Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough -- that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy? Brené is the author of I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power (2007) and the forthcoming books, The Gifts of Imperfection (2010) and Wholehearted: Spiritual Adventures in Falling Apart, Growing Up, and Finding Joy ( 2011).

Carl Jung - Matters of Heart

Documentary on the life and work of Carl Jung.

Tim Kasser: What Makes For a Merry Christmas?

Lisa Coon at the Register-Mail reports on Knox College professor Tim Kasser's research on people’s holiday well-being:

Most people likely aren’t living Christmas the way they truly want to live it, according to a Knox College psychology professor who has surveyed people on what makes for a Merry Christmas.

“Most people would say what’s important at Christmas time is family and spirituality,” said Tim Kasser, who has been at Knox since 1995 and serves as chairman of the psychology department.

Those people, however, need to take a look at how they’re spending their time.

“Are you spending your time with family or are you at the mall shopping? Are you at church or are you on eBay? The answers may signal to you that you’re not living Christmas the way you want to live it,” said Kasser, author of the book “The High Price of Materialism,” and co-author of a 2002 study “What Makes For a Merry Christmas.”

Kasser has spent his career researching people’s values and quality of life and the impact of consumerism on those areas.

The study was “kind of a microcosm” about a very specific and important time of the year.

The study, conducted after Christmas 2001 and including responses from 117 Knox County residents and Knox students, is the only research to be found that specifically addresses people’s well-being around Christmas, Kasser said.

For that reason, media from around the country (and yes, even here) contact Kasser around this time of year to solicit his input about whether people are happier being stressed about the holiday, rushing around buying gifts, fretting over the big feast and getting worked up about receiving the perfect gift.

Or, are they happier when they focus on spending time with family and drawing satisfaction from the spirituality of the season.

In regards to the survey, it specifically asked people about the importance of family, religion, traditions such as cutting down the tree, the need to help others, hedonistic aspects such as eating the big turkey dinner and the materialistic aspects of spending and receiving.

“We found that spirituality and family enhanced Christmas well-being,” Kasser said. “Those people reported having a merrier Christmas.”

The study also looked at alternative holiday practices such as being environmentally friendly.

“We found the more engaged in environmental friendliness, the happier they were,” Kasser said. “This is important because Christmas has a very bad environmental impact; what with wrapping paper and the use of electricity for the lights. ... You can have a more sustainable Christmas and be happier. It’s potentially compatible.

“It really suggests you can simplify your Christmas and have a happier Christmas,” he said.

Kasser isn’t surprised his eight-year-old study continues to receive attention.

“From my conversations with people, they’re not real happy with how Christmas has evolved in this culture,” he said. “If everyone was satisfied, nobody would pay much attention to our findings. It comes back to the nagging feeling that something is amiss.”

Kasser prefaced his next comments by saying he is not a Christian but his wife, Ginny, and their 11- and 13-year-old sons are. His wife and sons attend Christmas Eve services.

“I think Jesus was one of the best anti-materialistic people ever,” Kasser said. “Yet, his birthday has become a celebration of consumerism, and from what I’ve read, that’s the last way he would want his birthday celebrated.”

So what has happened in our culture?

“Consumerism and capitalism has taken over an aspect of life in order to make a profit from it,” Kasser said. “More people focus on the materialistic aspect of Christmas while less of their focus is on the spirituality of Christmas. This has created a tension between Jesus and Santa.

“I say this not as a Christian,” he said. “I think it’s fascinating at a scientific level and disturbing on a personal level.”

So how do Kasser and his family celebrate Christmas? As simplistically as they can.

The family lives in the country and they grow their own Christmas tree, cut down their tree and then it gets fed to the goats. “So it gets reused and not thrown in a dump,” he said.

They hardly use any Christmas lights in their decorating. And when it comes to gift-giving, Kasser’s wife starts preparing in October by going through all of the boys’ toys, books and clothing and loading the car with items to give away.

“So we don’t feel we are overwhelmed with possessions,” Kasser said.

The boys receive stocking stuffers, one gift from Santa and one gift from their parents.

“We’ve learned we can’t control what the relatives do,” he said. “We can ask, but we can’t control.”

The family also has a history of giving meaningful coupons to each other. For example, the house rule is no dessert without first eating the fruit and vegetable served at dinner. The boys may get a coupon allowing them to skip the veggies and move straight to the dessert. Or they may get a coupon for extra “screen time” on the computer or playing videos. The boys in turn have some favorites to give their parents, such as a free back massage or taking out the compost.

They also don’t stress over the big meal. On Christmas Eve, Ginny Kasser and the boys pick up a take-out pizza on their way back from church services. “That’s our Christmas Eve meal,” Kasser said.

And for Christmas dinner, there’s no stressing over the turkey. The family gets a tofurkey from Cornucopia.

