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About Recent Examples Of Delusional Behavior

July 31, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink

Dick Cheney: Unqualified, unprofessional, unrepentant.

Ego is blinding, and none of us are immune. But life allows some examples to be writ large.

Dick Cheney said this weekend that Sarah Palin wasn’t qualified to be Vice President, and who can argue? A few people in powerful positions in the media seem to think they can still make a buck off her obnoxious idiocy, though they’re pretty much alone at this point. But you know who else wasn’t prepared for the job? Dick Cheney. Because of his arrogant incompetence, thousands of our soldiers and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians died. Yet he goes around smugly believing he’s an incredibly accomplished person, free to judge the qualifications of others. Cheney is still the textbook example of why you hire a person, not a résumé.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to keep New Yorkers from drinking extra-large sodas, but he has said little or nothing about declaring war on toxic Wall Street products. He would probably assert that he is capable of legislating against the former but not the latter, but that argument doesn’t wash. As owner of Bloomberg News and mayor of America’s finance center, he should have been a relentless advocate for cleaning up Wall Street. Since the financial sector cratered our economy, he’s been largely silent about white-collar criminals, reducing himself to a highly selective technocrat who is oblivious to things that make him personally uncomfortable. I guess you can’t expect much more from someone who circumvented the free vote of the people and made a handshake deal with another billionaire behind closed doors to enable a third term for himself.

Mitt Romney thinks himself a good and moral person, but how can someone believe that while working to take health insurance away from more than 30 millions at-risk Americans? It doesn’t add up. If he gets his way, people who wouldn’t have died will die.

Sad to hear about Jonah Lehrer’s complete unraveling at the New Yorker. He’s obviously a bright and gifted person, but one with deep flaws of a seemingly pathological nature. I hope he figures out the bad stuff and can proceed with the good, though he needs to permanently step away from journalism. I always pause when people are lavishly rewarded at a young age, before they’ve had a chance to fail and struggle. The praise can freeze still-developing people in time, encouraging their gifts but also their flaws. Why change and grow when their behavior has led them to great heights so quickly? It seems dangerous to grant approval before time has been able to complete the growth (and vetting) process.•

Tags: Dick Cheney, Jonah Lehrer, Mike Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin

“The Truth Is Often Hidden Below The Surface”

April 11, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Jonah Lehrer’s smart new Wired interview with fellow neuroscientist Eric Kandel, a passage about the diffuse influence of 19th-century pathologist Carl von Rokitansky;

“Lehrer: One of the heroes in The Age of Insight is Carl von Rokitansky, the founder of the Second Vienna School of Medicine. You argue that he inspired, at least in part, the work of modernist artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. How did he exert this influence?

Kandel: Rokitansky is the founder of what is now considered the second Vienna School of Medicine, which began around 1846. He was the head pathologist of the Vienna General Hospital, called the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, and then became Dean of the Medical School at the University of Vienna. Rokitansky contributed importantly – I would say, seminally – to the development of modern scientific medicine. He realized that when one examines the patient, one essentially relies on two pieces of information: the patient’s history, and an examination of the patient – listening to the heart and the chest with a stethoscope. But in the 1840s, one did not have any deep insight into what the sounds of the heart meant, for example. No one knew what we now know to be the difference between the sound of a normal valve opening and closing, and the sound of a diseased valve opening and closing. So what Rokitansky realized was that one needed to correlate what one sees of the patient at the bedside, with the examination of the patient’s body at autopsy. Fortunately, Vienna was an absolutely ideal place to do this.

