death » The Thinking Meat Project

Mortality and evolution

Apr 102011

Well, it’s spring (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and new life is bursting out everywhere you look, but again I’m going to talk to you about mortality.
Specifically, I’m going to talk about a recent paper that looked at the way that thoughts of death affect people’s beliefs about science. Like the paper I discussed in a recent post about tolerance, and mindfulness, this one uses terror management theory to frame an investigation into how people react to an existential threat. According to this theory, contemplating our own deaths produces anxiety that we ward off by various psychological defenses. Among these defenses is a stronger belief in worldviews that provide meaning, order, and perhaps a promise of immortality in some form or another.

Three researchers examined how thoughts of death affect people’s acceptance or rejection of evolutionary theory, the foundation of biological science, and intelligent design (ID), which is often couched in scientific language but in fact is not well founded in science. Evolutionary theory is obviously incompatible with belief in a literal instantaneous creation by a deity and arguably with any form of belief in an orderly world created with some purpose. Unfortunately, many people also see evolutionary theory as draining the meaning and purpose from human life. ID is essentially a response to this perception, and as such it offers a more obvious and more traditional sense of meaning.

In a series of studies, the researchers asked participants to write about either their own death or dental pain (which also arouses negative emotions but presumably does not tap into existential anxiety). Then the participants read brief selections from Michael Behe, arguing for ID, and/or Richard Dawkins, arguing for evolutionary theory, and answered questions about how they rated the author’s expertise and how much they agreed with what he was saying. In three studies with a range of participants (some undergrads, some older people from a variety of backgrounds), the authors found that by and large those who had written about death were more likely to agree with Behe than with Dawkins. This was pretty much what they had expected; they figured that ID bolsters the psychological defenses that people tend to draw on when confronted with thoughts of their own death.

The really fascinating stuff comes in the fourth and fifth studies. In the fourth, some of the participants were also given a brief reading from Carl Sagan in which he describes science as providing not just knowledge but meaning and comes down squarely on the side of being courageous enough to accept the universe as it really is, to the best of our current knowledge, and to make our own meaning. The fifth study used only the Behe and Dawkins readings; participants were all college students in the natural sciences. In both, the participants did not tend to accept ID or reject evolutionary theory even if they had written about their own deaths; in fact, they were more likely to reject ID.

I thought these were exciting results, particularly the study that included the Carl Sagan reading. I think our ability to use reason and careful observation to understand the world around us, and to be, as Sagan put it, courageous enough to accept the truths we find, is one of the greatest things about us as a species. The rejection of not just scientific findings but also the values that underlie scientific research is deeply troubling for a number of reasons. I don’t think that accepting science leads to an impoverished worldview; in fact, for me it’s exactly the opposite. Presenting science in a way that is unflinchingly honest about the situation in which we find ourselves and its implications for traditional religious beliefs and at the same time nurtures the deep sense of meaning that people hunger for is crucial. When I read the passage from Sagan that was used in this study, I was impressed at how well he did this. The fact that his words can change the way people react to an existential threat is heartening. A current debate in the online atheist community centers around whether unvarnished, honest rejection of the supernatural is compatible with (a) changing people’s minds or (b) persuading people of the beauty and meaning to be found in science. Although this study involves only a snapshot of people’s reactions to various readings, I think it suggests that science can be presented both honestly and compellingly. Now we need to understand and apply the best techniques that people have found for doing this.

This paper was published in PLoS One, so anyone can read it: Tracy JL, Hart J, Martens JP (2011) Death and Science: The Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design and Discomfort with Evolution. PLoS ONE 6(3): e17349. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0017349. Published March 30, 2011.

More about mortality, intolerance, and mindfulness

Being human 3 Responses »

Apr 022011

A few weeks ago, I posted about a study that looked at how mindfulness affected people’s reactions to thoughts of their own deaths. Thanks to a good-hearted reader, I now have a copy of the paper itself, which provides a lot more information than the news article I was using.

The research was done in the context of something called terror management theory, which suggests that humans are motivated strongly by the fear of death. Past research has shown that after being reminded of their own mortality, people tend to become more biased and judgmental (favoring their own group over others, choosing harsher punishments for various offenses). The idea, very roughly, is that people defend themselves against uneasiness about death by clinging more strongly to the things in their worldview that provide identity and meaning. The paper looks at how mindfulness influences this behavior.

