The Greatest Show on Earth

3/27/11.  Interview with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,748673,00.html

Book Reviews: "Soul Dust"

3/26/11. Matt Ridley reviews Nick Humpreys "Soul Dust," looking at the magical mystery show of consciousness.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214771893335998.html?KEYWORDS=+the+magical+mystery+show+of+consciousness

Caspar Melville's review:

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2533/natural-history-of-the-soul

Photographs of American Frontier Life

3/24/11.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/02/23/from-the-archive-frontier-life-in-the-west/2713/

Detroit's Population Crashes

3/24/11. Born and raised in the motor city.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216850733151470.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Jonah Lehrer: What Causes Bad Moods?

3/24/11.

What causes bad moods? Why do we sometimes slip into angry fits and melancholy torpors? In general, happy moods have easy explanations – we know why we’re elated. But a bad mood often seems to arrive out of the blue, a gloomy weather pattern that settles in from everywhere all at once. All of a sudden, we find ourselves pissed off without a good reason, which only makes us more pissed off.

The standard theory of bad moods is rooted in a psychological quirk known as ego depletion. Pioneered by Roy Baumeister and Mark Muraven in the 1990s, the basic idea behind ego depletion is that self-control and willpower are limited cognitive resources. As a result, when we overexert ourselves in one domain – say, when we’re on a strict diet, or focused on a difficult task for hours at work – we have fewer resources left over to exert self-control in other domains. This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of pizza. A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.

A bad mood is no different. When we push our mind too hard, asking it to refrain from carbs and cigarettes, we struggle to avoid the negative thoughts and emotions that lead to sour moods. Consider this 2007 study: The scientists told subjects to refrain from eating a tempting chocolate donut for a few minutes. Then, they insulted these poor (and probably hungry) experimental volunteers. Not surprisingly, those who had successfully resisted the donut were more likely to get aggressive in response to the insult. Or look at the medical literature, in which people on diets are typically “irritable and aggressive.” (This is the so-called cranky dieter effect.) Although we’d like to be happy and polite, those positive moods take cognitive work, and our brain is too tired to care. We lose our temper because we lack the willpower to swallow our angry words.

A brand new paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, extends this link between self-control and anger, even as it complicates the ego-depletion model. In a series of clever studies, the Northwestern psychologists David Gal and Wendy Liu demonstrate that the exertion of self-control doesn’t just make it harder for us to contain our own anger – it also make us more interested in watching anger-themed movies, or thinking about anger-related information, or looking an angry facial expressions. In other words, acts of self-control haven’t just exhausted the ego – they actually seem to have pissed it off.

My favorite experiment involved movies. Two hundred and thirty nine subjects were given a choice between a virtuous apple and a hedonistic chocolate bar. (A slim majority chose the apple.) Then, they were offered a selection of movies to watch, from Anger Management (an anger themed film) to Billy Madison (a non-anger themed film.) Interestingly, students were significantly more likely to choose the angry films if they’d first chosen the apple. And it wasn’t just films: another experiment found that people who exercised financial restraint – they chose a gift certificate for groceries over one for spa services – were more interested in looking at angry faces.

What’s driving this effect? Gal and Liu argue that the preference for angry stuff is not simply a result of ego depletion. Instead, they speculate that self-control is inherently aggravating. Perhaps choosing the apple annoys us because our goals have been thwarted – we really wanted the candy bar – or maybe we’re pissed because we feel that our sense of autonomy has been diminished. (If we weren’t so constrained by societal norms and expectations, we would have gorged on chocolate.) The point is that the labor of self-control directly inspires our tendency towards anger, and not indirectly via a worn down prefrontal cortex.

So the next time you decide to resist some treat, be it a day at the spa or a pint of Haagen-Dazs, be sure to keep a few cognitive resources in reserve. You’ll need them to keep the urges of anger at bay.

