The blank slate, tabula rasa as the Greek termed it, is one of the worst ideas in science. For a long time scientists avoided asserting that anything about human behavior was innate. If they did, someone would point to a quirky tribe from Papua New Guinea to argue that all behavior comes via experience. This attitude has changed in the last couple of decades. Books ranging from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate to David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, give us a much more accurate picture of the nature-nurture debate. Now scientists know that the human brain is like a book: the first draft is written at birth and the rest is filled in during life. As NYU psychologist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises… ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means ‘organized in advance of experience.’”

Understanding human behavior in these terms is vital for moral psychologists. For thousands of years philosophers debated if humans are inherently good or evil. But we now know that this is a false choice. As Marcus explains, everyone possess a moral sense from birth that permits altruism, fairness and justice; the interaction between genes and environment influences how these qualities are drawn out.

Some of the most important work in moral development comes from Paul Bloom, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin. In one of their experiments they used a three-dimensional display and puppets to act out helping/hindering situations for six and ten-month-old infants. For example, a yellow square would help a circle up a hill; a red triangle would push it down. After the puppet show Bloom, Wynn and Kiley placed the helper and hinderer on a tray and brought them to the children. They found that they overwhelmingly preferred the helpful puppet to the hindering one. In an NYTimes article, Bloom concludes that, “babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest.”

This brings me to a brand new study by psychologists Stephanie Sloane, Renée Baillargeon and David Premack published in Psychological Science. There were two experiments and babies watched live scenarios in each. In the first, 19-month-olds watched two giraffe puppets dance as an experimenter cheerfully presented the long-necked puppets with two toys. Here was the ripple: the experimenter gave one toy to each giraffe or both to one of them. Sloane et al then timed how long the babies gazed at the scene until they lost interest. (Longer looking times indicated that the babies thought something was wrong). They found that three-quarters of the infants looked longer when one giraffe got both toys.

In the second experiment, two women played with a pile of small toys when an experimented said, “Wow! Look at all these toys. It’s time to clean them up!” In one scenario both women got a reward even though one put all the toys away while the other kept playing. In the other scenario both women got a reward and both put the toys away. Similar to the results of the first experiment, the researchers found that 21-month-old infants gazed longer when the worker and the slacker were rewarded equally.

Here’s Sloane on the implications of the research:

We think children are born with a skeleton of general expectations about fairness and these principles and concepts get shaped in different ways depending on the culture and the environment they’re brought up in… helping children behave more morally may not be as hard as it would be if they didn’t have that skeleton of expectations.

Sloane’s study and remarks complement other research. A study published last November by Kiley Hamlin (along with Karen Wynn) demonstrated that babies preferred puppets that mistreated bad characters from scenarios similar to the ones created by Paul Bloom et al. Hamlin concluded that babies, “prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated.” Moreover, last October a study by Marco Schmidt and Jessica Summerville found that, “the infants [expecting] an equal and fair distribution of food… were surprised to see one person given more crackers or milk than the other.”

This small but significant body of research is giving us a better understanding of morality from the developmental point of view. It also reminds us that behavior is not simply nature versus nurture; it is about the interaction of genes and their environments. A better understanding of where our moral sense comes from and how it develops will hopefully help us draw out what Abraham Lincoln called our Better Angels.

Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack, D. (2012). Do Infants Have a Sense of Fairness? Psychological Science, 23 (2), 196-204 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611422072

Conspiracy theories are tempting. There is something especially charming about a forged moon landing or government-backed assassination. Christopher Hitchens called them “the exhaust fumes of democracy.” Maybe he’s right: cognitive biases, after all, feast on easy access to information and free speech.

Leon Festinger carried out the first empirical study of conspiracy theorists. In 1954 the Stanford social psychologist infiltrated a UFO cult that was convinced the world would end on December 20^th. In his book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger recounts how after midnight came and went, the leader of the cult, Marian Keech, explained to her members that she received a message from automatic writing telling her that the God of Earth decided to spare the planet from destruction. Relieved, the cult members continued to spread their doomsday ideology.

Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance to describe the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. It is a “state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent,” as two authors describe it, “the more committed we are to a belief, the harder it is to relinquish, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.”

Smokers are another a good example; they smoke even though they know it kills. And after unsuccessfully quitting, they tend to say that, “smoking isn’t that bad,” or that, “it’s worth the risk.” In a related example doctors who preformed placebo surgeries on patients with osteoarthritis of the knee “found that patients who had ‘sham’ arthroscopic surgery reported as much relief… as patients who actually underwent the procedure.” Many patients continued to report dramatic improvement even after surgeons told them the truth.