The Vienna General Hospital had two rules that were unique in Europe. One is – every patient who died was autopsied, and two – all the autopsies were done by one person: Rokitansky, the head of Pathology. In other hospitals in Europe, the autopsy was done by whichever physician was is in charge of the patient. So Rokitansky had a huge amount of clinical material to work with. He collaborated with an outstanding clinician, Josef Skoda, who took very careful notes both of what the patient told him, and of what he found on physical examination, and he correlated that with Rokitansky’s autopsy. This allowed Skoda and Rokistansky to define what various heart sounds meant in normal physiology and in diseases of the valve. It also led Rokitansky to enunciate a major principle that had a huge influence – not only on medicine – but also on the cultural community at large, because Rokitansky was not simply a pathologist and Dean of the School of Medicine; he was elected to Parliament, became a spokesman of science, and had an enormous influence on popular culture. He said, ‘The truth is often hidden below the surface. One has to go deep below the skin to find it.’ This Rokitanskian principle had an enormous impact on Freud and on Schnitzler, who were students at the Vienna School of Medicine. In fact, Freud was a student in the last several years of Rokitansky’s Deanship. Rokitansky attended the first two scientific talks that Freud gave, and Freud attended Rokitansky’s funeral. He clearly had a significant impact on Freud’s thinking.” (Thanks Browser.)

Tags: Carl von Rokitansky, Eric Kandel, Jonah Lehrer

“What Good, After All, Is A Glue That Doesn’t Stick?”

March 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jonah Lehrer has an intriguing, counterintuitive argument in the Wall Street Journal, which posits that creativity isn’t just something for the chosen few, but a quality everyone possesses. Embedded in the article is the origin story of the Post-It Note. An excerpt:

“Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?

On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry’s thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that we’re forced to live with.

But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn’t tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the Post-it Note.”

Tags: Arthur Fry, Jonah Lehrer, Sheldon Silver

“In The Very Near Future, The Act Of Remembering Will Become A Choice”

February 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The erasure of memories through pharmaceuticals is upon us and has been reported with some concern. Will expunging traumatic memory alter a person fundamentally or did the trauma already do the trick? Thorny questions about the nature of identity abound. An excerpt from “The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever,” Jonah Lehrer’s new report on the topic for Wired:

“This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

And researchers have found one of these compounds.

In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.”

Tags: Jonah Lehrer

“It Will Begin With Nervous Parents Reading About Brain Trauma”

January 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “The Fragile Teenage Brain,” neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer’s devastating Grantland examination of football’s concussion problem, a plague not only on the NFL but also on high schoolers playing under the lights on Friday nights:

“If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency.”

••••••••••

Colt McCoy gets concussion, returns to game two plays later:

Tags: Jonah Lehrer

“The Mind Is Embodied, Not Just Embrained”

September 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mind and body have long been seen as disparate parts with the former located in the brain. But recent research suggests that the mind operates not just in our gray matter but in all our matter. The eloquent opening of Jonah Lehrer’s new Wall Street Journal piece on the topic:

“One of the deepest mysteries of the human mind is that it doesn’t feel like part of the body. Our consciousness seems to exist in an immaterial realm, distinct from the meat on our bones. We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.

This ancient paradox—it’s known as the mind-body problem—has long perplexed philosophers. It has also interested neuroscientists, who have traditionally argued that the three pounds of our brain are a sufficient explanation for the so-called soul. There is no mystery, just anatomy.

In recent years, however, a spate of research has put an interesting twist on this old conundrum. The problem is even more bewildering than we thought, for it’s not just the coiled cortex that gives rise to the mind—it’s the entire body. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes, ‘The mind is embodied, not just embrained.'”

••••••••••

Lehrer addresses concerns over the brain-changing effects of the Internet:

Tags: Jonah Lehrer

“People Who Daydream More Are Also Better At Generating New Ideas”

February 24, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in 'Internet leisure browsing.'" (Image by Mateo Inurria.)

It’s obvious that creative thinking requires time to just space out, that your brain can’t connect the dots if it doesn’t have free moments to recognize they exist and understand the relation between them, but science backs up what’s intuitive in this case. An excerpt from “Bother Me, I’m Thinking” in the Wall Street Journal, neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer’s article about the value of not focusing:

“Scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they’re allowed to engage in ‘Internet leisure browsing’ and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Memphis and the University of Michigan extends this theme. The scientists measured the success of 60 undergraduates in various fields, from the visual arts to science. They asked the students if they’d ever won a prize at a juried art show or been honored at a science fair. In every domain, students who had been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder achieved more: Their inability to focus turned out to be a creative advantage.”

