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6/22/04

Silas Weir Mitchell: Civil War Amputees and Pain from Phantom Arms


A Phantom Arm and A Bizarre Experience

pantom Limb syndrome, Silas Weir Mitchell Civil War
Union Army Amputees
US Civil War
My right leg seems trapped in time and space, at a day and place long ago. Along the leg runs a large scar that always tingles in the background of my consciousness, and which tightens into fear whenever I focus attention there. Yes, it is unmistakable fear, in memory of the event itself, and it is localized at the scar. How can fear be in a scar? I don't know. I can only tell you that's where it is. If anything touches the scar, my leg wants to pull away from the touch. This occurs and over-rules my reason. It simply happens. It is all a phantom of the mind.

Such phantoms are not unique to me. People have experienced them for thousands of years, but they received a name only in the Nineteenth Century. The Civil War was a gruesome conflict. My ancestor, Captain David Stewart, 28th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, spent part of the war as a field surgeon. He reached a point when he could no longer look at another gangrened leg, or another soldier quite literally biting the bullet to keep from screaming in pain as a limb was sawn through. Preferring being shot to cutting off another leg, Captain Stewart asked for a transfer to combat. I understand why. I have seen the saw he used for amputation. Its teeth could as easily cut through a tree limb.

After the Civil War, tens of thousands of soldiers had amputated limbs and told doctors of strange experiences. Silas Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia physician, coined the phrase "phantom limb" shortly after the conflict, and did so to explain the phantoms that the veterans described. Fearing ridicule from colleagues, he published anonymously in a popular magazine, Lippincott's Journal, wherein he described the phenomenon. In the century and a half since, phantom limb syndrome has become part of medical and psychological literature.

Older medical journals contain hundreds of fascinating case studies. Some of the described phenomena have been confirmed repeatedly and still need an explanation. In one case, a patient experienced a vivid phantom arm soon after amputation, which is normal, and in a few weeks he developed a peculiar, gnawing sensation in his phantom, which is not normal. He was quite puzzled by the these new sensations and asked his Army doctor about them, but the physician couldn't help. The veteran finally asked, "Whatever happened to my arm after you removed it?" The doctor told him to ask the surgeon.

The veteran did just that. The surgeon replied, "Oh, we usually send the limbs to the morgue."

The man asked the morgue and asked, "What do you do with amputated arms?" They replied, "We send them either to the incinerator or to pathology. Usually we incinerate them."

"Well, what did you do with my arm?" They looked at their records and said, "You know, it's funny. We didn't incinerate it. We sent it to pathology."

The man asked the pathology lab. "Where is my arm?" They said, "Well, we had too many arms, so we just buried it in the garden, out behind the hospital."

They took him to the garden and showed him where the arm was buried. When he exhumed it, he found it crawling with maggots and exclaimed, "Maybe that's why I'm feeling these bizarre sensations in my arm."

He took the limb and incinerated it. His phantom pain disappeared permanently.

For a man who had a phantom orgasm in his foot read Mind Shadows on Wilder Penfield and Brain Maps 22 April 2009. Read about the clever method VS Ramachandran used to rid a man of relief from phantom arm pain, 14 February 2012. Also read about Ramachandran who tells of a man who, after his leg was ampuated, felt sexual sensations in his phantom foot.


6/18/04

Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See



blindsight Graham Young Ramachandran Weiskrantz Blakemore
What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and so many other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of consciousness and, so to speak, they are not.

Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point. When eight years old, he suffered a head injury that damaged the visual cortex of his hind brain, and this experience rendered him unable to see on his right hand side, while he can see on his left. This blindness affects both eyes.

6/12/04

Mind over Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz and Neuroplasticity

Jeffrey Schwartz, Neuroplasticity, Daniel Dennett, Quantum Zeno Effect, Henry Stapp, Brain Science
Mindfulness Affects Brain Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Mind over matter, anyone? The question would be rejected by those who endorse the modern view of consciousness, which appeals to hard-liners in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, or behavioral genetics, all of whom would support some material explanation for consciousness. These approaches consider as defective and retrograde any appeal to a non-material explanation. Along comes Jeffrey Schwartz, neuroscientist and Research Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, who has worked with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients, and who has a wholly different take on consciousness after finding that OCD people can free themselves from the disorder. ( See his book, Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.) He has written another book, this one with Sharon Begley. Its title is italicized in the header for this article. Schwartz is also a practicing Buddhist. Here he is on materialist explanations:

LOOKING BACK, IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that advances in brain science during the 20th century led almost all people esteemed as "scientifically literate" to believe that eventually all aspects of the human mind would be explained in material terms. After all, in an era when the unquestioned cultural assumption was "for science all causes are material causes," how could one be expected to think differently? What's more, tremendous advances in brain-imaging technologies during the last two decades of that most materialist of centuries enabled scientists to investigate the inner workings of the living human brain. This certainly seemed to further buttress the generally unexamined and often smugly held belief that the deep mysteries of the brain, and the "laws" through which it created and ruled all aspects of the human mind, would someday be revealed.

Thus arose the then virtually hegemonic belief that human beings and everything they do are, like all other aspects of the world of nature, the results of material causes--by which the elites of the time simply meant results of material forces interacting with each other. While primitive, uneducated, and painfully unsophisticated people might be beguiled into believing that they had minds and wills capable of exerting effort and rising above the realm of the merely material, this was just--as Daniel Dennett, a widely respected philosopher of the day, delighted in putting it--an example of a "user illusion": that is, the quaint fantasy of those who failed to realize, due to educational deficiencies or plain thick-headedness, that "a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances." Were you one of the rubes who believed that people are capable of making free and genuinely moral decisions? Then of course haughty contempt, or at best pity, was the only appropriate demeanor a member of the intellectual elite could possibly direct your way.

On a societal and cultural level the damage such spurious and unwarranted elite opinions wreaked on the world at large was immense. For if everything people do results solely from their brains, and everything the brain does results solely from material causes, then people are no different than any other complicated machine and the brain is no different in principle than any very complex computer. If matter determines all, everything is passive and no one ever really does anything, or to be more precise, no one is really responsible for anything they think, say, or do.

