Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist and a well-known creativity coach, with many books to his credit. His co-author is his wife Ann, who is, according to the jacket blurb, busy researching the productive obsessions of others. They’ve produced a book of advice and encouragement for how to engage your mind in a project that can help you find meaning and fulfillment.
This book follows up on Eric Maisel’s earlier The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, in which he encouraged depressed creative people to work through the depression by focusing on how they were creating meaning through their work. The basic idea was that depression is what fills your heart when the meaning has leaked out, so the key to keeping it at bay is to never take meaning for granted, but to cultivate it assiduously.
Brainstorm is more of a how-to manual for the care and feeding of projects that can give life meaning. The idea behind a productive obsession is that it gives your brain something to focus on, something that will help you channel your mental energies into something more productive than the hamster-wheel spinning of worries, fears, or regrets that can sap your energy. A productive obsession can be just about anything: writing a novel, creating a series of paintings, launching a business or a nonprofit, solving some scientific or technical problem, or resolving some vexing personal dilemma like how to balance your work and your family or how to care for an aging relative. The key thing is to find something to which you can commit yourself wholeheartedly and that will repay your sustained attention.
The introduction says this book could be read in an afternoon, and I think that’s a pretty accurate estimation. The chapters are short and the writing is engaging and approachable. However, the payoff really comes when you apply the ideas to your own productive obsession, whatever it might be. So in that sense, it’s a book for bookmarking and dipping into as your obsession unfolds.
The book is structured loosely around the progress of a typical productive obsession. It describes identifying the thing that will most happily occupy and focus your brain, clearing the decks for action, mustering the discipline to succeed, and dealing with rough patches. The successful completion of your project is then only the beginning of the next obsession. Each chapter closes with a few paragraphs of more specific counsel: suggestions for dealing with obstacles, bits of insight into the process, words of encouragement, success stories for inspiration. The book closes with an appendix about how to start your own productive obsession group online in which you can find and offer encouragement and swap stories.
My own productive obsession at the moment is a novel that I’m writing. The idea first came to me on New Year’s Day, 2007. I’ve written a lot of background and sketches, and this January 1, I resolved to finish a first draft by the end of the year. (I think I may make it.) I read the Maisels’ book with this project in mind. It struck me as containing advice of varying degrees of usefulness to me at the moment. As I read, sentences or paragraphs would leap out at me, telling me things that I either hadn’t known or had sensed only dimly. I suspect that in another reading at a different stage of my work, a different set of ideas would be highlighted. This time, I got a lot out of the parts about self-doubt, follow-through, and being patient with the process.
For example, one of the things that has bedeviled me the most about writing a novel is trying to get a handle on exactly how the process works. I figured most people don’t just sit down, like Snoopy, and type “It was a dark and stormy night,” and then move along, page after page, until “The end.” Foundations must be laid, preliminary sketches made—but how does this fit into the actual production of completed pages? I wanted someone to tell me what I was supposed to do every day. And being a mildly (or maybe moderately) obsessive type, I wanted to see results, to watch the number of words and the number of pages steadily increasing. However, that just didn’t seem to be how it worked, at least not in the beginning. I’m slowly figuring out my own process (at least for this book), but I still feel like I’m floundering sometimes. So I was brought up short by the following:
There is simply no paved road from here to there.
It was surprising how much this helped. My reaction seemed to exemplify something the book said a few pages earlier:
Yet people are convinced that there is some linear way to write a novel, build a business, or answer a scientific question. Holding to this false hope, when they enter into the turmoil of process and discover that it is messy, nonlinear, and not what they expected, they quit. If only they could accept that process is exactly this messy, they might grow calm—and enjoy themselves.
Oh. OK. Yeah, that does make sense.
Maisel talks about neuronal gestalts and uses other brain-centered language in what seems to be a largely metaphorical way. He has the experience to back him up in his observations on how brains work and what makes them happy and productive (or unhappy and stuck), but it might have been nice to have some footnotes or suggestions for further reading that address what brain science can tell us about focus, mindfulness, self-confidence, and self-doubt. With that minor caveat, though, I’d say that this book has some helpful advice and inspiration that can help you get from a vague feeling of wanting to do something big with your time and energy to actually doing something about it.
