Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things

Michael Shermer was once a born-again Christian. Now he is a skeptic toward religion and anything that does not pass the test of empirical reason. In short, he either waits for proof or has made up his mind. His book is Why People Believe Weird Things. Here are a few notes from his book along with my own interpolations:

Sleep Paralysis. Waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you are conscious. It immobilizes your body, makes it rigid. It causes feelings of helplessness, weird visions. Long ago, I woke up and apparently a dream had entered my conscious mind, although I was unaware that was what happened. Awake, I heard a voice that said, "You have only a few weeks, maybe months, to live." Without an understanding of sleep paralysis, I was, shall we say, upset. Yet here I am all these years later.

In a recent study, feelings of loneliness were induced in people by a question which caused them to feel they would have few friends and would be isolated in middle age. After this ruse they were more likely to say they believed in ghosts, angels, the devil, God. Those told they would have friends in mid age were less likely to do so. The study was guided by Nicholas Epley, University of Chicago.

Neurons in the superior parietal lobe provide a sense of where the body ends and the world begins. Alter these neurons by drugs, meditation, or other means and one's sense of body-boundary changes.

Regions in the brain that become active when we imagine seeing or hearing something are the same regions active when we really do see or hear. This holds true for schizophrenics and normal people. The schizophrenic visual cortex becomes active when hallucinating. Normal people see or hear when intensely thinking about seeing or hearing.

Confirmation bias. The mind is better at recalling what validates that which we believe as distinct from that which refutes it. The behavior of Confirmation Bias is sometimes called Tolstoy Syndrome, after Leo Tolstoy who wrote this: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life."

At a British Association Festival of Science, Professor Bruce Hood of Bristol University, conducted an experiment. It is described this way: "Professor Hood asked members of the festival audience if they were prepared to try on an old fashioned blue cardigan in return for a £10 reward. After receiving no shortage of volunteers, he then told the volunteers that the cardigan used to belong to Fred West, the mass murderer. On hearing this, most of the volunteers put their hands down. Though a few did try it on, others moved away from them.

In fact, the cardigan had not belonged to Fred West. The experiment demonstrated that the belief that even the most rational of people can be made to feel uncomfortable by a physical object associated with evil.

Shermer points out that this suggests people think evil is physical. There is a spiritualist in people that thinks evil can transfer to the physical. Shermer suggests that our ancestors found it appropriate to assume a rock formation was a bear until they could prove otherwise.

Shermer states that within us is a deep dualism. We think of our essence as mental and our body as physical. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things

Bob Petrella and His Memory

Maybe remembering everything in your life is a blessing. Maybe it's a curse. Whichever, it is, Bob Petrella does not forget things. He is called the man with "Super-Autobiographical Memory" and is the fourth person to be diagnosed as having it. If you find this interesting, check out the interview with Jill Price, the woman who can't forget.

In 1976, Petrella met Tom Challis. Here is what Petrella says about it:

"I remember the first time we really talked, though, was New Year's Day 1978 when we watched Oakland and Denver," Petrella said. "It was over at Patty's house."

Sometimes he remembers more about his friends' lives than they remember about their own.
Watch the video here.

William James Sidis: Myths and Inaccuracies

I found a review of Amy Wallace's The Prodigy, about William James Sidis. I have a post about Sidis here. The reviewer is sympathetic to Sidis in that he claims too many myths have been put forth about the man. According to him, they largely stem from Wallace's book, which has many inaccuracies. As for my post on Wallace, he lists it among the many myth-promoting articles that can be found on the web. (I don't believe he read the article, although I grant his attention was caught by my title, which is hyped. The article, by Jim Morton, is about Sidis' collection of street-car transfers)

I like opinions that run contrary to conventional wisdom as we tend to absorb it unthinkingly and, I must confess, I know little about Sidis. The reviewer's chief point is the damage done to Sidis' reputation by Wallace's book. Here are excerpts:

"It is more than a little absurd that a frenzy of myths have been created about a man that was little known while alive, and even less known today. Relative to William Sidis’ life, for myself the final answer to all questions will forever remain 'I don’t know.' Never in my life have I researched a topic so satiated with exaggerations, fantasies, and outright lies as what is found in the William Sidis story."

"It is unfortunate that the errors within The Prodigy have become the primary source for the majority of current beliefs about William Sidis. Hundreds, if not thousands of authors, chose to not research beyond the reading of The Prodigy, and while holding up The Prodigy as if an inerrant holy book without flaw, the authors accepted the words within The Prodigy unchallenged." More

Gone For The Long Week End

The 4th of July is coming. I'll be back next week.

