Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Survival Of The Kindest
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.
In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits. They call it "survival of the kindest."
Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others. Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. The human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic. It found that people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances. Informally known as the "cuddle hormone,” oxytocin is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain; where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love among other functions.
While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question is; "How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?" One answer is that, the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. In one recent study, participants each received a modest amount of cash and were directed to play games of varying complexity that would benefit the "public good.” The results showed that participants who acted more generously received more gifts, respect and cooperation from their peers; as well as wielding more influence over them.
The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated. But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status. Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish. Such results validate the findings of positive psychology pioneers like Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research in the early 1990's shifted away from mental illness and dysfunction; delving instead into the mysteries of human resilience and optimism.
While much of the positive psychology being studied is focused on personal fulfillment and happiness, researchers have narrowed their investigations into how it contributes to the greater societal good. For instance, to assist in and promote the rearing of emotionally literate children; many parents are turning away from materialistic or competitive activities, and rethinking what will bring their families true happiness and well-being. Parents who start consciously cultivating gratitude and generosity in their children quickly see how much happier and more resilient their children become. What is often surprising to parents is how much happier they themselves also become.
This behaviour, the sympathetic touch, is common to mammals thanks to the vagus nervous system. In another Berkeley study, two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching each other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety. Overall, these and other findings challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last; and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion. This new science of altruism, and the physiological underpinnings of compassion, is finally catching up with Darwin's observations nearly 130 years ago; that sympathy is our strongest instinct.
In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits. They call it "survival of the kindest."
Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others. Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. The human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic. It found that people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances. Informally known as the "cuddle hormone,” oxytocin is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain; where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love among other functions.
While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question is; "How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?" One answer is that, the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. In one recent study, participants each received a modest amount of cash and were directed to play games of varying complexity that would benefit the "public good.” The results showed that participants who acted more generously received more gifts, respect and cooperation from their peers; as well as wielding more influence over them.
The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated. But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status. Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish. Such results validate the findings of positive psychology pioneers like Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research in the early 1990's shifted away from mental illness and dysfunction; delving instead into the mysteries of human resilience and optimism.
While much of the positive psychology being studied is focused on personal fulfillment and happiness, researchers have narrowed their investigations into how it contributes to the greater societal good. For instance, to assist in and promote the rearing of emotionally literate children; many parents are turning away from materialistic or competitive activities, and rethinking what will bring their families true happiness and well-being. Parents who start consciously cultivating gratitude and generosity in their children quickly see how much happier and more resilient their children become. What is often surprising to parents is how much happier they themselves also become.
This behaviour, the sympathetic touch, is common to mammals thanks to the vagus nervous system. In another Berkeley study, two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching each other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety. Overall, these and other findings challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last; and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion. This new science of altruism, and the physiological underpinnings of compassion, is finally catching up with Darwin's observations nearly 130 years ago; that sympathy is our strongest instinct.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Faith and Disbelief
When it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain; is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number? While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief. Nor is it known whether religious believers differ from nonbelievers in how they evaluate statements of fact.
In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain. The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. Sam Harris, who recently completed his doctoral dissertation in the lab of Mark Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, was a lead author on the study. Jonas Kaplan, a research assistant professor at the USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, was the co-lead author.
The study involved 30 adults - 15 committed Christians and 15 nonbelievers - who underwent three functional MRI (fMRI) scans while evaluating religious and nonreligious statements as "true" or "false." The statements were designed to produce near perfect agreement between the two groups during nonreligious trials (e.g., "Eagles really exist") and near perfect disagreement during religious trials (e.g., "Angels really exist"). Contrasting belief and disbelief yielded increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), an area of the brain thought to be involved in reward and in judgments of self-relevance. "This region showed greater activity whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc., or statements about ordinary facts," the authors said.
The case for belief being content-independent was further bolstered by the fact that while the trial statements accepted by religious believers were rejected by nonbelievers, and vice versa, the brains of both showed the same pattern of activity for belief and disbelief. A comparison of all religious with all nonreligious statements suggested that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation and cognitive conflict in both believers and nonbelievers, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks. Activity in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with cognitive conflict and uncertainty, suggested that both believers and nonbelievers experienced greater uncertainty when evaluating religious statements.
The study raises the possibility that the differences between belief and disbelief may one day be reliably distinguished by neuroimaging techniques. "Despite vast differences in the underlying processing responsible for religious and nonreligious modes of thought," the authors write, "the distinction between believing and disbelieving a proposition appears to transcend content. These results may have many areas of application - ranging from the neuropsychology of religion, to the use of 'belief-detection' as a surrogate for 'lie-detection,' to understanding how the practice of science itself, and truth-claims generally, emerge from the biology of the human brain."
