The Worry Free Life

Financial Illiteracy

2010-03-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

This week's article has been written by my friend Jason Kelly. He is an intelligent, kind, and thoughtful human being who is well-versed in personal finance. He is the author of a great series of personal finance books called the Neatest Little... series. A list of his books (with Amazon links) are listed at the end of this article. His newest book is Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One Of Them. It should be out very soon, so click on the name of the book and pre-order it. Not only are the books practical and easy to read, each one of them costs less than $15! The best bang-for-the-buck financial books anywhere.

Jason also has a great financial web site for the rest of us. He explains what is happening in the market each week, gives ideas for personal investing, and has a free financial planning newsletter. For a few dollars a month ($5.48 to be exact) you can get his invaluable weekly Kelly Letter. The purpose of this weekly email is...

To provide readers with clear investment guidance that maintains a long-term, steady growth path with the majority of the portfolio while taking advantage of medium-term trading opportunities with a minority of the portfolio.

Here's Jason:

Terry invited me to contribute the financial installment of his series on illiteracy. I've written about personal finance and investing for more than 15 years, so the angles I could take on this are numerous. The cloud of questions I've received over the years rose in my mind, with their attendant subjects: credit cards, bank rates, automobile financing, college tuition, budgets, mortgages, and so on.

You know what, though? That cloud itself is the problem. There's no lack of information, there's an overwhelming swirl of information. It's the endless details that make people think they can't possibly get their arms around this subject called finance. In that confusion lies opportunity for the shysters, which is why financial education will never take top priority in America. Ignorance is bliss — for those in the know. The ignorant themselves are fleeced.

Luckily, there's not a lot to the basics of finance.

I can tell you right here, right now the one rule that, if followed, will keep you out of financial trouble for the rest of your life. That's right: one rule. This is a blog about living free from worry, so we should aim for a simple rule that gets rid of a top source of worry in people's lives. Are you ready? Here's what I call The First Rule of Finance:

Spend less than 80 percent of your take-home pay.

That's it. Now, stop shaking your head and pooh-poohing this notion as overly simplistic, and consider how many of the common financial problems it solves. If you spend less than 80 percent of your take-home pay, you will never:

Pay too much for an automobile
Run up debt on credit cards
Collect more than one or two credit cards
Fall behind in household bills
Suffer buyer's remorse from impulsive spending
Commit to a mortgage payment you can't afford
Panic if you lose your job

The list is longer than that, actually, but you get the point. When you spend less than you earn, you save. When saving becomes a habit, your continued existence makes you financially better-off as time goes by. You'll be richer next month than you are this month, and you're richer this month than you were last month. It's easy to feel good about your finances when your net worth grows as long as you keep breathing.

Too many Americans, however, go in the opposite direction. They spend more than they earn, so each passing month finds them worse off than they were the month before. Time hurts them, because they're on the road to ruin. Steps ahead don't represent progress, they represent a countdown to collapse.

That's not hyperbole. Look at the subprime mortgage crisis. Sure, banks pulled a fast one on borrowers by offering loans with low payments up front and bigger ones later, zero-down deals, no-doc "liar's loans," and other such goofiness, but none of it would have hurt anybody if the population operated on the principle of spending less than they earn. They would have looked at the mortgage payment schedules, looked at their household spending, seen whether they could handle the payments, and made a decision. Instead, they just jumped in. Well, we've seen what happens when a whole population leaps before they look into murky financial waters. The economy swirls down the toilet.

Yet, I'll bet a good portion of people who find themselves unable to keep up with their credit card payments and mortgage schedule spent a lot of time finding the highest-interest-paying checking account in town, the best deal on frequent-flyer miles, and which gas station sells the cheapest gas (by a penny or two). Such tiny benefits against a backdrop of basic blow-ups are meaningless.
There's nothing wrong with choosing the best bank account, joining the best consumer programs, and saving money on gasoline, of course. Those are all good ideas, but they don't work unless they're part of a bigger strategy. The financially illiterate are tricked into thinking that "managing money" is a complex, multi-staged endeavor. Not really. It starts with spending no more than $8 of every $10 you earn.

There's more beyond that, but not much, and the returns on effort drop quickly. That first step, that first rule, is by far the most critical one. It alone is more important to your financial well-being, and certainly your financial peace-of-mind, than any sophisticated-looking credit card or surefire stock tip or consumer rewards program.

Notice that it's precisely the first rule that's most viciously attacked by corporate advertising and bank programs. That's no coincidence. They know that if they can get you in the habit of overspending, they can get you to open wide for all the other lures they've worked up over the years. Before you know it, you'll be chain-borrowing on cars that cost too much, buying everything you see advertised by using more credit on more cards, and signing on to mortgage loans that are sure to enslave you. Get the first step wrong, and that's the path in front of you. Get the first step right, and none of the other gimmicks will hook you.

Let's keep this easy. Financial literacy doesn't require lengthy explanations. It doesn't even require difficult math. All it really requires is knowing how to stop spending at 80 percent of your take-home pay.

Do that and you'll be a financial genius.

Thank you, Jason. If you want to stop being financially illiterate, you can check out each of his books by clicking on the link for each.

And don't forget to check out his forthcoming book mentioned above.

This finishes my series on illiteracy. I hope you have enjoyed it. Any comments you want to make about Jason's article will be forwarded to him promptly.

Psychological Illiteracy

2010-02-28T14:33:00.001-08:00

True or False:

Some people are right-brained, others are left-brained
When dying, people pass through a universal series of psychological stages.
Individuals commonly repress the memories of traumatic experiences.
Students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles.
Individuals can learn information, like new languages while asleep.
A positive attitude can stave off cancer.
It’s better to express anger to others than to hold it in.
Most children who were sexually abused in childhood develop severe emotional disturbances in adulthood.
Adult children of alcoholics display a distinct profile of symptoms.
Criminal profiling is helpful in solving crimes.
Abstinence is the only realistic treatment goal for alcoholics.

Everybody is a psychologist. That is, if we define a psychologist as someone who is interested in human behavior, emotions, and thoughts. We, as humans, are continually talking about one another. We are interested in why people act the way they do. We want to know why we do the things that are not good for us and why we don’t do the things that are good for us.

Psychology is everywhere. It is talked about in all forms of media such as talk shows, movies, newspapers and news magazines. Friends talk about their psychologists, bookstores have entire sections devoted to the topic and it is splashed all over the Internet. A Google search for the word psychology returns more than ninety-four million hits.

Yet, as psychologist Keith Stanovich points out in his book, How to Think Straight About Psychology, the most important aspects of psychology are invisible to the public.

Few people are aware that the majority of the books they see in the "psychology" section of many book stores are written by individuals with absolutely no standing in the psychological community. Few are aware that many of the people to whom television applies the label "psychologist" would not be considered so by the American Psychological Association or the American Psychological Society.

Like a lot of scientific research, new knowledge in psychology can take a lot of time and effort. The public is generally aware of new psychological knowledge only when something exciting is reported by the mass media. Even then, the news may be based on unreplicated research, poor research, or an inaccurate description of the actual research.

The general belief is that if research was done by a psychologist and reported by a reputable media source, then it must be true. This perception can set up the public to be quite gullible. Dr. Stanovich lists a half dozen well-accepted claims routinely seen in the media that have been proven false by psychology: "astrology, psychic surgery, speed reading, biorhythms, subliminal weight loss, and psychic detectives." His book is meant not only for psychology students but also for the general public. It is a book that helps us all learn how to evaluate the abundance of psychology claims swirling around our real and virtual worlds.

Much of the public is confused between scientific psychology and popular psychology. Popular psychology (good or bad) emphasizes facts about human behavior; real psychology emphasizes a way of thinking about human behavior. Most (but not all) psychologists are trained to think critically about claims made by the public, so-called mental health experts, and even their own colleagues. Psychology no longer accepts claims merely because an expert said it is so. What is the evidence? This is the question psychologists are trained to ask in order to weed out the wheat from the chaff.

What about the non-psychologist who is not trained to tell the difference between psychology and pseudo-psychology? If one looks hard enough, there are several excellent resources for the lay person to help discover what really is and what really is not legitimate even though there may sometimes be an overlap between scientific psychology and popular psychology.

Often popular psychology has the backing of enormous amounts of money so that advertising can overrule critical thinking. A good example is what has been called the Mozart Effect. Simply put, this idea claims that if you play classical music to your baby, you can help your baby become smarter as she or he grows up. Richard Coff, founder and director of the Suzuki Music Academy has this to say about the Mozart Effect:

The buzzword, Mozart Effect, has been bandied about by popular print and broadcast media. It is featured in parenting, education, and music oriented publications, and in the mainstream general press. While it has renewed interest in classical music education and focused much deserved attention on the general field of childhood development, the phrase (and the popular notion of its meaning) has been used to sell music lessons, music products of all kinds, including Mozart Makes You Smarter product lines, and frankly, some music education snake-oil.

You can now check out claims for the Mozart Effect for yourself with a great new book that has just become available. Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein have wirtten 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology in an attempt to look at psychological misconceptions. Even though the title says they examine 50 popular myths, they actually look at 300 "psychomythologies."

The beauty of this book is that the authors do not glibly dismiss outrageous claims. They carefully and thoughtfully look at the research regarding the myth in question rather than just giving their own opinions. For example, when they examine the claim that "there’s recently been a massive epidemic of infantile autism," they take six pages to investigate this claim and reveal the flaws and misconceptions about it.

As helpful as this book would be if the contents only dealt with looking at claims, the authors also teach us how to do this on our own. Some of you ask why myth-busting is so important. Three very important reasons are given for why the time and effort is important. Psychomyths can be harmful, cause indirect damage, and interfere with our critical thinking.

The reader also gets a mini-course in detecting false claims with ten tools called the Mythbusting Kit. Some of you may remember that Carl Sagan coined the phrase Baloney Detection Kit in his book, The Demon Haunted World. This idea is becoming more popular. Our friend, Google, gives us twenty thousand hits for the phrase "baloney detection kit."

As if this were not enough, the book’s postscript includes two more useful features. The first one, that I found truly enjoyable, was to take the book’s premise and turn it around 180 degrees. Three pages are devoted to "Ten Psychological Findings that Are Difficult to Believe, but True." Did you know that psychologists have taught pigeons to tell the difference between the music of Bach and that of Stravinsky? Yup, difficult to believe, but true. I know some people who can't do this.

This section is followed by a listing of twenty-two websites that are devoted to educating us for dealing with the ongoing onslaught of our society’s psychomythologies. And that’s not all. The reference section includes the books and research articles this book is based on. Although tracking this additional information down may seem tedious for some, reputable references are at the heart of mythbusting. These primary sources are all but absent in Internet articles, books, and news articles that promote common myths.

The fourteen pages in the index help to make this book a valuable resource for future reference when you need to check out specific claims. It’s like having your very own copy of the Snopes version for evaluating psychological myths and urban legends.

Maybe you want to know the answers to the eleven true-false statements at the beginning of this article. Here’s the condensed version. Get the book to get the full version. All eleven statements are false.
　
References

Gilovich, T. (1993). How we know what isn't so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. Washing, D.C.: Free Press.

Hines, T. (2003). Pseudoscience and the paranormal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Kida, T. (2006). Don't believe everything you think: The 6 basic mistakes we make in thinking. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Lawson, T. (2006). Scientific perspectives on pseudoscience and the paranormal. New York: Prentice Hall.

Lilenfeld, S., Lynn, S. J., Ruscio, J. & Beyerstein, B. (2010). 59 great myths of popular psychology: Shattering widespread misconceptions about human behavior. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Randi, J. (1982). Flim-flam! Psychics, ESP, unicorns, and other delusions. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Sagan, C. (1997). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. New York: Ballantine Books.

Shermer, M. (2002). Why people believe weird things: Pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time. New York: Holt.

Stanovich, K. E. (1998). How to think straight about psychology (9th edition). New York: Addison-Wesley.

Vyse, S. (2000). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Is Tiger A Sex Addict?

2010-02-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

First of all, is there really such a thing as sexual addiction? If you Google the phrase you will get a million and a half hits. Google sex addict and you will find over two million references. These terms are definitely popular.

What is an addict? The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines it as "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming." So why has society decided to describe habits as addictions? It all started when society accepted the notion that habits were a "disease" that needed to be cured by special programs, experts, or religion. This became official when the prestigious American Medical Association decided in 1956 that alcoholism was a disease. From this point onward addiction has had a complicated and controversial history.

And we all know diseases must be treated by experts. Well, not always. The medical community is well aware that many diseases automatically go away. This is called spontaneous remission. The basic problem with this perspective is that the vast majority of people who are addicted to something don’t change because of any treatment program. They give it up for other reasons of their choosing. Well over 75% of people with addictions quit on their own.

The concept of addictions began solely as an explanation for alcohol abuse. It caught the public’s fancy because it seemed like such a simple way to understand inexplicable behavior. Eventually, the term began to be used for any behavior that occurred outside some arbitrary social norm. If a person gambled more than others, she had a gambling addiction. If an individual spent too much time shopping, he had a shopping addiction. The same word is now used for any behavior a person spends a lot of time doing. The computer age has allowed the addiction vocabulary to grow like weeds in our lexicons.

Men of influence, money and power have always been on the prowl sexually since the beginning of time. Some societies accept the fact that their king, prime minister, president, or other head of state is going to have a mistress and several affairs. Other societies are appalled when this happens. People differ in their expectation and acceptance of multiple partners. As you know some countries even condone multiple wives as a sign of wealth and power.

Is there anyone alive today that hasn’t been told that Tiger Woods has a sexual addiction because he had sex with multiple partners? I wonder if he would have earned this label if he had not been married? Can you name a non-married male movie star who has had multiple sex partners. Are they thought of as sex addicts? Or do we refer to them as players, eligible bachelors? Are there any men who secretly or openly envy their behavior? Are there any women who dream of being one of those partners? Think George Clooney or Warren Beatty.

What do we gain by deciding that Tiger Woods is a sex addict? Actually, nothing. Maybe we feel comforted that there is a label for such behavior. Society loves labels because it simplifies things and helps us think we really understand something. In fact, labels often make us run in circles instead of giving us clarity. If the answer to the question "why is Tiger a sex addict?" is that he has had many sex partners, this seems perfectly clear. It gets a bit unclear when we ask another question, "Why has he had so many sex partners?" The answer is an unsatisfying, "because he’s a sex addict." Labels make us run in circles when we think are walking in a straight line.

How do we decide who does and who does not have an addiction? This is a murky question because there are few acceptable criteria for answering this question. Most people leave the answer to the "experts." Unfortunately some of these experts are self appointed with little expertise or background in understanding the controversy surrounding addictions. Many addiction experts are former addicts with little or no scientific training in medicine or psychology. It seems a bit like a social reprobate who gets religion and is immediately an expert on God and the bible.

Is it possible that addictions have gained such acceptance because money might be involved? After all, if any addiction is a "disease" then someone has to provide a "cure" — at a fee. The treatment for addictions is so popular that it has a special name, rehabilitation or "rehab" in popular parlance. Did I mention money? For the curious, you might be interested to know that the clinic Tiger has decided to use costs between twenty and forty thousand dollars for a mere six weeks. Unless you are wealthy, it is best not to become a sex addict.

Most psychologists who are scientifically trained in treating "addictive" behavior see it as a problem only if it interferes with normal functioning. This seems puzzling in the case of Tiger Woods. By all accounts, until his affairs became public, he was still the world’s greatest golfer. None of his liaisons kept him from winning tournaments. He was still loved by fans. His friends never left him. Where was the dysfunction? The only part of his life that really mattered was his relationship with his wife.

What is the problem here? The problem is a private one between he and his wife. In this country (not so in all countries) married men are not expected to have sex with other women even though at least a quarter of married men admit to having had an affair. This number could probably be doubled and still be accurate.

What are society’s expectations for famous people who get caught in an extramarital relationship. The drill has become fairly commonplace. Tiger is using the standard play book: Silence, then an acceptance of the "addiction," checking into a sex rehab clinic, and finally making a public apology.
Immediately after Tiger’s public apology on Friday, the reaction was mixed with 53% percent saying the apology was sincere while the rest didn’t think so. A local television station went to a golf course and asked golfers what they thought. The male golfer said he believed Tiger and people should now leave him alone. A female golfer thought the apology was phony and did not accept his apology. When asked what Tiger could have said that would convince here he was genuine, she said that nothing he could say would change her mind about him.

Could we as a public have lived without all the sordid details? Did we really have to insist that Tiger’s apology be broadcast for all the world to see and hear? Maybe the question is why we humans are so voyeuristic when it comes to celebrities. The answer is probably on an Internet blog somewhere.

Religious Illiteracy

2010-02-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

According to the latest Pew Poll entitled U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 83% of Americans identify themselves as religious. This figure would make the United States the most religious nation in the developed world. Most religious people would be proud of this finding which proves how alive and vibrant religion is in this country. Religious conservatives never tire of reminding the rest of the nation that America is, and always has been, a “Christian nation.”

When we look more deeply into the details of this survey we find some interesting surprises. The number of people who claim "no organized religion" has doubled since 1990 (more men than women claim to have no religious affiliation). When age is taken into consideration, 25% of young adults say they have no religious affiliation.

From its founding, many Americans have insisted we are a “Christian” nation which has generally meant a Protestant nation. This Landscape Survey shows that Protestants are quickly losing ground. A mere 51% of Americans now call themselves Protestant. Since it appears this trend will continue, this country will very soon become a minority Protestant nation.

What Is Religious Literacy?

Before we go any further let’s decide what we mean by religious illiteracy. Of course, to be religiously literate is the opposite of being religiously illiterate. To be religiously literate has nothing to do with one’s faith. It has to do with a shared vocabulary and basic knowledge of what a specific religion is about. Professor Diane Moore, Religion Professor at Harvard Divinity School believes a person who is religiously literate should have an understanding of:

• the basic belief systems of world religions
• the diversity within each belief system
• how religion affects social events, culture, politics
• the role religion has played in history

You can see that Professor Moore makes a distinction between what she calls a “personal devotional practice and the academic study of religion.” Most scholars who study religion believe there is a difference between learning religion which is devotional and learning about religion which is more objective, cultural, and historical. One is not more important than the other.

The Scope of Religious Ignorance

I think religious illiteracy exists because there is a tendency today among religious people to put more emphasis on religious piety than on religious knowledge. There are about 4,200 religions in the world so it is understandable that most people cannot have much knowledge about all of these religions. However, you would think that most people would be conversant with their own religion. This assumption would be mistaken. American religion tends to be Bible-based — a Gallup poll in 2002 discovered that 93% of Americans own a Bible. But do they know what is in it? The answering is a resounding “No.”

The Christian Century magazine ran an article in November 2009 on Biblical illiteracy. The article referred to a survey in 2007 (Kelton Research) that was later captured in headlines across America: “More Americans Know Big Mac Ingredients Better Than Ten Commandments.”

A 1950 Time magazine article mentioned that Professor of Religion, R. Frederick West, had tested over 2,000 students in his years of teaching. Most of these students had religious backgrounds. In spite of this training, most of them could not even name the four Gospels or had the slightest idea what Jesus stressed as the two greatest commandments.

Another religion professor, Stephen Prothero, points out in his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t that 67% of Americans admit to treating the Bible seriously in that they believe answers to all of life’s basic questions can be found in the Bible. In spite of this elevated view of the Bible, only half of these same Americans can name even one of the four gospels. More astounding is that most of them cannot name the first book of the Bible. This adult ignorance of the Bible holds true for young people. Half of all high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah are the names of a married couple in the Bible.

The irony here is that Christians want the rest of the world to honor the Bible. They, themselves, only honor it by picking and choosing what they pay attention to in the Bible. Religious illiteracy is even more pronounced when considering any knowledge outside one’s own religion.

Why is Religious Literacy So Important?

At this point, you may ask, “So what?” Why is everyone making such a fuss about religious literacy? Remember, religious literacy has nothing to do with one’s belief system, whether devout Christian or confirmed atheist. For better or worse, Biblical knowledge is imbedded within Western art, music, literature, philosophy and politics. To fully understand how religion relates to cultural interests is to better understand life in general. Professor Prothero believes that a well informed citizen of this country needs to have a minimal acquaintance of basic information in the Bible. But that is not enough because the world is quickly becoming a global village. This means we need to understand the “core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.”

Daily, we are exposured to global issues that are by shaped by religion. "If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they're both Muslim, and you've been told Islam is about peace, you won't understand what's happening in Iraq,” says Professor Prothero. He further adds, “If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it's so? If you want to be involved, you need to know what they’re saying. We’re doomed if we don’t understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can’t outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda.”

Not only does religion affect politics and national decisions in all countries, understanding biblical allusions in Western literature is impossible without a basic knowledge of common bible stories. Think of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol and the reference the Ghost of Christmas Present makes to the nativity. What about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where he uses the biblical story of the Hebrew people to highlight the struggle of the Joad family?

Even Hollywood gets into the act. If you saw the movie Mission Impossible you may remember the character Tom Cruise played who receives a strange email from Job@Job3:14 (never mind that this is not a possible email address). Biblical names pop up all the time in the movies: The spacecraft in Deep Impact that was destined to save earth is named Messiah. Matrix Reloaded is loaded with people who have biblical names: Trinity, Seraph, Cain, Abel and Malachi.

Religions of other cultures can shed light on current events. Most people see the Somali pirates as desperate men trying to “make a living” in an impoverished country. What few Americans know is that this behavior is grounded in the behavior of Muhammad and his friends after they moved from Mecca to Medina in 622. This migration from a thriving commercial center to a remote farming location left them without work or a means of supporting themselves. To avoid starvation and death Muhammad used an old Arabian tradition called ghazu which we would call kidnaping and ransom. They would attack caravans and capture the camels and their drivers. The owners of the caravans could get their property back of they paid the appropriate ransom. The Somali pirates are using a time-honored tradition for making money.

Why is it important to know this? It is possible that official denunciations of these pirates will have more impact if they come from Muslim leaders. It’s as if a foreign country would denounce the evils of subprime lending practices in America. Many people here would discount these condemnations as mere un-American rantings. Americans would pay more attention if their own leaders said the same thing. This is not to say, for example, that other non-Muslim countries should not be involved in dealing with Somali piracy. Understanding the historical setting of Arab piracy can help countries find more effective solutions to this problem.

Religious illiteracy can greatly contribute to increased human prejudice, misunderstanding, and violence. This is not to say religious literacy is the sole cause of these human frailties but it certainly hinders humankind’s attempts to offer “respect of pluralism, peaceful coexistence and cooperative endeavors in local, national and global arenas” says Professor Moore. She wants people to know that “religious illiteracy is often a contributing factor in fostering a climate whereby certain forms of bigotry and misrepresentation can emerge unchallenged and thus serve as one form of justification for violence and marginalization.”

Examples of these tensions belong to a very long list: anti-Semitism and the treatment of Muslims in countries where they are a minority. Perhaps even worse is the belief religious bigots of all religions share that declares "we are right and you are wrong." We see this in Christianity between Roman Catholics and Protestants. How many hundreds of years have Sunni Muslims and Shi’i Muslims been fighting?

Can Religious Illiteracy Be Converted to Religious Literacy?

Many religion professors believe the answer is "Yes" if this country will put religion back into standard education. This suggestion immediately raises concerns about the separation between church and state. However, the the U.S. Supreme Court has made a distinction between teaching religion in the schools and teaching about religion in the schools. The former is prohibited, the latter is encouraged.

In 1963 The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that schools could not require Bible reading in the classroom. The ruling stood even after an appeal was upheld which meant that the case went on to the Unites States Supreme Court. The highest court in the land also upheld the notion that teaching religion was prohibited (only one Justice dissented) even if it was done indirectly such as reciting the Lord’s Prayer or reading Bible verses without comment.

Nevertheless, the Justices made the point that knowing about religion should be part of every child’s education. The majority opinion was written by Tom Clark who said, "It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion … and its relationship to the advance of civilization."

Professor Prothero strongly supports teaching about religion in our public schools.

"Training in religious literacy provides citizens with the tools to better understand religion as a complex and sophisticated social/cultural phenomenon and individual religious traditions themselves as internally diverse and constantly evolving as opposed to uniform, absolute and ahistorical. Learning about religion as a social/cultural phenomenon also helps people recognize, understand and critically analyze how religion has been and will continue to be used to justify the full range of human agency from the heinous to the heroic."

Another advantage of religious literacy is the ability of people to think more critically about religious claims that constantly assail our sensibilities. Once people are trained in religious literacy they can learn to question the accuracy of universal claims such as "Islam is a religion of peace" or "Judaism and Islam are incompatible."

These religious scholars are all in agreement that our country should start teaching courses in world religions in middle-school followed by a required course in the Bible during high school and then making college students take at least one course in religious studies. These classes would avoid all faith-based teaching and religious dogma. Even though these types of classes could not guarantee the abuse of religion, they just might “make it more difficult for such bigotry and chauvinism to be unwittingly reproduced and promoted.”

References:

Apczynski, J. (1982). Foundations of religious literacy. New York: University Press of America.

Bowker, J. (2006). World religions: The great faiths explored & explained. New York: DK Publishing.

Kurtz, L. (2006). Gods in the global village: The world's religions in sociological perspective. New York: Pine Forge Press.

Moore, D. (2007). Overcoming religious illiteracy: A cultural studies approach to the study of religion in secondary education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nash, R. & Bishop, P. (2009). Teaching adolescents religious literacy in a post-9/11 world. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing.

Prothero, S. (2008). Religious literacy: What every American needs to know--and doesn't. San Francisco: HarperOne.

Wright, A. (1993). Religious education in the secondary school: Prospects for religious literacy. New York: David Fulton Publishers.

Scientific Illiteracy

2010-02-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

A few decades ago, Jon Miller who was the director of the Public Opinion Laboratory at Northern Illinois University, discovered that 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate. That’s a lot of people!

This means that only 5% percent of Americans were scientific literate. What did this mean? In his survey he tried to find out if people (1) understood the scientific method, (2) knew its common vocabulary, and (3) appreciated its social impact. Dr. Miller did not expect the average American to understand the minutiae of science but merely be conversant with its broader concepts and aims. But even this was difficult for many people who believed the earth is only ten thousand years old; even more people didn’t believe the universe began with a gigantic explosion.

Another poll a few years later found similar results but with different questions. Half the people in this survey said they had been in contact with someone who had died; two thirds admitted to some type of extrasensory perception (ESP) event; one third said they had visions or were clairvoyant. We would expect these results from people living in a time of superstition and ignorance such as the Middle Ages. However, we now live in an age of science.

These polls were twenty years ago. Perhaps Americans have become a bit more knowledgeable since then. I’m afraid not. A more recent poll was conducted in December 2009 by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Not much change. About a third of the respondents in this poll believed they had been touch with the dead; one-fifth had experienced a ghostly experience and one fourth believed in reincarnation.

Has science had no impact on our consciousness? There is almost nobody alive today who is not affected by science. We take for granted the innumerable advances of scientific without really understanding how hard scientists work to understand the universe and life within it. Because most people cannot fully understand the inner workings of science, we are ignorant of how laborious the quest for new knowledge really is.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, British scientist James Lovelock wrote in Science Magazine that people "take so much for granted, wholly forgetting how hard won was the scientific knowledge that gave us the comfortable and safe lives we enjoy. We are so ignorant of the facts upon which science and our scientific culture are established that we give equal place on our bookshelves to the nonsense of astrology, creationism, and junk science. At first, they were there to entertain, or to indulge our curiosity, and we did not take them seriously. Now they are too often accepted as fact."

Science has been too successful. It’s contributions are legion. Scientists have become victims of their own successes. These successes are so stunning that the dividing line between fantasy and reality often becomes blurred to the average person. Many people think that if science can put a man on the moon, then it is reasonable to believe that people from other parts of our universe can visit us. The gap between what scientists know and what the layperson knows is diverging at an unbelievable pace. Because science is advanced by very smart people who use a tremendous amount of brain power to discover new knowledge, we lay people cannot hope to keep up, even marginally, with the scientific advance of knowledge.

As we can escape cultural and mathematical literacy by expanding our minds and learning new ways of thinking, so it is with scientific illiteracy. Yet, there are many forces holding us back from doing this. Some of these forces begin at an early age. For years, teenage girls have known that to be popular they had to hide their intelligence and interest in science and math. Until they became millionaires because of the Internet, Geeks were the marginalized arm of the youth culture.

Another force that fostered scientific illiteracy began in the universities in the 1990s among humanities scholars. They borrowed an idea from French intellectuals insisting that objectivity was a myth — merely a social ideal. In other words, students in non-science classes were being taught that the laws of physics were no more real than the beliefs of astrologers.

A major force for promoting scientific illiteracy has been television. Producers quickly discovered that illiteracy in matters scientific could make them wealthy if viewers were told they were merely being entertained. Pseudo-documentaries dealing with psychics and UFO conspiracies became popular fare for the American television audience. Even CNN’s Larry King got in on the act by promoting people who made money telling people they could communicate with the dead.

The politics of the Republican party, which had been hijacked by right-wing evangelicals, became another major force for spreading scientific illiteracy when it openly opposed mainstream science in areas such as global warming and stem cell research. These politicians got rid of the scientific advisory office for the legislature. Politicians then took aim at research budgets by under-funding projects and even doing away with some governmental science agencies.

Amid all this turmoil over science, the religious right decided they would try to convince people that evolution is "only a theory." What they didn’t say was that gravity is also a theory but evolution is a more solid scientific theory than the theory of gravity. They attempted to convince scientifically illiterate people that intelligent design was a scientific alternative to evolution. Curiously, they never promoted it as a science but as a media event. It was only when they had to prove their case in court before a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania that their agenda was exposed for all to see. The verdict of the courts have consistently decided that Intelligent Design is a thinly disguised form of evangelical religion.

During this time, newspapers began trimming back and even dropping reports on what was happening in science. Movies jumped on the anti-science bandwagon and insisted on stereotyping scientists as social misfits who continually got in the way of non-scientists. Movie director, James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) has publically stated that the movies generally "show scientists as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains."

A survey several decades ago at Northern Illinois University found that the general public perceived a scientist as "a person who neglects his family; pays no attention to his wife; never plays with his children; has no social life and no other intellectual interests; bores his wife, children and friends; is always running off to his laboratory; and [gasp!] may even force his children to become scientists!"
These perceptions were not from people who had never finished grade school but from mainstream, educated Americans. When Harvard University graduates (really smart people) were asked to fill out a scientific literacy survey half of the graduating seniors did not know the difference between an atom and a molecule.

Why is all this concern about scientific illiteracy such a big deal? In what way does science matter? It matters because as citizens of a democracy we are asked to make important decisions on issues that our ancestors never confronted. Carl Sagan expresses this concern in his book The Demon-Haunted World: "I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about [what is happening around her]."

Asteroids have hit the earth for millions of years. Small ones continue to pelt us regularly. It is highly likely another big one will hit us again sometime in the future. The last big one was so destructive it wiped out the entire population of dinosaurs on our planet. The next one could wipe out the human race. Only scientists can find one in time and then have the means to prevent a catastrophe. If Americans don’t support funding for this kind of science, the result could be the end of humanity.

Other serious issues that can have a dramatic effect on the planet we live on include: tropical deforestation, overpopulation, airline safety, disease and genetic defects, radioactive waste. The list is almost limitless. Dr. Sagan continues by saying, "How can we affect national policy — or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives — if we don’t grasp the underlying issues."

This responsibility extends to those we have elected to run our country. Of all the members of the U.S. Congress in the last hundred years, less than one percent have had any significant background in science. Is it possible that the last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson? Perhaps President Obama, though lacking scientific training does not appear to lack sympathy and support for science.

Science also matters because a democracy depends on its citizens being able to understand public issues. If we cannnot understand what is happening around us on a daily basis as it relates to science, then we will be unable to make informed decisions about emotionally charged topics such as global warming, homosexuality, stem cell research, and evolution. Scientific literacy is not about knowing the details about the inner workings of science. It is about understanding just enough to be engaged in public debate. In their book, Science Matters, Robert Hazen and James Trefil say that "every citizen is faced with public issues whose discussion requires some scientific background, and therefore every citizen should have some level of scientific literacy.

Another reason Hazen and Trefoil give for scientific literacy is that we live in a universe that is based on only a few laws of nature. From the moment of birth until our deaths, everything we do is a result of these natural laws. They believe that we can enhance our lives by embracing the "exceedingly beautiful and elegant view" of how nature operates. "There is intellectual and esthetic satisfaction to be gained from seeing the unity between a pot of water on a stove and the slow march of the continents."