A recent experiment by Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton reminds us that holding inconsistent beliefs is more the norm than the exception. The researchers found that “mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement.” Many subjects, for example, believed Princess Diana faked her own death and was killed by a rogue cell of British Intelligence, or that the death of Osama bin Laden was a cover-up and that he is still alive. The authors conclude that many participants showed “a willingness to consider and even endorse mutually contradictory accounts as long as they stand in opposition to the officially sanctioned narrative.”

The pervasiveness of cognitive dissonance helps us explain why it sometimes takes societies several generations to adopt new beliefs. People do not simply change their minds; especially when there is a lot on the line. It took several centuries for slavery to be universally banned (Mauritania was the last country to do so in 1981). In the United States civil rights movements for women and African-Americans lasted decades. Same-sex marriage probably won’t be legal in all 50 states for several more years. Our propensity to hold onto cherished beliefs also pervades science. As Max Plank said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Are there ways to dilute the negative effects of cognitive dissonance? I’m afraid that the Internet is part of the problem. Google makes it so easy for us to find something that confirms a belief. But it is also part of the solution. History tells us that cooperation and empathy between individuals, institutions and governments increases as the exchange of information becomes easier. From the printing press to Uncle Tom’s cabin and through the present day (where social networks are the primary means of communication for so many) people tend to consider a point of view other than their own the more they are exposed to other perspectives.

Steven Pinker captures this point well in his latest book: “As literacy and education and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally. That will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage points – that makes it harder to privilege one’s own interest over others.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that the rise of published books and literacy rates preceded the Enlightenment, an era that was vital in the rise of human rights.

This brings me back to Hitchen’s quote. Indeed, a byproduct of democracy is the tendency for some people to believe whatever they want, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. However, Pinker reminds us that democracy is helping to relieve our hardwired propensity to only look for what confirms our beliefs. That our confirmation biases are innate suggests that they will never disappear, but the capacity to reason facilitated by the exchange of information paints an optimistic future.

Marsha Lucas, PhD, is a neuropsychologist based in Washington DC. She recently released Rewire Your Brain For Love: Creating Vibrant Relationships Using the Science of Mindfulness, a book that explores what neuroscience can teach us about creating and fostering healthy relationships.

Marsha’s book is charming and personal. She speaks with the reader, not to the reader. Along the way she outlines basic neuroanatomy, explains what prevents us from forming strong relationships and describes the benefits of meditation. Throughout the book Marsha reminds readers that mindfulness can change the brain in areas and ways that promote healthier relationships with yourself and others.

Learn more about the book and Marsha by reading our interview below!

Give us a little bit of your personal background. Where are you from and where did you grow up? 

I’m a native of New York, where I lived until heading off to college. I’m the daughter of a clinical psychologist and a stay-at-home mom who later became a silversmith.

How did you fall into your current profession as a psychologist?

I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, what’s “us” and what it is that makes us who we are. My dad and I would have these sometimes pretty odd conversations, about things like the Purkinje phenomenon (when, at dusk, your eyes are shifting from mostly color perception to mostly light detection, reds and greens seem to “pop” and appear much more intense), or hypothesizing what the dog might be thinking while he sniffs, um — well, you get the idea.

Why did you decide to write the book? 

I’d been so fortunate to have three important parts of my life converge – my passion for neuroscience, my love of doing psychotherapy, and the tremendous difference that mindfulness practice can make in well-being. Putting them together in everyday language — with some of humor and examples mixed in — made such a difference with my patients that eventually patients, colleagues, and friends were all encouraging me to write the book.

Take us through the writing process a little bit. What were the biggest challenges? What was your original idea and how did it change (if it did)? 

The biggest challenge in writing the book wasn’t the writing of the book itself — that was a challenge, but it was exciting and enlivening. I learned that to get a non-fiction book published, you first write a proposal — a business plan and sales pitch, really, plus a couple of sample chapters. Business plans, sales pitches — not exactly the stuff that most psychologists are inclined to do, so it was a steep learning curve. I had one author joke with me, “If you want to create a more mindful life, don’t write a book about creating a more mindful life!”

Ok, now for the good stuff. Meditation is a common theme in the book. So, how can we use it to improve our relationships? 

It seems a little counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? After all, most people don’t say, “I’m really so hungry for a relationships, or to improve the one I have – Hey, I know! I’ll go sign up to learn meditation!” But here’s the connection: Our brains are wired — or not — for healthy relationships very early in life, through our first experiences with those who cared for us. If, like so many people, your brain is not, you can improve that wiring through the simple practice of mindfulness. Research (from Harvard, UCLA, and so on) has shown that changes happen in the brain as a result of mindfulness practice, in areas and with pathways that support and promote better emotional resilience, healthier empathy, quicker recovery after an argument, and more. I talk about the changes in terms of seven “high-voltage” relationship benefits.

