On exciting brain research, insightful psychological studies, and the latest shocker from the ill-thunk war on terror.

Quotes of the day:

“I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,”

Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, in reference to the Guantánamo interrogation training chart repurposed from 1950s Chinese torture methods that elicited false confessions.

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

H. L. Mencken US editor (1880 - 1956)

Using structural and functional brain imaging, scientists now have unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of thought. Writing in the Public Library of Science, Liza Gross cites the ‘form follows function’ edict of architect Louis Sullivan, which itself echoed Aristotle’s essential philosophy of form, in describing the findings of Patric Hagmann, Olaf Sporns, and their colleagues. Hagmann and Sporns found that a dense set of core neural pathways acts as an interconnection hub to the brain’s cerebral cortex the home of higher cognitive thinking and self awareness. The elegant, symmetrical spread of pathways — like the branches of a tree extending from the trunk — correlates to the brain’s seamless processing of information on different levels and in different ways. (Gross’s use of computer technology analogies I find unhelpful. The brain is not like a computer, after all, a computer is, somewhat, like the brain.) Interestingly, the hubs correspond to a recently reported neural system that shows increased activity levels when we are at rest.

Psychologists seem to have uncovered where we aim some of that resting activity — self rationalization. (”The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press. “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Psychological Science, 2007.) The researchers devised cunning experiments to lure subjects into choosing an easy chore over a hard one while maintaining that they’d been acting fairly in leaving the harder chore for someone else. In the abstract, the subjects understood that choosing the easy chore wasn’t fair, but in practice most of them chose it anyway. But the true genius in the research came when the researchers asked the subjects to hold a sequence of numbers in their heads while they judged the fairness of their choice. All of a sudden they judged their actions just as harshly as anyone else would.

So, what kept them from admitting their unfairness wasn’t a failure to recognize it, it was a failure to admit to it. And the act of hypocrisy required considerable brain cycles.

Interrogation experts should take note. If you want to extract an honest answer, break out the Sodoku puzzles rather than the water buckets and manacles.

Since form follows function, it is no surprise that the form of the administration’s war on terror has evolved into a horrifying, amorphous mess. The New York Times reveals that the interrogation chart used as a training device for interrogators back in 2002 derived from a 1957 article entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist working for the Air Force, had put together the chart to document interviews with American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators falsely confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities (Chinese Torture Techniques - See page 4 of Biderman’s original report).

So, let’s see if I have this straight: In 1957, Biderman set out what Chinese interrogators did to obtain false confessions.  The army then used this to help them train the next generation of American soldiers so that they could avoid providing false confessions. And a few generations later the DOD used the same material to train interrogators on how to extract (false) confessions…

The only change made to the chart used at Guantánamo? The trainers dropped the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

No, that wouldn’t look good at all would it, using “communist” coercive methods.

Here’s the opening sentence of Biderman’s 1957 report: “The United States Air Force has expended considerable effort to get a full, accurate and meaningful account of what happened to its personnel who were captured in Korea.”

Related posts from around the web…

Better Brain Map - This is basically an outline of the wiring connections between neurons in the brain’s outer layer. This is the most complete mapping of the interconnected brain nodes to date. Apparently this is one of the first maps of the human brain …

Brain Mapping Initiative Reaches Core Of Human Brain - What is known of neural fiber connections and pathways has largely been learned from animal studies, and so far, no complete map of brain connections in the human brain exists. In this new study, a team of neuroimaging researchers led …

Moral hypocrisy emerges from deliberative processes: Study - … graduate student of psychology at Northeastern University. This study highlights that moral hypocrisy is controlled by a dual-process model of moral judgement, in which the prepotent negative reaction to the thought of fairness …

Are We Kidding Ourselves? - “Hypocrisy is driven by mental processes over which we have volitional control,” said Dr. Valdesolo, a psychologist at Amherst College. “Our gut seems to be equally sensitive to our own and others’ transgressions, suggesting that we …

US used communist Chinese torture techniques at Guantánamo - NYT: The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart … copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain …

Unconscionable - I’ve seen lots of commentary on the revelation that Bush administration torture techniques have been modeled on the work of the ChiComs but not much specific focus on the fact that the main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques …

Barack Obama vs. John McCain, Robert Mugabe vs. Zimbabwe, Abu Ghraib detainees vs. US interrogation contractors.

“We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.”

