Mysticism: The way brains sniff glue?

Struck me that trance and mystic mental states in general are a kind of high one learns to enjoy from an ordinarily noxious cognitive dissonance--such as between "the everything" and "the one." That can't be healthy. On the other hand, it does seem like what William James had in mind when he called prayer the "sovereign cure for worry" (allegedly, I can't find the reference). Through prayer we can envision circumventing the ineluctable, see how good may come of bad and construe what things mean as what they don't.
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By the way, let me second my occasional phronesisaical colleague helmut's grave recommendation of this article on the political influence of a publicly little known group of extreme-conservative, mystically-minded Christians.

Water-boarding demo

Look at the face and listen to the testimonial of somebody who has just been subjected to water-boarding by friends at his own instruction: Begins at the 5:00 minute mark of the November 6 broadcast of Democracy Now!

More on rewardism

Before I could even make it to the shower today, my mind returned to this casual hypothesis of awhile back about how the extraordinary smarts of humans might have evolved from a simple dopamine reward system. I was reading this review of a book by Read Montague, which as paraphrased by reviewer Andy Clark seemed to be suggesting something similar in Why Choose this Book?

Coincidentally, Oliver Sacks' musicophilia story in the New Yorker suggested to me something these reward proposals might help to make sense of: Patients turn to music when their brains cease to reward kinds of contemplation that have ceased to signal "the reward center," which might be expected from a circuit-scrambling seizure or electric shock. But the former connections were highly personal and presumably the product of a whole life history. They're liable likewise to be elaborate, having had a whole life to adapt and to optimize. So an adult brain suddenly starved of reward might not reestablish these same links, but might wire up something new, and perhaps like a child craving sweets or like an addict, it might be expected to pick the quick fix. For coherence in contemplative sense making, music strikes me as the sweetest stuff there is.

Consciousness and kinematics

Consciousness looks like it might be an adaption to multi-sensory life on the move, in that the blur of vision, the swirl of smell, the cacophony of sound and the sum of gravity and the various propulsive forces we're exerting with our limbs are a lot to be dealing with directly, if you've got a gazelle to catch (see Merker, B. Consciousness and Cognition 14: 115–118). In other words, there seems to be some speed and efficiency to be gained from walling that off and handing control to a front end that deals with just a simplified synthesis of these inputs, the content of which is the outside world and its happenings, and the disentangled subtracted ingredients of which include, for example, the "merely apparent" motion that our eyes would otherwise causes us every time we glance sideways. A world view sort of like the "image stabilized" view many digital cameras provide.

A nice illustration of a speed improvement that an animal might derive from a "guidance system" that works with a self-subtracted representation of the world might be how a dog fetches or chases: My dog, at least, pursues his line of sight, so that if a person ahead and to his left is tossing a ball to another to his right, he will trace an arc in the grass in his sprint after the hurling orb. When a throw is so weak that the ball would fall short, any human child with a little experience in sports, having had a moment to track the ball, could trace a straight-line course to where the arcing ball is bound to land and so might beat the dog. That which confers advantage in NBA draft selection could also confer advantage in natural selection.

But would it be fair to conclude that the child pursues the ball consciously while the dog does it only unconsciously? Or are dogs and people alike conscious, whereas my dog is just dumb? (Snoopy succeeded as a shortstop, after all.) Or are canines, as carnivorous hunters, just predisposed by evolution to see any moving target as animate and liable to flee adaptively to his or her pursuit? (reorienting always to maximize headway and so sure to extend its lead if a predator were ever to deviate from a dead-reckoned bee-line)

I imagine raptors and other high-nesting bird lineages might have evolved efficiency at intercepting a passively falling body (such as junior or his egg), but to the extent that everything falls at the same speed (shout out to Galileo), that may not have required anything so fancy as consciousness. Do many animals besides ourselves seem to distinguish passive motion and to know the laws that apply?

Dyslexia, stuttering, etc. down simply to bandwidth of left-right connection?