The Center for Inquiry is offering a two-month online course this fall on the topic of nature and morality. I have never taken a course from the CFI so I can’t vouch for their quality, and this doesn’t appear to count for any kind of college credit, but I thought it looked interesting enough to pass on. The course will discuss “the human place in the natural world and how we can naturalistically understand human morality” (i.e., without invoking the supernatural). For more, including information on how to register, see the CFI’s course information page. The cost is at most $90 (with a discount if you’re a friend of the CFI and a steep discount if you’re a student).
This article from Wired describes the work of Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress. It gives a good overview of the causes and costs of stress, some suggestions for how to cope, and fascinating news about work toward a vaccine against stress.
Sapolsky’s book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Third Edition describes how the body reacts to stress. In essence, the stress response is a dramatic shift from long-term functions (building bone, reproducing, general maintenance, etc.) in favor of short-term needs like running or fighting. In a zebra, the stress response kicks in when needed—for example, when a predator appears. If the zebra escapes being killed by the lion, it’s done being stressed, and its body can get back to maintenance and upkeep. The problems in humans (and other primates) arise when a chronic state of stress sets in. Zebras don’t get ulcers because they don’t like awake at night worrying fruitlessly about whether they said the right thing to the boss, or if they’re going to be able to make the mortgage payment this month.
The Wired article describes how social status affects stress; low-status baboons first alerted Sapolsky to the unfortunate effects of being low on the social ladder. Further studies in humans across a variety of fields have confirmed the effects. The presence or absence of control appears to be crucial to the way status mediates stress: if you have more control (which is typically associated with higher status), a demanding workload is easier to cope with than a dead-end job where you have little control.
The article suggests some things that you can do to help relieve stress (surprisingly, exercise is listed as being good for you only if you enjoy it overall—if you’re forcing yourself and gritting your teeth to get through it, maybe you should just stay home). It also describes some fascinating work on a vaccine for stress. It uses a reconfigured version of the herpes virus; all the harmful genes have been removed and replaced by various neuroprotective genes. This vaccine has been found to limit cell damage in rodents who have undergone a massive release of glucocorticoids (stress hormones). I was very impressed by this; it’s still nowhere near ready for humans, but it’s amazing to me that it could be done at all.
I really hope this work pans out in the long run and provides a stress vaccine for humans. I’d be tempted to say why bother doing all that when people can just exercise, meditate, or try to find other ways to control their stress. However, I know from personal experience that it can be extremely hard to do that. Sometimes it feels like my body has a mind of its own when it comes to stressing out, even over relatively trivial things. The reason it can be hard to combat stress is that the stress response operates on a kind of positive feedback loop. Basically, once your body and mind consistently get the idea that life is dangerous and that fear or caution is appropriate, it’s hard to persuade them otherwise. If you’re chronically stressed, you’re more sensitive to the effects of future stressors, and stresses that happen early in life can cast a very long shadow. The saddest part of the whole thing was probably this:
A recent study found that individuals abused by their parents during early childhood showed epigenetic changes to their DNA, which altered how their genes were read. The most prominent changes involved genes encoding glucocorticoid receptors, which led to a magnified stress response. The abuse might be temporary, but the damage is permanent, a wound that never heals.
It would be a wonderful world if children were never exposed to treatment or conditions that had the potential to hurt them for the rest of their lives, but that’s not possible. I hope that all the various stress-combatting activities can help even those with such a magnified stress response, but still, I wish Sapolsky and his colleagues success in their work on a human anti-stress vaccine.
What turned humans into such a force to reckon with? There are a number of usual suspects when the topic comes up: We’re bipedal; we have these big brains that allowed us to a) develop language and b) cooperate; we have these cool opposable thumbs. NPR recently ran a story about the humble yet complex human shoulder, which made its own contribution. The shoulder makes us dangerous by making it possible for us to throw things, including weapons of various kinds. In concert with our big brains, with which we can develop extensions of our throwing ability such as the atlatl, the shoulder allowed us to bring down big animals from a safer distance. This supplied useful protein and fat, which presumably helped feed that hungry big brain and made it easier for us to survive and thrive.