What's more, if anything they think, say, or do causes problems for them or society at large, then, the sophisticates of that thankfully bygone era believed, the ultimate way to solve the problem would be to make the required changes in the brain that would make it work the way a properly functioning machine is supposed to. This naturally led to the widespread use of drugs as a primary means of treating what generally came to be called "behavioral problems."

After all, if the brain is the final cause of everything a person thinks, says, and does, why bother with old-fashioned and outdated notions like "self-control" or even "making your best effort" to solve a problem? If the brain is the ultimate cause underlying all the problems, then the sophisticated thing to do to rectify things is to give a chemical (or even place an electrode!) that gets right in there and fixes things. "God helps those who help themselves?" Not in the real world, where science knows all the answers, sneered the elites of the time.

Happily for the future of humanity, in the early years of the 21st century this all started to change. The reasons why, on a scientific level, grew out of the coming together of some changes in perspective that had occurred in physics and neuroscience during the last decades of the previous century. Specifically, the theory of physics called quantum mechanics was seen to be closely related, especially in humans, to the discovery in brain science called neuroplasticity: the fact that throughout the lifespan the brain is capable of being rewired, and that in humans at least, this rewiring could be caused directly by the action of the mind.

Work using new brain-imaging technologies of that era to study people with a condition called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) played a key role in this development. OCD is a medical condition in which people suffer from very bothersome and intrusive thoughts and feelings that give them the sense that "something is wrong" in their immediate surroundings--usually the thought or feeling that something is dirty or contaminated or needs to be checked because it isn't quite right.

This is what is called an obsession. The problem the medical condition causes is that although the sufferers generally know this feeling that "something is wrong" is false and doesn't really make sense, the feeling keeps bothering them and doesn't go away, due to a brain glitch that was discovered using brain imaging. Sufferers often respond to these gut-wrenching thoughts and feelings by washing, checking, straightening things, etc., over and over again, in a desperate but futile attempt to make things seem right. These futile repetitive acts are called compulsions.

In the 1990s it was discovered that OCD sufferers were very capable of learning how to resist capitulating to these brain-related symptoms by using a mental action called "mindful awareness" when confronting them. In a nutshell, mindful awareness means using your "mind's eye" to view your own inner life and experiences the way you would if you were standing, as it were, outside yourself-most simply put, it means learning to use a rational perspective when viewing your own inner experience.

When OCD patients did this, and as a result came to view the bothersome intrusive thoughts and feelings just as medical symptoms that they had the mental power to resist, they found they were empowered to direct their attention in much more useful and wholesome ways by focusing on healthy and/or work-related activities. Over several weeks, and with much mental effort and faith in their ability to overcome the suffering, many OCD patients were found to be capable of regularly resisting the symptoms. . . .

In the early years of the current century brain imaging was used to reveal many similar and related findings. For instance, people with spider phobia, or people viewing stressful or sexually arousing films, were found to be entirely capable of using mental effort to apply mindful awareness and "re-frame" their perspective on their experience. By so doing it was clearly demonstrated that they could systematically change the response of the brain to these situations and so cease being frightened, stressed, or sexually aroused, whatever the case may be.

This latter finding was realized by some at the time to be potentially relevant to teaching sexual abstinence strategies to adolescents--for if you have the power to control your brain's response to sexual urges, then practicing sexual abstinence in arousing situations will not only strengthen your moral character; it will also increase your mental and physical capacity to control the workings of your own brain--an extremely wholesome and empowering act!

All this work came together when physicist Henry Stapp realized that a basic principle of quantum mechanics, which because of the nature of the brain at the atomic level must be used for proper understanding of the brain's inner workings, explains how the action of the mind changes how the brain works. A well-established mechanism called the quantum zeno effect (QZE) readily explains how mindfully directed attention can alter brain circuitry adaptively. Briefly, we can understand QZE like this: The mental act of focusing attention tends to hold in place brain circuits associated with whatever is focused on. In other words, focusing attention on your mental experience maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. . . .

The rest, as they say, is history. Once a solid scientific theory was in place to explain how the mind's power to focus attention could systematically rewire the brain, and that the language of our mental and spiritual life is necessary to empower the mind to do so, the materialist dogma was toppled. We may not have all lived happily ever after in any simplistic sense, but at least science is no longer on the side of those who claim human beings are no different in principle than a machine. More. If that link fails, click here for the article with omitted paragraphs. (From a defunct site, World on The Web, 3 April 2004, Volume 19, Number 13)

(In a spirited debate with Michael Schermer on C-Span2, Schwartz drew from the Buddhist concept of Dependent Origination to help explain his view of volition.)

6/9/04

Bird Brains and Theory of Mind

Bird brains theory of mind Alex Gray Parrot Irene Pepperberg
Alex the African gray parrot and animal psychologist
Irene Pepperberg in 1991

Bird Brains and Theory of Mind

Humans are exceptional beings, so we like to think. The so-called lower animals lack complex syntax for language. They simply are not as conscious. Many philosophers believe only humans understand that others have their own personal thoughts, which philosophers term as having a theory of mind, without which we would lack our empathy and deception. So goes the point of view. Theory of mind has implications that reach far into our notions about consciousness. For one, experiments suggest that the degree of consciousness has no clear correlation to matter, brain size in this case.

Biologists are wary of exclusionary assertions for human beings. We are not, apparently, the only species with a theory of mind. Biologists have found it in various mammals, ranging from gorillas to goats. Two recent studies suggest that theory of mind can extend beyond mammals to birds. Consider a recent article in the Proceedings of The Royal Society, in which Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar, University of Vermont, Burlington, describe experiments conducted on ravens. As birds, ravens are known to be clever and sociable, and for this reason, the scientists set out to find how the ravens would respond to human gaze.

Gaze response helps measure the development of theory of mind in human children. At about 18 months most children can notice another's gaze, follow it, and infer things about the gazer from it. Autism is revealed when a child fails to develop this skill, as the autistic child also fails to understand that other people have minds.

To test whether ravens could follow gaze, Dr Heinrich and Dr Bugnyar used six six-month-old hand-reared ravens, and one four-year-old. With the room divided by a barrier, the birds were placed, one at a time, on a perch. An experimenter sat about a metre in front of the barrier. He moved his head and eyes in a particular direction and gazed for 30 seconds before looking away. Sometimes he gazed up, sometimes to the part of the room where the bird sat, and sometimes to the part of the room hidden behind the barrier. The experiment was videotaped.