- George Bernard Shaw

As the presidential campaign continues, the exchanges between the Obama and McCain camps have honed in on the relative patriotism of the two candidates. Retired General Wesley Clark, speaking on CBS’ Face The Nation and acting, we are told, as a mouthpiece of the Obama campaign opined that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” Meanwhile, over on ABC’s This Week, Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “I think Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope perhaps should be retitled ‘The Audacity of Hypocrisy.’ ”

Not surprisingly, Obama wishes to steer the campaign away from a contest over who is the more patriotic. He’s smart enough to know that patriotism is a double-edged sword, and principled enough to want to avoid hollow pledges of undying allegiance to the idea of a country. McCain, the ultimate ironist, knows that he will always win any such contest, not just because of his war record, but also because he can claim undying patriotism with sufficient earnestness to convince those who care.

But it seems that we have some philosophical distinctions to make before we can decide whether Obama or McCain is the better patriot. The media loves the stereotypical definition of patriotism, the flag-waving, ’til-death, America-the-greatest kind of patriotism. McCain understands this and allows himself to be adorned by that mantle.  Privately he understands that the people who inhabit the rest of the world might beg to differ. Nevertheless one can imagine that if he had to choose a preferred country, McCain wouldn’t hesitate to choose America.

Obama’s patriotism comes from a different bottle. Obama believes that we can and should put our allegiance somewhere; that we should invest our hope in the potential of a thing or place or person. Obama’s patriotism acknowledges and mourns the shame, faults and frailties of the country, past and present, and he resolves that we can and should do better. America, the land of freedom, Obama understands, is the land of slavery, segregation, rendition, invasion and torture. McCain understands this, too, but he’s not about to ruin his chances of election by pointing it out. For the many millions of Americans who believe in America the way that an apple believes in gravity — as something inevitable and unswervingly sure — Obama’s patriotism inspires suspicion, ridicule, and fear.

Is Robert Mugabe patriotic for defining Zimbabwe and constraining it to his definition? Morgan Tsvangirai, who withdrew as the opposition candidate because of violence and intimidation by Mugabe’s thugs, would doubtless argue he’s not.

Unfortunately the conceptual ground of patriotism rests in the drawing of distinctions between ourselves and others. We measure the qualities of our own country in opposition to those of other countries. The aim and end of patriotism must be to inspire in us the assurance that we live in the best country there is. As soon as it moves beyond a benign, feel-good, group hug (and it always does) patriotism becomes corrosive and dangerous.

Today several Abu Ghraib detainees filed suit (here in the US) against the government contractors they say tortured them. Surely we won’t find a better example of patriotism’s failures and illusions. The Bush administration, the face and fist of American foreign policy for the past seven years, repeatedly ignored, twisted and refashioned international conventions and US law in its treatment of the detainees. Official investigations naturally failed to find and attribute fault to any but the most lowly and least culpable offenders. And now the detainees have turned to the American civil justice system to seek recompense.

Contorting our national pride to find a silver lining even in this sad cloud, Susan L. Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm Burke O’Neil, had this to say about the suit: “These men came to U.S. courts because our laws, as they have for generations, allow their claims to be heard here.”

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Thought for the Day, from George Bernard Shaw - “Liberty means responsibilty. That is why most men dread it.” George Bernard Shaw.

On Patriotism to counteract Fourth of July rhetoric - George Bernard Shaw, [Irish dramatist (1856 - 1950)]. Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate [or perhaps oil] above principles. George Jean Nathan, US drama critic & editor (1882 - 1958)

John Lumea: The Conspicuous Silence At The Heart Of Obama’s … - Indeed, the attempt to cast Obama himself as a closet Muslim — as if being a Muslim were somehow un-American — lies at the deepest, darkest heart of the most persistent attacks on his patriotism. Whatever else Obama did with his …

Text of Obama’s Patriotism Speech - “The America We Love” - And at the beginning of a week when we celebrate the birth of our nation, I think it is fitting to pause for a moment and reflect on the meaning of patriotism – theirs, and ours. We do so in part because we are in the midst of war …

Asked If He Questions Obama’s Patriotism, McCain Doesn’t Directly … - This is noteworthy: Asked directly at today’s presser whether he questioned Obama’s patriotism, McCain actually didn’t give a direct answer. Here’s the exchange:. Question: “Do you question at all his patriotism and secondly do you …

Mugabe: The Anti-Mandela - South Africa’s leaders remain shamefully silent and impotent regarding their northern neighbor’s recent ruthless power grab.