They remind us that our understanding of our world has moved from mythology to scientific discoveries. Intelligent and sincere people used to believe that the sun rose in the east and set in the west because it was being driven by a god who carried this fireball in his chariot pulled by magical horses. Humans can now appreciate the sun as a star that is one of billions upon billions of stars. Hazen and Trefil ask the question, "How . . . can anyone hope to appreciate the deep underlying threads of intellectual life in his or her own time without understanding the science that goes with it?" We are fortunate to live in a time where we have the capacity to see farther and deeper than our ancestors.

Since science has discovered so much in the last four centuries, how can we laypeople possibly hope to understand the bare essentials of science? This is possible because all of science is built upon basic and simple ideas. A limited number of natural laws can explain almost everything we experience in our lives.

Hazen and Trefil suggest there are only eighteen laws of nature that "bind all scientific knowledge together." They go on to say that "the things you need to know to be scientifically literate tend to be a somewhat mixed bag. You need to know a few facts, be familiar with some general concepts, know a little about how science works and how it comes to conclusions, and know a little about scientists as people." If you are interested in furthering your own scientific literacy, I’ve provided a list of books below that you can read.

Science is not merely something we have to put up with. In the last 400 years, it has allowed us to fulfill the dreams of ancient people by flying through the air, curing diseases, communicating with each other over enormous distances and even leaving the confines of our planet. We have begun to understand life in ways unimaginable to our forefathers. As non-scientists the rest of us must not only support science but be able in small ways to enter the public dialogue about its power and benefits to humankind.
　
References

American Association for the Advancement of Science A. A. (1994). Benchmarks for science literacy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Hatton, J. & Plouffe, P. (1996). Science and its ways of knowing. New York: Benjamin Cummings.

Hazen, R. & Trefil, R. (2009). Science matters: Achieving scientific literacy. New York: Anchor Paperback.

Mooney, C. & Mirshenbaum, S. (2009). Unscientific American; How scientific illiteracy threatens our future. New York: Basic Books.

Rutherford, F. (1991). Science of all Americans. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Sagan, C. (1997). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. New York: Ballantine Books.

Trefil, R. (2007). Why science? New York: Teachers College Press.

Wynn, C. & Wiggins, A. (1996). The five biggest ideas in science. New York: Wiley.

Cultural Illiteracy

2010-01-17T12:06:00.000-08:00

In the last article, I wrote about numerical illiteracy which is called innumeracy. In continuing this series on illiteracy, we’ll focus on something called cultural illiteracy. As an aside, I want to make clear that I’m not using the term illiteracy in a negative sense. No person is completely literate in all fields of human knowledge. This series is meant for us, myself included, to understand those areas of our lives that can be changed to help us live a fuller life.

This next topic, cultural illiteracy, does not refer to being misinformed about other cultures but rather being misinformed about one's own culture. The concept of cultural illiteracy was first brought to our attention by English professor, E.D. Hirsch in his book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. For Americans, culturally literacy includes a vast multitude of information from the mundane such as understanding street signs to the more remarkable works of Shakespeare.

To be literate as an American means being able to interact with these aspects of our culture and speak accurately about it. Cultural literacy doesn’t mean you are an expert on Shakespeare. It does mean you have a somewhat familiar understanding of who he was, what he did and some of his more famous quotes.

Many people think that cultural literacy means being fluent with literary classics that have historically been part of a liberal education. Not so, says Dr. Hirsch, because literacy can even embrace a wide range of trivia including current slang words and phrases. In our high tech culture this means we understand such words such as Twitter, blog, and smart phone -- alongside knowing who Julius Caesar was. Cultural literacy is not only knowing what a word means but also being able to use it correctly in conversation with others.

Not being aware of current events is one of the hallmarks of cultural illiteracy. If you have ever watched Jay Leno’s Jay Walk, you know that an astonishing number of people cannot recognize a picture of the Vice President of the United States. Some younger Americans are notorious for avoiding newspapers, weekly news magazines and books such as novels and biographies. It’s the avoidance of resources about the world around us that pushes us towards cultural illiteracy.

Dr. Hirsch believes that culturally literacy is the bedrock of a democratic society. A democracy depends on its citizens to make choices about how they want their country run and who is to run it. This means it is important for people in a democracy to effectively communicate with one another. As you know, communication is impossible without a shared body of knowledge. You have probably been frustrated by trying to talk with someone who had no background to understand what you were trying to say. The question arises, "How can we talk to one another without a shared background of basic information?" Because America has such a strong component of cultural illiteracy, we no longer talk to each other -- we yell, we call names, we instruct, but we don't listen.

The more people who are culturally illiterate, the more fragmented our society becomes. Maybe one of the reasons our country is so politically polarized is that so many people don’t know much, if anything, about our founding fathers. What were some of the issues Jefferson and Madison talked about? Why was John Adams so important in the production of our Constitution? If all our political information comes from talking heads whose only purpose is to promote a specific agenda (or as they say, to "entertain"), then we wind up basing our political decisions on someone else's biased opinions rather than facts.

Cultural literacy is about more than being able to read and write. It involves learning and having a fund of knowledge that is imbedded within out culture. For example to be a culturally literate person one might need to know about important documents such who wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. What is important about the date 1776? What does the figure of speech "nose to the grindstone" mean? What is DNA? Who was John Brown?

By this time you might object that the search for cultural literacy is nothing more than mere rote learning of historical trivia and meaningless facts. This is something educators are trying to move away from, you say. Aren’t educators trying to use new teaching methods based on experiential learning and critical thinking? You would be correct to bring this up. However, I don’t think it has to be a forced choice.

Having new learning tools doesn’t automatically eliminate any old ones that are still of value. When Einstein introduced relativity to science, Newtonian science was and is still legitimate. When science then moved to using even newer tools such as quantum mechanics, it did not throw out the tools from Newton and Einstein.

Likewise, we should continue using experiential learning and critical thinking in the educational process. This does not mean we then need to become culturally ignorant. But doesn’t this mean there will be too much material for people to learn? Information has exploded so quickly, people have barely enough time to keep up. Wouldn’t teaching cultural literacy just take valuable time away from our other ongoing, personal educational goals (our personal education is never finished)? Why is cultural literacy so important?

Past president of the American Federation of Teachers, Ed McElroy, says that if our society "made sure that all students, regardless of race, income, or neighborhood, were exposed to a rich, challenging, sequenced curriculum in important subjects, schools could make a much bigger difference than they already do."

In other words, we need to teach more than learning how to read (a "mechanical process", Dr. Hirsch calls it). Reading needs to be within a context that is "content-rich." A significant portion of people in our culture lives without a fund of basic knowledge. This keeps them from functioning more effectively because they do not understand what is often being said. For example, let’s say you are a sports fan and you hear someone tell you that the local team has risen phoenix-like from last place to taking the conference championship. Does this sentence have anything to do with the city of Phoenix, Arizona? Was the person talking about the graduating players going on to play for the University of Phoenix? Was a subtle reference being made about NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander? A basic understanding of Greek mythology would have immediately made sense of this comment. The phoenix was a mythical bird that died every thousand years by being burned to death and then reborn from the ashes. The reference to "phoenix-like" now obviously means the local team rose like the phoenix from the ashes of defeat to a new life of a winning championship.

Or take another example. A friend of yours says that a mutual friend is a woman who "doth protest too much." Why would a person use such strange language? Whatever does this mean? If one knew this was a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the meaning would become apparent. First of all, the word "protest" meant something different in Shakespeare’s day than it does ours. When we use the word today we are talking about denying or objecting to something. In Shakespeare’s day to protest meant to make a vow or make a solemn declaration. This expression in the play meant that when the Player Queen made vows or declarations, they were so over the top that she lost all credibility to her listeners.

Although many people may have heard the words "phoenix" or "protest," understanding the meanings of these words requires that fund of basic knowledge we've been referring to, a "common point of reference." Only when we understand the meaning of the words that are used within our culture can we understand one another.

For some people, reading is difficult for a number of reasons. For others the skill is just unfamiliar and we know that most of us would rather not do unfamiliar things that make us uncomfortable. Yet, as we all know, the more we do something unfamiliar, the more familiar it becomes. We become more culturally literate by not only reading more but also by reading about things we don’t know much about. As we become more knowledgeable, reading will seem less like a chore and more like something that brings us pleasure.

If you are wondering how culturally literate you are, you can check this out at a website that allows you to test your cultural literacy. Testing your cultural literacy has nothing to do with your intelligence or education. It is a way of finding out the gaps in your cultural awareness. It is only when we become aware of our deficiencies can we begin to take action to improve ouselves. This website can open up new avenues of ideas and information for you to find out about. You can find out your cultural strengths and weaknesses privately at a website called The Literacy Company.

If you are interested in helping children become more culturally literate, you can look at Dr. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Series of books that he began as a project in 1997. It includes books for all children between Kindergarten and Sixth Grade. Each book includes the knowledge that a child at a specific grade level needs to know as she or he begins their journey towards cultural literacy. My guess is that reading these books with your child will also help you fill in your own gaps. If you are a parent who home schools your children you will find these books an invaluable reference.

For adults who want to improve themselves in this area, Dr. Hirsch has written, with two colleagues, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Each chapter in this dictionary is devoted to a specific topic such as "Idioms," "Technology," "Mythology and Folklore." Amusingly, Micky Mouse is an entry in the Mythology and Folklore chapter. This book can be used by all adults for increasing awareness of the culture in which they live and living that cultural richness on a daily basis.

To become culturally literate can mean more than being familiar with the now but also with our past. So much of who we are as a people and how we think can be easily traced to civilizations from thousands of years ago. Finding the connections between these ancient peoples and our world of today can be fascinating and mind-expanding. Most of us know that a thumbs up for a movie is meant to tell us that we would probably like that movie. However, in ancient Rome a thumbs up meant a gladiator was now condemned to death. Much of our language and thought patterns germinated in Greek and Roman culture. Finding these origins helps us to find our roots. Here are some books you can think about if you would like to expand your awareness of who you are and where you came from.

Bloom, A. (1988). The closing of the American mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hirsch, E. (1988). Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know. New York: Vintage Books.
Hirsch, E., Kett, J. & Trefil, J. (2002). The new dictionary of cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Levine, L. (1997). The opening of the American mind. New York: Beacon Press.
Macrone, M. (1999). Brush up your classics. New York: Gramercy.

The next article in our illiteracy series will take a look at scientific illiteracy. This is important not only from a curiosity standpoint. We live in the age of science. In the long history of humanity, it was only "yesterday" that science began to change our ability to more fully understand our world. It also gave us the means to have more control over our world. It is a tool for satisfying our curiosity, tackling difficult problems, and letting us experience the awe and wonder of this strange and mysterious universe in which we live.

Innumeracy

2010-01-10T22:19:00.000-08:00

Innumeracy is "the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy," says computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter. It describes "a person’s inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives." Although Dr. Hofstadter coined the term, mathematician John Allen Paulos made the word part of the common vocabulary with his book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. Since its publication in 1989, it has been translated into thirteen languages.

Dr. Paulos is not saying that everyone needs to be a mathematician, but rather one must be able to understand the consequences in everyday life of how our society uses numbers. The consequences of innumeracy are not as visible or obvious as the consequences of illiteracy. Nonetheless, they can be just as profound when they contribute to "confused personal decisions, muddled governmental policies, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience." He wonders if this is why people would buy a home having a $2,000 monthly mortgage when they only make $4,000 a month? Or why a person might borrow money at thirty percent interest in order to buy a large screen plasma television?

The difference between illiteracy and innumeracy is that the former affects mostly uneducated people whereas the latter affects people who are both intelligent and well-educated Many people who are extremely competent in many fields of knowledge and can understand complicated issues may tremble when confronted with numbers or probability.

For example, some people won’t travel to other countries because they are afraid they might be killed by a terrorist attack. Yet, they continue to travel locally in their car. The odds? Your chances of dying overseas by a terrorist attack is about 1.6 chances out of a million, yet you have a 1 chance in 5,300 of dying in the family car.

Journalist, Chip Scanlan, tells about his innumeracy and what negative effects it had in his professional career as a writer. "In high school and college, I was a terrible math student. I flunked geometry, was totally bewildered by algebra. Trigonometry I ran from. I had trouble balancing a checkbook. As a reporter, I was painfully aware of my innumeracy every time a percentage appeared in my story. Budget stories made me cringe. Without math skills I was not as effective a journalist, and my readers weren't as well-served as they could have been. It wasn't just the mistakes I made or the agonies I went through trying to figure things out. As a reporter I regurgitated statistics without understanding them because I didn't feel capable of interpreting them. I'm sure I missed stories and screwed up others because of my weak math skills." He goes on to say his dilemma is not uncommon in the journalism business.

Sometimes, people can make numerical claims that are publicly embarrassing. Years ago when the speed limit debate was taking place in America, a Washington lobbyist, Clarence Ditlow, made a public, numerical goof. He published an article explaining why he believed raising the speed limit above 55 miles per hour would be dangerous.

His heart was in the right place because he was trying to educate people against driving too fast by explaining how far a car can travel in one second. He made the following calculation: "A vehicle traveling 55 mph covers 807 feet in one second, almost three football fields. At 70 mph, a vehicle covers 220 feet more or 1027 feet in one second." Anyone who has driven a car knows they are not going the length of three football fields each second. If you care to do the calculations, you will find that at seventy miles an hour you only travel 103 feet each second.

Innumeracy has many faces for many people. One such face is seen when people say that "there is no such thing as a coincidence" — a belief that philosopher Sigmund Freud held dearly to his heart. By underestimating the likelihood of coincidences, people believe that something strange or mystical must be afoot when a coincidence happens. For example, most people would consider it a coincidence that if in a room of only twenty-three people any two people would have the same birthday. "Common sense math" appears to support this notion. Most people would calculate it this way. Since we would need 367 (counting a leap year) people in a room to be absolutely certain of two people sharing the same birthday, then it seems "obvious" that there is only a 6% change of this happening with only 23 people in a room (23 divided by 367).

Innumeracy can also raise its head in financial matters. Assume your friend invested $1000 in the stock market and the next day her investment went up 60%. Yay! The next day the price dropped 40%. Your friend might shrug and say "Great, I’m still 20% ahead in my investment." "Wrong," you would say. You would tell her that she actually lost $40 of her original investment. Here’s how you would explain it to her. Her 60% gain the first day would leave her with $1600. The next day when this $1600 went down by 40% she was left with only $960. If this doesn’t make sense you can easily check it with a simple calculator.

Statistics is one of the fastest ways for innumeracy to come bubbling to the top in any conversation (if no mathematicians are present). Although developed in the eighteenth century mainly for the purpose of developing a theory of gambling games, statistics today are the mainstay of pollsters. Commonly, innumerate people decry the results of polls because they don’t understand how it is done. The statistics that comprise polling can be baffling because it seems impossible that enough people could be polled to account for a country’s entire population. How can asking a small group of people what they think of an issue be used to say that a certain percentage of all Americans believe something specific about that issue?

Additionally, we know that people are not honest all the time so how do we know that people being asked personal questions by pollsters are going to be honest? Mathematicians have come up with a clever solution to the problem of lying that could be used by pollsters to account for any lying from the people they question. Dr. Paulos gives an example in his book of how someone could estimate the number of people in this country who might engage in a potentially embarrassing sex act (use your imagination here). Suppose you randomly asked 1000 people whether or not they engaged in this unusual sex act. Just asking the question is useless because there obvious reasons why a person would avoid being honest about their sexual behavior.

However, let’s say that each person is asked to flip a coin of their choosing. Before the question is asked they are told to flip the coin and privately look at the result of the coin flip. If the coin lands on heads, they are supposed to answer "yes" to the question being asked even if they have to lie. If the coin shows tails, they are to answer truthfully. Now the person being polled knows that nobody will ever be able to know if he or she answered the question honestly or not.

Next, each person flips their coin and looks at it in secret prior to being asked the sex act question. Some say "yes ," others say "no." When we have finished asking the thousand people let’s say we find that 620 of them answered yes. So, how do we interpret the results? Simple. We know that 500 people answered yes because odds of getting heads is 50%. We throw out these answers. Now we know that of the 500 people left who answered truthfully, 120 people, or twenty-four percent, answered "yes"honestly about their sexual behavior.

One of the ways that statistics teachers teach numeracy in an introductory statistic course is to have their students solve the well-known Birthday Problem mentioned above. With simple math tools of probability, it can easily be shown that there is a 50% chance that a room of 23 people will have the same birthday. Gamblers have used this fact as a "bar bet" for years by betting someone with odds in their favor. The gambler would rig the odds so that even though they lost half the time, they would win more money when they won the bet than they would lose when they lost the bet. There are many variations of this non-obvious observation. Dr. Paulos notices that "at least two people living in Philadelphia must have the same number of hairs on their heads." Figure that one out.

There is an interesting stock market scam that is based on innumeracy but isn't legal so you may not run into it. It goes something like this. Let’s say you received an unsolicited email from a person claiming to be a financial advisor and he was predicting the direction a particular stock would take in the following week. The week goes by and the prediction comes true. Your next email explains his company can do this because of their just-developed proprietary computer model. This email also makes another prediction of the same stock. Surprisingly, they are also correct on this prediction. This happens six weeks in a row and by now you are becoming interesting in how they can do this and seeing mega-dollar signs in your eyes. You are hooked because now the "advisor" tells you that for a reasonable sum of money you can buy into their program and become wealthy in a matter of months. Most people would jump at the chance.

Here’s the problem. What you would not know is that this person sent out the same first letter to 32,000 people. Half of these letters told people the stock would rise, the other half are told the stock would drop. This means that 16,000 people would have gotten an email with the correct prediction. Which ever way the stock actual goes, these 16,000 people who got the correct prediction would get a second letter with a new prediction. The "advisor" would use the same principle: 8,000 people would be told the stock would go up while the other half that it would go down. This pattern continues until 500 people have been given six correct "predictions" in a row for the stock.

These are the "marks" for the scamer. They are all now sent the "if you pay a fee you will have untold wealth" letter. They are told that they only have to pay $500 in order to win big next week. They each figure they can easily get their $500 back in just a week. Since you don’t know 499 other people just got the same letter you send in your money and start planning for retirement. Since everyone sends in the money, the stock "advisor" is now $25,000 richer in just six weeks. Of course, nobody ever hears from this miraculous advisor again.

Belief in predictive dreaming and precognition is also enhanced through innumeracy. How many people have you heard say something like this? "I dreamed my brother, who lived in another country, died one night and when I awoke I received a phone call saying he had had a heart attack in the night and died." This experience can feel spooky to both the dreamer and people who hear the story.

Simple math can easily explain this precognition. I won’t bore you with the calculations but the numbers show that of all the people in the world who remember their dreams (we usually have more dreams than we can remember) about 3.6 percent of all the people will have a predictive dream on any given night. Although that number seems small it is significant because there are so many people in the world. We can expect that millions of people would have at least one precognitive dream every year while hundreds of thousands would do so each night.

When innumeracy and human emotions are combined (which invariably they are) we find that most people make many decisions that are wrong -- especially when it involves risk. It has been shown many times that people will avoid risks when seeking gains, but choose risks to avoid losses. This principle was co-discovered by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel prize winner in economics.

Let’s say you had the choice of winning $30,000 or making a bet that has an 80% chance of of winning $40,000 or a 20% of winning nothing. Most people would take the thirty grand even though the average gain from the second choice would be $32,000.

If the scenario were changed so that you it was certain you would lose $30,000 or given a second choice where there was an 80% of losing $40,000 or a 20% chance of losing nothing. In this case, most people would take the second choice even though it would be wiser to take the 80% change of losing $40,000.

Numbers are a part of who we are because we live in a world saturated by numbers. Technology, which is all about numbers, is advancing exponentially as is information from our technology. Thanks to the ubiquity of computers and the Internet, we are bombarded hourly with information and we have to decide whether to accept new information or reject it. Fortunately, we don’t have to make all the choices by ourselves.

We can make wise choices by using numerate people who understand numbers and know how to do legitimate research. One such example is the team of Barbara and David Mikkelson. They are excellent researchers and are experts at sniffing out rumors, urban legends and new myths. Their website, Snopes, often uses mathematics to find out the truth of dubious claims wending their way through cyberspace.

Numeracy is also required of all scientists since mathematics is the language of science. We need to listen to scientists for getting through the daily barrage of fluff, lies, and half truths poring forth from media outlets and their so-called experts. Even well-meaning and smart people can be propagators of nonsense by being innumerate. Scientists, mathematicians and engineers can help us get clarity on many issues. For example, Peter Aczel, is an audio engineer who has debunked nonsense in the world of high-end audio. His online magazine, The Audio Critic, is the place to head if you plan to spend any significant amount of money on new or even used high-end audio equipment. His back issues begin in 1991 (even though he began his magazine long before then) and well worth the read. His no-nonsense intelligence and sharp wit that does not suffer fools gladly will keep you entertained for hours.

Religion and innumeracy are common bed fellows. America is the most religious country in the world, yet for all its popularity, religion can promote certain myths as absolute truth. For instance, some religious people believe in a literal Flood as described in the book of Genesis. Fortunately, most religious people understand this story as a metaphor with much deeper meaning than can be had from a merely literal rendition.

Why is it difficult to accept this story literally? That is because the story is loaded with numbers — numbers that some people don’t take seriously or avoid even if they take the story seriously. The writer of this Genesis story says that ". . . all the hills that were under the whole heaven were covered . . ." Taken literally, this means the entire surface of the earth was covered by at least 20,000 feet of water which would make the water about four miles deep (the deepest part of our planet’s oceans in the Mariana Trench which is over 6.8 miles deep). That was a deep flood. Even worse, the Flood Story tells us that it rained steadily for 40 days and nights for a total of 960 hours. Doing the math tells us that the rainfall was at least 15 feet per hour! This is enough of a downpour to sink an aircraft carrier, let alone a small wooden ark with thousands of animals on board.

Mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote his book on innumeracy because, in his words, "I'm distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems so indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens."

Resources:

Best, J. (2001). Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling numbers from the media, policians, and activists. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Dewdney, A.K. (1996). 200% of nothing: An eye opening tour through the twists and turns of math abuse and innumeracy. New York: Wiley.

Paulos, J. (2001). Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. New York: Hill and Wang.

Illiteracy

2010-01-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

Webster's New Third International Dictionary defines "illiteracy" as "The inability to read or write, or the actual or perceived state of being uneducated or insufficiently educated."

When we think of illiteracy we immediately think of people in third world countries or the few dirt-poor areas of highly educated countries. Since the United States puts so much emphasis on education we don’t see illiteracy as a major problem in this country. We are leaders in research and educational opportunities. Our scientists have received over 130 Nobel prizes in the last hundred years. Americans have also received a number of Nobels for literature and economics.

Britain has some of the most prestigious universities in the world with Oxford and Cambridge. California has ten world-class campuses in its system — more than most countries have universities. This is not to mention the multitude of California State University campuses. Add to all this the multiple universities almost every state in America offers in addition to private universities in many states and you can begin to see why American is a leader in education and research. The University of California has produced 65 Nobel laureates with the Berkeley campus, alone, having twenty-five faculty who have won the prize.

So what does illiteracy have to do with America? Unbeknownst to many, we have forty-two million adults in our country who simply can’t read. That is a lot of people! Surveys have found that another fifty million people read no better than a 5th grade reading level. Is this just a passing problem? Not really. Twenty-five percent of all teenagers drop out of high school. Even sadder is that of those who do graduate, another twenty-five percent are at the same educational level as someone who stopped their education at the eighth grade. These numbers are huge. To illustrate the size of the problem, there were fewer people who voted in the 1980 presidential election than there are illiterate people in America. How few? Sixteen million fewer voters than those who cannot read or write.

Most of us don’t know about nor do we want to think about the appalling amount of illiteracy in this country. How can a society that is becoming more dependent on increased technology hope to find enough workers with these rates of illiteracy. One of the assumptions of our founding fathers was that a democratic society would be based on generally high levels of literacy.

In 1955 Rudolf Flesch stunned this country with his book, Why Johnny Can’t Read. Time magazine called his book "the outstanding educational event of that year." Since then, experts have found out that American illiteracy is still growing at an unacceptable rate. We are told that every year 2,250,000 more adults are added to the rolls of functionally illiterate people in this country.

I am going to do a series of blog articles on illiteracy, but not the kind that has been identified above. There are other kinds of illiteracy that involve people who can read and write just fine. There are several types of illiteracy that apply to educated people. For the next several weeks, I’m going to write an article on each one of these.

One type is called" innumeracy." It is a word devised by a cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter, who used to write a column for Scientific American. In the early 80's he used this word to describe the inability of anyone who could not understand the basic numbers that are used in our society. Then, in the late 80's, a mathematician, John Allen Paulos, wrote a book entitled Innumeracy. Is not knowing how to use numbers really a big deal? According to the experts the answer is "yes," because struggling with numbers has a high social cost such as wasted money, bad social policies, and unnecessary risks.

Somewhat related to this is another kind of illiteracy called scientific illiteracy. Mark Twain spotted this problem a century ago when he said, "The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so." We live in an age of science yet surveys have shown that many people have not shed the baggage of superstition. We are a people who have a very long list of things we believe in that "just aren’t so": lucky numbers; healing through pyramids, mind power, crystals, homeopathy, etc.; extrasensory perception; subliminal learning; biorhythms; astrology (55% of American teenagers believe in astrology; 75% of people in Great Britain believe it is scientific); UFOs. Much of scientific illiteracy occurs because people don’t understand what science is, what it is supposed to do, and how it is done.

Cultural illiteracy was a problem E.D. Hirsch identified about twenty years ago. Dr. Hirsch taught us that reading was not enough. We must also understand what we read and this can only be done if we have a basic fund of knowledge that we bring to our reading. Cultural literacy is only obtained when a society shares a basic knowledge of geography, history, literature, politics, and democratic principles. When Jay Leno finds random people on the street who cannot give him the name of the current Vice President of the United States, then something is wrong. Recently, we had the sad experience of someone who aspired to this office who had appalling gaps in her understanding of the world. She even relished in the idea of calling herself a "rogue." Perhaps she might have been more reluctant to do so if she knew the definition of the word. The dictionary says it means (1) a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel. (2) a scamp. (3) a tramp or vagabond. (4) in biology it refers to an usually inferior organism.

Have you ever heard of religious illiteracy? It has come to light that many religious people are not well-versed in their specific religion. For Christians to whom the Bible is the foundation of their faith, a recent survey discovered that only thirty-three percent of Evangelicals actually read the Bible; only twelve percent do so daily. Professor Stephen Prothero is chair of the religion department at Boston University. He has found that "Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about their religion." He gives examples:

Protestants who can’t name the four Gospels
Catholics who can’t name the seven sacraments
Jews who can’t name the five books of Moses

His research has shown him that faith in American is "entirely devoid of content." His conclusion is that America is "one of the most religious countries on earth and also a nation of religious illiterates."

Although I may throw in a few more examples of different types illiteracy, the final blog will be on financial illiteracy and will be authored by a guest. He is Jason Kelly, whom I greatly admire as a person of substance and highly knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the market and other financial concerns. He is the best-selling author of five books on investing and personal finance. I think you will really enjoy his article on this blog. Prior to his blog article, you can check him out at http://www.jasonkelly.com/

The Amazing Story of Dr. Katze

2009-11-08T21:26:00.000-08:00

Most of you know that psychotherapists need to be approved by a state licensing board in order to ply their wares. In California this means that after graduation from graduate school, a person needs to get three thousand hours of experience as an intern under the supervision of a licensed psychotherapist. They must then pass an exam in order to be licensed to practice.

Most states believe that the licensing of psychotherapists will "safeguard the health, safety and welfare of the citizens" of the state. This is a nice thought but does licensing really work this way? As far as I know, there is no research that has unambiguously found that licensing promises professional competence.

This is not true of all professions. For example, if your physician is what is called "board certified" there is a very good chance that she has passed some difficult requirements to reach this level. Psychologists have to jump through demanding hoops to obtain the level of Psychology Diplomate which is equivalent to a board certification.

Even these diplomas on the wall, however, can be bogus. Earlier this year the Attorney General of Connecticut issued an urgent warning to the public about the sale of bogus medical board certifications. Certification boards keep springing up around the country. For example, the Science-Based Medicine website has identified a "Pseudomedical Pseudoprofessional Organization" called the US Autism & Asperger Association (USAAA). The site identifies this organization as a scam because

USAAA Staff, Board of Directors, and Advisory Board rosters are filled with physicians and other professionals who, for the most part, lack real credentials in biomedical research related to autism. What do they have to recommend them? Overwhelmingly, they are parents of children with autism. I find it hard to muster the contempt that I usually feel for people whose pseudoscientific eruptions contribute to horrible outcomes. Instead I feel an almost futile sense of sorrow.

I remember a time in the 80s and 90s in California when increasing numbers of Master’s level students were being certified to practice psychotherapy. Soon, there were too many psychotherapists for the population and these practitioners had to find other ways to stand out from the crowd. To find ways to have an edge over the consumer’s dollar, many psychotherapists signed up for any therapy du jour class that just happened to be available. Many of these new approaches were based on pseudoscience. With more than five hundred unproven therapies available for psychotherapists, it was easy for these psychotherapists to slip into believing they were receiving training in legitimate therapies. The pull of the dollar got them to overlook the fact that there was no evidence their new therapy technique really worked. They believed in it because it seemed to make some of their clients better. These psychotherapists didn’t understand the power of the Placebo Effect and other reasons why people can get better in spite of the specific therapy.

This sad state of affairs came about because many Master’s level training programs gave short shrift to the science of psychotherapy. In a two year degree program there is often not enough time to educate students on the importance of critical thinking and the underpinnings of science for helping people. Consequently, there is wide variability among training programs so it is possible for a person to be poorly trained and still pass a licensing exam. There are psychotherapists today who are licensed and practicing who don’t think that science has anything to contribute to the field of psychotherapy.

In 1991, I presented a paper at the 99th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association about "psychology, mysticism, superstition and the paranormal" in the field of mental health. One of the examples I gave of bogus offerings to the public by psychologists was a licensed psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area who was advertising her services as a "Critter Consultant." If you had a problem with your pet you could take your beloved animal to this person and she would use her special supernatural powers to telepathically deal with your pet. My paper was called, Hungry People Who Buy Imaginary Food with Real Money (let me know if you would like a copy and I can send you a PDF version of it).

All of these bogus therapies, offered by equally bogus credentialing boards, became an irritant to a psychologist by the name of Steve K. D. Eichel. Dr. Eichel came up with a creative way to show the public how prevalent phony credentialing had become. He thought it would be interesting to see if his female companion (who had no college degree or any association with the profession of psychotherapy) could get some fancy psychotherapy credentials. He decided to see if "Dr. Katze, Ph.D." could get some bogus credentials.

Dr. Eichel found a website for credentialing lay hypnotists, paid the application fee and waited. Within a couple weeks his companion, Dr. Katze, was a certified lay hypnotist. The reason they decided on starting with this credential is that most lay hypnosis associations agree to accept without question certifications from other, similar organizations for lay hypnosis.

By using these reciprocity agreements, Dr. Katze was on her way to filling up a wall with impressive sounding and fancy looking certificates. By doing nothing more than sending organizations checks she was able to get certificates from the National Guild of Hypnotists, the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and the International Medical & Dental Hypnotherapy Association. She also became a Professional Member of the American Association of Professional Hypnotherapists.

A dream came true with so little work. If it was this easy, they decided to check out the next level called Board Certification. Now, this is serious. Physicians can practice medicine as soon as they are licensed. If they become "board certified" they are saying to the public they have achieved additional expertise in a specialty field like pediatrics or surgery. We psychologists go to the next level by working for Diplomate status which indicates we have reached the top of our profession.

An organization called the American Psychotherapy Association was originally established "to advance the profession of psychotherapy." Dr. Eichel discovered they offered the powerful credential of Diplomate. When Dr. Katze applied for this certification the American Psychotherapy Association requested both a resume and what is called a curriculum vitae (a listing of graduate classes and post-doc experience). After very little effort the computer was fired up and was able to print out some very impressive looking documents to comply with these document requests. The fake documents provided a long list of previous jobs such as having been a consultant for the bogus "Tacayllaermi Friends School" in New Castle, Delaware.

At this high level of certification, it is customary for the licensing body to request copies of corroborating documents. Although this request was fully expected, the association never asked for transcripts for the universities listed or copies of all the certificates listed, or for any copies of state required licenses to practice. This information is basic and required when applying for Diplomate Status. Additionally, after a licensing board reviews these documents, the candidate is then examined by other professionals in a face-to-face context. None of these were ever asked for. The credentialing board never met Dr. Katze.