Dr Heinrich and Dr Bugnyar found that all the birds were able to follow the gaze of the experimenters, even beyond the barrier. In the latter case, the curious birds either jumped down from the perch and walked around the barrier to have a look or leapt on top of it and peered over. There was never anything there, but they were determined to see for themselves.

A suggestive result, but not, perhaps, a conclusive one. But while at the University of Austria, Dr Bugnyar conducted another study. Its results were published last month in ,, and it suggests that ravens may have mastered the art of deception too.

Wanting to determine what ravens learned from one another while foraging, in his experiment Dr Bugnyar noticed strange behavior between two male birds, Hugin and Munin, the first subordinate, the second dominant.

They had to figure out which color-coded film containers held cheese, then pry off the lids and eat the morsels. The subordinate male excelled at this while the dominant was rather slow in working things out. However, Hugin could only swallow a few bits of cheese before the dominant raven, Munin, bullied him aside. Although it comes as no surprise, this indicated that ravens are able to learn about food sources from one another. They are also able to bully each other to gain access to that food.

Something surprising did happen. Hugin, the subordinate, tried a new strategy. As soon as Munin bullied him, he headed over to a set of empty containers, pried the lids off them and pretended to eat. Munin followed, whereupon Hugin returned to the loaded containers and ate his fill.

At first Dr Bugnyar could not believe what he was seeing. Hugin, he is convinced, was clearly misleading Munin.

Munin grew wise to the tactic, and would not be led astray. He learned from Hugin and tried to locate food on his own. Hugin became furious. "He got very angry," says Dr Bugnyar, "and started throwing things around."

Animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg had a special relationship with Alex the African gray parrot. Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. Alex's death on 6 September 2007, at age 31, came as a surprise, as the average life span for a grey parrot in captivity is 45 years. His last words ("You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you") were the same words that he would say every night when Pepperberg left the lab. Wikipedia

6/7/04

Freedom of Will: Myth of The Third Alternative.


free will and the myth of the 3rd Alternative Marvin Minsky Isaac SingerFreedom of Will and The Myth of The Third Alternative

Nobel winner and writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, when asked if he believed in free will, replied "I have no choice."

We each believe that we possess an Ego, Self, or Final Center of Control, from which we choose what we shall do at every fork in the road of time. To be sure, we sometimes have the sense of being dragged along despite ourselves, by internal processes which, though they come from within our minds, nevertheless seem to work against our wishes. But on the whole we still feel that we can choose what we shall do. Whence comes this sense of being in control? According to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for "freedom of the human will." Everything that happens in our universe is either completely determined by what's already happened in the past or else depends, in part, on random chance. Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these:

A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
A purely random set of accidents.

There is no room on either side for any third alternative. Whatever actions we may "choose," they cannot make the slightest change in what might otherwise have been-- because those rigid, natural laws already caused the states of mind that caused us to decide that way. And if that choice was in part made by chance--it still leaves nothing for us to decide.

Every action we perform stems from a host of processes inside our minds. We sometimes understand a few of them, but most lie far beyond our ken. But none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know ; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control. We like to give names to what we do not know, and instead of wondering how we work, we simply talk of being "free." Perhaps it would be more honest to say, "My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand." But no one likes to feel controlled by something else.

Why don't we like to feel compelled? Because we're largely made of systems designed to learn to achieve goals. But in order to achieve any long-range goals, effective difference-engines must also learn to resist whatever other processes attempt to make them change those goals. In childhood, everyone learns to recognize, dislike, and resist those various forms of aggression and compulsion. Naturally, we're horrified to hear about agents that hide in our minds and influence what we decide.

In any case, both alternatives are unacceptable to self-respecting minds. No one wants to submit to laws that come to us like the whims of tyrants who are too remote for any possible appeal. And it's equally tormenting to feel that we're a toy to mindless chance, caprice, or probability--for though these leave our fate unfixed, we'd still not play the slightest part in choosing what shall come to be. So, though, it's futile to resist, we continue to regard both Cause and Chance as intrusions on our freedom of choice. There remains only one thing to do: we add another region to our model of our mind. We imagine a third alternative, one easier to tolerate; we imagine a thing called "freedom of will," which lies beyond both kinds of constraint.

The Myth of The Third Alternative

To save our belief in the freedom of will from the fateful grasp of cause and chance, people simply postulate an empty, third alternative. We imagine that somewhere in each person's mind there lies a Spirit, Will, or Soul, so well concealed that it can elude the reach of any law--or lawless accident.

|Cause|----|Free Will|----|Chance|

I've drawn the box for Will so small because we're always taking things out of it--and scarcely ever putting things in! This is because whenever we find some scrap of order in the world, we have to attribute it to Cause--and whenever things seem to obey no laws at all, we attribute that to Chance. This means that the dominion controlled by Will can only hold what, up to now, we don't yet understand. In ancient times, that realm was huge; when every planet had its god, and every storm or animal did manifest some spirit's wish. But now for many centuries, we've had to watch that empire shrink.

Does this mean that we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that; too much of what we think and do revolves around those old beliefs. Consider how our social lives depend upon the notion of responsibility and how little that idea would mean without our belief that personal actions are voluntary. Without that belief, no praise or shame could accrue to actions that were caused by Cause, nor could we assign any credit or blame to deeds that came about by Chance. What could we make our children learn if neither they nor we perceived some fault or virtue anywhere? We also use a selfish impulse, yet turn it aside because it seems wrong, and that must happen when some self-ideal has intervened to overrule another goal. We can feel virtuous when we think that we ourselves have chosen to resist an evil temptation. But if we suspected that such choices were not made freely, but by the interference of some hidden agency, we might very well resent that interference. Then we might become impelled to try to wreck the precious value-schemes that underlie our personalities or become depressed about the futility of a predestination tempered only by uncertainty. Such thoughts must be suppressed.

No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will; that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false--except, of course, when we're inspired to find flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace.

