Several years ago the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began researching that most elusive of aesthetic experiences: the “chill” that you feel in your spine listening to moving passages of music. Panksepp’s studies make a convincing case that the shiver of pleasure we experience while listening to our favorite music is the release of endogenous opioids, the same molecules implicated in social bonding, parental love, the “runner’s high” — and, of course, in narcotic drugs like heroin and morphine. Panksepp has found that animals appear to have chill responses to music as well. In one widely cited study, he played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. (The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record “The Final Cut.”)
Now imagine taking Panksepp’s experiment one step further: instead of a chicken’s brain listening to Pink Floyd, imagine peering into a brilliant composer’s brain as he or she dreams up a new composition. Thus far, most brain-imaging research has focused on normal brains and on brains that suffer from some kind of disability. But we also have the opportunity to scan brains that are unusual in the sense of being unusually gifted. What vista into the world of inspiration will this open up to us?
I don’t know firsthand what moments of true musical inspiration feel like. For me, inspiration revolves around words and sentences, and not melody and harmony. I’m not imagining myself to be a literary Stravinsky, but stringing text into narratives and arguments has been the most fluid of my mental faculties for as long as I can remember. Could brain science have something useful to say about this talent? I wanted to know what was happening in my head when a new insight arrived, usually half formed and barely grasped: a vague connection between two ideas, a new way of introducing a troublesome chapter, a phrasing for a sentence. For reasons probably both genetic and cultural, I am not much of a mystic, but these flashes of insight were the closest thing I had to the experience of mysticism. These sparks were the transcendence that Keats sought when he commanded us to “open wide the mind’s cage’d doors.” An idea shoots in front of my mind’s eye seemingly out of nowhere. Where did it come from?
How extraordinary that we can even begin to answer this question! We can only speculate where new ideas come from in the sense of their evolutionary roots, and we don’t really understand how the firing of neurons creates the rich subtleties of ideation. But we can determine, with split-second precision, the parts of the brain that are active in the creation of a new idea. We can map mental processes as ephemeral as having a hunch. On a fundamental level, we can tell where the hunch comes from. All it takes is a brave, nonclaustrophobic subject and a $2 million magnet.
I thought I was precisely that brave, nonclaustrophobic subject until they strapped my head down to the mechanical gurney, and I began sliding into a two-foot-wide tube, with only a mirror the size of a playing card supplying me with a glimpse of the outside world.
There’s no better way to say it: I was having my head examined. Mechanically speaking, the exam was being conducted by a five-ton GE Twin-Speed fMRI scanner. My guide through the world of advanced brain scanning was Joy Hirsch, director of Columbia University’s Brain Imaging Group, who had graciously offered to help me in my pursuit: to see the brain, from the inside, as it comes up with a new idea.
A week or so before my appointment with the scanner, I suggested an experimental structure to Joy: we would begin with my reading a series of nonsense sentences, followed by my reading someone else’s prose, and then I would read a passage of my own work — a passage from this book, in fact. In reading my own passage, I hoped to spur one of those imaginative leaps: something about the words would make me think of a new line to add, or a new way of phrasing the idea, or some other unpredictable insight. If all went well, the machine would take a snapshot of that idea forming in my head. fMRI scans can capture subtle shifts of activity within a three-dimensional model of the brain by measuring levels of oxygenation in the blood of nerve cells. It is not a perfect view by any means — you have to have roughly 500,000 neurons active in an area for the scan to register them — but it is as close to pure vision of the mind’s inner life as current technology allows us.
When I arrive for my session, Joy and I sit down in her office. She explains that each stage of the experiment will involve three sections of forty seconds each: rest, activity, rest. The scanner will start up, and I’ll do my best to think of nothing for forty seconds. Then the stimuli will begin — the flashing checkerboard or the text — and I’ll process that for another forty seconds. And then I’ll think of nothing again. Each 120-second stage will be repeated twice.
As Joy lays out the sequence, I start to worry that I won’t have time to actually think while in the machine; I don’t want to spend the whole forty seconds reading, particularly once we get to my own words. I want to have the words trigger some new idea or association in my head. So Joy agrees to make a last-minute addition: a final stage during which I’m shown a single sentence from my book and given the entire forty seconds to ruminate.
Then Joy walks me through the risks. “We’re looking at your brain here. So there’s a very small chance that we might see something in these scans, some abnormality.”
I nod. “You mean a brain tumor.”
“Sometimes when we do work with experimental subjects — people who come in to help with our research, and who don’t have any symptoms — they say, ‘If you see something in there, don’t tell me.’”
“Hey, if you see something in there that you don’t like,” I smile ruefully, “by all means let me know.”
Then she moves on to the dangers associated with the scanner itself. “It is a fundamentally safe procedure, noninvasive.” I think of a news story from a few years back in which hospital staff had left a metal trash can in the room with an fMRI. When they began scanning a patient, the magnetic field triggered by the scanner being switched on turned the trash can into a lethal projectile that killed the guy instantaneously.
I choose not to bring this up.
A minute or two later, we walk over to the fMRI room. The machine itself looks like an oversized clothes drier — about ten feet high with a huge GE logo embossed above the hollow tube at its center. I lie down on the mechanical gurney, and the technician gently tapes my forehead to the cradle at the end, hands me a pair of earplugs.
And then I’m in.
Being inside an fMRI machine is definitely more unpleasant than it looks to be from the outside. The space itself is astonishingly small, and the sense of being encased in a huge piece of machinery unsettles more than you think it will. For my experiment Joy and her team have placed a small mirror above my eyes that enables me to see a sliver of the world outside the tube. This sliver lets me read the text that they’ve projected onto a screen, but it also prompts a surge of nausea as I first enter the scanner.
The fMRI machine is capable of capturing two types of images: conventional MRIs that are higher resolution but don’t show specific activity in the brain, and then lower-resolution “functional” images that show the brain actually thinking. (Functional MRI images work because active areas of the brain require an increase in oxygenated blood, which creates a small but detectable disturbance in a magnetic field.) We begin with a round of conventional images of my brain, during which time the machine rattles ominously around my head. Then we move on to our little experiment, starting with the checkerboard pattern.
You can easily tell when the fMRI is in its “functional” mode because it emits an uncomfortably loud, high-pitched, pulsing tone. (Hence the earplugs.) When you’re actually inside the scanner, it sounds like a truck backing up into your head. For the first forty seconds of “rest,” I find myself incapable of thinking about anything other than the excruciating noise. When the flashing checkerboard appears on the screen, it occurs to me that this is like attending some kind of demonic performance-art happening — a tiny, cramped space with strobing black-and-white images projected onto a screen, all accompanied by monotonous, piercing rhythmic tones.
