Number 10 ~ TREADING (Conduct)

Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite the man. Success.

The situation is really difficult. That which is strongest and that which is weakest are close together. The weak follows behind the strong and worries it. The strong, however, acquiesces and does not hurt the weak, because the contact is in good humor and harmless. In terms of a human situation, one is handling wild, intractable people. In such a case, one's purpose will be achieved if one behaves with decorum. Pleasant manners succeed even with irritable people.

Consciousness is More Than Our Brains

As anyone who’s a steady reader of this blog knows, there are a lot of current scientific studies trying to explain how we think and how we view the world. The most recent one below is a good example ~ do religious people have a less active anterior cingulated cortex, and if so, what does that mean?

I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with many of these neuroscientific studies. Either the researchers themselves are becoming more extreme in what they believe the evidence shows, or the news articles are sensationalizing the findings.

Likely some of both.

That’s why I’m interested in a new book by Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California. In Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness, he clearly disputes that our brains can be understood in their entirety by a bunch of laboratory tests.

Here are some quotes from Noë that I lifted from a recent interview in Salon.com. They give you a good idea of where he’s coming from:

I don't reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That's just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I'm attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn't happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It's more like dance than it is like digestion.

* * * * *

I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain. People like Sam Harris, who worry about the irrationality of religious customs and practices, are right to be concerned. I agree that religion can be dangerous. But I don't think neuroscience is the way to understand it at all.

* * * * *

Instead of asking how the brain makes us conscious, we should ask, How does the brain support the kind of involvement with the world in which our consciousness consists? This is what the best neuroscientists do. The brain is not the author of our experience. If we want to understand the role of the brain, we should ask, How does the brain enable us to interact with and keep track of the world as we do? What makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has nothing to do with the cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, but rather with the way the cells' activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us.

Click here for the entire Salon.com interview.
Photo at left is Alva Noë

Does Religion Reduce Perception of Error?

(The more I think about this article, the more I feel it's open for wide interpretation. If the subject interests you, I recommend you follow the link to the complete article for more details.)

A team of researchers recently took a close look at a small area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, or ACC. According to research leader Michael Inzlicht, the ACC tells us when something is wrong, as when we've made a mistake.

"When it's fired, the response engendered is 'uh-oh, pay attention, something is amiss here'," says Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.

• Among his findings are that people of a religious persuasion have less of an ACC ‘uh-oh’ response than non-religious types when they make an error on a simple test.

• On the other hand, people with known anxiety disorders tend to show high activity in the ACC when they make a mistake.

One explanation is that people with a genetic predisposition to reduced ACC activity gravitate toward religion. "It's possible that if you're born with a certain kind of brain, you're predisposed to religion," Inzlicht says. A recent article in New Scientist adds:

However, Inzlicht suspects that religious belief is driving the association. In unpublished experiments, Inzlicht's team asked religious volunteers to describe in writing either their faith or their favourite season. Those who wrote about their connection to God exhibited reduced ACC activation, compared with people who described the weather.

Inzlicht says it would be interesting to test people as their religious devotion strengthens or weakens over time to see if ACC activation changes accordingly. This could help confirm the correct explanation for the lower ACC activity.

"It's a very provocative finding and it is consistent with a lot of other things we know about religion" says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This might explain why religious belief seems to blunt feelings of anxiety.

Inzlicht's team tested 50 university students from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Christians made up most participants, but his team also tested Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists.

Click here for the complete New Scientist article.

Some 'Possession' Cases Still Baffle Exorcists

St. Francis Borgia Exorcising, by Francisco Goya, 1788.

Does Evil exist? Does Satan? How about Demonic Possession?

Such questions are nearly as old as Western Civilization and even if such notions are discarded by the scientific and medical communities, they’re still excellent fodder for scary books and movies.

That’s why I was interested to read of a new book entitled The Rite by journalist Matt Baglio, who follows an American priest named Father Gary, who is sent to Rome to learn to become an exorcist.

TIME magazine this week printed an interview with Baglio. Here are a few of the more interesting questions and answers taken directly from the TIME interview:

When you started the book, did you lean one way or another in terms of whether or not you believed in the possibility of exorcism?


I came at this topic very journalistically, not having an opinion for or against it. I wanted to really understand what it is and why the church still believes in it. But even exorcists themselves admit that 90% of the people that come to see them don't need an exorcism. There still remains a small percentage of cases, however, involving levitation, mind-reading and other paranormal phenomena that can't be explained through science. Maybe one day.

So how is a priest supposed to figure out that an exorcism is warranted? How do they judge who is and who isn't a worthy candidate?


The ritual stipulates that there are three signs that the priest has to look for: abnormal strength, the ability to understand unknown languages and the knowledge of hidden things. But they're very arbitrary, even those things. So they have to be in concert with something else. And typically what priests look for is what they call the aversion to the sacred, which is a person's inability to pray, to say the name of Jesus or Mary, to even look at the priest. Typically, when the person comes to see them, it's the last thing they want to do. They tend to have gone to see many doctors in search of a medical cure for whatever is afflicting them. They don't believe that the problem is demonic. They don't come in and say, "Father, I'm being attacked by demons. You need to pray over me." When someone says that to them, the priests immediately discounts that the problem is demonic.

So what happens during the exorcism rite?