 (From Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind.  See Minsky Awareness is No Big Deal 24 May 2004 in Mind Shadows)

6/6/04

Nature V. Nurture II: David Reimer, Ruined for A Concept

Nature Versus Nurture, II: Of David Reimer, and; A Man Who Tampered With A Human Being For The Sake of His Career

David Reimer John Money Sex Reassignment Suicide Nature v Nurture
David Reimer, 1965-2004
(SeeNature V. Nurture I, 29 May 2004 for the first part.)

The tragic story of David Reimer can be traced to one man, John Money, who put career, ideology, and dogmatism above any real concern for a human being. He wanted to prove that nurture could prevail over nature and used Reimer as his guinea pig, trying to make the boy think like a girl, messing with his mind, and generally making a wreck of the lad. "For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate experiment to prove that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation—an experiment all the more irresistible because David was an identical twin. His brother, Brian, would provide the perfect matched control, a genetic clone raised as a boy."

John Colapinto: "Just shy of a month ago, I got a call from David Reimer's father telling me that David had taken his own life. I was shocked, but I cannot say I was surprised. Anyone familiar with David's life—as a baby, after a botched circumcision, he underwent an operation to change him from boy to girl—would have understood that the real mystery was how he managed to stay alive for 38 years, given the physical and mental torments he suffered in childhood and that haunted him the rest of his life. I'd argue that a less courageous person than David would have put an end to things long ago. . . ."

"David Reimer was one of the most famous patients in the annals of medicine. Born in 1965 in Winnipeg, he was 8 months old when a doctor used an electrocautery needle, instead of a scalpel, to excise his foreskin during a routine circumcision, burning off his entire penis as a result. David's parents (farm kids barely out of their teens) were referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, home of the world's leading expert in gender identity, psychologist Dr. John Money, who recommended a surgical sex change, from male to female. David's parents eventually agreed to the radical procedure, believing Dr. Money's claims that this was their sole hope for raising a child who could have heterosexual intercourse—albeit as a sterile woman with a synthetic vagina and a body feminized with estrogen supplements. . . ."

The reality was far more complicated. At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In school, she was relentlessly teased for her masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She complained to her parents and teachers that she felt like a boy; the adults—on Dr. Money's strict orders of secrecy—insisted that she was only going through a phase. Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide; her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the neglected Brian eventually descended into drug use, petty crime, and clinical depression. . . ."

"After David's suicide, press reports cited an array of reasons for his despair: bad investments, marital problems, his brother's death two years earlier. Surprisingly little emphasis was given to the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing. This was unfortunate because to understand David's suicide, you first need to know his anguished history, which I chronicled in my book As Nature Made Him:The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl."

"For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate experiment to prove that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation—an experiment all the more irresistible because David was an identical twin. His brother, Brian, would provide the perfect matched control, a genetic clone raised as a boy."

"David's infant "sex reassignment" was the first ever conducted on a developmentally normal child. (Money had helped to pioneer the procedure in hermaphrodites.) And according to Money's published reports through the 1970s, the experiment was a success. The twins were happy in their assigned roles: Brian a rough and tumble boy, his sister Brenda a happy little girl. Money was featured in Time magazine and included a chapter on the twins in his famous textbook Man and Woman, Boy and Girl."

"The reality was far more complicated. At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In school, she was relentlessly teased for her masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She complained to her parents and teachers that she felt like a boy; the adults—on Dr. Money's strict orders of secrecy—insisted that she was only going through a phase. Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide; her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the neglected Brian eventually descended into drug use, pretty crime, and clinical depression."

"When Brenda was 14, a local psychiatrist convinced her parents that their daughter must be told the truth. David later said about the revelation: 'Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn't some sort of weirdo. I wasn't crazy.' "

"David soon embarked on the painful process of converting back to his biological sex. A double mastectomy removed the breasts that had grown as a result of estrogen therapy; multiple operations, involving grafts and plastic prosthesis, created an artificial penis and testicles. Regular testosterone injections masculinized his musculature. Yet David was depressed over what he believed was the impossibility of his ever marrying. He twice attempted suicide in his early 20s."

"David did eventually marry a big-hearted woman named Jane, but his dark moods persisted. He was plagued by shaming memories of the frightening annual visits to Dr. Money, who used pictures of naked adults to "reinforce" Brenda's gender identity and who pressed her to have further surgery on her 'vagina'."

"When David was almost 30, he met Dr. Milton Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii and a longtime rival of Dr. Money. A biologist by training, Diamond had always been curious about the fate of the famous twin, especially after Money mysteriously stopped publishing follow-ups in the late 1970s. Through Diamond, David learned that the supposed success of his sex reassignment had been used to legitimize the widespread use of infant sex change in cases of hermaphroditism and genital injury. Outraged, David agreed to participate in a follow-up by Dr. Diamond, whose myth-shattering paper (co-authored by Dr. Keith Sigmundson) was published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in March 1997 and was featured on front pages across the globe."

"I met David soon after, when he agreed to be interviewed by me for a feature story in Rolling Stone. He subsequently agreed to collaborate with me on a book about his life, As Nature Made Him, published in February 2000. In the course of our interviews, David told me that he could never forget his nightmare childhood, and he sometimes hinted that he was living on borrowed time."

"Most suicides, experts say, have multiple motives, which come together in a perfect storm of misery. So it was with David. After his twin Brian died of an overdose of antidepressants in the spring of 2002, David sank into a depression. Though the two had been estranged, David had, in recent months, taken to visiting Brian's grave, leaving flowers and, at some point prior to his own suicide, a note."

"David also had marital difficulties. He was not easy to live with, given his explosive anger, his cyclical depressions, his fears of abandonment—all of which Jane weathered for almost 14 years. But with David spiraling ever deeper into sloth and despair, she told him on the weekend of May 2 that they should separate for a time. David stormed out of the house. Two days later, Jane received a call from the police, saying that they had found David but that he did not want her to know his location. Two hours after that, Jane got another call. This time the police told her that David was dead."

"Genetics almost certainly contributed to David's suicide. His mother has been a clinical depressive all her life; his brother suffered from the same disease. How much of the Reimers' misery was due to inherited depression, and how much to the nightmare circumstances into which they had been thrown? David's mutilation and his parents' guilt were tightly entwined, multiplying the mental anguish to which the family members were already prone."