Harris is the author of two New York Times best-sellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation which have been published in more than 15 languages, and is the co-founder and CEO of The Reason Project. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic and many other journals. Other authors on the study included Cohen, Susan Bookheimer and Marco Iacoboni of UCLA; and Ashley Curiel of Pepperdine University. The authors report no conflict of interest.
In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain. The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. Sam Harris, who recently completed his doctoral dissertation in the lab of Mark Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, was a lead author on the study. Jonas Kaplan, a research assistant professor at the USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, was the co-lead author.The study involved 30 adults - 15 committed Christians and 15 nonbelievers - who underwent three functional MRI (fMRI) scans while evaluating religious and nonreligious statements as "true" or "false." The statements were designed to produce near perfect agreement between the two groups during nonreligious trials (e.g., "Eagles really exist") and near perfect disagreement during religious trials (e.g., "Angels really exist"). Contrasting belief and disbelief yielded increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), an area of the brain thought to be involved in reward and in judgments of self-relevance. "This region showed greater activity whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc., or statements about ordinary facts," the authors said.
The case for belief being content-independent was further bolstered by the fact that while the trial statements accepted by religious believers were rejected by nonbelievers, and vice versa, the brains of both showed the same pattern of activity for belief and disbelief. A comparison of all religious with all nonreligious statements suggested that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation and cognitive conflict in both believers and nonbelievers, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks. Activity in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with cognitive conflict and uncertainty, suggested that both believers and nonbelievers experienced greater uncertainty when evaluating religious statements.
The study raises the possibility that the differences between belief and disbelief may one day be reliably distinguished by neuroimaging techniques. "Despite vast differences in the underlying processing responsible for religious and nonreligious modes of thought," the authors write, "the distinction between believing and disbelieving a proposition appears to transcend content. These results may have many areas of application - ranging from the neuropsychology of religion, to the use of 'belief-detection' as a surrogate for 'lie-detection,' to understanding how the practice of science itself, and truth-claims generally, emerge from the biology of the human brain."
Harris is the author of two New York Times best-sellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation which have been published in more than 15 languages, and is the co-founder and CEO of The Reason Project. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic and many other journals. Other authors on the study included Cohen, Susan Bookheimer and Marco Iacoboni of UCLA; and Ashley Curiel of Pepperdine University. The authors report no conflict of interest.
Neotribal Festival
This is the first thing you learn about festival: to get there, you must leave here. You must, in other words, cross over, out of the ordinary world. Maybe you haul your tent to a glade in the middle of nowhere, and maybe you just hand some guy your ticket. But either way, you must cross a threshold. Without even noticing it, your normal body armor starts to slip away, as you instinctively recognize that the strangers around you are not quite so strange anymore, for even if they look strange, which could easily be the case, they are no longer judging you in the same way that people in the mundane world do. They are more likely to be friends you just haven't met yet, fellow conspirators of joy.
The anthropologist Victor Turner used the word liminal to describe the passageway between the known and the unknown, the path that takes you to a nomadic territory that lies in-betwixt and in-between. Turner was interested in traditional rites of passage, those tribal ceremonies that guide participants through the process of social transformation - from childhood to adulthood, say, or from novice to shaman. Such rites are important inspirations for today's neotribalists as well, both consciously and not. For though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it.
Every summer, tens of thousands of participants descend upon dozens of festivals and gatherings, great and small. The names of these clans and crews are legion: hippies, ravers, pagans, crusties, free spirits, burners, seekers, travelers, eco-warriors. They gather together to dance, to escape, to hold ritual and to craft a visionary culture based on community, creative self-expression and a celebratory earth wisdom. Labels are always dangerous, but an honest name for the scene is neotribal. These are the new tribes, recreating and reinventing patterns of organic culture that are inspired by the premodern past but designed for a high-tech planet hurtling through a period of unprecedented global change.
In festival culture, everyone is part of the picture - physical arts like poi and hooping are widely practiced, crafters make and sell art and ritual craft; and people treat fashion as an invocation and a performance. Everyone, in fact, is performing - not posing so much as actively participating in a collective game whose goal is beauty, wonder and transport. Festivals can be a wild time, but for many participants, the festival is also a vital space of cultural invention. Within the environs of the gathering, half sacred and half imagined, another possible world appears. Despite the variety of festivals and clans, certain values come to the fore: community over consumerism, the power of the feminine, the wisdom of consciousness exploration and the ethical call to develop a hands-on harmony with the earth. Some of these values grow out of countercultural movements generations old, others are modeled on the folkways of other times and places - sometimes with respect and sometimes with a hasty hunger. Like all ideals, neotribal values are rarely realized in full and are more complex and contradictory than they initially appear.