MUGABE IN OUTBURST, SWEARS AT UK JOURNALISTS - The amazing scenes came on the first day of the two-day gathering of African leaders who are under pressure to find a solution to Zimbabwe’s political stand-off after Mugabe was sworn in for a sixth term last Sunday following a disputed …

Ex-Abu Ghraib detainees sue military contractors for torture - [JURIST] Four former Abu Ghraib detainees filed lawsuits Monday against two private US military contractors and three of their employees, alleging torture, war crimes and civil conspiracy. The former detainees said that employees of …

Abu Ghraib Detainees Sue Contractors - Attorney Katherine Gallagher, stated bluntly: “Private military contractors and the individuals they employ cannot act with impunity. Contractors must act within the bounds of law and must be held accountable.” …

Former Abu Ghraib Detainees File Lawsuits … Thank You, SCOTUS - Former Iraqi detainees sue US military contractors. By Daren Butler. ISTANBUL - Four Iraqi men are suing US military contractors who they say tortured them while they were detained in Abu Ghraib prison, according to lawsuits being filed …

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1919).

Nearly 90 years after Oliver Wendell Holmes cast the fortunes of truth onto the open market, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt write that the processes by which we form memories aren’t as egalitarian as Holmes would have liked to think.

Deposited first in the hippocampus, pieces of information get drawn down and reprocessed each time we recall them. Once we’ve recalled them several times, the brain has written them to the cerebral cortex, weakening or severing the connection to the source of the information. And so, as researchers have now shown, we have ’source amnesia,’ an explanation (apart from stupidity) for why people still believe falsehoods to be true even after those falsehoods have been debunked. (Kerry and the Swift Boat smears, Obama and his religion…)

I’m intrigued as to why memory functions in this way:

As the human mind evolved it needed to be able to process and recall information. Some of this information would have been ultimately disposable, but very important and highly context sensitive (’I should stay clear of this part of the forest because I heard a bear growling here five minutes ago.’) Having a holding area like the hippocampus would allow us to store a lot of temporary data, much of which would be used briefly in a focused way, then let go.

Then there would be another class of information that we would need to recall over and again (’Red berries make you sick,’) without the fuss of recalling the context — this becomes the ‘rule set’ by which we live.

This second class of information can help us live safely and effectively. We build up our rule set and stick to it. And, if we’ve processed the original information correctly, the rule set will tend to do well by us. But, as Wang and Aamodt point out, when we’re misinformed or when we don’t process the original information correctly, or when lies get repeated often enough without a conscious internal effort to contradict or doubt, we end up believing falsehoods. Their advice: to be conscious about what we believe and contemplate the reverse.

And giving new hope to those who want to be able to process any information more effectively, researchers have found new evidence that we can change the way our brains work for the better. Back in April, several journalists (see below) wrote about research by a team from the Universities of Michigan and Bern that showed that memory training can increase fluid intelligence. The research adds to the growing body of data that the structure and makeup of the brain is more plastic than we used to think.

Although there are already several products on the market that purport to sharpen or improve brain power, the research results of the team from Michigan and Bern seemed so exciting and compelling that I decided to produce an affordable commercial software program that would allow anyone to benefit from the training at home. So today I’m blogging about my own news… You can now subscribe to the IQ Training program for the paltry (in comparison to its value) sum of $19.95 per month.

Brain Training Research In The News…

Wired…

Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter

“…a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as “smarts.”

Science News…

Smarten Up

“If you’re looking for an intellectual picker-upper that doesn’t come in a pill, remember this: A relatively brief memory-training program jump-starts general reasoning skills and problem-solving proficiency…”

New York Times…

Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brain Power

“A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.”

Related posts from around the web…

Executive function training - does it transfer? - Post regarding reported transfer effects (to Gf) from working memory training tasks generated a number of posted comments (go to link and see original post plus comments). Today Developing Intelligence has a nice critique …

ScienceDaily Links - … stuck with IQs set by their genes at birth? Until recently, nature seemed to be the clear winner over nurture. But new research suggests that at least one aspect of a person’s IQ can be improved by training a certain type of memory.

