Encefalitis 1

ENCEFALITIS An Encefalus blogzine July 23rd 2008 – August 23rd 2008, issue 1

Encefalus, is a psychology blog located at http://encefalus.com Encefalitis is a blogzine, which actually means, a collection of the most recent posts brought in a .pdf pretty much like a magazine and given away for free for your own leisure. This blogzine, like the blog, is distributed a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license, which means that you can distribute it for free, as long as you don’t modify it or make profit of it. For the last two cases, you’ll have to come in contact with me at [email protected] Enjoy! Note: Since this is my first instalment, please forgive grammatical mistakes on the first posts, since I haven’t written in English for a loooooong time, but I am getting better ☺. If you spot any problems just mail me.

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Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Encefalus (page 4) The cookie effect (page 6) Drugs, Guns, Cops and Tasers (page 10) Neurons, politics and economics (page 18) The Psychology of The Dark Knight: Batman, superheroes, popular culture,art, Friederich Nietzsche, terrorism and the politics of George Bush (page 22) Lotteries, poverty and social implications (page 29) Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society (page 32) Split Brains, Consciousness and Michael Gazzaniga (page 39) Homosexuality, evolutionary psychology and cognition (page 47) Seasonal Clock Changes Suck (page 50) Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck? (page 53) Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century (page 59) The metaphor of "mental illness" (page 65) Dungeons & Dragons and Psychotherapy (page 68) How to Bolster your Creativity (page 74) Musical Tastes Correlate with Personality Traits (page 79) The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg (page 84) Pimps of Knowledge! Free resources for all! How universities exploit knowledge while the PirateBay helps you (page 90) How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this had to do with the Flynn effect (page 96) Self-trepanation?!!?!? OMG!!! Yikes!!! (page 103) Honorable Mentions Sections (page 109)

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Encefalus Description : First thread. An introduction to the reason of existence of this blog. en·ceph·a·lon ( n-s f -l n ) n. pl. en·ceph·a·la (-l ) The brain of a vertebrate.

[Greek enkephalon, from neuter of enkephalos, in the head; see encephalo-.]

Encephalon comes the greek enkephalos which means "that which is inside the head". That is of course of the brain. Encephalous means that which possesses a head. The name Encefalus signifies three things: 1)It's a direct mention to the greek word for brain 2)It's signifies the person that thinks 3)It provides a different spelling than the correct one thus individualizing my blog :) (pretty much like the name Beatles instead of Beetles)

The purpose of this blog is to combine an update of the current scientific research on psychology (and all its related disciplines) along with criticism, personal thoughts and commentary. Since psychology, along with its many other facets, is a social science I consider its connection with society to be an essential part of it. Therefore, the criticism and the commentary I make will often take things to the larger scale of society whether the research concerns neurology, cognitive psychology or anything else. Holding true to this spirit, this blog will many times incorporate current news from all over the world in an attempt to establish the missing link that differentiates mainstream psychology from the real out-of-the-lab world. I hope that this blog really brings something different to just a simple updating of the current research, because there are, indeed, many blogs that do this job.

And here we go... 4

The cookie effect Description: The effect that trivial things can have on our cognitive system can be much more important than we think.

Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain: Scientific American This is a link to an article published in Scientific American It describes, in short, how our brain works in some ways like a muscle. It can be depleted after repeated use, leading to false choices. What is so interesting about this article is not the fact that depleted mindpower can have detrimental effects on our concetration or choice making. Everybody has felt this. What is very interesting in this article is something that cognitive psychologists always knew, and appears again and again in various researches and in various forms. The fact that we know jack about the decisions we make Certainly Freud had spoken of a subconscious mind (or "id", as it is also called, depending on the historical period of psychanalysis that we're talking, even though these two nearly mean the same thing). But cognitive psychology has taken the concept of the subconscious to a different, more mundane, level (that is no incest, sexual puns, Oedipus etc.). It's obvious that decision making is a very simple process that we perform every day. What this article does, is to summarize the finding of two papers (paper 1, paper 2) that study the correlation between depletion of our cognitive resources and decision making.

Sigmund Freud It suggests (based on some solid evidence) that the simple act of making choices (instead of just stating our preferences), waiting in the line or resisting the tempation to eat deplete our resources.

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And in that case, we rely more on what Kahneman and Frederick (2002) named System 1, the more intuitive driven system. System 2 is what we call "reason". The use of intuitive systems is not necessarily a bad thing. Many times we have to make simple decisions that do not require high level thinking. System 1 can save resources in that cases (like when we drive from work back home). However, in a cognitively ladden world, with countless stimuli that fight for our attention and force us to act, the human mind can only do so much before it "overloads".

Daniel Kahneman, nobel laureate (2002, prize in economics) Fiske and Taylor (1984) had described us as "cognitive misers". That means that the human mind has limited resources and has to find ways to cope with the environment that make the best out of its capacity. And that's where the fun begins. The paper by Anastasiya Pocheptsova gives at the end some economic examples like car or ticket buying. But Scientific American really digs into this whole concept. Cognitive depletion by trivial tasks such as not eating a candy, so subtle that is undetectable by us, can influence our actions and, thus, our life. Here comes the butterfly

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Just relax for a moment. Empty your mind and then try to think of all the trivial things you had to do today. Then yesterday, the day before that, etc. Then think of important decisions you had to make in your life. Think about career, job, wife, or of anything you consider important. Would you believe that these decisions could have in part be influenced by the cognitive depletion of your brain driven by your resistance to not eating a cookie?

Killer life-changin' cookie That's what's fascinating about researches such as these. The fact that they show us things for ourselves hidden even to us. The butterfly can move its wings in America and cause a hurricane in Tokyo. A single cookie can deplete you of your resources and change your life forever. And even if that's not always the case, think of that this is the case at least for a few times. And then add all each member of society together, each one trying to resist a cookie and then you got chaos out of what once seemed to be order. Therefore people, behold and beware of the mighty cookie effect!

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Drugs, Guns, Cops and Tasers Description: The first article of a series. Studies the relation between drugs and society throughout different cultures and times along with various political thoughts.

Ex-cop may be charged in case of man Tasered to death - CNN.com. All right. This is all wacked up.

This news article publicshed in CNN raises three important issues: 1)Drugs 2)Guns 3)Law inforcement I want this to be a series of three articles treating all 3, saying as much as I can say in a few words. The first installment is this one and so let's start right away

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Figure 2.1 Past Month Use of Specific Illicit Drugs among Persons Aged 12 or Older: 2006 1

Estimates for methamphetamine use incorporate data from new questions added in 2005 and 2006 that are not included in estimates for use of illicit drugs other than marijuana, use of psychotherapeutics, or stimulant use. See the introductory paragraphs of this chapter for further information. This is a graph from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of USA (since the current news was from the USA). The rest of the graphs can be found here. Obviously there are many people who are doing drugs. The questions we need to ask are 1)Why they use drugs? 2)What's the great fuss about the drugs that the state not only has strict regulations concerning their use, but also tasers users

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Cocaine and marijuana, common recreational drugs

Concerning the first there are surely many answers. But before we try to answer any of those we must think that when we are trying to talk about why people start taking drugs, we consider the drug use to be some short of special behavior that needs some special explanation. When someone says he wants to marry or find a job, many people won't ask him why, because the answer is, usually, pretty straightforward. But when he uses drugs, most people rush to find a million different explanations like for example: Low self-esteem, addiction, peer pressure, adolescence etc. But why talk, for example, about peer pressure concerning drugs and not peer pressure concerning other social habits (like wearing pants). Alright, I can feel now some of you losing me over there. "This guy's a freakin' idiot! He compares my pants with pot! I'm outta here!".

Freaked out reader

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Before you freak out let me explain a few things. It's very important when analyzing EVERY issue to consider that there is a difference between the structure and the content. This means that while peer pressure can exist in different settings, it's still peer pressure. The same holds true for many things. Therefore, while we consider drug abuse to be a grave issue, it's not much different from more mundane things. Therefore comparing clothing fashion to drugs may not be much different than comparing a sparrow falling to a meteorite crashing. Both the bird and the stone are governed by the laws of gravity and physics. What I'm trying to say here is that while the american society (and not only that) considers drug abuse a serious issue, a thoughtful analyzing of the subject requires careful thought without any biases. A very good strategy to eliminate any biases is to take a look at different cultures and societies. Even better yet, we should look into the history of mankind to find clues about drug abuse in the past of civilizations much different than our western 21st century reality. There are indications that drug use is not a recent phenomenon: Certain psychoactives, particularly hallucinogens, have been used for religious purposes since prehistoric times. Native Americans have used mescaline-containing peyote cacti for religious ceremonies for as long as 5700 years.[14] The muscimol-containing Amanita muscaria mushroom was used for ritual purposes throughout prehistoric Europe.[15] Various other hallucinogens, including jimsonweed, psilocybin mushrooms, and cannabis have been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.[16] (Taken from Wikipedia: Psychoactive Drug - Ritual and Spiritual Use ) Wikipedia also lists some nations that made systematical use of enthegens (psychotropic substances that they were used into a religious context in order to communicate with one's deity or some higher spirit) Entheogen-using cultures It seems that these societies held a very different view of drugs than the one we hold today. "Pfff, what could these primitives know anyway? They probably thought that weed is some kind of magic."

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Maybe weed is indeed magic Alright, maybe they considered weed to be magic and mushrooms to be spirits. This doesn't change the very fact that manty of these cultures managed to evolve and survive in their environment for hundreds of years despite systematic full-scale drug abuse. Then, why all this fuss? First of all, drugs cause economic damage. Surely, there's a connection between skunk and schizophrenia as well as LSD and psychosis. However, the greatest damage happens to the economy. It's self-evident that being stoned or dying from heroin abuse can significantly restrain your productivity.

Secondly, misinformation can spread quickly, parents can get concerned and through the years social norms get into action that are based upon the wrong facts. Cannabis can be considered worse than alcohol (even when it's not) and drugs can be thought to be the cause of every problem instead the result of it. You're not doing drugs because you have depression induced by stressful living factors (homelessness, poverty, work stress). You have depression because you're doing drugs and that causes worse living conditions (homelessness, poverty, work stress). See the relation between the

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two? Most people hurry to blame it on all drugs and see them as the cause instead of as the effect. Surely, drugs can cause anti-social behavior. But what tells us that this is not the result of social stigma and persecution (that is, purely sociological and juridical causes) instead that of chemical compounds? Let's see this graph taken from this article on BBC: Drug classification rethink urged

It shows the harm that drugs induce as rated by independent scientists. What does this show? It shows that barbiturates, alcohol and benzodiazepines are more harmful than amphetamines, LSD and cannabis! Therefore, why haven't we banned alcohol or barbiturates yet? The reason alcohol is still legal is very simple: The Prohibition. People just like alcohol. If they can't get the legal way, they'll get it the other way. But they're going to get it in the end. The reason that barbiturates and benzodiazepines are legal are also simple: The drug companies are making a shit load of money. Take a look at the Pharmaceutical Companies Revenues

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The kind of plants that the pharmaceutical companies have in their gardens Shocked? See why some things are not always as they seem? As long someone someone's making money and is bribing the proper officials everything's fine. So we see that these things happen 1)Drugs are banned because of misinformation and economical damage 2)Alcohol is permitted because in different case we would have civil unrest 3)Benzodiazepines and barbiturates are permitted because the big boyz are making piles out of your pocket So, we have to rethink the whole thing about the drugs. Should they be permitted? Maybe yes and maybe no. In my opinion, everything that does not harm someone else in some way should be permitted. But then, drugs cause loss of capital so maybe they really harm all of us. But then, so do other things and this can't stand as a serious argument unless we specify the magnitude of the damage and we consider it to be big enough to justify the ban of an activity (that in this case is usually deemed recreational). Maybe drugs cause anti-social behavior, but maybe the anti-social behavior is the direct result of laws that cause more problems, instead of solving those they claim to solve. Netherlands has made legal the use of "light" drugs such as cannabis. Other countries have not taken such legal approaches to the matter but are very loose on the subject. Others are strict. In USA as it seems, a cop considered a good strategy to taser a user 9 times. However, the guy tasered to death and his social circle maybe considered that taking cocaine didn't constitute a serious problem (but maybe they did, we'll never know that).