Book Review: "The Longevity Project"

3/19/11. How to keeping going and going.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160601149946420.html

The Economic Impact of Disasters

3/19/11. How delightful to see my Uncle George Horwich who was a Professor of Economics at Purdue University cited in this week's "Economist" for his analysis of the effects of the Kobe earthquake. Oh how I wish George were here to see some of the fruits of his discipline and creativity.

http://www.economist.com/node/18387016

Professor Horwich is mentioned in a NYT Blog:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/gauging-disasters-toll-on-an-economy/?src=busln

Professor Horwich cited in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_surowiecki

Professor Horwich referenced in the IrishTimes:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2011/0325/1224293045828.html

Interview with James Q. Wilson

3/16/11. Professor Wilson is the author of 14 books, including "Crime and Human Nature."

ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704823004576192673060882298.html?KEYWORDS=james+q+wilson

Live Sex Acts in the Classroom

3/16/17. Psychology, academic freedom, and sex toys in the classroom.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/lower-education_554092.html?nopager=1

Family Facts

3/8/11. Lots of data at your fingertips.

http://familyfacts.org/?utm_source=communications&utm_medium=homefeature&utm_campaign=heritagewebsite

The Duke, Before My Time

3/8/11. Nat Hentoff discovers some early Duke.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576076282468283342.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_TOPRightCarousel_1

Scientific Community Baffled

3/7/11. Scientists still puzzled about one man's condition of chronic incompetence. (R Rating:  Language.)

http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-baffled-by-mans-incredible-ability-to-f,19422/?utm_source=recentnews

Talk Pays Less

3/7/11.

Psychological therapy helps many people. Psychiatric medication helps many people. There is no substitute for the therapeutic relationship --- whether you benefit from psychological therapy, psychiatric medication, or both.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/health/policy/06doctors.html?_r=1&hpw

Balanced Budget vs. Brain

3/6/11. Jonah Lehrer - spot-on.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704506004576174440290134816.html?KEYWORDS=jonah+lehrer

Therapist-free Therapy

3/6/11. Not ready for prime time.

http://www.economist.com/node/18276234

Book Review: "The Social Animal"

3/5/11. Psychologist Christopher F. Chabris reviews David Brooks,' "The Social Animal."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704005404576176923998708008.html?KEYWORDS=david+brooks

The Science of Making Decisions

3/4/11. Should I read this?

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/i-can-t-think.print.html

Psychology and ESP

3/1/11. Science meets the paranormal.

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/bem-esp-2011-3/index2.html

Best Movies Ever?

3/1/11.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166543911285226.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

Book Reviews: on the metaphysical limitations of neuroscience

2/28/11. Raymond Tallis reviews, "Soul Dust:  The Magic of Consciousness" by Nicholas Humphrey, and "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, by Antonio Damascio.

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/02/mind-self-consciousness-brain

Monday Quotations

2/28/11.


“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”

--- H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946)


“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.”

--- Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976)


“Analogies decide nothing, that is true, but they can make one feel more at home.”

--- Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

2/27/11.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html

Why Economic Experts' Predictions Fail?

2/22/11.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=financial-flimflam&print=true
By Michael Shermer
February 22, 2011

Michael Shermer:
"In December 2010 I appeared on John Stossel’s television special on skepticism on Fox Business News, during which I debunked numerous pseudoscientific beliefs. Stossel added his own skepticism of possible financial pseudoscience in the form of active investment fund managers who claim that they can consistently beat the market. In a dramatic visual demonstration, Stossel threw 30 darts into a page of stocks and compared their performance since January 1, 2010, with stock picks of the 10 largest managed funds. Results: Dartboard, a 31 percent increase; managed funds, a 9.5 percent increase..."

The Pain of Schizophrenia

2/21/11. A father and a daughter express the pain and anguish of living with a schizophrenic family member.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/health/views/22zuger.html?_r=1&hpw

Monday Quotations

2/21/11.

"Our existence is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness."

--- Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977)


"Men and women do behave wisely, once all
other alternatives have been exhausted."

Abba Eban (1915 - 2002)


"The best is the enemy of the good."

--- Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

An Interview with Daniel Kahneman

2/20/11. Nobel Prize winner talks about his research on well-being.

http://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow/article/view/9/91

Lifestyle and Mental Health

2/17/11. What you can do to improve your mental health.