Meditation and Neuroplasticity: Happiness and How To Re-wire Your Brain

In 2002 in the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, Antoine Lutz and colleagues designated two groups, one experimental, one control. The control group were naive meditators, beginners. The experimental group of eight long-term meditators had meditated for years.

Before using the groups, Lutz positioned 128 electrodes on the head of monk Mattieu Ricard, PhD in Genetics. (To read about him here, see "On Happiness: Jean François Revel, His Son, & Their Exchange About Buddhism: 10 days in an Inn above Kathmandu.") Ricard had over 10,000 hours of meditation. As he did with the others, Lutz instructed Ricard to generate feelings of compassion not directed at any particular object. This objectless meditation is regarded as "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion."

As Ricard fell into deep meditation, something phenomenal happened. Lutz noticed Ricard's neural structures were firing in synchrony with other structures. This is known as Gamma-Band oscillation. In some cases, the Gamma rhythms in the monks' brain signals were the largest the scientists had seen, except in pathological states such as epileptic seizures, or deep anesthesia. The Gamma waves oscillate at roughly 40 cycles per second. They indicate intensely focused thought, but are usually weak and difficult to see. "Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output." Ricard's left prefrontal cortex was active. It is the area responsible for positive emotions.

After the phenomenal readings with Ricard, Lutz and colleagues set up an experimental group as they were worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods. Their control group was composed of college students inexperienced in meditation.

The experimental group yielded similar results.

In contrast, the control group of naive meditators did not generate Gamma.

"In the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains." Lutz Associate Richard Davidson thought the Dalai Lama would make an interesting guest speaker at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting. The prospect of the Dalai Lama as guest speaker was not without controversy among members. More at Wired. Here is a Wall Street Journal Article.

Against Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

Benjamin Libet provided a simple model of repeatable experiments to verify his findings which reveal that, so to speak, things seem topsy turvy. His findings are widely interpreted to mean that we can veto our actions but we do not decide when to initiate them. In other words, we have veto power but not decision power. (Libet said this is in keeping with the Ten Commandments as most of them are Do Nots.)

I found an interesting review of Libet's book. The review argued against the standard interpretation. I do not know the writer's credentials, nor do I know if he has professionally published--not that the questions must matter--but I did find Carlos Camara informative and intelligent in the points he makes. (English is not his first language, revealed by his spellings, which I corrected below.) Here is an excerpt from his review of Benjamin Libet's book, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness:

"Nor does Libet consider the fact of epilepsy, where brain activity is quite long in duration, but different in amplitude and frequency, and the patient is unconscious. Time cannot be the only factor. If it is, proving so requires more than what Libet offers.

Libet also famously found that brain activity precedes the conscious will to act for about 200 milliseconds. He also proposes that the notion of free will can be maintained, because there is time to veto consciously willed actions. You do not begin your actions, but you modulate them.

Again, his evidence is strong, robust and significant. But what about his 'veto' speculation. It is unnecessary. Firstly, materialists should not be surprised with the fact that conscious will comes late in the game. If conscious will is the result of brain processes, it cannot antedate these processes. Secondly, the obvious question arises if the veto function is not preceded by unconscious brain activity in turn. Libet here argues that it must not, for even if the awareness of the decision to veto requires brain activity, the content of that awareness (the actual decision to veto), need not. This reply depends of course, on the independence of consciousness from its content, an assumption that Libet gives us no reason to accept." More

Ego Is Lord: Philosophers & Neuroscientists in Its Service

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)

I find something supremely ironic in philosophers and neuroscientists who claim ego is a fiction of the brain. They may be right; they may be wrong. But they pursue careers. They seek to make names for themselves, for the sake of something they claim has no significance as a viable "reality." A sense of self and ego rules them as it does everybody else. Their ambitions are motivated by something they claim is a misperception of common sense: ego and self.

I think of The Rape of Nanking in 1937 and the unspeakable, despicable atrocities soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army committed against the defenseless men, women, and children of that city. I think of the International Safety Zone set up in the city by Western men and women, Germans, Americans, British, others, to protect the Chinese from the Japanese barbarians. There was Minnie Vautrin who risked a bayonet each time she shoved the American flag in front of a Japanese soldier about to yank an eleven year old girl away to rape her. There was Nazi party member John Rabe who wept at being unable to save more men and women from being gutted by a bayonet or having a sword lop off their heads. They risked their lives to save others. Rabe said it would be immoral to flee to safety in Germany while so many suffered so horribily. He stayed, risked his life to protect them.

These people had strong beliefs rooted in religious and moral convictions.