The ritual, as its written, has several different stages to it. You say the litany of saints, you read the Gospel, you say a homily. The priest is allowed to bring in other elements if he wants to — the renewal of the baptismal vows, for example. But at the core of it are the exorcism prayers themselves, which are composed of the imperative and the depreciatory. The depreciatory involves the exorcist entreating God — "God, come down and bless this person." The imperative is the command, "I command you to leave this person." If you were to do the whole thing from start to finish, it would take out about an hour. But none of the priests that I followed in Rome do it like that. Almost all of them get rid of everything except the exorcism prayers. And the reason they do that is because they don't have time. They have a waiting room of 20 people. That's one day. The next day they have another 20 people.

Click here for the complete TIME interview.

Gratitude Seen as Essential to Happiness

Gratitude ~ the emotion of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a perceived gift ~ is an essential ingredient for living a good life. And when it comes to achieving this well-being, gender plays a role. It seems men are much less likely to feel and express gratitude than women.

So says Todd Kashdan, an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University, whose most recent paper was published online this week at the Journal of Personality. Kashdan says that if he had to name three elements essential for creating happiness and meaning in life they would be:

• Gratitude
• Meaningful relationships
• Living in the present moment with an attitude of openness and curiosity.

"Previous studies on gratitude have suggested that there might be a difference in gender, and so we wanted to explore this further, and find out why. Even if it is a small effect, it could make a huge difference in the long run," says Kashdan.

In one study, Kashdan interviewed college-aged students and older adults, asking them to describe and evaluate a recent episode in which they received a gift. He found that:

• Women compared with men reported feeling less burden and obligation and greater levels of gratitude when presented with gifts.

• Older men reported greater negative emotions when the gift giver was another man.

"The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults," says Kashdan. "Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being."

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Debate Erupts About Dead Sea Scrolls

If you're at all interested in Biblical or Jesus history, you might want to visit my Ancient Tides blog for a couple of posts regarding new scholarship that's rocking beliefs about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem says the sect that supposedly authored the scrolls ~ the Essenes ~ likely never existed, and that the scrolls are the work instead of Jewish priests writing about Sadducees in Jerusalem. This calls into question considerable speculation that Jesus may have been associated with the Essenes.

If right, this new scholarship throws into doubt some long-standing contentions regarding early Christianity and paves the way for fascinating revisions.

Higher IQ Can Mean a Longer Life

(Here's another take on the impact of human intelligence, coming on the heels of last week's post regarding IQ and personal wealth.)

A massive Swedish study shows a distinct correlation between intelligence and lowered risk of death. As for the inverse, researchers also found that a lower IQ was strongly associated with a higher risk of death from causes such as accidents, coronary heart disease and suicide.

The researchers studied data from one million Swedish men conscripted to the army at the age of 18. After they had taken into account whether a person had grown up in a safer, more affluent environment, they found that only education had an influence on the relationship between IQ and death. 

The link between IQ and mortality could be partially attributed to the healthier behaviors displayed by those who score higher on IQ tests.

"People with higher IQ test scores tend to be less likely to smoke or drink alcohol heavily, they eat better diets, and they are more physically active. So they have a range of better behaviors that may partly explain their lower mortality risk," says researcher Dr. David Batty of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow.

A second study also co-authored by Batty used data from more than 4,000 US soldiers and followed them for 15 years. The study found the same relationship between IQ scores and mortality, as well as a significant association between higher neuroticism and increased mortality risk.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Human Smell of Fear is Contagious

New research proves humans, when frightened, emit a particular odor that turns fear contagious. In fact, just a whiff of the odor of fear can turn an ambiguous situation into a frightening one.

"Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings," says Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston.

In a recent study, male participants watched neutral clips, slapstick comedies and horror flicks, while a gauze pad in their armpits collected sweat. Later, female participants smelled the gauze pads as they watched images of faces that changed from somewhat happy to neutral to somewhat fearful.

• Researchers chose males as sweat donors because of their larger apocrine sweat glands. The men used only scent-free shampoo, conditioner and soap provided by the lab several days beforehand, and kept a diet journal to avoid odorous foods such as garlic, onion and asparagus.

• The study also used female respondents because of their better sense of smell and higher sensitivity to emotional cues.

The women were more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as fearful when they were smelling the "fear sweat," but only in the case of ambiguous faces. They still interpreted somewhat happy or somewhat scared faces according to what they saw.

Click here to read the complete LiveScience article.

Number 29 ~ THE ABYSMAL (Water)

The Abysmal repeated.

If you are sincere, you have success in your heart,

And whatever you do succeeds.

Through repetition of danger we grow accustomed to it. Water sets the example for the right conduct under such circumstances. It flows on and on, and merely fills up all the places through which it flows; it does not shrink from any dangerous spot nor from any plunge, and nothing can make it lose its own essential nature. It remains true to itself under all conditions. Thus likewise, if one is sincere when confronted with difficulties, the heart can penetrate the meaning of the situation. And once we have gained inner mastery of a problem, it will come about naturally that the action we take will succeed. In danger, all that counts is really carrying out all that has to be done ~ thoroughness ~ and going forward, in order not to perish through tarrying in the danger.

Is There Something Behind These Current Events?