Music & Intelligence: Will Listening to Music Make You Smarter? - In a study conducted by Dr. Timo Krings and reported in Neuroscience Letters in 2000, pianists and non-musicians of the same age and sex were required to perform complex sequences of finger movements. The non-musicians were able to make …

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The Brain Improvement & IQ Newsletter – June 1-2, 2008 from http … - Dr. Simon Evans holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology with 15 years research and teaching experience in neuroscience, and is a current faculty position in the Psychiatry Department at the University of Michigan. …

Lawyers who filed a class action on behalf of those who purchased the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been surprised and disappointed that the class of those offended by the hidden sex scenes is very small. The scenes themselves, a legacy of pre-release versions of the game, weren’t even completed, and could only be accessed with special hardware or software. Of the many millions who bought the game only a couple of thousand have expressed interest in the settlement. The lawyers, on the other hand, stand to recoup fees of $1.3M if the settlement is approved by the court. Makers of the game should perhaps consider recouping these fees in turn by designing a new game called Grand Theft Lawyer.

This odd situation of the lawyers so misjudging the shrug factor of the game players when it came to the hidden sex scenes seems to highlight a curious matter of our perspectives on sex in general.

A new report on the safe, or unsafe, sex practices of New Yorkers tells us that people in the city have a fair bit of sex and that many of them don’t wear a condom when common sense would say they should. But it’s the comments on this story that quickly become provocative. Alongside people talking frankly and straightforwardly about the difficulties of dealing with desire and pleasure and the practicality of condoms, we have this creepy and passionate post: “burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving their dues… ”

Sex is something we’re set up to do, something that comes naturally, something that non-conscious creatures have no hang-ups about. So how and why did sex become such a tricky topic when humans developed consciousness?

I’ll hypothesize that there may be several reasons:

1. We realized that sex is a high-stakes activity — It can end up with children and long term responsibility, and it decides the future of our group.

So, when people figured these things out it became important to establish social rules and conventions that would prevent problems in the coupling business and ensure the best survival rate for the society.

2. We became aware that the act of sex and the state of desire change our perception of ourselves and the world around us. We became conscious of a diminishing sense of self control when we were aroused, of the strength of the sex impulse, and of the tug of certain stimuli (erotic triggers).

Being conscious of these things tended to bring us into conflict with another gross effect of consciousness — self-control. The tension between the two led inevitably to self-consciousness about sex, and, in the extreme, feelings of shame and embarrassment.

(These ideas are supported by the varying degree of openness about sex in different cultures.)

One woman who purchased the Grand Theft game for her fifteen year old son had this to say when asked whether she would have bought the game if she’d known that it allowed players to kill police officers: “Well, I think he does have games with violence,” adding that she would have “possibly” bought such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

And the beat goes on…

On Bear Stearns executives charged with deception, a military lawyer’s defense by attack, and Bush’s call for an end to the 27-year old ban on off-shore drilling.

Ralph R. Cioffi and Matthew Tannin managed two risky Bear Stearns funds that ultimately collapsed early in the subprime market tumble. The investors lost all their money. 100%. Federal prosecutors have now charged Cioffi and Tannin with deceiving investors while protecting their own interests. Cioffi and Tannin knew that the funds were losing value rapidly and could collapse, but presented a confident picture to investors. Meanwhile Cioffi moved $2M (of $6M) of his own money out into a lower risk fund.

Ranked on impact, Cioffi and Tannin’s deception falls at the far end of the deception spectrum. But if every business person who deceived were to be subject to criminal prosecution, America (and most everywhere else) would be out of business. In practice, crime becomes a matter of degree. Small, unremarkable lies go unremarked. Medium lies maybe wrinkle your reputation. Big lies with real impact get you shunned. And maybe a huge lie with devastating business impact will get you an indictment.

The concept of crime requires the concept of law. And the concept of law rests on the idea that we can codify certain acts as wrongdoing. Society identifies behaviors it doesn’t want to tolerate and enacts laws so that people can be punished for such behavior.  Cioffi and Tannin may have broken a codified law by lying (we’ll have to see what the courts say) but for sure they broke an uncodified law; they lied big and the people they lied to lost a lot of money.

Military lawyer Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler has been going on the offensive in his defense of a Canadian, Omar Khadr, who has been charged with lobbing the grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. Kuebler has publicly and repeatedly attacked the military court system by which his client is being tried. Devoutly religious and ultra-conservative, Kuebler might seem like an unlikely activist. But he’s a stickler for fairness. It seems likely that Khadr isn’t an innocent party — he has the pedigree of a terrorist, and he wasn’t in Afghanistan sight-seeing. But Kuebler defends his aggressive defense tactics. “If we’re not advocating against the process,” Kuebler says, “we’re not competently representing our clients.”