What can neuroscience teach about reducing and controlling stress? 

Humans have this tremendous capacity for thinking, and thinking about thinking. It’s a good thing, but it also costs us. Robert Sapolsky wrote Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers — zebras have their stress and tension when they sense that there’s a lion about to try to make one of them her dinner, but when the threat is over, they go back to a non-stressed baseline and get back to munching the grass. We, on the other hand, dwell on what happened in the past, project into what might happen in the future — and using our busy minds, keep ourselves stressed beyond what serves our well-being. When we acquire the skill of greater regulation of our body’s response to stress or fear, as one example, we’re developing “better” neural pathways, and less stressed-out ways of living our lives.

Throughout the book you advise the reader to be more “mindful.” Tell us what you mean by this. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn, probably the most influential person in popularizing mindfulness in the US, describes mindfulness as paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgment. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? You’re bringing your attention to something — often your breath — and of course, with our busy minds, your attention wanders off. You notice it, and gently, non-judgmentally bring it back to the original focus. It’s not about “stopping” your mind, but noticing what it’s up to, and gently bringing it back to the present moment.

My favorite part of the book is chapter 9. You describe your experiences with a woman named Justine who is having problems finding a good partner. What does Justine teach us? 

It’s fascinating to me that so many people find Justine’s story so compelling. Justine was basically living her life in a way that was turning a blind eye, every minute of every day, to how she had fallen into a sort of “autopilot” — living her life pretty mindlessly so she could just keep on going. She was a power broker in Washington DC, very successful in her career doing things that were good for her clients but (as she readily admitted) not really the right or decent thing for the rest of us on the planet. She came in to see me because she was having some serious problems finding a “solid, decent guy.” Understandably, she was resistant to really taking a look at the life and the crummy relationships she’d created — but was ultimately able to develop the capacity to mindfully shift her perspective, her talents, and her life to something more meaningful, and with more integrity. Finding a more meaningful relationship, and a guy with integrity, flowed so amazingly from that.

For the big question. What does your book try to accomplish? Or, what would you like the reader to walk away with? 

We spend much of our time on “autopilot”. It’s like a prison, really. The practice of mindfulness gives you the chance to change your brain, to create better neural pathways, allowing you to break out of autopilot — and to create more vibrant, juicy relationships.

Thanks Marsha!

Rewire Your Brain For Love

It was Sunday in church, 1973, when Arthur Fry had his moment of insight. Fry, a member of the choir, was having trouble marking pages for the hymnals. Whenever he opened the book his makeshift bookmarks fell out or got caught in the seams. The problem was innocent enough, yet it persisted. What Fry really needed was an adhesive strong enough so his bookmarks stuck to the pages but weak enough so he wouldn’t damage the pages when he removed the bookmarks.

He recalled a seminar given by his 3M colleague, Spencer Silver, a few years ago. Silver described a new adhesive he discovered during his talk and Fry had been wondering how it could be applied ever since. That’s when the answer came to him: why not use Silver’s adhesive for the bookmark?

He called his idea the Post-It note.

Fry, of course, isn’t the only person to experience a moment of insight. Henrí Poincaré is famous for thinking up Non-Euclidean geometry while boarding a bus. “At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it…. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had the time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with the conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty.” Einstein, moreover, is known to have thought up Special Relativity after glimpsing at Bern’s famous clock tower.

When we think about eureka moments Rodin’s The Thinker comes to mind, maybe Newton’s famous apple inspired insight (as the story goes). We associate insights with deep concentration and contemplation. But surprising new research is demonstrating another side to the story. This is what Fry’s story tells us, that breakthroughs occur when we are relaxed, when the mind is not focused but at ease. An insight requires a lot hard work; it is often the peak of years of work. But on the path to discovery it’s important to let the mind wonder.

A recent experiment by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks demonstrated this nicely. They recruited 428 undergrads who identified themselves as either night owls or morning larks. Next Wieth and Zacks asked them to attempt 6 problem-solving tasks; half the problems were insights-based while the other half was analytical-based and they were given four minutes to solve them.

Here’s where things got interesting. Half of the students were tested between 8:30am and 9:30am while the other half were tested between 4 and 5:30pm. The researchers found that the undergrads were better at solving the insight problems when they tested during their least optimal time of function. This means that owls did better in the morning while larks did better in the afternoon. The BPS Research Digest explains the details:

When larks were tested in the evening and owls were tested in the morning, they achieved an average success rate of 56, 22 and 49 per cent, for the three insight tasks, compared with success rates of 51, 16, and 31 per cent achieved by students tested at their preferred time of day. By contrast, performance on the analytic tasks was unaffected by time of day.

