UFTOE-DIS/TAPCHIDU6-LF CHNGED FREVER
////////////SONOMA=ARTRE SUMMARY
1. EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. "Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence." This means that what we do, how we act in our life, determines our apparent "qualities." It is not that someone tells the truth because she is honest, but rather she defines herself as honest by telling the truth again and again.
I am a professor in a way different than the way I am six feet tall, or the way a table is a table. The table simply is; I exist by defining myself in the world at each moment.
2. SUBJECT RATHER THAN OBJECT. Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be "adjusted" or molded into roles --to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker. We must look deeper than our roles and find ourselves.
3. FREEDOM is the central and unique potentiality which constitutes us as human. Sartre rejects determinism, saying that it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies.
4. CHOICE. I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that is still a choice. If faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose how we are in those circumstances.
5. RESPONSIBILITY. Each of us is responsible for everything we do. If we seek advice from others, we choose our advisor and have some idea of the course he or she will recommend. "I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities."
6. PAST DETERMINANTS SELDOM TELL US THE CRUCIAL INFORMATION. We transform past determining tendencies through our choices. Explanations in terms of family, socioeconomic status, etc., do not tell us why a person makes the crucial choices we are most interested in.
7. OUR ACTS DEFINE US. "In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait, and there is nothing but that portrait." Our illusions and imaginings about ourselves, about what we could have been, are nothing but self-deception.
8. WE CONTINUALLY MAKE OURSELVES AS WE ARE. A "brave" person is simply someone who usually acts bravely. Each act contributes to defining us as we are, and at any moment we can begin to act differently and draw a different portrate of ourselves. There is always a possibility to change, to start making a different kind of choice.
9. OUR POWER TO CREATE OURSELVES. We have the power of transforming ourself indefinitely.
10. OUR REALITY AND OUR ENDS. Human reality "identifies and defines itself by the ends which it pursues", rather than by alleged "causes" in the past.
11. SUBJECTIVISM means the freedom of the individual subject, and that we cannot pass beyond subjectivity.
12. THE HUMAN CONDTION. Despite different roles and historical situations, we all have to be in the world, to labor and die there. These circumstances "are everywhere recognisable; and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if we do not live them.
13. CONDEMNED TO BE FREE. We are condemned because we did not create ourselves. We must choose and act from within whatever situation we find ourselves.
14. ABANDONMENT. "I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help.
15. ANGUISH. "It is in anguish that we become conscious of our freedom. ...My being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation."
1) We must make some choices knowing that the consequences will have profound effects on others (like a commander sending his troops into battle.)
2) In choosing for ourselves we choose for all humankind.
16. DESPAIR.
We limit ourselves to a reliance on that which is within our power, our capability to influence. There are other things very important to us over which we have no control.
17. BAD FAITH means to be guilty of regarding oneself not as a free person but as an object. In bad faith I am hiding the truth from myself. "I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully. (There seems to be some overlap in Sartre's conception of bad faith and his conception of self-deception.)
A person can live in bad faith which ...implies a constant and particular style of life.
18. "THE UNCONSCIOUS" IS NOT TRULY UNCONSCIOUS. At some level I am aware of, and I choose, what I will allow fully into my consciousness and what I will not. Thus I cannot use "the unconscious" as an excuse for my behavior. Even though I may not admit it to myself, I am aware and I am choosing.
Even in self-deception, I know I am the one deceiving myself, and Freud's so-called censor must be conscious to know what to repress.
Those who use "the unconscious" as exoneration of actions believe that our instincts, drives, and complexes make up a reality that simply is; that is neither true nor false in itself but simply real.
19. PASSION IS NO EXCUSE. "I was overwhelmed by strong feelings; I couldn't help myself" is a falsehood. Despite my feelings, I choose how to express them in action.
20. ONTOLOGY: The study of being, of what constitutes a person as a person, is the necessary basis for psychoanalysis.
////////////////////Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
///////////////////KLUGE-
From Publishers Weekly
Why are we subject to irrational beliefs, inaccurate memories, even war? We can thank evolution, Marcus says, which can only tinker with structures that already exist, rather than create new ones: Natural selection... tends to favor genes that have immediate advantages rather than long-term value. Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center, refers to this as kluge, a term engineers use to refer to a clumsily designed solution to a problem. Thus, memory developed in our prehominid ancestry to respond with immediacy, rather than accuracy; one result is erroneous eyewitness testimony in courtrooms. In describing the results of studies of human perception, cognition and beliefs, Marcus encapsulates how the mind is contaminated by emotions, moods, desires, goals, and simple self-interest.... The mind's fragility, he says, is demonstrated by mental illness, which seems to have no adaptive purpose. In a concluding chapter, Marcus offers a baker's dozen of suggestions for getting around the brain's flaws and achieving true wisdom. While some are self-evident, others could be helpful, such as Whenever possible, consider alternate hypotheses and Don't just set goals. Make contingency plans. Using evolutionary psychology, Marcus educates the reader about mental flaws in a succinct, often enjoyable way. (Apr. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
IMMEDIACY RATHER THAN ACCURACY
//////////////////Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.
Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us in knots even though it's only four words long.
Marcus also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge, for the betterment of ourselves and society. Throughout, he shows how only evolution -- haphazard and undirected -- could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
///////////////////Unintelligent Design
4:02 AM PDT, July 1, 2008
Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.
When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.
Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),
Our troubles with memory in turn lead to an unending litany of problems that the psychologist Timothy Wilson collectively refers to as "mental contamination", in which irrelevant information frequently, ranging from the physical attractiveness of political candidates to random numbers on a roulette wheel, subconsciously cloud human judgments. If an ugly child throws an ice-filled snowballs, for instance, we judge that child to be delinquent, but when an especially attractive child does the same thing, we excuse him, saying he's just "having a bad day." A study published earlier this month showed that people's moral judgments are more severe when made in a disgusting, soiled pizza-box filled office than when in an office that is neat as a pin; another, which appeared just last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that voters are more likely to favor school policies if the balloting takes place in a school than if it takes place in an apartment building. We may aspire, as Aristotle thought, to be "the rational animal", but in reality the flotsam and jetsam of barely conscious memory frequently intercedes.
At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
Imperfections riddle the body as well; the human spine supports 70% of our body weight with a single column, where four might have distributed the load better (greatly reducing the incidence of debilitating back pain), and the human retina is effectively installed backwards, with its array of outgoing neural fibers coming out of the front rather than the back, saddling us with an entirely needless blindspot.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
A local maximum is like a moderately high peak in a rugged mountain range that is filled with other peaks, some of which are considerably higher; a peak at the top of the treeline, when there are plenty of snow-capped peaks that loom considerably higher. The process of natural selection is vulnerable to such limits for two reasons: it is blind, and it generally takes only small steps; as such, it can easily get stuck on low-lying peaks that are impressive but well short of the highest possible mountaintop, designs that are "good enough for government work" but far from perfect.
Darwin gives a natural explanation that indicates poorly-designed features should be common in biology. The theory of intelligent design, in contrast, has a serious problem explaining such phenomena: an intelligent designer that could perceive the whole landscape could just pick us up and move us to higher ground. That this has never happened is clear testament both to the wisdom of the theory of natural selection and the implausibility of intelligent design.
The problem with the Lousiana law is not just that it seeks to mix church and state, a situation that the Constitution's framers rightly sought to avoid, but that it is predicated on the assumption that creationists have a reasonable theory with which to counter evolution with - where in truth they simply don't.
-- Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology at New York University, is the author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
////////////////his?)
We'd all like to believe that we're rational and clear-headed, and that our mind, will, and emotions are reliable (except, perhaps, when it comes to romance and chocolate). However, "Kluge" indicates that our Rube Goldberg brain often doesn't work quite as optimally as we believe it does. Thankfully, Gary Marcus' mind functioned well enough to bring us this fine book.
Reading about the brain is probably the ultimate act of navel-gazing, since it's the seat of who we are, and its function determines a large part of our destiny. I was glad to see a well-done and accessible analysis of our most important organ. I found the author's breakdown of the mind enlightening, like with the relationship between memory and context. Why can't I find my clipboard? Because I put it in an unfamiliar place - duh. He also compares our faulty context-dependent memory to the more accurate and systematic way a computer accesses information. Bottom line, we come up short in the total recall department.
Mr. Marcus is firmly in the evolutionary camp, so creationists may take issue with "Kluge." Mr. Marcus believes that a patchwork brain like ours couldn't be the product of a rational, superior creator. Instead, evolution fashioned our brain based on what worked for humanity's genetic propagation, not to imitate what is perfect or holy. "Good enough for survival" was evolution's mantra, as opposed to forming an "image of God," as most creationists advocate. But the author isn't demeaning towards believers, so persons of faith can at least take comfort in that.