Some conspiracy theories intrigue me and others I reject outright as just silly. However, the "world dominion" and "new world order" theories I put in the first category ~ intriguing ~ because so much has occurred during my lifetime to reinforce the concept. Some level of substantiation surfaces whenever I spend much time watching cable news.

The current economic and monetary crisis carries overtones of new-world-order thinking. The prominence of the Federal Reserve in developing our much-needed "solutions." The whispers already being heard of the need for a worldwide currency to "stabilize" international monetary problems. The presumed "socialist" governmental support of failing industries, when actually the Federal Reserve, through its unprecedented control over fiscal policy, actually is the body pulling the strings.

With all of that in mind, I offer this 10-minute video. Perhaps it's exaggerated or just silly, but you can't deny the ongoing references to "new world order" we've heard for decades, the paternalistic approach government and world leaders have exhibited toward their mass populations, and ~ worst of all, in my estimation ~ the numbing and dumbing of the populace who listens passively as they absorb world-domination messages from the inanity of the mass media.

So here it is. I hope you can spare at least a minute or two to get the idea.

IQ Not a Factor in Personal Wealth

A national survey has shown that people with below-average intelligence can be just as wealthy as geniuses. In fact, people with high IQs may make higher salaries but often are disasters when it comes to managing their money.

"What the results really say is it doesn't matter whether you are born smart or you are not born smart, you can do financially okay," said the study's author Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Ohio State University.

The study also showed that highly intelligent people have financial difficulties, maxing out credit cards and missing bill payments. Zagorsky suggests that the financial troubles could be linked with an inability to save money.

Higher IQ, Higher Income

Participants with higher IQ scores tended to earn higher incomes, with each additional IQ point associated with an income boost of $202 to $616 each year. For example, a person with an IQ that's in the top 2 percent of society (130 points) would earn between $6,000 and $18,500 per year more than an individual with an average IQ of about 100 points.

The results showed a financial sweet spot of sorts that hovered around the average IQ score, for which people had the lowest financial distress.

Ultimately, a person's IQ had no impact on his or her wealth. So even though the "rocket scientists" earned on average higher incomes, they didn't have the savings to show it. And in fact, some higher-IQ people had more problems with maxing out credit cards and missing bill payments.

Click here for the complete LiveScience article.

Peking Man's Age Now at 750,000 Years

Homo erectus skull from the Zhoukoudian caves.

A new and more accurate dating method shows Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than previously thought. Bones of Sinanthropus pekinensis ~ a Homo erectus commonly known as Peking Man ~ were discovered in the 1920s during cave excavations near Beijing and now believed to be 750,000 years old.

Scientists have used various techniques to try and date the fossils, but a lack of suitable methods for cave deposits has limited their accuracy. Shen and his colleagues used a relatively new method that examines the radioactive decay of aluminum and beryllium in quartz grains, which enabled them to get a more precise age for the fossils.

"The analysis dated the finds to around 750,000 years old, some 200,000 years older than previous estimates and indicates a hominin presence in the area through glacial and interglacial cycles. The results should help to build a more reliable chronology of human evolution in East Asia," the researchers wrote.

Click here for the Reuters article.
Click here for a more extensive LiveScience article.

Is 'Full-Moon Madness' a Myth?

The familiar concept of “full-moon madness” is being examined in the harsh light of day by a number of scientists who now are concluding it’s mostly … well, lunacy.

Essentially, the scientists say the condition is a psychological urban legend, according to an article in the new issue of Scientific American. But if it’s just a legend, why is it so widespread?

• Media coverage almost surely plays a role. Scores of Hollywood horror flicks portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

• Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to “illusory correlation” ~ the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research disconfirms this assertion. Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

As for how the full-moon notion got started, the article quotes psychiatrist Charles Raison of Emory University:

According to Raison, the lunar lunacy effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine. Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside ~ including many who had severe mental disorders ~ of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras. So the lunar lunacy effect is, in Raison and his colleagues’ terms, a “cultural fossil.”

Click here to read the complete Scientific American article.

Number 24 ~ THE RETURN (The Turning Point)

Return. Success.
Going out and coming in without error.
Friends come without blame.
To and fro goes the way.
On the seventh day comes return.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force. The upper trigram is characterized by devotion; thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time; therefore no harm results. Societies of people sharing the same views are formed. But since these groups come together in full public knowledge and are in harmony with the time, all selfish separatist tendencies are excluded and no mistake is made.

The idea of Return is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.

DNA Shows Mysterious Telephathic Qualities

Scientists are reporting that intact double-stranded DNA has an “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands at a distance ~ somehow identifying one another ~ and that the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA.

There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine in the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible, scientists say.

Communication But No Physical Contact

Research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry shows clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.

In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences.

May Foster DNA Repair

No one knows how individual DNA strands could be communicating in this way.

“Amazingly, the forces responsible for the sequence recognition can reach across more than one nanometer of water separating the surfaces of the nearest neighbor DNA,” said study authors Geoff S. Baldwin, Sergey Leikin, John M. Seddon, and Alexei A. Kornyshev and colleagues.

This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.

Click here for the Daily Galaxy article.

Suit Goes After Yale's Secret Society

A reputed photo of Geronimo's remains used in Skull and Bones secret rituals. Photo below shows Geronimo in 1887.