A split-brain individual throws down the newspaper that he's holding in one hand while reading with the other hemisphere--in an anecdote you may have read in a recent New Yorker profile of neurophilosophers Pat and Paul Churchland. To throw it down actually seems like the "natural" response to me--i.e. like the "menace" response by which neurologists and anestheticists gauge how conscious you are or how much "brain function" you retain; and maybe as in "Get this &^#%* out of my face!" That response would need inhibiting while you're reading, and the inhibition would have to come from the hemisphere that's actually reading. It would need to be a continuous and quick inhibition too--you don't want to be caught reading the ingredients of a box that's falling on you, or reading every symbol on the face of the enemy tribesman. So to delay or desync one hemisphere relative to the other seems like a recipe for just that kind of reading experience. And while I'm no neurosurgeon, severing the fat pipe that links the left hemisphere to the right seems like a recipe for just that sort of desynching. Not to mention all the evidence linking handedness, hemisphere separation and temporal delays with dyslexia, stuttering, autism and other diagnoses in the learning-disability category. But does anybody point to a person's corpus callosum or suggest that diversity of bandwidth might explain language learning problems?


Postscript: Yes!
(I will rederive the whole of human knowledge from first principles! Who needs Google?)

The Seven Neuroses of Highly Effective People

1) "I don't belong here, everyone is better than me, I'm going to have to work my butt off."
2) "People only love my work/my body/my style/my parties, and if that's my only way to get it, I'm going to have to work my butt off."
3) "Everyone is out to get me and just waiting for an opportunity, so I'd better work my butt off."
4) "My mother/father/sister/brother always viewed me as hopeless/supernaturally gifted at this, so if I want to have their respect/show them, I'd better work my butt off."
5) "My mother/father/sister/brother told me this was Wrong, so it's exactly what I'll work my butt off to do."
6) "God wants me here working my butt off, and He'll see that I suffer torture for eternity if I don't."
7) "If I just work my butt off a little more, my wildest wishes will be fulfilled."

(Just another idea from the shower stall. ..subject to revision...shouts out to Max Weber )





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Related links
1 Graeme Obree

Is an extra reward system why homo evolved extraordinary smarts?

(Another shower-stall moment.)

I surfed the science abstracts the other day on the topic of amphetamines (speed) and how they affect learning , memory and cognition in general. (Comes up because amphetamines make ADD kids better students and as contraband they're being called "smart pills"). The findings are a mess--is my tentative conclusion--and that's sort of to be expected given that the way to test intelligence is anybody's guess and that permission to drug healthy people is hard to get. In lieu of such subjects the reports tell us what happens when you give speed to schizophrenics, substance abusers, brain lesion victims and people with sleep disorders, plus a Noah's Ark of animals: Rats, chickens, horses, monkeys, fish...the list may go on a lot longer for all I know. Rats win the most attention hands down, of course. Anyway, I found a 1987 paper that matter-of-factly states by way of introduction (with reference to a string of citations) that the effect of speed on these species was zip, at least with regard to increasing a couple kinds of sharpness tested. So non-human animals seem to become no smarter on speed...traditionally...maybe. Yet all kinds of smartening emerges when you give speed to people--that is, to human beings who, while not "normal and healthy" in every test reported to a science journal, nevertheless may not be sick or weird in anyway that matters to the question at hand...far as I know, at least. Might this mean the human animal is special with regard to smarts? You know we'd like to think so.