Tags: Jonah Lehrer

“A Secret Worry Gnawed At Him: It Was Proving Difficult To Replicate His Earlier Findings”

January 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

"One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment."

I fell behind in my New Yorker reading in December, so I just got to this intriguing Jonah Lehrer article about a puzzling problem for scientific researchers: the inability to replicate their landmark findings in subsequent studies. It seems that researchers regularly avoid rechecking their results because they know future tests may call their findings into question. Does that mean that their original studies were unintentionally biased, subjective in some way that they don’t understand? The troubling occurrence is called the “decline effect.” One of the subjects Lehrer discusses the situation with is Jonathan Schooler, a highly self-aware psychology professor at the University of Santa Barbara. An excerpt:

“Jonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon ‘verbal overshadowing.’

The study turned him into an academic star. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.

But while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. ‘I’d often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn’t be as strong,’ he told me. ‘It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker.’ At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) ‘It wasn’t a very satisfying explanation,’ Schooler says. ‘One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.’”

Tags: Jonah Lehrer, Jonathan Schooler

“It Doesn’t Matter If The Place Is Manhattan Or Manhattan, Kan.: The Urban Patterns Remain The Same”

December 20, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"New York, just like I pictured it, skyscrapers and everything." (Image by Dennis Afraz.)

Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer had an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, about Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, theoretical physicists who are applying their science training to urban problems. (By the way, if you’ve never read Lehrer’s book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, I highly recommend it). An excerpt:

“Along with Luis Bettencourt, another theoretical physicist who had abandoned conventional physics, and a team of disparate researchers, West began scouring libraries and government Web sites for relevant statistics. The scientists downloaded huge files from the Census Bureau, learned about the intricacies of German infrastructure and bought a thick and expensive almanac featuring the provincial cities of China. (Unfortunately, the book was in Mandarin.) They looked at a dizzying array of variables, from the total amount of electrical wire in Frankfurt to the number of college graduates in Boise. They amassed stats on gas stations and personal income, flu outbreaks and homicides, coffee shops and the walking speed of pedestrians.

"These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars." (Image by Rebecca Kennison.)

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. ‘What we found are the constants that describe every city,’ he says. ‘I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.’ After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: ‘Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.'”

Tags: Geoffrey West, Jonah Lehrer, Luis Bettencourt

Medical Bag: The Importance of Daydreaming

January 7, 2010 in Science/Tech | Permalink

I'm Hippocrates. You've probably heard of my oath, ladies. It's quite popular.

Over on the Boston Globe site, there’s an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer about the value of daydreaming. Lehrer and a good number of doctors believe that daydreaming is the default state of humans not busy with tasks. It’s during this “down time” when they think we do a lot of our most important thinking. It seems that a lot of inspiration comes when we’re actively working on things, but the ability to “float” toward answers seems equally valuable.

Dr. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University, who was one of the first scientists to locate the default network in the brain, tells Lehrer that “when your brain is supposedly doing nothing and daydreaming, it’s really doing a tremendous amount.”

Lehrer posits that “the ability to think abstractly that flourishes during daydreams also has important social benefits. Mostly, what we daydream about is each other, as the mind retrieves memories, contemplates ‘what if” scenarios, and thinks about how it should behave in the future. In this sense, the content of daydreams often resembles a soap opera, with people reflecting on social interactions both real and make-believe. We can leave behind the world as it is and start imagining the world as it might be, if only we hadn’t lost our temper, or had superpowers, or were sipping a daiquiri on a Caribbean beach. It is this ability to tune out the present moment and contemplate the make-believe that separates the human mind from every other.”

Tags: Dr. Marcus Raichle, Jonah Lehrer