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Netherlands But, maybe, drugs are like alcohol. Most people use them just because they are fun. Maybe, we have a tendency towards drugs, much like we have towards alcohol. And maybe, even better yet, we should talk about a tendency towards psychotropic substances and eliminate the distinction between alcohol, coffee, drugs and benzodiazepines. According to the position of sociobiology if a human behavior exists in all societies and all ages, then (since we've eliminated the social factors) we can say that there is a genetic predisposition. Whatever your position might be, the fact that can be derived from this debate is that the view we take on the subject of drugs, is not something that can be so much concrete as rather more fluent and dependant upon the circumstances. I could go on with this article forever. There are certainly many more factors involved. There is a huge bibliography on the subject. However, I didn't want this article to become a book about every concept of substance abuse. I just wanted to pose some thoughts and let it function as a stimulus for some more. I hope it served my intentions. P.S.:If anyone's wants to flame me about what I've written just feel free to do so since this subject is usually a flamewar-starting subject

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Neurons, politics and economics Description: Neurons, politics and economics studies the new emerging fields inside neuroscience of neuroeconomics and neuropolitics.

Press Release: Neuropolicy Center Confronts the Biological Basis of Collective Decision Making I found the above link in the Neuromarketing (Neuromarketing » Neuropolicy Center at Emory). It's a press release about the opening of a new center for the correlation between brain and political behavior. I believe that we’re starting to see a pattern here. At the first we simply had neuroscience. Then we had neuropsychology. After that, neuroeconomics and now neuropolitics.

These are lot's of neurons there mate I believe this to be a major progress in the studies of cognitive science. Until now, the connection between the brain and behavior was analyzed only in very basic levels of individual psychology. Economics and politics constitute systems more complicated than the individual level, since they are based on groups (and on a scale closer to every-day life). But now, science has started to break this frontier and has started studying for the first time what a few decades ago seemed impossible. The correlation between something so small as a neuron and its effect on invisible constructions of humongous proportions that affect our lives. But not only that, but this new kind of science has started getting public attention through the publication of popular psychology books. Take this example over there: Two new books

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on neuroeconomics and Investing and the brain. In 15 or 20 years neuroeconomics will have, hopefully, become an established field and will have gained a huge amount of valuable data. The same will happen probably with neuropolitics, although the latter is an even newer discipline.

VS What I (and I believe most scientists that aspire to such disciplines) find so interesting about these fields is the fact that the brain can give us solid data. The human mind is an ever-chaning mechanism. Behaviors can get very difficult to measure. There have been numerous sociological, political and economic theories (or combinations thereof, like marxism) but none of them has managed to completely explain human behavior at that level. The reason, in my opinion, is very simple. These systems are so flux that finding laws about them can get a very daunting task. I'm not trying to formulate an attack on the fields of economics and sociology, but I believe that many times, the simple act of observation on a group of people can perturbate what might have been, pretty much like quantum mechanics work. This, along with the chaos that society is, makes the job of studying and formulating laws about any group of people extremely difficult. However, unlike groups, which are in a constant state of motion, data collected from a brain can yield a more static approach to the subject that could bring more solid results. I'm not implying here that the most complex entity we know, with trillions of synapses that constatly reorganize themselves is the paragon of solidity, but we know that the brain has some kind of specialization circuit: some areas do this and some areas do that. Even though playing with something so complex as the brain and so small as a neuron(that we cannot see with the naked eye) may not seem the best way to approach things such as politics, this is not the case. And the reason is that it is easy to alter the measure the brain function through fMRI than to ask tons of people what they're going to vote in the american election to get a statistical (but never completely accurate) sample. Surely, it's impossible at that stage to predict the american elections through fMRI, but after loads of data gathered we'll have uncovered much of the process that's going on inside the heads of the voters.

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Average George Bush voter Of course, as always, we cannot left out criticism out of this one. Here is a paper discussing some the problems of neuroeconomics: Behavioral Economics. Maybe economics are a different sui generis system. The data garnered by neuroimaging techniques can't tell us anything about economics because putting a man in an fMRI is much different than going with your wife to a restaurant and having to choose amongst a variety of foods or searching the internet for a new car to buy. An additional criticism concerning the neuroimaging techniques is that they are still very slow and not precise enough. This, however, has not stopped neuroscience from advancing forward. I believe that criticism at this point has the possibility of being correct, but I consider a better choice to let neuroeconomics and neuropolitics to advance before trying to tear them appart. If they are proven inadequate they will disappear by themselves, pretty much like most out-dated disciplines do. Another criticism that has been posed on the subject is of political kind. That is, which people will benefit from the information that concerns our consumer and political behavior at brain level. This is a criticism that I consider to be of great value, as it applies not only to neuroscience, but to every science, as well. Some decades before, the science that had the burden of ethics on its shoulders was physics. The creation of the first atomic bomb was a huge moral dilema. Now, the great moral dilemmas are faced not by physicists, but by neuroscientists. The new atomic bomb does not reside in a silo, but inside our brains.

VS

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It's pretty obvious that this power will be used by those who alreay have enough power. Probably, this seems a little pessimistic, but think for just a moment that the discoveries in the field of marketing have been used, not by consumers, but my marketing companies to sell more products. I believe that this could be the case with neuro-politics for example. Of course, there are thinkers like Steven Pinker who have proposed that better understanding of ourselves can lead to a better society. I believe this to be the best point of view I've heard so far. However, it may seem a little bit unrealistic, but still Pinker has showed us again that humanity may be getting in a better direction in the last centuries (A History of Violence). I only hope that he's right. Further Reading: The Economics of Brains: A collection of research papers touts the promise of neuroeconomics.

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The Psychology of The Dark Knight: Batman, superheroes, popular culture,art, Friederich Nietzsche, terrorism and the politics of George Bush Description: The psychology of Nolan's the Dark Knight along with all its implications for the modern society (like terrorism and popular culture).

I had the luck to watch the Dark Knight in the world premiere. This movie just stuck in my head and I couldn't get it out. I believe that it has steered many issues and there are a lot of things to say about it, so I decided to write a post and publish some of my thoughts. First of all, I believe this to be the first superhero movie that shows the superheroes in a realistic setting. Romanticism is gone here. You won't find superheroes who are happy to fight the crime or

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super-vilains that look as if they came out of a fairytale. Bruce Wayne is a troubled person who has to resort to being Batman to deal with his issues (or is it Batman who has to resort to Bruce Wayne in order to hide?). Joker is the incarnation of chaos and they story Harvey Dent/Two-Face provides a different sense of tragedy to the movie. This work has its roots back to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. This is, probably, the most important superhero comicbook and the first one to bring superheroes to a human level. Batman Begins (Nolan's first Batman movie) tried to encapsulate this spirit, but I believe that The Dark Knight, not only captures it, but maybe even surpasses it. And that, in the notion that while Frank Miller's the Dark Knight Returns still adhered to the superhero universe of DC (including Superman and Green Arrow for example), the Dark Knight denies any such relation and concentrates on the real world. Of course, someone might say that this made Miller's work even more worthy of praise, since it's more difficult to provide a realistic setting and explore Batman's psychology in a world that includes Superman, because in a world where an alien demi-god crashes enemy aircrafts, a psychopath dressed as a bat might not look as strange. However, I still adhere to the opinion I expressed previously.

The second issue I'd like to address, has to do with the the psychological subjects this movie raises. It's for the first time that psychologists have really started to take seriously the superhero culture. Take a look at these examples: 1) The Psychology of The Dark Knight « The Situationist. 2) The Dark Knight: A Psychologist's View 3) Chaos Theory and Batman: The Dark Knight Part I History Channel even had a 60-minute show discussing the Psychology of Batman

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And why would that be? Aren't superheroes supposed to be a geek thing only, shunned by high culture and science? What I believe makes superheroes important is that they are a part of the american mythology. Pretty much, like all ancient civilizations had their own heroes the american civilization has its own heroes. The ancient Greeks had Hercules and Achilles for example. The Sumerians had Gilgamesh. American has batman and superman. All these heroes have some common characteristics. They are stronger than the average human and they fight with forces that are also above the average human. One more common characteristic they have, is that in the ancient times all heroes had some relation with the metaphysical. For example, all greek heroes had the blood of a god in them. The reason for that was the concept of Hubris according to which, an ordinary human could not surpass the limits imposed on him by the gods. Therefore, he needed to have the help of a god, (like Patroclus in Homer's Iliad) or have the blood of a god (like Hercules). In later times, Beowulf and Lancelot both come from the sea, and the story tells that Lancelot was raised by the Lady of the Lake, clearly showing tha heroes had a relation with the metaphysical. What pattern can we see here? The first superhero, superman, came from the outer space. He wasn't a human at all. And he combined a number of extreme powers.

Superheroes of different times It seems probable that the human civilization has a propensity towards creating superheroes and in every age they exhibit some of the same characteristics. By telling that the superheroes are a part of the american civilization, I mean that they are selfevidently a part of USA's culture. As the politics and society of the country evolved so did the superheroes. The X-Men for example was the first comic to address the issue of racism in the modern society. And Spider-Man had as a protagonist a troubled geek with everyday problems who couldn't pay his rent.

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And so, we see how comics, as a form of art, do what every true form of art does. They express the spirit of their age. When I say true art, I leave out the art of the elite (which has always existed during different times under different forms), but popular art, which is derived from the civilization and the society that the common people constitute. And in that aspect, this art is ageless, since through the expression of a specific era, it provides the material for future generations to understand that era somewhat better. Mind you that when I am talking of popular art, I don't have in my mind, for example, the hits of popular music. I consider this to be mass art directed at a consumer audience. What, in my opinion, makes popular art important is that characteristic of agelessness. I believe mass art to have this characteristic as well, but in that case not concerning certain works of art, but the phenomenon itself. In the aspect of comics, I believe that certain comics, manage to escape from the simple superhero phenomenon and are elevated to a different tier, all by themselves.

What makes Batman different from the typical superhero is that he has no special powers, other than sheer determination, extreme intelligence and lots of money. He is not invulnerable. Instead, he is the most vulnerable of all, since he has to do what he does because of childhood trauma induced by the death of his parents. In that aspect, Batman could be anyone of us. One thing that Miller probably wanted to show with the climactic end of Batman's battle with Superman is that since Batman wins Superman, anyone who is determined enough can win superman. What Nolan changes with Dark Knight returns, is that Batman appears weaker since his opponent, Joker, is not a superhuman, but a person just like everyone, in who's case, something has gone terribly, horribly, wrong inside his head. However, the end obviously exemplifies for once again the determination of the Dark Knight, maybe even more so than Miller's the Dark Knight Returns. And now coming to the joker.

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Why so serious? First of all, Ledger's performance is superb. He's undoubtedly one of the best villains ever in the history of cinema. He portrays perfectly what Joker represents: pure chaos. What is so interesting from a psychological perspective concerning the Joker, is that he combines all the negative assumptions that the average person has inside his head concerning psychopaths, which, in the greatest part, are false. However, Ledger makes him seem completely realistic. And that happens in the aspect that while it would be hard to find someone who combined all these traits, it's not difficult to find out that Joker is the representation of every negative facet of our era. He is a true nihilist in the most pure form, just as like Friedrich Nietzsche imagined the century that was approaching. In that aspect, the Joker is maybe a true Übermensch (Superhuman). Joker, pretty much like Nietzsche visualised his superhuman, imposes his own values on the nihilism of his society. He destroys all social values and every notion of morality and he creates his own, based on his own vision of chaos. He doesn't want money. He doesn't want fame. He just wants to show his own vision of chaos to the world.

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Friederich Nietzsche What is so frightenning about the Joker is that he really enjoys the process. He finds funny what he does. Not only that, but maybe for him, this is the only source of true pleasure. Finally, the movie, as an expression of his age and civilization, has a few political connotations, which concern terrorism. Since the 9/11 attack on the twin towers the world has changed. USA has started a series of wars and aggresive politics on the Islamic world and islamic fondamendalists have started their own round of attacks on america and its allies. Nolan's few references to Joker as a terrorist clearly show this unconscious motive that is propagated via the american media and politics to consider every kind of attack an act of terrorism. In the notion that the Joker uses terror to reign, Nolan is absolutely right. He is a terrorist in his purest form.However, the association that exists in the western world concerning the word terrorist does not have to do with someone who simply uses terror and fear to attack his enemies, but has a historical meaning derived by the attack on the twin towers.