One thing I wondered about was what measure was used to determine how mindful the participants were. It turns out that their degree of mindfulness was assessed using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). (The MAAS is described in this paper, which notes that it “is focused on the presence or absence of attention to and awareness of what is occurring in the present”; it suggests that the degree of mindfulness can be increased with practice, and describes some findings that indicated various correlations between MAAS results and the Big Five personality traits. Those two things together strike me as quite intriguing because they seem to me to be saying that perhaps some personality traits can, at least to some degree, be altered.)

Anyway, the paper about mindfulness and fear of death covered seven different studies that looked at a variety of interlinked questions. The general outline was that participants wrote about either what they imagined their own death would be like, or what watching television is like, and then answered a questionnaire that examined their attitudes or reactions (e.g., the degree to which they favored something written by a foreign, pro-US author versus something by a foreign, anti-US author). One thing that struck me was that in four of the seven studies, the participants were undergrads in their late teens and early twenties. In two of them, the age extended upward to the mid-thirties, and in one of them it extended up to the mid-sixties (the paper didn’t give a breakdown by age). I wonder how age differences might affect the results.

I personally have felt fairly anxious when thinking about my own death; being dead poses no terrors for me, because I think my consciousness will be extinguished when my brain dies. What bothers me is the moment of death and the knowledge that my time has run out: that there are no second chances left, that all of the things I haven’t been able to do or experience will remain forever undone. I have wondered how really old people, who realistically must know that their time on earth is mostly behind them and that death will come sooner rather than later, deal with what that must feel like. I can only assume that if I am fortunate enough to make it into my 80s or 90s, I will have found a way to cope. (I hope I’ll be cheerful enough that I can make jokes about not buying green bananas.) It would be interesting to know how more or less mindful people of different ages compared with each other in these sorts of studies (or if there’s any difference in younger people who have been in a life-threatening situation).

Added to one another

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Mar 142011

“Here in time we are added to one another.”–Wendell Berry, Epitaph

Mortality, intolerance, and mindfulness

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Mar 132011

In a recent post, I talked about the adaptation of various Eastern spiritual practices by Westerners, and how in the process these practices became more or less belief-free techniques for living a better life within the limitations of being thinking meat. This story from Science Daily is a good example of what I was talking about.

Past research has suggested that when people contemplate their own mortality, they tend to become more biased and judgmental. The idea is that when people feel uneasy about facing death, they are more strongly inclined to defend the beliefs that give them some feeling of stability. However, new research has found that more mindful people were more tolerant of different world views than less mindful people after being reminded of their mortality (specifically, they had to write about what would happen to their bodies after they died). (The Science Daily story and the abstract of the paper don’t say how they determined who was more mindful, and the paper is not available for free, so I can’t find out; I’m guessing they chose people who regularly practiced mindfulness meditation.) Mindfulness involves a calm acceptance of reality that might help people face even the threat of death more open-mindedly.

I wonder if, by extension, people who regularly practice mindfulness might be less inclined to give the expected knee-jerk response when faced with political rhetoric designed to push people’s fear buttons. My own attempts at mindfulness are quite amateurish, but my understanding of the concept is that it can give you an instant of decision before you fall heedlessly into your typical reaction to something, which can be useful if your typical reaction is not helpful. That little bit of freedom to choose a response might make quite a difference. Christopher Hitchens described us as “partly rational animals with adrenal glands that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too small.” Maybe mindfulness helps us give the prefrontal lobes an edge over the adrenal glands?

The complete citation is:

Christopher P. Niemiec, Kirk Warren Brown, Todd B. Kashdan, Philip J. Cozzolino, William E. Breen, Chantal Levesque-Bristol, Richard M. Ryan. Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010, 99 (2):344. (Link goes to the abstract.)

I can’t imagine it

Being human, Psychology, Thought and consciousness 1 Response »

Oct 132008

I’ve always liked an epitaph supposedly used by Epicureans in ancient Greece: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not mind.” It expresses a benign resignation toward the inevitability of death as part of the natural cycle. And although it’s written in the form of a statement by a dead person, the dead cannot really express themselves thus, even if that’s how they felt about it when they were alive.

This article from Scientific American Mind proposes that the human tendency to believe in an afterlife is based on a particular cognitive illusion. Even if you believe that death is truly the end of the road, it’s impossible to imagine ourselves not being here and so to experience even in imagination what death will be like. In other words, we have to be here to think about not being here, which can be a major source of confusion for a brain trying to understand its own death. Obviously it’s possible to hold what the article describes as extinctivist beliefs about death truly being the end, but even extinctivists can have a hard time conceptualizing what that means for themselves.