Their findings are counter-intuitive but consistent with other recent research. Mark Jung-Beeman is a psychologist from the University of Northwestern who studies what happens in the brains when it has a moment of insight. A few years ago he teamed with John Kounios to try to understand the neuroscience behind problem solving. To do this they used EEG and fMRI to measure subjects while they completed Compound Remote Associate Problems (C.R.A.P problems, as the joke goes). Here’ an example: What word fits with “pine,” crab,” and “sauce?” The correct answer is “apple” (pineapple, crabapple, and applesauce).

They found that participants went through several phases as they tackled the problems. First was the preparatory phase where the prefrontal cortex was hot with activity. Next was the search phase where many parts of the brain were active. After that subjects either gave up or solved the problems. Jung-Beeman and Kounis found that the successful ones showed a burst in gamma rhythm, which is generated when neurons bind to each other. They also found a spike of activity in the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) moments before the insight. The aSTG is a fairly mysterious brain region but it is has been linked to the processing of metaphors. This makes some sense. C.R.A.P problems are, after all, about linking seemingly unrelated ideas.

What does this mean? One New Yorker article explains that, “the insight process… is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight.”

Research by Joy Bhattacharya of University London, Goldsmith confirmed this. Bhattacharya found that EEG data accurately predicted if a subject was going to solve a problem up to eight second in advance. What tipped the subjects off were alpha waves, which are electrical neural oscillations that show up when you are about to fall asleep, when you’re getting out of bed or when you’re taking a warm shower. “Sleeping on it” turns out to have some neurological merit.

The British Comedian John Cleese also confirms this research with an enlightening talk about his early day at Cambridge:

If I was trying to write a sketch at night and I got stuck… I would go to bed. And when I woke up in the morning and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to my desk and looked at the problem not only was the solution to this problem immediately apparent to me, but I couldn’t even remember what the problem had been the previous night.

In a Red-Bull driven society it’s believed that intense focus, determination and willingness to never give up are vital, but Cleese and this informing research remind us that a clenched state of mind is sometimes counter-productive. Indeed, caffeine might be our best friend when it comes to solving problems, but certainly not always.

The important role relaxation plays in problem solving, insights, aha-moments and the so-called creative process is receiving a lot of attention. In a recent article on Time.com the science writer Annie Murphy Paul described the study by Wieth and Zacks and reminded readers that, “by not giving yourself time to tune in to your meandering mind, you’re missing out on the surprising solutions it may offer.” Similarly, “when you have to be creative,” says University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock on PsychologyToday.com, “working at your non-optimal time of day is actually optimal.” (There is even new research suggesting that being sleepy and drunk is good for creativity!)

To be sure, empirical results from the science of insights are confirming, not discovering, what many have known for centuries. The Austrian born physicist Fritjof Capra has a wonderful quote that captures this point. In his book The Tao Of Physics he explains the following:

Rational knowledge and rational activities certainly constitute the major part of scientific research, but are not all there is to it.  The rational part of research would, in fact, be useless if it were not complemented by the intuition that gives scientists new insights and makes them creative.   These insights tend to come suddenly and, characteristically, not when sitting at a desk working out the equations, but when relaxing, in the bath, during a walk in the woods, on the beach, etc.  During these periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight to scientific research.

So it was with Fry, who, on the fateful Sunday morning, was innocuously singing hymnals when he had his insight. He wasn’t thinking about Silver’s research; he probably wasn’t thinking about much at all. But that was the important part. It was the calming presences of his fellow choir members, the congregation and warming resonance of the hymns that allowed his neurons to relax and form brand new synapses. And with his new neural network he left church to change the world, one Post-It note at a time.

• Thanks to Reisa Asimovic for leading me to the Capra quote!

Wieth, M., & Zacks, R. (2011). Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal Thinking & Reasoning, 17 (4), 387-401 DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2011.625663

Reason has fallen on hard times. After decades of research psychologists have spoken: we humans are led by our emotions, we rarely (if ever) decide optimally and we would be better off if we just went with our guts. Our moral deliberations and intuitions are mere post-hoc rationalizations; classical economic models are a joke; Hume was right, we are the slaves of our passions. We should give up and just let the emotional horse do all the work.

Maybe. But sometimes it seems like the other way around. For every book that explores the power of the unconscious another book explains how predictably irrational we are when we think without thinking; our intuitions deceive us and we are fooled by randomness but sometimes it is better to trust our instincts. Indeed, if a Martian briefly compared subtitles of the most popular psychology books in the last decade he would be confused quickly. Reading the introductions wouldn’t help him either; keeping track of the number of straw men would be difficult for our celestial friend. So, he might ask, over the course of history have humans always thought that intelligence was deliberate or automatic?