In that way, terrorism has become an alternative word for what really constitutes a war. A war between american imperialism and Islam who resists the attackers. The two worlds are alien to each other, each perceiving the other as simply an enemy who they cannot understand. Thus, the word terrorist also signifies a person who is not mentally stable, an alien, an outsider (without making any research to find the real causes of his behavior). So, while I believe that the Joker can said indeed to be a terrorist, the connotations that this word brings are completely out of context and simply propagate a kind of politics that the USA has supported the last years. 25

Of course there are also different opinions like this one: What Bush and Batman Have in Common. This article really gave me a strong laugh. I believe it to be a typical case of abductive reasoning gone wrong. Just like paranoids use abductive reasoning to conclude that everyone is after them, so the author of that article concluded that Batman is George Bush. Damn it! I thought he was Bruce Wayne! I believe such parallelism to be of the extreme kind, since if someone wants to project a certain view on a movie (or book or anything for that matter), he will do so, no matter what. I believe that the movie has primary entertaining value and such allegories can never be proven. In that case, I believe the allegory attempted by the L.A. times author to be a comical one, since it can be very easily inversed and become something like that: George Bush, The Dark Knight? Be Careful What You Wish For. You see? It's easy to prove anything in that whole "allegory" context. That's why the analysis I did above concentrated mainly on elements that can be observed via the one or the other way.

To conclude with this article, I believe the Dark Knight to be an excellent movie. If someone has anything to comment on it or my post please feel free to do so.

Further Reading: Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series) Batman Unauthorized: Vigilantes, Jokers, and Heroes in Gotham City The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration (Psychology of Popular Culture series)

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Lotteries, poverty and social implications Description: In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group

Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets. This above link is some news posted on Eurekalert. It's a study proving that poor people are more likely to buy lottery tickets "In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets." "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape." The article then goes on and reports a second study "A second experiment reported in the paper found that indirectly reminding participants that, while different income groups face unequal outcomes in education, jobs and housing, everyone has equal chances of winning the lottery induced an increase in the number of lottery tickets purchased. The group given this reminder purchased 1.31 tickets, compared with 0.54 for the group not given such a reminder."

Dream on dude... 27

These are two very interesting studies. They indicate a cognitive error with social implications. What is interesting in these studies is the fact that the simple reminder of their 1) status or 2) equality/unequality provided a stimulus that was enough for them to buy more lottery tickets. The question is why someone would indulge in such a maladaptive behavior. The chances of winning the lottery are very few and buying lottery tickets surely costs money, which worsens your financial state even more. Of course, there are some problems concerning the research. What applies to the experiment may not apply to real life. Maybe if the subjects didn't have an experimenter right there to give them tickets, they would choose some other kind of action. Obviously, the most productive strategy to escape poverty is to work smart and hard, but this doesn't seem something that could be put in an experimental context.

Surely not this kind of hard work However, since we cannot have such experiments (and the experimenters probably knew that already), we must try to draw conclusions from what we already have (not to mention that this criticism to psychological experiments is a whole other matter unto itself which will be addressed in future posts) . Even if fewer subjects would indulge in such behavior after the stimulus, in the context of national economics, we have a very strong effect. This shows clearly the connection that exists between psychology and politics, something that, fortunately, the authors address.

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"State lotteries are popular revenue sources that are unlikely to go away anytime soon," said George Loewenstein, a study co-author and Herbert A. Simon professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. "However, it is possible to implement measures that can actually benefit low-income lottery players and lead to fairer outcomes." It would be even more interesting to make this experiment in settings where the people are constantly reminded of their status and the social unequality, like poor neighborhoods, or, even business offices with a clear hierarchy. It would be also interesting to explain why this error exists. People are not very good with statistics like Peter Donnelly describes in this video posted on TED Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics However, cognitive errors are also a huge matter unto themselves, since they touch everything that includes decision making, which is pretty much... uh... everything. For now use this post as food for thought and for some further information read below. Further Reading: List of Cognitive Biases at Wikipedia Predictably Irrational Organizational Responses to Cognitive Bias Cognitive Biases: A Short List Cognitive Bias and Investing

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Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society Description: In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. What is their relationship with the age of information and the internet?

I found this article which had been published in sunday times and written by Steven Pinker In defense of dangerous ideas It's was first published in the Edge where various scientists expressed their opinions on the subject. Here is the start of the article

Steven Pinker In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them. Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? 30

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape? Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence? Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven? Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized? Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men? Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality? Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized? Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children? Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism? Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances? Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste? Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people? Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder? Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

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Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children? Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas -- ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order.

I find what Pinker describes here very important and thought-provoking. He challenges us to think, not about anything, but about our own thoughts and beliefs. We all hold notions that we believe them to be self-evident. If you are an atheist you believe that the inexistence of god to be obvious, while if you are a christian you deny evolution in favor of an all-powerful god. Those who are against the death penalty perceive it as barbaric, while those who support it believe it is a good measure of retribution. A lot of issues that Pinker addresses as examples in his articles are even more provoking than the ones I offered, because they have been correlated with nazism or other extreme ideologies. Differences between genders and races are clearly a taboo topic.

No, not this kind of Taboo Of course Pinker does not say he supports any of those ideas. He simply expresses them as ideas that tick people off.

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This debate raises a very important subject: the subject that societies throughout time have changed and what was once thought atrocious now is considered mortal and the opposite. Most people don't live long enough to see a cultural revolution or a radical change of morals in a society. So, most of us live with the same concept of morals and truths about the world for our whole lives. Of course, many people change values until their become adults, but after that, very few express radical changes in opinions, a phenomenon that has lead to what we call "the generation gap".

Highlander has lived long enough to witness many cultural revolutions Therefore, even truths that we hold self-evident could be entirely false. Even values like freedom that we all take for granted may have had a very different meaning centuries ago. If we take a moment and think about it, for its longest part, humanity has lived under totalitarian regimes (including kings or a noble super-elite) with little or no education and almost zero information. In the 20th public education could be said to be really widespread and only in the last ten-or-something years the information has started to become really free and instant, through the miracle of internet. However, even though we cannot enter into the minds of people that lived a thousand years ago, the internet and the huge amounts of information channeled through it at continuous rates have brought a qualitative change to our era. And that, I believe, is the social metacognition. Metacognition is defined by wikipedia as "the knowledge (i.e. awareness) of one's cognitive processes and the efficient use of this self-awareness to selfregulate these cognitive processes (e.g. Brown, 1987; Niemi, 2002; Shimamura, 2000). It is traditionally defined as the knowledge and experiences we have about our own cognitive processes (Flavell 1979)."

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Through the plethora of information flowing throughout the societal structures, these systems (the societies that is) have started to alter the informational systems on which they are founded. Societies have always been structured upon certain sets of information (whether they hold some truth or not). By information I mean any: 1)Norms 2)Truths (history, truths about the physical world etc.) 3)Myths 4)Any kind of cognition that is transfered through social means and is not inherent in nature What we have here is a dissolution of the informational structure of society through an overflow of abundant new data.

Information is everywhere. Information is everything What I describe is (and I will explain in a few seconds how this is related with metacognition) is a procedure very similar to the following: Let's say that you have a very difficult equation to solve. Instead of going the "mathematical way" you just put random numbers and try to see what happens. Through pure chance, one of the numbers will eventually solve the problem (even if this takes a hundred years to happen). So, in our example, let's see the society as a really big function. The data that enter the in the input of the function are innumerable. Some of them, are eventually going to fall on other notions of the world (informational constants as I like to call them) that will be mutually exclusive, therefore indicating an incosistency in the function. Some of these inconsistencies can be disregarded through the mechanism of social inertia. However, somewhere, sometimes, some chunks of information manage to

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infect the minds of some populations or small groups (or even of a single human mind), therefore resolving the inconsistency through the opposite manner: not by social inertia, but by social motion. So, to conclude with my point, the overflow of information causes the social systems to reveal their incosistencies at their informational structure thus creating social motion. And that's where the social aspect of metacognition lies. Societies have started as a system to reevaluate their own values. Nothing, could provide this change, except for the internet, through which, people miles apart and of different civilizations exchange information, even many times without wanting it to, since information is not only passed on verbally. It can be passed on by the social norms that have been imprinted in the behavior and thinking of each person. They can be passed through the art, through music or through videos posted on Youtube.

A frog showing use of some metacognition by thinking about his own thinking Those of you who are very observant will have probably already noticed that metacognition includes awareness. Therefore, by anouncing that a society can have metacognition I automatically suppose that it has awareness and therefore a conscience. This is the functionalist's way of thinking (Functionalism-philosophy of mind) and is based on the presumption that if something can perform a certain function (in that case, the functions that a conscient being does), then we must presume that it has a certain quality, in that case, a conscience. I disagree with this view, but I don't want to raise a metaphysical debate in this article. To avoid this problem I'll name this whole procedure as meta-informational social regulation, thus eliminating any notion of "self" or "consciousness" concerning the society.

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(Note: I have consciously decided not to include the subject of memes in this thread. I believe the memes to be a complicated subject that deserves an entirely different post unto itself) Now, someone might raise the question as to what is so special about this whole thing, since throughout history there have always been people with dangerous ideas. What made to me to raise the issue of meta-informational social regulation is that for the first time this procedure does not apply to individual people, but to society as a whole. If you take a look at the Edge you'll notice the plethora of writers (and journals) that took part in the the Dangerous Ideas debate. I find it positive that talking about such subjects has started taking somewhat of a mainstream root. By that, I don't mean that I consider it positive to talk particularly about the subjects Pinker spoke above (some of which I consider them myself to be very provoking), but to think about the relativity of socal truths and values and think about questions that no-one dares to answer. There's always a high probability that what you think can be totally false, but there's also a slight probability that it could be the next great thing. Until then, keep thinking folks! Further Reading: What is a taboo question? or http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/what_is_a_taboo.html: Poses some criticism on Pinker's article.

In Defense of Dangerous Ideas on Richard Dawkins' page Dangerous ideas in Thinking for a Change

Split Brains, Consciousness and Michael Gazzaniga 36

Description: This article describes the importance of split-brain experiments on the study of consciousness and the latest commentary of the pioneer Michael Gazzaniga

Spheres of Influence: Scientific American. The above was article was published in Scientific American Mind Its author is Michael Gazzaniga one of the most respected figures in neuropsychology.

Michael Gazzaniga If you don't know him, he's the guy who made the most important work in the lateralization of the two hemispheres. You've probably heard before that the left hemisphere is sequential and logical, while the right holistic and sentimental (even if this is not always true). These discoveries belong to this man.

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How he did that? Back in to 60's (starting from the 40's) it was a common procedure to cut in half the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres, thus splitting the cerebral cortex in half. Everything below the cerebral cortex remained unaffected, since lateralization is met only in in the cerebral cortex. The scientists at first expected the patients to meet problems in their everyday activities, however they did not. Gazzaniga (along with Roger Sperry) decided to study these patients (called split-brain patients in lay terms).

Roger Sperry, Nobel prize in medicine (1981) for his work about split-brains The patients seemed to cope with their every day activities because the two hemispheres could work in parallel as they received the same stimuli. Once Gazzaniga and Sperry put the subject in trials where the two hemispheres could not communicate the patients showed up the effects of lateralization. So for example, if a word was shown on the left visual field, the patient could not read it, because the right hemisphere, to where the left visual field belongs, was unable to read. What is most interesting however is this (taken from http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors-time/split_brain.htm)

• •

The left brain dominates for language, speech, and problem solving The right brain dominates for visual-motor tasks

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1. Each hemisphere was presented a picture that related to one of four cards placed in front of the split-brain subject. The right hemisphere saw the picture on the left (a snow scene), and the left hemisphere saw the picture on the right (a chicken foot). Both hemispheres could see all of the cards. 2. The left and right hemispheres easily picked the card that related to the picture it saw. The left hand pointed to the right hemisphere's choice, and the right hand pointed to the left hemisphere's choice. 3. The patient was then asked why the left hand was pointing to the shovel. Only the left hemisphere can talk, and it did not know the answer because the decision to point to the shovel was made in the right hemisphere. 4. Immediately the left hemisphere made up a story about what it could see --- the chicken. It said the right hemisphere chose the shovel to clean out a chicken shed. Does this reveals the left brain's interpreter in action? Source: Gazzaniga, Michael S., "The Split Brain Revisited," Scientific American, July 1998 (An official edition by Michael Gazzaniga explaining the whole procedure can be found in Scientific American Digital)

The left hemisphere just made a story out of nowhere to explain what the subject had chosen! So, we see that beyond lateralization, a much important issue was raised by this experiments. Maybe the most important issue of all: That of consciousness. Does each hemisphere have a different consciousness? How consciousness can emerge through what seems to be two different brains? If these brains really had two consciousnesses, then which of the two the patient experienced. Was it the left hemisphere's? Or was it the right's? If it was the left hemisphere, then the right hemisphere was doomed to eternal silence (since it could not speak) and who experienced it? Obviusly, split-brain experiments can freak you out.