From this viewpoint, it’s probably not existential terror that first led humans to think that there was an afterlife, but an innate trick of consciousness. The article describes various studies that have examined people’s statements about the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of the dead. In particular, some scientists have looked at what children have to say on the subject, and have found that younger children are more likely than older children to assume some kind of psychological continuity in the dead. Even when they’re aware that death will eliminate the need for food or sleep, they talk as if the dead will still be able to feel or think.

The fact that this tendency is weaker in older children indicates that it’s not (or at least not entirely) imposed by culture. Interestingly, however, language and religious training can influence the degree to which older children ascribe mental states to the dead: clinical or scientific language and secular schooling both seem to counteract the mental habit of assuming ongoing mental activity after death.

The article also mentions the concept of person permanence, which means the recognition that just because someone is out of sight doesn’t mean he or she has stopped existing. We learn this when we’re very young and, as the author of the article suggests, perhaps we can’t easily unlearn it when we’re thinking about people we know who have died, as opposed to people we know who are alive but absent. This may be another factor contributing to the intuitive feeling that maybe the dead aren’t really gone. (And in some sense, they do live on in our memories and imaginations, and in that sense, they’re always here. Not in the way you’d like them to be, but still, for people you were close to, parts of them live on in you. Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop explores this idea in detail. One of my favorite Ashleigh Brilliant cartoons has the caption “Officially, we begin at birth, and end at death, but it’s really much more complicated than that.” I don’t know exactly how Brilliant meant it, but even an extinctivist like me can find some truth in that.)

Dreaming of the dead

Psychology 1 Response »

Jul 032007

Why we dream is even harder to figure out than why we yawn. This article from the New York Times talks about a trend toward seeing dreams as carriers of psychological meaning (rather than, say, the more or less meaningless byproduct of physiological processes in the brain that happen while we’re asleep). The article, which struck me as a little disjointed but still interesting, discusses the “big dreams”, the memorable ones that resonate emotionally, in particular dreams about people close to you who have died. I was interested to read that one researcher believes that dreams of the dead vary as people go through the stages of grieving, and I wish more space had been given to the whole sequence of grieving and the related types of dreams.

Estimating near-term mortality

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Feb 142006

Perhaps you’ve had about all the hearts and flowers you can stand. If so, here’s an interesting story about a test that estimates how likely a person is to die in the next four years. Researchers have devised twelve questions for people over 50, each with associated point totals. The higher your score, the more likely you are to die in the next four years; the test is supposed to be 81% accurate. The complete test is not given in this article, but there’s a good bit of information about the questions. Some are obvious: smoking, being diabetic, and being unable to walk far without getting winded all count against you. There are no questions about your family history or eating habits, and the only specific question about weight gives you a point for being of normal weight (BMI less than 25) but no points for having a BMI over 25, which is considered overweight. (Although the BMI is a somewhat problematic indicator anyway, from what I hear.) My BMI is around 19, which I wouldn’t have guessed would count against me, but for older people a sudden weight loss can indicate trouble. I’m not 50 yet and the test is less accurate at the lower end of the age range anyway. (Another caveat is that of course this can’t take into account freak accidents, such as those that can happen if you don’t choose your hunting companions carefully enough.)

These kind of estimates can give doctors and patients another data point to consider when making decisions about medical treatments, and it can also make it easier to compare the performance of different health plans or health care providers. The most interesting thing to me, though, is to think about what the emotional response would be to knowing your score. I don’t know that our mental equipment is all that well geared to come up with an appropriate emotional response to a statistical statement about the chances of death in a certain time period (except for very short time periods, of course; if you think you’re going to die in the next five minutes, the response is hard-wired).

Thinking about dying

Psychology Comments Off

Jan 232006

This is not exactly a cheerful topic, but here’s an interesting press release about research at the University of Michigan into how people feel about various end-of-life matters. Researchers used a number of focus groups to study the feelings of different groups (men, women, Hispanics, African Americans, whites, Arab Americans) about things like assisted suicide, medical intervention at the end of life, and hospice care versus being cared for at home. There were some big cultural and gender differences; Arab Americans, for example, generally feel that it’s the family’s responsibility to take care of them in their final illness, whereas Americans do not feel that way. All 73 focus group participants were over the age of 50, so they presumably had some experience with parents or other family members dying and were old enough to be able to think realistically about what they would want when it’s their turn. It’s interesting to see the cultural trends, although I’m sure that’s only part of the story when an individual faces these kinds of decisions. I wonder if all these people went out to talk to their lawyers and draw up living wills and such after examining their own possible futures.