The check went out and another certificate came in the mail within a couple weeks — and a very impressive certificate it was. Dr. Katze was now a certified Diplomate because she had passed "rigid requirements" for this status. The certificate was accompanied with a letter of congratulations for her achievement. The letter told her she belonged to a "select group of professionals who, by virtue of their extensive training and expertise, have demonstrated their outstanding abilities in regard to their specialty."

It is hard to believe that anyone without any expertise could accumulate these credentials by merely asking and paying for them, but this is what happened. It is even more inconceivable when the applicant is not a human. Yes, Dr. Katze was the name Dr. Eichel gave to his cat. His last application even gave the organization a hint to this effect by imbedding a clue. Look at the name of the Friends School in the third paragraph above this one and read the name of the school backwards. If you are interested in reading Dr. Eichel’s original article you can find it here.

Living In La-La Land

2009-10-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color

of the waves that break upon

the idle seashore of the mind.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—

If all humans daydream, why is it seen in such a negative light? Why is something so easy and natural seen as a waste of time? How can something so universal to the average human be considered pathological?

It appears that daydreaming can have real benefits:

It can make us feel active and energetic by relieving boredom.
It can be similar to meditation by activating our parasympathetic nervous system.
It might help us be more aware of who we are.
It may be a key for researchers in understanding consciousness.
It can organize our conflicts into meaningful solutions.
It helps to enhance social skills and relationships.
It appears to be a wellspring for creativity.

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
—Steven Wright—

One of the first psychologists to scientifically study daydreaming is a retired Yale professor. Dr. Jerome Singer surveyed many different groups of people and found that most people’s daydreams are quite ordinary and not at all unusual. Dr. Singer’s book, The Inner World of Daydreaming, discovered that often daydreaming was a way for the brain to map out goals and doubts. Daydreaming as mental rehearsal can actually help you to be more effective in dealing with what is to come in the days ahead.

I remember years ago working with a woman whose husband was an NFL quarterback playing for a team that had surprisingly made it to the Superbowl. The other team was odds on to win the game easily. However, just the opposite happened. The underdog won the Superbowl game much to everyone’s amazement. Much of the credit went to this quarterback who had the best game of his career. He later told me that he had spent about twenty-four hours prior to the game thinking about nothing but throwing perfect passes. His "perfect" passing, which was not one of his strong points, carried his team to victory.

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my
accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway
from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie.
—Henry David Thoreau—

The amount of daydreaming varies a lot from person to person. Some people daydream as seldom as 5 times a day while others might daydream over 175 times a day. One finding of researchers is that people who daydream more than the average person tend to remember more content from their dreams at night.

Creative people also tend to daydream more than the average person. Daydreaming is usually a stream of consciousness that randomly moves from topic to topic. This randomness combined with high frequency is one of the determinants of creativity.

Every child knows how to daydream.
But many, perhaps most,
lose the capacity as they grow up.
—Dov Frohman—

It seems that daydreaming happens more often when we are bored or have no need to focus on the task at hand. How does this information apply to the real world? Some psychologists believe that we might be stifling creativity in our children by over programming their time. One study found that children who watch television at least three hours a day are less imaginative than children who watch only one hour a day. Of course, this study does not tell us which is the chicken and which is the egg.

The increasing use of drugs for children decreases daydreaming. For example, children with ADHD who are taking Ritalin are less creative than ADHD children who are not taking Ritalin. On the other hand, people with severe ADHD may daydream so much that they cannot focus on simple but necessary tasks.

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician.
I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music.
I see my life in terms of music.
... I get most joy in life out of music."
—Albert Einstein—

What drives the brain to daydream. It seems that daydreaming and night dreaming have something in common. It is a time when the brain assimilates the millions of data bits it continually receives. It must make sense of this chaotic, rambling information and does so during sleep and daydreaming. As with night dreaming, daydreaming helps the brain to solve problems and connect seemingly unconnected pieces of information. This latter function is what creativity is all about — finding the new by connecting pieces of the old. Various studies have shown that highly creative people from Albert Einstein to Walt Disney spent a lot of time daydreaming.

Active daydreaming can help us overcome personal problems. I had a therapy client who came to me because he had become sexually impotent in his marriage. This was before Viagra so we had to find a non-medical solution to his problem. His job was demanding and also involved a lot of daily driving. We found that during these drives, he spent a lot of time daydreaming about this problem and the negative effect it was having on his marriage. Wondering if changing the focus of his daydreaming would work, I asked him if he would like to spend his mental down time daydreaming about seducing and making love to his wife. His answer was not surprising. After doing this assignment not only faithfully but with gusto, he called me back in two weeks and told me he and his wife were having the best sex of their lives.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum.
It is rather the gift of an hour
which knows the plenitude of the soul.
—Gaston Bachelard—

It appears that there is a place in the brain called the "executive network." This area of the brain acts like a switchboard by combining the activity of different brain structures. This network is more sophisticated in adults than in children because it is not fully formed and operational until the early to mid-twenties. Neuropsychologist Dr. Karen Spangenberg Postal claims that we now know enough about this area of the brain so that parents can actually learn how to increase their children’s academic performance.

You can also use daydreaming to help yourself. Since you may already daydream, on average, about one-third of your waking day, why not use it to your advantage? The first step is to reinterpret the value of daydreaming. Instead of seeing it as a sign of laziness or time-wasting, view it as a way to enhance the quality of your life. Once you have given yourself permission to daydream, you no longer have to feel guilty for doing so. After this, you can anticipate and look forward to times of daydreaming. Some people actually schedule daydreaming times – these times can be as short as a few minutes to as long as you want. One final word. Let yourself get lost in your daydreams so that you are the passenger, not the driver. Some research has found that people who are not aware of the daydreaming content can be more creative than people who actively monitor their daydreams.

Thought is the labor of the intellect,
reverie is its pleasure.
—Victor Hugo—

Happy dreaming.

Have a New Husband by Friday

2009-10-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

The title of this book is enough to make any woman (and a few men) grab this book off the shelf and start browsing. Psychologist Kevin Leman has written thirty-two previous books for improving relationships between parents and children and husbands and wives. This latest book’s title follows his book for Moms called Have a New Kid by Friday. The subtitle of this book review tells you that you can "change his attitude, behavior & communication in 5 days."

The information in this book is not new but is presented in an engaging, down-home way as if he were in your living room chatting with you over a cup of coffee. The basis of his advice is what we all know to be the extraordinary differences between men and women. He begins by admitting straight up that men and women are different "species." This information is based on not only his decades of clinical work but the enormous research about brain differences between men and women.

His opening salvo will grab most wives immediately. Your husband can’t find the mustard in the refrigerator even when you tell him where it is. Eventually you "sweep" into the kitchen, open the refrigerator and quickly find the mustard. Dr. Leman then asks the rhetorical question, "Why is it that women always win at the lost and found game anyway?"

Every expert on marriage has emphasized that the secret to a successful marriage is communication. In the early days of marital psychology it was assumed that if a man could listen and talk like a woman everything would be just fine. The problem with earlier pronouncements on what makes a marriage tick is that these solutions were presented as obvious self-truths. Eventually, psychology used its scientific skills to study the matter. The pioneering work of psychologist John Gottman in Washington discovered that the key to better relationships is mutual respect. This seems self-evident but the irony is that communication between men and women can get in the way of respect.

Showing your husband respect is basically the core of Dr. Leman’s book, namely that respect trumps communication. That doesn’t mean communication is not important, it certainly is vital to a dynamic and healthy relationship. It’s just that women and men have such drastically different communication styles. Women need to share what they are feeling and are masters at minute details. When men are the recipient of this communication style, our eyes glaze over in about two minutes. When men begin to tune out, women feel they are not respected but then often turn around and respond in ways that are not respectful to their mates.

Men only want the facts and necessary information so that we can figure out things for ourselves. It’s not that we are aversive to details because we are not. Our details make women’s eyes glaze over. A man can get a woman antsy and looking at the clock in a few minutes as we recite the details of a baseball batter’s statistics or the details of an exotic sports car.

Because the communication of feelings is so important women need many friends to do this with. This seems perfectly natural to women. Consequently, they do not understand why we have fewer friends than they do. My wife is continually puzzled that I have "so few close male friends." For many of us men, our friendships are on a different plane.

Men don’t need to talk to each other every day — or even every week or month. We know our buddies are there for us if we need them and don’t need to constantly validate this fact. We men can have many acquaintances but few if any really close buddies. Dr. Leman echoes the experience of many men when he says, "As a guy, I call myself fortunate to have one really good friend..."

We enjoy activities with our male friends which may or may not include talking. We may talk about our troubles but in a way that is different from the "trouble talk" of women. I’m currently getting hassled by my insurance company about getting a fair reimbursement rate for the claim on my totaled car. When I "share" this with my male friends, the only emotion that presents itself is anger. We guys are good at talking about anger, but not so good at talking about disappointment, hurt, and vulnerability.

Dr. Leman reminds us that "Our brains are different, our body chemicals are different, our emotions are different, and we see life from completely different angles." He briefly reviews the research showing us how female and male brains operate so differently. The one that comes up often in the book is how well women can multitask and on well men can stay focused on the job in front of them. Both of these abilities have their assets and deficits but when they appear in a relationship, they can make a relationship volatile in a flash.

In a way, men are simpleminded so we tend to like to have a "job." We understand a job and we know how to focus on it. We don’t need to talk about it or if we do it is goal oriented about the job at hand. When men are complemented on doing something outstanding, our common reaction is that we "were only doing our job."

One of the most dangerous marital myths, says Dr. Leman, came out of the women’s movement when it insisted that men need to be more like women. Many women in the latter half of the twentieth century insisted that apart from out physical makeup, men and women are basically alike. As we now know the vast amount of evidence simply does not support this idea. Yet, Dr. Leman is an equal opportunity finger pointer by reminding men that if they had truly been doing their job correctly this crusade of emotional equality may never have had to take place.

So, if we are that different how can we ever live together harmoniously? Women are masters at relationships while men are as "dumb as mud." Consequently, females need to train us men in how to make a marriage work. Does this mean the author puts all the blame and responsibility for a healthy relationship on women? Not at all. He says this idea that women are the leaders and trainers is based on the notion that each person in a working group should be put in charge of those duties at which they excel.

This seems like a recipe for failure. After all, if men are so clueless when it comes to female relationships how can they change if these deficits are hard-wired? Dr. Leman cleverly tells women it is only a two-step process: (1) find out how men’s brains work and (2) use this knowledge to get them to perform new tricks. To begin this process, every women needs to know four simple pieces of information:

He wants to be a good husband.
He wants to please you.
But he doesn’t know how to do that.
He needs your help.

Later in the book, the author acknowledges that some men do not fit this template. Men who are abusive or men who have severe emotional problems may not be capable of changing. The question then becomes what to do. Not surprisingly, this issue is taken up later on in the book.

The foundation for having a new husband in the blink of an eye is to know and understand what your husband really wants from you. Often we men don’t even know this, so how can we be expected to tell you what we don't know? We don’t have to because the book spells it out in detail. In case you are wondering if I would share this explosive information with you, here it is.

Men need to be respected
Men need to be needed
Men need to be fulfilled.

The rest of the book walks you through each of these concepts by giving many examples of how to use these three principles. A man’s need for respect exists at all levels of society. When I have worked occasionally with teens and young men who have been in trouble with the law, they will often say trouble begins when someone does or says something to make them feel disrespected.

So how do you respect your mate? You do this by accepting a man’s limitations and emphasizing his strengths. We are not good at trying to figure out the important things you are saying to us because you give us too much detail. We need the facts, the headlines. We also get confused when you tell us your troubles because we want to fix it. If you have a problem, our brain immediately goes into fix-it mode so we stop listening. As a woman, you can sense this instantly, so you may try harder to give us more information thereby overloading our brain that is now focused on fixing your problem.

Our strength is we really want to love you but the only way we know how to show this is by doing things for you. Our competitive nature screws this up by thinking that bigger is better. We don’t get it that leaving you a short love note after we head off to work can be more important than blowing several hundred dollars on a dinner at an expensive restaurant.

I cannot do justice to how all of this plays out in the book. You need to get it, read it, study it and use it. None of the skills in the book are beyond the abilities of any women. Women are powerful (as compared to men) in a relationship but they often don’t know how best to use this power.

From personal experience, I can tell women that if you use the suggestions in this book, you will have your man more willing to meet your needs. Because of our emotional blindness, we may not even know we have changed. We will probably think you have made a dramatic turnaround yourself when all you have done is tweak a few knobs and twiddled a few dials in our very simple brain.

What might your result be from following the advice from this book? Perhaps this was best summed in a novel written in 1859. The famous novelist, Mary Anne Evans (better known as George Eliot), wrote a romantic novel called Adam Bede. In Book Six, Chapter 54, Adam and Dina pledge their love for each and seal it with a kiss. George Eliot then comments on the event with a familiar quote that has been used at countless weddings. "What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"

The Rabbit In the Hat

2009-10-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

With the exception of people within the magic community, most individuals are unaware of the role magic has planned in the history of the human race. When ancient peoples were confronted with the magic worker they took for granted the explanations about how the event took place. Almost universally, the explanation depended on paranormal or supernatural forces.

Two of the favorite demonstrations by magicians in the Middle Ages included (1) throwing a rope into the air and have it completely suspended by "nothing" and (2) dismembering an animal and then "raising the animal from the dead" by putting all the limbs and parts back together. A Chinese magician in the 14th century went a step further and combined these two effects by having a boy climb a length of leather strap that was apparently hung from the sky until the boy vanished. When the magician called for the boy to return at once, he refused. Angry, the magician climbed the leather strap and vanished. Spectators soon saw the boy’s body parts fall to the ground. The magician came back down and reassembled the parts. When he was finished, he kicked the body and "the boy stood up, complete and erect." All of this was observed and reported publically by an eye-witness.

Magicians have probably existed since the dawn of time. A story called "Bel and the Dragon" was written sometime in the second century B.C. The Persian king, Cyrus the Great, had a buddy named Daniel — who is the same Daniel from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. It seems Cyrus (whose god was Bel) was trying to convince Daniel (whose god was the Jewish god) that Bel actually came to the Persian temple at night and ate food left by the faithful. To prove his point he took Daniel to the temple holy chamber, showed him the room, left the food and proceeded to completely seal off the room so nobody could enter in the evening. Being of a more skeptical nature, Daniel, unbeknownst to the king had sprinkled a fine powder on the floor around the food. The next morning when Cyrus and Daniel entered the room, Cyrus said, "Aha! See? All the food is gone. Case closed." Then Daniel softly piped up (after all he was addressing the king) saying, "But, your majesty, look at those footprints on the floor. Let’s follow them from the food and see where they lead." Sure enough, they lead to a cleverly concealed door. When Cyrus had his men force the door open they looked in upon a group of priests feeding their faces with the god’s food. Cyrus was so angry, he killed the priests and tore down the entire temple.

We could go on and on about people through the ages fooling their fellow citizens through trickery. Now, you can imagine that if you could kill and resuscitate a person or make people think a god had eaten an offering, you would have enormous status and power. We have an immense amount of documentation about religious leaders such as priests and shamans using simple trickery — magic tricks — to get people to believe in their supernatural powers. Given the proper circumstances most of us are gullible. Prior to the Scientific Age, it was common knowledge that magicians could only perform their amazing feats through the help of devils and supernatural forces. Because of this belief those who performed these "miracle" were either venerated or feared. The latter group sometimes ended up dead.

Magicians have always used a two-part system for their magic: the Effect and the Method. Audiences only see the Effect and if the magician is really good, they will never know the Method. The test for all magicians, ancient and modern, is to separate the Effect from the Method so convincingly that nobody can figure out the Method. Although there are many ways to do this, one of the most common methods is called misdirection, both mentally and physically.

Experienced magicians also know that the belief system of the audience may determine whether the Method must be simple or complex. For example, modern magicians find it much easier to do the same trick as a pseudo-psychic than as a professional magician. They work much harder to fool their colleagues.

Neuro-scientists have found networks in the brain that are specifically adapted to provide humans with magical explanations for events they cannot explain. For example, a recent experiment was done with intelligent, college-educated people who thought their use of a voodoo doll had caused a study partner to have a headache. They did not know that the study partner faked the headache, so they assumed that something about the voodoo was actually affecting another person.

Magicians have always been a closed, secret society who passed on their secrets from generation to generation. The magician's oath has always insisted that anyone outside the magic fraternity was not to be let in on the secrets. For example, a club in Los Angeles called the Magic Circle is a confidential and exclusive club for magicians to gather. Outsiders may only enter through the sponsorship of a magician member. The society has a Latin motto: Indocilis Privata Loqui. I suppose it could be loosely translated, "keep your mouth shut."

In the 16th century the first magic book was written. Since then, there have been thousands of books written revealing some of the deep secrets employed by magic workers. Even today, anyone can walk into a magic shop and buy any book on magic. You can buy dozens of magic books on the Internet.

Yet, many people today still believe that any procedure they cannot explain must have a supernatural explanation. Religious healers use trickery to get people to think they are working miracles through the power of their god. Even highly intelligent people can be deceived about this. Many years ago, the prankster, Uri Geller, performed his paranormal feats to an audience of scientists at the Stanford Research Institute. He completely convinced all but one of the scientists that he had paranormal powers. The lone wolf was a psychologist and magician who was able to help unmask Mr. Geller’s tricks.

Today, professional magicians seldom claim supernatural powers and openly admit their trickery. Even though they fool people, the audience knows it’s a trick. But, what would happen if the magician convincingly told the audience he or she was performing these feats through the power of a supernatural entity? Several magicians have done this in the last century in order to educate people to the power of suggestion. After presenting themselves as having paranormal abilities and showing people miraculous feats, they then blow their cover and explain they are merely magicians. One such performer told me personally that after he made his presentation and confession, one audience member complained that they didn’t believe him. They suggested the magician was really paranormal and either didn’t want to admit or it or just wasn’t aware of his paranormal abilities. Amazing!

Another example of highly intelligent people being fooled by magicians are scholars who study ancient history and try to explain the role of miracle workers in various cultures. For example, one of the greatest New Testament scholars living today is Professor of New Testament in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Professor John Meier has written the definitive book on the historical Jesus. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus is a massive four-volume work that is seen by his peers as an "extraordinary achievement." In this remarkable work, he must deal with the miracles of Jesus and, as any good scholar would do, he attempts to define a miracle. His definition has three parts, the second of which states that a miracle is "an event that finds no reasonable explanation in human abilities or in other known forces that operate in our world of time and space."

The problem with this definition of a miracle is the fact that only professional magicians are capable of deciding if a miracle "had no reasonable explanation." Unfortunately, nobody every bothers to ask them. It does no good to check with other competent scholars who are not magicians. For example, sociologists study groups of people and their behavior. When they see a shaman, for example, perform a "miracle" they tend to take the experience at face value. This position is understandable because magicians are trained to perform the "impossible."

Problems arise when scholars do not take into account the complexities of the human brain. As was mentioned above, most people are by nature gullible given the right conditions. Humans also have the tendency to ascribe paranormal or supernatural explanations for events they find inconceivable. Our fallible memories also give the advantage to magicians. People who watch stunning magic tricks usually remember exactly what the magician wants them to.

Magicians have a skill they call "patter." As they talk to you during the trick they plant information into your mind that gets you to see and remember things that never happened.

Magicians love to hear people describe what they think they saw as they watched a magician perform. Once this eye-witness declaration is made to others, the phenomena of the urban legend kicks in. Researchers who study urban legends have shown that information received from a source that is perceived as reliable is usually accepted unconditionally. So if a friend tells you that a magician made a card rise from the table into thin air and the friend confirmed no strings were attached to the card, you would be inclined to accept this explanation — even though this is highly likely not what actually took place.

Magical thinking is all around us. Athletes who don’t change their socks before a game believe this behavior helps them play better. Gamblers are notorious for devising little rituals to help them beat the odds. Science has even shown that petitionary prayer only produces results no better than chance. Yet, religious people swear that their prayers for others really work.

Psychologists continually study how our brains deceive us into distorting and manipulating reality. People who are born with a natural knack for magic (similar to having a knack for music, sports, or writing) have been responsible for producing miraculous events for thousands of years. These folks have been intuitive enough about human nature to take advantage of brain deficits a long time before science can explain them.

Knowing that magicians have always had the ability to fool even the most intelligent people must keep us humble in declaring that we have all the facts about incredulous events regardless of what we call them: magic, impossible, or miracle. Any experience of this kind is never fully understandable without the knowledge of the professional magician. That knowledge is securely locked within the fraternity of magicians. The only way anyone can penetrate this inner circle is to take the time and make the effort to become a certified magician. All other attempts to understand anomalous experiences is based on incomplete understanding.

"You have offended my honor, Sir"

2009-09-17T16:00:00.001-07:00

By now, you’ve all heard about the ruckus caused by Joe Wilson (whose given name is Addison Graves Wilson), the congressman from South Carolina who called the President of the United States a liar to his face in public. The public place was the United States Congress which eventually included the entire world via television and the Internet.

No one is perfect and people can make major mistakes, like insulting someone. The usual procedure in a civilized society is to own up to the mistake and make a heartfelt apology. This is exactly what Joe Wilson did when he admited his behavior was wrong. Soon after the President’s speech the White House received a call from Joe. He apologized for his "inappropriate and regrettable" comments. Administration officials who took the call expressed appreciation for the apology and commented that this country needs "a civil discussion" to which Joe Wilson agreed.

This is the way we are supposed to handle human peccadillos. That exchange should have been the end of the matter — a regrettable incident put on the shelf and forgotten. Just the opposite has happened. Unfortunately, the apology was not the end of the story but the introduction to a larger story.

Our country once again displayed its amazing propensity for polarization. On one side the majority of people think Joe Wilson had crossed the line. His behavior was unacceptable and a poor model for this country's children. Others believe that Joe Wilson did the right thing. After all, freedom of speech is what makes this country great. In fact, Joe has become a folk hero to some people in this country for his courage in speaking out and representing the thoughts and beliefs of people who are afraid. Not only has he become a hero to some but they have used their pocketbooks to affirm their support. Soon after calling the President a liar, Joe received over one million dollars for his upcoming election.

Maureen Down, columnist for the New York Times, reported that supporters began wearing T-shirts and waving signs with brave slogans such as "Stand with Joe," "Joe 2012," and "Joe was right." What a lovely democratic display of free speech. Other more powerful people joined the applause. A congresswoman from Minnesota publicly declared, "Thank God for Joe Wilson." The executive of the American Liberty Alliance was thankful that finally someone had become brave enough to openly display "a defiant attitude."

These displays of bravado emboldened others to voice their well thought out opinions at an anti-Obama rally in Washington recently. Placards emphasizing civil discussions made such statements as "Trade Obama back to Kenya;" "We came unarmed (this time)" and "Bury Obama with Kennedy." At least we don’t need to be concerned that all this rancor might be tinged with racism.

Predictably, popular Obama-haters quickly became soloists in the choir. Rush Limbaugh threw more fuel on the flames of national loathing and bitterness when he said, "Every sentence out of the president’s mouth is a lie and what’s he [meaning Joe Wilson] supposed to do?" So now we know what the civil discussion looks like that Joe Wilson agreed was needed for our nation.

A disciple of Michelle Malkin’s blog threw his mouth into this civil discussion when he left a post reading, "I’d far rather be in Joe’s company than the presence of gutter-mouth Obama and his thugs." At least it’s nice to finally understand what the new definition of civil discourse means.

It seems this groundswell of support for Joe has given him a slight springiness to his step. He talked with reporters a few days after his heroic behavior and when he was done talking with them, he happily signed his autograph on a picture of his heroic outburst. Some of Joe's Congressional colleagues suggested that he also needs to apologize to them because he not only insulted POTUS but denigrated the dignity and decorum of the Congressional chambers.

Well, this was to much for someone who now believed in his heroic status. Here is what Joe said when asked on Fox news if he would apologize to his colleagues. "I apologized one time. The apology was accepted by the president and the vice president. I’m not apologizing again." Sounds like a hero to me.

Actually, Joe Wilson is carrying on a time-honored tradition in South Carolina politics. For a century and a half, lawmakers from South Carolina have displayed their own version of civil discussion. Historian Lewis L. Gould has written countless books including The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate. He says that Congress has seen these special civil gifts over the years from South Carolina members of this exclusive club in the form of "beatings, fistfights and wrestling matches."

This section of the country began its special contribution to Congressional decorum in 1856. Preston Brooks was a Democratic congressman from South Carolina who took umbrage at a speech made by a colleague, Senator Charles Sumner. Brooks went to the Senate chamber in what onlookers must have thought would be a verbal confrontation. Instead Brooks beat the living daylights of Sumner. Sumner tried to hide under a desk. Brooks attacked Sumner so violently that he ripped the bolted desk from the floor. He continued the attack with his stout wooden cane until Sumner, blinded by his own blood, staggered up the aisle, then collapsed and fell into unconsciousness. Did this stop Brooks? Nope. He continued beating Sumner until he busted his cane. Only then did he stop and walk out of the chamber.

Gould goes on to list other incidents by congressmen from South Carolina. In 1902 a Senator by the nickname of Pitchfork Ben Tillman decided to move debate to another level. He wanted to teach another senator a lesson in civility so he began a brawl by jumping over four chairs and starting a fistfight. In 1964, favorite son, Strom Thurmond initiated a shoving match which quickly turned into a wrestling match that lasted a full ten minutes. More civil discussion.

Those of us who have been parents of young children have dealt with trying to teach our children that violence is not the format for dealing with conflict. I can’t imagine how much harder this is now that our elected leaders, media people, and the rabid rank and file have decided that getting in someone’s face is now the accepted method for managing disagreements. "But Dad, Congressman Wilson called President Obama a liar and became a hero."

Parenting is going to get harder as long as attention and support is given to people in this country for being belligerent, lying, demonizing anyone who disagrees, and accepting uncritically everything they hear. We now have a large segment of our population that is governed and motivated by fear. It takes only a minute or two on the Internet to see and listen to a flag-waver who says, in all seriousness, "I’m so scared because our President is a Muslim and they are taking over our country." When I was growing up, Joe McCarthy (another fine example of an elected official) spread similar rumors and fears through the populace except it was the Communist devil that was spooking everyone.

In one of her columns, conservative writer Kathleen Parker reminded us that congressmen and other men of integrity in the nineteenth century had a specific, civil and honorable method for ending acrimony. In 1882, a gentleman by the name of Mr. John Goode insulted another gentleman, Mr. Bailey by calling him "a liar." Ahhh — such biting language. Ms. Parker then relates what a writer for the New York Times described as the ultimate solution for personal insults among men of honor — a duel. The writer declared that "Nothing but blood can wipe out this insult."

What a great idea. A method to settle disagreements once and for all. President Obama could approach Joe Wilson telling him he demanded satisfaction from Joe for being dishonored. The President would then signal this demand with a time-honored insulting gesture such as slapping Joe across the face with a glove.

Next, the President would pick his weapon and choose the field of honor. The only problem here is that dueling is illegal. Being a clever species, humans in the last hundred years have devised substitutes for dueling and it’s called sports. Can anyone deny that football or soccer are just duels without swords or bullets? Even a baseball thrown at a batter’s head is a form of a duel.

However, one of the more violent sports is basketball. Some commentators believe the NBA is more violent than other sports because the players are in continual contact. To make matters worse basketball players wear no padding or equipment to protect themselves. Some NBA coaches are convinced that basketball is as much of a contact sport as football.

After President Obama slaps Joe Wilson with a glove, he could declare the weapon of choice is a basketball and the field of honor would be the White House basketball court.

So let’s begin a new tradition. We could start it at the highest levels of our nation and use the Trickle Down Theory of Sport Economics to eventually move it to grade schools and kindergarten. It could be used to corral the craziness that has begun to grip our nation. Violence would be short-lived with the results being unequivocal.

The duel between the President and the Congressman would be a game of one-on-one basketball and could be televised nationally. Special uniforms would be designed for the participants with taxpayer’s money. On one side of the gym would be bleachers for the Obama haters while everyone else would be in the opposite bleachers. Naturally, all fans would be screened for other kinds of weapons.

Who would we have for referees? The Supreme Court, of course. All of these smart people would be given a written test on basketball rules and probably all of them would pass. Those who got a perfect score on the rules test would have to shoot free throws. The justice who hit three straight ones from the foul line would be eligible for the referee job. In case more than one justice mastered this heroic feat, they would keep shooting (not dueling) until the one with the most successive sinkers would win. Of course, the referee would not wear stripes but rather a distinguished jet black outfit.

We could hold tryouts for members of Congress to become cheerleaders. They could develop their own cheers that would represent their constituency. One side would have cheers like, "Kill him, he’s a liar." The other side might have a cheer along the lines of, "Money solves all social problems." This new political spectacle might even be bigger than world soccer. Las Vegas could contribute a significant percentage of gambling winnings to help ease the national deficit.

The loser of this faux duel would have to leave his job. Either Joe Biden would be president or South Carolina would be out a congressman (although Joe Wilson could keep all the money he made from being a hero). Does anyone know if Obama or Wilson have played basketball before?

Let the Game Begin.

What Good Is Research...

2009-09-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me recently what good is scientific research if "scientists are always changing their minds?" This is an honest question and one that many people wonder about. Unfortunately, the question, itself, is imbedded with several misconceptions about science.

When scientists "change their minds" it is not the same as when the rest of us change our minds. We can change our minds for many reasons. Our emotions might override our reason. This is something we learn to do in childhood. Children will often tell their best friend they "hate" them because the other child may have taken a toy without asking and won’t give it back. Our physical sensations can also take control of our intelligence. Maybe someone who would like to go shopping changes their mind because they are having a panic attack about going.

The influence of others can get us to change our minds. It can be from a trusted friend or family member. People in authority can easily get us to change our minds, especially if they speak with a great amount confidence and certainty. Con artists can get us to part with our money even though we don’t want to.

Science tries to avoid all these methods for mind-changing. Science began and still is dependent on only one source for change. Scientists rely on data or information that is reliable and valid. This information is collected in a highly systematic fashion so as to eliminate other sources of error. A simple example would be finding out the outside air temperature. Whatever instrument a scientist would use to measure temperature would need to be reliable and valid. To be reliable, the instrument must be able to accurately record the same temperature each time it is used. If it were an electronic thermometer and were turned off after every reading and then turned on to a different temperature, this would not be a reliable reading.

A valid measurement means that an instrument reads what it is meant to read. If the electronic thermometer was giving the same reading each time it was turned off an then on (reliable) but the results were really reading air pressure, then the thermometer would not be a valid instrument for deciding what the temperature was.

For an idea to be accepted, a scientist must collect data for a long time, sometimes decades. Then she must make sense of the data usually with complicated statistics. The next step is to turn it into a paper for acceptance in a professional journal. This is not an easy task. The papers are accepted or rejected by experts in the same field who read the article before publication and criticize it unrelentingly. Often the readers send it back to the author asking for corrections of mistakes they have found. When the readers are satisfied the paper contains the correct methodology and has come to conclusions warranted by the data, the paper is finally published in what is called a peer-reviewed journal.

When the article is finally published, the media may pick it up if they think the findings might be of interest to the general public. This can cause problems because the published paper is not the end point. Once it is published, the entire scientific community gets to study it, analyze it, and criticize it as they choose. Can you imagine your most cherished ideas going through a process like this?

Next, other scientists in the same field of interest will collect similar data and analyze it from a different perspective to see if they get the same results. If they do, then the scientific community is a bit more convinced the original ideas are acceptable. The end result is always based on the data, not what the scientists think. Until the data speak loud and clear, scientists will disagree on its meaning. Even then, with time, even newer data may come along and modify the earlier conclusions.

The average person would have difficulty with such a process regarding their most heart-felt beliefs. We often identify with our beliefs so much that our beliefs define who we are. For someone to come along and challenge our beliefs often feels as if they are attacking us personally. Imagine what it would be like if really smart strangers were constantly asking you to validate your beliefs and maybe even asking questions you might not even understand? Having a thick skin is a prerequisite for being a scientist.

Okay — let’s take a look at some of the research that psychologists have conducted recently. Growing older seems to have more disadvantages as the years proceed. Are there any advantages? It seems there might be, namely experience. What could experience possible offer seniors when memory seems to be less efficient and reflexes slow down? Let’s pick an occupation where age would seem to have no benefits over youth. How about being an air-traffic controller? This is a job where being alert, having quick reflexes and a good memory would seem to be paramount. Two psychologists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign decided to look into this question. They compared older and younger ACTs on fairly complicated tasks involved with the job. They also looked at simple mental abilities. What they found was that even though the younger people had an advantage regarding cognitive abilities, the older controllers, because of experience, were able to mentally compensate for mental agility that had declined due to age. It appears the older, more experienced people could do their job just as well at the young 'uns along side of them.

