Tag Archives: Psychology

I’m OK, But I’ve Got My Doubts About You

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“Sapient” means “wise or knowing”. That’s why Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, called our species “Homo sapiens“. In fact, we’re all members of the sub-species “Homo sapiens sapiens“. We must be really smart (given the competition).

On a less optimistic note, however, studies show that our species suffers from various cognitive impairments. For example, there is “motivated reasoning”: our emotions often affect the conclusions we reach. The existence of the “backfire effect” is especially counter-intuitive: when our deepest beliefs are confronted by contrary evidence, our deepest beliefs can become even stronger. It’s a cognitive defense mechanism frequently on display at family gatherings and in the House of Representatives.

Once we accept the widespread irrationality of Homo sapiens sapiens, it’s much easier to understand why certain politicians say such crazy things. They aren’t necessarily lying. Too often, they actually believe what they’re saying.

Yesterday, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the agreement to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling: “Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people”. The Senator may really believe that most of America was enjoying the shutdown and looking forward to the government running out of money. Public opinion polls indicating that most of us weren’t happy about it at all must be non-existent or seriously flawed.

Somehow it’s comforting to know that our political opponents aren’t lying bastards. They’re merely irrational, like so many of our species.

Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that all of us are equally irrational. Some people are more in need of cognitive defense mechanisms because they feel more threatened by what’s going on in the world. If you strongly prefer how things were back in the 19th century, when we didn’t have things like an income tax or child labor laws, you’ll have a lot of mental defending to do. Having that black guy in the White House clearly bothers a lot of people, who conclude that he must be the Antichrist or at least working for Al Qaeda. The Affordable Care Act scares the hell out of some people who think the government is becoming too powerful, so they hold on to the idea that death panels will soon be deciding who should live or die.

Of course, you might point out that many of us feel threatened by the radical Republicans among us. So maybe we are being irrational about them?

That’s possible, but it’s not what the evidence shows. Those people really are crazy! It’s just that their behavior is more common than some of us (the optimists among us?) would like to think.

For more on the backfire effect and whether journalists can do anything about it, here’s an article in the Columbia Journalism Review:

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_backfire_effect.php?page=all

Would You Forget About It, If You Could? (Part 2)

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Last week, I wrote about some scientists who have erased memories by injecting a drug into the brains of rats (our memory appears to work the same way as rat memory, but nobody is currently injecting propranolol into human test subjects). 

Now some other scientists have reported the ability to create memories in rats by injecting a certain kind of virus into their brains. The virus affects the creation of a protein that underlies the storage of memories. In this case, the rats were made to remember a certain environment as being painful, even though they had never experienced pain in that environment. 

Erasing real memories. Creating false ones. We’re a long way from our memories being manipulated like a character in a Philip K. Dick story (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”). But what’s a nice rat to think about its memories these days? Did I have that excellent cheese yesterday or not?

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/07/26/3811591.htm

Would You Forget About It, If You Could?

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Everyone has some bad memories. Would you erase a bad memory if you could?

That’s the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a wonderful movie from 2004 in which Jim Carrey (playing a serious role) and Kate Winslet use a new technology to erase their memories of each other. As you might expect, things don’t go as planned.

The idea that we might get rid of painful memories raises some interesting questions. Is it right to erase what is part of ourselves, something that contributes to making us who we are? Don’t bad memories help us avoid making the same old mistakes again? Does having painful memories help us appreciate our happy memories and the good things that happen to us?

We might have to consider such questions in the relatively near future. Scientists aren’t yet ready to erase our memories, but some of them are working on a way to make bad memories less painful. It isn’t clear from the article below whether the details of a memory can be changed, or whether it’s the emotion associated with a memory that can be changed. What is clear is that ingesting a certain drug (propranolol) within a window of time after a memory is formed or after it’s recalled can change the memory’s emotional impact. In theory, a traumatic memory can become relatively benign. 

The premise of the article is that this method will work because it takes a certain amount of time for a memory to be “consolidated” (added to our long-term memory), and each time we recall a memory, it is “reconstituted” (reconstructed from some underlying arrangement of the stuff in our brains). If the drug is administered at the right time, the process of consolidation or reconstitution can be modified.

Perhaps it’s a sign of having a “half-empty” personality, but I’d be more than willing to remove a few bad memories or make some of them less powerful. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between getting rid of a bad memory and avoiding a bad situation that you will later remember.

In fact, one of the benefits of being dead (there aren’t a lot, but there are at least a couple) is that you don’t have to remember how you screwed up that time or what that so and so did to you. Even if there’s an afterlife (don’t count on it), you won’t have to remember all the bad stuff unless you’re in hell — or heaven isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515981/repairing-bad-memories/

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media by Elaine Showalter

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Published in 1997, this interesting account of hysterical epidemics feels a little out of date, since it describes the most popular versions of hysteria as of 15 years ago: chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memories, Gulf War syndrome, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction. Maybe 9/11, war and economic distress have given people other things to focus on since the relative calm of the mid-nineties.

The book begins with a scholarly discussion of the origins of hysteria as a medical diagnosis in the 19th century. Patients, mostly women, exhibited strange behavior or physical symptoms for no apparent reason. Showalter convincingly argues that early forms of hysteria have been replaced by “hystories” or epidemics of hysteria. In remarkably similar patterns, people who have been subjected to stress or have unmet psychological needs develop symptoms. They seek treatment from particular doctors and therapists who, for their own reasons, collaborate in assigning mysterious or bizarre causes to these symptoms. Journalists and scriptwriters help spread the news. Evidence is lacking, but paranoia feeds mass hysteria. 

Showalter doesn’t discount the real suffering involved. She just thinks that we should pay more attention to scientific evidence and accept the fact that psychological causes can have very real, sometimes incredible, physical effects.  (8/9/11)