In his book The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, Clair Davies describes the shoulder injury that led him to write the book and says that for a while he thought that no one really understood shoulders or how to fix them. I can certainly appreciate that; I have had a lot of problems with shoulder pain from a repetitive stress injury (I think it was using a mouse that first did me in, back before I figured out what I was doing wrong). Shoulders might rank right up there with knees in terms of being complicated and delicate, so I guess it’s good to know that they helped get us where we are today.
Pop singers have asked how you can tell if someone loves you or if his or her love is lasting and true. Countless books and a long-running magazine column have helped dubious lovers explore the long-term potential of their marriages and other relationships. Now a psychological tool, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been put to use to answer this type of question.
The IAT is believed to reveal unconscious preferences or feelings by measuring how quickly you associate ideas. For example, do you categorize words or faces more quickly when young faces are paired with positive words and old faces with negative words, or vice versa? It can be used to look for unconscious bias or racism; I think there was a version early in 2008 that evaluated which of the candidates in the US presidential primaries was truly your favorite.
Anthony Greenwald, the developer of the IAT, has written an article for Scientific American about a new use for the IAT. Three psychologists have looked at whether the IAT can be used to predict whether romantic relationships will continue; basically they were looking for how quickly people associated their partners with either positive or negative words (both generic and relationship-specific words). It turns out that it does have some predictive power, more than questionnaires that were also used to evaluate the relationships. It’s an intriguing result, but it’s nowhere near ready for people to be able to sit down at a computer and take an IAT that will tell them whether to buy a house with their sweetie or pack their bags. However, if you want to learn more about how the IAT works and take some tests yourself, check out the Project Implicit web site. I’ve taken several IATs myself (on topics like fat/thin bias or old/young bias), and sometimes I feel a little dubious about whether the test is measuring my own unconscious attitudes or the beliefs I’m surrounded by, but of course it’s possible that I unconsciously subscribe to those beliefs myself without realizing it.
One night in the summer of 1987, I was awake late at night at a mountaintop solar observatory. The town of Sunspot, New Mexico, had maybe somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred inhabitants, all of them asleep as far as I could tell, but I was restless that night, emotionally unsettled by my grandmother’s recent death. Sunspot boasted a small informal lending library, in the form of a single room full of books in one of the houses. It was a small collection but the terms of service were fantastic: You walked over any time you wanted to and borrowed what you liked. Bibliotropism drew me there that night, and I stumbled across a book by Loren Eiseley called The Firmament of Time, which is a beautifully written meditation on the human race’s progress in understanding the place it occupies in the universe. As I read, Eiseley seemed to be speaking directly to me, offering an inspiring view of human life and the meaning to be found in the scientific endeavor. My mind was dazzled and calmed by his words, and eventually I relaxed enough to be able to sleep that night.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how really amazing communication is: that facts, ideas, opinions, and emotions can be conveyed from one human brain to another. (On my pessimistic days, I wonder how well any brain communicates anything to another brain beyond things like, “Ham and cheese, easy on the mayo.”) Eiseley had been dead for 17 years when I read that book, but that didn’t matter. I could still incorporate the products of his mental activities into my own brain. How cool is that?
A recent study has examined how the spoken word affects the brains of listeners using a recorded story. The speaker’s brain patterns were recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as she told the story, and then the brain patterns of listeners were examined as they heard the story played back to them. Various control conditions were also examined (listening to a story in a language the listener didn’t understand, or listening to a different story told by the same speaker). When the listeners understood the story, patterns of activity over wide areas of their brains were similar to those of the original story-teller; this didn’t happen in the control conditions. A closer match in neural activity was linked to a better understanding of the story. This guest blog post at Scientific American has more details.
The comments bring out a couple of interesting points. For example, while it’s tempting to think of the speaker as controlling the listener’s brain, the interaction between listener and story-teller was probably at least as much about collaboration as it was about control. In some instances where the listener was really on top of the story, activity in the listener’s prefrontal cortex preceded similar activity in the speaker’s brain, indicating anticipation of what was going to come next. The listener was actively participating in entering the story. (And on a related note, we’ve all experienced the limits of language in trying to convey ideas or information to an unreceptive brain.) When I read the article, my first thought was to wonder whether the same thing holds for writing; this question, and a similar question about music, also came up in the comments. (Answer: We don’t know yet, but the method used in this study should be applicable to those questions as well.)