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-ofp-walsh.pdf

Major Hasan, 'Star Officer'

2/15/11. The side-effects of multiculturalism.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146001069880040.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Monday Quotations

2/14/11.

"Visions rest ultimately on some sense of the nature of man --- not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations. Those who see the potentialities of human nature extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which themselves produce unhappy side effects."

--- Thomas Sowell
      (1930 -   )

"The fatal conceit:  the idea that the ability to acquire skills stems from reason."

 --- F.A. Hayek

     (1899 1992)

"With few exceptions, women writers build their stories on a predictable list of generic complaints. They are:

• Bad men treat women badly.
• Good men treat women badly.
• Men do not understand that all women are creatures of fine intelligence, character, and sensitivity.
• Life in any society debases women and fails to support their physical and emotional needs and desires.
• Men impose themselves on women's bodies and inflict abuse and pain..

One or a combination of these grievances is the tension and the reason for every romance novel and for most  of the of the novels from the finer women writers. They are also the basic grievances of the feminists."

 --- Helen Hazan

Book Review: "The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart"

2/14/11. An ode to that fabulous muscle in our chest reviewed by psychiatrist Paul McHugh.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703745704576136670951466658.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Marketers Discreetly Retool for Aging Boomers

2/12/11. Don't trust anybody over 90. The beat goes on...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013604576104394209062996.html?KEYWORDS=boomers

Book Review: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts to Answer

2/12/11.

"Can a retired 16th-century French provincial magistrate teach us how to live today? Sarah Bakewell’s engaging and idiosyncratic biography of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne suggests that the answer, in some quite subtle and interesting ways, is that he can. To judge by the enthusiastic reviews and healthy sales for Bakewell’s book since it was published in Britain early last year and this past October in the United States, many critics and readers would seem to agree."
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=936

Remarkable Hollywood Lives

2/11/11. The five best books about...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130501566858630.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

2/11/11. The decline in English, and stuff.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_snd-american-english.html

Liza Donnelly: Drawing upon humor for change

2/10/11. New Yorker cartoonist draws upon her wise and funny cartoons about modern life.

http://www.ted.com/talks/liza_donnelly_drawing_upon_humor_for_change.html

The Apostate

2/9/11. Paul Haggis vs. The Church of Scientology

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all

Medical Research

2/9/11. Buyer beware.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/why-almost-everything-you-hear-about-medicine-is-wrong.html

How Great Entrepreneurs Think

2/9/11. Inside the minds of some of the most successful entrepreneurs.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs-think_Printer_Friendly.html

Interview with Dr. Carol Tavris

2/9/11. Dr. Tavris talks about her experiences growing up, skepticism, pseudoscience, false memory syndrome, multiple personality disorder, the value of psychological therapy, equality feminism, and more...

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-02-09/

In Search of Alcoholism Genes

2/8/11. Alcoholism wrecks lives and tears families apart. Research is beginning to uncover effective treatments. AA has always been the best hope for the treatment of alcoholics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130074292859048.html?KEYWORDS=alcoholism+and+genetics

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

2/8/11. A psychologist tells the truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=3&ref=science

Monday Quotations

2/7/11.

"So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip."

--- Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)


"If you wish women to love you, be original. I know a man who used to wear fur hats summer and winter and women fell in love with him."

--- Anton Chekhov (1860 1904)


"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

--- G. K Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

25 Best Novels for Psychology Buffs

2/7/11.

http://www.mastersinhealthcare.com/blog/2011/25-best-novels-for-psychology-buffs/

Edge Questions

2/7/11. Thirteen years of questions about science, technology, and the future --- with answers from a distinguished roster of scientists.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/01/21/edge-questions/

A Key Lesson of Adulthood: The Need to Unlearn"

2/5/11.

"Nothing endures," said Heraclitus, "but change."

It is not just arteries and veins that become clogged during adulthood.

Beliefs and ideas get clogged  that have been overturned by new scientific findings.