But by the second iteration of the checkerboard stage, I start getting accustomed to the noise and the physical enclosure. I can see Joy smiling at me through the mirror, and the sound becomes more background noise than anything else. In fact, I feel comfortable enough that I start having difficulty shutting off my brain during the “rest” periods. First, I find myself thinking about ways that I could describe the setting, shaping the story of my fMRI experience while my head is still stuck inside the device. When I catch myself doing this, I smile in my dark tunnel. It occurs to me that this is one of those small examples of the brain’s miraculous resilience and flexibility: you stuff your brain into a physical situation that should by all rights overwhelm it, and you tell it explicitly not to think of anything, and yet still it churns away in spite of everything. You couldn’t imagine a more hostile environment for free associating, but here my brain was riffing away, as though I were daydreaming in the shade of an oak tree.
Then I’m reading. It ends up being easier to focus on my own words, but there certainly isn’t time to ruminate. As we finish that stage, I think to myself that I’m glad we added the rumination “bonus round.”
I’m glad, but I’m also getting tired. I haven’t moved my head more than a centimeter in around twenty-five minutes, and the space is starting to close in on me. When the first frozen slide of text arrives on the screen for the rumination stage, I feel like I’ve been caught off guard. “Shit!” I say to myself. “Now I have to think of something.” For forty seconds of this $2 million machine’s time, I think of absolutely nothing worthwhile. I think about trying to think about something. If there is a cognitive version of flailing, this is what I do for the first scan.
But when the second round — the last run of the entire experiment — arrives, I’m prepared. I decide to let my brain do what had come naturally to it throughout the experiment. I’ve already started down the road of describing the experience in the scanner — why not take this last round and actually start working out the language? And so when the text flashes up on the screen, notifying me that the forty-second rumination period has begun, a sentence starts to take form in my head. I am writing.
The words I string together in the fMRI are roughly the same words you encountered a few paragraphs ago describing the resilience of the brain in the most uncomfortable of situations. The general idea arrived a few minutes earlier, but the exact phrasing originates in that last session. The specific sentence, of course, is incidental; what makes it interesting is that Joy Hirsch and her fMRI are watching as it forms in my head, as my brain pulls the words out of the nothingness and makes them into something fixed — sturdy enough to remain intact until I sit down at my computer several days later to type them.
A few days pass, and Joy sends an e-mail to let me know that the results are in. “You’re going to like this,” she writes temptingly. The next afternoon I take the A train up to 168th Street, and Joy and I sit down at a conference table to spend some quality time with my brain.
Joy has assembled a collection of about forty color printouts, each displaying four images of my brain at work. The images are overhead views, and each one is a “slice” of my brain, starting with the brain stem, at the very bottom, and ending with the tip of the cortex. For each stage of the experiment — there are four in total — the fMRI has captured twenty-five slices of my brain going about its business. That business takes the form of changes in blood flow to different regions; the scanner first looks at my brain during the “rest” periods, then during the “activity” period, and it records any salient differences between the two. These images let you see the areas that are relevant to a particular task, and shut out the background processing that the brain is always doing. My brain stem, for instance, was steadily plugging away maintaining my breathing pattern — along with many other mission-critical operations — but that area doesn’t light up on the scan images because those patterns didn’t change during the experiment.
Areas that do show noticeable changes appear on the images as a cluster of bright yellow pixels, fading out to orange and red at their peripheries. The images look strikingly like the Doppler radar images you see on the Weather Channel. (If you blur your eyes a little, you might think that yellow patch on the image was a thunderhead, not a brainstorm.) The image is projected over a grid with numbers running along each axis. The numbered grid and the slices create a three-dimensional system of coordinates, the latitude and longitude of neuromapping. The grid is made up of small cubes called “voxels,” and each voxel has a specific address.
Joy begins by laying down the twenty-five slices for stage one of our experiment, the dreaded checkerboard. The pattern of activity is immediately visible, even to my untutored eyes, mostly because there’s literally nothing going on in 95 percent of my brain. Only a thin band wrapping around the back of my head, roughly at ear level, glows yellow.
“We know that the flashing checkerboard is a very salient stimulus for just the visual processing areas of the brain,” she says. “And that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
She points to the yellow band: “This part of the brain is all primary visual cortex. What’s unique about this is that this activity doesn’t get out of the occipital lobe — and nothing goes on in the frontal lobes. Nothing. This is just as exclusively visual as you can get.” We both start to laugh. “Your brain is doing the minimal amount it has to do to sit there and look at that stupid checkerboard!”
Looking at those blank areas on my mental map reminds me of all the times that someone had gravely explained to me that we only use 10 percent of our brains, and then waxed rhapsodic about how smart we’d be if we could tap 100 percent. Of course we only use a small percentage of our brain at any given time — and it’s a good thing, too! Your brain has dozens of dedicated tools, most of which aren’t relevant to whatever it is you’re focusing on right now. If your visual cortex keeps kicking into overdrive as you’re trying to memorize a speech, the words won’t stay in your head as readily. Only using 10 percent of your brain is a sign of efficiency, not underachievement. Arguing that we’d be better off with 100 percent is like raving about how great Shakespeare would have been if he’d managed to use all twenty-six letters in each of his words, instead of a small fraction of the alphabet.
There’s something in Joy Hirsch spreading out the images on the table that brings to mind a tarot card reader, but there’s nothing mystical in her analysis. I find myself thinking, This person I barely know has ventured inside my head in a way that no one has ever ventured before. That’s why the hall-of-mirrors interpretation feels wrong to me. It’s not an endless simulation I’ve entered into here, but rather something that feels authentic, even intimate.
Thus far all the images we’ve examined have been composite sketches: each stage included two runs, and so the images are a combined look at activity over the two of them. But with the rumination round, I had asked Joy to look at the two runs separately, because I had fared so poorly the first time around and because in the final run of the day, I had managed to get my brain exactly where I’d wanted it to be for my forty seconds in the spotlight.
The images from those two sessions do not disappoint. In the first run, small spots of activity are scattered across my brain, mostly in red voxels (suggesting less activity than the yellow). There’s little shape or symmetry to the map; my brain looks cluttered. But in the second run, what jumps out at me immediately is how silent most of my brain appears. Only the language centers light up with any intensity, along with a sharp yellow rod at the center of my brain, extending up to the very top of my cranium. There’s very little visual activity, and almost nothing from the eye-movement regions.