"In some press reports, financial problems were given as the sole motive in David's suicide. While this is absurdly reductive, it is true that last fall David learned that he was the victim of an alleged con man who had hoodwinked him out of $65,000—a loss that ate at him and no doubt contributed to his despair."

"In his final months, David was unemployed—for him, a disastrous circumstance. When I first met him, seven years ago, he was a janitor in a slaughter house—tough, physically demanding work that he loved. But when the plant closed a few years ago, David never found another full-time job. And thanks to me, he didn't have to. I split all profits from the book with David, 50-50. This brought him a substantial amount of money, as did a subsequent movie deal with Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. With no compelling financial need to work, David was able to sit around his house and brood—a state of affairs for which I feel some guilt".

"In the end, of course, it was what David was inclined to brood about that killed him. David's blighted childhood was never far from his mind. Just before he died, he talked to his wife about his sexual 'inadequacy,' his inability to be a true husband. Jane tried to reassure him. But David was already heading for the door."

"On the morning of May 5, he retrieved a shotgun from his home while Jane was at work and took it into the garage. There, with the terrible, methodical fixedness of the suicide, he sawed off the barrel. Then he drove to the nearby parking lot of a grocery store, parked, raised the gun, and, I hope, ended his sufferings forever."

From Slate Magazine, 3 June 2004, "Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide?" By John Colapinto.

( John Colapinto is the author of As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine where his original story about David Reimer won a national magazine award for reporting. His 2001 novel About the Author is being developed for the screen by Dreamworks.)

6/4/04

Theist Versus Skeptic


A Hairbreadth Difference and Heaven and Earth Are Set Apart: Theist, Skeptic

Theism versus Skepticism Buddhism Hindy Stephen Hawking Daniel DennettWhy is there something rather than nothing? Lucretius


  • The skeptic: The universe is eternal. It simply is. There is no need for a creator. Moreover, If the universe has a creator, then it is impersonal, merely a force.
  • The theist: The universe couldn't have happened by itself. All results from an uncaused Cause, which is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, purposeful, and personal. Astronomer magazine's Robert Naeye: "On Earth, a long sequence of improbable events transpired in just the right way to bring forth our existence, as if we had won a million-dollar lottery a million times in a row. Contrary to the prevailing belief, maybe we are special."

  • Stephen Hawking: There may or may not be a creator, but the Big Bang didn't necessarily depend on it. Hawking to a science writer who asked him about any connection between Hindu myth and Black Hole evidence: "It's fashionable rubbish. People go overboard on Eastern mysticism because it's something that they haven't met before. But as a natural description of reality it fails abysmally to produce results."

  • My comment: In our daily lives we can believe or disbelieve, but we can take away from quiet moments a different understanding of the matter. In that understanding, the questions no longer seem important. The understanding does not imply atheism or theism as the final truth, the ultimate meaning. Rather, it allows us to see things in a new light * by a method that is empirical and verifiable--not some abstract, debatable notion. Part of our discovery is that thoughts beget thoughts, that they are "mechanical" things requiring no thinker to think them. ( Empirical philosopher David Hume said as much in the Eighteenth Century.) In turn, self is created by mind, neurons if you want, and no ego, no little man or woman, presides over the course of our daily affairs. This understanding derives from a state that precedes all our usual questions and doubts. Unlike some scientists' claim, the state is not wrapped in mist, but is one of high, generalized, awareness. When asked what happened to him, Buddha said that he awakened. Buddha made no claims whether all was finite or infinite, godless, or godly. From the vantage of this state, the questions disappear and are seen as more creatures of the mind.

    That is the meaning of the leader for this article's title, an old Zen saying by Seng-Ts'an--"The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. A hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart." Theist and skeptic impose the difference that sunders Heaven and Earth.

    * (In Zen's Heart Sutra, form is emptiness, emptiness form. Each enables the other and is the other.)

  • Daniel Dennett, along with various other researchers and thinkers, has arrived at this view of no-self without any "mystical" experience. Theirs, however, seems to remain a largely intellectual understanding. Articles on them can be found variously in this blog. As an example of scientific explanations that don't rely on Eastern thought, see Space Capsules and Eastern I-Told-You-So, 29 January 2004. Another example can be found at Shakey, Beavers, and Cartesian Theater, 12 February 2004.)
  • 6/2/04

    Manufacturing Consent VII: The Media As Seen By Journalists


    Manufacturing Consent Media Journalists
    Manufacturing Consent VII: The Media as Seen By Journalists

    While their worries are changing, the problems that journalists see with their profession in many ways seem more intractable than they did a few years ago.

    News people feel better about some elements of their work. But they fear more than ever that the economic behavior of their companies is eroding the quality of journalism.

    In particular, they think business pressures are making the news they produce thinner and shallower. And they report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.

    These worries, in turn, seem to have widened the divide between the people who cover the news and the business executives they work for.

    The changes in attitude have come after a period in which news companies, faced with declining audiences and pressure on revenues, have in many cases made further cuts in newsgathering resources.

    There are also alarming signs that the news industry is continuing the short-term mentality that some critics contend has undermined journalism in the past. Online news is one of the few areas seeing general audience growth today, yet online journalists more often than any others report their newsrooms have suffered staff cuts.

    Only five years earlier, news people were much more likely to see failures of their own making as more of an issue. Since then, they have come to feel more in touch with audiences, less cynical and more embracing of new technology. In other words, journalists feel they have made progress on the areas that they can control in the newsroom.

    While feeling closer to audiences, however, news people also have less confidence in the American public to make wise electoral decisions, a finding that raises questions about the kind of journalism they may produce in the future.

    There are also signs that the people who staff newsrooms, at least at the national level, tend to describe themselves as more liberal than in the past. . . .

    What Journalists Are Worried About 

    Sizable majorities of journalists (66% nationally and 57% locally) think "increased bottom line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage." That is a dramatic increase from five years ago, when fewer than half in the news business felt this way.

