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 argues 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-to-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.

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

Our Prized Human ‘Six Degrees of Non-Separation’ Failed IT Blogger Kathy Sierra, and the Blogosphere Now Needs a Double Dose of Sack-Cloth-and-Ashes

There is a breathtaking, cause-for-soul-searching, if also morbidly fascinating, laboratory experiment on the human brain and behavior happening at the moment on the increasingly mob-minded “bizarre bazaar” called the Blogosphere. It is available for observing and pondering to anyone who cares to click through to various blog sites.

The proximate initiator—read that “cause” and now also “cause célèbre”—is one Kathy Sierra. She has been considered a prominent Information Technology (IT) blogger on the subject of cognition and computers. Her blog was/is called Creating Passionate Users. As of 6 p.m. (PST) on March 28, her blog’s laissez-faire policy of allowing all comments to appear unedited and anonymous was suspended. In fact, she has also suspended her own comments. As she explained in her final (to now) post:

“As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I'm not. I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I've been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that's not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs... blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you've probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).”

Unless for whatever reason the entire blog has been taken down or at least the current content removed by the time you check, you can see for yourself why Sierra was so disturbed by clicking on the URL for her blog that I’ve provided below. There were also postings on two other blogs that have now been taken down because of the furor stirred up by Sierra’s revelations. Both involved, among others, some of them also prominent bloggers, the aforementioned Chris Locke. One was called meankids.org and the other, unclebobism.wordpress.com.

Sierra says it was a posting on meankids.org that sent her to the police. “They posted a photo of a noose next to my head, and one of their members (posting as ‘Joey’) commented "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size." [italics hers]. She says law enforcement officers agreed with her that this posting was a violation of federal law and are investigating.

Prior to the death threats, Sierra said she tried to view the incoming anonymous, personally targeted remarks as just more of the same. That is, more of the Internet culture being the Internet culture. Simply more “flaming” by “trolls,” as Netheads might and do often style it. This despite a steady fusillade of blatantly sexist garbage one would hope to encounter only in the company of a pack of drunken male sociopaths who haven’t been fed in several days. Here’s one not-for-family-viewing example she provided in her blog finale: “fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.”

But even after all this, the experiment gets stranger and stranger. Most interesting of all is the nature, tone and content of Sierra’s defenders—those bloggers and blog responders who are incensed at such behavior on the Net. To their credit, their anger and calls for changed behaviors in the conduct of Internet dialogue have been admirable. One well-known IT blogger—PodTech.net’s Robert Scoble—suspended his own blog for a week in sympathy and support of Sierra. Even “Cluetrain Manifesto” co-author Locke quickly took down his Sierra-bashing blog sites (although he immediately launched an anti-Sierra counterattack, claiming that he was unjustly tarred with a brush of alleged complicity in the attacks on her, of which he professed total innocence and lack of prior knowledge.)

In general, Sierra’s defenders have pointed fingers at two disturbing issues visible in all this. One is misogyny—the hatred of women—which one Salon.com writer (a woman) says “grows wild on the Web” and which, apparently, is particularly problematic among IT blog readers. The other is the danger of allowing blog readers to respond anonymously. While it would seem to be a no-brainer, it appears that many of the Blogosphere’s movers and shakers are only now beginning to own up to the insanity of letting people post things without identification.

In the opinion of your always-humble scribe, what the Kathy Sierra Episode and its ongoing aftermath cry out for is a broader, deeper, smarter context. What is really going on here? And, where to we look for answers that are more meaningful than merely eliminating (not that it will actually happen) anonymous blog postings on the Web?

What I would like to have seen more of, and in fact, have seen nothing of thus far, in this debate is a recognition that what gets violated most in vicious attacks like those on Kathy Sierra is the ability of humans to live together socially and, yes, morally. The first quality—social living—is something found deep in the annals of even nonprimate behavior. As primatologist Frans de Waal has noted (in no less than six popular books), dogs, wolves, chimps and macaques are social. And, sometimes, of course, even we humans. “Instead of empathy being an endpoint,” de Waal writes in his latest work, Primates and Philosophers, “it may be the starting point.”

Indeed!

New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade spelled it out beautifully the other day in a piece about de Waal, evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and others investigating the origins of human morality. Sociality (or the ability to live together) is built on four kinds of behavior, the first of which is, indeed, empathy, followed by the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking. And even though it is painfully obvious that many humans, especially those who post vicious, anonymous, vile, demeaning, anti-social blog items on IT-oriented blogs (among others) can’t muster these qualities in sufficient quantity, other primates can and do.

What the human brain adds to what the brains of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, for example, can do are two additional, more sophisticated behaviors. One is the ability to enforce moral codes with punishments, rewards and the enhancement of reputations. The other is bringing judgment and reason to bear.

It is only when all six of these behaviors are acknowledged and are viable in the affairs of us humans that we stand a chance of living without fear. In the absence of these six, sooner or later, we usually go to war.

Because of absence of these Six Degrees of Non-Separation in the Kathy Sierra Episode, she now lives in fear.

She writes:

“Most of all, I now fully understand the impact of death threats. It really doesn't make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat... it's the threat itself that inflicts the damage. It's the threat that makes you question whether that ‘anonymous’ person is as disturbed as their comments and pictures suggest.

“It's the threat that causes fear.

“It's the threat that leads you to a psychiatrist and tranquilizers just so you can sleep without repeating the endless loop of your death by:
• throat slitting
• hanging
• suffocation
and don't forget the sexual part...

“I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

“I am afraid to leave my yard.

“I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”

The IT bloggers community needs to quit talking about whether or at what point the trolls "crossed the line" in flaming Kathy Sierra and do some heavy soul-searching about just what lines got crossed here and how to protect certain vital boundaries and qualities of social living and human civility to begin with.

Read Kathy Sierra’s final (at least for now) blog post: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

Go here for Chris Locke’s comments: stay tuned

Nicholas Wade’s New York Times feature: Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior [Payment is required.]

Salon.com columnist Joan Walsh’s analysis: Men who hate women on the Web

Books of possible interest by Frans de Waal:
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (The University Center for Human Values Series
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

Book of possible interest by Marc Hauser: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

Comment from Colorado reader:
The piece on blog terrorism was quite insightful. I would add that compassion is a needed social virtue. Unfortunately, the empathy that generates compassion usually comes from suffering—and these jokers have obviously not suffered enough. Recent research indicates that bullies do not suffer from poor self-esteem; rather, they have a very high self-regard, often unfounded, and abuse their world in a way that is justified by their megalomania. It would be amusing if they were identified as enemy combatants and played a stint at Gitmo. (Does this mean that I lack compassion?)

Posted on April 01, 2007