“There’s a concept of efficiency that has emerged in the neuroimaging community in the last few years,” Joy says. “It’s basically that when there’s a task that the brain is having difficulty doing, the pattern looks very distributed, like this here.” She points to the cluttered image of run number 1. “This was not an efficient action — as opposed to here, where the specific tools of the brain are contributing in an efficient way to the task at hand.”
“You really look like you got your act together here.” She’s pointing to that bright yellow dot on the upper images of run number 2. “Here’s more evidence of that — look at this very focused medial frontal gyrus. This is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of this scan — this is a very high-level executive function of the brain, and you can see it running like a pole all the way down to the cingulate. I think that the medial frontal gyrus is important in coordinating different activities in the brain, reaching for the right tool at the right time. In this last scan, the entire structure — not just a part of it — is active.” In Joy’s phrasing, my language areas were perfectly “robust” during these inspired forty seconds, but they didn’t turn out to be the most interesting element of the image. It was the overall orchestration, the clarity of the pattern, that stood out, the lack of mental clutter.
What had I been hoping to find? I thought about this on the subway ride home. In the crudest sense, I suppose I thought that my skill at stitching words together in my head might turn out to have its own modulelike presence in the scan: a distinct patch of neurons devoted to imagining sentences. If the brain is filled with all these modular tools, then somehow it seems logical that tasks you’re good at should have some visible presence on the brain map. Sometimes this is the case: Einstein’s brain had unusually large inferior parietal lobes, which we think gave him his extraordinary spatio-logical skills. (He famously solved problems as images in his head weeks before he could turn them into working equations.) Such a skill most likely would have shown up directly on an fMRI: a person gifted in spatial intelligence shows more activity in regions of the brain dedicated to spatial processing.
But in my case, the scan revealed something quite different. (I’m no Einstein, as it turns out.) There was no special module. What caught Joy’s eye in the final rumination scan was not a specific region, but the overall pattern of brain activity. The tools in the toolbox weren’t particularly impressive, but the toolbox itself was well organized. In fact, the only specific region that seemed to be at all above average was the one responsible for coordinating activity in other regions. Perhaps the most telling thing about my brain map was what didn’t show up on the images: when I was focused, there was almost no activity in areas that weren’t related directly to the task at hand. Compare that to my episode of cognitive flailing in the first run of the rumination stage: on that scan, there’s hardly a discernible pattern. It’s mostly noise, and little signal.
I have no idea how replicable my fMRI results would be if I tried the exact experiment again, and it’s unclear whether that pattern of organization — with its strong medial frontal gyrus and its many silent regions — holds true for my brain generally, or just for this little snapshot. But I suspect there is a larger truth nestled in that last fMRI image, one that has begun to change the way I think about people I know. I suspect that the world of talent is made up of two kinds of brains: some that have specific modules that are unusually good at their job, and some that are unusually good at keeping all the different modules organized. Both types of brains come across to us as talented, as intelligent, but I think the types are different enough that you can learn to recognize them if you know what to look for. We all know people who have dazzling skills: they can sit down at a piano and pick out a tune they heard last week; they can calculate interest rate payments in their head; they can actually understand quantum mechanics. But we also know people whose brains seem gifted in a different way: no stunning, off-the-chart skills, but a general competence and efficiency, with very little noise complicating their signal.
My dad used to say to me during my high school years: “You’re not a rocket scientist, but you’re smart and you’ve got a lot of talent.” I used to bristle at the remark. (If I wanted to, maybe I could be a rocket scientist!) But now I think he was onto something. I’ve met rocket scientists — and astrophysicists, and programming wizards, and architectural geniuses — and I don’t possess anything like what they’ve got mentally. I don’t have their special gifts. But those fMRI images made me think that perhaps I have something else, a little less dazzling, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Maybe I have a well-orchestrated brain — with no world-famous soloists but a nice sound nonetheless. In a sense, this is what my dad had been trying to say, in slightly different language: I was talented in an orderly brain kind of way, not a supermodule kind of way.
It was only one experiment, but the machine had given me something that machines don’t normally deal out: a hunch about myself, and maybe a larger hunch about people in general. I’d been dreaming for more than a year of capturing my brain as it came up with an idea, and thanks to Joy and her uncanny device, I’d managed to catch precisely that glimpse. The results were mesmerizing and remarkably legible, even to my untrained eyes. But they didn’t provide unequivocal answers or magic bullets. They were more like clues. Seeing my brain come up with an idea had given me another, more interesting idea, one that still reverberates in my head as I write. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a scan of that?
Steven Johnson is the author of "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" and "Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate."
More Steven Johnson.
I came home from work late one evening, hungry and frustrated, and popped into my mother’s house, which was next door to mine. She was eating a frozen dinner and sipping from a mug of hot water. CNN blared on the TV in the background. She asked how my day had been. I said, “Oh, it was good.” She looked up from her black plastic food tray and, after a moment, said, “No, it wasn’t. What happened? Have some pot roast.” My mother was eighty-eight, hard of hearing, and half blind in her right eye—which was her good eye. But when it came to perceiving her son’s emotions, my mother’s X-ray vision was unimpaired.
As she read my mood with such fluency, I thought about the man who had been my coworker and partner in frustration that day—the physicist Stephen Hawking, who could hardly move a muscle, thanks to a forty-five-year struggle with motor neuron disease. By this stage in the progression of his illness, he could communicate only by painstakingly twitching the cheek muscle under his right eye. That twitch was detected by a sensor on his glasses and communicated to a computer in his wheelchair. In this manner, with the help of some special software, he managed to select letters and words from a screen, and eventually to type out what he wanted to express. On his “good” days, it was as if he were playing a video game where the prize was the ability to communicate a thought. On his “bad” days, it was as if he were blinking in Morse code but had to look up the dot and dash sequence between each letter. On the bad days—and this had been one of them—our work was frustrating for both of us.
And yet, even when he could not form words to express his ideas about the wave function of the universe, I had little trouble detecting when his attention shifted from the cosmos to thoughts of calling it quits and moving on to a nice curry dinner. I always knew when he was content, tired, excited, or displeased, just from a glance at his eyes. His personal assistant had this same ability. When I asked her about it, she described a catalog of expressions she’d learned to recognize over the years. My favorite was “the steely-faced glint of glee” he displayed when composing a potent rejoinder to someone with whom he strongly disagreed. Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words, and are communicated—and understood—without conscious thought.