When it comes to thinking things through or going with your gut there is a straightforward answer: It depends on the situation and the person. I would also add a few caveats. Expert intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment, as Kahneman argues in his latest book, and it seems like everyone is equally irrational when it comes to economic decisions. Metacognition, in addition, is a good idea but seems impossible to consistently execute.

However, unlike our Martian friend who tries hard to understand what our books say about our brains, the reason-intuition debate is largely irrelevant for us Earthlings. Yes, many have a sincere interest in understanding the brain better. But while the lay reader might improve his decision-making a tad and be able explain the difference between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala the real reason millions have read these books is that they are very good.

The Gladwells, Haidts and Kahnemans of the world know how to captivate and entertain the reader because like any great author they pray on our propensity to be seduced by narratives. By using agents or systems to explain certain cognitive capacities the brain is much easier to understand. However, positioning the latest psychology or neuroscience findings in terms of a story with characters tends to influence a naïve understanding of the so-called most complex entity in the known universe. The authors know this of course. Kahneman repeatedly makes it clear that “system 1” and “system 2” are literary devices not real parts in the brain. But I can’t help but wonder, as Tyler Cowen did, if deploying these devices makes the books themselves part of our cognitive biases.

The brain is also easily persuaded by small amounts of information. If one could sum up judgment and decision-making research it would go something like this: we only require a tiny piece of information to confidently form a conclusion and take on a new worldview. Kahneman’s acronym WYSIATI – what you see is all there is – captures this well. This is precisely what happens the moment readers finish the latest book on intuition or irrationality; they just remember the sound bite and only understand brains through it. Whereas the hypothetical Martian remains confused, the rest of us humans happily walk out of our local Barnes and Noble, or even worse, finish watching the latest TED with the delusion feeling that now, we “got it.”

Many times, to be sure, this process is a great thing. Reading and watching highbrow lectures is hugely beneficial intellectually speaking. But let’s not forget that exposure to X is not knowledge of X. The brain is messy; let’s embrace that view, not a subtitle.

Suicide terrorism is a peculiar business. As a means of killing civilians it is hugely efficient. Steven Pinker explains that, “it combines the ultimate in surgical weapon delivery – the precision manipulators and locomotors called hands and feet, controlled by the human eyes and brain – with the ultimate in stealth – a person who looks just like millions of other people.” The most sophisticated drone doesn’t come close.

Relative to the past few decades it is trending. During the 1980s the world saw an average of about five suicide attacks per year. Between 2000 and 2005 that number skyrocketed to 180. The targets have been diverse. Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan get all the media attention, but Somalia and Sri Lanka experienced their share of self-destruction over the past five years.

What’s peculiar about suicide terrorism is that it is especially difficult to understand from a psychological point of view. Most people find it impossible to empathize with someone who walks into a crowded Jerusalem market wearing an overcoat filled with nails, ball bearings and rat poison with the intention of detonating the bomb strapped to his (99 percent of suicide terrorists are male) waist. How do we make sense of this?

Secular westerners tend to understand suicide terrorists as unfortunate products of undeveloped, undereducated and economically devastated environments. This isn’t true. All the 9/11 hijackers were college educated and suffered “no discernible experience of political oppression.” As Sam Harris explains:

Economic advantages and education, in and of themselves, are insufficient remedies for the cause of religious violence. There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God…. Religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated.

What is a sufficient explanation? In the case of Islam, why are so many of its followers eager to turn themselves into bombs? Harris believes that it is “because the Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity… Subtract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible.” However you interpret the Koran, Harris’ position is that faith motivates Muslim suicide terrorists and that beliefs are the key to understanding the psychology of suicide terrorism. When nineteen Muslim terrorists woke up on the morning of September 11^th they believed that 72 virgins awaited them in Heaven; they believed they would be remembered as heroes; they believed that self-destruction in the name of their God was glorious. It does not take a stretch of the imagination to correctly guess what they were saying (I should say, praying) moments before their doom.

Epistemology isn’t the whole story. Action requires belief but belief is not created in a vacuum. Understanding the motives of suicide bombers demands knowledge of the community they grew up in. You need context.

This is precisely what anthropologist Scott Atran attempted to dissect. After interviewing failed and prospective suicide terrorists he published several articles outlining the psychological profile of suicide terrorists and concluded that a call to martyrdom is appealing because it offers an opportunity to join a cohesive and supportive community of like-minded persons. Here’s Atran’s testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee:

When you look at whom [suicide terrorists] idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.

The work of anthropologist Richard Sosis suggests that Atran is correct. Sosis studied the history of communes in the United States in the nineteenth century. He found that twenty years after their founding 6 percent of the secular communes still existed compared to 39 percent of the religious communes. He also discovered that the more costly sacrifices the religious commune demanded the better it functioned. By requiring members to withstand from things like alcohol and conform to dress codes the religious communes quickly and effectively bound its members together. This is why if the West wants to minimize suicide terrorism, Atran recommends, it should “[learn] how to minimize the receptivity of mostly ordinary people to recruiting organizations.”