“She doesn’t have to make it and we’re supporting a local business,” Kasser said.

Wrapping paper consists of the Sunday comics and reusable gift bags.

Kasser’s advice for those wanting to shift to a more simplistic holiday is to go slow and steady, especially if there are children.

“You can’t just impose it on your children,” he said. “There has to be a conversation helping them to understand why you want to make the shift and what they’d be open to.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Study Finds Prayer can Help with Handling Harmful Emotions

Those who choose to pray find personalized comfort during hard times, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist.

The 75 percent of Americans who pray on a weekly basis do so to manage a range of negative situations and emotions — illness, sadness, trauma and anger — but just how they find relief has gone unconsidered by researchers.

Through the course of in-depth interviews with dozens of victims of violent relationships with intimate partners, Shane Sharp, a graduate student studying sociology at UW-Madison, gathered an array of ways prayer helped them deal with their situation and emotions through coping mechanisms such as venting. Sharp's interviewees represented a wide swath of the United States in geographic, educational and racial terms, and came largely from Christian backgrounds.

Those who were boiling with anger said they found "a readily available listening ear," says Sharp, who explores how prayer helps manage emotional pain in the current issue of the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

"If they vented their anger to that abusive partner, the result was likely to be more violence," Sharp says. "But they could be angry at God while praying without fear of reprisal."

During any interpersonal interaction, the participants are considering how they look through the other's eyes. In the case of people who pray, they are considering God's view.

"During prayer, victims came to see themselves as they believed God saw them. Since these perceptions were mostly positive, it helped raise their senses of self-worth that counteracted their abusers' hurtful words," Sharp says.

Prayer is also a handy distraction for some, Sharp's study found. Simply folding hands and concentrating on what to say is a reprieve from the anxiety of an abusive relationship. The experience isn't that much different from a conversation with a close friend or a parent, he says.

"I looked at the act of praying, of speaking to God, as the same as a legitimate social interaction," Sharp says. "Instead of a concrete interaction you would have face-to-face with another person, prayer is with an imagined other."

That's not to diminish God's role by considering him an imagined participant in a prayer, Sharp adds. "On the contrary, I wouldn't expect prayer to have these benefits for people if they thought God wasn't real," he says. "The important point is that they believe God is real, and that has consequences for them emotionally and for their behavior."

Yet, the consequences of prayer aren't always positive. "For some, through prayer they told me they learned to forgive their abusive partners, to let go of their anger and resentment," Sharp says. "But that's a double-edged sword. It's good for those who are out of that violent relationship to let go of it to a certain extent. But if they're still in their violent relationship, it may postpone their decision to leave, and that can be bad."

That double-edged sword makes the mechanics of prayer an important topic for new research, according to Sharp. "Religion is often pointed to as a mostly positive or mostly negative thing," he says. "It's way more complicated than that."

Many of those interviewed by Sharp said they believe in God, but don't belong to a specific church. "They still pray," he says. "It's the most common religious practice you can find. For that reason alone it deserves more attention, and I think future research should consider prayer as an interaction instead of a one-sided act."

PRESS RELEASE HERE

Thinking at the Edge

Thinking at the Edge (TAE), like Focusing, is a practice developed from the Philosophy of the Implicit. Here Mary Hendricks (Director of The Focusing Institute) and Eugene Gendlin introduce key concepts and describe TAE

It is a set of exact steps to develop a fresh use of language and a new kind of theory to speak from something in one's field which one knows but has not been able to say or write. This is a way to say something that can restructure the basic terms and practices in a field, rather than being able to say what fits the current viewpoint.
~5min excerpt from 235min 2xdvd set, videotaped in NY 2002.

Toward a Humanistic Positive Psychology: Why Can't We Just Get Along?

Kirk J. Schneider at Psychology Today reports:

In this article, I propose that despite the nay-saying 1) positive psychology is justifiably a branch of humanistic psychology, and 2) a humanistic positive psychology would be salutary to the profession of psychology. From the standpoint of theory, I show how positive psychology shares humanistic psychology's concern with what it means to be fully, experientially human, and how that understanding illuminates the vital or fulfilled life. However, I also show how the findings of positive psychology, particularly in the area "happiness" research-or what has recently been termed "human flourishing," stop short of the fuller aforementioned aims. Specifically, I show how positive psychology appears to oversimplify both the experience of human flourishing and its social-adaptive value. While the positive psychology findings on flourishing are useful in limited contexts, e.g., in terms of their implications for the attainment of pleasure, physical health, and cultural competency, they are inadequate with respect to the more complicated contexts of creativity, emotional depth, and social consciousness. I will detail the nature of these discrepancies, such as their implications for perception of reality, psychological growth, and capacity for self-reflection, and consider their role in an expanded vision of human resiliency.