We tell ourselves stories to get to the truth. We must constantly revise our stories to fit the ever-changing world of discoveries.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116032151311622.html?KEYWORDS=the+need+to+unlearn

The Virus of Hysteria

2/2/11. More on the anti-vaccination movement and its deadly consequences.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/bc0201td.html

PTSD's Diagnostic Trap

2/2/11. Psychiatrist Sally Satel on the history of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, some misguided efforts to treat PTSD, and how to think clearly about the psychological ravages of war and PTSD.

http://www.aei.org/article/103105

More Dentists Taking Pains To Win Back Fearful Patients

2/1/11. Sitting in the dentist's chair without the fear and trembling.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116053190333540.html?KEYWORDS=dentistry

Stardust Memories

1/31/11. What's in a great song? ---- plenty.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/stardust-memories/#more-8372

Monday Quotations

1/31/11.

"The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

--- Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)


"A man, a plan, a canal --- Panama!"

One of the best known palindromes (a word or words that spell the same thing forward and backward).

--- Leigh Mercer (1893 - 1977)


(Businessman talking into the telephone:) "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?"

--- Robert Mankoff (1944 -  )


"Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in
information."

--- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

"Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister"

1/31/11. A look at an urban high school. Many children left behind.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html

Libertarian Morality

1/28/11. The personality of a libertarian.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/20/the-science-of-libertarian-mor

Brute Reason

1/28/11. A man of many talents, always neo-, hard-headed and tender-minded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Berman-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive

1/28/11. There are always 10 leading causes of death.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704590704576092611642661534.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

A Hollywood Icon Lays Down the Law

1/28/11. Make my day.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703293204576106080298279672.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Both Leading Man and Comic Relief

1/28/11. I don't get tired of listening to him sing, kid around, and just plain entertain.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513204576047690474342246.html?mod=WSJ_Leisure%26Arts_LEFTFeatures

What Is a Good Life?

1/26/11. The good life is...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/what-good-life/?pagination=false

Daniel Bell. R.I.P.

1/26/11.  I remember reading the "Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," only 33 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/arts/26bell.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all 

The New Atheists Narrow World-View

1/23/11. Some atheists don't understand religion.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Athe-ists-Nar-row/126027/

Book Review. Frank: The Voice

1/23/11.  On the life of Frank Sinatra by James Kaplan.

Geoffrey O'Brien writes:

"...But triumph is not precisely Kaplan’s subject. He wants to get inside the headlong rush of Sinatra’s career, and find the inner connections in a life ranging from unparalleled lyrical expression to unpredictable violent explosiveness; he tries to slow down the familiar show-biz montage long enough to wrest some sense of actuality from anecdotes many of which have been told and retold many times over. What he gets to—by means of a piling up of day-to-day, night-to-night detail that yields an almost neurological realism—is a core of discomfort and anxiety, whose outward manifestation as often as not was a barely restrainable impulse to control, if not to attack. Sinatra, a solitary who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent, and imagining how he would conquer the world through the power of his voice. Even he, though, could hardly have imagined the riotous effect he would have on the teenage girls of America, or that it was his fate to usher in the era of a new sort of mass idolatry."


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/portrait-artist-young-man/?pagination=false

Sarah Palin and the Battle for Feminism

1/23/11. Kay Hymowitz writes:

"But “calm and collected” are not the words that come to mind to describe the feminist response to the governor from Alaska. The young feminist Jessica Grose, writing on the popular website Jezebel just after the Republican convention, was—well, we’ll let her describe it: “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. . . . What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage.” Grose’s readers left more than 700 comments, according to the late New York Sun, including one from a reader who wanted to “vomit with rage.” Other haters damned Palin as a traitor to her sex or an “insult to women,” as Judith Warner spat in the New York Times. “Turncoat bitch!” the comedian Sandra Bernhard railed in a performance caught on YouTube. “You whore in your cheap fucking . . . cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair up!” Writing on a Washington Post blog, Wendy Doniger, a Hinduism specialist at the University of Chicago Divinity School, topped them all: Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”


http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_palin.html

Curiosity Thrilled the Cat

1/23/11. The free-market system encourages curiosity ---- and so much more.

