaynes Society

Posted on April 27, 2007

Reader in Costa Rica Urges Us to Recognize that YuGiOh, Donald Trump and Direct TV Have Far Too Much Sway in "Alpha" Land

From a reader in Costa Rica:

I just finished your book The Mother of All Minds. It is a very thought-provoking work, and has created quite a log jam in my brain. I don't know if you have ever heard that you convinced someone to get out of a relatively profitable business, but that is exactly what is going to happen with me. I am one of two stewards to my parent's fortune (and we could possibly use the word "hostage" as well as "steward") and find myself at the helm of a ship that is comprised of a marginally profitable conglomeration of businesses on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

The reason they are marginally profitable is because of me. Without me, they would be broke, and the employees would very likely be in less favorable circumstances than they are now. (I have this odd conglomeration of businesses because of a rescue gene; I acquire stuff to fix it up.) I am not, however, a good long-term manager. So because of me, they are also marginal earners. This might not have been the case in the States, because the individual work ethic there is closer to my own, but here—well, it's different. Anyway, your book made me scrutinize what I am doing and made me realize that I am capable of more than what I am doing now. The problem is that my personal measure of "more" is actually "less" on the contemporary world scale, and frankly arguing the point has gotten very boring to me. I am not surrounded by a group of pre-Betas ready to cross the gap. I have a large group of 1.3s, a smattering of 1.4s, two 1.5s and me. I am a Beta [thinker] in ultra Alpha land.

(I lived for almost nine years in a tiny fishing village, and there were people whose Direct TV dishes threatened to overturn their houses. Many of them had never left the village or mixed with another group of people except as guides to tourists, and yet they were very comfortable passing judgment on...well, everything! Everything that they saw on TV anyway. I could go on for days. So many people never leave home, and with the insidiousness of television, some of them develop this odd ingenuous sophistication and feel capable of judging all nations, religions and races from the comfort of their living room chair. This is the wisdom being passed on to our future world leaders. Our children are learning mercy from YuGiOh and Donald Trump. Their world view can be measured in a double digit diameter. Sad. And dangerous.)

My dream was always to be an author, and a philosopher (as odd as that may sound). I never had the guts as a youngster to stick out the hee-haws that this causes. Through hard work, my parents have earned a lot of money. Enough, in fact, that I and my children are well provided for financially. If we are careful, we have more than enough. My block has always been making money. After a certain point, money has always seemed...superfluous. And I don't mean that in a snotty, nose in the air way, either. I am certainly capable of making money. I can spend it like Paris Hilton, too. I have lived high on the hog thanks to my father, and thanks to my own very stiff work ethic. But I also have had the experience of winning a $50 raffle,that was exactly enough to pay my electric bill, which was good because the next day they were going to shut off my electricity because my nuclear family was so poor at the time.

Your book brought many things to the surface for me, not the least of which is a drive to push outward, learn, educate, and evolve. My goal is not to create a manifesto for living, like the Bible, but to promote an organic educational growth system that levers us ever upward to meet our new challenges. Someday racism on the basis of skin color will be eradicated, but there will ever be new isms that we need to deal with. I don't think that the shape of our problems is going to change with our evolution, only the labels that they bear. I hope to have the opportunity to develop living apparatus to seek and disassemble these destructive patterns.

One cannot hope to fit the entire universe between their ears in this minimal blink-of-the-eye lifetime that we have, but there are some that have the responsibility before their world peers to try. I am in exactly that position. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience about being "out there"; it lets me know that while I am a loner, I am not alone.

What started as a thank you note turned into a missive. Thank you, Mr. Lynch, you are an inspiring writer and an impressive thinker.

Isn't it remarkable that a bunch of words printed on a few dozen sheets of paper can cause such a powerful reaction in a few billion brain cells, all of which are transient and, singularly, each by itself, so insignificant as to be close to invisible? But, it goes without saying, you've made my day. And I am going to want to "keep tabs" on you, if you don't mind being kept tabs on. I want to know how all this works out for you. (This isn't, of course, the first letter of this kind that I've received over the years. A colleague of mine [Paul Kordis] and I wrote another book called Strategy of the Dolphin® a few years ago that seemed to have a similar impact on some folks eager for "the next level.") Meanwhile, as we like to say around porpoiseful/purposeful waters, "Carpe dolphin!"

For more information on the two works cited above, go here:
The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature
Strategy of the Dolphin®: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World

Posted on April 17, 2007