Psychology
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On watchful gods, trust, and how academic scientists undermined their own credibility.
Despite my disagreements with a lot of its details, I thoroughly enjoyed Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods. The book posits an explanation for the current global dominance of the big three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Instead of the “quirks of history & dumb luck” explanation offered in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Norenzayan suggests…
Abrahamic faiths, Abrahamic religions, animal cognition, Ara Norenzayan, atheism, Automaticity of Social Behavior, Bargh, Big Gods, climate change, credibility, Daniel Dennett, experimental psychology, false positive, False-Positive Psychology, Freedom Evolves, Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, John Bargh, Joseph Simmons, Jurgen Osterhammel, Kanesh, Leonard Wantchekon, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Nathan Nunn, priming, religion, replication, scientific method, scientific publishing, social psychology, statistical significance, statistically significant, survivor bias, The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa, The Transformation of the World, trust, truth, unethical research
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On Mat Johnson’s Loving Day and wanting to fit in.
My condolences to those who feel as though it’s their heritage never to fit in. Growing up, I didn’t fit either. But I had no expectation of fitting in. I was an outlier by virtue of who I was, not who my parents were. And presumably I could’ve learned to talk differently, to act differently,…
ancestry, brain imaging, brains, Caitlyn Jenner, choosing our identity, contemporary literary fiction, Danzy Senna, differences between male and female brains, differences between men’s and women’s brains, Elinor Burkett, feminism, feminist, Gina Rippon, identity politics, Loving Day, Mat Johnson, mixed-race, multicultural, nail polish, race, review of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, rudely claiming that all black art is “urban”, The Mulatto Millennium, The Sympathizer, tribes, urban, urban fiction, urban graphic novels, Viet Nguyen, what does it mean to be black, What Makes a Woman, what should a black man look like, who is black
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On mental architecture and octopus literature.
I might spend too much time thinking about how brains work. Less than some people, sure — everybody working on digital replication of human thought must devote more energy than I do to the topic, and they’re doing it in a more rigorous way — but for a dude with no professional connection to cognitive…
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On depictions of (non)violence for the cause of justice.
Graphic novelist Nate Powell, alongside his March co-authors John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, will be speaking in Bloomington next month. I’m excited about the talk. I first learned about Powell’s work by reading The Silence of Our Friends about the civil rights movement in Texas. That book was especially meaningful for me because I’m generally non-confrontational, preferring…
Andrew Aydin, armed rebellion, Between the World and Me, Charles Deslondes, civil rights movement, graphic novels, human violence, John Lewis, March, March book one, March graphic novel, Nat Turner, Nate Powell, nonviolence, protest, racism, racist high school history curriculum, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Silence of Our Friends, violent rebellion against slavery, when is violence justified -
On witchcraft and mass psychogenic illness.
Because she is N’s best friend’s grandmother, I recently had the pleasure of meeting the researcher who first proposed that the Salem witchcraft trials were inspired by ergot poisoning of rye crops. And that, of course, is one of the papers I read while researching mass psychogenic illness / conversion disorders / violence against women. Does…
bistable switch, Caporael, conversion disorder, dancing sickness, did drugs cause the Salem witch trials, did PTSD cause the Salem witch trials, ergot, ergot poisoning, history of women not being taken seriously by medical doctors, how to explain complicated mathematics to people without a math background, hysteria, Intoxication, Le Roy, lysergic acid, mass psychogenic illness, oppression, ordinary differential equations, pop psychology, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Ronald Siegel, Salem witch trials, self-reinforcing behavior, stress, tarantism, the tipping point, tics, witchcraft
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On growing up poor, and hamsters.
I recently read a cute article by Emily Underwood, “How to tell if your hamster is happy.” There is an easy answer, too. The hamsters in question are research animals, so the answer is, “No, they probably are not.” Of all the research animals I’ve interacted with, the only one that seemed happy was the narcoleptic…
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On memory (part three): getting rid of memories.
This is third in a series. See parts one and two. Not all memories are good, obviously. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, blurted out plenty of awkward remarks in conversations, that I’d prefer to forget. And those are harmless. They might make me flush and feel retroactively embarrassed if I think of them at night,…
Blueberry, cognitive behavioral therapy, Do No Harm, Henry Marsh, Jan Kounen, memory, memory erasure, memory replacement, PKM zeta, post-traumatic brain disorder, psychedelics in psychiatry, PTSD, Ramayana, Renegade, speculative science, thought substitution, treating mental illness with psychedelics -
On racism and the empathy gap (while sneakily building toward the idea that teaching kids to root for your favorite sports team might be kinda evil).
There is an unfortunately compelling evolutionary model to explain why humans are so predisposed to racism. The rotten treatment of presumed outsiders may well be a corollary of our genetic inducements toward altruism. Which is grimly ironic, the idea that the same evolutionary narrative could explain both the best & worst sides of human nature. In…
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On undeserved forgiveness and global warming.
I wish there were more essays focused on philosophy in Freeman Dyson’s collection Dreams of Earth and Sky. I thought all his remarks on morals and philosophy were nuanced and compelling. His essay “Rocket Man,” for instance, is very powerful. This essay discusses Wernher von Braun, a German scientist who helped develop Nazi weaponry during…
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On memory (part 2).
Read part 1 here. Midway through spring, we found ourselves in Chicago for a wedding. K was asked to be best man, and since N was (is) still breastfeeding, she and I had to tag along. I’m not a big fan of weddings, but I did sneak in a lovely conversation with the groom’s younger…
analyzing a brain to see stored memories, Anthony Zador, differences between scientific findings and press releases, memory, mind reading, neurons, neuroscience, Quiojie Xiong, recovering data from broken brain, recovering data from broken computer, recovering data from dead brain, recovering memories, recovering memories from dead brain, Selective corticostriatal plasticity during acquisition of an auditory discrimination task, synaptic strength, wedding conversations
Frank Brown Cloud 