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/january/curiosity-thrilled-the-cat

The 'Point' Besides the Point

1/23/11. Does the universe have a purpose?

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/michael-shermer/the-%E2%80%98point%E2%80%99-is-beside-the-point

Five Best Books

1/22/11. on Thriller Plots With Terror Themes.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090403031399140.html?KEYWORDS=best+books+on+thrillers

Book Review: "Up from the Projects"

1/21/11. Jason Riley of the WSJ reviews Walter Williams' autobiography --- a devastating look on how the state has conspired against blacks.

"'Sometimes I sarcastically, perhaps cynically, say that I'm glad that I received virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people," writes Walter Williams in his new autobiography, "Up from the Projects." "By that I mean that I encountered back then a more honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Professors didn't hesitate to criticize me—sometimes to the point of saying, 'That's nonsense.'"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704881304576094221050061598.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Monday Quotations

1/24/11.

"'Itzig, where are you riding to?'"
"'Don't ask me, ask the horse.'"

--- Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)


"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

--- B.F. Skinner (1904 - 1990)


"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all gong to end?"

--- Tom Stoppard (1937 - )



"In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men become robots.

--- Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980)

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: "The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model. Reconciling Art & Science in Psychiatry"

1/21/11. S. Nassir Ghaemi 's, M.D., M.P.H. new book is a thoughtful critique of the biopsychosocial model, discussing the historical development of the model,  what went wrong, and where do we go from here.

The opening quote sums up too much of psychiatry's approach to mental health problems,  theoretical concepts and models:

"For each of the great problems of life, there is a solution:  simple, plausible, and wrong."

--- H.L. Mencken

Dr. Ghaemi advocates a method-based psychiatry, outlines the limits of evidence-based medicine, builds bridges between science and the humanities, and makes the case for a new psychiatric humanism.

The Hot Spotters

1/19/11. Can we lower medical costs and raise the level of care?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande

Money Can Buy Happiness - As If

1/19/11. Monopoly collides with the creative destruction of capitalism.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/01/24/110124sh_shouts_allen

Time to Mandate Reporting of Mental Health Concerns

1/19/11. A good idea that must be carefully studied in practice.

http://www.aei.org/article/103015

The Trouble with Sarah Palin and the Media

1/17/11. The author writes that the relationship between Sarah Palin and the media is like a scene from a bad marriage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17douthat.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

E-Maledictions

1/17/11. William Zinsser tells why he doesn't use e-mail.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/e-maledictions/#more-8351

Monday Quotations

1/17/11.

"There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words."

---Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)


"Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of."

--- Robert Benchley (1889 - 1945)


"Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said."

--- Mel Brooks (1926  -   )

What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?

1/17/11/.  164 scientists reply.

http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_index.html#lehrer

The Insanity Verdict on Trial

1/16/11. The insanity defense is rarely used and widely misunderstood.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-insanity-verdict-on-trial&print=true

We Tried Mandatory Psychiatric Treatment...

1/16/11. ...and it works.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_3_weve_tried.html

Chinese Mothers

1/15/11. Charles Murray on Chinese mothers:

"Amy Chua is a hoot. Her WSJ op ed about the superiority of Chinese parenting, a take from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has blogs around the world roaring at a woman who could be so cruel to her children. I was laughing out loud throughout, partly because she clearly was having the time of her life twitting the sensitive helicopter parents who can’t bear the idea that their wonderful child is stressed or criticized in any way whatsoever. I was also laughing because the mother of my first two children was half Thai and all Chinese, and it was all so familiar. The subject heading of the email attaching the Chua article to my elder two daughters was “Bring back memories?” My own archetypal memory is when my eldest daughter, then perhaps eight years old, came home with her first Maryland standardized test scores, showing that she was at the 99th percentile in reading and the 93rd percentile in math. Her mother’s first words—the very first—were “What’s wrong with the math?”

Both children turned out great and love their mother dearly.