Descendants of the Apache warrior Geronimo are suing the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University to retrieve the warrior’s skull, which they claim was robbed from his grave in 1918 by Prescott Bush, scion of the Bush family.

The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in late February in federal court in Washington. Geronimo’s heirs are seeking to have all his remains transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo wished to be interred. “I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, recently told reporters at the National Press Club.

Prescott Bush the Alleged Thief

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush ~ father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush ~ broke into the grave with some classmates in 1918 and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.

“Of all the items rumored to be in the Skull and Bones’s possession, Geronimo’s skull is one of the more plausible ones,” Alexandra Robbins, the author of “Secrets of the Tomb” (Little Brown 2002), a book about the society, told the New York Times. “There is a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.”

The Skull and Bones is one of America's most famous secret societies, noted for its bizarre rituals and a prestigious list of members, including U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices. It is a popular topic among some conspiracy theorists.

Though the society is not officially affiliated with the university, many of Yale’s most powerful alumni are members, among them both Bush presidents and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Click here for the complete New York Times article.

Meditation Can Alter Neural Perception

Researchers have found evidence that skills developed by Tibetan Buddhist monks in their practice of a certain type of meditation strongly influences their experience of "perceptual rivalry," dealing with attention and consciousness.

Perceptual rivalry arises when two different images are presented to each eye, and it is manifested as a fluctuation ~ typically over the course of seconds ~ in the "dominant" image that is consciously perceived. The neural events underlying perceptual rivalry are not well understood but are thought to involve brain mechanisms that regulate attention and conscious awareness.

Some previous work had suggested that skilled meditators can alter certain aspects of their brain's neural activity. To gain insight into how visual perception is regulated within the brain, researchers in the new study chose to investigate the extent to which certain types of trained meditative practice can influence the conscious experience of visual perceptual rivalry.

With the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks participated in the study, which was carried out at or near their mountain retreats in the Himalaya, Zanskar, and Ladakhi Ranges of India. The monks possessed meditative training ranging from 5 to 54 years.

Two Types of Meditation

The researchers tested the experience of visual rivalry by monks during the practice of two types of meditation:

• “Compassion"-oriented meditation, described as a contemplation of suffering within the world combined with an emanation of loving kindness.

• “One-point" meditation, described as the maintained focus of attention on a single object or thought, a focus that leads to a stability and clarity of mind.

Whereas no observable change in the rate of "visual switching" during rivalry was seen in monks practicing compassion meditation, major increases in the durations of perceptual dominance were experienced by monks practicing one-point meditation.

Within this group, three monks reported complete visual stability during the entire five-minute meditation period. Increases in duration of perceptual dominance were also seen in other monks after a period of one-point meditation.

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Doodling Shown to Enhance Recall Abilities

According to a new study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts.

Forty members of a research panel were asked to listen to a 2.5-minute tape giving several names of people and places and were told to write down only the names of people going to a party. Half of the participants were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper at the same time, but paying no attention to neatness. Participants were not asked to doodle naturally so that they would not become self-conscious. None of the participants were told it was a memory test.

After the tape had finished, all participants in the study were asked to recall the eight names of the party-goers they were asked to write down, as well as eight additional place names which were included as incidental information.

The doodlers recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by the non-doodlers.

"If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream," said study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in England. "Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task ~ like doodling ~ may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task."

"This study suggests that in everyday life doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing," Andrade added.

Click here for the complete Medical News Today article.

Perception of Power Often Misguided

None of us needs to look very far to spot someone whose sense of personal power has gone to his or her head. If you don’t happen to have a power-monger friend or relative, simply turn on cable news and you’ll be overdosing in a matter of minutes.

It comes as no surprise to even the casual observer that people who hold power ~ real or only self-perceived ~ are often misguided in their actions.

In a new study reported today in ScienceDaily, Nathanael Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Niro Sivanathan at the London Business School and Adam Galinsky at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, show that power can literally "go to one's head," causing individuals to think they have more personal control over outcomes than they really do.

• Leaders and commanders of warring nations regularly underestimate the costs in time, money, and human lives required for bringing home a victory.

• CEOs of Fortune 500 companies routinely overestimate their capacity to turn mergers and acquisitions into huge profits, leading to financial losses for themselves, their companies, and their stockholders. 

• Even ordinary people seem to take on an air of invincibility after being promoted to a more powerful position. 

The consequences of these tendencies, especially when present in the world's most powerful leaders, can be devastating.

"We conducted four experiments exploring the relationship between power and illusory control ~ the belief that one has the ability to influence outcomes that are largely determined by chance," said Galinksy. 

"In each experiment ~ whether the participant recalled power by an experience of holding power or it was manipulated by randomly assigning participants to manager-subordinate roles ~ it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the individual.  Furthermore, the notion of being able to control a 'chance' result led to unrealistic optimism and inflated self-esteem," he said.

Click here to read the complete ScienceDaily article.

Religious Services Reinforce Zealotry

Hamas supporters protest Israel's seige of Gaza, typical of the 'strength in numbers' psychology that can create 'parochial altruism.'

A group of studies in Middle East war zones shows that the more frequently a person attends religious services, the more likely he or she is to become a zealot, especially a suicide bomber. It is the sense of reinforced community ~ not the religious beliefs themselves ~ that encourage such things as suicide bombings.