The experience of feeling connected to others seems to start very early in life. Studies on infants show that even six-month-olds make judgments about what they observe of social behavior. In one such study infants watched as a “climber,” which was nothing more than a disk of wood with large eyes glued onto its circular “face,” started at the bottom of a hill and repeatedly tried but failed to make its way to the top. After a while, a “helper,” a triangle with similar eyes glued on, would sometimes approach from farther downhill and help the climber with an upward push. On other attempts, a square “hinderer” would approach from uphill and shove the circular disk back down.
The experimenters wanted to know if the infants, unaffected and uninvolved bystanders, would cop an attitude toward the hinderer square. How does a six-month-old show its disapproval of a wooden face? The same way six-year-olds (or sixty-year-olds) express social displeasure: by refusing to play with it. That is, when the experimenters gave the infants a chance to reach out and touch the figures, the infants showed a definite reluctance to reach for the hinderer square, as compared to the helper triangle.
Moreover, when the experiment was repeated with either a helper and a neutral bystander block or a hinderer and a neutral block, the infants preferred the friendly triangle to the neutral block, and the neutral block to the nasty square. Squirrels don’t set up foundations to cure rabies, and snakes don’t help strange snakes cross the road, but humans place a high value on kindness. Scientists have even found that parts of our brain linked to reward processing are engaged when we participate in acts of mutual cooperation, so being nice can be its own reward. Long before we can verbalize attraction or revulsion, we are attracted to the kind and repelled by the unkind.
One advantage of belonging to a cohesive society in which people help one another is that the group is often better equipped than an unconnected set of individuals to deal with threats from the outside. People intuitively realize that there is strength in numbers and take comfort in the company of others, especially in times of anxiety or need. Or, as Patrick Henry famously said, “United we stand, divided we fall.” (Ironically, Henry collapsed and fell into the arms of bystanders shortly after uttering the phrase.)
Consider a study performed in the 1950s. About thirty female students at the University of Minnesota, none of whom had previously met, were ushered into a room and asked not to speak to each other. In the room was a “gentleman of serious mien, horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in a white laboratory coat, stethoscope dribbling out of his pocket, behind him an array of formidable electrical junk.” Seeking to induce anxiety, he melodramatically introduced himself as “Dr. Gregor Zilstein of the Medical School’s Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry.” Actually, he was Stanley Schachter, a harmless professor of social psychology. Schachter told the students he had asked them there to serve as subjects in an experiment on the effects of electric shocks. He would be shocking them, he said, and studying their reactions. After going on for seven or eight minutes about the importance of the research, he concluded by saying,
“These shocks will hurt, they will be painful. . . . It is necessary that our shocks be intense. . . . [We will] hook you into apparatus such as this [motioning toward the scary equipment behind him], give you a series of shocks, and take various measures such as your pulse rate, blood pressure, and so on.”
Schachter then told the students that he needed them to leave the room for about ten minutes while he brought in still more equipment and set it all up. He noted that there were many rooms available, so they could wait either in a room by themselves or in one with other subjects. Later, Schachter repeated the scenario with a different group of about thirty students. But this time, he aimed to lull them into a state of relaxation. And so, instead of the scary part about intense shocks, he said, “What we will ask each of you to do is very simple. We would like to give each of you a series of very mild electric shocks. I assure you that what you feel will not in any way be painful. It will resemble more a tickle or a tingle than anything unpleasant.”
He then gave these students the same choice about waiting alone or with others. In reality, that choice was the climax of the experiment; there would be no electric shocks for either group.
The point of the ruse was to see if, because of their anxiety, the group expecting a painful shock would be more likely to seek the company of others than the group not expecting one. The result: about 63 percent of the students who were made anxious about the shocks wanted to wait with others, while only 33 percent of those expecting tickly, tingly shocks expressed that preference. The students had instinctively created their own support groups. It’s a natural instinct. A quick look at a web directory of support groups in Los Angeles, for example, turned up groups focused on abusive behavior, acne, Adderall addiction, addiction, ADHD, adoption, agoraphobia, alcoholism, albinism, Alzheimer’s, Ambien users, amputees, anemia, anger management, anorexia, anxiety, arthritis, Asperger’s syndrome, asthma, Ativan addiction, and autism — and that’s just the A’s. Joining support groups is a reflection of the human need to associate with others, of our fundamental desire for support, approval, and friendship. We are, above all, a social species.
Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer. Many languages have expressions—such as “hurt feelings”—that compare the pain of social rejection to the pain of physical injury. Those may be more than just metaphors. Brain-imaging studies show that there are two components to physical pain: an unpleasant emotional feeling and a feeling of sensory distress. Those two components of pain are associated with different structures in the brain. Scientists have discovered that social pain is also associated with a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex—the same structure involved in the emotional component of physical pain.
It’s fascinating that the pain of a stubbed toe and the sting of a snubbed advance share a space in your brain. The fact that they are roommates gave some scientists a seemingly wild idea: Could painkillers that reduce the brain’s response to physical brain also subdue social pain? To find out, researchers recruited twenty-five healthy subjects to take two tablets twice each day for three weeks. Half received extra-strength Tylenol (acetaminophen) tablets, the other half placebos. On the last day, the researchers invited the subjects, one by one, into the lab to play a computer-based virtual ball-tossing game. Each person was told they were playing with two other subjects located in another room, but in reality those roles were played by the computer, which interacted with the subjects in a carefully designed manner. In round 1, those reputedly human teammates played nicely with the subjects, but in round 2, after tossing the virtual ball to the subject a few times, the teammates started playing only with each other, rudely excluding the subject from the game, like soccer players who refuse to pass the ball to a peer. After the exercise, the subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure social distress. Compared to those who took the placebo, those who took the Tylenol reported a reduced level of hurt feelings.
There was also a twist. These researchers had the subjects play the virtual ball game while lying in an fMRI machine. So while they were being snubbed by their teammates, their brains were being scanned by the machine. It showed that the subjects who’d taken Tylenol had reduced activity in the brain areas associated with social exclusion. Tylenol, it seems, really does reduce the neural response to social rejection.