    And their concerns may be justified. The State of the News Media 2004 report produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in March found that most sectors of the news media have seen clear cutbacks in newsgathering resources. The number of newspaper newsroom staffers shrunk by 2,000 between 2000 and 2004, a drop of 4% overall. Some major online news sites saw much deeper cuts, such as MSNBC, which cut around a quarter of its staff between 2001 and 2003. Radio newsroom staffing declined by 57% from 1994 to 2001. After an uptick in 1999, network staffing began to drop again in 2000. Since 1985 the number of network news correspondents has declined by 35 percent while the number of stories per reporter increased by 30 percent. . . .

    There are also signs that the economic influences on the news business have become more pernicious. Five years ago we found that financial pressure in the newsroom was "not a matter of executives or advertisers pressuring journalists about what to write or broadcast." It was more subtle than that.

    Unfortunately, that is less true today. Now a third of local journalists say they have felt such pressure, most notably from either advertisers or from corporate owners. In other words, one of the most dearly held principles of journalism--the independence of the newsroom about editorial decision-making--increasingly is being breached. Nationally, journalists are more than twice as likely as executives to say bottom line pressure is eroding journalistic quality. The divide exists at the local level as well but not as drastically.

    Whatever the reasons for this, unless staffers and bosses can agree on first describing what is going on in the company and then agree on its impact, it seems doubtful they could agree on how to deal with it.

    Specific Areas of Concern 

    Beyond cutbacks and pressure to help advertisers or corporate siblings, journalists have other worries as well. Five years ago, people in the news business shared two overriding concerns. As we said back then, "They believe that the news media have blurred the lines between news and entertainment and that the culture of argument is overwhelming the culture of reporting. Concerns about punditry overwhelming reporting, for instance, have swelled dramatically in only four years."

    Today, the concerns are more varied and less easy to categorize. The worries about punditry are still there but they have diminished both nationally and especially locally.

    A bigger issue now is a sense of shallowness. Roughly eight-in-ten in the news business feel the news media pay "too little attention to complex issues," up from five years ago to levels seen in the mid-1990s, at the peak of the fascination with tabloid crime stories like O.J. and JonBenet Ramsey. . . .

    On the issue of accuracy, journalists seem divided. Nationally, the number of journalists who feel that news reports are increasingly sloppy and inaccurate is rising. Locally, it is dropping. . . .

    Confidence in the Public 

    . . . It is also possible that journalists are leaping to another conclusion: They see the content of the news becoming shallower and conclude that this must be what the public wants or why else would their organizations be providing it? More (From The Pew Research Center For The People And The Press, Survey Report titled "Commentary: A Crisis of Confidence," no date, by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell.)

    Other Mind Shadows posts on the media:

    5/29/04

    Nature Versus Nurture I: How David Reimer Became Brenda


    Nature Versus Nurture I: Of Twins and How David Reimer Became Brenda

    David Reimer Nature versus Nurture John Money As Nature Made Him
    David Reimer. 1965-2004
    They were meant to show that gender was determined by nurture, not nature - one identical twin raised as a boy and the other brought up as a girl after a botched circumcision. But two years ago Brian Reimer killed himself, and last week David - formerly Brenda - took his life too. Oliver Burkeman and Gary Younge unravel the tragic story of Dr Money's sex experiment.

    "Until a few years ago, the name David Reimer meant little to those outside his immediate circle, and by the time he killed himself last Tuesday in unknown circumstances in his hometown of Winnipeg, it was already slipping back towards obscurity - a name belonging to nobody more remarkable than a local odd-job man, a 38-year-old former slaughterhouse worker who was separated from his wife, and enjoyed shopping at flea markets and tinkering with his car.

    In fact, to anyone taking an interest in the development of psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, Reimer's life story would have long been infamous, but also pseudonymous. Going by the name "John", and subsequently "Joan", David Reimer had been an unwitting guinea-pig - along with his identical twin brother Brian - in a medical experiment at first celebrated, then notorious. Masterminded by a prominent Baltimore physician, John Money, it was an attempt to settle, once and for all, the fraught nature-versus-nurture debate: to prove that gender was so fluid that by a mere change in childrearing practice, plus a little surgery, a boy could be turned into a girl, while his twin developed as a male.

    It would split the world of sexual psychology in two. And after 12 years of traumatising treatment, followed by a further two decades spent attempting to repair the damage, it would drive David Reimer to his death."It was like brainwashing," Reimer once said, having resumed his male identity after a childhood spent as Brenda. "I'd give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it's torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind."

    The tragedy has its roots in what seemed like a routine trip to hospital in 1966 for Janet and Ron Reimer and their twin baby boys, Bruce and Brian. Doctors had recommended circumcision, a practice still routine in much of north America, but Bruce's operation went distressingly wrong. Like almost every detail of the story, what actually happened is still fiercely disputed but what is clear is that the electric cauterising machine being used by doctors caused burning to his penis so severe as to render the organ unrescuable.

    Reconstructive genital surgery was still rudimentary, and medical experts could offer only pessimism. So when the despairing parents happened to catch a television show, some months later, on which John Money was propounding his radical new theories about gender formation, it seemed to offer a lifeline. "He was saying that it could be that babies are born neutral, and you could change their gender," Janet Reimer later told John Colapinto, author of a book on the experiment entitled As Nature Made Him."

    In photographs taken at the time, Money - then, as now, affiliated to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland - looks like a parody of a progressive "sexologist", turtlenecked and moustachioed, and his writings did nothing to dispel that impression. Raised in a conservative religious family in New Zealand, he had rebelled and become a self-described "missionary of sex", revelling in shocked responses to his tireless advocacy of open marriages and - a particular favourite - bisexual group sex.

    At their most extreme, Money's public statements had appeared to endorse, or at least not to condemn, incest and paedophilia, but there was no hint of that in the television show Janet and Ron Reimer saw. They wrote to him, and he wrote swiftly back. He was confident, he said, that Bruce could be successfully raised as a girl. From an experimental perspective, Brian Reimer would provide the perfect control: his genetic inheritance was identical to Bruce's. The only difference was that one would be nurtured as a girl, and the other as a boy.

    Money's emphasis on nurture over nature played well with the progressive spirit of the times, and especially with the women's movement, its proponents eager to establish that women's traditional social roles were not biologically pre-ordained. "Postwar, in any case, there was a move away from people being innately, biologically, inherently anything," says Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College in London. "We'd just seen Nazism, and the emphasis had been put on the idea that certain people were innately evil - Jews and gypsies, among others - so the emphasis on culture and society fitted well with social democratic ideals." The Reimers did not engage in this kind of debate. "I looked up to [John Money] as a god," Janet said simply.