People have gathered in ritual celebrations throughout recorded history; and no doubt back through the depths of prehistory as well. At the same time, and despite the tremendous differences in human cultures, anthropologists recognize a shared language of the festival. People wear special attire, sometimes donning masks or fancy headgear; and sometimes painting their bodies. They drink and eat and dance, often with great exuberance and for hours or even days on end. Intoxicants are taken, if they have them, and maybe the spirits show up and join in the dance. Emile Durkheim, who believed that religion was fundamentally a social process, called the energy raised by such gatherings "collective effervescence." And though this powerful group buzz is invariably dedicated to the gods of earth and sky, it often generates its energies through the more secular strategies of a party. These entwined goals are key to the modern neotribal festival, whose exuberance bubbles up in the space between sacred and profane, ritual and fete, ceremony and celebration.
In his book The Eternal Return, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade described how certain rituals allow mythic time to erupt inside mundane history. In particular, Eliade talked about annual tribal ceremonies that stage the recreation of the cosmos. The idea, which is found throughout primal societies, is that by ritually returning to the chaos at the beginning of things, and then reenacting the emergence of our ordered world, the cosmos itself is renewed. Such ceremonies give us an insight into the deep impulses of the festival, within whose electronic noise and psychedelic chaos stir new forms of living and being together on this planet. The cutting edge festivals today are green and sustainable, with workshops on alternative fuel and carbon footprints rounding out the music and dance. Even more vitally, the infrastructure of the festival itself is becoming an experiment in right planetary living. This isn't just global warming window dressing. This represents an intuition, welling up from primal memory perhaps, that the festival is a foundation of world renewal.
The anthropologist Victor Turner used the word liminal to describe the passageway between the known and the unknown, the path that takes you to a nomadic territory that lies in-betwixt and in-between. Turner was interested in traditional rites of passage, those tribal ceremonies that guide participants through the process of social transformation - from childhood to adulthood, say, or from novice to shaman. Such rites are important inspirations for today's neotribalists as well, both consciously and not. For though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it.Every summer, tens of thousands of participants descend upon dozens of festivals and gatherings, great and small. The names of these clans and crews are legion: hippies, ravers, pagans, crusties, free spirits, burners, seekers, travelers, eco-warriors. They gather together to dance, to escape, to hold ritual and to craft a visionary culture based on community, creative self-expression and a celebratory earth wisdom. Labels are always dangerous, but an honest name for the scene is neotribal. These are the new tribes, recreating and reinventing patterns of organic culture that are inspired by the premodern past but designed for a high-tech planet hurtling through a period of unprecedented global change.
In festival culture, everyone is part of the picture - physical arts like poi and hooping are widely practiced, crafters make and sell art and ritual craft; and people treat fashion as an invocation and a performance. Everyone, in fact, is performing - not posing so much as actively participating in a collective game whose goal is beauty, wonder and transport. Festivals can be a wild time, but for many participants, the festival is also a vital space of cultural invention. Within the environs of the gathering, half sacred and half imagined, another possible world appears. Despite the variety of festivals and clans, certain values come to the fore: community over consumerism, the power of the feminine, the wisdom of consciousness exploration and the ethical call to develop a hands-on harmony with the earth. Some of these values grow out of countercultural movements generations old, others are modeled on the folkways of other times and places - sometimes with respect and sometimes with a hasty hunger. Like all ideals, neotribal values are rarely realized in full and are more complex and contradictory than they initially appear.
People have gathered in ritual celebrations throughout recorded history; and no doubt back through the depths of prehistory as well. At the same time, and despite the tremendous differences in human cultures, anthropologists recognize a shared language of the festival. People wear special attire, sometimes donning masks or fancy headgear; and sometimes painting their bodies. They drink and eat and dance, often with great exuberance and for hours or even days on end. Intoxicants are taken, if they have them, and maybe the spirits show up and join in the dance. Emile Durkheim, who believed that religion was fundamentally a social process, called the energy raised by such gatherings "collective effervescence." And though this powerful group buzz is invariably dedicated to the gods of earth and sky, it often generates its energies through the more secular strategies of a party. These entwined goals are key to the modern neotribal festival, whose exuberance bubbles up in the space between sacred and profane, ritual and fete, ceremony and celebration.
In his book The Eternal Return, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade described how certain rituals allow mythic time to erupt inside mundane history. In particular, Eliade talked about annual tribal ceremonies that stage the recreation of the cosmos. The idea, which is found throughout primal societies, is that by ritually returning to the chaos at the beginning of things, and then reenacting the emergence of our ordered world, the cosmos itself is renewed. Such ceremonies give us an insight into the deep impulses of the festival, within whose electronic noise and psychedelic chaos stir new forms of living and being together on this planet. The cutting edge festivals today are green and sustainable, with workshops on alternative fuel and carbon footprints rounding out the music and dance. Even more vitally, the infrastructure of the festival itself is becoming an experiment in right planetary living. This isn't just global warming window dressing. This represents an intuition, welling up from primal memory perhaps, that the festival is a foundation of world renewal.
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