Overview

Positive psychology is justifiably a branch of humanistic psychology. Let me clarify: To the extent that humanistic psychology stands for "What it means to be fully and experientially human, and how that understanding illuminates the vital and fulfilled life" -and it does, according to humanistic texts (e.g., see Moss, 2001 and Schneider, Bugental, & Pierson, 2001, p. xx)--I hereby advocate for a branch of humanistic psychology called positive psychology.

I am happy (and I use that word advisedly!) to endorse humanistic psychology as a positive psychology, and positive psychology as a humanism-yet with one major caveat: Positive psychology as it is presently constituted reflects what I call a "narrow band," cognitive-behaviorally informed theoretical perspective. What I mean by this is that prevailing studies of happiness (or even that which has been termed human flourishing) represent but a circumscribed range of how such phenomena are actually experienced--"on the ground," so to speak, in people's everyday worlds. If this were not the case, I don't think we'd see so many contradictory cases in positive psychology research, but I will elaborate on this momentarily.

Broad Band vs. Narrow Ban

To the extent that positive psychology is viewed for what it is, therefore--a narrow band formulation of a broad band experience --I welcome it into the humanistic mosaic. On the other hand, to the extent that positive psychology, that is, narrow band investigation, is mistaken for broad band comprehension, I have grave concerns, not just for the alliance of positive psychology and humanism, but for the alliance of our field with life.

To restate my case, I have nothing against narrow bands; within their proper contexts, they can have great value-such as their contribution to clarity, contentment, and order. The problem is that those things represent only slices of life, not life itself. Or to quote another wary observer of the human scene: "Twice two makes four is...not life, gentlemen, [but] the beginning of death" (Dostoyevsky, 1864/1975). Hence, while narrow bands can have great value, they can also pose great hazards, and these hazards are necessary to point out-especially today-when twice two makes four is increasingly trumpeted as constituting life.

Problems with Narrow Band Positive Psychology

As I view it, there are three main problems with a humanistically deprived (cognitive-behaviorally informed) positive psychology: 1) methodological narrowness; 2) neglect of the tragic dimension; and 3) susceptibility to the expedient; and all three bode dubiously for our society.

The positive notions of happiness and flourishing, therefore, are not just remote academic inquiries; they are innermost challenges to our nature and world today-and that is why this symposium is so imperative.

Without further ado then, let me illustrate how I believe a humanistically deprived positive psychology is impacting us today, and what, if any, steps we can take to remedy this situation-that is, to reconnect humanism and positive psychology for the enhancement of psychology as a whole.

In their 2005 article in the American Psychologist, Fredrickson and Losada conclude that human flourishing, which they define as an "optimal range of... functioning...that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience," is predictable based on one key factor-a "positivity ratio" (p. 678). What is a positivity ratio? It is a quantitative proportion of positive-(that is pleasant, grateful, upbeat, appreciative, and enjoyable) feelings-over negative (that is unpleasant contemptuous, irritable, disdainful, and aversive) feelings (p. 678). Further they identify a positivity ratio of 2.9 as the threshold for flourishing based on their review of the relevant research. In other words, one must attain a ratio of about three "good thoughts" to every single bad thought, in order to achieve what the authors call human flourishing. Or to put it another way, the "flourishing factors of goodness ("indexed by happiness, satisfaction, and superior functioning"); generativity ("indexed by broadened thought-action repertoires and behavioral flexibility"); growth ("indexed by gains in enduring personal and social resources"); and resilience ("indexed by survival and growth in the aftermath of adversity") are significantly "linked to a positivity ratio at or above 2.9" (p. 685).

Now these findings are notable, and help us to understand something about "optimal" human functioning within a context of narrowly operationalized definitions, strictly codified measures, and carefully controlled observations. [Granted, the researchers did use what they term "nonlinear, dynamic" equations (p. 680) to account for the relative variability of emotional processing, but nevertheless, their findings strike me as neither fluid nor dynamic-sorry!]

Contradictions in the Positive Findings

Furthermore, what the researchers don't help us to understand-and what will be essential to understand if we are ever to substantively broach human vitality-is how positivity ratios also appear to correlate with destructive human tendencies. For example, a growing body of research appears to suggest that what the researchers call high positivity-a disposition to pleasant, grateful, and upbeat feelings-is also correlative with a dimension called "positive illusion" (relative inaccuracy regarding reality); and that negativity (or what is generally characterized as mild to moderate depression) is correlated with relatively greater accuracy concerning reality (Alloy & Abramson, 1988; Tedeschi & Calhoon, 1995). These findings, moreover, also appear to square with recent correlations between highly positive people and suppressed psychological growth, inability to self-reflect, and racial intolerance (Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser, 1994; Stambor, 2005, p. 13).

