bodhi tree swaying

Natalie Angier is my favorite science writer. Often I’ll be a couple of paragraphs into a science story, notice how well written it is, and realize it must be one of hers.

Her latest is a preview of a new book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April.

The thesis of the book is that we evolved cooperation and social intelligence through learning to love babies. As Angier puts it:

…human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Unlike chimps, our closest relatives, we spend …

I’ve just started reading Susan Blackmore’s “Ten Zen Questions” so that I can review it on Wildmind.

I’ve only read the (long) introduction and the first chapter so far, but it’s a great read. If you’ve ever seen or heard Susan (I’ve heard her on Podcasts and seen her on TED videos) you’ll know she’s an unconventional character. She’s a psychologist who researches consciousness and she also practices Zen, although she stresses she’s not a Buddhist.

Her writing style is both perky and very, very thought-provoking. Or rather she’s “non-thought” provoking, in that she reminds you over and over again to pay attention to your present moment experience (in the first chapter at least) by asking the question “Am I conscious now?” (although I’d express the question as “Am I conscious of being conscious now?”).

The constant reiteration of the question …

There’s a nice article (or was) in Psychology Today on the topic of mindfulness. It contains a lot of useful tips for bringing your awareness back into your present-moment experience.

Here are some practical tips to help you get mindful now.

• Meditate. Meditating is nothing more than focusing on the present moment. The easiest way to meditate is to simply focus on your breath—not because your breath has some magical quality, but because it’s always there with you. The challenge is to keep your attention on your breathing. Inevitably, your mind will wander and thoughts will arise—and that’s fine. When it happens, just let go of the thought and bring your attention back to the present by focusing once again on your breath.

• Use a reminder of the string-around-your-finger variety. Wear your watch upside-down, put a quarter in your shoe, or put a smudge on one of the lenses of

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I found this interesting, and I found it here. We completely take it for granted that we live in “the present” and yet everything we perceive is a split second behind reality because of the transmission lag in our nerves. This means that for tasks like catching a ball the brain has to employ some interesting trickery so that our hand reaches the ball and not the place it was 1/30 of a second ago. I wonder if babies have to learn this? I rather suspect they do.

In this brief excerpt from The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, the novelist Wolfe describes the mind-set of writer and counter-cultural guru Ken Kesey. Kesey, who died in 2001, was the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, two novels that defined American life in the 1960’s. (“The Movie” mentioned in the excerpt was never finished.)

The

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Over on Wildmind I’ve written a longish post with some reflections on Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku, who played Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily I would post here, but I think that in future I’m going to be putting a bit more of my energy into Wildmind. That doesn’t mean I’ll be writing less or differently. I’ll keep using this blog as a way of letting people know what I’m up to, including passing on news of articles I’ve posted. I’ll probably also continue to post shorter pieces here.

Anyway, here’s the start of the article, with a link to the rest. The Buddhist stuff starts just after the jump to Wildmind…

So far there’s only been one episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, so perhaps it’s a bit early to be talking about overarching themes, leitmotifs,

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I have to admire the way that Tibetan Buddhists respond to adverse circumstances. When Tibetan monks and nuns are brutally tortured by Chinese security forces, rather than get angry their response is to be compassionately concerned about the karma of their torturers. When a Tibetan gets sick this is often taken as the result of bad karma in the past, and so rather than wallow in self-pity they do even more spiritual practice than usual in order to purify their karma. And when the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition’s Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, in Pomaia, Italy, burned down Lama Zopa Rinpoche wrote to the community

“I think what has happened at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute, with the blazing fire destroying the gompa, is an auspicious

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Scientific American has a very interesting and challenging article on how difficult it can be to bring about personal change. It’s worth reading the entire article, but here’s the handy digest (you know, just in case that resolution to stop skimming the surface of articles isn’t working out for ya).