Maybe what makes us special is an extra "reward circuit" in our brains. The characteristic addictiveness of speed and other stimulants gets pinned on dopamine and its action in the so-called "pleasure" or "reward" center of the brain. Maybe what distinguished early homo was that a banana or any other stimulus outside the skull was not all our ancestral brains could look to for reinforcing (ala Pavlov) a behavior or way of cogitating. What if a mutation sent some nerve astray during development in utero or postnatally and created a new input into the reward center? It was bound to happen, in fact, and what if on a particular occasion the stray originated from an area with great acoustics for what was going on overall in the brain. What if this line got livelier when several circuits resonated and such resonance signaled mental concepts cohering? That homo would get an internal reward--a splash of dopamine--every time she put two and two together. That is, she'd get the splash even if her immediate surroundings offered her no application for her insight. In particular, notice that pairing "two and two" would reward her, while not "two and three," say, because combination like that don't harmonize. To an individual of such an evolutionary lineage, suddenly logical coherence (cognitive resonance?) is its own reward.

Notice also that if you can receive a reward on the road, you become able to plan. Perhaps it would be wise to bring a stick or something club-like to the banana grove this time? It's easy to imagine that being able to plan even a little more elaborately could broaden a lot the spectrum of things that become easier with thought. So any homo with even a slightly bigger brain might be sure to compete more effectively and produce more progeny than the others, and our line would be on its way to a bigger and fancier brain. Meanwhile pongo (chimps) deriving no pleasure from a good proof are monopolizing mates each time mostly with such variations as super lustrous hair. Passing pongo homo can only remark "Too bad about the brain, but may I say what a fine coat you've got? Did someone just turn down the heat? Crap. I better come up with something quick."

The rest is history.

Note I don't imagine a just-so story like this one wholly displacing others that have been floated famously: Like that we surged toward fancier brains when we evolved the capacity for subtle vocalizing and/or invented language. But I find it uniquely pleasing. It explains the evolution of our ancestors into ourselves by a way of a process that seems contemporary and so might persist to this day. It also seems morally superior. Any lineage could have emerged smarter by flapping its lips. But maybe we got this way because we like to learn and choose to do so. Ever wondered why so many species can learn to act so smartly after you toss them a few biscuits or bananas or fish, but won't write so much as a novella if left to themselves?

Humane treatment and the limits of explanation

In a post over at All Intensive Purposes, blogmeister T.S. talks about a woman who takes to "training" her husband like the experts train zoo animals--by positive reinforcement. In a comment I replied with such pith that I'll just copy and paste it right here:

I think it's more about the wife becoming humane than about her husband being an animal. Oddly, we seem to talk about humane treatment for non-human animals mostly. But what's humane and "civilized" often is to treat people like the animals we are. Angry dogs and angry people aren't so different. Instead of answering anger with anger--barking back or stabbing with a knife--you address the fear and suspicion with words or gestures (handshake, gift of a cracker). We really aren't foremostly rational beings. I suspect that the idea that we are is largely the fault of the Bible. "God" giving us "the word" and so on. Like having just a hammer is supposed to make every problem look like a nail, I think the apotheosis of verbiage makes every issue look intellectual--that is, conscious and rational. Har de har har.

For awhile I've thought that becoming a dog person (spouse and I have two) had made me a better people person, and I've wondered how much it's like the lessons so many say they learn in caring for infants and toddlers (spouse and I have none, but our friends have many). Obviously the same training tools apply to both dogs and human infants: Reward and rebuke (or punishment) are all you have as an aspiring teacher, and reasoned discourse isn't an option. So I think therein lies the lesson for the would-be people person: How to influence others without explanations.

A common mistake or bad assumption seems to be that after little people grow smart and begin to talk and finally become "mature," explaining or offering reasons is all we have to do to make them see the light (a.k.a. "make them do what we want them to"). Although anybody who's ever had a friend or lover or an ornery boss has stockpiled exceptions to the supposed rule, still it's an upside-down or at least skewed perspective, I think, to consider them exceptions. The rule, I'm inclined to say, is that we are emotional and unconscious actors--dogs and people alike. In civilizing I think we've engineered relations so that generally explanation offers quick relief--at the department-store returns desk, in court, at NASA and military control centers, etc. I also think a result or aspect of this engineering is that we have to go about pretending everybody fundamentally is rational, including ourselves, which would be a recipe for a lot of social and scholarly ineptitude.