Anyway, the whole thing gives you something interesting to think about the next time you talk to someone. And I have to wonder what’s happening in your brain right now as you read these words, and how much it might resemble what’s going on in mine as I write them.
The paper is available for free online (for now, anyway): Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication,
Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print, July 26, 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008662107
Although we sometimes refer to sadness as “the blues,” depression can often feel more like a state of unrelieved gray. Some recent research has found that in the retinas of depressed people, the response to black/white contrasts was notably lower than in healthy people. This backs up an earlier study which found that depressed people had a harder time detecting differences between black and white (I’m assuming they were talking about fairly subtle differences). The effect of viewing a more monotone world seems obvious (what a downer), but it’s not clear to me how to interpret it. This seems like evidence of a glitch in the sensory equipment that’s associated with depression. On the other hand, some researchers think that depression might be (or might have been) an adaptive withdrawal from the world; in that case, the change in vision might be part of the mechanism that causes that withdrawal. At any rate, the effect was big enough that they could tell most of the depressed people from the healthy ones.
This video, which pairs words from Carl Sagan with images from from Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe and Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System, gives Carl Sagan’s poetically expressed description of how our species has grown into a better understanding of the universe. Enjoy.
I’ve posted a couple of links lately to stories about humans, chimps, and violence. The New York Times recently ran a brief interview with two primatologists who study bonobos, the hippy cousin of chimps and humans. The title of the article is “Why Bonobos Don’t Kill Each Other,” and while that question isn’t really answered, it’s still an interesting look at bonobo research.
I’m really enjoying Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
The survey, which its authors report as the first representative sample of the entire planet, asked respondents about their income levels, standard of living, overall evaluations of their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, and numerous quality-of-life indicators such as the degree to which they feel respected or autonomous or find their jobs fulfilling.
The results seemed to identify two different aspects of happiness: an overall feeling that your life is satisfactory and the experience of positive emotions. Life satisfaction does correlate fairly well with income, but evidently the link between enjoying life (or not) on a day-to-day basis is much less well correlated with income. Basically, the study seems to have identified two different types of resources: the possession of economic resources affects life satisfaction, and the possession of psychological/social capital affects day-to-day reports of positive or negative feelings. The study shows that these two flavors of happiness are separate, but I wonder about how they are related.
John Horgan at the Scientific American has written a follow-up to Nicholas Wade’s recent article on chimp violence. Horgan reviews the evidence for and against the theory that chimp violence is widespread and that our hominid ancestors inherited the tendency toward violence from our common ancestor with the chimps. Specifically, he explains why he has become skeptical of the theory. What kind of species are we really? Within the limits of our genome, we’re the kind of species we choose to be, but we may be going less against the grain than we sometimes think when we choose peace.
To understand the full spectrum of the human religious experience, it makes sense to study unbelievers, who have almost certainly been exposed to religious beliefs but chosen not to accept them, as well as believers. Researchers in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo are surveying atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, skeptics, humanists, etc., to try to get a handle on how they view and experience life. If you fall into any of those categories, consider contributing your data points. You can find the survey and more at the Atheism Rising web site. Yes, you probably live in a country that is WEIRD (or maybe WIRED or even WIDER, as a friend pointed out), but they’ve got to start someplace. (Although actually I’d be very interested in learning about the areligious in non-WEIRD cultures. On a somewhat-related tangent, I’ve long wondered what freethinking types did during the Middle Ages in Europe, for example, or in other times and places where everyone was assumed to belong to the prevailing religion.)
That’s a western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) country. Odds are most of you live in one too. So it’s unfortunate, according to a recent study, that people who live in such countries—and typically a particular subset of those people, to boot—provide much of our data on human psychology and behavior.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia examined a comparative database of information from various behavioral sciences and found that it would be hard to find a population less suited for broad generalizations about humans than the inhabitants of WEIRD countries, who provide far and away the majority of data for behavioral studies. The areas they looked at included “visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.” College students in the US are a subgroup that has its own quirks that differentiate it even from the general run of WEIRD people, and I’m guessing that they are one of the more heavily used groups for psychology research.