How important are grandparents? Other than spoiling children and being free babysitters, what do they offer to grandchildren? It seems they offer a lot, especially to children who are being raised in single-parent families. There also seems to be an advantage for children in step-family households. A study that looked at 1,315 adolescents found that spending time with a grandparent could offset the negative effects of not living in a nuclear family of origin. Specifically, these adolescents had fewer behavior problems and were more pro-social than teens who were not able to have a grandparent to stay connected with. The researchers suggested that maybe grandparents can offset any negative effects of children struggling with the effects of losing an intact set of parents.

Our DNA is involved in every aspect of our lives. This mechanism that Darwin didn’t know about is being more understood each day. Is it possible that traumatic events can have an effect on our DNA? In other words, can our genetic makeup be effected by what goes on around us? Many lay people think our DNA is like an unchangeable script that determines and drives our behavior. Continued research is showing that this is not so. A study at the University of Montreal looked at the DNA of people who were suicide victims and had also been abused as children. They found these people "exhibited changes in the DNA of the hormonal stress gene NR3CI." These changes had an effect on how the gene operated or how it was "expressed." Similar changes were not seen in a group of people who had not been abused as children or people who had died of natural causes. This is another corroboration of how our DNA can affect us as it is modified by what happens around us and to us.

Sometimes our kids look like one of us. Sometimes they don't. Parents are often at a loss to explain how their kid doesn't even resemble anyone on the family tree. So what, you might say? As I keep reminding you, psychologists love peeking into areas of human behavior that might appear insignificant and trivial. Dutch psychologists wondered if these differences might have any effect on any aspect of family life. We know that some men are overly concerned whether or not a child is really theirs. It seems that fewer women have this concern. When the researchers studied ninety Dutch parents, they found that Dads can indeed be affected by the possibility that they may be raising someone else’s child. It seems that Dads were more emotionally connected with their children if they believed their kids looked like them. Perhaps male brains have evolved this way over time because of a number of issues such as inheritance matters and the continuation of the family line.

"Girls gone wild" is an expression describing the hormonal chase that takes place in college age youth. With nature demanding that babies be made as soon as possible, it is common knowledge that college males are continually prowling for female sexual partners. Enter alcohol. It is an age-old assumption that booze can loosen up the most reluctant female in order to delight a male’s fantasy. How true is this? As with so many psychology studies that explode common myths, research at Loyola University found that college females were way off target in how much they believed their male counterparts expected them to drink. They asked males how much they would like girls who they were dating to drink. Then they asked the girls how much they thought the boys wanted them to drink. The results were surprising. It seems the girls were overestimating how much the boys actually expected. In fact they found out that the majority of the girls overestimated this by as much as fifty percent. This finding was not just a curious case of wrongful second guessing. The researchers also discovered that this inaccuracy can lead to dangerous behavior. The young women who were poorest at estimating how much they were expected to drink were more likely to binge-drink and to experience the associated negative consequences of alcohol.

Impulsiveness is something that many people have experienced. Like all human behavior, the frequency and intensity of this characteristic will vary from person to person. Sometimes, when we see this in young children it can either be cute or drive us to distraction. A study at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center along with the University of Montreal were interested in the following question: what might be the downside of early impulsiveness as these children age? They studied five-year olds and then went back and looked at their behaviors six years later. They found a relationship between early impulsiveness (inattentiveness, distractibility and hyperactivity) and a higher likelihood of involvement in gambling behaviors. The eleven year olds were more likely to play cards, bingo, or video poker. Although these kids were not throwing money at these games, the researchers saw a tendency in that direction because they were engaging in "gambling-related activities." If this research holds up, then it would be even more important to use psychology tools such as behavior analysis to teach children more control over their impulsive behavior.

Civility costs nothing...

2009-09-05T18:18:00.001-07:00

Have humans always treated each other like Americans are treating each other? Why have we given up on gently talking to and politely listening to each other?

I was reminded of these questions the other day when I received a comment on one of the past articles posted on this blog. You may not know that when people post comments about articles, I have the ability to reject them or allow them to be posted as a comment. My job is accept all comments that I don’t agree with and would like all comments to automatically be posted.

The only two criteria I have for not allowing comments to be posted are quite reasonable. The first is some form of identification. Public discourse is not possible if you don’t know who you are talking with. Therefore, people who make comments but don’t identify themselves will not see their comment appear on the blog.

Any comments that demean other people are also rejected. This second criteria means that comments must be polite, respectful and reasonably rational. Unfortunately, the most recent comment has violated both of these standards. Before explaining this further, I’m interested in putting this comment into a broader context.

Some people think Americans have become more uncivil and rude than necessary. For example, this summer the media has reported such bad behavior in local town hall meetings. Town hall meetings have a long history in this country. They began in New England and were examples of "direct democracy" in action where people could gather to discuss and decide issues of interest such as politics and health concerns. Each person was respectfully given a chance to speak while others listened and responded.

For the most part, these town hall meetings were courteous except for vocal minorities who believed their point of view was so correct that any means justified their behavior. Shouting, pushing behavior got a few people arrested for assault. I find it hard to believe this could be called democracy in action.
We also see this rudeness on television talk shows and hear similar behavior from the so-called shock jocks. Shouting instead of listening, name-calling, making comments unsupported by the facts are becoming more common. This lack of social graces could be written off if it weren’t for the fact that it improves ratings. It improves ratings because more people are watching.

Why do so many people find this kind of interchange so fascinating? Why not watch professional wrestling or cage fighting? Are we entering a new era where we are redefining what democracy is all about? Have we become a people who want to open our screaming mouths while keeping our minds closed to opinions that bother us?

We have been a nation that has been proud of our ability to settle our differences with civility and respect (oh well, the civil war only happened once). Now, some people have even said publicly that since they have a president they didn’t vote for and don't agree with, then he deserves to die. Our country was founded on the concept of free speech but it seems that freedom of speech only belongs to those who agree with us.

Sociologists are telling us of increased incivility in the work place. This often takes the form of an intimidating boss or supervisor. These people will display angry outbursts, degrade employees publicly, and even threaten them. Research at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion Institute in Israel found that managers who display public anger and have temper tantrums are perceived as getting better results than those managers who treat subordinates with dignity. This unacceptable bullying behavior may work — and result in promotions — because the corporate ethos often identifies these bosses as people "who gets things done."

Another more recent venue for uncouth and graceless behavior is the Internet. In years past, people would rant by sending a letter to the editor of the local newspaper but they would also identify themselves by signing their name. This way everyone could know who was saying what. Scientists are always disagreeing with one another but they are fully identified as to their speciality and academic affiliation.

With the Internet and the ease of having a platform for anyone to make their thoughts public, we are seeing a new form of rudeness and incivility called "flaming." The website WiseGeek defines flaming as,

the often deliberate act of posting or writing messages on Internet bulletin boards and message groups that have the intent of insulting or creating dissent within a group. An Internet flame is often filled with coarse language and personal insults. It is meant to hurt people’s feelings, get them fired up, and not to further conversation on a personal issue. It is never conversational, but it may be meant to upset an entire group, provoking conversation about someone’s flame
or on the practice of flaming in general.

What can make this even worse is not providing any identification by those who flame. Anonymity increases a person’s capacity for informational mischief. Anyone can put written information that consists of unsubstantiated accusations and bully tactics on the Internet and not have to take personal responsibility. The flamer can hide under a cloak of invisibility.

Even when anonymous people give criticism or feedback it can be done in a way that is not constructive. Some people believe this behavior also offers protection which would be absent if it were done in a face-to-face situation. Internet users who use cyberspace and are mean-spirited are called trolls within the Internet community.

Much more could be said about this but it brings me back to the start of this blog. As I mentioned, anonymous blogs and blogs that are disrespectful are rejected on my blog. Disagreements, no matter how severe, are encouraged. Here is what happened.

Someone who was afraid of being known publicly decided to respond to one of my blogs. They very cleverly signed their name, Anonymous. As if I wouldn’t have known this. To make matters worse, they did not even write a single thought of their own but cut and pasted the opinions of others who had a different perspective from those presented in my blog article. They used about a half dozen different sources to present their comments — I’m assuming, to present their beliefs about the matter.

Here is the disrespectful part. They sent twenty-three (yes, 23) emails beginning at 1:28 in the afternoon and continuing throughout the day into the evening. The last one was sent at 7:49 pm. The first seven were sent within the first hour.
Then twenty minutes later, it started again. Three more the next hour. Another 20 minutes went by and ten more cluttered my inbox the following hour.

Twenty-five minutes later the deluge slowed to a dribble: only two more showed up. Then two hours later the coup de grace was delivered with the twenty-third email.

My immediate reaction was the phrase running through my head about "having a life." Then I was puzzled why someone would take almost seven hours to send me quotes by other people. Talk about double anonymity. First, there is no name and then no thinking. This person is really afraid of something.

I’m still wondering what the point of these twenty-three emails was about. Was it a contest to see who could get the most people to agree on a specific point? This is the way junior high kids argue. Presenting a dissenting case does not rest on how many agree with you. It based on the evidence and rationale a person can bring to bear rather than finding people to quote.

Was this an attempt to overwhelm me with the opinions of Ph.D. writers who we all know are really smart. I was overwhelmed alright, but not as it was intended. My email box was cluttered and I had to waste my time reading this stuff.

Maybe the invisible Anonymous wanted me to feel badly for posting the article. Disappointingly, I did not drop to my knees in chagrin over having written such a bad article.

I’m almost finished with this rant. I don’t know if this person stumbled onto my blog, read one of them and was so incensed that they had to waste half a day trying to overwhelm me with the thoughts and ideas of other people.

Anonymous, if you are reading this, please don’t waste your time and my time again with such foolish antics. If you have something to say, use your own brain, name, and say it. If you are respectful I will put anything you have to say personally (except a lengthy diatribe) in the comments section.

Send me a comment, Anonymous, and tell me who you are and what you think about this article.

What Do Psychologists Do?

2009-08-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

Some people, when they think of psychology, think of a counselor talking and listening to someone with problems or feeding a pellet to a rat after it has run a maze correctly or teaching university classes. Others, more rarely, think of that old dinosaur, psychoanalysis. Although these things are part of psychology (the psychoanalysis part is dying a well-deserved death) they are only a very minor part.

Anyone in college knows that psychologists are teachers and researchers in the academic world. Another group of psychologists work in settings like hospitals and mental health clinics. In the latest survey only twenty-nine percent of psychologists were employed in stereotypical jobs such as research, counseling, testing or education. Another twenty-one percent worked in the health care system. Less known are those psychologists who work in other settings such as government, businesses, industry, nonprofit organizations.

Some psychologists work with other psychologists, some work with non-psychological scientists, and a few work independently. Collaboration with other professions helps psychologists contribute to almost every part of our society: politics, military, engineering, computer science, legal, medicine, schools, business and even economics. One psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, even received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

To give you an idea of the wide range of psychological specialities, here is a partial listing of the kinds of psychologists out there. If you are interested in finding out more about any of these specialities, just click on the link.

Cognitive and perceptual psychologists
Developmental psychologists
Educational psychologists
Engineering psychologists
Evolutionary psychologists
Experimental psychologists
Forensic psychologists
Health psychologists
Industrial/organizational psychologists
Sport psychologists
Neuropsychologists (and Behavioral Neuropsychologist)
Clinical Neuropsychologist
Quantitative and measurement psychologists
Rehabilitation psychologists
Social psychologists

It might seem strange that a psychologist would work with the federal government. However, most people don’t know the US Congress has several psychologists. The first was in 1993 when Ted Strickland from Ohio was elected to the House of Representatives. Today, psychologists are politically active not only at the federal level but also in many state governments.

Psychologists also act as consultants to government agencies. Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who is a cognitive psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, is a consultant for two federal agencies. He is an advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee. In his free time he chairs the Risk Communication Advisory Committee with the Food & Drug Administration. He is committed to using psychology to help government make policies and procedures more useable and efficient. Four years ago he explained to Congress how they could improve their communication with the American public.

You may have heard of Sport Psychology. This relatively new field of psychology began in Germany in 1920 with the founding of a laboratory devoted to sport psychology. Since then sport psychology has developed its own journals and training programs around the world. As you would expect, sport psychologists spend a lot of their time helping coaches and athletes with performance enhancement. They also try to help younger athletes discover ways in which physical activity can improve personal development. Sport psychologists are often former athletes, some of whom participated professionally in their sport. Dr. Roland Carlstedt who used to be a professional tennis player, coach and consultant is now the head of The American Board of Sport Psychology. His goal is to put sport psychology on a more scientific footing by minimizing guesswork and opinions about how to make athletes perform better.

Have you ever heard of a Violent Crime Resource Specialist? This is Dr. Kristen Beyer’s job description. She is a psychologist who works for the FBI conducting research on child abductors who murder and those who are serial murderers. She also is a counselor for the FBI employee-assistance program. Working alongside trained agents, Dr. Beyer helps them with any significant behavioral aspects of a case and can often provide them with valuable input based on her psychological expertise.

Some people will complete a doctoral degree in a specific field and then, instead of practicing their profession, will write about it. Some journalists who comment on legal issues, medical questions, or science problems have Ph.D.’s but really enjoy educating the public about their specialty area. One such person is psychologist, Laura Helmuth, Ph.D. who decided to look at psychology from the outside rather than the inside. She became a science writer specializing in the many areas that psychology touches. She now writes articles from a psychological perspective for the prestigious Science magazine.

Who would have thought a psychologist would be working for Microsoft? Paul ElRif, Ph.D. is one of a several psychologists at Microsoft who call themselves "usability engineers." These psychologists work with software developers to help make software easier to use. Dr. ElRIf does this by collecting information on what end users need and how they behave when using certain software. His data is collected through the use of customer roundtables and focus groups. The human element provided by Dr. ElRif helps the software developers make a product less mysterious and more accessible to those of us who use software (are there any people left who don’t use it?)

What do you suppose a psychologist does for a police department. Police psychology gained prominence years ago with the Los Angeles Police Department. Today there is a department within LAPD called the Behavioral Science Services unit. This department, headed by psychologist Dr. Debra Glasser, not only provides counseling for personnel and their families, but is involved in life and death matters that face law enforcement on a daily basis. Her team of psychologists are present during hostage negotiations, SWAT call-outs and are members of the Critical Incident Response Team. They also engage in ongoing research projects related to law enforcement.

Technology and education seem made for each other. Almost every school has computers. Students take notes on laptops, get class assignments through the Internet, and stay in touch with classmates using their cell phones. Psychology is making contributions in the field of technology and education. Dr. Marita Franzke used to work in the usability lab of U.S. West before they were taken over by Qwest but now is with Pearson Knowledge Technologies. Her research deals with helping people to learn better through the use of computers.

We all know that NASA is about space exploration: spacecraft, robots, rockets and all that high tech stuff. What about the human element? When we watch important space events, we see lots of people sitting behind consoles anxiously awaiting some technical outcome. When it occurs there is a lot of high fives, laughing and breaking out of the bubbly. Psychologist Robert McCann works at the NASA-Ames Research Center but is not one of those people at the console. His expertise in human information processing has allowed him to work on projects such as how pilots can best use a Head-Up Display in a cockpit. These "HUDs" project a picture of the instrument panel onto a glass panel mounted on the inside of the windshield. Consequently, a pilot does not have to look down and away from what is happening outside in order to see and read the aircraft instrumentation. Originally many difficulties had to be worked out because of human perception and how it works. Dr. McCann and his colleagues were able to use the psychology of perception to overcome these problems. Does he like his job? He loves it and believes that "unusual career paths can end up in very rewarding directions!"

So what do psychologists do? The is answer is just about anything that involves humans. Think of something humans do, whether mundane or critical and the likelihood is that a psychologist is lurking close by.

Nothing Is Better than Something

2009-07-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Imagine you have gone to your physician and were told you needed a specific medicine to help you get better. Then your doctor told you that if the medication wasn’t working you could make it stronger by diluting in water. You were told to keep diluting it until there was only one molecule of the medicine left in the water. You were told this small amount of the medication would be extremely strong and would cure what ailed you. Would you have some misgivings about this advice? Most people would leave immediately, never go back and probably report the doctor to the medical board.

Yet, there are people who believe this kind of "medicine" really works. It’s hard to imagine this but millions of people swear this system has helped them with their medical problems. This treatment is called homeopathy. For many people homeopathy is a misunderstood concept. People often think homeopathy describes a remedy that uses natural herbs. This is not what homeopathy is. Regardless of this misconception, it is a popular treatment. If you Google "homeopathy" you will get over a million and a half hits most of which are favorable to homeopathic medicine.

Let me give you some background on what homeopathy real refers to. It was invented in the late eighteenth century by Samuel Hahnemann. He based homeopathy on a philosophy that believed all illness and disease was caused by "disturbances of the life force." Hahnemann lived during a time when the germ theory was just beginning to be understood. Humans had always wondered why people got sick and many ideas over the millennia had been advanced as to why people fell ill.

One of the more common theories on why people got sick was based on the idea that life could only be fully explained on the basis of a mysterious form of energy inherent to all living things. This strange force had nothing to do with the laws of physics and chemistry, however. People who held this view thought a healthy person was one in whom these forces were in balance. One became unhealthy when the forces were out of balance.

Hahnemann believed this vital force could be affected by internal events (like a person’s thoughts) or by circumstances outside an individual. He called this the "law of susceptibility." To cure this imbalance he devised a method based on the notion that "like cures like." In other words if you had a headache, the cure would be based on anything that would give you a headache. If Hahnemann could find a piece of bark or a root that would cause headaches he would then make a potion from it.

Hahnemann observed that if he swallowed a small amount of cinchona bark he would experience symptoms similar to malaria. Cinchona bark is used to produce quinine which in turn is an effective drug for the treatment of malaria. Aha! He thought he had found the miracle cure. Cinchona bark must have the vital force for curing malaria because in high enough doses it can cause malaria (it can’t).

To create the proper medicine for an illness he would find something that could cause symptoms similar to the illness. He would then dilute the chosen substance so much there was not enough toxicity left in the solution. He reasoned that the more he diluted a substance, the more powerful it became because the dilution would make the vital force even stronger. If this was true, then the more he diluted it, the stronger it became. Of course, he had no evidence this was true, it just seemed like a good idea to him.

This Principle of Similarities became the foundation for homeopathy. So, if rotten meat brings on nausea to the point of vomiting, then a solution with trace amounts of rotten meat, he declared, will cure nausea.

How much do homeopaths dilute their curing solutions? More than you can imagine. If you are really sick then serious dilution would be a lengthy process. A very small amount of the first dilution would be diluted again and again. This would be repeated until the initial substance barely existed. What remained would be equivalent to one drop of the cure diluted in all the water on earth.

Homeopathy proponents also believe that literally anything can be a potential remedy. Dr. Harriet Hall, a retired Air Force flight surgeon is convinced that homeopathy is absolute nonsense. When it comes to finding absurd things to act as a cure, her favorite is "eclipsed moonlight." She ponders as to how it is collected in order to prepare the remedy. Let me know if you find how out to harvest eclipsed moonlight.

What keeps this pseudoscience alive is that homeopathic practitioners and their patients swear these treatments work. Of course, swearing and belief do not a treatment make. There are many reasonable explanations why homeopathy "works." One of the strongest reasons is the power of the placebo. Since a placebo can be so effective, a treatment is not considered legitimate by the scientific community unless it can produce effects significantly greater than a placebo treatment would provide.

This is a very stringent standard because people can think a treatment is helping them when, in fact, it is the result of placebo. For example, a study was done where two groups of people were given either morphine for severe pain or an inactive placebo. Here’s the astonishing part. The people getting the "nothing" treatment were told they were getting a powerful new painkiller. The researchers were shocked to find out this group got just as much relief as the group who actually got morphine.

Placebos have been studied so extensively that we now know there is a pecking order of effectiveness. Some placebos work better than others. Here is a list of which placebos work better than others. It looks something like this (This list is taken from "The Placebo Effect" by Harriet Hall in the Skeptic magazine, Volume 15, Number 1, 2009):

Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections.
Placebo injections work better than a placebo pill.
Fake acupuncture also works better than a placebo pill.
Pills as capsules work better than pills as tablets.
Big pills work better than small pills.
The more doses a day, the better.
The more expensive the pill, the better it works.
The color of the pill makes a difference.

This doesn’t make any rational sense and we only partially understand how a placebo works. So far we know it works and it can work very well. When studies of homeopathic treatment take into account the results of the placebo, homeopathy is left standing naked.

What about "all the studies" supporters of homeopathy quote that show how legitimate homeopathy is? We must realize there are studies and there are studies. It is very easy to do sloppy science. This kind of science can verify all sorts of crazy notions. Consequently, only well-designed studies are acceptable.

To illustrate this point, we can observe the career of Edzard Ernst who is a physician and the world's first professor of complementary medicine. He used to be a passionate support of homeopathy. Then he began to do research. He and his team of researchers have published over 700 papers in scientific journals on alternative medicine. After fifteen years of studying homeopathy, he has concluded that "the evidence points towards a bogus industry that offers patients nothing more than a fantasy." Strong language from someone who used to be inside the camp.

If you are interested in what logic is used by supporters of homeopathy to maintain that it is an effective treatment, you only need to browse the writings of Louise McLean who is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Natural Health. You can find her writings here. You will find an article called, "Homeopathy Facts List – 54 Facts." As you read through this article of "facts" you may quickly realize the "intellectual bankruptcy of the homeopathic belief system." Here are some examples (my comments are in parentheses):

FACT 10: Outcomes of homeopathic treatment are measured by the LONG TERM curative effects of prescribing and complete eradication of the disease state. (Like scientific medicine is only concerned with short term effects? All measurements of long term effects from homeopathy have found no significant effects.)

FACT 20: In 200 years, there has never been a single homeopathic medicine recalled, unlike pharmaceutical medicines. (That’s because homeopathic "medicines" are not regulated by any government body. Therefore, they cannot be recalled. The FDA doesn’t regulate treatments that don’t work.)

FACT 30: The Homeopathic Hospitals are clean, with friendly, well informed staff. The patients are generally pleased with their treatment unlike many orthodox National Health Service hospitals. (She is obviously comparing the best Homeopathic Hospitals with the worst British Hospitals. Even if this were true, I’m not sure how this proves that homeopathy works.)

FACT 40: Homeopathy can never be properly tested through double blind randomised trials because each prescription is individualised as every patient is unique. Therefore 10 people with arthritis, for example, may all need a different homeopathic medicine. (This is merely an excuse for why all double blind tests of homeopathy have failed. It would be easy to design a test for each of the 10 people who needed 10 different homeopathic medicines. Supporters of homeopathy need to do this if they really want to be accepted as legitimate. I wonder why they have not done so?)

FACT 50: Hundreds of famous people throughout the past 200 years have enjoyed the benefits of homeopathic medicine. (Hundreds of famous people in the past 200 years have believed in witchcraft, psychics, or other foolishness. The belief of intelligent people is hardly a reliable standard to finding truth. Some of the most gullible alive are members of MENSA.)

What really keeps homeopathy alive is that it is supported by nice people; humans respond to what nice people say. If you were to visit a homeopath you would probably find it to be a very pleasant experience. He would sit and patiently listen to you as you tell your personal story. You might not get this much attention from your MD. The homeopath would make you feel special because he would pick out a "special" treatment designed just for you which would make you feel special. The remedy would be inexpensive and would most likely have little or no side effects (how could there be side effects when there is nothing to cause it?). You would tell your friends that you were very reassured because the homeopath had been interested in you as a person.

Who wouldn’t want to experience this atmosphere along with medical treatment? Scientific medicine could use more of this relational aspect in their treatment. Many of my clients tell me they will change physicians if their physician treats them poorly. Excellent.

The Gold Standard (double blind studies) for deciding what works and what doesn’t is the Gold Standard for a good reason. It minimizes human error and bias that is built into all human researchers, practitioners, and those of us who use treatment services. Hopefully, homeopathy will eventually go the way of bloodletting and purging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett at Tufts University has said that treatments based on "mysterious stuff" need to be relegated "to the trash heap of history." Amen.

Nobody Can Explain Love

2009-07-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

Years ago when I became interested in science and would attempt to explain all the exciting things we can learn through science, it was not uncommon to get the rejoinder that "science cannot explain everything" (no scientist ever said it could).

The example that was often given to explain this belief was love. "Science will never be able to explain love." Of course, the human race has made this blunder ever since the dawn of science. Every time some says "Science will never be able to . . ." the prediction inevitably fails.

During my early years, grownups tried to convince me that a car could not be built to exceed sixty miles an hour. Even if the technology could pull this stunt off, I was told the human body would not be able to stand the force of such speeds. At the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of putting someone on the moon was laughable. There is a very long list of common bonehead statements like this and they are the result of our limited imagination. Science fiction writers and other novelists, like Ursala Le Guin, have been able to envision future human achievements that seem incredibly far fetched.

"Nobody can explain love." Like so many statements that have put constraints on scientific endeavors, this one is about to be thrown into the historical dustbin. Love is so powerful, so universal, so . . . unexplainable. Its mystery is probed in poetry, novels, movies, daily conversation and now by science.

You are probably already aware of the fancy tools scientists are using to peer into our brains. The human brain may be the most complicated thing in the universe and we are just barely beginning to understand how it works.

A recent study was conducted at State University of New York, Stony Brook. The researchers studied college students who had recently fallen in love (maybe we should call universities and colleges "love factories.") and the effect it was having on their brains. They watched the brain's reaction when these people were shown pictures of their beloved.

Sure enough, as soon as they glanced at the picture, a specific part of their brain lit up like fireworks. The interesting part is that this part of the brain is the same one that gets lit up for cocaine and nicotine users. It gets flooded with the brain chemical dopamine. We know that dopamine flooding is so rewarding that humans will do almost anything to make it happen.

Another love chemical in the brain goes by the tongue twisting name of isphenylethylamine. It is easier to call it PEA which scientists do. PEA is produced by the brain and is a naturally occurring amphetamine. These chemicals work in tandem. Amphetamines cause brain synapses to release this little, tiny spray of dopamine into the brain. There's the buzz — the same high after someone snorts a line of cocaine.

Using cocaine is illegal, smoking cigarettes should be illegal, but love will never be illegal. Many of my clients have told me that they have kicked highly destructive habits after they have fallen in love. A female client was relieved of her depression when she fell in love; a male client stopped having panic attacks when he fell head over heels for the "most beautiful woman" he had ever seen; a teenage client "cured" her bulimia when she met the perfect boy. And so on.

Guess what happened when these relationships ended? The dopamine no longer overrode the other chemicals that were making these people's lives miserable. This may be why some people have so many relationships. After one fails, they need a fix, another love fix. Some people who are not so intensely caught up in the cycle may still complain they just can't live by themselves and are continually on the prowl for someone to fill that emotional/chemical void.

This is not to say that we should have to enjoy being alone. After all, we are social creatures and find comfort and meaning within relationships. However, the people I have known who enjoy their relationships the most are the ones who are comfortable being by themselves.

Dr. Helen Fisher is a researcher in this field who did a similar experiment with a simple revision. She also showed her subjects a picture of another person who was neutral. You can probably guess the first picture released all the chemicals and the second picture did not get the same response. That is what happened.

Another research project wanted to find out what the brain chemistry was like for couples who had been together for many years. They chose couples who had been married for at least twenty years and said they were still deeply in love. Not surprisingly, their brains also showed increased levels of dopamine. However, something else was discovered.

Have you ever heard older couples talk about how love is even better after the initial burst of chemistry begins to subside? When I was younger, my friends and I thought this was laughable. All we knew was the dopamine high. Well, these scientists found that older love birds had another chemical in their brains called oxytocin. This brain chemical is often called the "cuddling chemical" because it helps new mothers make milk and be more capable of bonding with their babies.

Another brain chemical is released when we start experiencing puberty. Do you remember your days of pre-teen infatuation? How could we forget. This state of mind is caused by still another drug called norepinephrine. Because this is the first experience of a love chemical, pre-teens get jolted by this strong drug and think it is The Real Thing. Not that it doesn't feel good. It is just the brain's way of getting young people together to learn the social skills needed for The Real, Real, Thing (dopamine and associates).

There is no question that love is the result a drug. Anyone who has been addicted to this drug and then done something incredibly stupid will not deny its power. Science and human experience know that love is such a powerful experience that it can completely override common sense and rational decision making. When hit with this emotional genie we can go hungry, avoid sleep and cause our friends to shake their heads in disgust and confusion.

So what does this all mean? Has love now been relegated to something so mundane as a drug? Has science taken away the mystery and excitement of falling in love? I don't think so. Knowledge is always better than ignorance. Do astronomers yawn and become bored when looking at a beautiful galaxy or nebula in their telescope? Most certainly not. They go back again and again to gaze at these heavenly wonders. Do English professors stop reading because they have the ability to dissect and discuss the fine points of an author's work? The opposite is true. They have a deeper appreciation of what they are reading. How about musicians? Does their knowledge of the link between music and neurology of the brain lessen their love of music? Not at all. This type of knowledge enhances the music. Even religious people who read the Bible can have a more profound experience of its contents when they begin to understand the insights of professional scholarship from the last two hundred years.

So in summary, this is what love is about: oxytocin makes you want to cuddle and touch; PEA gets your juices and energizes you to lose sleep; dopamine makes you crave more of what you have; and norepinephrine makes you have sweaty palms and a pounding heart when you are near to or even think of that really special person.

Although we have only mentioned a few brain chemicals, Dr. Mary Cochrane at the University of Buffalo says there are many more chemicals involved in romantic love. Her article, Psychologist Says Neurochemical Processes Explain Romantic Attraction explains what those other chemicals are.

Additional Reading:

Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love. (Holt Paperbacks)

Regan, P. (2008). The mating game: A primer on love, sex, and marriage. New York: Sage Publications.

Science, Food & All That Jazz

2009-07-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

It seems like these summer blogs are becoming less about psychology than they are about my travels and hobbies. Last Saturday, Sharon and I left early in the morning and headed to San Francisco for my Birthday Boy Bash weekend (July 5). She wouldn’t tell me where we were going exactly but we had to get there by 9:00 in the morning.

Day 1: July 3, 2009
When we arrived at Golden Gate Park I followed her directions and found the destination was the new Academy of Sciences Museum. Even though we got there before the doors opened, the lines were so long it took us thirty minutes to enter the building. Once inside, we stayed there until closing at 5:00. A surprise benefit was the food available in the two cafes. Usually, food in these places is overpriced and underwhelming. We forgot we were in San Francisco, the Mecca of fine food. The meals were delicious.

The California Academy of Sciences is a world-class scientific and cultural institution based in San Francisco. The Academy recently opened a new facility in Golden Gate Park, a 400,000 square foot structure that houses an aquarium, a planetarium a natural history museum and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof.

The new facility is also home to the Academy's staff of world-class scientists, an education department that provides a wide range of student and teacher services, and an extensive science library with over 20 million specimens and artifacts.

This place is a stunning science museum. The building, itself, is a wonder to behold. It is the world’s greenest museum. The roof is called a "living roof" because it is composed of plants, soil and solar panels. You can see a picture of the roof here. Visitors can visit the roof and see why it is the largest public energy efficient building in the world. The website, itself, is quite educational and entertaining.

Inside we attended an amazing planetarium show with the latest digital effects. The aquarium consists of many different nooks and crannies for seeing a large selection of marine life. There is also a natural history museum and the one place we were not able to get to – the tropical rain forest.

After closing, we left the Academy and walked across the street to the De Young Museum. Since it was Friday night there was no admission charge. It was open to the public with entertainment by members of Stellamara. They presented live music and dance from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Roma "Gypsy" trail. You can hear a sampling of there music here. At 9:00 we drove to our hotel in the financial district for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: July 4, 2009
The Ferry Building by the Bay is an unusual building. Not only is it a ferry landing but it is also the site of one of the best Farmer’s Markets in California. The large Saturday market is found in front of, inside, and behind the building that overlooks the Bay. About ten to fifteen thousand people crowd into this place each Saturday. Being San Francisco, the food is exquisite.

We left the Ferry Building around noon and caught a bus to The Fillmore, land of jazz, to wander around the Fillmore Jazz Festival. It stretched up and down Fillmore Street for about seven long blocks and touts itself as the Largest Free Jazz Festival on the West Coast. We listened to Sam Reider, a local twenty-something who is making his musical mark in the New York jazz scene. Later in the day we listened to another local musician, Bobbie Webb and his Smooth Blues Band. Bobbie is a local legend. Although he has played with every great Blues musician in the world, he was never a full-time musician until recently. He realized early that he needed to take care of his wife and eight children which would have been difficult as a musician. He became a mechanic by day and a musician on weekends and during vacations. Now that he is retired and has a pension and social security he has devoted himself to playing non-stop.