    Bruce Reimer started to become Brenda on July 3, 1967. Physicians at Johns Hopkins surgically castrated him, and the remaining skin was used to forge a "cosmetic vaginal cleft." Money sent the family back to Winnipeg with strict instructions. "He told us not to talk about it," Ron Reimer told John Colapinto. "Not to tell [Brenda] the whole truth, and that she shouldn't know she wasn't a girl."

    Things started going wrong almost immediately. Janet Reimer recalled dressing Brenda in her first dress just before the child was due to turn two. "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, she knows she's a boy and she doesn't want girls' clothing." Brenda was bullied viciously at school. When she urinated standing up in the school lavatories, she was threatened with a knifing.

    Whether all the blame should lie with Money remains a matter of contention. His supporters argue that reconstructive surgery techniques of the time were such that trying to turn Bruce into Brenda might genuinely have been the least worst option. In public, Money advertised the "John/Joan" study as a resounding success. "This dramatic case," Time magazine reported, picking up on his salesmanship, "provides strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered."

    In private, though, things were spinning into chaos. Brenda was required to attend regular therapy sessions with Money in Baltimore, in the company of her brother. According to Colapinto's account, they soon degenerated into horrifying encounters that deeply traumatised the two children. Showing the children "explicit sexual pictures" was seemingly central to Money's theories of gender reassignment. David Reimerlater recalled, as Brenda, "getting yelled at by Money ... he told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed 'No!' I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking."

    In the children's grimmest recollection - one they found almost impossible to talk about years later - Money allegedly made "Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks", an element of Money's theory he referred to as "sexual rehearsal play". (The author John Heidenry, who wrote a recent review defending the sexologist, calls this charge "outrageous and offensive", and says Brian, the source of the claim, may have been suffering false memory syndrome.)

    By the time Brenda reached her teens she had attempted suicide at least once; she refused further surgery but consented, though irregularly, to take oestrogen supplements to encourage the development of breasts. John Money gradually drifted from the Reimers' lives, but Brenda remained under constant psychiatric treatment. It was after one such session with a Winnipeg psychiatrist in 1980 that Ron Reimer collected his daughter in the car and, instead of taking her home, drove her to an ice-cream parlour, where he told her everything.

    The upturn in Reimer's fortunes lasted several years. Brenda opted for a sex change within weeks of her father telling her the truth. Thanks to developments in phalloplasty, Brenda, taking the name David, received surgery that after five years left him with a reconstructed penis resembling a real one, with limited sensation, and usable for sex. When he was 23 he met Jane, a single mother of three, and married her soon afterwards. In 2000, he went public with his story.

    But his happiness didn't last. For reasons that remain unclear, David and Jane eventually separated. Then, two years ago, Brian Reimer apparently killed himself, taking an overdose of drugs he was taking for schizophrenia. David reportedly felt responsible for the death, and visited Brian's grave daily, weeding the plot and bringing fresh flowers.

    Despite Colapinto's claims that David made a large amount of money from the book, those who knew him said he was often hard up; at the Transcona golf club, in Winnipeg's eastern suburbs, where he did odd jobs, the members had a whip round for him so he could afford to eat. Friends say he had became particularly distraught during the last few months after he bought thousands of dollars' worth of shares in an investment that flopped.

    The world of psychology learned of the failure of Money's experiment through a paper by a rival, Dr Milton Diamond, of the University of Hawaii, who eventually traced those who had taken over treatment of the twins. For Lynne Segal, the story of the experiment does not settle the nature/nurture debate one way or the other - her view, widely shared today, is that the dichotomy is false - but it shows the perils of psychologists trying to prove too much through research. "It's far too simplistic, and far too interventionist, this idea that we can control and model and shape people to prove one thing or another."

    John Money remains an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins. "He's not commenting on this story," his assistant told the Guardian yesterday. "There is no comment to make." Click for Nature v. Nurture Part II.

    As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto is published by Quartet, priced £10.

    Quoted material from The Guardian, Wednesday, 12 May 2004.

    5/27/04

    Theory of The Leisure Class: Thorstein Veblen on Dogs


    The Theory of The Leisure Class: Thorstein Veblen on Dogs

    Born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrants Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857 –  1929) was an American economist and sociologist, famous as a witty critic of capitalism. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen writes critically of the leisure class.  Here he  coined the term "conspicuous consumption." He used it to mean spending more on something than it is worth. Why? To impress others of social standing or power and prestige, real or artificial. Before meme as a term and concept was formulated, he was on to it, though he had no name for it. Veblen wrote that others in society, concerned about their own impression on people, strive to emulate the class that can flaunt its wealth, the leisure class. The result? A society turned toward acquisition of goods to promote the appearance of status. His theory of course is more detailed--so if you want more read the book--but that provides a brief introduction.

    Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption Theory of The Leisure Class and Dogs
    Thorstein Veblen
    In the following excerpt, Veblen has a bit of cranky fun with canines, which allows a kind of metaphor for
    some elements of his theories. The dog, according to Veblen, promotes economic competition as dictated by Leisure Class values. First, it helps the owner feel superior, like a top dog. It gives the owner a sense of the denigration of others by its threat to them. It serves as an emblem of conspicuous consumption. It is as useless as a lawn, both it and grass providing status precisely because they are inutile. It promotes the mythos of the Leisure Class by its predatory nature, suggesting survival of the fittest.

    Veblen: " He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favour by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated in our imaginations with the chase--a meritorious employment and an expression of the honourable predatory impulse."

    Click The Theory of The Leisure Class. For memes read Mind Shadows Beyond Memes 4 March 2004 and Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain 26 February 2004.

    5/24/04

    Marvin Minsky: Awareness is No Big Deal


    Marvin Minsky Artificial Intelligence Dalai Lama
    Thinking Without Thinking: Marvin Minsky, The Dalai Lama, and Artificial Intelligence

    Some people think that consciousness and computers are a contradiction in terms. That is, they believe that computers can never qualify as conscious, which is a uniquely human quality.

