Month: January 2012

I guess it was inevitable.

New research illuminates how the brain grapples with sacred beliefs and indecent proposals:

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," [lead author Gregory] Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Put another way:

In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” [neuroscientist Greg Berns] said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”

Wendy Campbell explains Takahiro Kimura's "Broken Face" collages:

Since 1991, Kimura has been creating own unique style of collages (with a focus on faces) that depicts the complicated nature of the human spirit through peculiar physical distortions.

Lomography has more:

Kimura also creates these “faces” for his Foster Parent Project, in which he attempts to “compare creative work to a child—in as literal, diverse, and simutaneously humane sense as possible.” This way, he plays the role of a “biological parent” to a work of art that becomes his “child.” Consequently, someone who purchases a “child” becomes not a mere collector, but a “foster parent.” He even requests buyers to complete a Child Information Form as part of the project, where they will name their “foster child” and even state how they intend to raise the “child” up.

More work here. An example of his recent animation here.

Susan Cain praises introverts in her new book:

It’s never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population. We discovered this with women decades ago, and now it’s time to realize it with introverts.

This also leads to a lot of wrongheaded notions that affect introverts and extroverts alike. Here’s just one example: Most schools and workplaces now organize workers and students into groups, believing that creativity and productivity comes from a gregarious place. This is nonsense, of course. From Darwin to Picasso to Dr. Seuss, our greatest thinkers have often worked in solitude, and in my book I examine lots of research on the pitfalls of groupwork. 

I’ll own that headline for this one. The total invention of Barack X as opposed to Barack Obama is getting worse, not better, as Bill Maher explains in this instant classic:

First off, the head of the RNC, Reince Priebus, just said this about the bitter GOP death-match now in full flood:

In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we’re going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama who’s abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

So the man handed an economy contracting by an annualized rate of 9 percent, and two failed wars, is now the man who is abandoning ship. Next up:

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal is under fire after asking Republican House members to pray for President Barack Obama’s death. O’Neal made the request via an email he forwarded to GOP colleagues in the House. In an email sent in December, O’Neal asked his fellow Republicans to pray Psalm 109, which contains the following lines:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

The Secret Service needs to give that man a call. Then he should resign. No public official anywhere should be calling for the death of the first black president.

Julian Baggini thinks not. But he doesn't believe that the self is an illusion:

Sam McNerney pushes back:

He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.

Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”

A recent study put the question to German eBay customers who had offered a neutral or negative evaluation of a transaction:

One-third of the unhappy customers received a message that included the sentence: “I would like to apologize and ask whether you might withdraw your evaluation.” The others were offered, in place of expression of regret, either 2.5 or 5 euros “as a goodwill gesture.” Writing in the journal Economics Letters, the researchers report nearly 45 percent of those given the apology withdrew their evaluation, compared to only 21 percent of those offered cash. A direct apology: priceless.

Yosemite at its most beautiful:

Dr. David Agus wages it in his new book The End of Illness. Brian Bethune summarizes:

Vitamin supplements would be bad enough if they were merely useless, he says. The money Americans spend yearly on vitamins—some $25 billion—is sorely needed elsewhere in the medical system. They aren’t getting much for their money now. Consider claims that vitamin D significantly cuts cancer risks and that three-quarters of the U.S. population had insufficient levels of it. For Agus, these results are found in not very high-grade studies; for one thing, he’s at a loss to understand how anyone can claim to have established the correct dose for appropriate D levels. The bone disease rickets is long gone and age-related fractures are not on the rise, meaning that by the only indications we have, the population has quite enough vitamin D. 

Gregory Ferenstein details Agus' other prescriptions:

[W]e combat weight loss by driving to the gym to walk on a treadmill–and then return to hunch over laptops for hours on end. "Sitting at your desk is akin to smoking a cigarette," he says. Prolonged sitting, independent of physical exercise, he writes, "has been shown to have significant metabolic consequences," influencing everything from cholesterol levels to blood sugar.

From "The Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The poem continues. Amit Majmudar analyzes the work of T.S. and Kay Ryan as the two major philosophical poets.

(Image by Markus Reugels)