In the late afternoon we drifted into Yoshi’s, one of the premium jazz locations in the Bay Area. We got good seats and were entertained by a Latin jazz group. Around dinner time we went to the Jazz Club (another jazz room in Yoshi’s) for a jam session. We were lucky to get one of the last tables. We had missed Marcus Shelby on the street but caught him at a jam session in Yoshi’s Jazz Club. He had just come back from Jazz Camp West. Marcus brought four people with him from the jazz camp and they improvised for an hour and a half. BTW, Yoshi’s has great ribs.

Around 8:30, as it was getting dark, we got on another bus and headed to Pier 39 to see the fireworks over the Bay. We thought it started at 9:00 but it didn’t get going until 9:30. Even so, there were a lot of people. Everyone had taken all the places for sitting so we, and hundreds of others, had to stand. It was a beautiful night and everyone was friendly and in a good mood. As we waited for the light and noise to begin, we watched about half a dozen cruise ships take their place out in the Bay for the paying customers on board. Along the waterfront, there were four different locations where the fireworks were being set off. We could just barely see another location at Pier 27 and noticed that their fireworks were perfectly synchronized with the fireworks we were watching.

It was a spectacular show and when it was over, we walked to Fisherman’s Wharf and had a snack. From there we walked a few more blocks and caught a free bus (have I mentioned that all the entertainment during this day was free — even the music at Yoshi’s?). The city provided free bus service back to the Ferry Building. From there we walked the mile or so back to our hotel.

Day 3: July 5, 2009
We were planning to get up early, drive to Muir Woods on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and do some hiking. Instead, we slept in and just goofed off for a time. At 10:00 we walked about a mile to the new Contemporary Jewish Museum. Quite a place! Although founded in 1984 it took over a historical landmark, the Jessie Street Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Power Substation. They hired the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind to design their new home. The architecture is full of contrasts: historic and contemporary; subtle and boisterous. The blue cube in the picture on the right looks like it is falling down but is actually a part of the museum’s external structure. The inside is open and airy and is full of surprising angles. One of the exhibits we enjoyed highlighted the work of Marc Chagall and his work with the Russian Jewish Theater in the first half of the twentieth century. Other exhibits included "Being Jewish": A Bay Area Portrait, Jews on Vinyl, and Susan Hiller: The J Street Project. Fascinating.

It was finally time to head back to Sacramento except we took a side trip to the Ster n Grove Festival. This is an annual summer event held in a beautiful setting among trees and hills. Roberta Flack appeared here in June. The San Francisco Ballet will be performing in August. We were privileged to listen to the San Francisco Symphony with an exciting and very young conductor James Gaffigan.

Prior to the symphony we were surprised with a half hour of jazz by the Inouye Jazz ensemble. The leader is the principal trumpet player of the SFS. The bass player is the principal bassist of SFS and the drummer is also a member of the SFS. They had added a non-SFS member, Jeff Massanari, to play guitar. Jeff is one of the most in-demand guitarists in San Francisco.

It was engaging to listen to musicians who are so talented they can be stars in both classical and jazz music. It reminds me of the young Andre Previn who is a virtuoso jazz pianist and a top-ranked orchestra conductor.

And then we had to go home.

Tents and Telescopes

2009-06-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

Humankind has been fascinated by the stars ever since we were capable of looking upwards. Ancient civilizations thought the stars were holes punched into the dome (the firmament) that encircled the earth. They thought the firmanent was a hemispheric dome that sat on a round, flat earth.

Since then, people have marveled at the slow, gentle movement of the stars across the sky from east to west. In the summer under a dark sky, we are dazzled by what is called the Milky Way. John Milton, the great seventeenth century poet, described this beautiful heavenly highway in Paradise Lost:

A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars,—as stars to thee appear
Seen in the galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powder’d with stars.

For people who live in the light-filled skies of the modern world, spending the night under a truly dark sky can be daunting. There are so many stars that even if one is familiar with the constellations, they are difficult to find amid all the other stars. It was that dark sky that inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write, "Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels." These dark sky blossoms are indeed lovely to see.

Some people have the impression that as they look up at the stars, the stars themselves are looking down at them. People who spend time watching, observing and studying the night sky (astronomers) feel a sense of familiarity when a new season brings back stars that have been gone for a period. To some astronomers, it almost feels like a homecoming with a close friend.

Religious people through the ages have thought the stars represented something more than mere lights. For many, they were the lights from some supernatural being that had an influence on human affairs. People who believe in astrology today are convinced the position of the stars can make a difference on what happens on earth. Of course, there is not one shred of evidence (good evidence, not bad evidence) that astrology has anything important to say to us — but that is another topic for another time. Poetry about the sky is much more compelling than the pseudoscience of astrological nonsense.

All of this is an introduction to my activities last week: camping out under the stars with my new telescope and a good friend. The event lasted for four nights. We expected more nights but the weather had a different plan for our lives. My friend, Gary is an astrophotographer which means he takes pictures of different objects in the night sky. It may seem like a simple hobby, but the technology and learning curve can be forbidding. I am always amazed at his persistence and talent for capturing the beauty of things we simply cannot see with our naked eye.

We pitched our tents at a place called Blue Canyon in the California Sierra Nevada mountains. The site we originally went to was rained out at first, so we left. Each night at Blue Canyon was warmer and darker than the previous nights. For those of you who might not be interested in the technical details of what I saw and why, you can leave the blog at this point. The rest of you can follow along.

First of all, I bought a new telescope a few months ago after selling off an old car that had been sitting in my garage for many years. The telescope is made by Celestron and is a Schmidt-Cassegrain type of telescope that has an aperture of eleven inches. Eleven inches is quite respectable in size for amateurs. Most of my eyepieces are made by Televue (unfortunately expensive but they greatly enhance the ability to enjoy the sky). The two that I used most of the time were a 31mm Axiom LX (made by Celestron) and a 17mm Ethos (made by Televue) — the first for a wider field of view, the second for more faintly difficult objects.

To give you an idea of what one looks at through a telescope, let’s break down the parts of our universe. Our sun and planets (including our earth) is in the Milky Way galaxy. If we could stand outside our galaxy, it would see a pinwheel made up of millions of stars, some of which would be smaller and some bigger than our sun. Our sun is a very average star when compared to other suns in the galaxy. Many of the suns are doubles, triples or quadruples, meaning they travel through our galaxy as a unit. If a person were on a planet in one of these systems. she would see two or more suns in their sky. Through a telescope we can see many beautiful combinations. Some double stars have contrasting colors, for example a blue star next to a bright yellow star. Tracking down and finding these double stars is something amateur astronomers enjoy doing.

Our Milky Way galaxy also contains concentrations of dust and gas called nebula. These nebula are the place where stars are born so they are often called star nurseries. If there is a bright star near one of these nebulas, the nebula will light up and can be seen as a large patch of bright, hazy wispiness. Our eyes can only process black and white for dim objects so astrophotographers, like my friend Gary, can expose their cameras for long periods of time and see these nebula in brilliant colors.

We can also look at what is left over after a star has blown up at the end of its lifetime (yes, stars are like us because they are born and eventually die). After a star has died we can see the remains of the large amounts of gas expelled during its death throes. The most famous example is something called the Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra.

As stars are born in their nurseries, they will often stay together for awhile like siblings growing up within a family. The sight of these clusters of stars can be stunning through a telescope. Seeing them is like looking at a scattering of diamonds under a very bright light. Each cluster is unlike any other. Because the stars within the cluster are loosely bound together by gravity, they move through our galaxy like a band of adolescents roaming the dark streets of a city.

One of the more famous open clusters is called the Pleiades and can be easily seen with the naked eye. Some people have called this cluster the Seven Sisters because there are seven stars (some people only see six bright stars) more prominent than the rest of the cluster. In the Japanese language, the word for "unite" can also refer to the Pleiades star cluster. The word is subaru and you can see the cluster of these six stars in the logo on the back of any Subaru car. Open clusters eventually break up like children who grow up and eventually leave home. The gravitational attraction is not strong so the stars in these clusters eventually wander off on their own. Some astronomers think our sun may have originally been part of a star cluster.

Another enjoyable sight in the sky is a different kind of star cluster, the globular cluster. Whereas an open cluster can have up to a couple thousand stars, the globulars can include millions of stars packed tightly together. The most powerful amateur telescope can only pick out a small fraction of the individual stars. The stars in these clusters are as old as the galaxy itself. Instead of being found in the galactic disk, these stars roam around the outside of our galaxy as if they are lost with nowhere to go.

The largest objects available for most amateur telescopes are the galaxies. As enormous as our galaxy is, it is merely one of many billions of galaxies in our universe. Galaxies also have different personalities for the observer. Some are small, others are large; some are young, others old; some are beautiful, others are just plain.

During our nights under the stars, I tried to see all of these different types of objects. On the last night, I concentrated on ten globular clusters that sounded interesting. There was a lot of variety. Like other objects, some of the clusters could barely be seen. One of the most stunning globular clusters almost looked like an open cluster with a very tightly packed center. However, the stars were so brilliant that when I looked through the eyepiece, the sight took my breath away.

Amateur astronomy has become a fascinating hobby for me. Dark skies, balmy weather, a good friend, the quiet of night, a telescope and a sky map can be soothing, but unsettling. Our brains do not yet have the capacity to really understand the immense distances involved in our own galaxy, let alone the entire universe. Carl Sagan used to refer to the earth as the "pale blue dot." In comparison to our own planet, we are microscopic beings in a vast universe that we are just beginning to understand. Are we alone? If it takes a thousand years to send a message to another galaxy, will we ever find out? Although humans are fragile, we are also responsible for the continuation of our species. What will the human race be like in another thousand years? One hundred thousand years? A million years? The likely answer is that we will be unrecognizable compared to who we are today.

"Ye quenchless stars! so eloquently bright, Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night." — Robert Montgomery.
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena ...The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand." Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot

Autism

2009-06-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

Do not expect to arrive at certainty in every subject which you pursue. There are a hundred things wherein we mortals. . . must be content with probability, where our best light and reasoning will reach no farther. — Isacc Watts, English poet, theologian, hymn writer.

The February 21, 2009 issue of Newsweek had an article about the big autism "controversy." Perhaps you know someone who has an autistic child. If so, you may be aware of the grassroots movement that is trying to prove to us that autism is caused by childhood vaccines. These folks are convinced that a preservative in vaccines, called thimerosal, "has been implicated in autism" (Google "autism" and you will get over 18 million hits; you will get just under a million hits for "thimerosal").

There are three reasons for keeping this non-issue alive.

Parents who are convinced that thimerosal made their child autistic.
Lawyers who are bringing class action suits against pharmaceutical companies.
Physicians who have joined the anti-vaccine parade.

When you read the plaintive cry of pain from parents of autistic children, you can understand their emotional discomfort and readiness to accept any idea that can help explain their plight. Unfortunately, most of these parents are absolutely certain they have an autistic child because they agreed to have the child vaccinated against childhood disease. Explanations for what goes wrong in this world can be soothing even if the explanations are bogus.

It is sad to notice how certain these parents are in their assumptions of the relationship between vaccinations and autism. Their certainty does not allow them to accept the possibility they could be wrong. This degree of certainty can be dangerous. It is dangerous because vaccinations have saved the lives of millions of children on this planet. They do not accept the fact that without vaccinations we would unnecessarily be missing millions of children because they would have died unnecessary deaths.

Certainty is understandable — it is the curse of being alive. The demand for certainty is natural to humans. This is where we need to be thoughtful. Insisting on certainty may be folly because life is based on probabilities not guarantees. Granted some probabilities are extremely high while others are unbelievably low. One of the important lessons science has taught us is that we need to withhold judgment on what we don't know until good evidence has been found. As Jacob Bronowski reminded us, "knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty."

The problem is that few people can sort out good evidence from bad evidence. Doing so is not a matter of willpower or an intensity of feelings. For millennia, people have found many avenues for poor evidence: personal experience, authority figures, majority opinion, strong beliefs. These types of evidence are highly error prone. Since the time of Galileo, we have found that information separated from our personal biases and desires is much more reliable. The venue for finding this type of information is called the scientific method.

Science is poorly understood by the public. Good sources of evidence demand patience, objectivity, intelligence (because science is hard to do), and skepticism. Skepticism is the difficult stance that one takes by being willing to be proven wrong. Good scientists are never certain because they know that all knowledge is tentative and subject to change. This is what is so difficult for non-scientists to understand. They often think that scientific findings are eternal and unchangeable. Just the opposite is true.

Using the legal to discover the truth of a claim constitutes the vast hole in the idea that vaccines cause autism. By using the legal system to "prove" their case, anti-vaccination supporters are bypassing the highest standards of knowledge given to us by science. This is why the court system has become so skittish about "junk science." To illustrate this, you only need to look at the evidence put forth by the pro-thimerosal advocates. One example is the website entitled The great thimerosal cover-up. The end of the article has a section in which twenty-two expert opinions are quoted supporting the dangers of thimerosal. At first glance, this would seem highly credible and convincing to many of us.

However, of the experts listed, only six had advanced degrees: two with a Ph.D. and four with an M.D. One of these experts was quoted six times. All of these quotes were taken from books rather than peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals that emphasize empirical knowledge are the gold standard for finding what is true and what is not. These journals are important because submitted articles are read by the top experts in the particular field who try to find what is wrong with the article. The tougher the critics, the more credence can be given to scientific articles.

Much of the world languished for a thousand years in the Middle Ages because the major source of evidence was power and authority. Not until Galileo dared defy the authorities did the ability to see more clearly begin to take shape. Since then we have learned more about humans and the world around us than all of the millennia prior to his bravery and courage. The tools of science have rid us of devastating diseases, put a person on the moon, invented radio, TV, computers and the smart phone and given us cognitive behavior therapy. The use of power and authority could have lasted forever and these discovers would have never taken place without the tools of science.

In the web site referred to above, the rest of the citations came from popular magazines and books such as Alternative Medicine and Building Wellness. These sources are not not known to utilize the highest standards for honest and helpful information gathering. One of the experts has since taken himself outside the self-correcting arena of science. Russell Blaylock is a retired neurosurgeon whose bio states, "During his 26 years of treating patients in his medical, nutritional, and neurosurgery practice, he became disgusted with the state of medicine in the U.S. and recently retired to devote his full attention to nutritional studies and research."

This bit of information about Dr. Blaylock makes him sound like a pioneer who is not afraid of bucking the medical establishment so that he alone can find the real truth about autism. In reality, the time of the renegade genius is long past and is now the stuff of fictional movies and novels. The science of medicine has become too complicated for any lone wolf researcher to independently overturn the combined work of tens of thousands of competent scientists.

What do the hundreds of scientists who specialize in this area have to say? Although the original link between autism was seen as a possibility in the 1990s and early 2000s, recent medical opinion has begun to change as more and new evidence has become available (remember — this is how science works).

2003: The medical journal, Pediatrics, published an article titled, "Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases." this study found no consistent significant associations between vaccines with thimerosal and "neurodevelopmental outcomes."
2004: An organization known by the lengthy name of The Immunization Safety Review Committee at the Institute of Medicine published a report that examined scientific studies from around the world. This review found no convincing evidence that vaccines cause autism.
2004: One of the premier medical journals in the world, Lancet, published an article concluding that thimerosal based vaccines are "not associated with an increased risk of pervasive developmental disorders."
2007: Another prominent medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, published a study that did not support the notion that thimerosal caused autism.
2008: The medical journal, Archives of General Psychiatry, put another take on the research. They noted that, because of the public outcry about thimerosal, drug companies have stopped using it as a vaccine additive. Nevertheless, the frequency of autism keeps increasing "at a steady rate."

These articles in the peer-reviews journals above are only a fraction of the evidence that vaccines are not responsible for autism. The trend is now well established. The matter should be settled except for the certainty of the anti-vaccine crowd. As these folks continue their quixotic campaign they are verifying Voltaire when he said, "Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous."

As a side note, it was discovered in 2004 that the doctor who began this thimerosal scare, Dr. Andrew Wakefield of England, had a severe conflict of interest. He was paid over half a million dollars for helping lawyers try to prove the case against thimerosal. This vast amount of money certainly brings Dr. Wakefield's integrity into question regarding his stance against thimerosal.

We all know that we humans scare easily. What is more difficult is the task of getting us to calm down after the scare has taken place. Emotions can easily override intelligence. Yet, it is our reason that can save us as a race, not our emotions running rampantly out of control.

The big tragedy in keeping kids from getting vaccinated is that they might well die from measles or other deadly childhood diseases. In England a large number of parents, a few years ago, stopped having their children vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. Consequently, England now has more children developing measles than at any other time in the last twenty years. This is unfortunate because medical science has had the opportunity to almost eradicate measles in children.

For the first time in history, fewer children all over the world are dying from disease. In the 1980s only twenty percent of children were vaccinated against deadly illness. Today, eighty percent of children in the world have been saved from death by having been vaccinated. We know that childhood immunizations have saved the lives of about nine million children. Vaccinating young children around the world has shown a seventy-four percent drop in children who used to die from measles.

Because media stars such as Oprah have supported the anti-vaccination program, public attention has been drawn away from finding the real causes of autism. Millions of dollars have been wasted in futile legal wrangling that could have been used for more research to help families with autistic children. Fighting the power of science because of inadequate information and public hysteria is wasted effort because the human race needs all the intellectual resources available to make this planet a better place to live.

For more information on the actual science of vaccines, see...

Science Based Medicine
Timeline of the Autism Scare

Learned Optimism

2009-06-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. — Robert Brault

In the last article on Learned Helpless, you found out that psychologist, Martin Seligman, was instrumental in discovering the concept of learned helplessness as a graduate student. He became aware that learned helplessness is the result of a pessimistic view of life. His enquiring mind wondered what could be done about pessimism. Since it can be learned, he assumed it could also be unlearned. Dr. Seligman set out to see if this could be done.

Remember that people learn to be helpless by being taught they have no available options for dealing with unpleasant events. This belief is called a pessimistic explanatory style which means a person continually sees the world and self as bleak and unforgiving. How does a person learn to be pessimistic? It’s like most other things we learn. As infants our brains are in hyper learning mode. We are continually checking out the world around us so see how it works. Young brains strongly learn by imitation. Every person I’ve worked with who is pessimistic can easily identify the pessimistic adults who were in their lives when they were children. Like baby animals watching their parents in order to learn how to survive, human children look to older people for learning about the world.

At this point you may be wondering why optimism is so much better than pessimism. After all, some people reason, this world has a lot of heartache and pessimism is a better match with the world as it really is; pessimism is more realistic. Being optimistic in the face of financial meltdowns, starving children, natural disasters and all the things we read and hear about every day seems to be a fool’s errand. Optimism is best typified by the ostrich with his head in the sand — "if I don’t know about bad things, then I won’t have to feel so bad all the time."

Although many people believe that pessimism is a better way to deal with life, research has shown otherwise. As a scientist, Dr. Seligman did not merely think optimism was a good idea, but he and his colleagues studied optimism scientifically to see if there were really any benefits.

The first step was to show that an optimistic explanatory style could cure depression. This step has been a resounding success. Hundreds of studies have shown that cognitive therapy (CBT) is as good as or better than medication for dealing with depression. Additionally, CBT has no side effects, you can’t overdose on it, there are no costs for refills, there is no time limit for when it stops working. Many studies, but not all, also show the combination of medication and CBT is also a workable solution. My experience is that many of my clients, when they have mastered CBT and have fewer depressive symptoms, have been able to significantly decrease their dependence on medication or have even lived their lives without any medication.

Having an optimistic explanatory style has two overwhelming advantages: Optimists lead a better life and optimism can be learned. What is meant by a better life? Basically it refers to quality of life. As we have mentioned in other articles, there are two kinds of happiness. Optimism leads to the type we call the Big H. It is a type of happiness typified by tranquility and peace of mind. This state of being has enormous benefits. Research on thousands of people have show that people who experience this type of happiness actually live longer. Not surprisingly, relationships are much better than those pessimists have. You probably enjoy the company of someone who is upbeat more than someone who is continually whining and complaining about how bad life is.

Dr. Seligman did an interesting piece of research with Metropolitan Life in 1985. As with most companies, Met Life hired life insurance agents based on their skill and experience. Dr. Seligman persuaded the company to try an experiment by hiring people with less skill but who scored high on a test for optimism. After two years, the results were checked and they were stunning. The people who had been hired based on their optimism score outsold more experience agents who were more pessimistic. The optimists outsold the more experienced pessimists by fifty-seven percent!

The one place where you would think that skill would be more important than optimism is in sports. Dr. Seligman worked with the swim team at the University of California, Berkeley. He found optimistic swimmers overcame negative results by trying harder while swimmers who were less optimistic swam even slower after a poor performance. Other researchers have found similar results in other sports such as soccer, baseball, and basketball. In addition to optimism in individual athletes, optimistic teams tend to outperform teams who are more pessimistically driven.

Optimism appears to have a dramatic effect on health. We need to be careful here because there are so many snake oil salespeople out there insisting that your mind can cure all ills. This connection between the "mind and body" is constantly being exploited to the unsuspecting. Bogus cures are the life blood of infomercials. They are to be found in newspapers, the Internet, and even such trusted sources, sad to say, as Oprah Winfrey (See the Newsweek article).

Even though much of the nonsense about the power of the mind says it is research based, when looked at closely it is usually not. If it is, it is poorly done research but this is something the average person would not be able to discern. How your mind affects your health is a new area of research and is already loaded with exploded land mines. Your "mind" has little effect on your life. Rather, it is how you use it. In other words your type of explanatory style is what affects the rest of your body. This is miles away from so-called "positive thinking."

A study of Harvard University students found that many years after graduation, students who were optimistic when they graduated remained more healthy than their more pessimistic classmates when they were checked twenty and forty years later. Studies on the health of pessimistic people — not surprisingly — found they were generally less healthy, died younger, and had more diseases.

Remember to take this information with caution. It definitely does not mean that if you are not as healthy as others your age that you are more pessimistic. The effects of optimism and pessimism are only one the many qualities that affect your health. The big one is your genes you inherited from your parents and many other environmental factors.

A pessimistic thinking style is what causes and maintains depression. Depression is the result of bad learning and is not the fault of the depressed person. Since pessimism and depression are learned, they can be unlearned and new thinking styles can be learned. The process to teach people how to change their explanatory style is called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).

We know that CBT is the method of choice for changing from a learned style of pessimism to a new one of optimism. The CBT variation (There are many effective variations — see The Worry Free Life) promoted by Dr. Seligman is called the The ABCDE Method of Learned Optimism. The five steps are as follows:

A - Define the problem: Adversity
B - Define the belief system that is interpreting that adversity: Belief
C - Define the consequences arising from the adversity and the (in)action: Consequences
D - Argue the core belief and effectively dispute the belief that follow the adversity: Disputation
E - Use the positive feelings that occur after the negative thoughts have been changed. Energization

Dr. Seligman explains that one of the results of using this five-step approach is to become more persistent because pessimistic people tend to give up more easily. Optimists are continually forging ahead in spite of the most devastating occurrences. For example, optimistic parents continue to find new and better ways for managing their out-of-control children.

These steps also lead to having less stress in one’s life. Surprisingly to some, optimistic people experience less stress than people who identify themselves as "realists." This is because optimists easily overcome minor setbacks and quickly bounce back from major negative events. You can review my article on stress and what to do about it at The Worry Free Life web homepage. At the home page, click on "Downloads" on the left. A new window will open with all the downloads. Click on the fourth one from the top.

You might think that optimists would take more dangerous risks. It is true they are risk takers but the risks are healthy ones — not ones that self sabotage. They see risks as the way of opening up life opportunities and enriching themselves and those around them.

If you are interested in finding out what your explanatory style is, you can take the Learned Optimism Test by clicking here.

Dr. Seligman has written many books. Here are a few that you might be interested in.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1995). What you can change and what you can’t: The complete guide to successful self-improvement. New York: Ballantine Books.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1995). The Optimstic Child. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1998). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. New York: Free Press.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York: Free Press.

Learned Helplessness

2009-05-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

Dogs were given a harmless but uncomfortable shock. After several of these they quickly learned ways to avoid any more shocks. A few dogs were put into situations in which they could never do anything to stop the shocks. Eventually, they just stopped trying to avoid the discomfort — even when their situation changed and they were given the opportunity to avoid the shocks. These dogs just sat there while getting shocked even though it would have been easy for them to avoid the discomfort. They had been taught to be helpless. They had learned that nothing they did mattered. They had just given up.

As psychologists began to conduct similar research with humans they found similar results. People who learn to be helpless have an outlook on life that is pessimistic. Optimistic people are convinced they have options and choices in all of life's situations.

So, the concept of Learned Helplessness came into existence in the mid 1960s. Until this time, most psychologists believed one of two concepts: either humans acted the way they did solely because of rewards and punishments or emotional problems were the result of deep, mysterious unresolved conflicts (mostly sexual in nature). By doing carefully designed experiments, psychologists began to recognize the importance of thought processes for determining our behavior.

Several professionals began to discover that helping to change people's thoughts brought about a change in emotions and behavior. Albert Ellis, a New York psychologist, became disillusioned with psychoanalysis and discovered that his clients would get better when he could help them change the way they thought about themselves and the world. Aaron Beck was a psychiatrist who also found that psychoanalysis was not a very helpful treatment for people with problems. Martin Selgiman, a psychologist who was later to become a president of the American Psychologial Association, joined Dr. Beck in the quest for finding out how to find better ways to help people change their destructive thinking.

The researchers had one situation they couldn't explain, however. Namely, not all people who were taught to be helpless in the laboratory actually became helpless. Some people never adopted helplessness as a result of the experiments. As Dr. Seligman pondered this, he recognized that the results depended on the beliefs each research subject brought to the experiments. Those who could be taught to become helpless had a more pessimistic view of life, while those who did not become helpless were more optimistic in their outlook.

This difference in how optimists and pessimists see the world is called "explanatory style." Pessimists explain and understand their lives in three predictable ways. They see misfortune as personal, permanent, and pervasive.

When bad things happen to pessimists they believe they are the cause. This can even happen at an early age. One mother brought her 7-year-old son to me because every time he heard about something bad happening in the world, even on the other side of the planet, he believed that he was somehow at fault. As with many parts of our being, we often learn certain traits at an early age.

Pessimists also believe that troubles will never go away (troubles are permanent). So many of my clients that I see in my private practice don't think their life will ever change. They are skeptical that I can help them and are often in my office because it is their last hope. One of the rewards of my job is to have these folks tell me as they leave one of the early sessions, "Doc, I feel so much better because I finally have hope."

Not only do pessimists believe they are the cause of all their problems or that nothing will ever change, they also believe that tribulations are what life is all about. "My entire life is messed up" is a phrase I hear often. Even though we may talk in therapy about other areas of a person's life that are going well, they still believe that every nook and cranny of their life is futile.

This is the exact opposite of how optimists explain personal misfortune. Optimists will look for causes outside themselves for why life just went off track. They see the causes as external not internal. They also believe that bad things are temporary and the exception to life rather than the rule of life. Finally, optimists don't understand misfortunate as being so pervasive. Although they accept the bad situation, they also are well aware of other areas of their lives that are going well.

Let's look an example. Your house is robbed while you are out for the evening. Both pessimists and optimists would agree this is a very bad situation. However, pessimists would take it personally and blame themselves for not checking the locks or thinking it would not have happened if they had stayed home. The optimist would not shrug off the event in a Pollyanna type of response. Acknowledging the robbery as awful, she would realize that there was probably nothing (reasonably) she could have done differently to have avoided the robbery.

The pessimist would also think the situation was permanent: "Every time I go out for the evening, something always bad happens." or "Now I have to live always thinking about when this will happen to me again." The optimist sees this as a rare event but will probably explore any possibilities for trying to minimize a similar event in the future.

Finally, the pessimist will explain the robbery as a pervasive event: "See, things like this always happen to me." or "This robbery just goes to show you that my entire life is one bad event after the other." The optimist will think about all the things in her life that are still going well. She still has a good job, great friends, money in the bank.

Does all this mean that if you have learned to be a pessimist you have to live the rest of your life this way? Not at all. The opposite of learned helplessness is called learned optimism. This will be the subject of next week's article.

Managing Temper Tantrums 2

2009-05-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

The previous two blogs covered some of what we know about temper tantrums and what you can do to help prevent them. Sometimes this is not enough. Children being children they are going to have a tantrum in spite of your best efforts to avoid them. There are a number of ways to handle a temper tantrum.

The first order of business is perhaps the most difficult. When your child begins the tantrum, if you are like most adults, your own stress level will immediately rise. You may lose focus, your body will become tense, your breathing might speed up, your blood pressure might increase. These physical symptoms will make it difficult for you to think clearly and follow through with your chosen strategies. By keeping yourself calm, you will at least not add fuel to the fire. Spend some time thinking about how you can remain calm when the storm hits.

If you raise your voice, argue, threaten or otherwise match your child’s behavior, your child will have the upper hand. Not only will it make your job more difficult but you will inadvertently reinforce the tantrum behavior with your escalated attention.

You may not need to act immediately. If your child is not in danger or if she is not causing a major public disruption, take a few moments to collect yourself, calm down, and decide what to do. After all, you are the adult and smarter than your kid. Some parents do the old standard counting to ten while they slow down their breathing, relax their body and calm their mind.

If your child is not in all-out mode but merely starting the engine, you might try to reverse the process by trying to connect and reassure him. For some parents it helps to stop what they are doing (if possible) and make eye contact at the child’s level. When you have contact, speak in a soft and gentle voice. You may want to say something like, "It looks like you are starting to get excited. Let’s see if you can remember how to calm yourself down." You, of course would use your own words. This assumes that prior to this, you have taught your child how to do this and have had a lot of practice sessions when he was in a good mood. If you can get some good results, then you can spend time "catching him being good."

With small children many parents find that distraction can often help. You know what interests your child and can use these interests when necessary to break the tantrum chain. Since you now know most of the situations in which your child will have a tantrum (from your Tantrum Diary), plan ahead. When you know these situations are coming up, think about what distractions you can use if you should need them.

If used properly, Time Out can be an effective technique for managing a temper tantrum. Unfortunately, it is often used incorrectly so it has gotten a bad name. If you want to use Time Out at home, pick a place that is dull and boring but not scary: laundry rooms, spare bedrooms, whatever you have available — but definitely not the child’s bedroom or a playroom. Children are different in what they find dull and boring so you may have to experiment a bit.

When the child is in a good mood so that you can talk about her behavior, gently explain that from now on when she loses control, you are going to help her calm down by letting her spend some time in the Time Out Room. Show her the room and tell her that if she can stay in there you won’t close the door. But, if she attempts to come out of the room then you will have to keep the door shut. Then explain that how long she stays in there will depend on her.

Tell her when she quiets down, you will set the timer and if she can remain quiet until the timer goes off she can come out. What she won’t know is that you will set the timer for as short a period as you can — like less than a minute. You are doing this because you are helping her to be successful. When she comes out you want to reward her for her "being quiet" behavior. Being quiet in Time Out means she can’t talk to you but she can talk to herself if that helps to quiet her down. If the child is older, you may let her write in her diary about what is happening to her and what she can do to help herself.

One of the reasons Time Out doesn’t work well is that a busy parent ignores her child when he is behaving well. Remember, that some children don’t know how to tell you appropriately they want your attention. They know they can get it by having a tantrum. Because of this you want to continually give your child attention when he doesn’t expect it. The more attention your child gets for behaving well, the better Time Out will work when needed. Time Out is really shorthand for Time Out From Positive Reinforcement. In other words, Time Out is designed to remove the child from attention when he is behaving poorly.

If you are in a public place when your child decides to go into her routine, have your Time Out plan already in place. Most parents immediately leave the store and take their child to the car. When you are in the car, tell her that when she calms down you can set the timer so that both of you can go back into the store. As always when you use the timer, make sure the time is short enough for your child to succeed. You tell her that if she decides not to calm down, then you will be going home immediately.

While you are in the car with her, completely ignore her after you have given her the instructions. When she is calm, tell her you are going to set the timer so that both of you can go back into the store. She will be in the back of the car and you will be in the front. Ignoring your child means you don’t look at her, you don’t make any sounds, you don’t touch — basically you are invisible. As you can tell this whole process can be very inconvenient for you so you. Therefore, you will need to always assume a tantrum will take place so that you can be prepared. Make sure your shopping is set up in a way so that using your plan is possible.

Some parents have used the timer in a dual role. When the child goes into Time Out, they set the timer and if the child can calm down before the timer goes off, then it is reset again for calm behavior. The first setting is long enough for the child to succeed in calming down and the second setting is short enough for the child to succeed by staying calm.