Thankfully, the number of suicide bombers has declined in the last few years. In Iraq Vehicle and suicide attacks dropped from 21 a day in 2007 to about 8 a day in 2010. Along with a surge of American soldiers, the decline can be attributed to an attitude shift within the Islamic community. In Pinker’s latest book he explains that, “in the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, support for Al Qaeda plummeted from 70 percent to 4 percent in just five months in late 2007… In a 2007 ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan, support for jihadist militants nosedived to one percent.” If Atran is correct in suggesting that suicide terrorism is fueled by an appeal to community and an opportunity to gain esteem then this is good news.

Individual belief and the communities they arise from help us understand the psyche of suicide bombers. But even a sufficient explanation would leave me wondering. Our DNA has one goal: replication. That natural selection has given us the means to stop this process might be one of Nature’s great ironies.

Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. (2003). Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion Cross-Cultural Research, 37 (2), 211-239 DOI: 10.1177/1069397103037002003
Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of Suicide Terrorism Science, 299 (5612), 1534-1539 DOI: 10.1126/science.1078854

Below is my latest column at The Creativity Post in its entirety. I argue that good ideas benefit from intellectual diversity. Incidentally, I came across this wonderful NYTimes article on the same subject at Farnam Street blog this morning. It discusses Scott Page’s The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies.

A few years ago Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University and Jarrett Spiro of Stanford University set out (pdf) to answer this question: What determines the success of a Broadway musical? Uzzi and Spiro began by poring through a data set that included 2,092 people who worked on 474 musicals from 1945 to 1989. To determine how good each production was they considered metrics such as reviews and financial success. They also controlled for things like talent and economic and geographic conditions to ensure that the big New York City musicals didn’t flub the data.

What they found was that successful productions relied on two components: “The ratio of new blood versus industry veterans, and the degree to which incumbents involved their former collaborators and served as brokers for new combinations of production teams.” In other words, productions that worked found a balance between strong social ties and weak ones, rookies and veterans, familiarity and novelty. They weren’t flooded with a group of likeminded people but neither was everyone a stranger to each other. Uzzi and Spiro hypothesized that the reason intellectual diversity was important is because “small world networks that help to create success or failure in Broadway musicals… face liabilities in the realms of innovation and collaboration that impede their creating new, successful musical hits… too much small-worldliness can undermine the very benefits it creates at more moderate levels, due to a decrease in artists’ ability to innovate and break convention.”

What’s alarming about their conclusions is that a plethora of psychological data suggests that most of us balk when we are given the chance to connect with people who might not share similar intellects. Consider a study (pdf) done back in 2007 by Paul Ingram and Michael Morris at Columbia University. The psychologists gathered a group of executives and had them attend a cocktail mixer where the psychologists encouraged the executives to exchange ideas, network and meet new people. Like good behavioral scientists, Ingram and Morris weaseled microphones on all the nametags to record what was said. Prior to the “mixing” the executives stated that they wanted to “meet as many different people as possible” or “expand their social network,” but the Ingram and Morris found just the opposite. “Do people mix at mixers? “ they asked in the concluding remarks of their study, “The answer is no… our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well.” Or, as Jonah Lehrer somewhat sarcastically puts it in a recent post, “investment bankers chatted with other investment bankers, and marketers talked with other marketers, and accountants interacted with other accountants.”

Ingram and Morris’ study should be taken as a warning: If we want to broaden our intellectual horizons it’s important to remember our natural tendency to drift towards and eventually connect with only likeminded people. Stories of innovation and discovery throughout history illustrate how important this point is. My favorite, which doesn’t get told enough, is the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), a key piece of evidence that changed our understanding of the origin of the universe forever.

The story begins in Holmdel New Jersey at Bell Labs where Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were experimenting with a horn antenna originally built to detect radio waves that bounced off of echo balloon satellites. After spending some time with the antenna they ran into a problem. It was a mysterious hissing noise – like static on the radio – that persisted all over the sky, day and night. The duo went to great lengths to eliminate the hiss – they even washed bird droppings off of the dish – but it was all to no avail. Meanwhile, at Princeton University just 60 miles down the road, Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles and David Wilkinson were trying to find evidence for the Big Bang in the form of microwave radiation. They predicated that if the Big Bang did in fact take place it must have scattered an enormous blast of radiation throughout the universe much like how a rock thrown into a lake creates ripples that broadcast outwards. With the right instrumentation, they believed, this radiation could be all over the sky, day and night.