Another way of reconciling Kuebler’s philosophy would be to say that if a society must have laws it should have some tension balancing the enactment and enforcement of those laws against the protection of its members against arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate indictment and punishment under the law. If not, the laws will inevitably become arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate.

Ironically, those who make law — politicians — are often some of the most deceptive and corrupt members of society. This, I expect, is no coincidence. Politicians have a feel for matters of rightness and wrongness because they identify with the urge leverage any advantage for their gain. And, as we’ve seen with Elliott Spitzer, they’ll be no less zealous for their empathy with the perpetrator of the crimes they seek to prosecute.

I’m trying to get to the idea of whether such a thing as natural or fundamental crime exists or is merely fabrication. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates pushes and pulls his interlocutors in an attempt to have them break free of the idea that something is right or wrong, good or bad, because we feel it is so. You can get many or most people to agree on whether some things are a crime. Other things tend to be more difficult to gain consensus on. But the ground of wrongdoing, if such a thing exists, must find its feet beyond human judgment.

The only pertinent to existence is whether it continues to exist. As human beings we feel this same urge. To continue to exist, to persist. And if we examine our feelings about right and wrong we find that they tend to stem from a judgment about whether an action will contribute to the persistence of a person or group or not.

A former co-worker asked me in an e-mail today whether consciousness, through the potential for personal growth, doesn’t offer in itself some goal or reward outside the persistence of humanity and existence. Valerie, a frequent commentor to this blog, coined a term ‘the evolution of consciousness’ which puts me in mind of the same idea.

I am tempted to subscribe to this idea. After all, why must consciousness be subordinate to material existence just because it came after and through material existence?

This may explain my disgusted reaction to George Bush’s grandstanding about oil drilling. I don’t even care whether he’s right. I just don’t like the idea that someone with so little integrity and such narrow thoughts could hold so much sway. If consciousness does have an independent evolutionary trajectory, we can only hope that the Bush’s of this world will one day be no more than fossils in the museum of intellectual history.

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About those Bear Stearns prosecutions - … even if you weren’t convinced that was a certainty before? Or, like Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, do you instead steel yourself for eventual federal prosecution, complete with camera-ready perp walk?

The Chilling Effect Of The Bear Stearns Prosecution - But this case seems likely to make those discussions too dangerous to hold. The prosecution of these two Bear Stearns executives offers a bad lesson for Wall Street: If you have doubts about your strategy or returns, never put it in an …

When Military Justice Departs From The Bush Administration Script … - (1) Someone forgot to give Guantánamo tribunal judge Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III the memo about how his job is just to quietly produce convictions. Either that, or someone did a lousy job of vetting him before they made him a …

Pentagon Manual: OK to Destroy Gitmo Interrogation Notes - The Guantanamo “war crimes” trials took another shameful turn yesterday when the Navy lawyer representing Canadian-born Omar Khadr revealed that a 2003 Pentagon manual encouraged interrogators to destroy their hand written notes made at …

On the philosophy of The Incredibles, Tiger Woods, and the conceptual founder of the world wide web.

My wife just introduced our four-year-old son to The Incredibles (he’s going through a super-hero phase). As the movie played today I was struck by the question raised by Mr. Incredible about his son Dash. To paraphrase: he asked his wife (Elastigirl) why Dash shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate his incredible speed by going out for sports. (In the movie it’s because they’re in the super-hero protection program.) The question got me in mind of norms and deviations from those norms.

Modern society often gets twisted up in the idea that we’re all equal but we should still revere exceptional ability.

David Brooks writes a drooling piece about Tiger Woods (the golfer). The piece is a great example of the uneasy path we walk when thinking about those with great talent or ability. It’s difficult not to be impressed and somewhat in awe of Tiger Woods’ talent. But would we accept the premise that Tiger Woods has more value as a human being than someone without his talent and determination?

Even when we’re dead and gone people go back to review our contribution to this our that. As is happening with Paul Otlet who dreamed up the Internet before computers had been invented. Otlet imagined a world wide interconnection of nodes that would allow people to share libraries of information and exchange messages.

Does it matter that Otlet’s ideas may have prefigured those that resulted in the actual world wide web? Did Otlet’s ideas actually influence anyone who eventually began the real internet? Or does this just happen to make a plausible and interesting story?