So whatever other reservations you may have about things like how well surveys or lab experiments capture people’s real-life behavior and attitudes, add to that the possibility that what we’re learning about is really an atypical batch of humans. A few years back I read David Buller’s book on evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books), in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.
Being wrong is unpleasant, in my experience, but the fear of being wrong is even worse. Kathryn Schulz (who recently wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error) has written an article for the Boston Globe about what’s wrong with how we view being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, especially a visible one, can be crippling, and it doesn’t necessarily help prevent mistakes; in fact, it can make it harder to analyze and understand what’s going on in order to rectify it.
Schulz notes that it is our capacity for inductive reasoning that makes us prone to mistakes; our ability to quickly generate likely answers sometimes leads us to accept the wrong one as true. Looked at this way, making mistakes goes hand in hand with being able to eliminate a confusing clutter of possibilities in favor of homing in on probable solutions. As in many other situations in life as thinking meat, we’re looking at a trade-off.
This essentially allows a reframing of the discussion of error. Rather than seeing it as revealing our deepest flaws and inadequacies, Schulz suggests that we accept it as part of the cost of doing business as a cogitating being and move on to understanding it. Only by understanding when and why we’re likely to commit errors are we going to be able to figure out workarounds. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we embrace our fallibility so as to better understand our mistakes and learn how to recover from them or avoid them in the first place. Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. When have you ever improved at anything by shaming yourself or trying to hide your inadequacies? (For that matter, when’s the last time this worked when you tried to change someone else’s behavior?) I haven’t read the book yet, but the article may give you a new take on being an error-prone thinker. (H/t Greg for the link to the article.)
Here are some interesting items that have crossed my radar lately.
Subjective information: This article from Seed Magazine may be relevant to a recent comment about the difficulty of answering personality test questions. The article examines the role of self-reported data of all kinds in science. People are asked about various aspects of their own behavior, but how accurate are their answers?
Chimp warfare: Nicholas Wade reports on war-like behavior among chimps at Ngogo, in Kibale National Park in Uganda. A recent paper on ten years of observations concludes that a group of chimps engaged in aggression to expand its territory.
A voluntary end to humans? Bioethicist Peter Singer has written an essay about the morality of bringing children into the world. Many people hesitate to have children whose lives they have reason to believe will be unusually painful or difficult. Singer points out that even a normal healthy life typically involves considerable pain as well as pleasure, and asks why we should go on reproducing at all. The reader responses are full of interesting takes on parenthood, the value of life, and the future of the planet.
Atheist posthumans:This essay provides a completely different view of the (post)human future, suggesting that posthumans will probably be atheists and furthermore that this would be a desirable development. I’m not sure I see super-intelligent posthumans in the future any time soon, but the discussion of atheism is interesting.
Steven Pinker, in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proposes an explanation of how human intelligence evolved. He begins by noting that Charles Darwin had no problem believing that intelligence could be explained by evolutionary theory. However, Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at the idea of natural selection around the same time as Darwin, thought that because abstract reasoning would have been of no use to prehistoric humans, intelligence must have been the work of a superior being rather than solely the result of natural processes. Scientists have sided with Darwin, but Wallace’s point about the dubious adaptive value of higher cognitive functions to earlier humans is worth examining. Pinker offers an explanation of how we gained our unique profile of cognitive capabilities.
The explanation rests on two things: the idea that we evolved to fit a cognitive niche, and our capacity for metaphorical abstraction. The concept of a cognitive niche originated with John Tooby and Irven DeVore; the basic idea is that we brought to the evolutionary arms race the rudiments of several characteristics that allowed us to exploit other organisms by reasoning and information-sharing rather than by sheerly physical or chemical means (running faster, producing toxins as plants do, etc.). Once we began to move into this niche, new possibilities opened up, and a host of peculiarly human traits likely co-evolved. Pinker emphasizes three traits: the smarts needed to develop and use tools, the capacity for cooperation with those to whom we are not related, and the capacity for the uniquely human combinatorial system of grammatical language.
He discusses briefly how various quirks of the human organism (for example, our relatively long childhoods and long lives, our cultural differences) could have arisen as a result of the development of these capabilities, and also some of the factors that might have predisposed us toward moving into the cognitive niche (prehensile hands, the inclusion of meat in the diet, living in groups).