• Studies of personality development often focus on traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to new experiences. In most people, these traits change more during young adulthood than any other period of life, including adolescence. Openness typically increases during a person’s 20s and goes into a gradual decline after that.
• This pattern of personality development seems to hold true across cultures. Although some see that as evidence that genes determine our personality, many researchers theorize that personality traits change during young adulthood because this is a time of life when people assume new roles: finding a partner, starting a

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There’s an excellent but rather long article in Psychology Today about the benefits of mindfulness, called, “Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment.” Here’s a digest of some of the main points, in case you don’t have time to wade through all seven pages of the piece.

1. To improve your performance, stop thinking about it (unselfconsciousness)
By reducing self-consciousness, mindfulness allows you to witness the passing drama of feelings, social pressures, even of being esteemed or disparaged by others without taking their evaluations personally, explain Richard Ryan and K. W. Brown of the University of Rochester. When you focus on your immediate experience without attaching it to your self-esteem, unpleasant events like social rejection—or your so-called friends making fun of your dancing—seem less threatening.

2. To avoid worrying about the future, focus on the present (savoring).
When subjects in a …

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about people’s relationship to their frozen embryos. Because IVF treatment is so expensive and success is so hit-or-miss, couples generally create more embryos than they need. Those remaining after conception are stored in deep freezes. But couples become attached to those embryos — blastocysts, really — and can have trouble letting go of them.

The article gives an overview of different relationships with these embryos. Some people are willing to let them be used for research. Some are willing to donate them to other couples. But others are unwilling to have them donated, even though it would help another family get through the painful situation they themselves have experienced, because they regard these as “their” embryos and are unsure of what kind of life they wold have with a new family.

Some people are simply so …

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a free trial to Ancestry.com and have been intensively investigating the history of my mother’s family — the Tragheims (or Traghams — some of them changed their name during the second world war). I wanted to squeeze every last bit of data out of my trial period, before the $19.95 per month charge kicked in, and so I’ve not had much time for blogging. But I’m back! (And I’ll say more about the outcomes of my researches later).

Anyway, I was struck by an article in the NYT about how grandparents keep in touch with young children over long distances using webcams. The article had a lot of resonances for me because Maia has been keeping in touch with her grandparents that way since she was perhaps six months old. It was hard to get my …

Here’s a brief one from the Boston Globe:

QUICK, READ THIS paragraph out loud as fast as you can! Feel better? You should, if a team of Princeton and Harvard psychologists is right. Motivated by the observation that euphoria is often accompanied by “racing thoughts” among manic individuals, the psychologists conducted a series of experiments – including one that had people narrate the famous “Job Switching” episode of “I Love Lucy,” at fast or slow playback speeds – to test whether being forced to think faster results in a more positive mood. Not only was thinking faster significantly associated with positive mood, but there was some evidence that thinking faster inflated self-esteem and made it harder for people to stop talking. Other research by the authors even found that thinking fast about ostensibly depressing things can improve mood too. The authors conclude that “experiences

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The NYT has a report on studies claiming that the amount of time spent watching television is a good indicator of how happy a person is: the less time spent in front of the idiot-box, the happier a person tends to be.

The researchers caution that they can’t yet explain the correlation — whether happy people watch less TV or whether watching TV makes you unhappy.

I have no special insight into these studies, but I doubt the statement of the researcher who said, “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy.” In itself, no. But I think that socializing, exercising, meditating, and reading are inherently more enriching than watching television. But I suspect the relationship works both ways — watching TV diminishes our lives and when we’re unhappy we’re more likely to turn to a passive form of entertainment. …

In an article in Atlantic magazine, author and Yale University professor of psychology Paul Bloom makes a provocative observation about parenthood and happiness:

Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with

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There’s a compelling article in Atlantic on the theory that the self is not unitary but a composite of multiple selves. The article should be of interest to all Buddhists or meditators, and is a modern equivalent of the teaching of anatta (lack of unitary, unchanging, enduring selfhood).

