A bit about book covers and the brain

By now anyone not buried in sand or on a trek through the Antarctice knows the name Susan Boyle. If you haven't seen the Youtube replay of her performance on Britain's TV show "You've Got Talent", you might want to do so before reading on. Go ahead, I'll wait.....

Okay, back? If you think anything like me, you found the story interesting, inspiring, amusing and a little odd. On the face of it, the whole episode reminds me of my mother's admonition (echoed throughout my life from a jillion other sources) about the pitfalls of judging a book by its cover. Yep, she looks frumpy and yep, she doesn't do a great job of looking collected and alluring up there on the stage. We like our stars handsome and someone who doesn't fit has the temerity to aspire to stardom, we don't just dismiss her, we scorn her. Never mind that few in the audience would come off much better, we frumpy folk are supposed to know our places and not inflict our frumpiness on others, especially not on national TV.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have offered plenty of analysis of course. In this article from the NY Times, several experts note that this categorizing behavior runs very deep in the brain, reaching far back into our evolutionary history. Back then, we benefitted from a quick assessment of the stranger in front of us: are they good or bad, am I safe or in danger, can I eat it or have sex with it, etc. In modern times, we employ the same basic behavior to distinguish far less critical matters, like who's in and who's out, or who we want as leaders and who we can safely ignore.

As with so many other modern cultural co-optations of basic brain circuitry, we do not easily resist this compulsion to stereotype:

Scientists are finding that stereotypes are not simply stored and retrieved by the brain, but “are associated with general regions in the brain involved in memory and goal-planning,” Professor [David] Amodio [an assistant professor of psychology at New York University,] said, suggesting that “people recruit stereotypes to kind of help them plan a world that’s consistent with the goal they might have.”

The article goes on to note the research of Susan Fiske, , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton,who found that:

The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is surprisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people...It’s kind of a neural dehumanization...But...the neural response is restored when people are asked to focus on what soup the homeless person might like to eat, something that makes one think about the person as someone with wants or goals.

In other words, the more we know about someone, the harder time we have not seeing them as "one of us", a human being.

I think this story tells us a lot more than simply to watch out for the dangers of judging by book cover. It demonstrates a few critical aspects of cognitive accuracy:

One: we get a more useful, accurate result if we base our assessment of someone on as many available facts as possible.

Two: we get more useful results when we recognize that our assumptions may interfere with the accuracy of our assessments.

Three: we get more useful results when we use available feedback to update our assessments when new information becomes available.

Need an Electronic Pause?

Once again, neuroscience seems to have gained a new insight into an aspect of human brains that folks with general semantics experience have known about for some time. You tend to produce a more compassionate response if you wait a few seconds for the higher brain circuits to kick in and add reason to your evaluation. This story from Wired describes research that found that brain circuits involved in the experience of empathy take several seconds to activate. The rest of the story worries, probably with some good justification, that today's instantaneous communication modes, especially social networks like Facebook and Twitter, allow us to respond before we have had a chance to engage in a deeper emotional and rational evaluation.

One sentence in particular gave me pause: Empathy "...might even fail to properly develop in children, whose brains are being formed in ways that will last a lifetime."

The entertainment and communications industry have long denied that consuming their products can "harm" or even seriously affect the brains of viewers and listeners. This suggests otherwise--or at least, it makes it pretty apparent that what we do affects the shape and circuitry of our brains.

GS in the Media

General semantics doesn't make it big in the entertainment world, despite some interest generated in the 50s and 60s. In Hitchcock's The Birds, Tippi Hedrin tells Rod Taylor she is taking a course in general semantics at Berkeley. In another movie, the name of which eludes me, we catch a fleeting glimpse of a structural differential on the wall of a bedroom.

So imagine my surprise when tonight's episode of Criminal Minds ended with this quote from Stuart Chase:

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

You just never know where these little tendrils go and grow.

RIOT with emphasis on the Relative

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. -Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

In an era when few people ventured more than 20 miles from their birthplace, Montaigne strongly promoted the idea of travel as a way to see our foundational beliefs as simply one of many ways to look at the world. In the quote above, he reminds us that even our foundational beliefs may not have absolute invariance over time or in different contexts.