This is interesting for several reasons. For one, it’s intuitively appealing (to me, at least) to think of a multitude of interwoven causes for something as complex as human intelligence rather than a single development on which everything else hinged. Also, this theory might explain very nicely why we seem to share some capabilities with other animals, things that were once thought to be uniquely human (compassion for conspecifics, tool use, etc.), but we are the only ones to have such well-developed versions of them and to have them all in combination. Pinker also mentions that we test and fine-tune our strategies on the fly within our own lifetimes rather than relying on the much slower pace of evolutionary change to develop responses to environmental challenges or changes in the organisms we eat or otherwise exploit:
Because humans develop offenses in real time that other organ-
isms can defend themselves against only in evolutionary time,
humans have a tremendous advantage in evolutionary arms races.
This seems to explain why we are uniquely destructive as well, and it gives us (although we should already know this) an extraordinary responsibility.
I was also struck by the following:
The selection pressures that the theory invokes are straight-
forward and do not depend on some highly specific behavior (e.g.,
using projectile weapons, keeping track of wandering children) or
environment (e.g., a particular change in climate), none of which
were likely to be in place over the millions of years in which modern
humans evolved their large brains and complex tools. Instead it
invokes the intrinsic advantages of know-how, cooperation, and
communication that we recognize uncontroversially in the con-
temporary world.
This seems to sidestep my objections to the way evolutionary psychologists sometimes seek to explain our behavior and the way they assume there was a single environment that definitively shaped everything about us.
You still have to wonder how we developed the ability to understand and use things that our ancestors had no pressing need for (differential equations, the concept of the state). That’s where the idea of metaphorical abstraction comes in. Basically, this means that we are able to take relationships that apply to space and force and then abstract them out to apply to other things. Our language is full of such metaphorical uses; when the Dow goes up, it doesn’t really ascend skyward, for example (although when it falls we do sometimes seem to hear a certain sickening thud). These metaphors reveal that we have pressed various physical concepts into use in novel ways. The power of this is that it allows us to mentally combine and manipulate abstractions. He gives lots of interesting references to the literature on this capability.
The article also offers some insight into how the theory of the cognitive niche could be tested, which I find exciting:
The theory can be tested more rigorously, moreover, using the
family of relatively new techniques that detect “footprints of selection” in the human genome (by, for example, comparing rates of
nonsynonymous and synonymous base pair substitutions or the
amounts of variation in a gene within and across species). The theory predicts that there are many genes that were selected in
the lineage leading to modern humans whose effects are concentrated in intelligence, language, or sociality. Working backward,
it predicts that any genes discovered in modern humans to have
disproportionate effects in intelligence, language, or sociality (that
is, that do not merely affect overall growth or health) will be found to
have been a target of selection. This would differentiate the theory
from those that invoke a single macromutation, or genetic changes
that affected only global properties of the brain like overall size, or
those that attribute all of the complexity and differentiation of
human social, cognitive, or linguistic behavior to cultural evolution.
However, Jerry Coyne, in his blog Why Evolution is Truediscusses this paper and goes into some very interesting details on why such testing would be difficult.
In short, Pinker’s paper is full of meaty food for thought and discussion, and it also offers a way to look for evidence, problematic though that may be. Fascinating stuff! The entire paper is available online. The full citation is:
Steven Pinker, The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 11, 2010; 107 (Supplement 2): 8993–8999. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914630107
In the early 1970s, a Doonesbury comic strip showed a classic moment in which a rebellious crowd of protesters that couldn’t agree on anything found a rallying point: they agreed that they wanted to kill the moderator who was urging them to find common ground in order to effectively fight the system. This captures very nicely the Jekyll and Hyde nature of in-group cohesion. It can be heartwarming, but it often comes with animosity against an out-group.
Some recent research into the workings of the hormone oxytocin revealed that emphasizing its role in fostering trust and interpersonal connections doesn’t tell the whole story. While oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone because of its importance in pair bonding and maternal behavior, it’s also important in two facets of in-group cohesion: altruism toward those on your side, and defensive aggression against the other side. Male volunteers participated in three experiments where they self-administered either oxytocin or a placebo and then were presented with choices that had various financial consequences for themselves, their in-group, or an out-group. Oxytocin spurred generous, even self-sacrificing, behavior toward one’s own group; if the out-group appeared threatening, oxytocin also spurred defensive aggression to counter the threat.