Furthermore, if we couple the above findings on positivity with the consistent findings that approximately 80% of the American (U.S.) population calls itself happy (Time Magazine, 2005, January), then we have some very puzzling (some would say, troubling) juxtapositions to account for. For example a quarter of the U.S. population (presumably a healthy percentage of the happy 80%) believes that "using violence to get what they want is acceptable" (Rifkin, 2005, p. 32). Nearly half "are more likely to believe that human nature is basically evil, and that ‘one must belong to the one, true religion to lead the best, most meaningful life'" (Spirituality & Health, May/June, 2005, 27); 59% believe that the prophesies in the book of Revelations (such as the Rapture and a war with Islam in the final reckoning) are going to come true (Moyers, 2005); and 67% of US men and 57% of US women are overweight or obese (Payne, 2005).

Finally, the researchers fail to explain how high positivity seems to be correlated with some of the most egregious forms of behavior in the history of our world. To wit, the eye-witness reports of Nazi party rallies and the mass enthrallment with authoritarian leaders (Shirer, 1960; Goldhagen, 1996). William Shirer, for example, noted that by the time of his Nuremberg address in the early 1930's, Hitler had received "the most frenzied adulation for a public figure that [Shirer had] ever seen" (p. 230).

On a much tamer level, although still to the point, Richard Handler (2006), a reporter for the Psychotherapy Networker wrote at the conclusion of a positive psychology course taught by no less than its acclaimed founder that: "Seligman has undoubtedly done the field of psychology an enormous service by demonstrating that ...the study of what makes people happy, optimistic, and wise is just as important as the study of what makes them anxious, depressed, and crazy....And yet I am still left wondering if...the will to try for the optimistic life must come from something deeper, more mysterious, [and] less definable"(p.12).

"Oddly enough, " Handler concluded, "while we were never supposed to give in to negativity and depression, they both shadowed the whole course; they were the unacknowledged elephants lurking in the corner" (p. 11).

Perhaps genuine happiness is not something you aim at, but is, as Frankl once noted, a byproduct of a life well lived-and a life well lived does not settle on the programmed or neatly calibrated.

Consider Rollo May's (1981, pp. 241, 242) distinction between happiness and the more fecund (in his view) "joy:"

"Happiness depends generally on one's outer state; joy is an overflowing of inner energies and leads to awe and wonderment....Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher harmonies. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary to break new frontiers."

Summary and Conclusion

In short, positive psychology and its cognitive-behaviorally informed theoretical base have a lot of explaining to do. If scoring high on positive psychology scales-which often means enjoying lots of friends and family, and frequently going to church-encompasses the oblivious couch potato as well as the fanatical ideologue, something is amiss.

Furthermore, the ratio of positive to negative feelings would seem to be a very crude indicator indeed of the highly nuanced and multimodal experiences of flourishing and happiness. On the other hand, a humanistcially informed positive psychology, in my view, could help redress that explanatory chasm. By marshalling perceptive, subtly nuanced, quantitative and qualitative data, we may discover a very different portrait of the "flourishing" person. This portrait would likely unveil a many-textured personality-closer to Zorba the Greek, than to Dick or Jane who may well keep a clean and orderly life, but who, at the same time, may also quietly endorse a materialist, militarist, and imperialist lifestyle. How else will we find out about such discrepancies unless we employ methodologies that cut beneath the deceptive surfaces of human performance (Shedler, Mayman, Manis, 1993).

Hence in answer to the question that I posed at the beginning of this article: What it means to be fully, experientially human, and how that illuminates the vital life--I advocate for a humanistically informed positive psychology, one that would supplement positive psychology scales with intimate, in-depth portraitures, and that would augment positive psychology theorizing with theorizing that accounts for the pithier ranges of human fulfillment. In his study of self-actualizers, Abe Maslow (1968) made a similar point. One observation that had long stumped him, he said, began to fall into place, and that is that "these most mature of all people were also strongly childlike. These same people [with] the strongest egos ever described and the most definitely individual, were also precisely the ones who could be most egoless, self-transcending, and problem-centered" (p. 140).

"Now it is very curious," wrote Rollo May (1995, p. 99) along a parallel line of investigation, "that each of [the creative therapists he-May--admired was] great in exactly his weakest point." For example, "Harry Stack Sullivan, the person who could never relate to others, founded...interpersonal [psychiatry];" Abe Maslow, "who had so many hellish experiences [as a child growing up in the streets of New York] founded...the school of peak experience and the human potential movement." May goes on: "the experience of degeneration...is I hope, temporary, but [it] can often be used as a way of reforming and reorganizing ourselves on a higher level. As C.G. Jung puts it, ‘the gods return in our diseases" (p.100).