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Don't try splitting your brain like that kids Consciousness is a subject that I am directly interested in, but it can't be covered in full detail in just one post. So, in this one,we will focus on the implications of the split-brain experiments on consciousness and the commentary of Michael Gazzaniga In the article Spheres of Influence published in Scientific American Mind (which was mentioned in the beggining) Gazzaniga writes the following: "When we triggered a negative mood in the right hemisphere by a visual stimulus, the patient denied seeing anything but suddenly said that she was upset and that it was the experimenter who was upsetting her. She felt the emotional response to the stimulus—all the autonomic results—but had no idea what caused it. Ah, lack of knowledge is of no importance, the left brain will find a solution." So, Gazzaniga goes on to postulate his own theory of consciousness. What he believes constitutes consciousness is the left hemisphere's ability to interprete events. So, in his own point of view, our brain simply experiences events in seperate circuits and then the left hemisphere connects them into a whole. To recapitulate (again from http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors-time/split_brain.htm)

The Left Brain's Interpreter This and other split-brain experiments show that ... • •

Each of us has an interpreter in our left hemisphere. This interpreter constructs theories about why we act and behave the way we do. 40

•

Thousands (perhaps millions) of brain activities go on relatively independently of one another and all outside the realm of conscious experience. They affect body movements, emotions, thoughts, ....

•

Once these brain activities are expressed, the expressions become events that the conscious system takes note of and that the interpreter must explain.

--- "tip of the tongue" phenomena --- "unconscious" problem solving • •

The interpreter constructs our conscious reality by interpreting the (limited and fragmentary) data available to it. Your conscious life is an "afterthought" constructed by the interpreter.

Source: Gazzaniga, Michael S., Mind Matters

Consciousness can sometimes be a problem This is a very interesting theory and a very realistic one as well. Michael Gazzanina drives the left brain's interpretive property to a whole new level through his theory, proposing that the left brain does not simply interprete events about the external reality, but about our own consciousness. However, what this theory doesn't do, is to explain how the hard problem of consciousness, as it was described by David Chalmers, can be solved (Hard Problem on Wikipedia). This theory does not explain how consciousness is emerged through the neuronic chaos of our brains. However, Gazzaniga offers a second step into the whole debate of consciousness.

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The problem of consciousness has been separated into the aformentioned hard problem and the easy problem. The easy problem of consciousness is constituded simply by the functions that give rise to experience. The hard problem explains how the subjective experience emerges and why.

David Chalmers (photo) has a hard problem to solve Consciousness has also been seperated into two parts: Primary and secondary. Primary consciousness is what we can call self-awareness. It's the ability to recognize our existence, to know that we exist and that we are different beings from each other. Very few animals are believed to possess this ability (like dolphins or some other primates). Secondary consciousness is the simple existence of awareness and feelings. Consciousness can also be categorized as phenomenal consciousness (what we described as secondary consciousness) and as access consciousness. Access consciousness is the consciousness that can be used for rational behavioral control and verbal report. Ned Block has theorized that phenomenal consciousness is simply the existence of a stimulus and its awareness without conscious awareness. Access consciousness comes once the awareness is conscious. Maybe the last sentences don't make much sense to you. How can we be aware and not self-aware. Ned Block gives the example of a clock that ticks in the background, when we suddenly become aware of its presence. In that case, we have a-consciousness (whereas before we had only p-consciousness). Interestingly enough, not much time ago this research showed up on PLoS Biology : Neural Correlates of Auditory Perceptual Awareness under Informational Masking It describes this very procedure: how an object can be audible without us knowing. Actually, what is interesting with this research is that it finds the neural correlates of the whole procedure: which areas of the brain function when sounds enter into the proccessing stage, before getting to the aware stage, and which areas of the brain function when awareness occurs. 42

No, it's not an intergalactic weapon. It's an fMRI used to study the neural correlates of conscious experience And so Gazzaniga introduces a new dimension to the whole problem of consciousness: the gestalt dimension, or, how the parts become a whole. Even though there is no complete theory of consciousness yet, there is a huge amount of scientific data directing to the brain performing certain functions at certain spots. Gazzaniga's theory is a way to explain how these different spots can emerge as a whole. There have been two very popular neurological theories concerning this subject (the easy problem of consciousness) that of Christof Koch's and that of Susan Greenfield's. Koch believes that the center of consciousness lies inside a specific part of the brain, and Greenfield speaks of "assemblies" made of neurons that give rise to consciousness. (For more visit Scientific American: How Does Consciousness Happen) Gazzaniga offers with his theory another perspective, not on the neural correlates of consciousness, but a way that different neural correlates can become a whole and be subjectively understood as such. So, he has proposed his own theory of how a split brain, becomes one. I hope this was not too much information on just one post With this article I just tried to scrape the surface of consciousness along with some of its historical roots. There have been many theories that we did not access in this post (like the theory of quantum consciousness for example) and will be covered in future posts. As always, feel free to comment

Further Reading:

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Online Papers on Consciousness (by David Chalmers) Mind Papers at Fragments of consciousness (run by David Chalmers) Consciousness in the news Consciousness matters at Harvard University Press Publicity Koch on (= against) quantum consciousness theory Kuhnian and Conceptual Reflections on Dennett’s Critique of the Hard Problem Cognition, Brain and Consciousness Access consciousness and language Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness Lectures on Neuroscience and Consciousness X-Phi meets A-Phi Will Solving The 'Hard Problem' of Consciousness Unweave the Rainbow?

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Homosexuality, evolutionary psychology and cognition Description: This article addresses some recent research on homosexuality along with its connection with evolutionary psychology and cognition.

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Men's sexual orientation recognised in a fraction of a second. The above link points to a very interesting research (Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms). The experimenters showed a series of faces to the subjects and the subjects could identify with 57% accuracy which of them were homosexual. The homosexual photos were taken from a gay dating site. To check their results, they included a second round where they included photos from Facebook, finding the same results. The authors conclude that "The finding that male sexual orientation can be accurately perceived in such a short period of time is striking," the researchers said. "Although previous work has shown that 'thin slices' of behaviour are remarkably rich in providing information about people, none have sliced as thin as 50ms."

What is obviously so intriguing about this research is the fact that 50 ms are enough to judge someone's sexual orientation. We've all experienced our reflexives to work faster than our conscious thoughts when we try to avoid an obstacle, but we want to believe that are thoughts about the others are more rational.

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Of course, readers of Encefalus already know that people don't always act rationally (The Cookie Effect, Lotteries, poverty and social implications). BPS Research Digest also mentions two more researches (Your trustworthiness is judged in a tenth of a second, or less, A company's profits are linked to the facial appearance of its chief executive) Once again, we must mention again what we said in the Cookie Effect. That humans are not very rational creatures. However, the subject of this research concerns a very hot social topic: Homosexuality. Surely someone might argue that in a real life situation we get many more cues about one's orientation (clothing, movements etc.) and that this research ignores the social factor. This doesn't change the fact, however, that people still make judgments about other people's sexuality in 57ms and that many times they are correct. And also, when the researchers added as a factor the percentage of homosexuality in the society the accuracy actually increased.

Your conscious mind is just the tip of an iceberg The point I'm trying to make here, is that we are watching psychology moving away from social explanations to more individualistic ones. Of course this debate hasn't appeared just now. It can be seen again and again in various contexts. However, what I believe has changed now, is the very fact that psychology has progressed as a science, so that we can make experiments and create theories on the individual that hold a great amount of truth and can be seen to be applied in a complete context in some decades that includes inter-group and intra-group interaction.

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Intra-group interaction gone awry Many would consider this to be a withdrawal from social explanations, but I believe it to be a focus on explanations that can be measured and quantified, away from nebulous sociological theories. The social part can be introduced inside the theory once we have built a solid foundation. I'm not trying to bash sociological explanations here, I'm just expressing my optimism about the appeareance of researches that engage hot social topics via a psychological perspective. In that context we will discuss the next article on homosexuality published in Scientific American Mind Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American

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Seasonal Clock Changes Suck Description: Seasonal clock changes simply suck. They have no reason for existence as an article in BPS research digest shows. BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Our bodies fail to adjust to seasonal clock changes. I promised to throw some random rant now and then and here it is. The above link will send you to BPS Research Digest and a a research with a 55.000 people sample proving what every one of us who faces sleeping disorders already knows: the body CANNOT addapt to seasonal clock changes. Your circadian rythm is perturbated. Your energy is lost, your head is foggy and you can't sleep at night. After some weeks you'll maybe start looking like Christian Bale in The Machinist

The result of a few sleepless nights If you think of all the lost time-schedules you'll quickly gain a first impression of the money lost because of this stupid practice. Cows won't make milk earlier, nor will crops start to grow faster. We simply change our clocks for no reason at all! We literally jet-lag ourselves. If you suffer from sleeprelated problems this can be detrimental to your health and well-being. The funniest thing about this whole procedure is how many people will claim they get more daylight and how they say that they don't understand any difference concerning their sleep cycles. Concerning the first, the day cannot stretch itself (unless you're moving with the speed of light), nor will you gain any more daylight. You just wake up one hour earlier, something you could have already done during winter-time, already. Concerning the second, it reminds me of Road Runner.

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Roadrunner says "beep-beep" Now, before you think that I've flipped over by the lack of sleep, let me explain for a few seconds. If you've ever seen Road Runner, you'll see that this kind of humor is usually focused around a certain element: the violation of the laws of physics. Some of these times, the violations occur once the coyote notices that he violates them. For example, he walks over a chasm, and falls only once he notices that he walks on air. This kind of humor is typical of case of egocentrism as Freud and Jean Piaget had described it. What this means, is that the person feels that the cause of all effects is internal, it stems from himself. The coyote won't fall unless he realizes that he is standing on the void. The BPS Research Digest also offers a research on egocentrism and the evaluation of visibility in very young children (“If I cover my eyes I’ll be hidden” – how young children understand visibility). So, this is pretty much what those who believe that the clock change has no effect on their bodies. Just because you change your clock, you didn't change time. The human body has its own laws. Time has its own, too. And, apparently, so do the stupid western goverments who continue to use this practice. Perhaps, if I continue to have more sleepless nights I'll be inspired by another Christian Bale movie and take the things into my own hands.

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The Dark Knight ready to fight insomnia induced by seasonal clock changes Further Reading: Saving Time Seasonality Daylight Saving Time Disrupts Humans' Natural Circadian Rythm

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Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck? Description: Does psychiatry suck? This is a fundamental question that bothers psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health patients. We'll try to answer it. I found this link in Providentia A Shocking Discovery (Part One) It speaks about the discovery of the electroshock by the psychiatrists in the 1930s. As it seems, this is a series of articles discussing this issue. I felt compeled to offer my personal viewpoint concerning a few facts about psychiatry. The above link may appear a little shocking to some people (pun intended). It describes psychiatrists killing dogs with electroshock in order to find a miracle electroshock cure and later testing this method on a human being with absolutely no proof or evidence that this would work. These practices don't look scientific, nor do they look supportive to the patients. Obviously something stinks here.

Something stinks here bro Yet, to those who have studied the history of psychiatry, this story doesn't seem so strange. We've all heard of lobotomy. It ain't pretty and it ain't good. And it failed to treat anything. For those who don't know, a lobotomy consists of plucking a thing into the forehead (frontal lobe) and cutting synapses and destroying brain regions (which probably they knew shit about what these regions were supposed to do) thus turning the patient into a rehabilitated living zombie.

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Now, we have psychiatrists giving away drugs like they're candies, without even knowing possible side-effects. Prozac was accused of causing teens to commit suicide and ritalin has been accused of causing heart problems and stunt growth.