As we mentioned last week, small children can be quite humorous when they are engaging in Attention Getting Behaviors. If you think this is what is going on, ignoring your child is your best response. In case you missed the link to last week’s video of a small child doing his tantrum thing in order to get parental attention. You can see it here.

Holding a child who is out of control is a very controversial technique. Many people have used this to excess. There are many good reasons not to do this. In 2000, there was a tragic case in Colorado where adults attempted to deal with an out of control child by using a "holding" technique. The child died and the four were charged with the child’s death. Most mental health professionals find these "holding techniques" to be dangerous and not helpful. The technique is a part of something called Attachment Therapy. If you are interested in reading articles on the dangers of Attachment Therapy you can check out this link.

With this said, holding a child is best done with young children and its purpose is make the child feel safe and loved. The traditional "holding" techniques do just the opposite — they make the child feel more frightened and insecure. You want to hold your out-of-control child so that he no longer feels afraid and unsafe. While you are holding the child talk softly and reassure him that he can calm himself down. You can restore his confidence in himself by telling him you love him and always be there for him. If you try holding your tantruming child, then continue doing it only if your child responds well. Otherwise do something else instead.

After the Tantrum Has Finished
Some parents like to talk with their child after the child has calmed down. If your child is capable of talking about his feelings, have him do so. You might want to help him come up with a mutual solution for the next time this might happen. Reassure your child there is a better way to get what he wants. You can then take time to teach your child better behaviors for dealing with feelings such as anger or frustration.

When to Get Help
The first clue that you might need to seek professional help is when you notice that in spite of all the new approaches you are using, the tantrums are increasing in frequency or intensity. Contact a psychologist who has a long history in helping parents dealing with behavior problems. At the same time, have your pediatrician give your child a thorough checkup to make sure there are no physical conditions contributing to the tantrums.

Not just any psychologist will do. The psychologist must be trained, if not certified, in Behavior Analysis. Mental health diagnoses are not particularly effective accept in extreme cases such as autism. Even then you will want a Behavior Analyst to help you deal with the behavior.

Behavior Analysis is a relatively new field. The most likely licensed candidates are psychologists, social workers, and school psychologists. Some states are now beginning to honor licensed Behavior Analysts. If you are interested in this new field you can find out more information at the Behavior Analyst Certification Board web site.

Some Things Not to do

Never, under any circumstances, give in to a tantrum. Giving in will only reward the tantrum and your child will continue to have them and probably have them more often. Giving in does not mean giving ultimatums by drawing a line in the sand. It means giving your child choices and then spelling out the consequences for each choice.
Never punish the child for having the tantrum. Time Out is not punishment.
Don't reward your child immediately after she calms down. This is because in order to calm down, she has to have the temper tantrum first. You will be rewarding the pair of behaviors: having a tantrum and then calming down. Reward your child for being calm for a short period of time after the tantrum stops. This is exactly what you will be rewarding your child for when she is not having a tantrum.
Watch out for grudges. If you are the kind of person who carries a grudge, don’t let your grudge interfere with your relationship to your child. This may be hard but it is vital to successfully carrying out your plan.

Books
Agassi, M. (2000). Hands are not for hitting. (Ages 4-7) Minneapolis: Free Spirit.

Greene, R. W. (1998). The explosive child. New York: Harper Collins.

MacKenzie, R. (2001). Setting limits with your strongwilled child. New York: Prima.

Nelson, J. (1999). Positive time-out and over 50 ways to avoid power struggles in the home and the classroom. New York: Prima.

Websites
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies
National Association of School Psychologists

Preventing Temper Tantrums 1

2009-05-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

This part is a continuation of last week’s blog. I gave you an overview of what tantrums are about. Many parents think that tantrums erupt suddenly and often out of the blue. Child psychologists who have carefully studied children for decades tell us that most children will send you signals that they are at the beginning of a temper tantrum.

Once you discover those tells — or signals — you will find that trying to prevent a tantrum will eventually be easier than trying to deal with it once it has begun. Your first job will be to take the time to find the tantrum signals, sometimes called "triggers." Successful parents keep a Tantrum Diary so they can have a written record what of sets up the tantrum. Even though you may already know this information a Tantrum Diary may still help you discover some not-so-obvious triggers.

Tantrums can be anything in your child’s environment. Time is a very common trigger: bedtime, mealtime, nap time or the end of a fun activity. Another extremely familiar trigger is when you are busy: when you are on the phone, in the presence of another person, shopping, Your child’s non-tantrum behavior can be a precursor to a tantrum: whining, complaining, being sulky or morose.

Very young children throw tantrums when their goals are frustrated, or in more ordinary language, when they "don’t get their way." This can occur when the child is trying to do something new or unfamiliar. Again an instance of where the brain is ahead of the body. Some parents also find that certain times of day can be predictable times for tantrums showing up. This may be due to fatigue, hunger or just some kind of conditioned response.

Sometimes children are more prone to have tantrums when they are away from home: visiting other people, riding in the car. Some children throw a tantrum more often when they are playing by themselves, others do so when playing with their peers.

You can now see that the potential tantrum triggers for children seem almost infinite. Your child will more than likely specialize in certain triggers. The more accurately you can identify these triggers, the better chance you have of warding off the impending blow up. In your Tantrum Diary be sure to note, not only the specific triggers, also their frequency.

So what do you do when you have found all your child’s triggers? Keep doing it because as the child matures, there may be new triggers that suddenly appear. You may never have a complete list so feel free to add new triggers as they become apparent. Once you are ready to manage the triggers you may want to make a Behavior Chart. Many of you are already familiar with using these for your child. Doing this makes the information you are finding more visible and easier to use.

Managing the triggers
Plan ahead – Try to guess how your child is going to behavior as you plan your day. When you have an idea of what you will be doing during the day, you can compare it to the Tantrum Diary. For example, maybe you need to go shopping and course you will bring your child with you. Your Tantrum Diary tells you that your child has a tantrum in the grocery store about 50% of the time. You also found out that it is more likely to happen when your child is tired or hungry.

Knowing this can help you to expect your child to be unruly in the store. What to do? Make sure she is well rested and fed. You also discovered that certain items in the store attract her attention and set off inappropriate behavior. Since children love to be helpers, you will tell your child that you are going to play a game today (smart parents make a "game" of everything they want their child to do). The Grocery Game must be explained in such a way as to make your child interested and eager to play. There are so many way to do this. Being mommy’s helper can be part of the game. Letting her pick out items on the shelves from the grocery cart she will be sitting in can get her interest. Letting her actually take some of the items off the shelves is another option. As you can see, keeping her busy, away from boredom, and always interacting with you (attention) can often bring big rewards for you.

Change the environment
Sometimes the sameness of a place can begin to induce boredom in a child. What a surprise, because this never happens to us adults. If your Tantrum Diary tells you that playing or drawing or any other activity has about a 45 minute limit before a tantrum is inevitable, then you want to change the environment prior to this time limit so that a new stimulation will keep your child’s brain from turning on the tantrum switch.

This is also a good idea when your child shows pre-tantrum behavior such as whining or complaining. In your pre-day planning, have some ideas in mind for what you will do when you need to change the environment. What are examples of new, changed environments? Almost anything your child likes to do — or maybe even something new that she has never done before. You might suggest you both take a walk, ride your bikes, watch a movie, or whatever else "works." By avoiding the potential source of the impending tantrum you may be able to ward it off.

Make sure your child is well rested and fed
As we mentioned above, physical situations can temper tantrums more likely. As adults we can also get grumpy when we are hungry and tired. Fortunately, not too many of us throw a temper tantrum in these situations. Remember, from last week’s blog, that your child may not have developed language or coping skills for these feelings. Your child has learned there is only one way to be expressive when frustrated and perhaps get you to help solve a problem.

Plan for your personal busy times
Most parents know that tantrums often occur when the parent is busy and needs to finish what he or she is working on. Again your Tantrum Diary may show you that your child has tantrums when you are fixing a meal or on the phone or sending email. But it doesn’t happen all the time. The diary will also show that when you can engage your child during these times, the tantrum is less likely. For example, maybe you found out accidently that meal preparation can be easier if your child is with you and allowed to help or even snack and watch. Maybe phone calls will be more calm if your child can sit on your lap or draw a picture for you or your friend on the phone. Find out what works for your child. Ask other parents what they do. I have found that parents can be extremely creative when they put their minds to it.

Make some triggers invisible
Maybe your diary showed you that during an art activity, your child has a tantrum when he can’t use the scissors in the art box because he is not old enough to handle them safely. Maybe other objects in the house like certain papers, your cell phone or some kitchen utensils are also off limits for your child. Hide them so the child cannot see or touch them. Some parents get substitute items such as their child’s own "cell phone" (most people have old ones laying around) or a beat up kitchen utensil. Often your child is merely trying to imitate your behavior and can’t understand why you won’t allow this.

Tell your child what to expect
Your diary might show that visiting new places or spending time with people the child doesn’t know can create anxiety and uncertainty in your child. Children often do best when they feel safe (and well fed and rested — oh, yes, we already noted that). Explain everything to your child ahead of time such as what to expect when some unfamiliar events might take place. Ask your child if he has any questions. If you can anticipate any problems tell him what you can do if he feels upset. Help him feel safe and let him know you will be there for him.

Provide mental, behavioral, and social challenges
Again, boredom is a trigger that makes most humans feel uncomfortable. How many times did you complain to your parents by saying, "I’m bored, there’s nothing to do." Our brains, from birth, are meant to be curious and explore the world. Always be on the lookout for something new that might grab your child’s attention. Then save it for those times when you need to interrupt your child’s boredom triggers.

Signal the end of an activity
It is not a secret that tantrums often occur at the end of an activity your child is enjoying. Give her a 10-minute warning, a 5-minute warning or whatever time intervals seem best with your child. Portable kitchen timers are one of the best tantrum tools parents can have. "When the timer goes off, you only have five minutes to finish coloring." "Now, we’ll set the timer to let you know when you need to put away your crayons and books." "Your time is up. Let’s see if you can get everything put away before the timer goes off again."

Reward good behavior
We could do an entire mini-series on this topic. Attention is one of the most powerful motivators for young children. They are really good at getting our attention when they want it. It makes no difference that the attention you give them is "negative" because for young children, attention is attention. Our kids teach us to pay attention for misbehavior and then we basically leave them alone (ignore them) when they are behaving well. You want to reverse that. Remember the phrase "Catch them being good." In the paragraph above, each time your child is successful (you always manipulate things to increase the probability this will happen) before the timer goes off, you will reward her with hugs and kisses, verbal attention, stars, whatever turns her on. This is especially effective for managing triggers. In the presence of a potential trigger let her earn something important for behaving well. Be sure not to reward her for "not having a temper tantrum." You want to reward her for what she does rather than what she doesn’t do.

Be reasonable
Try to set expectations and demands that match your child’s developmental level. A successful child is a happy child. You also need to know the difference between requests and demands. A request is something ask your child to do but you are okay if she refuses. A demand is something the child must do. Moms tend to be more inclined to ask questions, "Would you like to go and wash your hands now?" Although you mean this as a demand (no choices available) it sounds like a request and will confuse your child because you really meant to say, "It’s time to eat so please go and wash your hands."

Teach control skills
When situations come up where several possibilities are okay with you, give your child choices. Having choices is important to us humans and your child is being more aware of this as she ages. Having control over the little things may help avoid power struggles over bigger things. Often, children engage in temper tantrums because it is the only skill they know. Identify replacement behaviors you want from your child instead of the tantrum behavior. Then teach these behaviors when he is pleasant and you are in a good mood. Practice the new behaviors until he is proficient. Make it fun – a game. Tell him how much more enjoyable this will be for both of you than feeling badly during a tantrum.

Choose your battles
Sometimes we parents are so tired of fighting with our children and having to put up with their tantrums, we begin to draw mental lines in the sand. We start to see all minor indiscretions as places where we need to take a stand as the adult authority figure. This often becomes a no-win situation for you. There will be times when ignoring a temper tantrum is your best choice. Letting your child ride it out will also teach him that not all temper tantrums will engage you. Your Tantrum Diary might give you clues as to when, what, and where you can basically let the performance run its course. Ignoring behavior on your part means you basically make yourself invisible: no sounds, no eye contact, no physical closeness. Some time after the tantrum is finished and your child is behaving well, give him lots of attention (for doing good). Be careful not to do this right after the tantrum is finished because you will then teach your child he can get your attention by having a big tantrum followed quickly by doing something that will please you.

Increase your tolerance level
You, in addition to your child, also need to be rested and stress free. Ever notice how your child’s behavior will often match your well-being? The Tantrum Diary will give you a sense of control. Planning ahead will give you a sense of control. Managing the tantrum triggers effectively will give you a sense of control. Enjoying your child in formerly rotten situations will give you a sense of control. When you feel in control, you will have more tolerance for those small things that used to set you off.

To learn about managing your stress click this link. Then click on the link to the left that says "Downloads." In the window that pops up click on "Stress Management." This will lead you to a complete set of instructions for developing and mastering skills for dealing with stress.

Keep a sense of humor
Finally, learn to laugh at some of the behaviors that used to be so annoying. When some parents laugh at the tantrum it surprises the child and halts the tantrum. Be careful using this, however, because you want to focus on your child’s behavior, not his worth. Many parents will laugh with each other in private or with their friends. This can often make a tantrum more tolerable or manageable in the future. Here is a funny video that was taken of a toddler’s temper tantrum. Read again the importance of attention.

Next week we’ll take a look at what to do if, in spite of all you do, the temper tantrum still happens.

Feel free to leave any comments on your experiences with temper tantrums (not yours, but those of your child’s)

Mother's Day

2009-05-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

Mother’s Day. A special time when we honor and remember our mothers. Mothers like to be remembered and pampered so we do our best. Mom’s really don’t want to be reminded of unpleasant things on this day so it might seem a bit unusual to do a blog on something that drives most mothers up the wall: temper tantrums.

Is there a Mom alive who has not been the target of a temper tantrum? Is there anyone who has not seen one? This article is the beginning or a series of three articles on the subject. This, the first one, will describe and help us better understand what temper tantrums are all about. Stepping back from emotional situations can give us perspective and help to find ways to deal more effectively with unpleasantness.

Introduction to Temper Tantrums

When our small child acts up, a lot of thoughts go through our head: "I can’t stand it when she acts this way;" "Why does my child have to do this?;" "I feel so helpless when he has a temper tantrum;" "Why don’t my friend’s kids act like this?"

Most parents share the common frustration of the Terrible Twos. The first child to go through this stage is often the worst (so it seems) — partly because we don’t know what to expect and because with the next child it already looks familiar. In this first part of a three-part article, I want to help you understand the "normality" of temper tantrums. Why do so many children go through this stage? Next week’s article will look at what parents can do to anticipate and possibly help prevent or moderate temper tantrums. The last will offer some suggestions about what you can do when the child has a temper tantrum regardless of the preventative techniques you use. We’ll also consider what can be done post-tantrum. What can you learn from each temper tantrum that might be useful for the next episode? Additionally, this last post will include some suggestions about how and when you might want to seek professional help. The article will also offer book suggestions for those of you who would like to have a reference handy.

One of the first problems that pop up around temper tantrums is the inclination for parents to take it personally. I sometimes wonder if there is a special place in the parent brain that automatically judges oneself when our child misbehaves. It is so easy to do so and so many parents are self-condemning as the result of temper tantrums.

Why shouldn’t you take it personally? One reason is that you are probably not responsible for the tantrum. Good parents have kids who behavior miserably (it sometimes works the other way around, too). Those of you who know about the Domino Effect will understand that your child’s behavior belongs in the Life Domino. This means you have no control over another person’s (your child’s) behavior. Neither girls nor boys generally have more tantrums than their opposite gender. We also know that over 50% of young children have an average of one temper tantrum a week.

Another part of the parent brain gets us to think that the behavior of our children is a reflection on our parenting skills. This is why talking with other parents of young children can be so refreshing. We then know we are not alone. Not only do their kids throw tantrums but the parents also think and feel like you do. One of the most productive things a parent of a young child can do is to expect their child will have temper tantrums. It begins somewhere in the first year and can last up until year five. We know that almost three-quarters of children between the ages of 1½ and five years have tantrums.

So why do young children even have temper tantrums? Life would be so much more pleasant if they just wouldn’t upset us so with their tantrums. When you think about it, it makes sense that young children should have temper tantrums. Frustration is one of the common human experiences and it begins to be felt at an early age, around one or two. What a coincidence.

As babies’ brains begin to develop a sense of independence, this new found awareness sometimes outpaces the necessary skills for independence. Not only is your baby trying to convert a brain concept into a physical action (putting on her own socks) but her brain also knows when it is not being done right. So we have a conflict between the part of the brain that knows what it wants to do with the part of the brain that doesn’t know how to do it. Have you as an adult ever had this experience? Of course.

What do adults do when they are frustrated? Cussing is a common reaction. Screaming, throwing something, just giving up or asking for help are common adult reactions. Your baby can do all of these except those that need advanced verbal skills. Can you imagine what it would be like if, when you were frustrated, you did not have the verbal skills to tell someone what you wanted? You already know that your toddler’s vocabulary is quite limited. But did you know that when a toddler speaks to his parent, the parent may only understand what is being said about half the time. How often has a tantrum erupted when you didn’t understand what your child was telling you she wants? Your child wants something from you and when she doesn’t get it, WHAM!

Frustration often occurs when we know that we have certain choices in a situation but have few skills to implement one or more of those choices. Another part of the growing baby’s brain is an awareness of choices but without the necessary skills to make the choices happen. The needs of newborns and infants are quite simple: food, sleep, and having someone clean them up. Getting their basic physical needs met keeps them happy. By the age of two these needs become more plentiful and diverse. It's around this time that one part of their brain runs ahead of another part of their brain.

Some professionals have called the Terrible Twos by another name: First Adolescence. Becoming a teenager is another time when new awareness often proceeds faster than the capacity to make good decisions. Teenagers have a new sense of being independent (again) but become frustrated and angry when many of their new choices are confined by adults in their environment.

Understanding this growth pattern in your young child can be a time for you to recognize that your child is in a transition stage of healthy childhood development. We often see our tantrum prone children as too determined, too self-centered, too sensitive, and maybe even too creative. When you think about these traits they are actually good ones. They can potentially be used for living a productive and happy life as an adult. It is your job as a parent to begin to help your child channel these traits into new behaviors that your child can more effectively use as she gets older.

Some parents wonder if children are purposeful in their tantrums. "Are they doing this to just bug me?" The brains of toddlers are not developed enough for them to be plotting how they can get back at you. They are too young to even enjoy watching you lose it. This only happens when the teen hormones kick in. A toddler's brain interacts with the world (and you) in a very simple, non-adult way. There is also a good likelihood that neither you nor your child enjoy these difficult moments.

Psychologists who study young children tell us that temper tantrums change over time — even though for many parents a temper tantrum is a temper tantrum is a temper tantrum. As we’ve mentioned above, two-year olds begin to recognize they can interact to change their limited environment. When this recognition clashes with a two-old’s skills temper tantrums often result.

By age three, language begins to become less simple and less limited. During this year, parents report that tantrums begin to subside in frequency and when they do occur they may be less intense. Unfortunately, this newly developing brain might also have learned that temper tantrums can be an extremely effective tool for getting something from adults, such as attention.

It is common for four-year olds to become quite skilled at interacting with their world with less adult help. In addition to their advanced physical skills they also have a much larger vocabulary. They may have also learned some rudimentary interpersonal skills such as the appropriate expression of anger, compromising and the beginnings of empathy. With this said, children as old as six can still have temper tantrums for a variety of reasons.

I hope this gives you some sense of what temper tantrums might be like from your child’s experiential vantage point. As awful as tantrums are, they are a natural part of a child’s growing up during a time when he is not being quite ready for the complexities of the surrounding world.

Next Friday, you will find an article that is more practical — strategies you can use to minimize the possibility of temper tantrums happening.

May Q&A

2009-05-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Q: I have heard about two kinds of eating disorder: anorexia and bulimia. Are there are other kinds?

A: Yes there are. We know that about 5% of teenagers and young adult women have either anorexia (self-restricted eating with severe weight loss) or bulimia (binge eating followed by purging).

However, young females can have other types of eating disorders like Bulimiarexia. The is the condition where some women live on 500 calories a day, are extremely thin and also purge their food. This is one of the most dangerous conditions and has a high mortality rate.

Purging Disorder. We have recently noticed that some women purge even though they don’t binge eat. Sometimes the purging will be induced by enemas or the abuse of laxatives or diuretics. Purging is most often done in secret accompanied by lying if questioned about the behavior.
Binge Eating. Although binge eating is often a sign of bulimic behavior, we know that binge eating can occur without self-induced vomiting. What constitutes a binge can vary from person to person. Some people who think they binge are actually eating an appropriate amount of food.
Chewing and Spitting. I’ve only encountered this twice in my practice but there is mention of it the professional literature. These females will eat food (sometimes large amounts) but will not swallow the food. One client I had would carry food and plastic bags in her purse. She would chew the food and then spit the chewed up food into plastic bags which she would put back into her purse.

Q: Why are some teens more anxious than others about dating?

A: By definition, the teen years can be filled with strong emotions. Anxiety, jealousy, and anger are part of making the transition from childhood to adulthood. Dating and romantic relationships during adolescence can add more emotional strain.

Research by psychologists at the University of Miami in 2007 found a strong correspondence between the amount of anxiety a teenager experiences over romance and the quality of close friends. The researchers found that two elements can influence teenage romance. First, a teenager will probably have less problem in dating if he or she has a number of supportive friends of both sexes. Secondly, dating is more difficult for those with little or no dating history. Like jumping into cold water, once a teen has started to date and has supportive friends, the situation tends to improve.

Q: My daughter recently told me about a friend who cuts on herself when she is feeling bad. Is this common?

A: Yes, it is more common than many people realize. The frequency is possibly between two and three percent of high school age females. The World Health Organization estimates that four times as many females than males attempt to harm themselves. The most common form of self-injury is cutting and the most prevalent place on the body is on the arms.

Many young girls will cut themselves, for example, to relieve tension and painful emotions. Others, ironically, will injure themselves to cause themselves to experience a type of pleasure. In these girls, self injury may release a type of opioid in the brain that make them feel better. Certain conditions increase a girls’s risk for self-injury: Any previous suicidal attempts; sexual intercourse before the age of 15; same sex romantic interest; poor social support; minimal attachment to parents.

Q: I’ve just quit smoking and am concerned about relapsing. What are the reasons people start smoking again?

A: Excellent question. The common wisdom has believed that smoking relapse is the result of drinking alcohol or coffee, being around others who are smoking, or socializing.

However, a recent study a few years ago found out this wasn’t so. Psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh Smoking Research Group wanted to find out what really got people to relapse. They discovered the most important reason for smoking relapse is negative emotions and distress. In order to guard against smoking relapse you need to find new ways of coping with strong negative emotions. You may want to check out The Worry Free Life -- a book full of coping techniques for distress and negative emotions.

Q: My best friend thinks that maybe I need to see a psychologist for therapy. Although I’m not against the idea, I’m not sure how to find a good therapist. I have heard too many horror stories about therapy and I also know that many people have been helped by it. What’s the best way to go about finding a therapist who might be right for me?

A: This a question I wish more people would ask who, not only are thinking of beginning therapy, but have also been in therapy for awhile but feel like they are not making any progress. As with people who seek the services of any professional you want to be able to make an intelligent decision.

Years ago a prominent psychologist, Arnold Lazarus, devised a questionnaire to evaluate the behavior and personality of a therapist. I give a copy of this to every one of my clients on their first visit. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, send me your request to me and I’ll send you the 2-page form that I use. It has 17 items for you to consider. On the second page, you can score your answers to determine if the therapist and you might be a good fit.

Here are some examples from Dr. Lazarus of the things to consider about a therapist:

I feel comfortable with the therapist.
The therapist does not treat me as if I am sick, defective, and about to fall apart.
The therapist has a good sense of humor and a pleasant disposition.
The therapist admits limitations and does not pretend to know things he/she doesn't know.
The therapist answers direct questions rather than simply asking me what I think.

Predicting the Future

2009-04-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

We all predict the future. When we read a story, educators tell us that we are unconsciously trying to guess what comes next in the story. It’s part of the fun of reading. Sometimes the author will give us hints about what is coming next such as using the writing technique of foreshadowing.

Here is an example of how the average person might make a prediction. Someone buys an old, used car. A friend says, "You just wasted your money. It’ll break down within the year (prediction). You would have done better buying a new one." We are not only good at making a lot of predictions we are also good at covering our tracks when the prediction doesn’t pan out. If the car is purring along after a year, the friend might say, "Of course, it lasted longer than a year. You took better care of it than most people." After two years, the friend might be saying, "Well, I guess you just got lucky and got a better-than-average care." Very few people would say, "I was flat wrong about my prediction because your car is still running."

Of course, we mortals act like this. That’s because we are not professional prognosticators. We all know that the pros do a much better job at making predictions. That is why they are interviewed for the knowledge they have to share.

Oops, maybe they aren’t all that good. Several years ago, a psychologist decided to check out how well professional forecasters actually do. Philip Tetlock is a professor at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley. He decided to find out if experts who actually made their living in the field of politics and economics could predict events accurately in their field of study. He found people who regularly offered advice and made public comments on a variety of trends in their specific fields of expertise. He chose 284 experts to study. Over the course of the study, the experts had made an amazing total of 82,361 forecasts.

Let’s see how these experts did. Would you pass the envelope, please. Okay, let’s look at the results of these super mortals. Oh — something must be wrong here. The results are unimpressive. Did they do only slightly better than you or I would have done? No. Did they do the same as Jane and John Doe might have done. Nope. Omagosh. They actually did worse than the average person would have done by just guessing.

The study also found that the more the experts knew the less reliable they were at guessing what would happen to the world in the future. Dr. Tetlock explained this by saying, "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly. . . . In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations." This study also showed that forecasters who were well known would have exaggerated confidence in their forecasts. He concluded that "Experts in demand were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight."

This is terrible. Why do our experts do so poorly? The best guess is based on human nature. People love to be right but hate being wrong. So, when we make a guess (forecast) we "fall in love" with our choice. No matter how it turns out we stick with the choice, justifying it right to the bitter end. This seems to be exactly what plagued the experts.

You would think that really smart people would learn from their mistakes. Even though experts are smarter than most of us, they are also human and subject to the thinking errors that affect all humans. One (of the many) thinking errors that might explain why smart people don’t learn from their failed predictions is called confirmation bias. This error describes how most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. So if experts really believe their predictions actually come true most of the time, then they will automatically refuse to accept the failures.

Other psychologists think that maybe too much information may also be a handicap for accurate predictions. By having more information than the rest of us, an expert can marshal more facts to support her predictions. Although these predictions may be more appealing to the average person, they are still subject to the same failure rate.

Even when a prediction does come true, an expert will believe they had made the prediction with a great amount of certainty. Dr. Tetlock found out this did not match the data they had collected. In other words the experts were actually more tentative prior to the prediction than what they thought after the predicted event.

This also happens to people who believe they have special powers to see into the future, like psychics. Years ago, a young woman contacted me to tell me that she had precognitive dreams. For example, she would dream about a terrible tragedy like an airplane crash prior to it actually happening. After she gave me some very impressive examples, I suggested she write down the details of her next tragedy dream immediately upon waking in the morning. After writing down the details, she was to seal the paper in an envelope and mail it to me immediately. She called me a few weeks later and excitedly told me about a dream she had about an accident that had killed many people. When she read about it a few days later all the details in her dream matched the newspaper account. I had her come to my office and we opened her letter together. She was surprised, shocked and disappointed with what she had written. The information was not even close to the event in the newspaper. Her mind had tricked her with something called retrograde memory. As she read about the accident in the newspaper the information went into that part of her brain that held long-term memory. As she tried to recall what she had dreamed, the dream details were replaced with the actually details.

How about those of us who buy into the predictions made by other people? Why would we be so gullible? There are many factors that make it more likely we will do this. One reason is that people tend to be more willing to believe information that has a lot of detail. One study asked people which of two health policies they might choose. The first policy covered their hospital expenses for any reason. The second policy also covered their hospitalization expenses for all diseases and accidents. Even though the coverage on these policies were identical, most people said they would be willing to pay a higher insurance premium for the second policy. More detail. This might mean we are more likely to accept a prediction if it has a lot of details instead of one that is less descriptive.

All of this is to say that people should be cautious about making decisions. A few years a really smart person made the mistake of making his prediction public. William Dembski is a Ph.D. mathematician who did not understand the pitfalls of predictions. Oddly enough, even though he teaches in an academic setting, he is a vocal critic of Darwin and evolution. He believes that evolution will never be able to answer how life evolved on our planet and is a strong supporter of something called Intelligent Design. He was so confident in his beliefs that he wagered a bottle of single-malt scotch about the truth of his beliefs. He publicly said that if the issue of teaching evolution or Intelligent Design in schools should ever go to trial, Intelligent Design would win hands down. Then the Dover trial took place. Intelligent Design was thoroughly dismissed (by a conservative judge) as an acceptable subject for school biology classes. Like many prognosticators, Dr. Dembski will not admit defeat. Evidently he has never given away that bottle of single-malt scotch.

Another smart person is more humble. Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and a professor at Princeton University, says that "making predictions is hard … especially about the future, and sometimes about the recent past." Even that great philosopher about life, Yogi Berra, agreed with Dr. Krugman when he said, "It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

If you are interested in the book from which much of this material was taken, it is called "Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can we Know?" (2005), Princeton University Press.

Science Doesn't Know Everything

2009-04-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard someone say that science doesn’t know everything? I hear it often when a someone is trying to explain something based on science. A listener may nod sagely and respond with the above observation. For example, at a party someone mentions they have found that psychics are really good at what they do. Eventually, someone else will say there is absolutely no scientific evidence that psychics can do what they claim to do: talk to dead people, read the future, know something private about someone they have never met. The person who finds psychics helpful will retort that it doesn’t make any difference that science doesn’t support psychics because "science doesn’t know everything."

This actually is a correct statement. Every scientist I have known has readily admitted that as a scientist they cannot explain everything. Not even close to everything. Why would a smart scientist admit such a thing? Doesn’t this just bolster the notion that science is not such a big deal after all? Even the great Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Wow! How could such a hard-headed egghead make such an admission? It’s because the job of science is to probe the mysteries of life and the universe. Science is always wandering into areas that are not understood or not yet explained. They can do this because the tools they use are the most powerful ever developed by the human mind. Who would have ever thought that we would even attempt to try understand emotions such as love or even the nature of consciousness? Yet, this is what psychologists around the world attempt to understand daily.

But, since science can’t explain everything, doesn’t this take the glow off the adoration that people have towards science? Not really. The average person loves absolutes, but science does not deal in the absolute. Instead of concentrating on "everything" what if we were to emphasize what science can actually explain. Think about what humans did not know before the advent of science about 400 years ago.

Contributions of Science
Here are some discovers made by scientists in the early years:

Johannes Kepler (1609) was able to figure out that the planets in our solar system had orbits that were elliptical. Prior to this everyone knew (because Aristotle said so) that the orbits were circular.

William Harvey (1628) found out how blood was circulated through the body. His discovery was the beginning of modern physiology.

Robert Boyle (1661) made an important distinction between alchemy and chemistry. He introduced the concept of earth’s building blocks, the elements, and helped found the new science of chemistry.

Isaac Newton (1687) revolutionized how we understood our world. He was able to show us that natural laws exist in nature. For example, the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.

Edmund Halley (1758) was the first person to accurately predict the appearance of a specific comet.

Joseph Priestley (1774) found out through the scientific method that the air we breath is made up of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Richard Trevithick (1804) was able to use the principles of science to invent the steam locomotive.

Michael Faraday (1823) was the first person who was able to turn a liquid into a gas.

Friedrich Wilhelm Essel (1838) used science to shrink the size of our solar system by finding out that a star, 61 Cygni, turned out to be 35 quadrillion miles away. It is so far that it takes six years for the star’s light to reach us.

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1847) gathered enough scientific data to show that the total amount of energy in the universe was constant. This came to be known as the law of conservation of energy and was later called the first law of thermodynamics.

Charles Darwin (1858) published The Origen of Species which rocked the world of science and became the basis for a new biology. Some scientists consider his painstaking data collection and conclusions to be the equivalent of the accomplishments of the great Isaac Newton.

William Huggins (1863) discovered that everything was made up of the same elements.

Alexander Graham Bell (1876) invented the telephone.

Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran (1880) isolated the microorganism that causes malaria.

