'Bout time somebody sorted this out

Oxford to Study Faith in God:

University of Oxford researchers will spend nearly $4 million to study why mankind embraces God. The grant to the Ian Ramsey Center [sic] for Science and Religion will bring anthropologists, theologians, philosophers and other academics together for three years to study whether belief in a divine being is a basic part of mankind's makeup.

Here is a summary of the project from the Ramsey Centre. In addition to the areas listed above, there will also be a psychologist on the team, but how come there are no neuroscientists? Evolutionary biologists? It seems like these fields would be kind of relevant.

Democracy (what is it good for):

Tyler Cowen says:

The lesson is this: democracy is a very blunt instrument. Especially as it is found in the United States, democracy just isn't that smart or that finely honed or that closely geared toward truth or "progressive" values. (NB: Democracy in smaller, better educated, ethnically homogeneous nations is, sometimes, another story.)

But unlike one of my esteemed colleagues, I believe that we should revere democracy as one of the modern world's greatest achievements. [...] The future is far more likely to have "too little democracy" than "too much democracy." I do believe in checks and balances, but within a broadly democratic framework, such as we have in the United States.

That all said, we should not demand from democracy what democracy cannot provide. Democracy is pretty good at pushing scoundrels out of office, or checking them once they are in office. Democracy is also good at making sure enough interest groups are bought off so that social order may continue and that a broad if sometimes inane social consensus can be manufactured and maintained.

On the one hand, this means that, insofar as it can be considered to be at all goal- oriented (goals being things like fairness, high standard of living, etc.) democracy seems to function in a biased random-walk style, with each movement being more-or-less arbitrary and only corrected if a major error results. On the other hand, biased random-walk has turned out to be implicated in several neurological models for how we learn (here are more technical and less technical descriptions of some neuro models incorporating random-walk) as well as explaining how bacteria are able to locate food without a brain or sensory organs. So I'm inclined to find this similarity encouraging, since I think social processes are at their best when they replicate the interesting processes that have already evolved to solve astoundingly complex problems.

"My God, man. Drilling holes in his head isn't the answer!"

Neurophilosophy has a short post summarizing the US history of the 'ice-pick lobotomy,' occasioned by a new PBS documentary on the subject. This was in the 1930's and 1940's, mostly; the doctor who pioneered the 'treatment' drove around the country teaching others the finer points of the technique. Evidently this became popular for use in managing 'troublesome' children, bearing some similarities to our massive over-medicating of kids with Ritalin starting in the 1990's.

A great sentence:

"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."

From a very fascinating article about recent research showing that physical motion is intimately tied in with cognition at all levels (via MR). What impressed me most about this piece, aside from the research, is that it contains several paragraphs summarizing the history of mind-body theory, Descartes up through modern cognitive science.

George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is the most enjoyable and fun non-technical linguistic text I've read (a small sample).

It's, like, the circle of life or something.

From Neurophilosophy:

The spores of the fungus attach themselves to the external surface of the ant, where they germinate. They then enter the ant's body through the tracheae (the tubes through which insects breathe), via holes in the exoskeleton called spiracles. Fine fungal filaments called mycelia then start to grow inside the ant's body cavity, absorbing the host's soft tissues but avoiding its vital organs.

When the fungus is ready to sporulate, the mycelia grow into the ant's brain. The fungus then produces chemicals which act on the host's brain and alter its perception of pheromones. This causes the ant to climb a plant and, upon reaching the top, to clamp its mandibles around a leaf or leaf stem, thus securing it firmly to what will be its final resting place.

The fungus then devours the ant's brain, killing the host. The fruiting bodies of the fungus sprout from the ant's head, through gaps in the joints of the exoskeleton. Once mature, the fruiting bodies burst, releasing clusters of capsules into the air. These in turn explode on their descent, spreading airborne spores over the surrounding area. These spores then infect other ants, completing the life cycle of the fungus.

The original post has video of this. This fungus, and many other varieties of bug-killing parasites, are used as environmentally-friendly pest control. (The other brainwashing parasite mentioned in the post: the gordian worm, which as a juvenile takes up residence inside a grasshopper or beetle, then induces the insect to drown itself so that the adult worm can emerge and reproduce.)

I think I found this post especially vivid because I just finished reading the Worlds trilogy (Joe Haldeman), in which humans colonizing a new planet are terrorized by the Eveloi, a parasitic species that directs its hosts' actions by means of a tiny filament accessing the brain through a hole in the skull. (An interesting thing I noticed about the Worlds books -- there are references throughout, in character and place names, to giants of sci-fi/futurism like Asimov, Heinlein, and some others that seemed familiar but I couldn't place.)

Friday time-suck: tell me what you see.

Check out this incredibly cool blog post over at Neurophilosophy on how the brain interprets 'ambiguous' images -- images that are capable of more than one interpretation, and therefore cause the brain to flip-flop back and forth, perceptually. I could include here the mind-bending sample image, but wouldn't want to deprive you of the opportunity to read the whole thing.

Update: I just saw Voltaire in the Dali painting -- whoa!

Hypothesis: The Smell of Enlightenment?

Having just returned from a weekend trip to Nebraska, I'm behind on my thinking and therefore my blogging. Most posts to come, but in the meantime I offer you "the world's first spiritual perfume" (via Feministing). According to the press release, Virtue has a frankincense/myrrh base and culminates in an apricot top note (biblical scholars have apparently determined that apricots, not apples, are the 'forbidden fruit' mentioned in Genesis).

All well and good, but on a philosophical note: one of the fragrance's designers notes that “almost every religion and spiritual system worldwide acknowledges that many individuals of high spiritual attainment give off a fragrance attributed to their virtue.” This is interesting. If fear has a smell (as cops and animal trainers both claim), then is it possible that 'enlightenment' does too? Hear me out: fear is a specific physiological and mental state tied to specific neurological and hormonal changes; this is what creates the odor of fear (spent adrenalin, to be exact). Deep meditation has also been tied to specific physical, hormonal and neurochemical changes -- could these changes also generate an odor? I think probably not, but enjoyable to contemplate anyway.

Woolgathering: Are You Normal?

Via TierneyWeb I see a pointer to this survey from Columbia University psychologist Malia Mason, who is trying to find out if daydreaming tendencies can tell us anything useful about background cortical functions. The upshot is, if you answer 12 questions about your daydreams, you can see how you compare to the "average" daydreamer. (According to the stats at the end of the survey, I spend more time than the average individual in mental wandering, but less time thinking about practical matters or other people.)

Questions I have about daydreaming:

-Does the ability to daydream decrease with age? I remember spending much more time lost in thought as a kid, and find that it's harder to achieve this state now.

-Does daydreaming serve as important a cognitive function as actual, REM dreaming? (I imagine this is part of Dr. Mason's project.)

-Is daydreaming as useful as traditional meditation for reducing stress and bringing mental clarity? Both activities induce alpha brain waves, which are associated with relaxation and rest, as well as theta waves, which are linked with inspiration and creativity (and can also be induced by monotonous driving).