The studies use the rather benign term “parochial altruism” to define such behaviors, where here “parochial” refers to killing someone from another religious group and “altruism” refers to self-sacrifice.

A major conclusion of the studies is that collective religious ritual appears to facilitate parochial altruism in general and support for suicide attacks in particular.

• Researchers surveying Palestinian Muslims found that devotion to Islam, as measured by prayer frequency, was unrelated to support for suicide attacks. However, frequency of mosque attendance did predict support for suicide attacks.

• In a separate survey of Palestinian Muslim university students, researchers found again that those who attended mosque more than once a day were more likely to believe that Islam requires suicide attacks.

• In another experiment, researchers conducted phone surveys with Israeli Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza and asked them either how frequently they attended synagogue or how often they prayed to God. All participants were then asked if they supported the perpetrator of a suicide attack against Palestinians. Analysis of the responses showed that 23% of those asked about synagogue attendance supported suicide attacks while only 6% of those queried about prayer frequency supported suicide attacks.

In the last experiment, the psychologists surveyed members of six religious majorities in six nations (Mexican Catholics, Indonesian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Russian Orthodox in Russia, British Protestants and Indian Hindus) to see if the relationship between attending religious services and support for acts of parochial altruism holds up across a variety of political and cultural contexts.

These results also showed that support for parochial altruism was related to attendance at religious services, but unrelated to regular prayer.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Leper-Treating Priest to be Sainted

Father Damien ~ the Belgian priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii until he succumbed to the disease himself in 1889 ~ will be canonized as a saint in October.

Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join other missionaries and minister to leprosy patients on Molokai island, where some 8,000 people had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s.

He eventually contracted the disease ~ also known as Hansen's disease ~ and died in 1889 at age 49. "He went there knowing that he could never return," The Rev. Alfred Bell, who spearheaded Damien's canonization cause, told Vatican Radio. "He suffered a lot, but he stayed."

Miracles Ascribed to Father Damien

Father Damien was beatified ~ a step toward sainthood ~ in 1995 by Pope John Paul II after the Vatican declared that the 1987 recovery of a nun of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was a miracle. The nun recovered after praying to Damien.

After beatification, a second miracle is needed for sainthood.

In July, Pope Benedict XVI declared that a Honolulu woman's recovery in 1999 from terminal lung cancer was the miracle needed for the priest to be made a saint. She too had prayed to Father Damien.

Click here for the Associated Press article.
Photo shows Father Damien two months before his death of leprosy.

Beware of Hnegripitrom!

In a new study reported in Psychological Science, a group of students were given a list of made-up food additives and were asked to rate how harmful they were. The additives all contained 12 letters, with "Magnalroxate" being one of the easiest to pronounce and "Hnegripitrom" one of the hardest.

• The students consistently rated the difficult-to-pronounce additives as being more harmful.
• In addition, the hard-to-pronounce additives were considered to be more novel than those with easier names.

In another experiment, students were shown a list of made-up names of amusement-park rides and were asked to rate the rides on how adventurous they would be and how risky ~ and therefore most likely to make them sick ~ the rides would be. The names ranged from being easy to pronounce, such as “Chunta,” to very difficult to pronounce, such as “Vaiveahtoishi.”

• Consistent with the first experiment, the students rated the rides with the difficult-to-pronounce names as being more risky, but also more exciting.

The findings also suggest that risk perception may be influenced by the way the items are presented. If they are difficult to process ~ such as hard-to-pronounce names ~ they will be viewed as being inherently riskier.

Click here for the complete article in Science Daily.

Violent Video Creates Emotional Numbness

A scene from "Manhunt 2"  for Nintendo's Wii system.

Evidence continues to mount that violent movies and video games numb people to the suffering of others, as well as affect someone's willingness to offer help to an injured person.

"These studies clearly show that violent media exposure can reduce helping behavior," says Brad Bushman, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. "People exposed to media violence are less helpful to others in need because they are 'comfortably numb' to the pain and suffering of others, to borrow the title of a Pink Floyd song."

Video-game Numbness

In one of the studies, 320 college students played either a violent or a nonviolent video game for approximately 20 minutes. A few minutes later, they overheard a staged fight that ended with the "victim" sustaining a sprained ankle and groaning in pain.

• People who had played a violent game took significantly longer to help the victim than those who played a nonviolent game ~73 seconds compared to 16 seconds.
• People who had played a violent game were also less likely to report the fight. And if they did report it, they judged it to be less serious than did those who had played a nonviolent game.

Violent-movie Numbness

In a second study of 162 adult moviegoers, researchers staged a minor emergency outside the theater in which a young woman with a bandaged ankle and crutches "accidentally" dropped her crutches and struggled to retrieve them. The researchers timed how long it took moviegoers to retrieve the crutches.

• Half were tested before they went into the theater, to establish the helpfulness of people attending violent vs. nonviolent movies.
• Half were tested after seeing either a violent or a nonviolent movie.

Participants who had just watched a violent movie took 26 percent longer to help than either people going into the theater or people who had just watched a nonviolent movie.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Number 47 ~ OPPRESSION (EXHAUSTION)

Oppression. Success. Perseverance.

The great man brings about good fortune.

No blame.

When one has something to say,

It is not believed.