And it is precisely for reasons like these, that we need a humanistically informed positive psychology today. For, far from being diversionary-or God forbid, fuzzy-minded(!)--a humanistically informed positive psychology would aim straight at the paradoxes of human well-being studies-resolutely excavating their depths, their complexities, and their ambiguities (Schneider, 2004, 2009). A humanistically informed positive psychology would acknowledge the capacities of depression or anger or fear to distort, but it would also, and at the same time, recognize their capacities to clarify, liberate, and sensitize. In short, a humanistically informed positive psychology would foster a brute inquiry of being. Such an inquiry would be forged in "the lived truth of the terror of creation," as the noted anthropologist, Ernest Becker (1973, p. 283) once phrased it, "with full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow" (p. 284). Anything less, as he also noted, would be a dereliction of both our science and our practice.

References

Alloy, L., & Abramson, L. (1988). Depressive realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L. B. Alloy (Ed.), Cognitive processes in depression (pp. 223-265). New York: Guilford.

Becker, E. (1973). Denial of death. New York: Free Press.

Bodenhausen, G., Kramer, G., & Susser, K. (1994). Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(4), 621-632.

Floyd, M., Coulon, C., Yanez, A. P., and Lasota, M. T. (2005). The existential effects of traumatic experiences: A survey of young adults. Death Studies, 29, 55-63.

Goldhagen, D. (1996). Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York : Alfred A. Knopf.

Fredrickson, B.. & Losada,M. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60, 678-686.

May, R. (1981). Freedom and destiny. New York: Norton.

May, R. (1995). The wounded healer. In K. Schneider & R. May (Eds.) The psychology of existence (pp. 98-102). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Maslow, A. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. New York: Van Nostrand.

Moss, D. (2001). The roots and genealogy of humanistic psychology. In K. Schneider, F. Pierson, & J. Bugental (Eds.) The handbook of humanistic psychology: Leading edges in theory, practice, and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Moyers, B. (2005, January 30). Harvard commencement address. (Survey based on a 2002 Time-CNN poll.)

Payne, J. (2005, March 16). Obesity spreads across the Atlantic to Europe. San Francisco Chronicle, p. A-12.

Rifkin, J. (2005). The European dream. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

Schneider, K., Bugental, J., & Pierson, J. (2001). The handbook of humanistic psychology: Leading edges of theory, practice, and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Schneider, K. (2004). Rediscovery of awe: Splendor, mystery, and the fluid center of life. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House.

Schneider, K. (2009). Awakening to awe: Personal stories of profound transformation. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.

Shirer, W. (1960). The rise and fall of the third reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Stambor, Z. (2005, June). Self-reflection may lead independently to creativity, depression. American Psychological Association Monitor, 36,13.

Tedeschi, R. & Calhoon, L. (1995). Trauma and transformation: Growing in the aftermath of suffering. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Hanna Rosin: New Data on the Rise of Women

Hanna Rosin reviews startling new data that shows women actually surpassing men in several important measures, such as college graduation rates. Do these trends, both US-centric and global, signal the "end of men"? Probably not -- but they point toward an important societal shift worth deep discussion.

A Conversation with Loren Mosher, Robert Whitaker and Dan Kriegman

In this video, psychiatrist Loren Mosher, M.D., former Chief of Schizophrenia Studies at NIMH, journalist Bob Whitaker, author of the acclaimed "Mad in America: The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill," and psychologist Dan Kriegman, Ph.D., founder of Zuzu's Place, examine the way in which Big Pharma exaggerates the efficacy of their products and hides evidence of their dangers. Evidence is also presented to show that Big Pharma is composed of "true believers," i.e., the psychiatrists and drug execs are not just pushers; they're users!

This video is excerpted from a full length documentary entitled "The Truth about 'Schizophrenia'" For more information about this video, visit this link: http://www.yoism.org/zp/?q=node/70

The so-called "antidepressants" blunt feelings but are actually not very effective in diminishing depression per se. On the other hand, in a small number of cases, they lead to tragic violence.

For more videos about this topic, see http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/234
For more information about "schizophrenia" and the movie, see http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/120

Out of Our Brains

Andy Clark at the New York Times reports:

Where is my mind?

The question — memorably posed by rock band the Pixies in their 1988 song — is one that, perhaps surprisingly, divides many of us working in the areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Look at the science columns of your daily newspapers and you could be forgiven for thinking that there is no case to answer. We are all familiar with the colorful “brain blob” pictures that show just where activity (indirectly measured by blood oxygenation level) is concentrated as we attempt to solve different kinds of puzzles: blobs here for thinking of nouns, there for thinking of verbs, over there for solving ethical puzzles of a certain class, and so on, ad blobum. (In fact, the brain blob picture has seemingly been raised to the status of visual art form of late with the publication of a book of high-octane brain images. )

There is no limit, it seems, to the different tasks that elicit subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, different patterns of neural activation. Surely then, all the thinking must be going on in the brain? That, after all, is where the lights are.

As our technologies become better adapted to fit the niche provided by the biological brain, they become more like cognitive prosthetics.