This is an incredibly small sampling of what science discovered in its first two hundred years. From then on the scientific discoveries came faster and faster. The speed of light was measured at 186,000 miles per second. The bacterium that caused tuberculosis was found. A vehicle was designed to be driven by internal combustion. More elements were discovered. Science found out about radio waves.

You get the idea. We haven’t even listed any discoveries of the twentieth century. You may want to think of the contributions that science made in the last hundred years. As you make your list, you will notice that the rate of discovery is accelerating.

The Power of Prediction
Anyone can make predictions. And many have tried. Market analysts are constantly making predictions about what direction the market will take. Some religious people love to predict the end of the earth. Psychics make predictions of what will happen in the future: meeting someone to fall in love with; natural disasters; what is going to happen to famous people in the next year.
It only takes a few minutes of reflection to realize how inaccurate nonscientific predictions are. If you listen to the talking heads on the financial channels you will quickly notice that everyone contradicts everyone else. One says the market will soar in the next year, while the next expert says we will have a financial melt down.

Christianity has a long list of dates when momentous events were supposed to happen but didn’t. One of the favorite predictions by "end times" Christians is the date of the world’s end (the rapture): a dozen predictions were made that 1988 would be the year of earth’s demise. Even the great apostle Paul predicted that Jesus would return in his lifetime.

For many years an acquaintance of mine would cull all the tabloids on January 1st in order to list all the predictions psychics made for the coming year. On December 31, he would publish the predictions. Year after year, every psychic failed to make a single prediction that came true. Yet, year after year people continue to be amazed at the non-predictions of psychics.

Only scientists consistently make accurate predictions. Of course they cannot do this with 100% accuracy because the data they use is sometimes faulty or skimpy. What other group or institution could predict within minutes the sunrise for any date in the distant future? What other group devised a tool that can predict—with an 87 accuracy—which newlywed couple will divorce? What other non-scientific organization can accurately determine the age of the earth and its moon?

The answer, of course, is that only scientists can accomplish these amazingly difficult tasks. Many other organizations have attempted through the millennia to explain how nature works. Philosophers have debated and disagreed among themselves how things are. Theologians try to explain life but have no data to back it up so find themselves fractured and disagreeing vigorously between each other.

Since the dawning of humans on our planet people have tried many methods to discover the truth about life and the world in which we live. Humans have tried to increase knowledge by an appeal to authority and this works sometimes. However, smart authority figures still make mistakes because of the biases built into the human brain. This may explain why so many intelligent people will follow the lead of a powerful figure: Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler are only two examples of the power of authority. Authority figures usually have a public platform they can use to constantly pass on ideas and information to their followers. the problem with this is that experiments have shown us that simply repeating a false statement over and over leads people to believe that it is true. Accepting the words of an authority figure must be done cautiously.

Societies have used tradition to establish what we must believe and how we must behave. One problem with tradition is that each new generation wants to put its own stamp on the traditions of their elders. This introduces differences between the old traditions and the new traditions. Another problem is that each culture has its own tradition. No matter how revered the traditions are they often contradict one another — they can’t all be right.

Humans love to decide what is right and true by attending to testimonials. This is why advertising relies so heavily on testimonials. Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist and author of the powerful book Influence, discovered that people make decisions on what to believe or how to act by looking at what other people believe. If they know or like the other person they are even more likely to be persuaded to adopt the other person’s beliefs. Advertising has made us cynical because we all know that famous people are paid enormous sums of money to say what the advertiser wants them to say. Nevertheless, testimonials still convince people to believe the unbelievable.

In more recent times, humans have turned to majority opinion to determine what is right. Although this works sometimes, we have also discovered what is called the "tyranny of the majority"—when a majority of people decide that wrong is right. Slavery is an excellent example of majority opinion going down the wrong path.

Faith is another method for determining what is right and good. Yet even faith has its limitations. Since faith is defined as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," each person or group of individuals can believe what they want without any evidence to back it up. Some people believe that God will heal their sick child even when the parents avoid any medical intervention. This kind of faith almost always ends in disaster and grief. As philosophers often disagree, people of faith disagree, sometimes violently, with people of a differing faith. To guard against someone else’s faith interfering with their own, many people declare that their faith is the only true faith. When thousands of groups demand that their version of faith is right (orthodox) and all other faiths are heretical, something must be amiss. How can everyone be right at the same that everyone is wrong?

A more recent style of discovering truth is the use of personal experience. Have you ever heard someone say, "I don’t care what the evidence is, I know what I believe." People who believe they have seen or experienced a UFO from somewhere outside our solar system or galaxy use this method a lot. "You can tell me all you want about how impossible it is for someone that far away to get to our planet, but you can’t convince me that I didn’t experience it." If personal experience is the final word, we are all in trouble. It only takes two people to be in the same location for a disagreement to arise. With six billion people on planet earth, there is a lot of divergent experience.

All of these methods for finding knowledge are flawed in that they have extremely high error rates. When the scientific method became a viable option, people realized that science was now the method with the lowest error rate. Though not perfect, science has reduced human error dramatically. Scientists are trained to put aside all the above methods for increasing knowledge.

When they do this (even though they also can slip up) the results are stunning. What other organization of people have given us the wonders of modern medicine? No other group. What other collection of humans have discovered how the world operates? There aren’t any. Science is the only organization that has made any significant contribution towards increased life expectancy. Science alone has shown us how vast our universe is. Only science can explain the microscopic world of molecules, atoms and leptons. Will power and determination did not land people on the moon — scientists did that.

More importantly, only science is willing to say, "we were wrong" because that is the nature of science. By definition every scientist is supposed to be skeptical of the work of all other scientists. Science is not a method driven by opinion, faith, authority, or majority vote. No association of scientists voted on whether or not to believe in gravity. The secret of science’s amazing productivity is the reliance on what the evidence says. When scientists disagree it is because the evidence is not yet complete.

Science doesn’t know everything and never will. Science is based on understanding the unknown by letting the unknown speak forth its truths. Once the unknown is known the scientist moves on to the next unknown. Why will science never finish its job? The editors of The Encyclopedia of Ignorance wrote, "Compared to the pond of knowledge, our ignorance remains atlantic. Indeed the horizon of the unknown recedes as we approach it." This is the job of science—to light candles in the darkness of our ignorance.

Cosmology and the Bible

2009-04-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

If you are not familiar with the word cosmology, it merely means the the study of the origin and nature of the universe.

From the very beginning, the Bible teaches that we live in a three-tiered universe. We find this idea in the story of creation. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. (Genesis 1:6)

The original readers of these words, the Hebrews, understood this to mean that the earth was like a hemisphere floating on a giant body of water. The firmament was a solid, arched vault that sat over the earth. It had several functions: it supported a reservoir of water (Psalms. 148:4); it also supported the stars; and it was the dividing line between heaven and earth. In this solid dome were windows and doors that let moisture fall to earth in the form of rain and snow (Genesis. 7:11; Isaiah. 24:18; Malachi. 3:10).

Ancient people had no idea of the vast distances in our solar system, let alone the universe. They thought the firmament was close enough that birds could fly to it and cruise along its underside. The writer of the Book of Baruch adds additional details to the tower of Babel story. He said the people who built the tower (or ziggurat) wanted to find out what the firmament was made of: clay, brass, or iron. When they reached it their intent was to poke a hole in it (3 Baruch 3:7-8). Sounds like an early scientific experiment. Since God wouldn’t allow them to mess with his creation, he caused them to go blind and scrambled their brains.

Without modern technology and mathematics, people believed that God and other divine beings such as the angels lived above the firmament (The Lord is high over all nations, and his glory is higher than the heavens.—Psalm 113:4). Below the earth was a dark, watery place of chaos (The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the Devil.—Revelation 12:9). Over the millennia, people have always assumed God lived "up there." People refer to the "Man Upstairs" and will raise their eyes or point upward when speaking of God. A familiar hymn sung in churches is titled "Glory to God in the Highest."

In this day and age we know that God doesn’t sit on a throne above the heavens. If you travel high enough you won’t be bumping into any angels flitting about. Many Christians have even began to wonder about Jesus ascending into the clouds. Even though the writer of Luke told two different stories (one in the Gospel of Luke, the other in the Acts of the Apostles) about how Jesus left his disciples, Christian tradition has always focused on the first story — that Jesus was bodily lifted into the sky on his journey to heaven. Contemporary Christians question this story. Even if Jesus had been able to travel at the speed of light in his journey to heaven, two thousand years later, he would not even have left our galaxy.

Does this mean that Christians today know better than our ancestors long ago? Have Christians stopped thinking that God lives "up there?" As I’ve mentioned before, psychologists like to try to find answers to human questions. Psychologists from Gettysburg College and North Dakota State University wondered if people still thought of God as being above the earth. Or in their words, did people "consistently employ descriptions of vertical space in both Christian and non-Christian religions?" The researchers also recognized that most people thought of the Devil as being "down there."

They devised a clever experiment to find out if people associated God with "up" and the Devil with "down." They did this by showing a series of four God-related words (Almighty, Creator, Deity, and Lord) and four Devil-related words (Antichrist, Demon, Lucifer, and Satan) on a computer monitor. The total of eight words were randomly shown either at the top of the monitor or near the bottom of the monitor. When the word appeared the subjects were supposed to indicate whether it was God related or Devil related. Sometimes the God words appeared near the top and sometimes near the bottom of the monitor. Likewise for the Devil-related words.

The researchers were not interested in whether or not people assigned the words to the correct category — God or Devil. They measured how quickly each person responded. The psychologists guessed that people would take longer to assign a word to the correct category if the word were in a mismatched space, namely, a God word at the bottom or a Devil word at the top.

The results verified what they thougth would happen. The subjects took longer to match the God word when it was at the bottom than when it appeared at the top. Here is how they explain their results.

It seems that our results are consistent with religious symbolism and ritual. Preachers, priests, or ministers often speak to their congregations from an elevated platform known as the pulpit. This practice intentionally or unintentionally builds on the sorts of perceptual representational processes examined here, with a higher vertical position suggesting a closer relationship to God.

Our data are also consistent with the frequent observation, in anecdotes at least, that higher realms of attention seem to promote experiences of closeness to God. Along these lines, it has been reported that military pilots and astronauts tend to have experiences of God when flying high above the earth Similarly . . . an upward eye gaze is generally associated with experiences of being closer to God. Such systematic links seem particularly amenable to conceptions of divinity emphasizing high regions of vertical space.

The authors of the study explain the reason people do this is because our brains have a mechanism for using metaphors for describing something that is not directly accessible to our senses. The human brain is a sensory-based organ. Consequently, when we need to describe and make sense of abstract concepts, we need to use metaphors to make sense of what we are attempting to communicate. Since nothing supernatural can be perceived through our five senses, humans need to use metaphors for describing God or the Devil. That is why humans use metaphors such as "up" to describe something as ineffable as God.

A final note. The study did not find as strong a relationship between Devil and "down" as it did between God and "up." The data also found no significant differences in performance between believers and nonbelievers.

If you want to read the original study, you can go to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007, Volume 93, Number 5, pages 699-710). I can also send you a copy of the article in PDF format if you send your request to terry@sandbek.com.

Cleanliness Is Not Next to Godliness

2009-04-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

As a doctor and waiting-woman eavesdrop on Lady Macbeth, they have the following whispered conversation followed by Lady Macbeth's immortal words.

Doctor:
What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.
Gentlewoman:
It is an accustom’d action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.
Lady Macbeth:
Yet here’s a spot.
Doctor:
Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady Macbeth:
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then ‘tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow’r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Macbeth Act 5, scene 1, 26–40

Today, we call it mysophobia — an irrational fear of contamination. Lady Macbeth had developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It is a common after someone who has experienced or witnessed a traumatic event. Although there was a time delay for her, she was the one who convinced her husband, Macbeth to murder King Duncan of Scotland. By so doing, she became Queen of Scotland. Eventually, the awareness of what she had done began take its toll on her. The excerpt above is from the famous scene (Act 5 of Shakespeare's play Macbeth) and typifies the agony of living with OCD.

I still remember when my new client walked into my office many years ago. Moving slowly so that she would not brush against anything, she carefully wiped off a place on the couch with a tissue she kept in her purse. During the interview she admitted that she used up two large spray cans of Lysol in her house every week.

She was deathly afraid of germs contaminating her body, Like Lady Macbeth, she never really saw what she desperately tried so hard to clean. Education had no effect on her compulsive behavior. She was an intelligent person who understood that her body contained about 100 trillion cells. She also knew that ninety percent of these cells belonged to bacteria (germs) living in and on her body. When she recounted these facts, she curled up in a ball, closed her eyes and looked like she was attempting to hide from the germs.

As a nation we now have people who, although they don’t have mysophobia or OCD, have gone overboard on cleanliness. As the twentieth century progressed, Americans became more consciously aware and afraid of uncleanliness. Maybe it all started with deodorant and mouthwash. Although originally cosmetic, their effectiveness had to do with being able to kill "germs." Most people had never heard of anti-bacterial soap ten years ago. If they did, it was because of its use in medical facilities.

Gradually this product made its way to the average consumer. Now these products can be found in any drug store or grocery store. The big jump in usage came in 2005. People spent more than sixty-five million dollars on sanitizers which was a jump of more than fifty-four percent from only the year before.

Microbiologists have become concerned about our obsession with killing germs because our bodies need bacteria for a variety of reasons. These good germs and bugs help us digest and use the nutrition in the foods we eat. They also protect us from bad bugs that get into our bodies. Microbiologists have determined that if you could become totally germ-free, you would be dead within two weeks.

We need to begin to have a balance in our lives regarding cleanliness. Appropriate hygiene is important but knowing where to draw the line is equally important. Dr. Anne Maczulak, a microbiologist, has written a book entitled The Five-Second Rule and Other Myths About Germs.
Some of her gems (not germs) are startling. One of the big questions many people think about is related to the use of public toilet seats. She says it is extremely difficult to catch a disease from toilet seats. Studies have shown that there are about fifty microbes per square inch of surface on a public toilet seat. Your average office has about 21,000 microbes per square inch of surface. Scary.

She also says it is important what you do with your hands. After using the bathroom you are advised to wash your hands with soap and warm water for about twenty seconds. This will kill about eighty percent of any dangerous germs. On the other hand (no pun intended) try to keep your hands away from your face until after you have washed your hands. Why? Because these are the openings in your face — eyes, nose and mouth — that the germs use to get inside your body.

You’ve probably read by now that your kitchen cutting board is a breeding ground for the bad guys. After using a cutting board, she suggests you wash it with hot, soapy water, rinse it well, then pat it with a paper towel and let it air dry. Why go to so much trouble? She points to studies that have shown the average cutting board has two hundred times more fecal bacteria than your toilet seat. More scary.

For many people in our society, the old saying that "cleanliness is next to Godliness" has now been converted to "cleanliness is next to perfection." Basically, Dr. Maczulak tries to convince us that perfect cleanliness is not only impossible but is harmful.

Back to OCD and mysophobia. What is this all about? The condition is generally maintained by an attempt to control anxiety and discomfort. If a person feels uncomfortable in the presence of dirt or invisible germs, he might feel better after cleaning. Once this happens, it can escalate. When the anxiety returns, the person believes that if he doesn’t clean, then the anxiety will get worse and last forever. Unfortunately, it is like taking drugs to feel better. The effectiveness eventually wears off and more cleaning is needed to get the same sense of relief.

How do psychologists treat this problem when it has evolved into OCD/mysophobia? Our current treatments are quite effective. Unfortunately, there are people who try to sell treatments that are unproven and may not be any more effective than a placebo. Some of the more common examples of unproven therapies include hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, and so-called "energy therapies."

Cognitive-behavior therapy and exposure therapy have proven track records and have helped millions of people lead more normal lives. Sometimes these two are used by themselves; other times they are used in conjunction with each other. These treatments are extremely effective and, if properly administered, work after just a few months.

Some people have been helped with SSRI antidepressant medications used along side of psychological therapy. However, you must understand that few people get a permanent cure using these drugs by themselves. There is also the problem of unwanted side effects.

So, if you know of someone suffering from mysophobia or OCD related to germs and dirt, contact an experienced cognitive behavior psychologist who has had experience with this problem.

What’s Good About Good Friday?

2009-04-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

First, a little history. According to the New Testament, Good Friday honors the crucifixion of Jesus. Most scholars accept Friday as the day of his death yet point out various problems in the stories as told by the four Gospels.

For example, The narration in the book of Mark says that Jesus was betrayed at the darkest point of the night, namely around midnight. When Jesus was arrested he was dragged before the Chief priests for a trial that presumably lasted until 3:00 a. m. Bible scholars struggle with this fact because no pious Jewish priest would have done such a thing because Jewish authorities were forbidden by the Torah to sit in judgment at night.

Since Mark tells us that "all of his disciples forsook him and fled," there would have been nobody around to tell anyone the details of Jesus’ final hours. So where did Mark get his information? How then did Mark know what happened after the disciples ran away?

Many Bible scholars suggest that Mark created these events from passages in the Old Testament (which would have been known as the Hebrew Scriptures). Perhaps, it is suggested, Mark used a phrase from Psalm 22 to put on the lips of the dying Jesus: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He gets other ideas from this same Psalm. When he relates the story of Jesus being thirsty, he uses verses fourteen and fifteen. Mark tells us the Roman soldiers divided up his garments by using information from Psalm 22:18.

Then he uses ideas from the 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah. Mark noticed that Isaiah wrote aboaut a Suffering Servant who "was numbered with the transgressors" (v. 12). This gave him the idea to write about two thieves being crucified with Jesus. The section about the rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, may have been inspired by Isaiah, in verse 9, which said the Suffering Servant was "with a rich man in his death."

And so it goes. The other three Gospels were written decades after Mark’s gospel and, except for John, copied a lot from Mark. Luke also takes material from Isaiah. He noted that in Isaiah 53:12 the Servant made a petition to God regarding the transgressors. Luke then has Jesus speaking from the cross to God about the cruelty of the soldiers, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

So what does this have to do with psychology? Psychologists learned long ago that when people tell their story in therapy, the literal words are often a screen for deeper truths. For example, if a client were to relate the horror of reading about the terrible abuse of someone when they were a child, the client might be (but not always) trying to talk about her own abuse as a child. Deep truths are sometimes not on the surface of communication.

Many contemporary Christians and Biblical scholars believe that the Gospels are not about literal and historical truth. Rather, they believe that the stories point to something deeper and more meaningful than mere history. Unfortunately, other Christians are appalled at the idea that the Bible is not literally true.

Psychologists (also novelists and poets) would say that literal truth has severe restrictions. That is why great literature is not merely about the story that is being told. If any of you have taken literature classes in school, you know that you were encouraged to dig deeply into a story to find out what the author was trying to say through metaphor and other literary devices.

You were also taught that literary devices within a story are the most effective methods an author can use to get her point across to the reader. Some of these devices include figurative language, irony, allusion, simile. You may have discovered this took a lot of work. It would have been easier to just be satisfied with the literal story. For some of you, the light began to dawn and you found that literary and philosophical treasures could be found underneath the literal words.

The writers of the gospel stories were intelligent people who knew how to use literary devices to tell a powerful story. They were not literal historians whose only purpose was to record dry facts about Jesus. Their mission was much more profound than that. Jesus was not expected to die like a common criminal. When this happened, his followers were stunned and confused. It took years to figure out what his death meant. Each writer tried to express in mere words the seemingly inexpressible. Their words made use of literary devices to convey what simple facts were incapable of doing.

We still do this today. When we have had a profound, life-changing experience, we must resort to literary devices to convey to other people what really happened to us. We may struggle with finding the right words or phrases. This is why therapy can often be hard work. It can be an attempt to pass on to another person what is wholly subjective and personal to the person trying to tell their story.

Bible scholars realized these stories were more than just stories because the truths they were trying to explain were often beyond human understanding. To illustrate this point, look at all the different ways Christians disagree on what the Bible means. If it were as simple as an historical story, everyone could agree and Christians would be one big happy family.

As people, we are continually trying to figure out what life is all about. We are born with a brain that has no prior knowledge of how things are. We spend our entire lives learning, understanding, questioning. This is what gives life such richness. The more we probe beneath the surface of everyday existence, the more we discover the awesomeness (to borrow a currently over-used word) and depth of existence.

Oh yes, what about the title? Today is Good Friday 2009. As I thought about the day, I was reminded of what someone told me many years ago. He asked, "Why do they call it Good Friday? Shouldn’t it be called Bad Friday? After all, that’s when Jesus was killed. Doesn’t sound so good to me."

It all depends on your perspective. If you are a devout Christian, then I suppose Good Friday is all about Jesus dying for your sins. If you are a nonbeliever, then Good Friday gives you a three-day weekend.

Weight Loss

2009-04-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Some circumstances beyond human control have caused people to experience drastic weight loss. For example illness, extreme exercise (forced marches), imprisonment, famine, wars and religious fasting have caused people to lose weight.

Losing weight was not good for the survival of the human race. Long ago, people who lost too much weight did not survive long enough to pass on their genes. People who were better at keeping their bellies full were able to more effectively pass on their genes to later generations.

This is our heritage — to eat more than we need so that we can survive times of famine and food scarcity. We are programmed to eat this way. The only problem is that in the world of today, famine is a rare occurrence. We have become so efficient at making food available, even people with limited financial means can stay alive by eating enough. Our brains have gotten us to eat more than we need by making it one of the more pleasurable human pastimes.

In the course of history, eating has become associated with many other human activities. In the ancient world, offering food and drink to a stranger was a form of hospitality that almost had the force of law. Today, holidays are often spent with family and friends and enormous amounts of food. We eat with people we want to know; we eat with others as a way of staying connected; we offer food to people as a way of showing gratitude; food is often provided at meetings and conferences. Food has become the hub of social activities. Eating has become a social event.

For many people, hunger is merely a momentary sensation prior to filling our stomachs. Eating has recently become a habit that successfully takes away personal discomfort like boredom and loneliness. We have become a people who eat any time we want. Food is everywhere. The workplace is often filled with snacks. When we stay at a hotel, breakfast is often provided the next morning. We can find food at gas stations. Snack machines are conveniently available as we travel our nation’s roads.

So now we are told that we have an obesity epidemic. Nearly sixty years ago, thirty-one percent of the population thought they needed to lose weight. Today, fifty-eight percent think they need to lose weight. The irony is that half of us want to lose but less than a third of us really try to lose weight.

It gets even stranger — two-thirds of people who are trying to take off the pounds have no plan in mind for how they are going to pull it off. There is definitely a disconnect between our wanting to lose weight and our actual willingness to put the effort into it.

One of the major components of our super-sizing population is less and less exercise. Extreme athletes can consume thousands of calories a day and not gain weight. Without exercise as a weight control component, our metabolism slows down which means we have to eat less food.

Eating less makes our brain think we are in a famine and slows our metabolism down even more. At some point we just give in and start eating again which makes it even worse because our body has now adjusted itself to fewer calories.

Solving overweight problems can be complex. The contribution of psychology has been to show people how to manage their thought life regarding eating. Since our behaviors are often controlled and maintained by our self-talk, we need to understand what we say to ourselves when we try to eat more healthy. Dieters often sabotage their eating plans with continual mythological monologues.

If I don’t get rid of this hunger right now, I just won’t be able to stand the discomfort.
Since I have done so well with my eating this week, I’ll reward myself on the weekend with the food I didn’t allow myself to eat during the week.
If I just eat until I feel full, then I won’t overeat.
I’ve had such a rotten day that I deserve to feel better by eating.
I don’t want to diet any more because it’s too painful.

I call these self statements myths because they are not true. Can you spot the distortions in these beliefs? To be successful in losing weight these Voice messages must be defeated and replaced with a perspective that is more in line with reality. Here some examples of replacement thoughts that successful eaters have used.

I really enjoy the feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day when I have stuck to my eating plan.
I have other methods for defeating hunger instead of not following my plan.
My body is programmed to overeat, therefore I must use my brain to overcome this programming.
Instead of using food as a reward, I have a long list of non-food rewards I can earn by following my plan.
The longer I am successful, the easier it gets.

These "affirmations" are not very effective until you have cleaned out the mental garbage in your brain. The best sequence is to follow Voice fighting with affirmations. Realistic self-talk is a powerful tool for anyone who is trying to change their behavior.

Healthy Painful Emotions

2009-04-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ms. Anonymous sent a comment to my post on Six Unhealthy Emotions. Obviously I don’t know the gender of Ms. Anonymous so I will pretend it is female.

Normally, I would not allow this comment to be published. As I’ve mentioned before, I would like to publish all your comments to any post. However, the requirement is that you sign your name for it to be published. If you would rather not so, your comment will not be published. Instead of not having a response to your anonymous comment, you would be better off sending me a personal email message at terry@sandbek.com.

With that said, I decided to post a response to Ms. Anonymous because the confusion implied by her comment may be common for others of you. Here is what she said: "There are not only six unhealthy emotions. three are left out...anger, jealousy, and lust. and envy. thats four that were forgotten and i think should be included."

There are two kinds of painful emotions: healthy and unhealthy. You can review this concept in the previous article on the subject. If you have a copy of The Worry Free Life, you can review this material in Chapter Three. If you don’t have the book yet, you can also read Chapter Three online by clicking this link.

I would like to address the idea of healthy emotional pain. To do that we need to understand that our emotions exist within the package of thoughts and behavior. All emotions are preceded by some type of thought process (even thought you may not be aware of it) and followed by a behavior (active or inactive).

One of the major differences between your healthy painful emotions and the unhealthy painful ones is the different paths they take. The unhealthy painful emotions will propel you down a path of self-destruction and a life of misery. The healthy painful emotions are the warning bells that remind you that life can be painful but built within that pain is the means to manage and cope with it. Although there many healthy, painful emotions, fortunately there are only six unhealthy ones.

Let’s take a closer look at the comment by Ms. Anonymous. She believes that anger, jealousy, lust and envy are unhealthy emotions. This is a common misunderstanding. They certainly seem unhealthy. Don’t we have anger management classes for people because anger can be so destructive? Isn’t jealousy called the "green-eyed monster?" Aren’t we taught that lust and envy are emotions to be avoided?

The only way to make sense of the fact that these emotions are healthy is look at them in their packaging. Anger is a very common emotion. Few people go through a day without experiencing it. Anger is generated by something that takes place outside of us. Often it is because someone else does something that violates our sense of fairness of right and wrong. We then say to ourselves, "What they did is bad and they shouldn’t have done that." Our automatic reaction is to feel anger. Now, if this anger remains pure anger and doesn’t get polluted — which it often does by one of the unhealthy emotions — then the emotion will move us towards confronting the person about their behavior. When this happens, we may have increased the possibility of helping this person change the way they behavior towards you.

As happens so often, anger gets mixed with its opposite, resentment. Resentment when we respond to the injustice with the thought that other person is bad and worthless. Then we feel resentment, on top of the anger, and want to retaliate and hurt the other person.

This can be confusing because many people don’t make the distinction between anger and resentment. By mixing the two, it is easy to see why Ms. Anonymous thinks that anger is an unhealthy emotion. It is unhealthy because reasonable confrontation is very important in relationships. As social creatures, we improve ourselves by having people give us feedback on our behavior. Think of the times in your life when you have improved yourself because someone cared enough to let you know you were off base.

If you are a faith-based person, you probably believe that Jesus never sinned. If this is so, then you are on dangerous ground by thinking that anger is unhealthy. Do you remember his white rage when he carefully made a whip of nasty knots, walked into the temple and started beating people and destroying their legitimate businesses (John 2:13-16)? If you read this section carefully you realize how genuinely angry Jesus really was. It does no good to justify his behavior by using adjectives, like "righteous," in front of the word anger. Perhaps he was angry but not resentful. Anger, by itself, is normal and healthy. However, we need to be cautious about not letting resentment override our anger.

Jealousy is another difficult emotion to see as normal and healthy. Again, this is because we don’t understand the packaging of the emotion. Jealousy is triggered when we think someone wants to take something or someone from us that we love and admire. If someone feels jealousy, they might say to themself, "I think that person wants to take my boyfriend from me." The jealousy (free of unhealthy emotions) gets the jealous person to behave in healthy way by putting more energy and effort into keeping the relationship with the boyfriend strong and connected.

Ms. Anonymous mentioned lust. Actually, this is a physical sensation, not an emotion. It may be accompanied by emotions such as envy, excitement, or wanting. Since this post is about emotions we can leave lust for another time. Envy is often the flip side of jealousy. Instead of someone wanting something of ours, envy is the healthy emotion that occurs when we want something that someone else has. You can see why it is healthy because it motivates us to behave in ways that help us get what we want on our own. If we begin telling ourself that the person who has what we want is a bad person who doesn’t deserve it, then we might introduce the emotion of resentment and try to take what is not ours. Even though we might not actually do this, we may fantasize about doing it which is equally bad for our own well-being.

There are many more unhealthy painful emotions: boredom, loneliness, sadness, remorse, to name a few. In the near future I will be putting up a long list of healthy painful emotions that you can use a guide for knowing what emotions are healthy if though they hurt.

I hope this has brought some clarity to the notion that healthy emotions are also painful. Painful doesn’t mean they are they are bad for us. Just because they can get polluted by unhealthy emotions doesn’t mean they are bad for us. It only means we need to eliminate the pollution. Of course, this is done by changing our thought life — defeating the Voice.

The Trip

2009-03-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Since so many of you have written saying you would like to hear more about our trip I would like to make my first blog since we got back a review of our trip to Greece and Italy. The next blog will be focusing on psychology stuff.

I’m using the previous mini-mailings as a point of reference so that those of you who didn’t get a chance to read them will be able to get a perspective. These previous comments will be in italics followed by newer details.

As you read this, my wife and I will be spending the day (and night) flying to Athens, Greece via Chicago & Brussels, Belgium. Since I will be away from my computer until March 22 there will no new posts until the end of the month.

It was a long flight with a 2-hour layover in Brussels so we hung out, read, walked around and bought some Belgium chocolates. Total time from San Francisco to Athens was just over 18 hours. We were met at the airport by Sue Horner and driven to our lovely apartment where we fought sleep until the sun went down.

This is our third day in Athens. We are staying at the American College of Greece (ACG) where our friend, Dr. David Horner, is being installed as the latest president. With frequent flyer miles, free room and board, and daily guided tours, we could hardly refuse this invitation. Even though we have visited Athens before, we will be visiting the National Archeological Museum that we missed on our previous trip.

As you can see, this trip was somewhat unexpected. Six months ago we were notified by our friends, David and Sue Horner, that we were among several dozen of their friends invited to join them in the inaugural celebration. We came from many difference places on the planet and were escorted around Athens in sight-seeing buses to see the sights and eat at great Greek restaurants. Since this was an all-expenses paid trip, you can see why it was an offer we couldn’t refuse. When we arrived at our large two bedroom apartment, we checked out the two balconies at either side of the apartment that overlooked Athens. The kitchen had a freshly baked loaf of bread on the counter and two bottles of Greek wine on the table (one red, one white). The refrigerator had bottled water, soft drinks, fruit juices, a plate of cold cuts and a plate of various cheeses. Additionally, we found my favorite, Greek yogurt and honey. Yum! Needless to say we did not leave Athens hungry. The last tour we took before leaving was a visit to the Temple of Poseidon about two hours from Athens. This was the beginning of seeing many astonishing buildings throughout Greece and Italy. And, yes, the National Archeological Museum was a good choice. Very informative about ancient Greece.

One of the fun things we did was to march in the inaugural processional. It was very formal with all the college professors in caps, gowns and colorful hoods walking into the auditorium to the familiar strains of Elgar. The professors were followed by the rest of us guests who had flown to Athens for this occasion. We, too, wore caps, gowns and the hoods that represented the schools we graduated from. About fifty different American schools were represented.

It’s Tuesday, so it must be Sicily. Sharon’s friends from Finland just happened to be finishing up their month’s vacation in Sicily. We are staying in the same B&B and they are touring us around the island which they have been exploring for three weeks.

The one drawback in Greece is the pervasive cigarette smoke inside buildings. With the exception of one restaurant where we were the only people, my lungs became bombarded with a smell that had almost been forgotten in California. By the time we arrived in Sicily, the smoky attack on my nasal passages had caused cold-like symptoms. I found myself extremely tired with a headache and clogged sinuses. I slept the entire first day as Sharon and her friends wandered around the small village near our B&B. It was a chilly and rainy day so I missed nothing but was treated to the food and stories they brought back with them. That was the only rain we had for the rest of the trip — in spite of forecasts that continued to call for rain and sprinkles.