When the Bee Gees long ago sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” they probably didn’t foresee that the answer was to take two Tylenols. That Tylenol would help really does sound far-fetched, so the brain researchers also performed a clinical test to see if Tylenol had the same effect outside the lab, in the real world of social rejection. They asked five dozen volunteers to fill out a “hurt feelings” survey, a standard psychological tool, every day for three weeks. Again, half the volunteers took a dose of Tylenol twice a day, while the other half took a placebo. The result? The volunteers on Tylenol did indeed report significantly reduced social pain over that time period.
The connection between social pain and physical pain illustrates the links between our emotions and the physiological processes of the body. Social rejection doesn’t just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being. In fact, social relationships are so important to humans that a lack of social connection constitutes a major risk factor for health, rivaling even the effects of cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of physical activity. In one study, researchers surveyed 4,775 adults in Alameda County, near San Francisco. The subjects completed a questionnaire asking about social ties such as marriage, contacts with extended family and friends, and group affiliation. Each individual’s answers were translated into a number on a “social network index,” with a high number meaning the person had many regular and close social contacts and a low number representing relative social isolation. The researchers then tracked the health of their subjects over the next nine years. Since the subjects had varying backgrounds, the scientists employed mathematical techniques to isolate the effects of social connectivity from risk factors such as smoking and the others I mentioned above, and also from factors like socioeconomic status and reported levels of life satisfaction. They found a striking result. Over the nine-year period, those who’d placed low on the index were twice as likely to die as individuals who were similar with regard to other factors but had placed high on the social network index. Apparently, hermits are bad bets for life insurance underwriters.
On May 8, North Carolinians will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines a marriage between a man and a woman as the “only domestic legal union” the state will recognize — thereby barring LGBT marriage equality. The amendment would also ban civil unions and end domestic partner benefits like prescription drug and health care coverage for the partners and children of public employees. At its deepest level, this issue is about fairness for everyone under the law. But less mentioned is that it is also about science, and about what’s factually true.
Many voters who go to the polls to support Amendment One will do so believing outright falsehoods about same-sex marriages and civil unions. In particular, they hold the belief that such partnerships are damaging to the health and well-being of the children raised in them. That is, after all, one of the chief justifications for the amendment.
According to the pro-Amendment One group Vote for Marriage NC, for instance, “the overwhelming body of social science evidence establishes that children do best when raised by their married mother and father.” If marriage is defined as anything other than the union between man and woman, the group adds, we will see “a higher incidence of all the documented social ills associated with children being raised in a home without their married biological parents.”
“Overwhelming body of social science evidence”? “Documented social ills”? Is this really true? Are same-sex marriages and civil unions bad for kids?
Well, no. Indeed, as I report in my new book ”The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality,” the claim that the kids won’t be all right in same sex marriages or partnerships now rates up there with a number of other hoary old falsehoods about homosexuality: the assertion that people can “choose” whether to be gay; the notion that homosexuality is a type of disorder; and the wrong idea that it can be cured through “reparative” therapy. All of these claims are explicitly disavowed by the American Psychological Association (APA).
In a moment, I want to explore the underlying psychology behind how conservatives, especially religious ones, can believe such falsehoods. But first, let’s dismantle, on a substantive level, the idea that research shows that kids fare worse when raised by two parents who are of the same gender.
According to the APA, the relevant science shows nothing of the kind. “Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents … have no empirical foundation,” concludes a recent publication from the organization. To the contrary, the association states, the “development, adjustment, and well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents do not differ markedly from that of children with heterosexual parents.”
So how can Christian conservatives possibly claim otherwise?
Well, one favored approach is literally citing the wrong studies. There is, after all, a vast amount of research on kids in heterosexual two-parent families, and mostly these kids do quite well — certainly better than kids in single-parent families (for obvious reasons). Christian conservatives cite these studies to argue that heterosexual families are best for kids, but there’s just one glaring problem. In the studies of heterosexual two-parent families where children fare well, the comparison group is families with one mother or one father — not two mothers or two fathers. So to leap from these studies to conclusions about same-sex parenting, explains University of Virginia social scientist Charlotte Patterson, is “what we call in the trade bad sampling techniques.”
But wait: Don’t Christian conservatives want to be factually right and to believe what’s true about the world? And shouldn’t a proper reading of this research actually come as a relief to them and help to assuage their concerns about dangerous social consequences of same-sex marriage or civil unions? If only it were that simple. We all want to be right and to believe that our views are based on the best available information. But in this case, Christian conservatives utterly fail to get past their emotions, which powerfully bias their reasoning. Indeed, science doesn’t just demonstrate that the kids are all right in same-sex unions. It also shows how and why some people reason poorly in highly politicized cases like this one — and, in the case of the anti-gay views of Christian conservatives, rely on their gut emotions to come up with wrong beliefs. Here’s how it works.
There are a small number of Christian right researchers and intellectuals who have tried to make a scientific case against same-sex marriages and unions by citing alleged harms to children. This stuff isn’t mainstream or scientifically accepted — witness the APA’s statements on the matter. But from the perspective of the Christian right, that doesn’t really matter. When people are looking for evidence to support their deeply held views, the science suggests that people engage in “motivated reasoning.” Their deep emotional convictions guide the retrieval of self-supporting information that they then use to argue with, and to prop themselves up. It isn’t about truth, it’s about feeling that you’re right — righteous, even.
And where, in turn, do these emotions come from? Well, there’s the crux. A growing body of research shows that liberals and conservatives, on average, have different moral intuitions, impulses that bias us in different directions before we’re even consciously thinking about situations or issues. Indeed, this research suggests that liberals and conservatives even have different bodily responses to stimuli, of a sort that they cannot control. And one of the strongest areas of difference involves one’s sensitivity to the feeling of disgust.
A recent study, for instance, found that “individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.” In other words, there’s now data to back up what we’ve always kind of known: The average conservative, much more than the average liberal, is having visceral feelings of disgust toward same-sex marriage. And then, when these conservatives try to consciously reason about the matter, they seize on any information to support or justify their deep-seated and uncontrolled response — which pushes them in the direction of believing and embracing information that appears to justify and ratify the emotional impulse.
And voila. Suddenly same-sex marriages and civil unions are bad for kids. How’s that for the power of human reason?
All people engage in emotion-guided or -motivated reasoning, to be sure. But mounting evidence suggests that the Left and Right may do so differently. And they definitely do so for different reasons — as the present case so strongly demonstrates.
Does this mean we should be more tolerant of the intolerant, or less disgusted by those who may consider us disgusting? Maybe. After all, people may not have much control over these impulses. They may not even be aware of them. At the very least, such knowledge should increase our level of understanding of those who disagree with us.