The latest psychiatric achievement Reading all this, one wonders why the psychiatrists would put themselves in so much trouble. To cure mental illness of course! But what the hell is really mental illness? Could melancholy be considered a mental disease? Am I sick because I feel like shit all the time? Can believing in strange things be considered a mental disease? Then why aren't all the christians who believe in the raising of the dead, demons and people who walk on water considered schizophrenic? Is a hypermobile child mentally sick? Why is it so strange for a child to be hypermobile? And why we give ritalin to him? And let's say that being hypermobile is bad and we should administer ritalin to calm him down. But, why we would want to do that? To be more attentive at the class at school? Where he is going to learn what? About guys who walk on water? (see christians above). The thing with mental illness is that it is not a disease. It's a social label. Thomas Szasz once wrote that: If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. Which actually means, if god talks to you, you're screwed.

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You're screwed darlin' Thomas Szasz was one of the leading figures of the antipsychiatric movement. Antipsychiatry considers psychiatry simply as a means of repression of whatever is considered "socially deviant". Psychiatry has in its roots biology, thus eliminating social problems as a cause of psychological problems (for example depression induced by unenmployment) and has authority over patients considered mentally ill, like, for example, the right to involuntary hospitalization. Psychiatry also, belongs to system which includes universities, workplaces and drug companies that is a large part of the economy and benefits over people that are unable to work (these are the "mentally sick"). So it is very profitable. On the other hand, real treatment for these people means plain cost without any real benefit. Anti-psychiatrists on the other hand advocates the use of humane treatments, which do not include chemical compounds or coercion.

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Psychiatry is BIG business From the beginning of this article the discussion has been focused mostly on social subjects which proves for sure on point: psychiatry has a lot of social implications. Whether mental illness is a social construct or not is a large debate, but surely psychiatry does not claim what psychiatrists claim it to be: plain medicine. No guys, I'm sorry. Psychiatry has been proven again and again hopeless in trying to incorporate the biomedical model to mental disease. That is, the labeling of different diseases with certain symptoms and cures. The failure to find any biological treatments back in the first years of psychiatry gave rise to clinical psychology. The repeated use of force and "cures" with all side-effects gave rise to movements that rose to speak against it. Of course, this doesn't seem that psychological treatments work. Neither does this mean that biological treatments don't. I've heard people telling me that a prozac a day changed their lives. There have been cases of psychologists sexually abusing their patients. And there are people who find it easier to take drugs than to change their environment (and many times they're right). But this doesn't change the fact that psychiatry has commited crimes against humanity. Nor does it change the fact that mental illness, drugs and social stigma are issues that the average person, brainwashed by the media, has never heard of. Instead, he has a very clear view of what Holywood believes of mental health patients.

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A typical holywood patient Of course, there is always the other side. And when I'm talking of the other side, I don't mean fanatical psychiatry fondamendalists. Take a look at this video posted on TED Sherwin Nuland: My history of electroshock therapy This man describes how ECT (electroshock therapy) saved him from serious depression. Depression so serious, that no other cure could be proven helpful. Of course, later in the video he admits to the various problems he had in his life, which obviously made the problem even graver. However, as we said just before, not all people can change their lives, so maybe Sherwin Nuland was right. This therapy maybe indeed saved his life. Of course, we wan't stop there and we'll show the anti-shock view, too. Dr. John Breeding, Ph.D has an excellent video on YouTube testifying against ECT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5LIVAaYNrQ We have covered many issues on this post and none of this issues can be covered in one single article. From here we could go on to many other things. For example, what are the implications of biologism in social sciences? Is it wrong or right? What are the implications of chemical in our body and considering it completely normal? Now we don't have only psychiatric drugs, but we also have nootropics that we take willingly in an effort to become smarter.

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Furthermore, we did not discuss completely the history of the various movements mentioned above. But all these can be discussed in future articles. For now, just treat this article as food for thought and reflection on what psychiatry constitutes and what its opponents propose. Maybe you'll come up with your own criticism and ideas. Further Reading: It's Not Supposed To Work This Way FDA Gives Thumbs Up To Kiddie Bipolar: Is KOL Syndrome Next? New social networking for the ill dubbed “Myspace for the afflicted” The APA and Drug Money: We're on it senator! The Pseudoscience of Anti-Psychiatry in PLOS Medicine New Anti-Psychiatry Blog Bipolar in Newsweek Mental Health Consumerism = Antipsychiatry? Consumer reports Drugs, Guns, Cops and Tasers

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Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century Description: Does clinical psychology suck? Can the human behavior be measured? Do we need a paradigm shift in psychology? These are the subjects of this article. I just felt the urge to throw some random rant. CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY SUCKS I just had to say it. Psychology became a science at 1879 at Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt. It was seperated from philosophy since what seperates science from philosophy is the experimental procedure that science makes use of. It all started with simple psychophysical experiments trying to study the nature of consciousness. Because psychology is the science that studies the consciousness and the behavior of everything that can have these qualities.

Wilhelm Wundt, father of psychology If you study the history of psychology you'll see that the introspespection that Wundt proposed as the correct method for studying psychological phenomena gave its position to behaviorism, since it was deemed impossible at that time to trust verbal announcements of internal evects. Behaviorism

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then gave its position to cognitive psychology, once the computer paradigm both allowed and proved that the internal is an integral part of the study of an organism's behavior. Somewhere in between you'll hear some words about clinical psychology or humanistic psychology. You'll wonder what these things have to do with psychology. Do they measure anything? Do they study the full spectrum of human behavior or even have an idea of how they're going to do that? NO So what are these two? They're psychotherapy damn it! Alright, you'll probably be thinking "what the hell is this guy trying to say?". I an saying that psychology needs a clear method and theory in order to achieve its goals. Somewhere in the road the whole thing got lost and a lot of theories popped up out of nowhere. However, we don't live in the 50s. We live in the 21st century. And instead of trying to create a unified method or theory, we lose our time with theories from the Jurassic period.

Leave such theories to this guy I am not trying to say that these theories are useless. They can be useful, but in a psychotherapeutic context, not in a psychological context. Of course, concerning clinical psychology, many theories (even behaviorism) have been part of it. What makes me treat clinical psychology as a different theory altogether is the fact that it is based on the following premises: 1. Some people need psychological support, either because they are mentally ill (as we described in Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?) or because they ask for it 2. This help can be given without medical support (as opposed to psychiatry)

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What this has to do with the study of consciousness and behavior? I tell you: nothing! Of course someone might say "What are you saying you idiot? Depressive people or schizophrenic have an entirely different internal and behavioral content, which clinical psychology studies". Yes, but it studies this in order to ail it. Clinical psychology is an applied field. Psychology on the other hand is a fundamental science.

I ain't no idiot dude... Take a look at this BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Inter-ethnic violence predicted by same rules that govern chemicals. The article says "Over time, mixed ethnic groups tend to separate as people are drawn towards living around others like themselves. This reflects a universal process that is also seen in chemical and biological systems. And according to May Lim and colleagues, when this separation reaches a given threshold, violent conflict is highly likely." "Using such information about the geographic distribution of ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, in the early 90s, just prior to civil war, and India, using both countries' census data, the researchers were able to predict with a high degree of accuracy where real future violent conflicts took place (as determined by historical records)." So what do we see? That the laws of chemistry can be indeed applied on the human behavior (at least in this case). Meanwhile, most other psychologists are occupied with being guests in b-rated tv shows.

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I don't know if psychotherapy helps people. Maybe they just think it does (check this out How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance). And maybe this is alright by itself. The only thing that surely gets benefited from psychotherapy is the economy. Money flows, people get jobs and people that would have otherwise been unable to work, benefit the economy via the production of more workplaces (as we described in Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?). If you haven't noticed already, I love hard science. I love mathematics. I love models. I love quantifying. But, can the human behavior be quantified? The answer maybe was very complex some decades ago. But now, with the computer power that we possess, I believe that the answer is a definite YES.

Of course, there is always the old cliché that the human behavior can't be put into models. But why should that be? Nietzsche had theorized about the existence in society of an undercurrent of christian morals that people aspire to, without even realizing it.

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What happens in this case is that conceptions about mankind that date back to ancient religions and philosophies, based on absolutely no evidence, prevent us from seeing the obvious: that we don't differ not only from any other animal or organism, but from every other phenomenon. There is however one and only one difference between man and beast. The unfathomable ability of man to gratify himself, his kind, his abilities and his achievements to semi-godly status.

Mankind peering at itself Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instict describes how we have been focused on things that make people different instead of focusing on the common traits we all share, like for example marriage, reproduction and religion. I am not making this reference in a "Love-Peace-Unity" context, but in an epistimological context. Since all humans share common traits, we have a solid foundation upon which we can build our laws of psychology and study the human animal. Of course, the observant reader, will have probably noticed by now, that what I am proposing in this article has obvious social implications. But we will not discuss these for now, since I want this article to be purely of epistomological nature. So, there we have it. A new paradigm for psychology paradigm. A way to quantify and measure the human behavior. A paradigm founded upon the cold hard science that the great fathers of psychology tried to incorporate, but they failed with their weak technological means. Hail the new era kids!

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The sunshine of the new paradigm shift P.S. 1: I am not a a maniac, fascist hardcore scientist that tries to turn societies into machine and people into robots. I am just posing an epistimological argument here P.S. 2: I wish I could analyze the theories and philosophies of the great fathers of psychology, but I don't wan't my articles to get a zillion lines long, nor do I have right now the time, but I promise I'll do it later. That's the same reason that I couldn't write a few more things about the schools of psychology mentioned above. P.S. 3: Don't take this as an argument for the abolition of psychotherapy. I just have many arguments against therapy. This, however, doesn't mean you won't see clinical articles in Encefalus ;) P.S. 4: If you feel the urge, too, throw some random rant back at me

Further Reading: Unifying Psychology Unity: The Cognitive Revolution Unifies A Unified Psychology? Tree of Knowledge System

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The metaphor of "mental illness" Description: Mental illness is nothing more than a metaphor that has failed to help anyone or anything as a recent article shows. Remember what we were saying at Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?. I found the other day this article The Mental "Illness" Metaphor Has Not Worked: What's Next? at Psychology Today It addresses pretty much the same thing that we do, albeit more briefly. To make a synopsis, it starts with some of the methods used by psychiatry in its early years "The mad were injected with horse’s blood and malarial fever, placed in refrigerated “mummy bags,” given camphor derived seizures, subjected to various “heating” therapies--the list goes on." "At last antipsychotics arrived, and when they did they were referred to as “chemical lobotomies” because their chief effect was to produce disinterest and apathy (just like today, in my opinion)."

Then it goes on to conclude to what many people (including the readers of Encefalus ;) ) already know

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"The sad fact is that in over 100 years of research into mental “illness” driven by a defect-based disease model, the yield in terms of true understanding has been negligible. That may sound unrealistically unkind, but here is what I mean.Still today, we have no idea what schizophrenia even is, let alone what causes it or how to effectively treat it (to take just one example)." "Although it may seem different, the case is much the same for depression.We do not know what causes it— though there are lots of theories—and the antidepressant medicines on average only slightly outperform placebo in clinical trials (one study, for instance, found a 89% placebo duplication rate for Prozac in particular)."

And so it ends by saying '"With mental problems, diagnosis is sketchy and almost never definitive (no UA or blood draw or brain scan tells me what you “have”), causality is a mystery, and treatment is trial and error (for instance, no one knows with any degree of certainty which antidepressant will work for which individual)." "Prima facie, the disease model makes very little sense.And, even more importantly, it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.Psychiatry is in the stone ages."

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Modern (?!?!?!?) psychiatrist It's good to see a popular and american magazine like Psychology Today to publish such an article. I am saying american, because the USA is the main country where psychiatry and the drug companies operate. I don't forget here, that psychiatry began from Europe, but let's face it, the bulk of scientific knowledge is now produced in the USA, including psychiatry (if you consider psychiatry a science :P , no flame intended). Of course, we can't forget that Thomas Szasz (the father of anti-psychiatry) is also an american :) . I just hope we see more such articles published in mainstream magazines, so that we can see subjects once "deemed" controversial become a part of our everyday lives and incite lively debates. Further Reading: The Metaphor of Mental Illness (International Perspectives in Philosophy & Psychiatry) Thomas Szasz's Summary Statement and Manifesto Cruising Szasz by Jeffrey A. Schaler Psychiatry - Label-Based Quackery or Research-Based Science? The Anti-Psychiatry Movement

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Dungeons & Dragons and Psychotherapy Description: Can Dungeons and Dragons have therapeutic implications? Can we use D&D to create personality tests? Can role-playing be the future of psychology?!?!?!!? I managed to write three articles with the word "suck" in the title. Since, I think that I threw enough rant, and after my bashing of clinical psychology (Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century) I need to redeem myself. So, in this article I will discuss about something else, D&D and psychotherapy!