My mother would often answer a question by saying "I'm of two minds about that." I took this to mean that she recognized the difference between her and herself. I have found the phrase a useful reminder that even my strongest opinions don't reliably represent my strongest opinions, if you know what I mean.

Why Critical Thinking?

I have not posted here since well before the election, and now we have a new president, one who speaks frankly and humanely, who apparently favors the "reality-based" approach to life. We teetered for a while on the possibility of having new leaders who exhibited their poor thinking skills in myriad ways.

Dick Cavett, long-time laser-like observer of the human condition, continues to marvel at the bizarre and disturbing following acquired by the defeated Republican candidate for vice-president. His articles on the subject draw flocks of commentors, some simply thanking Cavett for his wit and insight, others offering answers to his requests for help deciphering the inexplicable appeal of the woman. As one might expect, his readers in many cases write almost as articulately as he does and their answers sometimes come from unexpected angles.

The article on the NY Times website sports 15, count 'em, 15 pages of comments--all posted in a single day! Two of these, I think, will suffice here. Joel writes:

Her supporters love Mrs. Palin for advertising her mediocrity as a virtue. That perspective allows them to dismiss nuance, complexity and tolerance as partisan tactics.

And Richard observes:

Palin’s patter derives from her most extensive area of training: teen beauty pagent contestant.

A contestant is given 90 seconds to respond to a panel’s question. She prepares (is more likely is prepped) by assembling stock answers for rapid delivery.
Stock answers are crammed with words and concepts designed to overwhelm the questioners. As the latter are not a PhD panel, the range of acceptable and even “impressive” blurted replies is large.

Palin is captive of that speaking style. It would require psychoanalysis to shift her away from going into overdrive when questioned on a subject of any complexity.

Completely different in their perspective, but incisive in their application. We could use more critical thinkers like THAT in the government. Let's go find more graduates of the schools that produced THEM.

Terry Pratchett: I'm slipping away a bit at a time... and all I can do is watch it happen | Mail Online

Author Terry Pratchett writes about his experiences with PCA alzheimer's with moving frankness. Because his rare form of Alzheimer's largely focuses on the loss of physical skills, he remains articulate and reasoned in his view. He strikes an important blow for cognitive accuracy in facing the world as it is and not as we wish it could be.

It is a strange life when you ‘come out’. People get embarrassed, lower their voices, get lost for words. Part of the report I’m helping to launch today reveals that 50 per cent of Britons think there is a stigma surrounding dementia. Only 25 per cent think there is still a stigma associated with cancer.

The stories in the report - of people being told they were too young or intelligent to have dementia; of neighbours crossing the street and friends abandoning them - are like something from a horror novel.

We can't find a cure for something we are afraid to talk about, right?

Pratchett's article seems to me like it could come straight out of a coursebook on cognitive accuracy:

What is needed is will and determination. The first step is to talk openly about dementia because it’s a fact, well enshrined in folklore, that if we are to kill the demon then first we have to say its name.

Pratchett has given $1 million pounds to help push research on Alzheimer's forward, and to break through the superstitious prejudice that most people still feel about this very physical disease.

To see the full report, Dementia: Out Of The Shadows go to www.alzheimers.org.uk, or the Alzheimer’s Research Trust www.alzheimers-research.org.uk

Two words

Two simple words can end many a pointless argument: "to me". Consider Benjamin Franklin's observation:

Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so. It is not so. It is so. It is not so.

Imagine it recast with "to me":

It is so, to me. It is not so, to me......okay, let's go have a beer.

In my youth, my well-educated, Catholic family used a lot of Latin in normal conversation. One phrase stuck with me and blossomed much later when I learned more about "to me" and general relativity:

De gustibus non disputandum.

"In matters of taste, we cannot dispute." In other words, if you add "to me", you change from making a statement that others can challenge ("butter is good") to one they cannot challenge ("I consider butter delicious and healthful.") They may NOT consider butter delicious or healthful, but you didn't say THAT, you said YOU CONSIDER it so. To disagree with that, they would have to be inside your head, and they are not. They can only take your word on the validity of the statement--only YOU know if you actually consider butter delicious.

Applying this to your reactions to others offers an equally agreeable respite: if you simply add, out loud or sotto voce, "to you" whenever someone states their opinion as fact, you can simply accept their statement as one about their "state of mind" and moderate your reaction. You may disagree with the view they appear to hold, but you have no reason or motivation to disagree that they hold it. This can greatly reduce stress in otherwise stressful interactions.