This article from Science Daily has more information, including a bit about the possible evolutionary implications. The last paragraph seems to be saying that the existence of a neurobiological mechanism that promotes in-group altruism and out-group aggression would support the idea of group selection—selection for behaviors that benefitted an individual’s social group rather than the individual—which is an interesting twist in the discussion on group selection.
It’s interesting that when the out-group didn’t appear to be threatening, only the altruistic behavior appeared. It’s also interesting that one way people have encouraged aggression against others (and, in a roundabout way, social cohesion) has been by emphasizing (or in some cases perhaps even fabricating) evidence that the others are somehow a threat. I’m thinking of the portrayals of enemies during wartime, for one, but also social battles like the one over gay marriage. It’s hard for me to see how widening the definition of marriage to include loving, long-term commitments between same-sex adults poses a threat to heterosexual couples, but plenty of people do feel threatened. Maybe those who encourage such fears are pushing an old (and evidently effective) emotional/neurochemical button.
You may remember hearing about some work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these aspects, and those who are politically conservative tend to consider them all. (Liberals emphasize caring for others/avoiding harm and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives also consider in-group loyalty, purity, and authority/respect.) A new study expands our knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and political views.
The new work looks at several of the Big Five personality traits: Openness/Intellect, two different aspects of Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness), and the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness. Previous work had indicated that a conservative political outlook was negatively correlated with Openness/Intellect and positively correlated with Conscientiousness. The current work adds a little nuance: the negative correlation between conservatism and Openness/Intellect still holds, and a positive correlation between Orderliness (rather than overall Conscientiousness) was found. Furthermore, a liberal/egalitarian outlook was linked to higher levels of Compassion and a conservative/traditional outlook with higher levels of Politeness.
“Level” is a key word here, it seems to me. With personality traits, everyone falls somewhere on a continuum, so even those who are, say, profoundly introverted still enjoy spending time with others—just not nearly as much as those who are highly extroverted. So these differences are not apples and oranges, exactly; we should in theory be able to find some common ground and at least understand the other side’s point of view, even if we disagree with the degree to which they emphasize one thing or another. This article from Science Daily closes with a quote from one of the new study’s authors to the effect that we appear to need both the liberal and the conservative mindset in any society.
So why are these differences in mindset so sharply and painfully divisive in US politics at the moment? I think part of what is going on is that because political views are linked to personality traits, they often feel like self-obvious views of how the world is and how things work. They’re taken for granted like the water a fish swims in. It can be very difficult to examine them rationally and be prepared to compromise to accommodate the fact that the world and how it works look very different from behind another set of genetic and environmental influences. This leaves aside nasty tactics such as dishonesty or pandering to prejudice, ignorance, or selfishness, the need for an educated citizenry to make a democracy work, and things like the confirmation bias, which tends to make us notice the evidence that confirms our views and discount the evidence against them. I think all these other things come into play partly because our beliefs about the relative importance of fairness, order, or compassion are so inherent to us that we have a hard time taking other rankings of them seriously. I don’t know if it’s a failure of the melting pot, a failure of education, or some more fundamental human flaw, but somehow we haven’t really developed the capacity to use both mindsets productively rather than set them at each other’s throats. Maybe they can’t be consciously accommodated in a single society but must battle it out, back and forth, over and over again?
There are those who say that the development of agriculture was a bad idea. It’s about 12,000 years too late to do anything about it, and as I sit here in an artificially lit room late at night with my laptop connected to the wide world and my stomach pleasantly full of smoked salmon and petite syrah, both of which come from far away (not to mention my blood pressure nicely under control due to medication), I have to say that the civilization that sprang from agriculture is not altogether undesirable. On the other hand, earlier this evening I looked at a heartbreaking series of recent photos from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s enough to make me wonder if even the greatest achievements of the human mind, which have been possible only through the development of a way to accumulate our knowledge from generation to generation (i.e., civilization) are worth the destruction we have wrought.
