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Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting next Tuesday May 4th.

Americans & Trust: An Interview With Steven Pinker

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is author of The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought. Among other contributions, he is widely known for his work in the field of evolutionary psychology. He is also something of a pubic intellectual, and in the following interview he shares his thinking on the current social and political landscape.

"Americans' trust in the media, their government, and each other has declined over the past four decades. And yet, according to many national surveys, trust in science and scientists remains high. In a 2006 Harris poll, for example, 77 percent of respondents said they trust scientists to tell the truth–roughly 60 percent more than the number who trusted the president.

In recent years, however, several areas of scientific research—from global warming to stem cell research to evolution—have become highly politicized, in ways that threaten the credibility of prominent scientists and their findings.

In one notorious instance, the Bush administration fired cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and medical ethicist William May from the President's Council on Bioethics, a decision that many critics alleged was part of an effort to purge the Council of dissenting scientific voices." More

You Say Tomahto, I Say Tomayto, You Say Potahto, I Say Potayto . . .

How do you raise children when one parent is agnostic, the other Christian?

"Daddy, why did Jesus invent butterflies if they die after two weeks?"

I just about hit the panic button when my six-year-old son Theo put this question to me not long ago . . . our boys have parents with very different views on religion - their mother a Catholic, their father an agnostic humanist. This is only one of the several ways in which our family is "mixed": Nilsa is from Puerto Rico, I from the Midwestern US; she grew up in a working-class family in the countryside, I in a middle-class one in the suburbs; she speaks to the children in Spanish, I in English. Our differences regarding religion must therefore seem, to the kids, par for the course, no? More

Blind Soldier Sees With His Tongue

During much of the 20th century, neuroscientific consensus held that after childhood brain structure could not be changed in the lower brain and the neocortices. The prevailing view was that strengthening or weakening neural connections allowed change in these structures, but the structures were immutable. Then along came Paul Bach-Y-Rita and neuroplasticity.

Bach-Y-Rita developed the approach of sensory substitution.

A woman came to him desperate for help. Her brain's vestibular system damaged, she often felt she was falling even when lying flat on her bed. Walking, she hugged walls, strode spraddle-legged. Like a soldier in battle, she and her body lived on high alert. The relentless stress was overwhelming her and undermining her health.

To treat her, Bach-Y-Rita used a computer attached to small electrodes on her tongue. He chose the tongue because of its high density of sensory receptors. In short, because it is extremely sensitive. As she learned to use this device, her vertigo gradually disappeared. She was able to stay balanced.

Her brain structure was not hard-wired. She, among others, showed that the brain is highly plastic in its ability to take over functions once performed by a different--but now damaged or missing--function.

BrainPort was Bach-Y-Rita's invention. Now it is being used for blind individuals.

Case in point. British soldier Lance-Corporal Craig Lundberg lost his eyesight in a rocket-launched grenade attack while serving in Iraq in 2007. He was told he would never "see" again. But now he can--with his tongue.

Lundberg uses a BrainPort device. For him, it involves a video camera resting on a pair of sunglasses in turn linked to an electrode on his tongue.

The camera converts image-pixels into electrical pulses which are sent to the tongue, where they cause a tingling sensation. Varying tingle strength is interpreted by him so he can mentally visualize and navigate his surroundings. For example, white pixels are strong, while grey are medium, and black have no signal.

Such adaptation is possible because blindness or deafness generally only means one kind of loss--loss of ability to transmit sensory signals to the functional brain area. The pathways remain. The transmitter--retina for eyes or cochlea for ears--does not.

Lundberg says that using the tongue electrode is like "licking a nine volt battery." Learning to see with it takes intensive training.

It helps him see shapes and even read letters.

Alan Watts: Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, & Fussing

In the San Francisco Bay Area long ago, I used to turn on KQED, Channel 9, and watch Alan Watts discuss Zen Buddhism in the days of black and white television. Dressed in a white juban and white pants, he was adept at Zen calligraphy and with his brush he made skilled strokes of a Japanese pictogram while explaining the character's meaning. I have forgotten much of his program, except that I considered myself very lucky to be learning from The Man Himself. He, I thought, was somebody special, and I would have listened to him on anything, for he was wise, but that was not what he wanted. No fuss. Make no fuss, he said, even about fussing.

He wrote an engaging pamphlet, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, which I bought at City Lights Books in San Francisco back when owner and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti worked behind the counter. (I also have a City Lights booklet by Ferlinghetti, Pictures of The Gone World.) In its 25 pages, Watts concludes with this: "The old Chinese Zen Masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in its total interrelatedness and saw that every creature and every experience is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to justify anything. They didn't do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for getting away with murder. . . . Their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately 'nothing special,' or 'no-fuss.' But Zen is 'fuss' when it is mixed with Bohemian affectations and 'fuss' when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan . . . .

Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. . . . . If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country."

His monograph was published by City Lights in 1959 and in Watts' sentences I hear the 1960s rushing headlong toward American youth culture. Beatnik would become Hippie. From all over the country, young people moved to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. At the Fillmore Auditorium there, Grace Slick sang White Rabbit with The Jefferson Airplane. At the University of California Berkeley, students rioted against Vietnam. Others rode buses to the South for sit-ins.

Vietnam has been turned into a memorial in Washington, DC, and grey-haired men walk along the black granite wall, looking for the names of teenage buddies long dead. The March on Selma is history. The flower children of Haight-Ashbury became grandparents and the Jefferson Airplane are faces on a quaint collectors' album with a psychedelic cover.

Alan Watts is also gone now, but he left something behind. He had a remarkable ability to explain Buddhism, and he did so with a genius in terms of his insights. I offer these comments as an example:

"On Nothingness. The idea of nothing has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western world.We have a saying in Latin, Ex nihilo nuhil fit, which means "out of nothing comes nothing." It has occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in many parts of the East as well. It manifests in a kind of terror of nothing, a put-down on nothing, and a put-down on everything associated with nothing, such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principles. But to me nothing--the negative, the empty--is exceedingly powerful. I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing. Imagine nothing but space, going on and on, with nothing in it forever. But there you are imagining it, and you are something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast."

In a sense, then, nothing is something. Or, as Zen has it, form is emptiness, emptiness, form.

I learned from Alan Watts and it was not just about Buddhism. Although he had not intended it, he taught me that he, himself, was nothing special, nobody to fuss over.

People might tend to make Zen masters special, as they might with Zen intellectuals such as Watts, and this is due to the halo effect, as it is called in cognitive psychology. If we admire traits in other people, those traits influence our interpretation of the people and our expectations of them. Movie stars are commonly associated with the effect. Attractive and financially successful, they are often seen as having more desirable traits--personality, intelligence, skills--than others have.

Alan Watts had a halo for me. He was somebody special, although his booklet cautioned me against any fuss. Once while I watched him during his show on KQED, he began to do some arithmetic. It was simple. Let's say it was 8 times 8 equals 64. I really don't remember the calculation but I do recall that he couldn't do it. For me, that was a revelation.

Then in the early 1970s I opened The San Francisco Chronicle to learn that he had died. An alcoholic, he died in his sleep after his heart finally gave out.

I don't mention the math problem and the alcoholism to detract from Watts. I mention them because of the halo effect.

Alan Watts was adept at explaining and expounding on Eastern spirituality, but he was first of all human. Make no fuss about him, he would have said.