As for they who claim that self and ego are fictions, what would they have done? It follows from their views that any moral position we take is a function of a something tenuous at best--our belief in who we are and what we stand for. Imagine these philosophers and neuroscientists in Nanking in 1937. Speaking for myself, I find it hard to think of them as acting with the same conviction.

Don't Underestimate Yourself

Psychologists have observed that depressives have a more realistic view than have optimists. This should offer little comfort to those who are inclined to expect gray skies rather than sunshine. You can spend your life preparing for thunder storms and miss the pleasure of blue skies. Optimists also tend to accomplish more in life.

Do you prepare yourself for the possibility of bad news by assuming the worst?

Well, don't.

In an experiment, students took a personality test. Then they had to wait for the results of the test. Having taken the test on a computer, they sat in front of its screen. The computer randomly offered them a choice. They could predict the results would be good or bad.

What happened? The "official" results were given to the students. Those with bad results felt no less bad even though they had predicted a poor outcome. Those with good results felt no better, though they had predicted a good outcome.

The point here: having low expectations did not help alleviate feelings of students with bad results.

"Likewise, students who had low expectations of their performance on midterm exams did not feel better than students with high expectations after getting their exams back. The authors speculate that people cling to the low-expectations strategy because they falsely assume that the initial emotional impact from learning the actual outcome will last for a long time. "More

Buddhism & Happiness

Click for other videos in the series.

I'm Away

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting on June 22nd.

Naysayers To Richard Dawkins

A reviewer (Terry Eagleton) on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.

Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. More

Then there is Alvin Plantinga. Among his comments, Plantinga says this in his review:

One shouldn’t look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?

You might say that some of [Dawkins'] forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Plantinga dances rings around Dawkins' thinking on matters theological. He points out a central flaw in Dawkins' reasoning, which I have phrased differently: We know of no irrefutable evidence that God exists. Therefore God does not exist. Correctly reasoned, Dawkins could only say that he thinks God is improbable and that materialism is probably true. In a book supposedly based on reason, he offers no compelling argument.

As for probability, Stephen Hawking has observed that "fine-tuning" was needed for life to exist at all. The question arises, How probable was this fine-tuning to have occurred strictly by chance? More at Plantagina's Review, "The Dawkins Confusion."

From William Paley To Charles Darwin, With Brian Boyd on Purpose

Darwinism "seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration." Back to Methuselah (1921), by George Bernard Shaw.

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. . . . [The precision and intricacy of its mechanism would have forced us to conclude] that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at sometime, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use." Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), by William Paley.

Notes from Purpose-Driven Life by Brian Boyd:

"Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose."

"In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin showed how new species could evolve through a process of blind variation and selective retention. He transformed at a stroke our understanding of natural design. Living things manifest complex design but can be produced by a mindless process, one that does no more than passively register, in terms of survival and reproduction, the advantages of particular variations."

"We think of purpose as something prior to decision and action: I want to raise my arm, and, unless I am paralyzed or restrained, I do. But in fact purpose emerges slowly, in the species and in the individual. My capacity to move my arm in as many ways as I can depends on things like the evolution of forelegs into arms early in the primate line, the evolution millions of years later of a rotating socket in the shoulder of great apes, to enable swinging in trees, and the further freeing up of arm movements after early hominids became fully bipedal. Babies flail their arms uncontrolledly and purposelessly for months before they can direct them in a particular way for a particular purpose."

Paley’s example of the watch assumes a purpose we already understand: the intricate integration of material objects into instruments for telling the time.

"If we develop Darwin’s insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itself—the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss."

"As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like sex. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science."

"Art at its best offers us the durability that became life’s first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them." Found here.

Fashionable To Be Devoutly Undevout

"Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance" More

Peter Russell On Consciousness

When he is not attending or conducting seminars somewhere on the globe, or not acting as consultant to businesses seeking new ways to think, Peter Russell, a Brit, lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, across the bay from San Francisco. At Cambridge he studied mathematics and theoretical physics under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He has published several "consciousness-raising" books, among them The White Hole In Time. He has a website where statements such as this can be read:

"The one thing we know for sure is that we are experiencing beings. Yet the one thing that science cannot explain is the fact that we are conscious. Do we need a new paradigm?"

"The really hard problem is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

I now believe this is not so much a hard problem as an impossible problem–impossible, that is, within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, called a 'paradigm shift'." More

Wikipedia Bans Scientologists

The Church of Scientology has overplayed its hand. As usual, it propagandizes everything it touches, but this time the strategy did not work. Wikipedia has banned the "Church" and its members from editing the Scientology article at the Wiki site. Wikipedia discovered that members of the church were editing articles in order to give the church favorable coverage. More

Mind Shadows posts on Scientology can be read here and here.