Jesus, help me redeem this blog I found this article a few days ago Dungeons And Dragons - Or Mazes And Monsters? at PodBlack Cat. It discusses some common (and funny) misconceptions abour RPGs. What I found interesting in this post was the last paragraph

As a final point - I must make a strong emphasis that people check out the use of D&D in therapy settings - one such example is the experience of Derek Colanduno, the host of Skepticality, as documented by Mur Lafferty in The Escapist: His therapist, Karen Patterson, asked him what he did for fun, since a lot of everyday activities count as therapy for stroke victims, and if they can have fun during therapy, all the better. When he mentioned his D&D playing, Karen asked for more information. “Once she read more about D&D and other games of the type, she realized that it is a good use of my time at home to get myself back to talking normally and with friends and coworkers,” Derek said. “She also found 66

out that in the early days of the creation of D&D, it was used at hospitals and schools for kids and others that had issues with talking and other problems with relating to others, or with the world in general. So, she became a big fan of me getting back to doing the gaming with friend on a normal schedule. Who was I to argue?

I have played RPGs myself. I haven't played only D&D but I am also the biggest fan of Vampire: The Masquerade and of all White Wolf's games in general. One thing I had found very interesting in RPGs was how traits of one's personality would enter into the game. The character we created were always reflections of some parts of ourselves. The same was true for the Dungeon Master. Since he prefered to create his own worlds (we didn't like playing with ready worlds like Forgotten Realms) he created it pretty much to his liking, letting in his beliefs and opinions about the world. That's what made me think that RPGs can have implications in psychology

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The new layman's handbook What if we could exploit the popularity that RPGs got today in order to create a new personality test? Psychoanalyst's consider minor facts like the a slip of the tongue to be evidence of subconscious behavior. In an RPG setting we have more blatant facts. For example, the ability to play a paladin (a defender of the good), a magician or a thief. The alingment you choose, that reflects your views towards good, evil and the law. For example, I remember that a Dungeon Master we had that was a fanatical atheist, and so he didn't include any gods in his setting. Another one, that was very politically involved, and he inserted many political features into the story.

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A new kind of psychologist emerges Of course, maybe I am talking crap here, but I think that no-one will disagree that what I am saying is interesting. And even if I'm wrong, the article I mentioned above, has another perspective. RPGs can be used in a therapeutic context. The article mentions that it helps people to socialize and talk to each other. Even more than that, role-playing could help them get in touch with parts of themselves. For example, someone impersonating a character with completely opposite beliefs could analyze his feelings and thoughts about his own view of the world. After all roleplaying isn't much different from theatre, which is an ancient form of art that encompasses the complete spectrum of human feelings. In ancient Greece, tragedy was thought to bring catharsis to the spectators.

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Try role-playing this guy for example Furthermore, role-playing games involve many times decision making. This could help patients to become more assertive, to exercise social skills, and to study their own inner selves. To go a little further, take a look at this research: Want to achieve something? Picture yourself doing it from a third-person perspective. It says that if we imagine doing something from the third perspective, it becomes much more likely that we will really do it. Our D&D characters can serve as this third perspective. We can even embede these characters with traits that we consider as targets of our therapy. So for example, a depressive patient could roleplay a cheerful bard. Before closing this post, we must mention a research mentioned in the article in PodBlack Cat, since it's of cognitive nature: Superstitions Among Roleplaying Gamers. It describes how roleplayers can create complex rituals of their own in a funny effort to influence the dice :) This, however, belongs to the domain of cognitive errors and will be covered in another article Until next time, throw your opinions (and dice) and show this article to anyone who thinks that role playing games are just for fun!

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Further Reading: Dungeons and Dragons: The Use of a Fantasy Game in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Young Adult Dungeons and Dragons: the use of a fantasy game in the psychotherapeutic treatment of a young adult. D&D Therapy

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How to Bolster your Creativity Description: Bolster your creativity and your brain. Recent researches proves many insightful findings into the workings of creative minds. Unlock the secretes! Out of the Box: Scientific American. The above link comes from an article published in Scientific American Mind. It has a conversation around three individuals: Julia Cameron, an awarded poet, film-maker and playwright, Robert Epstein, who is a psychologist and has worked in Scientific American Mind and Psychology Today, and John Houtz who is a psychology professor at Fordham University. The interviewer is Mariette DiChristina. The subject is creativity.

The conversation revolves around a lot of topics. I have made five points that I want to discuss.

• • • • •

1)Everyone can be creative 2)Strategies to productivity 3)Correlation between getting ideas out of you all the time and getting one of them right and connection to probability theory. 4)Maddness and out of the box thinking 5)School and IQ hinder creativity

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The first thing that the article tells us is that everyone can be creative. Some strategies we can use to bolster our creativity are the following: 1) Emerge yourself into your everyday activities, thus absorbing every stimulus possible. Cameron mentions that during a writer's block she woke up in the morning and wrote three pages about things that came to her head. That helped her get past her writer's block. 2) Try to think all the time of new things. Capture them so you can use them. "Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab! " 3) Broaden your horizons. With larger horizons, more ideas can arrive 4) Surround yourself with interesting things and people. 5) Challenge yourself continuously with new problems.

You can challenge yourself with something simpler than that

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The writers make a division between little c (little ideas) and big C (the ideas that change the world). While most people believe that quality and quantity are two different things, in creativity they are connected. And this, because if you have a lot of ideas, some of these will eventually (and hopefully ☺ ) fall into the big C category. This can be supported by probability theory, since continuous trials bring the variable close to a certain probability, which (we hope) is greater than 0%, thus helping you to succeed. Or, more simply, if you throw a lot of arrows some ought to hit the mark :-P . Thus, creativity should be a continuous hunt for new ideas. Of course, try not to get so many ideas that you sabotage yourself. Exercise self-discipline as well. However, new ideas meet some problems. First they meet social inertia and social criticism. The authors encourage us to work through criticism, to avoid rejection and to surround ourselves with supportive people. We can also exploit strategies like writing our ideas which help us avoid criticism alltogether. Other choices include talking about our ideas to a few trusted friends who can provide valuable criticism or trying to visualize getting through the whole procedure. Of course, the most important aspect of all is to be self-confident. All great people have met rejection and shunning at one point or another in their lives. People are not good with new ideas. Societies just have a tendency to equilibrate themselves to some kind of social homeostasis. This has lead to the conception of great scientists and artists as "mad" or "insane". These are simply stereotypes that discourage people from reaching their creative potential.

Unlocking your creative potential can make you look like this guy Of course, school plays an important role in the whole procedure. Children are creative by nature, since they are not bound by our rules or knowledge about the world. School, however, hinders creativity. We teach children not to ask silly questions. We don't allow them to daydream. We obsess over standardized tests and IQ scores. We give problems that have only one solution, instead of

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problems that could have no or limitless solutions. Therefore, our creativity is blocked by the educational system and the restrictions it imposes on our minds. Also, concerning school and social rejection, groups can sometimes hinder creativity as well. And that because group dynamics influence individual creativity. Usually, the most dominant person's opinion is the one to be accepted. In addition, groups tend to shape each person's opinion to a middle ground amongst the opinions of different members. This means that if a person has a bad idea, this could become better, but if one has a really great idea, this could be extinguished. So, group work may not always be the best choice. Invividual work should be taken into account, too.

This is not the road to creativity Concerning the paragraphs about school take a look at this article Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers at Psychology Today. It speaks about hunter-gatherer societies where the children educate themselves. They don't engage in any work, until late teens and they spend their childhood playing. They learn most things from direct observation. Maybe, a few of those ideas could be incorporated into our educational system in order to bolster creativity, instead of blocking it. Our virtues seem to be mostly centered around how to induce karōshi on our children, than helping their talents to grow.

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To close this article, we shall offer in our further reading session some resources about general brain health. A creative mind first needs a healthy brain ;) so we will give you some information to keep you occupied and well-going.

Further Reading: Feed your brain well Scientists learn how food affects the brain Physical Exercise and Brain Health 10 Brain Training Tips To Teach and Learn Neurogenesis and Brain Plasticity in Adult Brains Self-discipline matters more than IQ

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Musical Tastes Correlate with Personality Traits Description: Music is an all-human trait. It has been found (as we all already know) that personality traits correlate with musical tastes. Musical key to unlocking teenage wasteland | theage.com.au. I came across this very interesting article the other day. It describes how music genres correlate to personality traits. The findings are the following:

WHAT STUDIES SAY ABOUT YOUR SOUNDS: POP: Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance. HEAVY METAL: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex. DANCE: Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background. JAZZ/RHYTHM & BLUES: Introverted misfits, loners. RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

Not only metal causes depression, it can also make you look like these guys

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Of course, it's pretty obvious that we don't need a research to identify that music genres create groups of like-minded individuals who share common traits. The authors, fortunately, offer a complete view of the subject stating that... "It's more a case of teenagers who may have a mental illness or are involved in these antisocial behaviours being drawn to certain types of music." ...instead of accusing metal or rap for anti-social behavior. We all remember how Marilyn Manson and Eminem were accused of causing the Columbine murders. Michael Moore offered in his documentary Bowling for Columbine a very nice view on the whole fuss about Manson.

Surely he ain't pretty, but he didn't kill nobody Of course, the relation among music, culture and individual concerning personality is much more complex. For example, dance music lovers are reported to have higher percentages of drug abuse. In my opinion this could be explained as following 1)Dance music is a music played mainly in clubs, where people go to socialize. Drug abuse can facilitate this process, either by relaxation, or using this habbit as an opportunity to engage in conversation

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Wanna share this with me? 2)Stimulant drugs (like cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines) can offer much excitement in the dance club context. When the club is full of people, energy and dancing, using a stimulant to dance along with the others or to stay up until the next morning is a choice that many people make. 3)Stimulant drugs can be addictive, so, once someone uses them a few times, the addiction becomes one more way of connecting with the dance culture. The research showed no variance depending on the socioeconomic background, so we can suppose that reason like poverty have nothing to do with dance club drug abuse. As it seems the "excitement theory" I offered above seems a plausible explanation.

Of course, concerning metal and depression, I believe the case to be different. As an avid metal listener for years, I know that most metal themes circle around dark subjects. So, the correlation with depression comes to me as no surprise. However, I believe that we can't point to a certain way things work here, that is, whether metal causes depression or depressive teens listen to metal. I believe that

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maybe both happen and then the whole procedure works as a feedback loop, each part making depression stronger, thus solidifying certain traits in the listeners. Something that intrigued very much was the characterization of jazz/blues listeners as misfits and loners. I'd like to read a few more things as how this came to be. I've been listening to jazz for a very long time, and I don't know if I could be categorized in these categories. PsyBlog also offers a research which could help us a little Personality Secrets in Your Mp3 Player In that research, jazz listeners are classified as "intellectual". Concerning the research, the subjects had to judge other people's personality solely on their 10 top songs. PsyBlog reports: "Overall the results showed that music preferences were reasonably accurate in conveying aspects of personality. Of the five traits, it was a person's openness to experience that was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs, followed by extraversion and emotional stability. On the other hand, music preferences didn't say much about whether a person was conscientious or not."

Your new personality test Psyblog then goes a little further "This raises the question of why people listen to particular types of music. One theory is that people simply find some music more pleasant for aesthetic or cognitive reasons. Another is that people use music to regulate their mood: I want to get hyper for a night out so I put on some dance music. Another is that music is related to identity; people listen to music that expresses they way they see themselves. It seems likely that a combination of all these theories is probably true." I believe that we have one more interesting point we ought to mention. That is of course what is the use of music? There is no single explanation for that and there have been many theories. However, 80

music holds a great interest for evolutionary psychology. It's a trait shared by all civilizations, throughout history and by all humans, regardless of status or age. Therefore, it must have some evolutionary significance. We will not go on to investigate these theories (which range from theories that treat music's reproductive benefits, to Steven Pinker's theory that music is just an evolutionary byproduct, with no obvious benefits). However, I believe that the first research could provide a foundation for an evolutionary explanation of music. Maybe music is a strong group bonding factor, but not only that. Maybe music helps in the survival of groups which are composed of individuals in adverse conditions. So, for example, metal and rap can provide mental support through song listening, and peer support through the creation of groups with similar musical tastes. This is a subject that we will surely delve into a little deeper in future articles. Until then, keep on rockin' !