The article, “First Person Plural,” is written by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University and the author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. He’s writing a book on the theme of pleasure, and I imagine it’ll be well-worth reading.

His article shows that the self is not a single entity but a multiplicity:

Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles

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Kirk Warren Brown, an assistant professor of social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, co-developed a 15-point mindful attention awareness scale (see box) and has used it to test the levels of mindfulness of college students in romantic relationships. He has conducted two studies that suggest increased mindfulness correlates with overall relationship happiness.

In the first, he found that men and women are equally likely to be mindful, and if one person in the relationship is mindful, both members of the couple can benefit.

In the second study, Brown asked longtime couples to discuss a contentious issue in the relationship while being observed in his lab. Those who scored higher on the mindfulness scale were less anxious and less hostile after having such simulated conflicts with their significant others, he found.

“Mindfulness tends to inoculate people against feeling negative thoughts in the first place. You go into

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From Scientific American:

The brains of bullies–kids who start fights, tell lies, and break stuff with glee–may be wired to feel pleasure when watching others suffer pain, according to a new brain scanning study.

The finding was unexpected, noted Benjamin Lahey, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study, which appears in the new issue of the journal Biological Psychology. Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, is lead author of the study.

The researchers had expected that the bullies would show no response when they witnessed pain in somebody else—that they experience a sort of emotional coldness that allows them to steal milk money with no remorse, for example.

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In addition to revealing activity in pleasure- and pain-related areas of the brain, the scans also showed that a portion of the brain that helps regulate emotion is inactive in bullies.

In

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From the NYT:

In studies over the past few years, researchers have demonstrated how quickly trust can build in the right circumstances. To build a close relationship from scratch, psychologists have two strangers come together in four hourlong sessions. In the first, the two share their answers to a list of questions, from the innocuous “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” to the more serious, like “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?”

In the second session, the pair competes against other pairs in a variety of timed parlor games. In the third, they talk about a variety of things, including why they are proud to be a member of their ethnic group, whether Latino, Asian, white or black. Finally, they take turns wearing a blindfold, while their partner gives instructions for navigating a maze.

Trivial as

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There’s a fascinating article on a site by Bob Sutton about the effects of “priming” people with ideas of money on subsequent acts of generosity. Here’s a snippet:

I ran into a fascinating set of nine studies packed into a 2006 Science magazine article called The Psychological Consequences of Money by Kathleen D. Vohs and her colleagues. They used a series of “primes” to turn research subjects’ attention to money (showing them lists of words about money, putting piles of monopoly money in front of them, showing them films that talked about money) and then created a host of little challenges, ranging from whether they would ask or gave help while struggling to solve an unsolvable to whether they helped an (apparently) blind person who accidentally dropped a bunch of pencils. Note there we no incentives manipulated in these studies, just a focus on money.

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An interesting article on the role of negative emotions in the election campaign — although it defines negative emotions narrowly in terms of gloom and despondency rather than in the Buddhist sense that includes ill will and craving. Anyway, it suggests that demoralized McCain voters are less likely to motivate themselves to vote.

More McCain supporters also feel angry and bored, while Obama’s are likelier to say they are proud and hopeful.

All of this is a bad sign for McCain, according to George E. Marcus, a political scientist from Williams College who has studied the role emotion plays in politics. Negative feelings about a campaign can discourage voters by making them less likely to go through what can be a painful process: Voting for someone who will lose.

“If I’m getting my head handed to me by a tennis player, my brain is

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Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by.
From Predictably Irrational, a really fascinating blog on the science of rationality.

He stops in mid swing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

Who do you think will find this joke more funny liberals or conservatives?

Common stereotypes link the word “liberal” with words such as open-mindedness, tolerance, and impartiality, while the word “conservative” is linked with tradition, caution, and conventional values. Given these associations we might expect that liberals will appreciate, and respond more to humor and jokes than

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