But then again, maybe not. We’ve all heard the story of the drunk searching for his dropped keys under the lone streetlamp at night. When asked why he is looking there, when they could surely be anywhere on the street, he replies, “Because that’s where the light is.” Could it be the same with the blobs?

Is it possible that, sometimes at least, some of the activity that enables us to be the thinking, knowing, agents that we are occurs outside the brain?

The idea sounds outlandish at first. So let’s take a familiar kind of case as a first illustration. Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk. For many years, it was assumed that this bodily action served at best some expressive purpose, perhaps one of emphasis or illustration. Psychologists and linguists such as Susan Goldin-Meadow and David McNeill have lately questioned this assumption, suspecting that the bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along.
“Brain Cloud (2010)” on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of a show by John Baldessari,Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times. It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution. There may be more to so-called “handwaving” than meets the eye.

This kind of idea is currently being explored by a wave of scientists and philosophers working in the areas known as “embodied cognition” and “the extended mind.” Uniting these fields is the thought that evolution and learning don’t give a jot what resources are used to solve a problem. There is no more reason, from the perspective of evolution or learning, to favor the use of a brain-only cognitive strategy than there is to favor the use of canny (but messy, complex, hard-to-understand) combinations of brain, body and world. Brains play a major role, of course. They are the locus of great plasticity and processing power, and will be the key to almost any form of cognitive success. But spare a thought for the many resources whose task-related bursts of activity take place elsewhere, not just in the physical motions of our hands and arms while reasoning, or in the muscles of the dancer or the sports star, but even outside the biological body — in the iPhones, BlackBerrys, laptops and organizers which transform and extend the reach of bare biological processing in so many ways. These blobs of less-celebrated activity may sometimes be best seen, myself and others have argued, as bio-external elements in an extended cognitive process: one that now criss-crosses the conventional boundaries of skin and skull.

One way to see this is to ask yourself how you would categorize the same work were it found to occur “in the head” as part of the neural processing of, say, an alien species. If you’d then have no hesitation in counting the activity as genuine (though non-conscious) cognitive activity, then perhaps it is only some kind of bio-envelope prejudice that stops you counting the same work, when reliably performed outside the head, as a genuine element in your own mental processing?

Another way to approach the idea is by comparison with the use of prosthetic limbs. After a while, a good prosthetic limb functions not as a mere tool but as a non-biological bodily part. Increasingly, the form and structure of such limbs is geared to specific functions (consider the carbon-fiber running blades of the Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius) and does not replicate the full form and structure of the original biological template. As our information-processing technologies improve and become better and better adapted to fit the niche provided by the biological brain, they become more like cognitive prosthetics: non-biological circuits that come to function as parts of the material underpinnings of minds like ours.

Many people I speak to are perfectly happy with the idea that an implanted piece of non-biological equipment, interfaced to the brain by some kind of directly wired connection, would count (assuming all went well) as providing material support for some of their own cognitive processing. Just as we embrace cochlear implants as genuine but non-biological elements in a sensory circuit, so we might embrace “silicon neurons” performing complex operations as elements in some future form of cognitive repair. But when the emphasis shifts from repair to extension, and from implants with wired interfacing to “explants” with wire-free communication, intuitions sometimes shift. That shift, I want to argue, is unjustified. If we can repair a cognitive function by the use of non-biological circuitry, then we can extend and alter cognitive functions that way too. And if a wired interface is acceptable, then, at least in principle, a wire-free interface (such as links your brain to your notepad, BlackBerry or iPhone) must be acceptable too. What counts is the flow and alteration of information, not the medium through which it moves.

When information flows, some of the most important unities may emerge in regimes that weave together activity in brain, body and world.

Perhaps we are moved simply by the thought that these devices (like prosthetic limbs) are detachable from the rest of the person? Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote in the seventh volume of his epic “De Anima (Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus)” that “These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members” (translation by R. Martin). Much the same is true, I want to say, of our own cognitive circuitry.

The fact that there is a stable biological core that we do not “remove and throw down” blinds us to the fact that minds, like bodies, are collections of parts whose deepest unity consists not in contingent matters of undetachability but in the way they (the parts) function together as effective wholes. When information flows, some of the most important unities may emerge in integrated processing regimes that weave together activity in brain, body, and world.

Such an idea is not new. Versions can be found in the work of James, Heidegger, Bateson, Merleau-Ponty, Dennett, and many others. But we seem to be entering an age in which cognitive prosthetics (which have always been around in one form or another) are displaying a kind of Cambrian explosion of new and potent forms. As the forms proliferate, and some become more entrenched, we might do well to pause and reflect on their nature and status. At the very least, minds like ours are the products not of neural processing alone but of the complex and iterated interplay between brains, bodies, and the many designer environments in which we increasingly live and work.