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The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg Description: The Digg has a profound effect on the informational flow of the society. This article studies its effects and offers a possible model to explain they way it works. Today's subject is the social information flow. I had expressed a few ideas in a previous article called Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society. A recent article I found steered my thoughts for once again so I felt compelled to return to this subject. The article is this one The Digg Effect - ReadWriteWeb. The article starts by describing how Digg works. It then describes its position in the news ecosystem.

News that originates at media companies and in the blogosphere follows along a few paths. First, raw news come to aggregators like Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Another flow is to the automatic popularity sites like Techmeme. Unlike Digg, Techmeme is powered by an algorithm and computes popularity of stories based on the number of sources talking about it and linking to each other. The third pass is through Digg, which is a human-powered news filter. The best stories that people find are bookmarked and stored permanently on sites like del.icio.us.

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Then it goes on to describe two concepts that we'll analyze in this article. 1) Digg is a man-made, self-organizing, complex system 2) Digg is a filter which shifts a lot of the the signal from the noise of the web. However, we need to add a specification to these two concepts, that lies at the core of this analysis. By all accounts, Digg is an informational system. So we should restate the first two concepts concluding that

Digg is a man-made, self-organizing, complex, informational system that filters out noise from the signal.

The author of the original article probably thought that the informational character of Digg is selfevident. However, we had to give the definition above in order to drive our model forward. Information is the core of the whole process we're trying to analyze. By specifying this, we immediately raise a new subject. Since we're talking about informational proccesses, we're talking about humans. The mechanism that analyzes information is the human cognitive system. By stating this, our analysis can stay at this level and doesn't have to proceed to a lower level, through the reductionism paradigm, thus simplifying our job. However, after that statement we have a difficult task to do. By stating that the level our analysis is the cognitive system, I made evident that I stripped out the social factor. However, Digg is a social website. However, can we consider it social for the purposes of our analysis?

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A social system encompasses groups of people and analyzes their dynamics. Digg contains a group of people: its users. However, the dynamics of the community are evolved not in a pure sociological context, but in a social psychological context. The reason for that is that the user that sits behind a computer holds a much greater degree of individuality concerning the simple procedures that he can do as a Digg user (commenting on and digging articles). So, it would not be wise to study the interaction of users purely in a sociological level. However, Digg holds also to a certain degree of sociological analysis for two reasons. 1)All the users come from certain social backgrounds 2)It shapes the informational structure of society A few things about the second can be found in the article Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society. So our analysis needs to be centered around these subjects

This picture shows that we have 4 factors, each one affecting the one next to it. The more steps a factor is from another, the more difficult it becomes to see a direct influence to it. So, let's start by stating how digg affects society 1)It provides a faster flow of information, thus conducing to meta-informational social regulation as stated in Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society. Thus, here we have the society and the social influence factor. 2)It creates a hive-mind as stated in The Monitor. The Monitor ep. 5 - Digg makes you Dumb and an AAAS Roundup [Video]. This means that the opinion of the individuals are influenced by the opinion of the group. So, here we have the social psychology and the cognitive factor. 3)It shapes the opinions of the individuals and their cognitive content. So, here we have the cognitive system factor. The argument that The Monitor presents and was posted here The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts describes a research that compared newspapers headlines with social networking sites headlines, indicating that newspapers headlines were more important, dealing with issues such as Iraq

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and immigration. A very good critic of this research can be found here Does Social Media Make You Dumb? where the author identifies two problems with the study: Social networking sites can handle more news, so just looking at the headlines isn't a decisive to a conclusion and the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing (where in the case of Digg for example, we know that the users have actually read the headlines).

No, not that Monitor you geeks Now, we will discuss the structure of Digg that we derive from the definition we gave before. Digg is 1) A self-organized system. Digg starts with a few basic principles (that we will call acting rules) and organizes itself through what we will call acting units. That is, its users. The acting matter is the information found on the web. 2) A complex system 3) A filter that filters out noise from the web information (the signal). This might seem a little strange to some, since we haven't specified what the signal is. If the signal is web information in general, then we cannot consider anything noise, since the signal could be considered to be everything: the words used, the images in an article and the meaning conveyed (but not just this). However, in the beginning of the article we stated that by considering Digg an informational system we are talking about how us humans perceive and use information, which is through the cognitive system. So, we define information as follows

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Information is the meaning that an article conveys. This includes not only the concept, but any additional views by the author(s), facts and evidence concerning any claims (whether this is statistical, anecdotal or otherwise specified).

So, to recapitulate, the creators of Digg, by giving the acting rules they created a complex system organized by the acts of the acting units, so as to filter out information, which is the the acting matter. Thus, digg manages to convey us information in a purer form, thus becoming some sort of socially driven search engine. This is something that the Google already knows, that's why you'll see many times searches on Google indicating articles on Digg or other social networking sites. Digg matters, since the filtering is done by human subjects.

However, Digg is dynamic in its function. The information that appears on it has points that determine the visibility of the posts. Pretty much like a propaganda machine that propagates certain news changes the opinions of the individuals (and the therefore the social informational structure), the same happens in the context of Digg. Thus, we have a new factor: the Digg Factor. This factor affects mainly the cognitive factor, influencing the others indirectly through it. However, Digg can have its own noise. User/Submitter is a service that has a goal profit and corrupts the Digg procedure, making its goal of conveying information more difficult. I wish I could go on with this article but I'm afraid it will get too long. We have just scrapped the surface of the social networking phenomenon. We just talked about digg and some of its core principles: A very elementary model of the way it works and a very elementary model of how it affects society and the individual. Heck, we didn't ever cover the whole idea the news ecosystem described in which can even include blogs (like Encefalus ;-) ) and provide a more clear view of the informational flow on the internet and how to benefit from it. And most important of all, we didn't offer sufficient criticism, since maybe social networking is working more like an obstacle to good information, rather than a help. We will return to this subject at other articles. Until, next time try to dig ;-) into the subject.

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Just dig(g) it Further Reading: Social networks and the profit motive What Happened At Digg? Social Media Like digg.com isn’t Evil, We Just Don’t Need it

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Pimps of Knowledge! Free resources for all! How universities exploit knowledge while the PirateBay helps you Description: Universities are really pimps of knowledge! This article studies how universities exploit knowledge for profit and how a free knowledge movement can fight back. I found this report the other day on Eurekalert. The article reports: "Rice University's Connexions, one of the most-visited online sites for open-educational resources, today announced it is making a popular textbook available free this fall for one of the country's most-attended transfer-level community college courses -- elementary statistics. The book, "Collaborative Statistics," has been used for more than a decade in California community college courses accepted for transfer credit by one of the nation's premier public university systems, the University of California. The online version of the book has already been chosen as the primary text for fall classes enrolling more than 700 students." The book can be found here http://cnx.org/content/col10522 So, we can get a free book written especially not for mathematicians, but for the scientists of applied fields with no profound mathematical knowledge! I consider this to be a very important movement. As the rate of information exchange increases, we see an exploitation of knowledge instead of free distribution. The article also reports: "More than 90,000 U.S. students take a statistics course at a community college each year and many pay $100 or more for a traditional statistics textbook. According to the nonprofit MakeTextbooksAffordable.org, the average U.S. college student spends about $900 per year on textbooks, and textbook prices are increasing faster than inflation."

This goes for your new textbook...

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So, giving away for free a valuable resource like that can go a long way towards improving the financial state of many students. So, you'll ask me, what should this be? After all, money is the way everything works. But I ask you, is this right? Let's go back to the creation of the first universities. We find in wikipedia in the entry University "The original Latin word "universitas", first used in time of renewed interest in Classical Greek and Roman tradition, tried to reflect this feature of the Academy of Plato (established 385 BC)." The Academy of Plato reflected a lot about the higher ideals that the Athenian Democracy aspired to. This civilization held in high esteem wisdom and knowledge. The first universities were founded upon that tradition. But at what tradition are the modern universities founded upon? I'll tell you: PROFIT! We live in a capitalistic world. Everything in that system must relate in one or the other way with its core principles to survive. Of course there can be exceptions, but a worldwide system like the one that the universities constitute, could never be classified as an exception, since its sheer size would never be able to be, if the universities were not an important element of the modern economy.

This guy wouldn't be very happy about this whole situation... So, instead of seeing a propagation of knowledge what do we see? EXPLOITATION. Universities contribute to this system with the following ways 1)They tax their students large sums of money to register in the university 2)They are directly connected with corporations which use the research to drive forward the capitalistic vision of constant growth. These corporations can be the army, can be enterprises or it can 89

really be anything. Sometimes, they can be whole other systems unto themselves like the mental healthcare system as I stated in my article Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century 3)They don't help their students with their textbooks, or anything for that matter, since they'll sometimes force you to stay in their campus and pay for the rent. So, a university student will pay large sums of money, with the hope that he will get a degree and become, too, a cog in the whole system that gave birth to his degree. Reading Freakonomics I learned to find common economic patterns in everything that can have them (like for example McDonalds and ghetto gangs). You know what this system reminds of? PIMPS! Most people would have an image like that come to their mind when they think of a pimp [flash]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4aXM-T_NFA[/flash] However, I think of that

But the exploitation doesn't stop there. Think something more important. As the knowledge increases in size, we need to have ways to search through all this. So, we will use academic search engines. Which need payment for their services. The most profound example is Science Direct which taxes each paper 30$. Of course, you can have free access if you are a university student, but why shouldn't anyone else have free access (even if this somebody is a former student who obtained his degree). I'll tell you why: because he is useless for this system, since he doesn't give or make any more money.

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If knowledge was the purpose of existence of universities, then anyone, and I really mean anyone, could and should have access to every scientific information ever produced. Of course, someone will argue that this system couldn't be any other way in the current economic system, and that it also benefits the economy and, so, it benefits society. But I ask you, can economic growth and the concentration of money bring welfare to the individual? Or maybe is it the case that certain individuals or entities make large profits out of this situation and others (like the average scientist) simply survive in the whole system, floating in the waters of the vast ocean of exploitation of knowledge?

How things work Furthermore, one could argue that personal gain is the motivation upon which capitalism has been founded and without it, we would have no books (academic or otherwise). But again, we have to ask, what is best for society? The personal gain or the benefit of everyone? Couldn't for example, the state pay a certain sum of money to create public search engines to give access to everyone, while paying the authors for their work? Or, if this would cost so much money, couldn't at least create a search engine with a minimal fee in part of those who want to use it?

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I am from Greece, and here universities, by constitutional law, are public and free. Anyone can attend a class, and anyone can enter the university, as long as he passes the exams. But, the times are achanging and the government is trying again and again to slowly corrupt the current educational system, obeying to the Bologna Treaty which really is a treaty to make the universities to function like they do in the USA and in Great Britain. The greatest universities will be for the elite of the society, thus leading Europe into the dogma that the USA has abided by since its very roots. Of course, we have some enlighted individuals who have contributed to the free knowledge movement. We have Wikipedia and we have Pubmed. But are these enough? Certainly not, even if they are movements in the right direction. However, some people have decided to do something more

The Pirate Bay has become some sort of a modern movement for the free distribution of knowledge. Of course, before that, we had simple piracy, we had other torrent trackers. Now we also have rapidshare, or Freenet. But, the Pirate Bay is the first tracker to come out and speak loudly about the right to free information. I know that there are many people out there who will disagree with what I'm saying, but I believe that information is meant to be free. That's the way society and individual can progress. When someone tries to take that or any other right away from you, you fight back. This is why universities don't promote knowledge as much as they'd like to claim they do, but Pirate Bay does. Heck, even blogs like Encefalus fight for free knowledge! Through the expression of our opinions and the commentary on research that might not be available to non-academics, we distribute information to those who might want it or might need it.

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While corporate and govermental interests fight the citizen, the latter will rise to claim what is rightfully his. To close this article I will post in the further reading section a few links to sites that promote free distribution of knowledge. I encourage you to post yours in the comments if you want.

