March, 2010

Interesting article on spiritual maturity versus emotional maturity out of the University of Haifa.  I tried to track down the actual research but could not find it.  The general implication is people can be spiritually mature without being emotionally mature.

I find this discussion fascinating since I am very curious about maturity on the whole.  What do we really mean by human development?  Can someone seem to be mature and at the same time be immature in some ways. Intuitively I would say this is absolutely true.  I think there is also strong evidence for this in communities of spiritual practice where some practitioners reach very high levels of spiritual maturity in a tradition, but tend to act out in all sorts of ways usually involving sex, power or money.

An interesting take on this was offered in the New York times article from last year about a severely depressed Zen Monk.

I want to make a distinction that I am not talking about ethics, but rather about maturity.   I think some people can be extremely mature, considerate, thoughtful and developed in the way they see the world and consider others – while acting from very impulsive, unregulated places in other parts of their lives.

Good summary post, with many nice links from Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry on the effectiveness of anti-depressants.  The news is that antidepressants are not that much more effective than Placebo according to a recent review of the literature.  Here is the summary of the data:

Mild to moderate depression: Effect size of d = .11, which is tiny (and was not statistically significant)

Severe depression: Effect size of d = .17, which is pretty darn small (and not statistically significant)

Very severe depression: Effect size of d = .47, which is moderate.

When you take these results along the research showing that exercise and placebo are both just about as good at treating depression, without some of those pesky sexual side-effects, it makes you wonder why we anti-depressants are the most widely prescribed drug in the the united states.  Or why doctor’s prescribe them for nearly all patients seeking help with depression?

Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact antidepressants sales account for nearly over $10,000,000,000 dollars a year?  Or the fact that drug companies spend over a $100,000,000 dollars a year marketing directly to consumers.

Good post from Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex about Obama’s use of personal narrative in the health care debate.

I think research is compelling that we have an easier time dealing with moral issues on a personal level than on a mass level. I don’t think this horrible story of a woman losing her coverage, due to our poorly functioning health care system will will help the cause much though.

My sense is there is equally compelling evidence that once people have made a moral decision, they are very good at giving post-hoc rationalizations for their moral intuitions.

Where does that leave us?  Forty percent of our country thinks that the story Natoma Canfield is proof that our system is immoral and forty percent think that the story of Natoma Canfield is proof that Obama is immoral for playing on our fears. Twenty percent of the country is probably watching Jersey Shore and feeling superior to both the people on the show and the 80% of the country arguing about health care.

Personally the whole situation leaves me incredibly sad and frustrated.  I believe we need a more rational political system, one that allows us to come to common sense decisions and act on our shared values. Instead we are making constantly more craven emotional appeals, ranging from Sarah Palin’s bizarre death panel diatribe (in my mind one of the low moments of American political life in the past 2 years) and Obama’s attempt to humiliate the executives of the insurance companies.

While I agree passionately with the need for health care reform. I neither liked the Obama’s speech today nor thought it was effective. Sadly I think our politics demands this type of emotional circus. I for one hope that we can demand better of our politics.

When I teach students about the brain, I always start with some visual illusions. One of the reasons for this is how counter-intuitive some of them are.  After viewing a couple, it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that we see with our brain not just with our eyes.

That’s why I love this study about how vision affects cognition.  The study takes a bunch of snooty, very well trained wine tasters. These guys are paid to write long poetic reviews about the way a wine smells.  As WinePro.org tells us

The nose can sometimes even beat the eyes in the race for setting up the tasting expectations. An aroma can carry from one room to another, beyond the line of sight. Of the five senses, smell is the most acute, approximately 1,000 times more sensitive than the sense of taste. As a result, what is termed flavor is influenced by roughly 75% smell (olfaction) and 25% taste (gustation) in healthy individuals.

To sum up: the nose knows.  Now, apparently there is a very specialized vocabulary regarding the smells (aromas? ) of wine.  The smell of red wines and white wines are often described in different languages.  In fact if you want to sound snooty when describing your wine you can even order a wine aroma wheel and use it to construct sentences like “”Intense aromas of ginger, citrus, candied berry and multigrain bread turn to honey, roasted almonds and graphite on the palate.”  To sum up, the nose of a wine taster, knows more then your nose.

So what happens when researchers used am oderless, tasteless liquid to change the color of white wine red?

It turns out that the experts use the red-wine language to describe the fake red-wine.  All those years of gently quaffing their glasses, inhaling deeply and donning mysterious looks of profound insight, meant little in the face of a couple drops of food coloring.  The information from the eyes, in this case, simply overruled the information from the nose.

It’s just another subtle but fun case of the brain adjudicating reality for us.