    Marvin Minsky believes that conscious artificial intelligence is not at all out of the question, which is in keeping with his writings. His thinking in no regard qualifies as religious, and therefore holds nothing sacred about human ability. Would religious leaders differ with him? If readers expected solid disagreement from the Tibetan Buddhist community, they might be surprised to learn that the Dalai Lama does not take exception to a point of view such as Minsky's. Here, then, are two perspectives on the issue, first Minsky, then the Dalai Lama.

    Minsky: " Just as we walk without thinking, we think without thinking! We don't know how our muscles make us walk--nor do we know much more about the agencies that do our mental work. When you have a hard problem to solve, you think about if for a time. Then, perhaps, the answer seems to come all at once, and you say, ' Aha, I've got it. I'll do such and such.' But if someone were to ask how you found the solution, you could rarely say more than things like the following :

    ' I suddenly realized . . . '

    ' I just got the idea . . . '

    ' It occurred to me that . . . '

    If we could really sense the workings of our minds, we wouldn't act so often in accord with motives we don't suspect. We wouldn't have such varied and conflicting theories for psychology. And when we're asked how people get their good ideas, we wouldn't be reduced to metaphors about ' ruminating,' and ' digesting,' ' conceiving' and ' giving birth' to concepts--as though our thoughts were anywhere but in the head. If we could see inside our minds, we'd surely have more useful things to say.

    Many people seem absolutely certain that no computer could ever be sentient, conscious, self-willed, or in any other way ' aware' of itself. But what makes everyone so sure that they themselves possess those admirable qualities? It's true that if we're sure of anything at all, it is that ' I'm aware--hence, I'm aware.' Yet what do such convictions really mean? If self-awareness means to know what's happening inside one's mind, no realist could maintain for long that people have much insight, in the literal sense of seeing-in. Indeed, the evidence that we are self-aware--that is, that we have any special aptitude for finding out what's happening inside ourselves--is very weak indeed. It is true that certain people have a special excellence at assessing the attitudes and motivations of other persons (and, more rarely, of themselves). But this does not justify the belief that how we learn things about people, including ourselves, is fundamentally different from how we learn about other things. Most of the understandings we call ' insights' are merely variants of our other ways to ' figure out' what's happening." (The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, (Simon and Schuster) )

    The Dali Lama once said that there is no theoretical limit to artificial intelligence. If "conscious" computers are some day developed, he will give them the same consideration as sentient beings.
    (Salon Magazine, 27 February 1997, in an interview with Jeff Greenwald.) Elsewhere, he had this to say about artificial intelligence : "It is very difficult to say that it's not a living being, that it doesn't have cognition, even from the Buddhist point of view. We maintain that there are certain types of births in which a preceding continuum of consciousness is the basis. The consciousness doesn't actually arise from the matter, but a continuum of consciousness might conceivably come into it." (Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, Jeremy Hayward and Francisco Varela ( Shambala) )

    5/19/04

    Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib


    Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment Abu Ghraib

    Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib

    With its obvious relationship to Abu Ghraib Prison, the Stanford Prison Experiment (1973) raises troubling questions about the ability of individuals to resist authoritarian or obedient roles required by social situations. Philip K. Zimbardo, professor of psychology, Stanford University, studied the process by which prisoners and guards become compliant or authoritarian. He placed an ad in a local newspaper:


  • Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 2-3 weeks beginning Aug. 14. For further information & applications, come to Room 248, Jordan Hall, Stanford U.

    In his essay on the experiment, Zimbardo has this to say: "When we planned our two-week-long simulation of prison life, we sought to understand more about the process by which people called ' prisoners' lose their liberty, civil rights, independence and privacy, while those called ' guards' gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges. . . .

    The sample of average, middle-class, Caucasian, college-age males (plus one oriental student) was arbitrarily divided by the flip of a coin. Half were randomly assigned to play the role of guards, the others of prisoners. . . .

    The prisoners wore smocks and nylon stocking caps; they had to use ID numbers; their personal effects were removed and they were housed in barren cells. . . Their smocks, which were like dresses, were worn without undergarments, causing the prisoners to be restrained in their physical actions and to move in ways that were more feminine than masculine. The prisoners were forced to obtain permission from the guard for routine and simple activities such as writing letters, smoking a cigarette or even going to the toilet; this elicited from them a childlike dependency. . .

    Guard M : ' I was surprised at myself . . . I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands; I practically considered the prisoners cattle, and I kept thinking, " I have to watch out for them in case they try something. " '

    Guard A : ' I was tired of seeing the prisoners in their rags and smelling the strong odors of their bodies that filled the cells. I watched them tear at each other on orders given by us. They didn't see it as an experiment. It was real and they were fighting to keep their identity. But we were always there to show them who was boss.' . .

    Prior to start of experiment :[Guard A :] ' As I am a pacifist and nonaggressive individual I cannot see a time when I might guard and/or maltreat other living things.' . .

    Fifth Day : [Guard A : ] ' I have singled out [a prisoner] for special abuse because he begs for it and because I simply don't like him. . . I walk by and slam my stick into the Hole door . . . I am very angry at this prisoner for causing discomfort and trouble for the others. I decided to force-feed him, but he wouldn't eat. I let the food slide down his face. . . .[Several guards were involved in the abuse, but Guard A is used here because he serves to track the change in one individual.]

    The potential social value of this study derives precisely from the fact that normal, healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under the institutional pressures of a 'prison environment' . If this could happen in so short a time, without the excesses that are possible in real prisons, and it could happen to the ' cream-of-the-crop of American youth,' then one can only shudder to imagine what society is doing both to the actual guards and prisoners who are at this very moment participating in that unnatural 'social experiment'." ( Excerpted from Philip K. Zimbardo, "The Mind Is A Formidable Jailer," The New York Times Magazine, 8 April 1973. )

    My Comment: I fully condemn the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners and do not offer Zimbardo in defense of the abusers. Zimbardo's experiment is provided as a reminder that we should not piously mouth that we would not do such a thing. More than pieties are required. We must think about and plan for the challenges to our character and integrity. Zimbardo cautions us against smugness.


  • Also see Mind Shadows What Happened to The Women Involved?:Feminism and Abu Ghraib, 17 May 2004.