It was only a matter of time before serendipity set in and a mutual friend at MIT, professor of physics Bernard F. Burke, told Penzias about what the researchers at Princeton were looking for. After that, the two teams exchanged ideas and realized the implications of their work. It turned out that the hiss that Penzias and Wilson were trying so hard to get rid of was precisely the radiation that the Princeton team was looking for. A few calculations and a published paper later landed Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Noble Prize in Physics; the rest of us are still repeating the benefits of a more complete understanding of the universe.

The story of CMB reminds us that when it comes to solving difficult problems a fresh set of eyes, even one that comes from a different field, is vital. The CMB story shows itself in one form or another many times throughout history. The world’s great ideas are as much about other people as they are about the individual who makes it into the textbook. As Matt Ridely explains in a TED lecture in a slightly different context, “what’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating not how clever the individuals are… it’s the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between that [causes]… innovation.”

There is a wonderful website called InnoCentive.com that facilitates what Ridley calls the meeting and mating of ideas. The framework of InnoCentive is quite simple: “seekers” go to the website to post their problems for “solvers.” Problems range from the “Recovery of Bacillus Spore from Swabs,” to “Blueprints for a Medical Transportation Device for Combat Rescue,” and multi-billion dollar companies like General Electric and Procter and Gamble often post them with cash prizes up to $1 million.

The amazing part is that it’s working. A study (pdf) by researchers at Harvard Business School found that about 33 percent of problems posted on InnoCentive were solved on time. Why does InnoCentive work? The same reason that successful Broadway plays do and CMB was discovered: intellectual diversity. If an organic chemistry problem only attracted organic chemists it tended to be troublesome. However, if a biologist got involved with that same problem then the chances were greater that the problem was solved. The implications of this should make you think: solvers were at their best when they were at the margins of their fields of expertise.

Maybe it sounds obvious to suggest that a proper mixture of minds is important for accomplishing tasks, but remember the lesson from Uzzi’s and Spiro’s cocktail party study: it’s really hard to not surround yourself with people like you. Don’t hang out with too many opposites though, we don’t want another Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark.

Ever since Darwin published Origins, Nietzsche declared the death of God and Hitchens argued that religion poisons everything, atheists have struggled with atheism. Some deny the supernatural but are “spiritual;” some deny the historical credibility of the scripture, Torah or Quran but value their principles; some don’t believe in anything that cannot be explained by science yet maintain that humans possess an intangible essence or that there is an afterlife. I’ve even met folks who call themselves “atheists who believe in God.”

It’s easy to understanding said beliefs as inconsistent or incompatible; how can someone both believe and not believe in God? Be scientific and religious? This attitude ignores a truth that doesn’t get said enough: atheism is diverse.

The repetitive and attention grabbing debates between fundamentalists and non-believers are one reason this is forgotten. It’s easy to assume that only two opinions exist when searching “atheism” on YouTube or Google returns talks and articles from only William Lane Craig or Christopher Hitchens.

But most atheists know that the worldview of the fundamentalist and staunch non-believer inaccurately portray religious belief as black and white. These more mainstream atheists know that there is a fairly large middle ground where religion and atheism can exist simultaneously to promote human flourishing. Religious people can believe in natural selection and be pro-choice even though many texts suggest otherwise while atheists have no problem being moral and giving to charity even though they never went to Sunday school.

When it comes to scientific claims, Hitchens and Dawkins are right: the world wasn’t created in a few days; natural selection is an observable phenomenon; God probably doesn’t exist; one can be moral without religion. But when it comes to how we ought to behave and what we ought to value the great religious texts got a few things correct. The problem is that hardcore atheists don’t let the mainstream cherry pick the good parts of religion without criticizing them for being inconsistent or intellectually lazy. We have to allow atheism to incorporate those religious practices and principles that we know contribute to human flourishing.

My conviction is not only a reminder that atheism is more diverse than some make it out to be, but also that atheism can be improved if it considers the right religious themes.

In a recent TED lecture Alain de Botton assumes a similar position. He explains:

I am interested in a kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines… I can’t believe in any of this stuff. I can’t believe in the doctrines… but – and this is a very important but – I love Christmas carols! I really like the art of Mantegna, I really like looking at old churches and I really like learning the pages of the Old Testament. Whatever it may be you know the kind of thing I am talking about: people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic communal side of religion but can’t bear the doctrine. Until now these people have faced an unpleasant choice: either accept the doctrine and have all the nice stuff or reject the doctrine and live in a spiritual wasteland…  I don’t think we have to make that choice… there’s nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. To me atheism 2.0 is about a respectful and impious way going through religions and saying what could we use. The secular world is full of holes… a thorough study of religion can give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well.

The good news is, I think, most people agree. The problem is that they don’t get the coverage.