As the whole the book was eye-opening, with chapters on concrete themes ("Memory") and more abstract topics ("True Wisdom" - yes, there's a little cognitive self-help advice). Some of the chapters were a bit more compelling than others, but that's mainly a personal preference thing. No matter the subject, each chapter contained one or more "a-ha" moments. For example, I identified with the blinding effect pleasure has on my higher cognitive functions. I've certainly made some dumb rationalizations in order to gain immediate gratification, only to look back after the fact and ask, "What was I thinking?" Of course, I wasn't firing on all cylinders - my "grab bag of crude mechanisms" devoted to pleasure was easily tricked.
My only real gripe with "Kluge" was with the tantalizing, yet too-small bits the author threw out about certain subjects. I wish he had spent more time on, say, sociopathy. He devotes all of one sentence and a footnote to this topic, but I wanted more analysis, since the idea that brain structure might be responsible for a Hannibal Lecter would be fascinating (and somewhat ironic) reading. Indeed, a deeper dip into the link between morality and brain formation/function would have been intriguing (or perhaps disconcerting to a person of faith who believes in the theology of sin and freedom of the will). In addition, Mr. Marcus' take on the idea of changing the brain, vs. simply "doing better," would also have been welcome, since that theory seems to be in vogue these days. I suppose these topics were beyond the book's scope, so I can't complain too much.
"Kluge" is a good read on its own, but I recommend going through it in conjunction with some complementary books: "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead," by David Shields, "Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women," by Joe Quirk, and "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," by David Quammen.
////////////////////CASPIAN TIGER-EXTINCT-1937
///////////////////BARBARY LION OF N AFRICA-?BABBAR SHER
/////////////////TECHNO-OPTIMISM
/////////////////CLUTTER AND STRESS
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Researchers have uncovered a completely unexpected way that the brain repairs nerve damage, wherein cells known as astrocytes deliver a protective protein to nearby neurons.
Astrocytes are a type of support cell in the brain that serve many functions; one of their roles is to chew up damaged nerves during brain injury and then form scar tissue in the damaged area.
Roger Chung and colleagues have now found that astrocytes have another trick up their sleeve. During injury, astrocytes overproduce a protein called metallothionein (MT) and secrete it to surrounding nerves; MT is a scavenging protein that grabs free radicals and metal ions and prevents them from damaging a cell, and thus is a potent protecting agent.
While the ability of astrocytes to produce MT has been known for decades, the general view was that the MT stayed within astrocytes to protect them while they help repair damaged areas. However, Chung and colleagues demonstrated that MT was present in the external fluid of damaged rat brain. Furthermore, with the aid of a fluorescent MT protein, they observed that MT made in astrocytes could be transported outside the cell and then subsequently taken up by nearby nerves, and that the level of MT uptake correlated with how well the nerves repaired damage.
While the exact physiological role that MT plays in promoting better repair remains to be identified, this unexpected role for this protein should open up new avenues in treating brain injuries in the future.
///////////////////////// Beauty and the Brain
Neuroaesthetics promises to reinvigorate science's search for a theory of beauty.
by Moheb Costandi • Posted September 16, 2008 08:48 AM
Illustration by Gluekit.
Why is something beautiful? David Hume argued that beauty exists not in things but "in the mind that contemplates them." And everyone has at some point heard the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But Plato had a fanciful answer made to argue for a universal truth: In his world of forms, he claimed there existed a perfect Form of Beauty, which was imperfectly manifested in what we call beautiful. Despite the allure of Plato's metaphorical claim, students of aesthetics have struggled to substantiate it. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that there exist quantifiable, describable, universal aspects to the human capacity for appreciating beautiful forms, perhaps originating in our ancestors' experience on African savannas or in the need to find suitable mates. They have not solved the problem. However, recent work by several researchers at University College London — including the establishment of the first major grant-driven research program for the neurobiological investigation of aesthetics, or neuroaesthetics — has made the first steps toward a unified biocultural theory of art. An object's beauty may not be universal, but the neural basis for appreciating beauty probably is. The researchers' initial discoveries and the increasing formalization of the field promise to open the way for the first time to an understanding of beauty based on something other than speculation.