It’s hard to accept that we are neither the true owners of our own successes, nor the architects of our failures. And then at the same time, since no-one and no-thing can lay claim to owning our success or failures, we have no better recourse than to claim them for ourselves.

Part I in brief — The Supreme Court decided that it would not be fair to deny Guantanamo detainees the right to represent their innocence and present evidence of such. (A constitutional right, with its own clause, no less.) I applauded this decision but lamented the 5 - 4 vote. I wanted less equality in the spectrum of views of the court.

I then explained how the concept of equality derives from the fundamental principles of existence…

The NY Times magazine has one of those really long stories (a feature, I think they’re called) about shared child care or shared parenting. I like reading these magazine feature articles on-line because for some strange reason I don’t feel obligated to read past the first page. I figure the rest of the article is most likely just more of the same.

I have this to say about the idea that men and women should, as a point of general fairness, share parenting equally — hooey!!

I say this with all due respect to those who choose to do so, but with an equal amount of respect for those who don’t.

My wife and I, parents of a four year old and a nine week old, have been working through our perceptions and the realities of shared parenting. This afternoon I was at the playground with both children while my wife went to a yoga class. (This morning I went for a swim, while she was with the baby and our son was at pre-K.) At the playground, I watched as a mother chatted with another mother while her two year old wandered off with another kid’s wagon (my son’s) and then spilled, dropped, and drank out of the other kid’s (my son’s) sippy cup. I intervened at various points to retrieve the purloined and abused items. She apologized but didn’t take any steps to be more watchful.

She seemed like a normal enough person, but if I had been as neglectful as she I would have felt guilty. And if I’d seen a father behave that way a part of me would have blamed it on his being a man. But through my unscientific and highly personal parent-watching lens, I’d say I have a belief that women make better parents that often isn’t borne out by my observations.

So in any parenting relationship, how likely would it be that each parent can be as good a parent as the other in all ways? More than likely they have their strengths and weaknesses, each their own degree of enjoyment and or acceptance of the role. What’s most important, surely, is that the parents amicably agree, either implicitly or explicitly, and with the good of the children in mind, what will be the appropriate roles. On any other path we will find friction and unhappiness for all concerned.

And finally to the media coverage of Hillary Clinton. Was it gender biased? How biased? And, perhaps least importantly and most difficult to answer, did it make a difference?

Since I’ve written a lot already, and since it’s late, and since you’re probably getting bored, I’ll cut to the chase — the media reflects the nation. If the media coverage was biased it’s because the prevalent perspective of the country is biased. This question couldn’t come up in England, for instance, not because England doesn’t have gender bias but because that gender bias is subordinated to a general sense of ability to do the job. Margaret Thatcher, love her or hate her (more sensibly the latter) was Prime Minister of England decades ago. She was tough, overbearing, ruthless and wore skirts. I’m sure there were unkind and derogatory comments made about her gender, but it didn’t shape the country’s perception of her capacity to do the job, or of the media’s ability to portray her fairly.

But the matter has come up with Hillary because in many people here still feel that competence and ability is subordinate to one’s gender. In Barack Obama’s case, many people feel competence is subordinate to one’s race.

If Hillary is a victim, America is to blame as much as the media. More fervently than I am pleased that Hillary didn’t win (because her fundamental sense of goodness seems predicated on her success more than on anything of value to others) I am fervently afraid that Obama’s presidential candidacy will suffer too greatly from the country’s focus on his race and ethnicity rather than his ability to do the job. What a terrible shame that would be for America, for the world and for the next four years.

Related posts from around the web…

Sexism verses Media bias - If you want to claim there was media bias on some parts I agree with you, but I would like to point out this study. http://journalism.org/node/11266. If you wish to talk about Media Bias I believe we will all agree that yes there was …

NYT’s Dowd: Hillary Has a History of Using Sexism as Cover for Her … - New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said Sunday that Hillary Clinton blaming her campaign woes on gender bias is “poppycock” that is “very damaging to feminism,” and that the former first lady “has a history of covering up her own …

Equally Shared Parenting and its Opposite - I recently read this article in the NYTimes Magazine about the struggle to maintain some form of equality in parenting. Although I can’t really think about a child until I have some stability (a tenure track job), I did appreciate this …

Laura Vanderkam: Men Who ‘Halve’ It All - Our husbands say they believe in equality, but assume that the existence of a child will not impinge on their ability to be gone overnight on business trips, or come home later than expected if a meeting runs late. …