Golly, could those lesbians be thinking something different too?

Another one of these oh-my-god brain-imaging stories (henceforth OMGMRIs), in which it is now finally scientifically revealed that something different is going on in the brains of people who behave differently than we do. Shocker! First place I would've looked would've been the kidneys or their livers. Have I told you all my hunch that schizophrenics differ from the average person in the flexibility of their toes, and that when math geniuses do math their ears get warmer than when an average person does math? Thinking and behavior have something to do with the brain? Give me a break!

On personal integrity

It seems odd to me that we value, or that we're supposed to value, "personal integrity." Usually it's invoked defensively. John McCain calls Dick Cheney a "man of integrity" to say Cheney is a good guy, and not the ruthless and corrupt guy characterized by accusers. Why should McCain think "integrity" conveys all that? Because like all politicians, Dick Cheney plays a good guy on TV--and if Dick Cheney is a man of integrity, then by analogy to physical integrity, his parts extending off camera are good too. The sober, amicable "Meet the Press" Cheney is the White House Cheney, the Cheney in Iraq, the Cheney at dinner, the Cheney in bed with Mrs. Cheney. "Nothing new outside your field of view" is what integrity is about.

"Integrity" implies trustworthiness, because it implies consistency and as a result predictability. Employers talk up such qualities with assembly lines in mind. But with life and death and war and diplomacy in minds it seems weird. It seems like we wish our leaders, as people of integrity, not to compartmentalize, not to discriminate between intimate and public, casual and formal, not even to have moods. Isn't this a childish wish? Isn't this a little like wanting never to see mommy or daddy angry or sad or aloof? Well I say to hell with integrity! I'm with Whitman on this one.

What we really want

Malcom Gladwell has been writing both explicitly and indirectly a lot about what I'll call "what people are really thinking" and in particular about how organizations and institutions can get to know it and better exploit it. Of course, it must have occurred to me that the same insights might be exploited for goals not shared by the rest of us, but I think the lure of a pure and attractive currency--"what people are really thinking"--made me eager to see a free market in it. I just noticed a terrible flaw in that vision, thanks to the PBS Frontline documentary "The Persuaders". Notwithstanding the eternal underlying motive of making money, I had been thinking that putting psychological and social science into marketing was the very opposite of the "sex sells" mentality or mission. I guess unconsciously I had assumed this science was all about the so-called "higher" cognitive processes. Or maybe I had forgotten that feelings and desires aren't pure manifestations of high-mindedness but originate in all sorts of ways, which can descend as low as cognition goes. Here's "The Persuaders" producer Rachel Dretzin commenting online

I think we are already seeing the impact of Luntz' preference for the "gut" over the rational.. and Dr. Rapaille's preference for the "reptilian" brain over the "intellectual" brain. In politics and in commercial marketing, it is our emotions that are played to most. Look at this past presidential campaign and the kind of emotional hot buttons that were pushed in voters from both parties.

So here we have a program that's even worse than "sex sells," because now we're learning how to drive shoppers and voters with forces as primal and potent as sex but which do not risk alienating the Bible Belt or baiting the FCC. Now, I'm not saying that all that's primal and potent in us is to be ignored. I want my shoes to be comfy, my TV dinners to taste good and above all I like my models' abs hard. But I also don't want individuals so tuned to the primal virtues of a Hummer that they never mull more complicated things like the societal good of controlling carbon emissions. I don't think the Sierra Club should have to put girls in bikinis on its Web site or tap mother love to sell socially beneficial policy goals. In fact, I think that in that direction there only lies peril. It's not just because I know they lack the deep pockets to compete with the oil lobby for production value. It's because for one, societies don't control the TV remote, individuals do. For another, it's the producers who are truly catering to our inner lizard in offering us something to consume. What the Sierra Club has to sell isn't even intelligible to the lizard. Likewise for what Kerry was selling versus what Bush was selling--fear.

Whither society when all broadcasting goes out on the lizard frequencies?