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The first studies of aesthetics and the brain began with the sort of self-experimentation that science doesn't encourage anymore. In the 1920s neurologist Heinrich Klüver documented the hallucinations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline, using four categories: grids, zigzags, spirals, and curves. Noting their similarity to the hallucinations experienced in various conditions, such as migraine, sensory deprivation, and the hypnagogic state that occurs in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, he named them "form constants." These motifs do indeed seem to be constant — they recur throughout history and across cultures, and can be seen, for example, in prehistoric cave paintings, in the girih patterns of the tile mosaics decorating medieval mosques, and in the repeating tessellations of M.C. Escher's impossible figures or the rectangular forms of Mondrian's Compositions. Underlying those patterns, at least in part, are the intrinsic properties of the visual nervous system. Most neurons in the primary visual cortex occur in repeating structures called ocular dominance columns; these in turn are organized into hypercolumns, whose long-range interconnections are arranged geometrically. The spontaneous activity of these neural networks gives rise to the patterns Klüver studied.
The "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape.
Such investigations of the biology of aesthetics, however, had heretofore not been anyone's primary research focus; rather, the investigations have been subordinated to some other work, such as modelling the visual system. Semir Zeki of University College London is pioneering modern neuroaesthetics, and, thanks in part to a £1 million grant from the Wellcome Trust in the UK last autumn, is forging ahead with a research program that tries to establish the neurobiological underpinnings for creativity, beauty, and even love.
Zeki's work has been ongoing for several years. In 2004 he led a neuroimaging study designed to investigate the neural correlates of beauty. Ten participants were shown 300 paintings and asked to classify each of them as beautiful, ugly, or neutral. Paintings rated as beautiful by some of the participants were rated as ugly by others, and vice versa. The participants were then shown the paintings again while lying in a scanner. "Beautiful" paintings elicited increased activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is involved in emotion and reward. Interestingly, the "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape. More recently, Zeki has started to collaborate with scholars from the arts and humanities under the guidance of a multidisciplinary advisory board that includes author A.S. Byatt and Jonathan Miller, a physician and opera producer.
Richard Morris, head of neuroscience and mental health at the Wellcome Trust, says Zeki's work "gives insight into what it is to be human." And according to Wellcome senior scientist John Williams, could reveal some of the underpinnings of conditions, such as depression, that are marked by a reduced aesthetic sense.
Elsewhere at UCL, neuroscientist Hugo Spiers is investigating how the brain encodes direction, location, and the dimensions of space — the implications for architecture could be profound. Spiers recently collaborated with artist Antoni Malinowski and architect Bettina Vismann on a project that aimed to explore the relationship between art, architecture, and the brain. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project resulted in an installation called Neurotopographics, which tracked the relationship between movement though space and the activity of the brain. "When someone traverses a space, their brain produces an oscillating, rhythmic pattern," Spiers explains. "We tried to realize this abstract understanding into an everyday reality."
As for architecture, altering space can have a large impact on brain function. Changing the dimensions of an animal's enclosure causes grid cells to alter their scales accordingly, such that the periodicity of their firing, which is observed as the animal moves across a space, increases or decreases. Surprisingly, negotiating a corridor in opposite directions elicits completely different patterns of place-cell activity, so the same space is apparently encoded as two different places. A less surprising but still important finding is that the lack of easily recognizable landmarks causes disorientation. Spiers and his colleagues are now investigating how the brain encodes three-dimensional space. While recording neuronal activity as rats negotiated a spiral staircase, they found that place cells, but not grid cells, respond to changes in height. Thus, the brain seems to encode the vertical and horizontal dimensions in different ways.
Such knowledge of spatial cognition provides an understanding of the brain's response to the built environment and can inform architects as they consider the aesthetic elements and function of a space. "From an architectural point of view," says Vismann, "I find the correspondence between what occurs in the brain and the physical nature of space and spatial navigation fascinating." She expects that understanding the neural bases of spatial perception will inspire projects, inform the design process, and help formulate ways of organizing space.
Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
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UPFRONT
Stun guns may cause brain injury
Print version: page 12
New research finds that stun guns—also known as Tasers and used by two-thirds of the nation's law enforcement agencies—may impair people's cognitive functioning.
In a study of 62 police officers, researchers at Rosalind Franklin University of Medical Science in Chicago and the University of Illinois found that police officers who had been "tased" during training drills fared worse than a control group in attention, processing speed and memory. The results, though preliminary, suggest that law enforcement agencies should reconsider their use of Tasers in training exercises and that researchers need to further investigate the potential long-term effects, says study co-author Neil Pliskin, PhD, a University of Illinois psychology professor.
"It's a provocative finding because the kinds of difficulties that were observed ... are the same kinds of changes we see in people who have suffered electrical shocks from accidents involving domestic power sources," Pliskin says.
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