Times of adversity are the reverse of times of success, but they can lead to success if they befall the right man. When a strong man meets with adversity, he remains cheerful despite all danger, and this cheerfulness is the source of later successes; it is stability that is stronger than fate. He who lets his spirit be broken by exhaustion certainly has no success. But if adversity only bends a man, it creates in him a power to react that is bound in time to manifest itself. No inferior man is capable of this. Only the great man brings about good fortune and remains blameless. It is true that for the time being, outward influence is denied him because his words have no effect. Therefore in times of adversity it is important to be strong within and sparing of words.

Read and Become Luminous

A depiction of Jesus meditating in the desert.

A blog I follow called Quaker Pagan Reflections carries an interesting post on the question of reading the Bible. It reminded me of this quote from the late Indian mystic Osho in his Art of Tea book. Here he’s talking about “meditations to awaken your spirit,” and I quote:

All of the great scriptures of the world are written in sutras, aphorism ~ because the people who wrote them went through this flood of catharsis. When the catharsis was complete, then diamond-like, small sentences ~ simple, aesthetic, beautiful, complete ~ started bubbling in the consciousness. It is from that consciousness that the Vedas were born, and the Koran. And it is from that consciousness that the beauty of the language of the Bible arises. Never has it been surpassed.

Jesus was illiterate, but nobody has ever surpassed that clarity, that penetrating reality of his assertions. Behind it is great meditation. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or the Brahma Sutras of Badrayana or the Bhakti Sutras of Naad ~ small sentences, the smallest you can conceive, almost telegraphic ~ but so much is pressed into them that each sentence has atomic energy. If you lovingly take it into yourself, to your heart, it will explode and you will become luminous through it.

Nearly 3,000 Languages Endangered

The world’s human languages are disappearing about about as quickly as species are going extinct. Of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world, 2,500 are now endangered, according to the United Nations.


That’s a huge increase from the last atlas compiled in 2001, which listed 900 languages threatened with extinction.

• There are 199 languages in the world spoken by fewer than a dozen people, including Karaim with six speakers in Ukraine, and Wichita, spoken by 10 people in Oklahoma.
• The last four speakers of Lengilu talk among themselves in Indonesia.
• Some 178 other languages are spoken by between 10 and 150 people.

More than 200 languages have become extinct over the last three generations, such as Ubykh that fell silent in 1992 when Tefvic Esenc passed on, Aasax in Tanzania, which disappeared in 1976, and Manx in 1974.

India tops the list of countries with the greatest number of endangered languages, 196 in all, followed by the United States, which stands to lose 192 and Indonesia, where 147 are in peril.

Click here for the complete Discovery article.

A Lesson in Fear

This is by the Indian mystic Osho, at the conclusion of his book Courage. With all of the fear the media is promulgating these days, I believe this tale is worth remembering:

A man walking in the night slipped from a rock. Afraid that he would fall down thousands of feet ~ he knew that place was a very deep valley ~ he took hold of a branch hanging over the rock. In the night, all he could see was a bottomless abyss. He shouted, but his own shout was reflected back. There was nobody to hear.

You can imagine that man and his whole night of torture. Every moment there was death, his hands were becoming cold, he was losing his grip.

And as the sun came out he looked down and he laughed. There was no abyss. Just six inches below his dangling feet there was a rock. He could have rested the whole night, slept well ~ the rock was big enough ~ but instead the whole night had been a nightmare.

From my own experience I can say to you: the fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet.

There is nothing to fear.

Phobia-Erasing Drugs Discovered

Dutch scientists have discovered that a family of drugs called “beta blockers” can erase bad memories, including phobias. The discovery is igniting medical ethics debates across Europe, according to the London Mail.

The scientists actually discovered the drugs’ memory-erasing properties while working with patients with heart disease, for whom the beta-blocking drugs are sometimes prescribed. They found that the beta-blockers interfere with how the brain makes and remakes memories of frightening events.

To test the drugs' memory-altering capability, a Dutch medical team created fearful memories in volunteers by showing them pictures of spiders, while also administering electrical shocks. The following day the volunteers were split into two groups: One given the beta-blocker, the other a placebo. Both groups were then shown spider pictures and their fear responses were recorded.

The group given the beta-blocker had a much weaker fear response than the other group. Both groups were tested on the following day ~ two days after the initial fright ~ and the beta-blocker group essentially were without memory of the spiders, while the control group continued to exhibit considerable fear.

Click here for the complete London Mail article.
Photo is "Phobia" by Joshua Hoffine.

Thanks to my friend Ludmil Marcov for alerting me to this article.

Don't Scoff at Animal Intelligence

Last night I read a spiritual writer discussing why animals don’t believe in God. My immediate thought was, How do you know what animals believe or don't believe?

Then this morning I found an article much closer to my own suspicions, dealing with a recent symposium entitled “Animal Smarts,” where attendees learned:

• Monkeys can perform mental math.
• Pigeons can select the picture that doesn’t belong.
• Some animals plan for the future.

"I suggest we humans should keep our egos in check," Edward A. Wasserman of the University of Iowa said last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He said that, like people, pigeons and baboons were able to tell which pictures showed similar items, like triangles or dots, and which showed different items. This is the definition of a concept, he said, "and the animals passed it with flying colors."