To get a little bit serious: large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua’s approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts—they’re nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves. There are also large numbers of children who are not especially talented, but would do a lot better in school if their parents applied the same intense home supplements to their classroom work.

But genes play a big role in whether you can demand that your child get an A in advanced calculus or make first seat in the violin section of the orchestra. With that in mind, let’s contemplate the genes being fed into those Chua children who are doing so well.

Maternal grandfather: EE and computer sciences professor at Berkeley, known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks.

Mother: able to get into Harvard (a much better indicator of her IQ than the magna cum laude in economics that she got there); Executive Editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Father: Summa cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, now a chaired professor at Yale Law School.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths—parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities—seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept."

Charles Murray and the Enterprise Blog:

http://blog.american.com/?author=23

The Line Between Madness and Mayhem

1/15/11/ What science tells use about the risk of violence, and why treatment in prisons could help.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703583404576080373538042898.html?KEYWORDS=the+line+between+madness+and+mayhem

Tree of Failure

1/14/11. Recognizing our limits is a strength.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=2&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

The Case for Cab Calloway

1/13/11.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-case-for-cab-calloway-15624

Why the Left Lost It

1/13/11. WSJ Deputy Editor Daniel Henninger on the murder in Tucson, and the competing visions of America.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576076373704758778.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

The Social Animal

1/12/11. Brain science will change how we view ourselves.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all

Massacre, Followed by Libel

1/12/11. Smart people, jumping to conclusions, missing key information, to confirm their biases, does not equal intelligence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011106068.html

Murder in Arizona

1/11/11. Mental health services in Arizona are among the worst in the nation. The tragedy of the murder in Arizona, says E.Fuller Torrey, began when we emptied the mental hospitals starting in the 1960s without providing adequate treatment alternatives.

Both the political right and political left had a hand in turning their backs on the mentally ill.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576073973345594508.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop#printMode

Junk Science is Not a Victimless Crime

1/11/11. A 1998 study published in Lancet, a leading medical journal, claimed that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism --- using eight autistic children in the sample. This poorly designed research sparked a storm of controversy, leading many parents to stop giving vaccines to their children. Many children needlessly died.

This kind of study with large samples across continents, proper controls and statistical analyses have looked at the relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism, and have been repeated 14 times. The studies have shown that MMR does NOT cause autism.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576073744290909186.html?KEYWORDS=junk+science+is+not+a+victimless+crime

Debbie Friedman. R.I.P.

1/11/11. Singer and songwriter of Jewish Music.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/arts/music/11friedman.html?hpw

Murder in Tucson

1/10/1l. The WSJ's sober editorial about the murder in Tucson.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703667904576071943007100666.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Monday Quotations

1/10/11.

"A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."

--- Tom Wolfe (1931 -  )


"There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

--- W. Somerset Maughn (1874 - 1965)


"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated."

--- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Grace, Elegance and Wit

1/9/11. Denis Dutton, founder of ALD, brought a window into the intellectual world onto the web.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704405704576064540563199586.html?KEYWORDS=denis+dutton

Book Review: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

1/8/11. Dr. Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine, reviews Dr. V.S. Ramachandran's book on the brain. Dr. Tallis knows of what he speaks --- that is, neuroscients are experts at creating the illusion of understanding what makes us human. When, if fact, neuroscientists have no clue how the brain creates the mind and consciousness.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704034804576025681468057572.html?KEYWORDS=the+mind+in+the+mirror

Book Review: The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear

1/8/11. Michael Schermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, reviews Seth Mnookin's incisive book about the fallacious link between autism and vaccines causing an epidemic of ignorance.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704034804576025682621085122.html?KEYWORDS=an+epidemic+of+ignorance

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

1/6/11. The answers are...?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704405704576064900279077050.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Sex in America

1/6/11. The survey says...

http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/05/sex-in-america-new-survey-resu

Seeing the Future

1/6/11.