Please don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are neuroscientists and neuro-imagers (as it happens, my partner is a neuro-imager, so brain blobs are part of our daily diet). The brain is a fantastic beast, more than worthy of the massive investments we make to study it. But we — the human beings with versatile bodies living in a complex, increasingly technologized, and heavily self-structured, world — are more fantastic still. Really understanding the mind, if the theorists of embodied and extended cognition are right, will require a lot more than just understanding the brain. Or as the Pixies put it:

Where is my mind?

Way out in the water, see it swimming

Andy Clark is professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He is the author of “Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again” (MIT Press, 1997) and “Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension” (Oxford University Press, 2008).

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Does Thinking Happen In The Brain?

Alva Noe at NPR reports:

Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels and wants and decides. Each of us is that thing.

This is the traditional view of mind, the view that has dominated establishment research into cognition and consciousness for the last 500 years.

Contemporary scientists — neuroscientists as well as other cognitive scientists — by and large take this basic schema for granted no less than Descartes did. Of course, today’s thinkers believe that thing inside us, which is the self we are, is a bit of our flesh (the brain). Descartes, for his part, could not conceive of how mere meat could produce mind, so he supposed that mind was an immaterial something. But this difference, it turns out, and as I argue in Out of Our Heads, is merely technical. Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.

This last claim is not controversial, not really. But then why are we so certain, as a scientific and as a popular culture, that the secrets to our nature lie inside us, in the brain?

Answer: We can’t imagine an alternative to this “you are your brain” idea that does not end up giving up on science. Either you are your brain, or you are a mystery.

But this is mistaken.

It’s like thinking that the only alternative to finding the value of money in the chemical composition of the bank notes would be supposing that monetary value is magical! And so here, is the case that interests us: there are good, sound, naturalistic approaches to the self and consciousness that give up the shopworn prejudice that we are identical to pieces of ourself inside our heads. The brain is necessary for our life, but it is hardly sufficient. A human being, like every living being, is a locus of densely interwoven coupling with the world around us. We make consciousness dynamically, in our exchange with the world around us. Ultimately, if we want to understand consciousness, we need to go out of our heads and look at the way we are embodied and also bound to and embedded in the world around us.

My topic for today, and next week, is recent work by John Dylan Haynes and his colleagues at the Humboldt University in Berlin on what they call Brain Reading. Let me say right at the outset: This is exciting work. It’s smart work. What interests me, though, is how easy it is to misunderstand the research itself and jump to the conclusion, entirely unwarranted, that it lends support to the Cartesian (= derived from Descartes) neuroscience from which we so urgently need to free our scientific and cultural imagination.

Let’s begin at the beginning: Mental acts and processes of all sorts — for example, feeling excited, thinking about someone, hoping for something to take place, savoring the taste chocolate — happen only thanks to the activation of systems in the brain and nervous system.

Some people confuse this truism — that mental episodes have neural correlates — with the further, entirely different claim that thoughts, feelings, experiences of taste, and the like, are, simply, events in the brain. This latter claim is not a truism. It is not even true.

How my car drives depends on what goes on inside its engine. Modifying the engine affects the driving behavior. Speeding up, slowing down, and such like, in turn, affect the engine. But it would be bizarre to say that the driving really happens in the engine. If my car has no wheels on it, or is up on the lift, it won’t drive, whatever happens inside the engine.

Brain stands to mind the way engine stands to driving. Or, to shift comparisons: to insist that thinking and feeling happen in the brain is rather like insisting that speech — talking — happens in the brain. We could not speak without the brain, to be sure. But speech also depends on many other physical processes — such as articulatory movements in the mouth and throat, and also respiratory activity. And of course it depends on social circumstances, and needs. People speak, and they do so thanks to their brains, and mouths, and throats, and much else besides (e.g. the existence of socially shared linguistic practices!)

Many mental processes or capacities depend on patterns of activation in specific areas of the brain. For example, visual recognition of faces is associated with neural activity in a region that has come to be known as the fusiform face area (FFA), whereas episodes of seeing houses (and other place-related items) are associated with activity in a different region (the so-called parahipocampal place area, PPA). Given correlations such as these, it is should not be surprising that facts about experience (e.g. that one is looking at a face) carry information about a person’s neural states. And vice versa. It ought to be possible, at least in principle, to find out that someone is experiencing a face by direct observation of neural activity in FFA.

Enter John Dylan Haynes and his colleagues at the Humboldt: prospects for “brain reading” have been greatly improved thanks to recent work by Haynes and his colleagues at the Humboldt in Berlin. They have developed techniques that allow one to determine a person’s cognitive state on the basis of neural data, even when, as happens to be the case, there is no one-to-one mapping between the occurrence of that cognitive state and neural activity in a specific location. Making use of computer-based multivariate pattern recognition software, they are able to use information about the brain’s total state gathered from brain imaging tools (fMRI) to make reliable predictions about a person’s mental state, in real time.

Is this brain reading, really? And what does it tell us about the neural substrates of experience? Does the possibility of this sort of brain reading lend support to the stronger claim that mental events are neural events?