In the last 20 years there has been a major revolution in the understanding of animals, added Nicola S. Clayton, a professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge in England. Animals not only use tools, there is evidence that some of them save tools for future use, she said.

"Planning ahead was once thought to be unique to humans," Clayton said. "We now know that's not true."

Click here for the complete Associated Press article.

Body Language & Economic Status

People of higher socio-economic status (SES) are less dependent on other people and show their detachment with their body language. Meanwhile, people of lower economic status demonstrate more interpersonal engagement, such as laughing and greater eye contact.

Psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to see if body language can indicate our SES, according to Science Daily. To test this idea, the researchers videotaped participants as they got to know one another in one-on-one interview sessions.

During these taped sessions, the researchers looked for disengagement behaviors ~ fidgeting with personal objects and doodling ~ and for engagement behaviors such as head nodding, laughing and eye contact. The results, reported in Psychological Science, reveal that nonverbal cues can reveal a person's SES.

Volunteers whose parents were from upper economic backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60-second clips of the videos, they correctly guessed the participants' socio-economic background, based on their body language.

Click here for the complete Science Daily article.

Meditation Proven to Reduce Pain

A new study says people who practice Zen meditation have a lower sensitivity to pain ~ meaning they feel less of it ~ when they’re meditating and when they’re not. In other words, meditation can reduce pain.

The study was performed at the Université de Montréal, where scientists recruited 13 Zen meditators with a minimum of 1,000 hours of practice to undergo a pain test, then contrasted their reactions with 13 non-meditators. The subjects were 10 women and 16 men between the ages of 22 to 56.

In the study, a computer-controlled heating plate was pressed against the calves of subjects intermittently at varying temperatures. Heat levels began at about 110 degrees and went to a maximum of 130 degrees, depending on each participant's sensitivity.

Pain Drops 18 Percent

Scientists noticed a marked difference in how the two test groups reacted to pain testing. Zen meditators had much lower pain sensitivity ~ even without meditating ~ compared to non-meditators. During the meditation-like conditions it appeared meditators further reduced their pain partly through slower breathing: 12 breaths per minute versus an average of 15 breaths for non-meditators.

Zen meditators experienced an 18 percent reduction in pain intensity. "If meditation can change the way someone feels pain, thereby reducing the amount of pain medication required for an ailment, that would be clearly beneficial," says Justin Grant, one of the lead scientists.

Click here for the article in Medical News Today.

Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall . . .

Venus at a Mirror by Peter Paul Rubens, 1615: The Venus Effect

A new study on mirrors concludes that people cannot always relate spatially to mirrors. They think their image should be visible, even when it is impossible due to the viewer’s location. The other study says that our perceptions of our appearance can be dramatically altered by the mirror.

Dr Marco Bertamini, from the University of Liverpool School of Psychology conducted a number of experiments by covering a mirror on a wall and inviting participants to walk along a line parallel to the mirror. He asked them to guess the point at which they would be able to see their reflection. Results showed that people believe they can see themselves even before they are level with the near edge of the mirror.

"People tend not to understand that the location of the viewer matters in terms of what is visible in a mirror,” Bertamini says. “A good example of this is what we call the Venus Effect, which relates to the many famous paintings of the goddess Venus, looking in a small mirror. If you were to look at these paintings, you would assume that Venus is admiring her own face, because you see her face in the mirror. Your viewpoint, however, is rather different from hers; if you can see her in the mirror then she would see you in the mirror."

Click here for more about the Venus Effect study.

Mirrors and Self Image

The Mirror by Sir Frank Dicksee, 1896

Another study regarding mirrors has been conducted by Dr. Manos Tsakiris of the University of London. It concludes that recognition of our own face is not as consistent as we might think.

The participants' ability to recognize their own face changed when they watched the face of another person being touched at the same time as their own face was touched, as though they were looking in a mirror. Specifically, when asked to recognize a picture of their own face, the picture that people chose included features of the other person they had previously seen. This did not happen when the two faces were touched out of synchrony.

Sharing an experience with another person may change the perception we have of our own self, such as the recognition of our own face. "As a result of shared experiences, we tend to perceive other people as being more similar to us, and this applies also to the recognition of our own face. This process may be at the root of constructing a self-identity in a social context," says Dr Tsakiris.

The findings imply that shared experiences may influence the way we perceive ourselves and possibly the way we interact with others. Dr Tsakiris explains: "If I feel that you are more like me, I might then behave to you in a different way. We now test whether shared experiences can make us stereotype others less, or change our attitudes towards people of different social groups, race or gender."

Click here for more about the University of London study.

Number 10 ~ TREADING

Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite man. Success.

The situation is really difficult. That which is strongest and that which is weakest are close together. The weak follows behind the strong and worries it. The strong, however, acquiesces and does not hurt the weak, because the contact is in good humor and harmless.

In terms of a human situation, one is handling wild, intractable people. In such a case one's purpose will be achieved if one behaves with decorum. Pleasant manners succeed even with irritable people.

Philosophers to Probe Consciousness

A team of English philosophers has launched a three-year research project to explore conscious experiences that science still cannot explain.

Funded through Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and involving the collaboration of some of the world’s leading philosophers and cognitive scientists, the project will attempt to answer the mystery of consciousness.