Those reservations have to do with our effect on the planet, though. The arguments about agriculture being a bad idea have to do with its effect on humans, and that is the central point of a new book by Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. Wells, a geneticist, directs the Genographic Project, which uses DNA samples from humans worldwide to trace the story of our migrations out of Africa and across the planet.
I haven’t read Pandora’s Seed yet, but an essay Wells wrote for Seed Magazine sparked my interest. After noting the current rapid pace of change and describing some of the ills of westernized societies, which are on the rise in developing countries, he writes:
This seemingly inexorable march toward western unhealthiness made me wonder why it happened in the first place. Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?
I would really like to know the answer to this question, or even an explanation that might hint at an answer, but I guess I’ll have to read the book, because the article doesn’t really give one. He talks about how we adapted biologically to the changes in our lifestyle, mentioning the accelerated rate of change in our DNA in the last 10,000 years compared to the previous 500,000, which is interesting stuff. I’m assuming the point here is that cultural evolution moves so fast that it outstrips the capacity of biological evolution to keep up because the latter moves much more slowly even at this accelerated pace. Wells mentions a cycle that repeats over and over again in human history but doesn’t really explain what it is and how it is relevant to this problem.
The essay focuses on three challenges we face that evidently are discussed in the last section of Wells’s book: our ability to engineer our genes, climate change; and the fact that we live in a networked world that has, as he describes it, resulted in the loss of “the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.” Regarding this last problem, he says: “Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.”
My hackles rose when he described the down side of secular rationality as the “loss of faith and certainty.” I was reminded of something Richard Feynman said: “I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” And as I wrote recently, I consider the loss of faith to be a step forward. On the other hand, Wells has traveled to remote corners of the world to gather DNA samples, so I’d like to know more about how he sees this loss of faith and certainty playing out in the lives of people around the world, and whether he has any thoughts on how that “inclusive mythos” might be crafted. There certainly are growing pains involved in growing out of faith-based certainty and into a more nuanced, reality-based view of human knowledge about the world, in individual lifetimes and in the lifetime of the species. I hope he’s not saying that these growing pains are not worth the resulting process of maturation.
In short, the essay generated more questions than answers for me, so I will have to read the book and see what it’s all about. Another book on the pile, oh boy!
The more I learn about fish oil, the happier I am that salmon tastes so good. Fish is an excellent source of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is an essential part of the human brain and appears to be vital for healthy brain function.
In fact, it’s possible that an expanded diet that included fish and other aquatic creatures was a necessary part of the process by which our brains grew to their relatively large size. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines fossils from a site in Kenya that indicate that pre-Homo hominins had added aquatic animals to their diet about 1.95 million years ago, before the emergence of Homo erectus and other ancestor species to our own. Perhaps the addition of these protein-rich and DHA-rich creatures to the hominin diet provided the energy and nutrients needed to support bigger brains. This story from Wired has more information, and the paper is: Early hominin diet included diverse terrestrial and aquatic animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya, David R. Braun, John W. K. Harris, Naomi E. Levin, Jack T. McCoy, Andy I. R. Herries, Marion K. Bamford, Laura C. Bishop, Brian G. Richmond, and Mzalendo Kibunjia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 22, June 2, 2010.
The Economist has written this article about a recent “Celebration of DHA” in London. The article briefly describes the importance of DHA for not just the emergence of large human brains, but perhaps the emergence of nervous systems in the first place. It also talks about the current human diet in many industrialized countries, which tends to substitute omega-6 fats for omega-3 fats, and goes into some of the detrimental effects of this switch. Eat your fish!
describes how the body reacts to stress. In essence, the stress response is a dramatic shift from long-term functions (building bone, reproducing, general maintenance, etc.) in favor of short-term needs like running or fighting. In a zebra, the stress response kicks in when needed—for example, when a predator appears. If the zebra escapes being killed by the lion, it’s done being stressed, and its body can get back to maintenance and upkeep. The problems in humans (and other primates) arise when a chronic state of stress sets in. Zebras don’t get ulcers because they don’t like awake at night worrying fruitlessly about whether they said the right thing to the boss, or if they’re going to be able to make the mortgage payment this month.
, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
, in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.
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. Wells, a geneticist, directs the Genographic Project, which uses DNA samples from humans worldwide to trace the story of our migrations out of Africa and across the planet. 