The Questioning Christian

Category: Brain

  • Free will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — but it’s probably not nothing either

    The determinist viewpoint recounted in this article seems like unwarranted either-or binary thinking. That view appears to posit that either we're totally in control of ourselves, or we have no control at all. I suspect that doesn't square with most people's personal experiences.

    (Cf. Paul's letter to the Romans: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."  Rom. 7.15)

    One problem might lie in the nomenclature. The term "free will" is simply wrong. And it's not like "sunrise," which is likewise wrong but for everyday purposes the error is harmless.

    (Article: Steven Cave, There's No Such Thing as Free Will, The Atlantic, June 2016.)

  • Tunnel vision is the source of so many of our troubles

    David Broder writes that President Obama’s quest for rational, evidence-based public policies is likely to be derailed by the tunnel vision of people acting like heat-seeking missiles, pushing and shoving in their single-minded struggles to get what they want:

    … [This highly rational, comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different players, most of whom are far more concerned with the particulars of policy than its overall coherence.

    The energy bill that went into the House was a reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere. When it came out, it was a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups. Now it is stymied by similar forces in the Senate.

    Schambra’s essay anticipated exactly what is happening on health care. Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

    But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it.

    Everyone has a parochial agenda.

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status.

    (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

    Of course, at an individual level this tunnel vision makes perfect sense. Harry Reid knows full well that his chances of reelection hinge more on his being able bring home the bacon than on whether he enacts policies good for the country as a whole.  (On a related note, see also this post about a mother whose tunnel vision enabled her to rescue her child from a polar bear.)

  • A brief meditation about a civilized prison – NY Times

    I’ve long wondered whether imprisonment, especially for long terms in unpleasant conditions, is the most effective ‘industry-standard’ consequence for criminal behavior. In the NY Times Magazine, Jim Lewis writes of a strikingly-‘civilized’ prison in Austria, musing about how American prisons came to be the way they are, and wondering whether “to borrow a phrase from a Conservative British home secretary, [prison] has been ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse.’”

    Excerpt:

    Does imprisonment work? It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide. * * *

    …  most crimes are committed either in the heat of the moment or by career criminals who consider themselves invincible. Few people in either group think about where they might wind up.

    When I asked one of the prisoners at Leoben if he was surprised by how nice it was, he said no; what surprised him was that he’d been caught in the first place.

    In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes.

    It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it.

    [Emphasis in original, extra paragraphing added.]

    Read it all.

  • Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

    Nicholas Kristof writes:

    Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

    Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

    The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

    Read it all, especially toward the end, concerning possible evolutionary bases for these divergent reactions – and how to compensate for them.

  • Original sin: Self-interest motivating self-deception

    “The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. … There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. …

    — Rodney Clapp, “American Soundings,” The Christian Century, Nov. 18, 2008, p. 45.

    Related posts:

  • Conservatives laugh more than liberals?

    From John Tierney’s column today in the NY Times:

    Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

    “I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

    Check it out.

  • Political differences may lie in different fear responses

    From the Boston Globe:

    … researchers found a strong correlation between subjects’ political attitudes and their physiological responses to threat. People who showed more “blink startle” and perspiration after a threatening stimulus tended to cluster on the right politically. They advocated capital punishment, school prayer, and defense spending, and they supported the Iraq war.

    In contrast, liberals – who supported “less protectionist” policies such as gun control, open immigration, and increased foreign aid – showed significantly less physical response to the threatening stimuli. … And the degree to which a person was startled by threatening stimuli indicated how much he or she advocated policies that protect society from external and internal threats such as wars and crime. [¶ ¶]

    When researchers compared subjects’ physical responses with their political opinions, they found a striking correlation. “It was clear,” Hibbing said, “that some individuals have certain central-nervous-system reactions in the part of the brain involved in fear – there’s a genetic basis for this – and this brain activity underlies both their startle response and their political views.”

    Eve LaPorte, Born to Party, Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 2008 (emphasis added; hat tip: Hacker News).

  • Nirvana may be a right-brain phenomenon

    "JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana. [¶] But she did it by having a stroke."

    Read the rest.  [UPDATE: See also the video of her TED talk is here (thanks to commenter ‘RedLefty’).]

  • Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

    From Eric Asimov, “Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” NY Times, May 7, 2008:

    But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

    The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

  • Emotion makes reasoned decisions possible

    “Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible.”

    — David Brooks, How Voters Think, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2008