“When we see a sunset or hear a symphony our sense organs, brains and bodies are moved in ways that are well understood by the physical and biological sciences,” Professor Paul Coates of the University of Hertfordshire told ScienceDaily. “But during such experiences we also enjoy distinctive forms of conscious awareness. Yet this undeniable fact about our conscious lives is stubbornly resistant to scientific understanding.

“How is it even possible for purely physical brain activity to produce conscious experience?” he went on. “How do the qualities that manifest themselves in experience relate to the very different properties that are referred to in scientific descriptions of the physical world?”

To find the answers, Coates and a scientific team will re-examine fundamental concepts relating to consciousness and physical reality. They say they will examine experimental results in psychology and brain science as well as phenomenology and other forms of philosophical enquiry.

Click here for the ScienceDaily article.

A Worthy Sentiment

This morning I saw this old Monty Python video on George Breed's spiritually provocative blog, Embodying Spirit, and I thought, "Come on, George ..." Then I found myself whistling the tune and reliving the same sense of joy ~ admittedly a somewhat twisted sense of joy ~ I felt when I first saw the cast of Monty Python's Life of Brian sing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" as shown here. Now all I can say is, "Thanks, George!"

Outlying Moons Suitable for Exploration

Depiction of surface of Saturn moon Titan.

NASA’s leading candidates for extraterrestrial life are now Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus or perhaps Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. Scientists are weighing the possibilities in anticipation of picking a destination for a $4 billion space mission set for around 2020.

According to the BBC, the potential Saturn mission would follow up the remarkable discoveries made by the Nasa/Esa Cassini-Huygens mission which continues to operate at the ringed planet. Cassini has sent back data that indicates Titan is akin to a primitive ~ albeit frozen ~ Earth. It has a thick atmosphere and is rich in organic (carbon-rich) molecules.

But Nature News says the arguments for exploring Jupiter’s moons are just as compelling. In 1995, the Galileo probe began an 8-year tour of Jupiter’s system, during which it snapped the first close-ups of Europa’s scarred surface. Analysis of a magnetic anomaly soon revealed the moon’s most astonishing feature: that eggshell of ice is thought to enclose a warm, salty ocean. Scientists immediately clamoured to return.

Click here for the Discover magazine article.

Dementia Sufferers Can't Detect Sarcasm

People suffering from dementia can’t tell if someone is being sarcastic, thus sarcasm has been elevated from the lowest form of wit to a medical diagnostic device.

Australian researchers said people under 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) ~ the second most prevalent form of dementia ~ cannot decipher sarcasm, which helps explains some of their lack of feeling toward their caregivers.

"This is significant because if caregivers are angry, sad or depressed, the patient won't pick this up. It is often very upsetting for family members," John Hodges, one of the lead researchers, told Cosmos magazine. "Patients find it difficult to interact with people, they don't pick up on social cues, they lack empathy and they make bad judgements."

Researchers began studying the role of sarcasm in detecting FTD, because it requires a patient to spot discrepancies between a person's words and the tone of their voice, Hodges said.

Click here for the complete article in Cosmos magazine.

Placebo Effect Occurs with Acupuncture Too

I’m a firm believer in acupuncture, having had a number of maladies ~ including a couple of serious ones ~ seemingly remedied by the needles. Yet I’m not surprised at the new studies showing a portion of acupuncture’s benefit is the placebo effect.

There’s no reason why acupuncture shouldn’t be susceptible to placebo along with the rest of the world’s medical cures. I just hope people don’t take the unwarranted leap to see the studies as somehow denigrating acupuncture’s effectiveness.

Acupuncture is based on the theory of lines of energy running along meridians through the body. With acupressure, a fingertip or a bead is used to press a specific pressure point, while needles are used in acupuncture to stimulate the meridians and cure energy blockages responsible for much illness.

The placebo effect is mostly a mind-over-matter cure. If a person believed totally in the efficacy of acupuncture, it is reasonable that his or her mind could enact a cure even if the needles were misplaced, since a placebo cure would have no direct relation to the needles anyway.

German researchers have fueled the current discussions by releasing a study where needles were inserted at fake points to cure specific conditions ~ mostly headaches ~ yet the cures occurred anyway. According to Reuters News:

Their findings suggest the benefits of acupuncture may stem more from people's belief in the technique, said Klaus Linde, a complementary medicine researcher at the Technical University in Munich, who led the analysis published in the Cochrane Review journal.

"Much of the clinical benefit of acupuncture might be due to non-specific needling effects and powerful placebo effects, meaning selection of specific needle points may be less important than many practitioners have traditionally argued," he said in a statement.

Several studies have shown both treatments may stimulate the release of hormones known as endorphins, which can relieve stress, pain and nausea.

Linde and colleagues conducted two separate reviews that included 33 studies of nearly 7,000 men and women to see whether the technique was effective at preventing headaches and migraines.

The studies concluded that people treated with acupuncture suffered fewer headaches compared to men and women given only pain killers. When it came to migraines, the needles beat drugs but faked treatments worked too, the researchers said. For less severe headaches, acupuncture worked just slightly better than sticking the needles randomly, the researchers said.

"Doctors need to know how long improvements associated with acupuncture will last and whether better trained acupuncturists really achieve better results than those with basic training only," Linde told Reuters.