The last day in Sicily was spent driving through the beautiful countryside to the Valley of the Temples near Agrigento. These Greek temples are considered one of the most important archeological sites in the world. At one time, there were temples to Hera, Lacinia, Heracles, Zeus, Castor and Pollux, Hephaistos and Asklepius. There was even the temple of Concordia (picture on right) but no one knows who this was specifically dedicated to. Nevertheless, it is the temple most intact because it was converted to a Christian basilica in the sixth century. One of the reasons so many Greek and Roman buildings are in such a state of ruin is because Christian builders "borrowed" the marble from these great structures for their own basilicas and cathedrals.

A plane flight from Palermo, Sicily to Naples, Italy and then on to Rome. Ah, what a city. Sharon and I watched the complete HBO series, "ROME." prior to leaving. What a magnificent miniseries. What great sets. What great acting. Granted it was gory and full of sexuality. Anyone who knows Roman history knows these two experiences were common to the daily life of Romans. Determined to set themselves apart from their surroundings, the early Christians chose the opposite of these two life styles as part of their moral code. Today, we visit the Vatican with all its splendor. Tonight we attend a performance called "Enchanted Opera Arias" at the Chiesa di S. Paolo Entro Le Mura -- a church whose names translates to St. Paul Within the Walls.

After arriving at the Rome airport, we took a taxi to our lodging — a monastery. The room was spacious and overlooked their garden. We also had a nice breakfast available to us every morning. The only downside was the menu never changed. By the fifth day, we were glad it was the last time we would be getting our "free" breakfast.

The Vatican is a stunning structure. We both had MP3 players that gave us a guided tour of the Vatican. As awe inspiring as this structure is, the visit to the relatively tiny Sistine Chapel was another matter. I was surprised at how big the room was. The famous "God giving the spark of life to Adam" was surrounded by other works of Michelangelo depicting stories from the entire Bible. Even though no flash photography was allowed in the chapel, people were continually doing just that. This kept the blue coats in charge of such matters busy hollering at people about not taking flash pictures. The chapel was jammed with people so the noise level would rise often. These same staff people then had to hush everyone up. It seemed that none of their admonitions had much effect in the long run. Unlike the Louvre in Paris, these staff did not confiscate cameras that were misused.

The evening concert took us outside of ancient Rome. We got there early so walked around, had a bite to eat and sat through a nice concert of operatic arias. The church was fairly small (by cathedral standards, anyway). The four soloists were accompanied by a small ensemble consisting of two violins, a viola, a cello, flute, piano and clarinet.

So what have we done besides visiting the Vatican Museum and listening to arias? Well, the next day we did a walking tour of Old Rome: Colosseum, Forum, Palatine Hill, Trajan’s Column, Capitoline Hill and the Pantheon. On Sunday we visited museums -- the two must see museums are the National Museum and the Borghese. Along the way, we strolled hither and yon and visited the Spanish Steps where I held on to Sharon’s Mastercard. The Spanish Steps is the location of primo tourist shopping.

The weather again was cooperative. We had a little change of plan. Instead of the Borghese Museum, we walked from the Spanish steps to the Pantheon (picture on the right). Again, the pictures simply can’t do justice to actually standing in these amazing buildings. The Pantheon is in excellent shape because it, too, had been used as a Christian church in the 7th century. It is the oldest standing domed building in Rome and is the best preserved building of its age in the world. You can see by the accompanying picture the size of the people against the gigantic building. Standing inside this building is as humbling as looking through a telescope at a galaxy that is over two million light years away.

When we finished at the Pantheon, we walked to the Trevi Fountain. Again, pictures do not capture its allure. Next, we hiked over to the Fountain Navona in the large Piazza Navona. By this time it was getting dark so we caught the bus back to our monastery room.

Several of you have chastised my for the sexist remark about holding "on to Sharon’s Mastercard" at the Spanish Steps. I have been duly humbled and offer my apologies to any of you who were offended by that careless remark.

A sad day today — we leave Roma. However, to ease the pain we will be traveling up north to Modena by train. It’s supposed to be a beautiful trip and lasts about 4 hours. Friends of Sharon’s who used to live in Seattle are now living in Italy and running a tourist agency. We will spend a few days with them before heading back home.

We left Rome on the train and spent two wonderful hours going through and seeing the beauty of Tuscany. We got off at Siena and stayed there for two days and nights. The taxi ride to the hotel was better than any ride at Great America. The driver zoomed through small one-way streets and would turn into what was apparently a road only after we were in it. The hotel, Palazzo Ravizza, was originally the home of a wealthy Italian several hundred years ago. We stayed on the second floor. When we opened the large shutters on our windows we saw a breathtaking view of the valley and hills that looked like it had been painted especially for us. As we took in the scenery, we had to keep remembering we were actually in Tuscany and not looking at a movie. For dinner, we went to a local shop and brought back cheese, bread and a bottle of wine. When we asked the concierge how to get to the patio because we wanted to have our meal outside with the fabulous view, she gave us directions and then sighed, "how romantic." She was right.

After two days, we jumped on another train and headed north to Modena, home of balsamic vinegar and Ferrari cars. Our friends picked us up at the train station and brought us to their house. We wandered through a very old fort while Terri and her daughter had their swimming lesson. The next day we visited a mom and pop balsamic "factory." After that we headed up the cabin our friends share with one of their Italian friends. It was at an elevation of 6000 feet so we were in the snow and chilly but sunny weather. The cabin was old, huge and could sleep twelve people when needed. The next day we were dropped off at the train station for our last train trip to Milan.

So much has happened in these last weeks. We will be going to Milan tomorrow to catch our plane home on Sunday. While there we thought it would be fun to see an opera at the famous La Scala opera house. When we found the ticket price was $250/ person we opted for taking a guided tour instead. We leave Milan Sunday morning and arrive in San Francisco Sunday night around 10pm -- passing through ten time zones.

La Scala is a beautiful opera house. Adjoining it is their museum with pictures and busts of famous composers, artists and musical artifacts. Curiously, we saw an entire section devoted to the German conduct Herbert von Karajan. The exhibit had been running for five months and was scheduled to finish its run two weeks after we left the country. The multi-media exhibit almost felt like a shrine to the famous man. It was inaugurated by his widow.

We finally made it home, with a 7 hour layover in JFK. We landed in San Francisco around 10 pm and passed out in our hotel near the airport. Jet lag woke both of us up around 5 am so we drove home beating the rush hour traffic in San Francisco. No matter how wonderful travel happens to be, the old cliche is still true, "There’s no place like home."

Sleep Deprivation: Part 2

2009-02-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

Continued

Sleep Deprivation and Women
For some reason women are more prone to sleep deprivation than men. Twice as females than males say they struggle with insomnia. Furthermore, it appears that seventy-five percent of women do not get the recommended eight hours of sleep each night.

Most modern women would not be surprised by these findings. After all, a woman’s brain and body are much more complicated than a man’s. It seems as if women’s bodies never stop making complex biological changes — changes that can keep a good night’s sleep elusive. These changes include menstrual periods, pregnancy and menopause. Women have had to deal with this since the dawn of time. Now modern women can add contemporary life that might include single motherhood and demanding, stressful jobs.

When we look at the life cycle of a woman’s life we tend to see a pattern. During the early years, the 20s and 30s, pregnancy, childbirth and just being a mom can make sleep deprivation a constant companion. Later on, during the 40s and 50s women are beginning to struggle with hormonal changes. This is also the time when family concerns can become problematical: children leaving home – or coming back, possible separation or divorce, an awakening that life has to be more than it is, the search for one’s self. After 60 it is easy to decrease daily activity. In addition to making the body more lethargic, some scientists think that a change in outdoor activity for older people may decrease exposure to sunlight. This, in turn, can mess up a person’s internal clock

What can we do to overcome sleep deprivation?
I suppose the easy answer would be, "Well, just get more sleep." As is often the case, such simplistic responses are useless. Perhaps one of the most common responses to sleeplessness is medication. Over fifty million prescriptions are being written for sleeping pills every year.

This sounds like a simple and effective solution but it really isn’t. Most experts agree that taking medication to overcome continuing sleep problems should always be a last resort. As a temporary fix, it is probably benign. The problem with such an approach is the side effects issue. Consumer Reports found out that "Sixty-three percent of those who took sleep medications experienced side effects; 24 percent said they became dependent on the medication they used; and 21 percent said that repeated use reduced the drug's effectiveness."

Many drugs have a dramatic effect on different stages of sleep. One of the side-effects is somnambulism mentioned above. One woman found out she had eaten an entire box of chocolates during the night with no memory of having done so. Dommon effects of sleep medication are trouble waking up, headaches or nausea, feeling tired or dizzy. Some people say they feel as if their head is full of cotton in the morning and they can’t really think clearly. Even newer drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants can significantly reduce REM sleep for months or years. Most sleep specialists believe that long term use of sleeping medication can mask the real causes of sleep deprivation which, aside from real medical causes, are almost always life style issues.

If personal issues are serious, the best results occur when a person sees a psychologist skilled in cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). This approach offers the most effective remedy for sleep problems. At the beginning of such treatment, temporary use of medications can help to kick-start CBT.

How much sleep do we really need. It depends on age and here is the consensus:

Newborns and infants may need as much as 16-18 hours of sleep (including naps) each day.

Toddlers between the ages of 3-6 should have 10 to 12 hours every 24 hours.

Children who are between the ages of 6 and 9 are at their best with about 10 hours of sleep.

Beginning at age nine and continuing through adolescence kids need a minimum of about 9 nighttime hours.

Adult sleep is generally supposed to run between eight and nine hours. A few adults are wired to live on four to five hours sleep with no detrimental effects.

Some experts think seniors may find they need as much sleep as children, including naps.

Now that you know how much sleep you are supposed have, let’s look at how to get it. At the top of most lists is the need for regular exercise. A study at Stanford University corroborated this — especially for senior citizens. When they would exercise consistently, they "fell asleep more quickly, slept longer and felt more rested when they awoke than did their sedentary counterparts."

A comfortable environment can contribute much to a good night’s sleep. Although often difficult to do, going to bed at the same time every night, including weekends, can help your brain find a helpful sleep rhythm. One often overlooked issue is the pillow and/or mattress. If your mattress is more than ten years old, you may want to consider checking out a new one. Many sleep problems go away with a better mattress.

Many people find that predictable and soothing rituals about thirty minutes prior to bedtime can help make the transition to a sound sleep. Each person needs to find their own pattern but here are some suggestions that have helped others: a hot bath can lower your body temperature helping you to enter the first sleep stage more easily; using relaxation/meditation techniques; drinking a cup of hot tea or a glass of milk; reading something interesting that takes concentration and effort. Read until your eyes begin to close or until you find yourself reading the same sentence over and over. Some people set a clock radio to soothing music that will turn itself off in about a half hour. If you try this and are still awake when the music shuts off, look at the suggestions in the next paragraph. Whatever works for you, do the same thing every night.

In addition to what to do, you need to also avoid certain behaviors. Alcohol, caffeine and even food will stimulate your brain and make it harder to get to sleep if taken less than two hours before bedtime. It is helpful to get rid of anything that can stimulate your brain including sounds, light, lively music and pets. Avoid bringing anything work-related to bed. Computers and televisions can also offer too much brain stimulation.

Worry will have the same effect. After you have turned out the light and you find yourself tossing but not sleeping thirty minutes later, it is best to get out of bed and stop trying to sleep. If worry has kept you awake, then make a healthy contribution to your worry diary (Voice Diary). Some people find it helpful to find a room that has soft lighting. While there, do something soothing that is repetitive but not challenging — like knitting or reading. When you feel sleepy, head off to bed. If you’re not worrying but you are physically uncomfortable, you may want to try moving about. Walking or even mild exercise may be able to calm your body.

I hope this information has been helpful and you can soon get a better night’s rest.

Feel free to send me any suggestions of strategies you have successfully used to help get more sleep. You can contact me at this link.

There are many websites devoted to sleep and sleep deprivation. Here are a few to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation
http://www.sleepnet.com/depriv.htm
http://www.sleep-deprivation.com/
http://www.sleepdisorderchannel.com/stages/index.shtml
http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm

Sleep Deprivation: Part 1

2009-02-24T06:00:00.001-08:00

Not getting enough sleep is common to all of us. This happens when our body’s natural rhythm gets out of sync for a variety of reasons. This is most dramatic when we cross time zones while traveling by jet. Some nights we have a lot on our minds and will worry for a few hours before falling asleep at our regular time. Inactivity can also contribute to occasional sleeplessness. Studies show that over half of us occasionally experience loss of sleep.

Sleep deprivation refers to a condition that is much more chronic. When loss of sleep interferes with our normal activities it is called sleep deprivation. As you can guess, parts of our brain need to rest during sleep. When your brain sense it needs to rest, it will begin to shut down for very short periods of time which is called microsleep. Microsleep only lasts a few seconds Maybe you have experienced this as your head droops during a boring lecture or when driving late at night. The microsleep is sending you a signal that says "if you don’t give me more sleep soon, I’m going to shut down completely." Many traffic accidents are caused by ignoring this brain message.

Ironically, some people have the mistaken belief they can train themselves to live on less sleep than they normally get. This is different than a few individuals who are somehow born needing less sleep. One disturbing study found that people who consistently get less than four hours of sleep are prone to dying within six years at a rate three times greater than people who get more sleep.

What is Normal Sleep
Before we look further at sleep deprivation, let’s try to understand more thoroughly what sleep really is. Over fifty years ago, sleep researchers discovered that we all go through five different phases when we sleep. The first phase occurs before we actually go to sleep and is called the Waking Stage. It sounds strange that being awake is actually a sleep phase. This occurs when you begin to feel sleepy because your body is preparing itself for falling asleep. Several things happen here. As your body begins to prepare itself, your muscles begin to relax and your eye movement begins to slow down.

Next, your body enters what is called Stage One sleep. This begins when drowsiness sets in and your eyes finally close. This usually lasts about five to ten minutes. Even though this is a sleep stage, if you are awakened you may not feel as if you have really slept. Those of you who practice a muscle relaxation exercise or meditate will recognize this as the stage you experience when you are fully relaxed. Some people in this stage may have a sense of falling followed by sudden muscle contraction.

When your muscles begin to tense and relax (and you are not aware of this) you have entered sleep Stage Two. Now your heart rate slows down and your body temperature drops. This stage gets your body ready for deep sleep.

Stages three and four are similar except stage four is more intense. You may have heard of these stages referred to as delta sleep or slow-wave sleep. It is called slow-wave sleep because your brain patterns on an electromyogram show brain waves that are very slow.

These four stages generally run about ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes. Up to this point you have not yet been dreaming. Interestingly, you don’t immediately dream after stage four. It appears that after stage four you go back to stage three, then two and finally dream sleep. This complete forward-backward cycle occurs several times per night and can take anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours. When you dream your eyes move very rapidly so it is called REM sleep – REM stands for rapid eye movement. This sleep stage was not discovered until 1953.

As the night wears on, most of your sleep stays in the first two stages with some REM sleep thrown in. Some scientists think the brain does this in order "to create the healthiest possible balance to prevent fatigue and irritability during waking hours."

When you begin to dream a lot of changes take place in your brain and body. Even though your brain patterns look like stage one sleep, you will now display the telltale sign of dreaming: rapid eye movement (REM). Prior to this, much of your body functions have slowed down. Now your breathing and heart rate speed up and become irregular. If someone was watching, they might see twitching in your legs, face, or fingers. For most people, REM sleep is experienced about three to five times each night.

Here is the interesting piece about REM sleep: your major voluntary muscle groups become paralyzed. Why is this? Most scientists believe this is a safety factor built into the brain. When your muscles and brain are activated, the likelihood that you will act out your dream increases. As you can imagine people acted out their dreams while asleep (like driving a car) would have less chance of passing on their genes. They would probably take themselves out of the gene pool.

In this sleep stage a couple of interesting things can take place. If your brain doesn’t shut down your muscles, you may begin to sleepwalk (technically called somnambulism). People have done some amazing, silly, and dangerous things while in this state. While sleepwalking takes place when you are fully asleep with fully operating muscles. The opposite can also occur when you become awake while your body is still paralyzed. This experience is called hypnopompic sleep. This paralyzed-awake experience can also occur before fully falling asleep and is called a hypnogogic experience. Both are referred to as an HHE (hypnopompic-hypnogogic experience).

Best estimates are that twenty to thirty percent of the population may experience some form of this HHE brain state. Sometimes it is remembered and sometimes not. When experienced it can be frightening if you don’t know what is happening and why. No matter how scared you are, you cannot move or speak. It is usually fairly short-lived, no more than a few moments. Strange things can happen during these few moments when time seems to stand still. It is common for people to report some kind of "presence" that is threatening or even an "evil" presence. This presence is usually felt to be close by and may seem to be standing near or sitting on the bed watching or monitoring you. Some of the many experiences that accompany this is feeling is one of being strangled, attacked and having vivid hallucinations. Some people even report an out-of-body experience (OBE) like floating near the ceiling of the room. Even after the event is over, there can still be a sense of anxiety. From this description you can now understand how the idea of the incubus became popular in medieval Europe. In more modern times, we now know that alien abductees are those who have experienced an HHE.

So what’s the purpose of this back and forth activity in your brain during sleep. The answers are just beginning to appear. Many studies have lead researchers of sleep to think that one of the major functions of sleep is related to memory processing. Some studies have shown that sleep is responsible for allowing you to keep new memories. During sleep the brain can actually make new synapses and connections between brain cells.

Causes of Sleep Deprivation
So, why are so many people sleep deprived when sleep is so terribly important for health and well-being? It seems there are many reasons. Many people tell researchers their lives are so fast paced that they simply don’t have enough time to get everything done, let alone get enough sleep. Many contemporary societies value productivity. This can put sleep at the bottom of one’s personal priority list. Since most people (especially younger adults) are not aware of the detriment of sleep deprivation, they just accept being tired thinking they will catch up on the weekend and all will be well.

There are also a series of medical reasons for sleep deprivation that are called sleep disorders. One of the most common is sleep apnea. Many people who have this condition don’t even know they have it and just feel tired all the time. My co-author of The Worry Free Life had this condition for most of his life. When we went on a book tour, I was awakened one night in our motel room by the sound of a chain saw. I realized it was Pat snoring. As I listened I guessed the noise was more than snoring because there would be long pauses where it seemed he had stopped breathing. We talked about it the next day and he eventually found a physician and had surgery for the condition. After that, Pat reported he had never felt so refreshed. Sleep apnea is not only annoying but it can be dangerous by raising a person’s blood pressure.

One of the major psychological reasons for sleep deprivation is insomnia caused by worry. Most of us have some insomnia now and then. When it becomes more frequent, it is time to do something about it. Those of you who are using the tools in The Worry Free Life already know how to do this. Most of my clients have learned to sleep well by using a combination of the three stress reduction exercises and Voice Fighting.

Suggestions for combating insomnia include issues like depression, being overweight, or eating and drinking too much prior to sleep. The bottom line for all these suggestions is to change your thinking. If you remember the Domino Effect (page 25) you will also remember that behaviors are usually preceded by feelings that are caused by thought patterns. Worry is just another word for destructive thinking (or as we refer to it, the Voice).

Why is sleep deprivation so bad?
Research has shown that a lack of proper sleep translates to problems of poor concentration, increased irritability, and a decrease in school and job performance. Sleeplessness can also increase your vulnerability to certain illnesses because of a less effective immune system.

We mentioned traffic accidents resulting from sleep deprivation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that more than 100,000 crashes each year are a result of drivers falling asleep at the wheel. This is because the brain begins to lose its ability to function at an appropriate level: malfunctioning of your brain neurons that have a drastic effect on perception and reaction time.

Being able to use language effectively more difficult as you get less sleep. Severe sleep deprivation can basically shut down all activity in your brain. What happens to your behavior when this condition sets in? The answer is, lots of nasty things. You can begin to slur your speech just as you would if you were drunk. One study found that if someone drives after being awake more than seventeen hours he or she will drive worse than someone who has a blood alcohol level of .05 percent – the legal limit for drunk driving. In addition to slurred speech, you may stutter, speak slower and in a monotone voice. Even if your speech sounded normal to you, you would still have trouble speaking intelligently. Instead of creatively using a rich vocabulary to express yourself, your brain would choose simple phrases that were clichéd and repetitious.

Another study found that reaction time was significantly impaired. When you are sleep deprived, you lose your creative ability for making logical decisions quickly. No wonder accidents and sleep deprivation are related. This is even made worse because your ability to multitask becomes less efficient. One of the most pernicious accidents occurs in hospitals when residents don’t get enough sleep (working to much with too little sleep has typically been one of the rites of passage for new physicians). Several studies have found out that sleep deprivation increases the number of medical errors in medical settings to increase dramatically. This is why I politely grilled my surgeon before my LASIK eye surgery. "Did you get enough sleep last night?" "Any major stresses with your family?" Only after she answered all my questions to my satisfaction did I let the surgery begin.

If you are person who has difficulty with focusing, attention and impulse control, sleep deprivation will only make these conditions worse. Well, what about stress? This, too, can be a problem because lack of sleep can increase your body’s production of stress hormones.

A sleep deprived body will begin to slow down the facility for metabolizing glucose. This can lead to early-stage diabetes type-2. As you can probably imagine, if the body does not metabolize sugar well, obesity will be more likely. This is exactly what one study found – the research suggested a link between sleep deprivation and weight gain. This problem then becomes a vicious circle because weight gain increases the likelihood of sleep apnea which increases the probability of sleep deprivation, and so on.

Is this the end of the bad news? Nope. If sleep deprivation continues too long you can experience hallucinations, temporary insanity or even death as your system shuts down.

To be continued Friday

25 Random Facts About Psychology

2009-02-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Not everyone who hears voices is mentally ill.
Lightner Witmer founded clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896.
A psychologist and psychiatrist are not the same: psychiatrists are physicians who specialize in helping people through medication; psychologists use non-medical means to help people.
The results of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 were so unexpected that Dr. Zimbardo had to discontinue the experiment before it was complete.
Psychology is a science; parapsychology is a pseudoscience.
No one yet knows how the brain develops consciousness — often called "an awareness of awareness."
Psychologists try to describe reality as it really is rather than what humans believe it to be.
For a person to practice psychology, she must be licensed and have a doctorate degree.
Psychology has discovered over forty cognitive, thinking errors all people are susceptible to.
The polygraph, the so-called "lie detector," cannot reliably detect a person who is lying.
Psychologists do more than provide therapy to people in need (clinical psychology). They teach, do research, design programs for NASA, work with law enforcement, help business be more effective, and show athletes strategies for peak performance — to name a few of the many areas of expertise for psychologists.
Psychologists cannot read people’s minds.
There are currently more female than male graduate students in psychology.
Hypnosis, when effective, is nothing more than the operation of the placebo effect.
Freud was not the "Father of Psychology." Although there is no one founder of psychology, many psychologists consider Wilhelm Wundt the founder of psychology in the sense that he made it a true science.
Psychologists have shown that two- and three-day old babies can perceive musical rhythms.
Psychohistories are problematical when they "explain too much." This occurs when the writer doesn’t account for chance and coincidence in the life of the person being studied.
The ink-blot test is not much use for finding out anything about another person.
In psychology, a "believer" is someone who accepts something before checking it out scientifically whereas the "skeptic" is someone who does not accept something until it has been verified scientifically. Most psychologists are skeptics.
The term ESP (extrasensory perception) was made popular by Duke University researcher J. B. Rhine. He identified four types of ESP: clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition. He was a poor researcher and was often tricked by many of his subjects. Any good magician can outperform the most successful practitioner of ESP.
Psychologists now study concepts earlier thought impossible to study such as morality, love, and human belief systems.
In 1907 German psychologist Oskar Pfungst studied a horse that its owner claimed could perform mental feats such as adding numbers. It couldn’t without unconscious cues from its owner.
Psychology research in human perception has solved problems such as radar monitoring, street lighting, and airplane cockpit design.
One study on a college campus found that there is a wide discrepancy between student perceptions of the profession of psychology and reality.
Psychologists, like all scientists, understand that there is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. Knowledge is always susceptible to change. Some knowledge changes frequently, other knowledge changes minimally.

The Art of Napping

2009-02-17T06:40:00.000-08:00

Do you ever take naps? If you do, are other people aware of your napping? It wasn’t so long ago that napping was seen as a sign of weakness. Then we realized very famous people regularly took naps: Winston Churchill, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Napoleon Bonaparte, Johannes Brahms, John D. Rockefeller.

We might even say these "nap models" could credit some of their success to naps. None of them could have accomplished what they did if they were sleep deprived. Their output demanded mental and physical alertness which is not possible for those who are sleep deprived. Yet more people are sleep deprived today than what we need in a healthy society. Unfortunately, two-thirds of Americans are sleep deprived according to a poll taken in 2000 by the National Sleep Foundation.

Most people need seven to eight hours of sleep each night — few of us get it. So what’s the point of getting so much sleep? The answer is that it makes us less dangerous. For example, we know that car crashes and other accidents are often the result of sleep deprivation. Many people use late night driving tricks like drinking caffeine, turning on loud music, talking aloud to oneself in order to stay awake. Napping is a much more effective alternative. If a tired driver were to take a sixty minute nap before getting in the car, alertness could be improved for up to ten hours.

For those whom alertness is vital, napping also increases performance. One such study was done on pilots who took a twenty-six minute nap during their flight. The results showed a thirty-four percent improvement in performance and a fifty-four percent improvement in overall alertness.

Napping can sometimes reverse the effects of too little sleep. Some studies have demonstrated that naps are as good as an entire night of sleep on certain types of memory tasks. Many studies have agreed that naps can make our late afternoon hours as good as our morning hours. The participants in these studies found that an early afternoon nap boosted their performance back to morning levels.

Napping also helps us to become more productive, alert and creative. Naps can even improve our mood. One study, from Harvard University, showed the effectiveness that naps had in reversing burnout from a stressful workday.

Napping might also make us healthier and less susceptible to certain diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, even stress. Some studies have even suggested that naps can lower the risk of excessive weight gain.

With all these benefits, why don’t more people nap? William Anthony is a psychologist and the executive director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University. In his book, The Art of Napping, he explains that even though more people are willing to privately tell others they nap, it is still a forbidden topic in the workplace."Our culture has developed the mistaken belief that productivity and napping are two different extremes," he says. He has coined some funny terms. Unlike some people in European countries, Americans devalue the siesta because they think it diminishes their work output. Dr. Anthony calls us a "nappist society" filled with napaphoics — people who try to make nappers feel guilty. His nickname for people who nap but keep it a secret is a "clapper" — a closet napper.

A humorous aside about Dr. Anthony. His entire family believes in napping. His family is so competitive they can be found having napping contests. No wonder he wrote a book on napping.

How long should you nap? That depends on what you want to accomplish. Naps can vary from a few minutes to more than an hour. Sometimes the "pretend nap" can also be effective. This is a nap that is not a nap — you lay down, close your eyes and never fall asleep. Just relaxing and letting your mind drift peacefully can also be restorative.

Some people take catnaps of about twenty minutes. Even this short amount of time can give you benefits in concentration and alertness. Additionally your mood may improve. If you need to be immediately alert after your short nap, you can turn your catnap into what is called a caffeine nap. This is done by ingesting caffeine (caffeinated beverage or caffeine pill) before napping. Since caffeine takes about twenty to thirty minutes to kick in, soon after you wake up you will be alert and full of energy.

If you sleep longer — up to forty-five minutes — your nap may also include REM sleep (dreaming). This stage of sleep improves creative thinking and lets your brain process information more effectively. Napping even longer will cause your brain to experience all five stages of sleep including slow-wave sleep. If you have a long nap in the morning, you will have more REM sleep; long afternoon naps produce more slow-wave sleep. If you choose an extended nap be sure to avoid being awakened before you automatically wake up. Being awakened during slow-wave sleep will produce "sleep inertia" — a condition that makes you feel disoriented and foggy headed. You may even feel more sleepy than you did before napping.

A psychologist at Cornell University, James Maas, developed something called the power nap. In his book, Power Sleep, he suggests that naps should take place about eight hours after we wake up from our night’s sleep. The power nap needs to quit just prior the slow-wave sleep so that you can awake fully alert with no drowsiness. Some power nappers set an alarm so that they don’t slip into slow-wave sleep.

Typically, people think naps are only for people who don’t get enough sleep. Two Japanese researchers have shown that napping can improve mental performance even if a person has had a full night’s sleep. Naps, then, are important. You need to find the best napping style for you. There is no one best length of time. If I have nothing scheduled, I like to nap until I wake up. Sometimes when I feel really tired, I might nap for only twenty to thirty minutes. Other times, I’ll tell myself that I only need a few minutes rest and will awake an hour or more later. At other times, I feel like I have not napped at all and decide to get up finding myself surprised by the clock that I had actually slept. Do what works for you.

Happy Napping.

Happiness - Part 2

2009-02-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

Why another article on happiness? Because it is becoming a major force in psychology. It is the cover story for this month’s issue of Psychology Today. My article today will summarize some of the information in this 10-page story written by Carlin Flora and entitled, The Pursuit of Happiness. As Flora says on the opening page,

Caught up in a happiness frenzy for much of the past decade, Americans have remarkably little to show for it. Herein we highlight the research that illuminates a more satisfying way to well-being.

In a mere eight years, the number of books on happiness increased by 4000%. Even though the topic has been researched for more than 25 years, it has only become an official part of psychology in the last ten years. Once this research became public "experts" began to appear out of the woodwork. Much of what is available about happiness in books and on websites tends to be of the "quick fix" variety.

Often it tells you "what to do" instead of the "how to do it" of the psychological research. The science of happiness is interested in the details and methods that have proved to work better than placebo. It is how all science is done: use a control group, do the study more than once, and control as many outside variables as possible.

What is happiness about? This article tells us it "is not about smiling all the time. It’s not about eliminating bad moods." We make the distinction in The Worry Free Life between Big "H" and little "h." The distinction is important. Happiness (Big "H" variety) is like contentment, tranquility, or peace of mind. This is the happiness that psychology is interested in. Consensus on what is happiness is shared by many different people in many different fields: "neuroscientists, psychiatrists, behavioral economists, positive psychologists, and Buddhist monks."

The other type of happiness — the little "h" variety — is often equated with excitement, passion or pleasure. This type of happiness cannot be experienced alongside emotional discomfort. You either have one or the other. We often use little "h" to drive away discomfort. Discomfort can also drive away the little "h." In contrast, the Big "H" and discomfort can coexist. No matter how bad we feel, it is possible to have contentment exist underneath all the pain. As you can imagine, the little "h" is short-lived; the Big "H" can last a lifetime.

Ironically, happiness is never a goal but a side effect of engaging in behavior that moves us toward our goals. So many people think that happiness will be theirs when they get what they are going after. When they have achieved their goal, it dawns on them that they were happier while working towards and anticipating the goals. Is this why couples often reminisce about the early days of their relationship when they had no money and were struggling to define their life?

What about money? Does it bring happiness? Yes and no. It can bring enormous amounts of little "h" type happiness — and then it’s gone. It can have an effect on Big "H" if your life has been a struggle because the lack of money has interfered with being comfortable. After you have become comfortable more money has no effect.

You can increase your happiness quotient by what you do and what you think. Researchers have found that expressing your gratitude toward people can strongly increase you sense of happiness and well-being. Frequently engaging in acts of kindness, randomly or planned, has a positive impact on your happiness level. Being more happy is something you must do for yourself. Psychologist Sonya Lyubormirsky, a major researcher in positive psychology, tells us that "Becoming happier takes work, but it may be the most rewarding and fun work you'll ever do."

Your thought life can also have a dramatic impact on future happiness. Carefully replacing habitual negative thoughts and attitudes (our gift from cognitive-behavioral psychology) is one of the most effective techniques. Another technique is to learn to accept and not fight against healthy painful emotions. Even though you need to work at changing your unhealthy emotions such as depression and guilt, you want to use other techniques for managing healthy emotional pain like sadness and remorse. One of the most successful strategies is something called "mindfulness." Author Flora describes mindfulness as "a mental state of relaxed awareness of the present moment, marked by openness and curiosity toward your feelings rather than judgments of them."

Often we find the daily grind can shorten our perceptions of what life is all about. Sometimes it is helpful to look at the longer arcs of your life in order to realize that your life is more than the grinding routine. "Evaluate your well-being at the macro as well as the micro level to get the most accurate picture of your own happiness."

Finally, we know that part of living the happy life is to be yourself. Although this sounds simplistic it is difficult in a society where are continually being evaluated either directly or indirectly. Finding out who you are can be the beginning of happiness. At some point in the psychotherapy process my clients begin to discover their true self. It can be painful and scary, but an exhilarating step. This is often begun by uncovering one’s personal values and then learning to live out those values. This experience is not an "a-ha" moment but the beginning of a lifelong journey to a different place. The author of the Psychology Today piece puts it this way: "The state of happiness is not really a state at all. It's an ongoing personal experiment."