Or so it seems, to me. ;-)

Who do you think you "are"?

Paul Newman died today. I read some quotes from interviews he did and once really stuck out:

The light that you think you emanate is not necessarily the light that other people see.

At times like this, I realize that most of the valuable notions in general semantics do not represent radical, unheard of perspectives that no one ever thought before, although perhaps no one had ever pulled the ideas together and systematized them as Korzybski did.

Newman lived a highly challenging, varied life full of opportunities and advantages. This quote clearly says, to me, that no matter who YOU think you are, others see you differently.

We know this because we understand non-identity and to-me-ness and all the other gs formulations.

I think he knew this because he had the good sense to learn from his experiences, and apparently he learned the wisdom of relativity.

Why truth "is" never "true"

Today I happened across this quote from Ernest Hemingway:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.

On the face of it, I think he means that a good story says something we can all relate to. Fine.

But it then occurred to me to ask why fiction accomplishes that better than non-fiction. And the answer jumped out at me: fiction can leave out all the stuff that makes things gray and imprecise and ambiguous.

So what does that say about "truth"? I think it says that "truth is what you get when you leave out the stuff that doesn't quite fit." In other words, when you dial the gray areas into black and white, then you have something you can make a solid decision about: black bad, white good. Which might explain why we find it so hard to pin down "truth" and why we argue about it so much.

In Levels of Knowing and Existence, Harry Weinberg devotes a whole chapter to discussing beauty. In a "beautiful" example of clear and unequivocal logic, he shows that the quest for "beauty" cannot possibly succeed, because "it" doesn't exist. He describes how we apply the word "beauty" to wildly disparate experiences for wildly different reasons, and says, in effect, that we use the word "beauty" when we experience a range of feelings, triggered by a range of experiences, but that no thing exists that we can call "beauty". I recall thinking at the time, that beauty is kind of like your "lap" or your "voice": it only "exists" while you are "using" it, because it has more to do with a moment and a process.

"Truth" falls into the same category: something can only "be true" as long as we narrow the object to something specific, for a particular person, for a particular time. No "thing" exists that we can call "truth". Only by a quirk of language does the word qualify as a noun, which tricks us into believing that it must, like other nouns, "exist" "out there".

In GS, we try to address this problem by "dating" and "indexing": "this is true at this time for this purpose" for example. But does that really address the problem? It still implies a certain amount of noun-ness, as I see it. We might do better to craft a new form of word, something that embodies "observer's semantic reacting".

Stephen Colbert's lovely coinage, "truthiness", comes close, by incorporating the inherent subjectivity of an observation of "truth" as seen in this definition from Wikipedia:

Truthiness is a word that U.S. television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Granted some things seem to evoke the reaction of "truth" more reliably than others, but when every such event involves dimensions of perspective, time, and context, I don't see any "there" there that all people would agree on for all times and purposes.

So, in effect, "truth" is never "true", it only kind of "feels" or "seems" "true" "for now" "to me". Or so it seems, to me.

What Does It Mean To Be Alive?

What Does It Mean To Be Alive?

Science Daily reports on a study that suggests that "knowledge is shaped by language." The study compared children who speak English with children who speak Indonesian, specifically in terms of how they classify things as "alive."

In English, the word "animal" can sometimes refer to all living beings, including humans, while at other times it refers only to non-human living beings. In Indonesian, the equivalent word unambiguously excludes humans. In the study, the two groups of children identified pictures of things as "alive" or not. Indonesian children easily included plants and animals in the "alive" group, while English-speaking children even up to age 9 often excluded plants. The researchers concluded that

"understanding the conceptual consequences of language differences will serve as an effective tool in our efforts to advance the educational needs of children."

"Conceptual consequences of language differences...." Where have I heard something like that before? Oh yeah, Sapir Whorf, anybody?

The Gentle Art of Deconstruction

Tempting times reveal a richness of language
Author Ruth Wajnryb, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, pauses to savor how a little other-awareness can make a simple email message seem like a rich exchange of meaning. We get to listen in as she contemplates how much more a person can say simply by sharing words with a sympathetic friend. Along the way, she also provides an admirable model of self-awareness.