Gender equality begins at home - Marc and Amy Vachon’s website, Equally Shared Parenting, is definitely worth a peek. As is another website mentioned in the article, The Third Path Institute, whose mission is to enable both parents to cooperate at home and regarding …

On the Supreme Court’s split snub to Bush, shared childcare, and news media coverage of Hillary Clinton. (In two parts because it got really long…)

By a 5 - 4 majority, the Supreme Court has decided that this country wants, deserves and damn well should have equal rights of representation for its accused, whether they be detained at the local precinct for fare evasion, or captured, rendered, disappeared for three years and then reappeared again just in time for a Guantanamo military tribunal hearing before the election ends Bush’s reckless rampage through the fields of decency, honesty, restraint and respect for human rights. Hip hooray for equality!!

It’s a good thing, of course, that there is an odd number of justices on the supreme court. Equality in some matters — such as making decisions — isn’t helpful at all. It’s also not encouraging that the decision was so equally balanced. I would have preferred to see a little less equality in the spectrum of opinions. 7 - 2 perhaps? Or 8 - 1? How about some gross inequality? — a 9 - 0 decision in favor of upholding the constitutional rights of our detainees.

Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent said that the constitutional right of habeus corpus wasn’t really that important and that the detainees were really getting some very generous treatment. (I guess that happened while they were disappeared.) So four S.C. justices, almost half, don’t understand the fuss. This indicates a problem. The NY Times editorial frames it as a political problem, but one wonders how we can tolerate a system that could so easily politicize the court.

Without the concept of equality the world would be an odd, unendingly complicated place. And we owe the concept of equality to the orderly and consistent principles of existence. Space and time and the stuff of matter obeys laws of equivalence. The mass of a proton is the same wherever you go. (As a side note, I believe that this indicates that time and space and, fundamentally, units of energy are quantized, as I explain in the appendix to LIFE.) It is because we have this absolute equivalence that we can draw conclusions about presumptive equivalence — that the rights of one person should be the same as another, for instance.

Continued in Part II — shared parenting and the accusation of discriminatory coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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Why is it that I invariably disagree with David Brooks? He seems like a nice enough guy, smart, sensitive… But I just can’t help thinking that he is mostly wrong-headed. Today, he writes an impassioned piece about the problems with our “values,” government policies, and economic institutions that have led to an exponential growth in personal debt over the past thirty years.

Brooks hangs his argument the idea that those who founded the country embodied traditions of “hard work, temperance and frugality.” He then niftily declares that these early traditions resulted in the country’s prosperity. (Thereby overlooking any other reasons why the country might have been prosperous — such as an abundance of natural resources, the absence of any incumbent public or private institutions that in Europe complicated and inhibited growth over the same period, and the immigration of millions of people who had the drive and ambition to up and travel thousands of miles by boat to seek their fortunes.)

Central to Brook’s theme is thrift. He points out that while we’re smoking less and trying to protect the environment, we’re ever more reckless with money. I’m grateful for these problematic comparisons because they give us an insight into where Brooks is going wrong.

People tend to smoke less these days because they realize it’s bad for them. People tend to care more about the environment because they realize that if they don’t we’ll destroy it. Brooks could have also mentioned the curtailing of promiscuity (primarily because of AIDS).

My point is that our behavior is influenced by perceived cause and effect as much as it is by our values. Or, put another way, values are nothing more than nebulous, intangible codifications of cause and effect that have become untethered from their origins. The reason that some people get into debt or anything else that’s “bad” for them is very simple — they haven’t realized how harmful it can be, or they can’t help themselves.

Citing history as a finger to wag at the present, as Brooks does, seems to be a sure sign of sloppy reasoning. People are people, after all, and we’ve been making the same mistakes and smart decisions for thousands of years.

In his Freakonomics column Stephen Dubner points to a similar example about specialization. Dubner makes a pint of ice cream at home for $12, exemplifying some of the problems with small scale, local production — it’s wasteful, inefficient and uncompetitive. Dubner points out that there has been specialization of trades in society for thousands of years — long before conglomerates, and mass farming.

Dubner’s in pursuit of a rational discussion about sound environmental decision making. But his train of thought also says something about the way that society naturally and inevitably reflects human instincts, reasons and choices. There will always be some people who want to make their own ice cream. And there will always be plenty of people who don’t. And just so long as there’s a profit to be made in mass production, it will continue to exist.