"One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events." I knew it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/06/the-esp-study-when-science-goes-psychic/a-cutoff-for-craziness

Psychological Therapy and Depression

1/5/11.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer on the importance of psychological therapy for depression:

Every period has its signature disorder. We live in the age of depression. Consider a brand new survey published in the Archives of General Psychiatry: Between 1998 and 2007, the percentage of Americans being treated for depression increased by more than 20 percent. Other studies estimate that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of American adults will suffer from depression at some point in their life.

Obviously, there’s a dizzying array of forces that are causing this rise. Part of the problem is diagnosis, as people like Alan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield have argued. Thanks to changes in the DSM, Horwitz and Wakefield insist that we’ve medicalized sadness, transforming anguish and its synonyms into a clinical condition.

But it remains unknown how much of the rise in depression is accounted for by changes in diagnosis. And I think it’s extremely important to not dismiss the likely possibility that, even if our diagnostic standards had remained constant, there would still be a rise in depression. In other words, is there something about the way we live now that’s making us extremely sad? Are these intensely negative feelings symptoms of a larger societal problem?

Hard questions, no easy answers. In this blog post, I’d like to focus instead on one of the troubling data points in this most recent medical survey, which is that the percentage of depressed subjects seeking psychotherapy for treatment declined dramatically between 1998 and 2007, from 53.6 percent to 43.1 percent. (This drop has come despite the fact that a majority of subjects say talk therapy is their preferred method of treatment.) Needless to say, pills have taken the place of therapists, as more than 75 percent of depressed patients are now treated with anti-depressants, which has led to a dramatic increase in medical spending on the disorder. Between 1998 and 2007, Medicare expenditures for depression increased from $0.52 billion (1998) to $2.25 billion (2007).

When anti-depressants work, they are little blue miracles. But they often don’t work, at least not at rates higher significantly higher than placebo. (Plus, they often have unpleasant side-effects, which leads more than half of patients to stop taking the drugs shortly after the worst symptoms disappear. And then they relapse, which helps explain why patients treated with SSRI’s have relapse rates above 75 percent.) And that’s why I’m troubled by the drop in talk therapy, as most studies demonstrate that the most effective treatment for depression is pharmaceuticals coupled with a good therapist. Furthermore, many different kinds of therapy can be effective. For instance, the same December 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry also contains an interesting comparative study of anti-depressants and mindfulness therapy in preventing relapse following an extended depressive episode. The mindfulness therapy itself was straightforward stuff, if time intensive. There were eight weekly group sessions of two hours each, plus a full day retreat and optional one-hour meditation classes. The subjects learned how to reflect upon their feelings with “non-judgmental awareness” and “self-compassion.” They were urged to apply their new mindfulness skills to everyday life challenges.

The results were stark. Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of anti-depressants, and then stopped taking the drugs, relapsed about 70 percent of the time. The chemical boost was temporary. However, during the 18 month follow-up period, only 28 percent of patients in mindfulness therapy slipped back into the mental illness.

What we often forget is that therapy alters the chemical brain, just like a pill. It’s easy to dismiss words as airy nothings and talk therapy as mere talk. Sitting on a couch can seem like such an antiquated form of treatment. But the right kind of talk can fix our broken mind, helping us escape from the recursive loop of stress and negative emotion that’s making us depressed. Changing our thoughts is never easy and, in severe cases, might seem virtually impossible. We live busy lives and therapy requires hours of work and constant practice; our cortex can be so damn stubborn. But the data is clear: If we are seeking a long-lasting cure for depression, then it’s typically our most effective treatment.

Conquering Fear

1/4/11. Tremble no more.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059823679423598.html?KEYWORDS=conquering+fear

Resilience

1/4/11. There is one universal in human life:  struggle. Life is like climbing one mountain after another. The challenge is to enjoy mountain climbing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/health/04mind.html?_r=1&hpw

The Elements of Clunk

1/3/11. What's the matter with writing today?

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Elements-of-Clunk/125757/

Study vs. Study

1/3/11. Scientists search for truth. Why is truth so hard to find?

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=12510202

Monday Quotations

1/3/11.

"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of."

--- Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)


"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.
There is no humor in heaven."

--- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)


"It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better...
while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

Woody Allen (1935 - )