In the end, however, facts are facts — and emotions and gut instincts are an utterly unreliable way of identifying them. We can try to be understanding of people different from us — even when they’re manifestly failing at the same task. But the latest research makes it more untenable than ever to base public policy on gut-driven misinformation.
Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn’t a joke must be nothing less than horrifying.
Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala” ($$). The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that’s activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)
That has implications for our political world. In a recent interview, Chris Mooney, author of “The Republican Brain,”explained, “The amygdala plays the same role in every species that has an amygdala. It basically takes over to save your life. It does other things too, but in a situation of threat, you cease to process information rationally and you’re moving automatically to protect yourself.”
The finding also fits with other data. Mooney discusses studies conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in which self-identified liberals and conservatives were shown images – apolitical images – that were intended to elicit different emotions. Writing at Huffington Post, Mooney explains that “there were images that caused fear and disgust — a spider crawling on a person’s face, maggots in an open wound — but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit.” The researchers noted two differences between the groups. The researchers studied their subjects’ reactions by tracking their eye movements and monitoring their “skin conductivity” – a measure of one’s autonomic nervous system’s reaction to stimuli.
Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images, compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or “attentional” patterns, they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or threatening images, and [then] spent more time fixating on them.
Mooney concludes that this “new research suggests [that] conservatism is largely a defensive ideology — and therefore, much more appealing to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive or threatening aspects of their environments.”
But those cognitive biases are only part of the story of how a political movement in the wealthiest, most secure nation in the world have come to view their surroundings with such dread. The other half of the equation is a conservative media establishment that feeds members of the movement an almost endless stream of truly terrifying scenarios.
The phenomenon of media “siloing” is pretty well understood – in an era when dozens of media sources are a click away, people have a tendency to consume more of those that conform to their respective worldviews. But there is some evidence that this phenomenon is more pronounced on the right – conservative intellectuals have had a long-running debate about the significance of “epistemic closure” within their movement.
So conservatives appear to be more likely to be hard-wired to be highly sensitive to perceived threats, and their chosen media offers them plenty. But that’s not the whole story because of one additional factor. Since 9/11, and especially since the election of President Barack Obama, one of the most significant trends in America’s political discourse is the “mainstreaming” of what were previously considered to be fringe views on the right. Theories that were once relegated to the militia movement can now be heard on the lips of elected officials and television personalities like Glenn Beck.
Consider, then, what it must be like to be a true-blue Rush Limbaugh fan, or someone who thinks Michele Bachmann is a serious lawmaker with a grasp of the issues – put yourself into that person’s shoes for a moment, and consider what a nightmarish landscape the world around them must represent:
The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero, who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the United States – a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This president doesn’t just claim the right to assassinate suspected terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement – he may be planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops.
Again, these ideas are not relegated to the fringe of forwarded emails. Glenn Beck talked about FEMA camps on Fox News (he later debunked them, which only fueled charges of a media coverup); dozens of Republican elected officials have at least hinted that they are birthers, while an erstwhile front-runner for the GOP nomination has repeatedly claimed that Obama is not eligible to be president. The head of the NRA, and the GOP’s presidential nominee have both claimed Obama is plotting to take Americans’ guns.
In reality, Americans are safer and more secure today than at any point in human history. But inhabitants of the world of the hard-right are surrounded by danger – from mobs of thugs at home to a variety of powerful and deadly enemies abroad.
For the true believers, Latin American immigration isn’t a phenomenon to be managed, but a grave existential threat. A plot to “take back” large swaths of the Southwest is a theory that has aired not only on obscure right-wing blogs, but on Fox and CNN. On CNN, Lou Dobbs claimed immigrants were spreading leprosy; Rick Perry, Rep. Louie Gohmert and other “mainstream” voices on the right (that is, people with platforms) agree that Hezbollah and Hamas “are using Mexico as a way to penetrate into the southern part of the United States,” possibly with the aid of “terror babies” carried in pregnant women’s wombs.
In the real world, the rate of violent crime in the US is at the lowest point since 1968 – in fact, it is somewhat of a mystery that the violent crime rate has continued to decline even in the midst of the Great Recession. It’s also true that 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. But if you read the Drudge Report, or check in at Fox, on any given day you will see extensive coverage of any incident in which a black person harms a white person. These fit in with the narrative – advanced by people like Glenn Beck and long-touted by Ron Paul – that we stand on the brink of a race war, led by the New Black Panthers (just consider how frightening it would be if there were more than a dozen New Black Panthers, or if they did more than say stupid things). Marauding “flash-mobs” of black teens – a near-obsession at many conservative outlets these days — are simply a harbinger of things to come.
Continue, for a moment, to stroll in the shoes of a true believer on the right. Imagine how frightening it would be to believe Frank Gaffney, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and leading neoconservative voice, when he claims the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, or Newt Gingrich, when he says that “sharia law” (there isn’t such a thing in the way conservatives portray it – as a discrete canon of laws) poses a grave threat to our way of life.
Imagine believing that the Democrats’ business-friendly insurance reforms included panels of bureaucrats who would decide when to let you die, as Sarah Palin infamously suggested. Or that virtually the entire field of climatology is perpetrating a “hoax,” as senator James Inhofe claims, in order to undermine capitalism and impose a one-world government. Imagine seeing energy-efficient light bulbs as part of an international plot to, again, undermine capitalism, as Michele Bachmann believes. Imagine thinking that the public school system “indoctrinates” young children into the “gay lifestyle,” as influential members of the religious right – James Dobson, Bryan Fischer, Anita Bryant – have claimed for years. Imagine believing our electoral system is tarnished by massive voter fraud or that union thugs are running amok or that the Department of Homeland Security is making a list of people who advocate for “limited government.” Imagine if there really were a War on Christmas!
These dark narratives come in addition to more run-of-the-mill fear-mongering about the Iranian “threat,” or nonsense about how “entitlements” are leading our economy to look like Greece’s. Those of us in the “reality-based community” may look at these specters haunting the right with exasperation or amusement, but just consider for a moment how bleak the world looks to those who buy into these ideas.
Perhaps the most frightening part of all of this for the true believers is that even though these things aren’t just fringe ideas circulating in forwarded emails – they’re discussed by influential politicians and on leading cable news outlets – the bulk of the media and most elected officials refuse to investigate what’s happening to this country.
