I float! :>))
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2012 9:02 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of both networks Ray, glad to see you came through the storm ok and are back online! Barry On Nov 1, 2012, at 1:47 AM, Ray Harrell wrote: http://www1.georgetown.edu/departments/justice_peace/research/theses/theses2 005/nagle_mary.pdf This is from my hometown. Many of the trials Mary faced were the same for me and my friends including the allergies, the inability to manipulate symbols in memory and of course the cancer caused by heavy metal pollution. People who never smoked have squamus cell carcinoma of the lungs. Squamus cell is caused by sunlight but the sun don't shine in the lungs or where I had my cancer. The Doctors and scientists in this little play, taught me to mistrust them when I was young in the Tri-state area. That was a good lesson considering the health issues missed completely by most of my "regular" doctors. On the other hand the people who found my health problems were immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa. I owe them my life, vision, breath and heart. Now, I think what these neurologists are calling "empathy" is a little too simple for the tool that actors use with great skill and that traditional healers call the entrance into the Dark world. These scientists seem unsure of what exactly they are calling empathy. I would also suggest that students are not the ideal selection for knowing what the human learning process is capable of. Can you imagine making judgments about the potential for concert pianists drawn from six year olds with undeveloped hands? There is a big lack of knowledge and information and most of all the researchers seem afraid of bad judgment. That fear makes them all touchy/feely around the word empathy. That is not true empathy based in reflective action and genuine knowledge but just stage fright. Medical science is still poor at their defining of the mechanisms of empathy and they are positively primal when they try to define the system of emotions. They don't even define the different between emotion and the Interoceptive processes. English has a problem with "feeling." On the other hand a person who has inadequate information about the long term effects of a given situation often falls back on what he/she calls logic, but I call idiocy and Ruskin called stupid self interest. (The paper I sent by Ruskin last week adequately explained what I mean.) But our's is an age of self stimulation and inadequate dialogue. A time when "tweets" are considered great truths and pulp newspapers are the closest we have to philosophy. It's a bad time to be practicing the science that makes the extraordinary ordinary. But that is the root of the word virtuosity. The prior to science that makes science a possibility. Without virtuosity taught to Galileo Galilei by his father Vencenzo and the great scholars of the Florentine Camerata di Bardi, science would have never had Galilei. Science as predictability and generic process is forgotten and the Domain of science is turned into a mechanistic universe that is inadequate at best and terminal under most circumstances. In other words it's just bad systems thinking and resembles nothing more deep than office politics. It's so political and subjective that the whole concept of Formal Knowledge is tossed on the garbage heap with the Artist. Consider how science is letting politics run its world in the areas of space, weather satellites, stem cells and evolution. Scientists and Economists have destroyed the brand to the point that Italians are jailing scientists and America doesn't know what to think as the climate goes to hell. The graduate students that I teach come to school with no concept whatsoever of the role of organizational domains in the individual, in society or in the organizational groups like churches and synagogues where they will work. They have been so convinced, by bad preachers and arrogant physicists, that the function of art and religion is nothing more than superstition. Their books are simple minded and ignorant. Even as a high school student reading "Why I'm not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell I found his arguments silly and shallow. Now let me say that I like Lord Russell, especially when he stood up to the world and pointed out the U.S. and Russia had a much greater capacity for Evil than Hitler because Hitler didn't have the potential to destroy the whole world and we did. But his religious discussion was flawed and his understanding of the purpose of the God function was evangelical fundamentalism and is the same for Richard Dawkins. We've seen such scientists effects on American Culture and religion. Now they have ruined us they are turning on themselves just as Hitler turned on the German Jews with simpleminded lies. The great existential Theologians like Paul Tillich and Martin Buber are much more in tune with the current exploration of God as a choice of what one finds fundamental to their lives rather than arguing about what one is incapable of knowing or proving. Tillich called it "Ultimate Concern." Period, end of discussion. Dawkins has an Ultimate Concern as did Russell and that is the "God" they chose for their lives, end of story. As for Neurology. Its time is now but it has, like anthropology, a checkered history. In the past it has been much more supportive of conservative ideas that developmental. When I took my neuro-anatomy course thirty years ago they really didn't know much more than we did about the floor of the ocean. Now, a whole group of sciences is making it more available, testable and even the political conservatives who don't want to be the idiots of history, have embraced the Arts now as the Foundations of perception and technical processes. But for years the Arts have been butchered by the neurologists who spoke of "correlation" between intelligence and the arts. Oops now they call it "foundational" to the development of intelligence and all of the failed artists for want of food, clothing and shelter are on the garbage heap of history. The official story is that these heroes were really people addicted to playing with entertainment when the scientists have a very poor definition of what they call entertainment. Now what is more sensible as in sens-able then the sensorium being essential to intelligence? How could they not have known it when Ruskin fought with J.S. Mill and was correct although the world followed Mill. How could they not know that technical systems that develop the Sensorium, i.e. Art, are priors to all of the tools that evolve in the human mind? Can you imagine a preacher, banker, teacher, politician, scientist or doctor being such with no perceptivity? If the instrument is poor the system is ill equipped to do the work. Even the broken instrument of Steven Hawking has some very highly developed senses by which to gather and compare information. Without them he would be as would we all, simple blank slates. Sometimes a venturi effect can squeeze something so tight that reality enters another realm but if there is simply no hole for any information to slip through and be processed then there is no life as we know it for intelligence to flower. REH From: Steve Kurtz [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 7:30 PM Subject: Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of both networks This is very significant in my opinion. Steve <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm> Empathy Represses Analytic Thought, and Vice Versa: Brain Physiology Limits Simultaneous Use of Both Networks Science Daily Increasingly we know how the mind operates. Yet we do not integrate this knowledge when developing social policies. Ideology and theology are more important. The research is published in the current online issue of NeuroImage. Sources: Case Western Reserve University (2012, October 30). Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of both networks. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 30, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com- /releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm Anthony I. Jack, Abigail Dawson, Katelyn Begany, Regina L. Leckie, Kevin Barry, Angela Ciccia, Abraham Snyder. fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. NeuroImage, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061 New research shows a simple reason why even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler's story -- one that upon a second look offers clues it was false. When the brain fires up the network of neurons that allows us to empathize, it suppresses the network used for analysis, a pivotal study led by a Case Western Reserve University researcher shows. How could a CEO be so blind to the public relations fiasco his cost-cutting decision has made? When the analytic network is engaged, our ability to appreciate the human cost of our action is repressed. At rest, our brains cycle between the social and analytical networks. But when presented with a task, healthy adults engage the appropriate neural pathway, the researchers found. The study shows for the first time that we have a built-in neural constraint on our ability to be both empathetic and analytic at the same time The work suggests that established theories about two competing networks within the brain must be revised. More, it provides insights into the operation of a healthy mind versus those of the mentally ill or developmentally disabled. "This is the cognitive structure we've evolved," said Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve and lead author of the new study. "Empathetic and analytic thinking are, at least to some extent, mutually exclusive in the brain." A number of earlier studies showed that two large scale brain networks are in tension in the brain, one which is known as the default mode network and a second known as the task positive network. But other researchers have suggested that different mechanisms drive this tension: One theory says that we have one network for engaging in goal directed tasks. This theory posits that our second network allows the mind to wander. The other theory says that one network is for external attention, and the second network is for internal attention. The new study shows that adults presented with social or analytical problems -- all external stimuli -- consistently engaged the appropriate neural pathway to solve the problem, while repressing the other pathway. The see-sawing brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Jack worked with former Case Western Reserve undergraduates Abigail Dawson, now a graduate student at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand; Katelyn Begany, now a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley; and Kevin P. Barry, now a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Other co-authors are, from Case Western Reserve: former research assistant, Regina L. Leckie and Angela H. Ciccia, an assistant professor of psychological sciences; and Abraham Z. Snyder, MD, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Jack said that a philosophical question inspired the study design: "The most persistent question in the philosophy of mind is the problem of consciousness. Why can we describe the workings of a brain, but that doesn't tell us what it's like to be that person?" "The disconnect between experiential understanding and scientific understanding is known as the explanatory gap," Jack said. "In 2006, the philosopher Philip Robbins and I got together and we came up with a pretty crazy, bold hypothesis: that the explanatory gap is driven by our neural structure. I was genuinely surprised to see how powerfully these findings fit that theory." Philip Robbins is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri. These findings suggest the same neural phenomenon drives the explanatory gap as occurs when we look at a visual illusion such as the duck-rabbit, he continued. The drawing of the head of the animal can be seen as a duck facing one direction or a rabbit facing the other, but you can't see both at once. "That is called perceptual rivalry, and it occurs because of neural inhibition between the two representations," Jack said. "What we see in this study is similar, but much more wide-scale. We see neural inhibition between the entire brain network we use to socially, emotionally and morally engage with others, and the entire network we use for scientific, mathematical and logical reasoning. "This shows scientific accounts really do leave something out -- the human touch. A major challenge for the science of the mind is how we can better translate between the cold and distant mechanical descriptions that neuroscience produces, and the emotionally engaged intuitive understanding which allows us to relate to one another as people." The researchers recruited 45 healthy college students, and asked each to take five 10-minute turns inside a magnetic resonance imager. Meanwhile, the researchers randomly presented them with 20 written and 20 video problems that required them to think about how others might feel and with 20 written and 20 video problems that required physics to solve. After reading the text or viewing the video, the students had to provide an answer to a yes-no question within seven seconds. Each student's session in the MRI included twenty 27-second rest periods, as well as variable delays between trials lasting 1, 3 or 5 seconds. Students were told to look at a red cross on the screen in front of them and relax during the rests. The MRI images showed that social problems deactivated brain regions associated with analysis, and activated the social network. This finding held true whether the questions came via video or print. Meanwhile, the physics questions deactivated the brain regions associated with empathizing and activated the analytical network. "When subjects are lying in a scanner with nothing to do, which we call the resting state, they naturally cycle between the two networks," Jack said. "This tells us that it's the structure of the adult brain that is driving this, that it's a physiological constraint on cognition." The finding has bearings on a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, from anxiety, depression and ADHD to schizophrenia -- all of which are characterized by social dysfunction of some sort, Jack said. "Treatment needs to target a balance between these two networks. At present most rehabilitation, and more broadly most educational efforts of any sort, focus on tuning up the analytic network. Yet, we found more cortex dedicated to the social network." Perhaps most clearly, the theory makes sense in regards to developmental disabilities such as autism and Williams syndrome. Autism is often characterized by a strong ability to solve visuospatial problems, such as mentally manipulating two and three-dimensional figures, but poor social skills. People with Williams syndrome are very warm and friendly, but perform poorly on visuospatial tests. But, even healthy adults can rely too much on one network, Jack said. A look at newspaper business pages offers some examples. "You want the CEO of a company to be highly analytical in order to run a company efficiently, otherwise it will go out of business," he said. "But, you can lose your moral compass if you get stuck in an analytic way of thinking." "You'll never get by without both networks," Jack continued. "You don't want to favor one, but cycle efficiently between them, and employ the right network at the right time." The researchers continue to test the theory, studying whether brains will shift from the social network to the analytical when students in the MRI see people depicted in a dehumanizing way, that is, as animals or objects. The group is also studying whether disgust and social stereotyping confound our moral compass by recruiting the analytical network and depressing social network activity. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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