CONTINUE TO FULL ARTICLE HERE

Disciplined (Un)Knowing: The Pedagogical Possibilities of Yogic Research as Praxis

This week in The Qualitative Report, Sarah K. MacKenzie of Bucknell University reports on her study, "Disciplined (Un)Knowing: The Pedagogical Possibilities of Yogic Research as Praxis." Here is the abstract with a link to the full article below:

Within this paper, I seek to engage with the possibilities that may exist when, through a yogic lens, we disrupt those unspoken, but accepted boundaries with/in research and pedagogy that separate art and science, reader and author, student and teacher, knowing and not knowing. Using multiple genres, I explore the practice of researching and the limitations of Truth seeking to create space for dialogue across the text, as reader and writer consider the pedagogical possibilities of letting go within research. In a culture that places a premium on knowing, this work can be uncomfortable, but in the discomfort one may discover new ways of knowing and seeing that invite praxis within pedagogy.

FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Creating Leaders: An Ontological Model

Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, and Kari L. Granger report, as forthcoming in The Handbook for Teaching Leadership (Sage, 2011):

Abstract:
The sole objective of our ontological approach to creating leaders is to leave students actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression. By “natural self-expression” we mean a way of being and acting in any leadership situation that is a spontaneous and intuitive effective response to what one is dealing with.

In creating leaders we employ the ontological discipline (from the Latin ontologia “science of being”, see Heidegger (1927)). The ontological model of leader and leadership opens up and reveals the actual nature of being when one is being a leader and opens up and reveals the source of one’s actions when exercising leadership. And ontology’s associated phenomenological methodology (explained in the next paragraph) provides actionable access to what has been opened up.

The being of being a leader and the actions of the effective exercise of leadership can be accessed, researched, and taught either: 1) as being and action are observed and commented on “from the stands”, specifically as these are observed by someone, and then described, interpreted and explained (third-person theory of), or 2) as being and action are actually experienced “on the court”, specifically as these are actually lived (real-time first-person experience of). As a formal discipline, the “on the court” method of accessing being and action (that is, as being and action are actually lived) is named phenomenology. In short, an epistemological mastery of a subject leaves one knowing. An ontological mastery of a subject leaves one being.

Of course the students themselves do not need to study ontology; they only require the access to being and the source of action that is provided by the ontological perspective. And, they don’t need to study phenomenology; they only need to be provided with the actionable pathway to the being of being a leader and the actions of effective leadership made available by the phenomenological methodology.

Keywords: Leader, Leadership, Ontology, Phenomenology, Context, Occur, Correlate, Natural Self Expression

FULL TEXT OF REPORT HERE

Early Intervention Essential to Success for at-Risk Children, Study Finds

Science Daily reports:

Children living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to succeed if they participate in a community-based prevention program, according to findings released recently from a multi-year research study based at Queen's University.

Children participating in the Better Beginnings, Better Futures (BBBF) project showed improved social and academic functioning. The project also impacted positively on families and on neighbourhoods.

"The results from our study indicate that the project has been a success," says Queen's psychology professor emeritus Ray Peters, the lead researcher on the study. "The project was designed to prevent young children in low-income, high-risk neighbourhoods from experiencing poor developmental outcomes, and to decrease the use of expensive health, education and social services. The study has proven that goal to be attainable."

The BBBF study is the most ambitious research project of its kind in Canada to date. 601 children between four and eight years old and their families as well as 358 children and their families from sociodemographically-matched comparison communities participated in the study. Extensive follow-up data were collected when the children were in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 12.

The researchers found marked positive effects in social and school functioning domains in Grades 6 and 9 and evidence of fewer emotional and behavioural problems in school. In Grade 12, study results continued to show positive effects on school functioning for BBBF children, who were also less likely to have committed property offences. Parents from BBBF sites reported greater feelings of social support and more positive ratings of marital satisfaction and general family functioning, especially at the Grade 9 follow-up. Positive neighborhood-level effects were also evident.

Economic analyses also showed BBBF participation was associated with significant government savings per child.

The Society for Research in Child Development, an international association with a membership of 5,500 researchers and practitioners from more than 50 countries, has published a 150-page monograph detailing the research findings.

The research was funded by the Government of Ontario, Ontario Mental Health Foundation, National Crime Prevention Centre and Public Safety Canada.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

BETTER BEGINNINGS, BETTER FUTURES WEBSITE

Kirk Schneider: Psychotherapy and the Mystery of Being

Recorded at the International Conference on Personal Meaning, Toronto Canada, July 25, 2008 by TV Ontario's "Big Ideas" program. For further information about the ideas discussed in this video see Kirk Schneider's recent books: "Rediscovery of Awe" (2004) and "Awakening to Awe" (2009) and his website: www.kirkjschneider.com