That one ideological camp is so consumed with fear also has a lot to do with why conservatives and liberals share so little common ground. Progressives tend to greet these narratives with facts and reason, but as Chris Mooney notes, when your amygdala is activated, it takes over and utterly dominates the brain structures dedicated to reason. Then the “fight-or-flight” response takes precedence over critical thinking.
In his previous sally, he cited the story of Maria’s Shoe, a tall tale that has been circulating in the New Age community for decades, always growing in the telling. This story is the claim that a woman with a heart condition was hospitalized, and while unconscious with a heart attack, her spirit floated out of the coronary care unit to observe a shoe on a third-floor ledge. As has been shown, she described nothing that could not be learned by mundane observation, no supernatural events required, and further, that the story is peculiarly unverifiable: “Maria” cannot be found, not even in the hospital records, and no one has been found who even knew this woman. The entire story is hearsay with no independent evidence whatsoever.
Beauregard attempts to salvage the story by layering on more detail. The description of the shoe was very specific, he says, right down to the placement of the laces and the pattern of wear, and she could not possibly have learned this by overhearing staff talking about it because “it would have been difficult for Maria to understand the location of the shoe in the hospital and the details of its appearance because she spoke very little English.” This is a curious observation; the claim is that she could not understand a description of the shoe, but she was able to describe the shoe herself to a woman, Kimberly Clark Sharp, who did not understand Spanish.
“When I got to the critical-care unit, Maria was lying slightly elevated in bed, eyes wild, arms flailing, and speaking Spanish excitedly,” recounts Sharp. “I had no idea what she was saying, but I went to her and grabbed her by the shoulders. Our faces were inches apart, our eyes locked together, and I could see she had something important to tell me.”
The question isn’t whether a seriously ill woman with poor command of English could see the shoe; it’s whether a healthy, ambulatory, English-speaking woman who has made a career out of the myth of NDEs could see the shoe. Beauregard’s additions to the anecdote do not increase its credibility at all.
Beauregard adds another anecdote to the litany, the story of another cardiac patient who was resuscitated and later recounted seeing a particular nurse while his brain was not functional. Seriously — more anecdotes don’t help his case. He threatens to have even more of these stories in a book he’s in the process of publishing, but there’s no point. He could recite a thousand vague rumors and poorly documented examples with ambiguous interpretations, and it wouldn’t salvage his thesis.
This new anecdote is more of the same. The patient is comatose and with no heart rhythm when brought into the hospital; over a week later, he claims to recognize a particular nurse as having been present during his crisis, and mentions that she put his dentures in a drawer.
I am underwhelmed. I must introduce Beauregard to two very common terms that are well understood in the neuroscience community.
The first is confabulation. This is an extremely common psychological process in which we fill in gaps in our memory with fabrications. I described this in my previous response, but Beauregard chose to disregard it. The patient above has a large gap in his memory, but he knows that he existed in that period, and something must have happened; he knows that he was resuscitated in a hospital, so can imagine a scene in which he was surrounded by doctors and nurses; he knows that his dentures are missing, so he suspects that someone put them somewhere, likely one of the people surrounding him during the emergency. So his brain fills in the gap with a plausible narrative. This whole process is routine and unsurprising, and far more likely than that his mind went wandering away from his brain.
The second term is confirmation bias. Only positive responses that confirm Beauregard’s expectations are noted. The patient guessed that a nurse he met during his routine care was also present during his episode of unconsciousness, and he was correct. What if he’d guessed wrongly? That event would be unexceptional, nobody would have made note of it, and Beauregard would not now be trotting out this incident as a vindication of his hypothesis. This is one of the problems of building a case on anecdotes; without knowledge of the range and likelihood of various results, one can’t distinguish the selective presentation of chance events from a measurable phenomenon.
While unaware of basic concepts in science, Beauregard seems to readily adopt the most woo-ish buzzwords. His explanation for this purported power of the mind to exist independently of any physical substrate is, unfortunately and predictably, quantum mechanics. Every charlatan in the world seems to believe that attaching “quantum” to a word makes it magical and powerful and unquestionable. I have to accept Terry Pratchett’s rebuttal: “‘Let’s call it Quantum!’ is not an explanation.” And neither is Beauregard’s feeble insistence that the universe possesses quantum consciousness, that psychic powers represent quantum phenomena, or that there is an infinitely loving Cosmic Intelligence.
Beauregard then accuses me of having an ideological bias, and that I’m a fanatical fundamentalist. He, of course, is the dispassionate, objective observer with no ax to grind, only interested in reporting the scientific facts. Unfortunately, his book “The Spiritual Brain” reveals to the contrary that he has some very, very strange beliefs.
Individual minds and selves arise from and are linked together by a divine Ground of Being (or primordial matrix). That is the spaceless, timeless, and infinite Spirit, which is the ever-present source of cosmic order, the matrix of the whole universe, including both physics (material nature) and psyche (spiritual nature). Mind and consciousness represent a fundamental and irreducible property of the Ground of Being. Not only does the subjective experience of the phenomenal world exist within mind and consciousness, but mind, consciousness, and self profoundly affect the physical world…it is this fundamental unity and interconnectedness that allows the human mind to causally affect physical reality and permits psi interaction between humans and with physical or biological systems. With regard to this issue, it is interesting to note that quantum physicists increasingly recognize the mental nature of the universe.
If I am an ideologue, it’s only in that I demand that if you call something science, it bear some resemblance in method and approach to science, not mysticism. Beauregard insists on trying to endorse the babbling piffle above as science by reciting the number of publications he has made, and how much grant money he’s got, when I’m looking for verifiable, reproducible, measurable evidence.
I would also remind him that Isaac Newton, who was probably an even greater scientist than the inestimable Beauregard, wasted much of his later years on mysticism, too: from alchemy and the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, to arcane biblical hermeneutics, extracting prophecies of the end of the world from numerological analyses of Revelation. While his mechanics and optics have stood the test of time, that nonsense has not. That his mathematics and physics are useful and powerful does not imply that he was correct in his calculation that the world will end before 2060 AD; similarly, Beauregard’s success in publishing in psychiatry journals does not imply that his unsupportable fantasies of minds flitting about unfettered by brains is reasonable.
It simply isn’t true that there are no folks of color in the new HBO series “Girls,” in which young, attractive white women try to find their way in the post-9/11 Big Apple. For example, in the last minute of the very first episode, a homeless black guy talks to our quirky, spunky heroine, Hannah. “Why don’t you smile?” he says to her. “Does your heart hurt? Oh, girl, when I look at you, I just want to say Hellloooo, New York!”