At the risk of stating the obvious, let’s remember that knowing how to live the best possible life requires both humanistic ideals as well as ideals from many of the great religions. As Jonathan Haidt concludes his enjoyable book The Happiness Hypothesis, “by drawing on wisdom that is balanced – ancient and new, Eastern and Western, even liberal and conservative – we can choose directions in life that will lead to satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of meaning.”

I am pleased to announce that I will be a regular columnist at The Creativity Post, a website dedicated to “quality content on creativity, innovation and imagination.” It was founded by Milena Z. Fisher, Elliot Samuel Paul (Barnard) and Scott Barry Kaufman (NYU). All three have a Ph.D in either psychology or philosophy, so the content is pretty awesome. They seem like great people also.

I will still write and maintain Why We Reason regularly. But when I post there, I will put a link here. My first post at TCP went up yesterday. Frequent readers might recognize it. Here is the gist:

People care about origins. A lot. The difference between a baseball used to break a record and an ordinary baseball is millions, an authentic painting and a forgery tens of millions. And your original stuffed animal versus a replacement, well, that’s priceless.

This is why Todd McFarlane paid 3 million dollars for Mark McGwire’s home run ball, why Han van Meegeren’s forgery of Vermeer’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery hangs in a small gallery in Greenwich Connecticut and why two year-olds erupt into tantrums when mom tries convincing them that their new snuffed animal is same as their old one.

Continue reading here

For a long time people thought that the self was unified and eternal. It’s easy to see why. We feel like we have an essence; we grow old, gain and lose friends, and change preferences but we are the same person from day one.

The idea of the unified self has had a rough few centuries however. During the English Enlightenment Hume and Locke challenged the platonic idea of human nature being derived from an essence; in the 19^th century Freud declared that the ego “was not even the master of his own house;” and after decades of revealing empirical research neuroscience has yet to reveal anything that scientists would call unified. As clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks says, “We have this deep intuition that there is a core… But neuroscience shows that there is no center in that brain where things do all come together.”

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of unified self comes from Michael Gazzaniga, who showed that each hemisphere of the brain exercises free will independently when surgeons cut the corpus callosum. Gazzaniga discovered this with a simple experiment. When he flashed the word “WALK” in the right hemisphere of split-brain patients they walked out of the room. But when he asked them why they walked out all responded with a trivial remark such as, “To go to the bathroom” or “To get a Coke.” Here’s where things got weird. When he flashed a chicken in patients’ left hemisphere (in the right visual field) and a wintry scene in their right hemisphere (in the left visual field), and asked them to select a picture that goes with what they saw, he found that their left hand correctly pointed to a snow shovel and their right hand correctly pointed to a chicken. However, when the patients were asked to explain why they pointed at the pictures they responded with something like, “That’s easy. The shovel is for cleaning up the chicken.”

Nietszche was right: “We are necessarily strangers to ourselves…we are not ‘men of knowledge’ with respect to ourselves.”

But you don’t have to have a severed corpus callosum or a deep understanding of Genealogy of Morals (which I don’t) to appreciate how modular ourselves are. Our everyday inner-monologues are telling enough. We weigh the pros and cons between fatty meats and nutritious vegetables even though we know which is healthier. When we have the chance to procrastinate we usually take it and rationalize it as a good decision. We cheat, lie, are lazy and eat Big Macs knowing full well how harmful doing these things are. When it comes to what we think about, what we like and what we do Walt Whitman captured our natural hypocrisies and inconsistencies with this famous and keenly insightful remark: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

That the unified self is largely an illusion is not necessarily a bad thing. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Dennett suggests that it is a convenient fiction. I think he’s right. With it we are able to maintain stories and narratives that help us make sense of the world and our place in it. This is a popular conviction nowadays. As prominent evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker explains in one of his bestsellers, “each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce.” In fact, without the illusion of selfhood we all might suffer the same fate as Phineas Cage who was, as anyone who has taken an introductory to psychology course might remember, “no longer Cage” after a tragic railroad accident turned his ventromedial prefrontal cortex into a jumbled stew of disconnected neurons.

However, according to the British philosopher Julian Baggini in a recent TED lecture the illusion of the self might not be an illusion. The question Baggini asks is if a person should think of himself as a thing that has a bunch of different experiences or as a collection of experiences. This is an important distinction. Baggini explains that, “the fact that we are a very complex collection of things does not mean we are not real.” He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.

Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”

Shakespeare opened Hamlet with the huge and beautifully complex query, “Who’s There.” Four hundred years later Baggini has an answer, but many of us are still scratching our heads.

Volpe BT, Ledoux JE, & Gazzaniga MS (1979). Information processing of visual stimuli in an “extinguished” field. Nature, 282 (5740), 722-4 PMID: 514351