Further Reading: Connexions The Pirate Bay Mininova Pubmed Wikipedia Shareminer Passfans TechYou The Free Knowledge Institute

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How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this had to do with the Flynn effect Description: This article describes how popular culture (The Dark Knight, video games, cartoons, tv series etc.) contribute to the general increase in IQ called the Flynn Effect.

Today we're revisiting the Dark Knight. This time we'll move in a different context, letting the Dark Knight inspire us into a conversation about the relation between cartoons, intelligence, and the IQ gap between generations called the Flynn Effect. So let's start right away!

Psychablog: A Cohort Effect to The Dark Knight Experience?. I stumbled upon this article some time ago. It was posted on Psychablog, a blog ran by clinical psychologist Robin S. Rosenberg, Ph.D. I really like this blog for one particular reason. The writer is really fond of superheroes and has done a great work towards explaining the psychology of this culture. He has even written a book on the subject The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration (Psychology of Popular Culture series). Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to read it yet, so I can't rate it. Finally, Dr Rosenberg has also starred in the 60 minute show on the History Channel that talked about the psychology of the Dark Knight. Generally, if you like superheroes and

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you are a psychologist, you'd better be visiting his blog a little too often, since he generally adds a lot of good stuff on the matter ;-) . The article describes how Dr Robin was confused during the watch of the Dark Knight. To cite his exact words:

There were times when I wished that I could press a pause button so that I could fully digest a scene before moving on to the next one. It was frustrating. I felt as if I was on a treadmill that would sometimes shift into a faster pace than I was prepared for, and it was all I could do to keep up and not fall off. In the last third of the film, rather than feeling energized, the pace left me fatigued. The younger people that I know who saw the movie did not feel this way, and they seemed to understand most everything that happened. And they didn't feel tired during the film, only afterward, when the adrenaline rush stopped.

Dr Rosenberg failed to catch up to the fast pace of the batpod ;-) Then, Dr Rosenberg made a connection to the cohort effect

Psychologists call this a cohort effect: The impact of a common event or experience on a group of people, compared to those who do not share the event or experience. My hypothesis is that there is a cohort effect in how tired people feel after watching The Dark Knight. Younger viewers, by virtue of their technological and media experiences during their formidable years, experience the film differently than do older viewers.

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And, he went on to make the connection with the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is named after James R. Flynn. It is term used to describe the raising of the IQ scores of the newer generations. To explain this I'll use an example. Let's say that you are a 20 year old male or female. If you consider that you represent the average person, then your IQ is 100. However, towards your parents, which are a generation older, your IQ is considered to be 120. Towards your grandparents your IQ is considered to be 140, rendering you near-genius.

How you may look to your grandparents So, this one might explain to you why it is so difficult for older generations to grab concepts such as the internet. Take John McCain for example who not only admits to not knowing how to use the internet, he is even proud of that. Take these two links to deep digger into the illiteracy of the republican candidate (note: the fact that I am bashing McCain doesn't mean that I support the democrats or Obama. This, in order to avoid misunderstandings). Capital Commentary: McCain and the Internet: Why It Matters John McCain, Internet dunce Anyway, going back to our subject which is the Flynn Effect. Now, don't accept what I told you above without a healthy dose of criticism. First of all, there is a debate concerning what IQ really is, and what IQ tests really measure. There is an old saying among psychologists that IQ is that which IQ tests measure. In general, IQ tests, as Flynn proposed, "do not measure intelligence well but only a minor sort of "abstract problem-solving ability" with little practical significance" (taken from wikipedia Flynn effect). That is, IQ is something like school intelligence, where you have to solve abstract problems that don't have anything to do with real life. We will not analyse IQ further (this will be done in future posts), since it would take too many pages to do so, but we had to do this minor analysis, in order for those of you who don't know psychology to understand the whole concept.

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Now, concerning the Flynn Effect, there have been many explanations. One such theory, is that the world is getting more complex, especially its visual part (Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests American Scientist). Reading of the words of Dr Rosenberg I cited above I couldn't stop thinking of these two videos I had seen some time ago. They are intros from 80s and 90s cartoons. I post them here to watch them for yourself. Since they are, 30 minutes long each, you don't have to watch the whole thing to understand the concept I am presenting here, just a couple of minutes (unless of course you are a geek like me and these videos strike a string in your heart :-P ). If the videos don't play click the links under them. Cartoons from the 80s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bto7l3cKhvk Cartoons from the 90s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmcKGcKW76M Did you see the difference? Ignoring the better animation of the 90s, you'll see that the cartoons of that decade are all more complicated. For example, most of the 80s cartoons have a plot that goes like that: A band of heroes (good guys) fights with a bad guy. Not very complicated, huh? But looking at the 90s we see Batman, the Pinky and the Brain, Looney Toons, Pokemon, Yu-gi-Oh! and many other, which escape this stereotype. Concerning especially Pokemo and Yu-Gi-Oh! we have another factor of complexity that contributes to the general rise of IQ scores. That is, the games.

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If you don't know pokemon and yu-gi-oh! are also card games. The mother of moden card games is Magic the Gathering. What is so interesting about these games is that the strategy that one must use in order to win, involves the use of probabilities. Obviously, most children can't make very good use of probabilities, but, even an instictive use of probabilities at a young age is impressive, considering the fact that most people face problems with probabilities even during their adult lives.

Your new nootropic agent But games are bound by the laws of physical reality. There is a category of games that can do much more for your intelligence. That is video games! In a world of ever increasing complexity what better example of an IQ booster than a video game? Video games can incorporate any kind of rules without limitations. Just think of how many genres of games exist. First, we had just tetris and pacman. Then we had adventure games. Today, we have real times strategies, massive online role playing games, actions adventures, and the list goes on!

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Of course, someone might argue that video games intelligence can't live up to the challenges of the real world, but take a look at this article at the Wired magazine. You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! The article describes how WoW can be a productive learning environment "Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate." The article also says how Stephen Gillett (senior manager in engineering in Yahoo) is using his skills acquired through Wow to his work. Magnificent, isn't it?

Candidates for the new management position Scientific American Mind has an excellent article concerning what we just discussed: Solving the IQ Puzzle. The article is by James Flynn himself, and provides the problems that have been found concerning the relation among intelligence and the Flynn effect, and proposing theoritical solutions based on the data. The article also contains a mention about the increasing complexity of the surroundings we just mentioned and provides the examples of Tetris, Myst and Grand Theft Auto and tv series Hill Street Blues, as indications for the aformentioned observation. I wish I could go on with this subject , but this article is getting too long, already. For once again, we just scratched the surface of the topics we discussed. We didn't go any further into IQ, we didn't talk about the various explanations for the Flynn Effect, and its political implications concerning race, and,

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finally, we didn't analyze the possible applications of the video games for the educational system and the every day life. I promise I will dig into these subjects in future articles. To compensate I added a few very interesting articles in the further reading section. For know, just use this article as an excuse for playing video games for countless hours :-P See you next time!

Further Reading: Video games help improve visual skills Electronic Media, Attention, and Visual Spatial Skills Video Games and TV: Do They Make Kids Smarter? Dr. James Flynn on the Flynn Effect The Situation of I.Q. None of the Above Are you smarter than Aristotle? Part I

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Self-trepanation?!!?!? OMG!!! Yikes!!! Description: Heather Perry is a woman that trepaned her scull in an effort to enlarge her consciousness. Neurophilosopher had an interview with her that we repost a part of it here to form your own opinions. Just don't try this at home kids!

Neurophilosophy has an interview with Heather Perry: Lunch with Heather Perry. In case you don't know her, she is an individual who decided to trepan herself. Trepanation is a procedure in which you open a hole in the skull. It was mainly used in ancient times to release the bad spirits, but it is also used in modern medicine to relieve pressure. Of course, it is a dangerous procedure since it can cause infection or disease. However, many people, starting with Bart Huges, believe trepanation to be the road to enlightment, through increased blood flow. Of course, there hasn't been any medical proofs of that. This theory also postulates that children have a higher state of consciousness because their skulls aren't yet fully closed, and with trepanation, we can return to that child-like state. However, all this smells a lot like pseudoscience to me.

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Heather Perry described the experience as "acid mixed with some kind of opiate". Still, we have to take into account the unfathomable ability of the human mind to trick the body, so we can't really be sure whether this is the result of trepanation or wishful thinking. Comments in the post ranged from critical to comical like "OK. This is fucking ridiculous." or "I've trepanned myself 83 times. My wife often puts ground pepper in my head and suspends me from the ceiling as a novelty shaker for when we have guests." As it seems, the whole procedure has been received negatively by most people. Anyway, I post here a part of the interview, along with a further reading section below, so you can form your own opinions. (Note, any pictures, except for the picture of Heather Perry are additions of mine to give the article an Encefalus-like touch and make a little more pleasant reading through this interview ;-) )

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Heather Perry Neurophilosopher: Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation. M: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done? HP: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn't think Lennon's cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought "Wow! That's a bit freaky" and didn't think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn't dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in

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the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.

The trepanator is coming... M: Didn't Bart Huges decide to trepan himself after taking acid, because he believed that trepanation was the next step in expanding his consciousness? HP: Yeah...certainly the first self-trepanners in the 60s and 70s - they all knew Bart - and me, we'd all done a lot of acid. I once found a website that theorized that taking too much acid encouraged people to trepan, which is just ridiculous. I just think that the kind of people who take acid are more experimental, so might be more likely to try that kind of thing if they're really into consciousness expansion. I never thought "Why don't I trepan myself?" while I was tripping. But actually, Amanda Fielding was tripping when she first did hers. She knows Pete, and had her first trepanation around the same time as Pete, in the early 70s. She paid a doctor to do it back then, and found another to redo it a few years ago because the bone had grown back. I spoke to her on the phone just after I was trepanned. Bart's theory about trepanation wasn't as a result of a 'trip' though, he'd studied medicine. M: So do you subscribe to Huges' theory that trepanation can lead to a higher level of consciousness by increasing the blood brain volume? HP: Yes and no. It certainly does initially when you're trepanned. In fact, Pete now has doctors down in Mexico who will do the operation, and they take MRI scans pre- and post-trepanation. After the 104

operation the ratio of brain blood volume to cerebrospinal fluid is increased. I'm not sure if that's true for everyone. Maybe it depends on the size of the hole. It's probably variable from person to person, depending on the person's unique physiology, and on whether the bone grows back. What Huges was saying was that it allows the heart b..................

Now kids can play it, too!

So that was it! Visit neurophilosophy for the whole interview! I hope that you'll form your own opinions on the subject. I personally, think that all this is more like new-age fiction, rather than science. However, if you have a different opinion, feel free to express it. And remember kids, DON'T try this at home

Just DON'T!!! Further Reading:

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An illustrated history of trepanation Prehistoric Inca neurosurgery The operation of the skulls Self-trepanation: try it and see! Trepanation on sceptic's dictionary Interview by Bryan Henderson (aka Crow) of Modified Mind

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HONORABLE MENTIONS SECTION Description: This section contains posts that link to posts in other sites

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A Shocking Discovery and the History Of Psychiatry

Providentia just released part 3 of A Shocking Discovery series describing the use of ECT throughout the history of psychiatry. It also includes a few remarks about antipsychiatry and closes with a very reasonable debate concerning the use of shock therapy as a treatment. A Shocking Discovery (Part Three) A Shocking Discovery (Part Two) A Shocking Discovery (Part One)

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Encephalon 51st edition is out The blog carnival Encephalon is out for once again. Get it at: Ode to the Brain: Encephalon 51st edition now out!

Encephalon 52 is out! Grab the psychology blog carnival enchephalon 52 at Encephalon 52 !!!

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Trapped: Mental Illness in America's Prisons Trapped: Mental Illness in America's Prisons

I found the above link in Mind Hacks. It talks about a project of photographer Jenn Ackerman. She is making an essay on Kentucky's correctional facility for prisoners with mental illness called Trapped:Mental Illness in America's Prisons. For she now she has made an excellent video, that contains an overview of the concept, as well as, videos about the inmate watchers (see the site for more details) and, the most shocking and interesting of all, videos with mentally ill inmates. There is also a very good photo gallery. Her project is not finished and she's looking for ideas and support, so I guess anyone who could offer any of these would help a lot towards the completion of this excellent project.

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[email protected]

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

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