Hello, New York, indeed. This isn’t the first time TV pushed millions of immigrants and people of color to the margins of one of the most diverse cities in the world. Hello, Woody Allen! Hello, “Seinfeld”! Hello, “Friends” and “Sex and the City”! If “Girls” can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere. Of course, the rest of TV has been overwhelmingly white, too. Ever since “Father Knows Best” and “Wagon Train,” the medium has long presented a whitewashed version of the way we live.
That might be why some “Girls” writers take exception to their show being singled out for criticism. Here’s what writer Leslie Arfin tweeted in response to criticisms: “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” (“Precious,” the 2009 film about a mentally and sexually abused teenager, featured a predominantly black cast.)
Why shouldn’t Arfin and creator Lena Durham be able to re-create their own private girl-world on screen? What responsibility do show runners have to represent diversity? Does it even matter? How do our brains respond when people of color are invisible or stereotyped on TV?
This is where science can help. I co-edited a book called “Are We Born Racist?,” which features new insights from psychology and neuroscience about what happens in our nervous systems when we encounter people of different races. And we found that decades of studies say yes, the racial vision of “Girls” does matter. For example, a series of four 2009 studies found that people who watched shows that featured negative nonverbal behavior toward blacks became more prejudiced themselves, as measured by tests of implicit bias — this was especially true when viewers didn’t recognize the behavior as negative. It seems that TV can indeed subconsciously induce racism.
So how can show runners correct for that? The research is overwhelmingly clear: job one is to confront the fact that racial difference exists. The new science of racism reveals that our brains do indeed seem to react negatively to people of different races — exposure of just milliseconds to a black face can cause white folks’ amygdalae to light up with fear.
Colorblindness doesn’t work because we never stop spotting differences in our environment. Our brains are designed to do that; that’s how we survived on the savannah 50,000 years ago, and it’s how we survive in the globalized urban jungles of the 21st century. It takes an effort of will to cover your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and shout, “Nah nah nah I’m not listening,” when confronted with racial difference. And doing that is what psychologists call “non-survival behavior,” something that belongs in the same category as smoking cigarettes and riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
The antidote to subconscious bias is not political correctness — shoehorning in a quirky, spunky black BFF for the girls will just annoy black viewers, instead of making the world a better place. Rather, the best cure for what ails shows like “Girls” is a dose of thoughtfulness, self-awareness and courageous originality.
The good news is that our brains get used to difference; in most situations, exposure to people of different races reduces prejudice. That’s a good reason for TV and movies to at least make an effort to show our cities in all their diversity. But that’s not all. As researchers have developed new and creative ways to induce racial nightmares in brain scanners, they’ve found that the prefrontal cortex — that’s the newest, most human part of the brain, the one responsible for long-term planning and intentional thought — is able to tell the oldest, least human part of the brain, the amygdala, to calm down. In other words, people can outthink and unlearn subconscious prejudice.
Some folks seem to think, as my colleague, UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton writes, that “unconscious biases reveal ‘the real you’ — how you really feel about X or Y group despite your best, superficial efforts to hide it.” Some interpret this idea to mean that saying whatever ugly thing enters our heads is simply being honest. We don’t want to suppress our true savage nature, do we? We don’t want to sweep it under the rug, do we?
No, we don’t. And we should also be honest about how racially homogenous our social networks tend to be — if the quirky, spunky frenemies in “Girls” are all white, that’s just realistic, I agree. But shows like “Girls” improve when they implicitly and explicitly recognize that there are people in the world who aren’t like the protagonists, and that sometimes we all say stupid things. So instead of being defensive, as Arfin was in her tweet, what if we just took knee-jerk bias for granted — and then also took it for granted that people can grow and correct for prejudice? What if we just, you know… had faith in each other?
“The assumption that prejudice and egalitarianism is an all-or-none proposition (i.e., one is either prejudiced, or one is egalitarian) makes the possibility that one may think or do something stereotypical very threatening, precisely because it would reveal one’s true nature,” Mendoza-Denton argues. But when we consciously condemn racism, that act of the prefrontal cortex is just as authentic and meaningful as the unconscious impulses we find in the amygdala. In fact, I’d argue that intentionally rejecting racism reveals the very essence of our humanity.
The trick is, quite simply, to acknowledge race and racism, and to talk about it. Many white parents avoid the subject like the plague — in one notorious instance, parents pulled out children en masse from a study when they learned it would entail talking about race. But this strategy doesn’t produce colorblind citizens. It creates shows like “Girls,” “Seinfeld” and “Sex in the City.” It perpetuates a society that historically has pretended to be entirely Anglo-Saxon.
In fact, many, many studies find that children whose parents talk with them about race ultimately become less prejudiced. Talking is how we become conscious of subconscious biases — bias against anyone or anything, not just people of different races. All this science stuff sounds high-minded and earnest, doesn’t it? Is it even possible to apply these insights to a TV show without wrecking its entertainment value? Is it possible to depict racially insular and casually prejudiced white people in a way that doesn’t promote insularity and prejudice, as “Girls” does?
“Mad Men” does it (for gender as well as race). The non-quirky, non-spunky main characters are all white, but race haunts the show, in ways that are mostly lost on the chain-smoking ad executives it depicts. The difference between “Mad Men” and “Girls” is simply that “Mad Men” sees its characters with a combination of compassionate objectivity and ruthless historical perspective. That’s the result of artistic integrity, not political correctness.
Take this video, for example. It’s easy to chuckle at the character, Pete Campbell. But as you watch this clip, think about the nuances involved in this interaction — the ways Pete and Hollis struggle to communicate across profound differences in social power.
And by the way, HBO has done it before. “The Sopranos” was a show about Italian-American mobsters who must, as with any modern line of employment, work with people different from themselves. In this scene, we see the crew discussing some workplace diversity issues, wiseguy-style.
It’s raw, racist and honest. But it’s more than that. The writing is also smart, self-aware and grounded in the real world. This kind of writing does not see moral seriousness and entertainment as a trade-off, an either-or. It’s a both-and.
“Girls” is actually a pretty good show; it made me laugh, it made me sigh. But the bloggers are right to ask for it to be smarter and better. It’s something we should always be asking of ourselves.
(Credit: Peter Bernik via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki via Shutterstock) 
Rush Limbaugh(Credit: AP Photo/Chris Carlson) 
Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala” ($$). The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that’s activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)
PZ Myers (Credit: Wikipedia) 