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After writing a post on mindfulness recently (Mind Power in Physical and Mental Therapies), I had some correspondence with my former life coach Serge Prengel. Serge shared with me something he’d written about mindfulness in response to the same news report, which I thought I would share here, republished with gratitude to Serge.

Mindfulness Coaching & Therapy

By Serge Prengel“>Serge Prengel

What is mindfulness, and what does it have to do with therapy or coaching?

1. Is it mystical?
First, I’d like to dispel some of the esoteric, mystical associations that many people have with the word “mindfulness’. For many people, “mindfulness” still has the connotation of something magical, endowed with mysterious powers. In fact, mindfulness is very much a part of the human experience. While some people do develop their ability to reach “higher” states of consciousness, everybody has the ability to be mindful and to increase that ability.

Helping clients practice mindfulness has long been a part of many traditional, talk-based psychotherapies, even though it has not necessarily been conceptualized as “mindfulness” within the theories underlying these therapies. For instance, many therapists help clients grow from self-consciousness into self awareness, without necessarily thinking of this as mindfulness training. Another example is how therapists help clients develop the “observing self”: In addition to noticing your mood, you become aware that there also is an “observing self” that notices how you feel, but doesn’t drown in this feeling.

2. The practitioner’s mindfulness

Having a personal experience of mindfulness has profoundly influenced the way many therapists and coaches experience what they do, and changed the way we do our work.
By this, I do not mean that we “prescribe” meditation to our clients. In fact, many of us do not specifically refer to either “mindfulness” or “meditation” during the work we do with our clients. But the profound change is that it influences how we are, and what we do, during our sessions. The practice of mindfulness helps us look for a different quality of listening - - a deeper way of paying attention to what clients say and mean.

By the way, the experience of mindfulness doesn’t just come from the practice of traditional meditation techniques. Standard “lotus” meditation is not the only way to mindfulness. Many Buddhist traditions include such practices as “walking meditation”. Some traditions go further, considering that any activity can be an opportunity to practice a mindful attitude (e.g. the injunction to “chop wood, carry water” as a way to spiritual development). Other gateways include “Focusing”, which was developed by Gene Gendlin as he analyzed the process of therapy to understand what happened in successful therapies.

3. Transmitting an experience

As a therapist/coach, you have the possibility of shaping the experience of what happens in sessions in order to help your clients “get it”. You are not teaching a whole class to try to impart them some general knowledge of what mindfulness might be. You see one client at a time, and this gives you the opportunity to tailor each session to help each client get a direct, personal experience of mindfulness.

This experience starts with what I was describing in the previous paragraph: How a mindful therapist can give a client the experience of being listened to and heard in a profound way. This continues into a creative process that is based on the very specific circumstances of this very specific client, and the nature of the interaction between this very specific client and this very specific therapist.

Over time, clients come to internalize this mixture of mindfulness, receptivity and creativity. Neural pathways adapt so that the client knows how to get back to that state of mindfulness/receptivity/creativity without thinking about it, without having to remember a procedure (much the way “procedural memory” helps us remember how to use a bike).

4. Self-regulation

As the findings of neuroscience make more inroads into the psychotherapy world, there is a growing interest in “bottom up” processes as opposed to “top down” processes. In a nutshell, “top-down” approaches focus on how our “higher” functions, such as the intellect or the will, influence what we do. “Bottom up” approaches focus on how what happens at a sensorimotor level affects what we do and who we are. Far from seeing the brain as just the organ of cognition, we tend to see it more as the place that receives input both from the outside world and from inside ourselves, and that regulates our functioning “from the bottom up”.

So there is a growing interest in how mindfulness can help us enhance the natural processes of self-regulation. This is not done in a mechanical way – i.e. saying “meditate 15 minutes a day” the way you would say “take two aspirins”. Regulating a complex mechanism is a complex thing, as everybody knows from the experience of how difficult it is to relax by just thinking “I should relax”.

Several contemporary therapies have developed ways to help people achieve more self-regulation in dealing with difficult or overwhelming circumstances. The process of doing that involves moment-by-moment attention to fleeting experiences, including body senses. This is facilitated by of the ability of the therapist to be attuned to the client, and to have the ability to be mindful during this process. This creates a learning experience where the client experiences mindfulness and develops skills to increase the ability to be mindful. While this has a lot of similarity with the skills fostered by meditation, it is not meditation per se - - and it goes further than most people can hope to achieve individually through meditation.

Serge Prengel