She starts, naturally, with an anecdote: a professor of hers named Lester managed to think his way out of a heart condition by “systematically let[ting] go of every negative emotion he was experiencing.” And of course, “after he had attained this state he found that he could heal people and fix objects, such as broken TVs, merely by ‘seeing them as perfect.’”

Stephen Law recently felt compelled to comment:

Are you actually suggesting that if we really, really believe we can fly by flapping our arms, and jump of the roof, then we will fly? Surely this takes the “power of positive thinking” too far?! [...]

One danger of this sort of nonsense is that it leads to blaming people for their own illnesses. If you’re ill, it’s your own fault! Banish those bad thoughts. You just need to *think* your way to health.

Gerloff’s response was largely unhelpful, and ended with the statement: “By the way #2, if people can levitate–as has been demonstrated–then why shouldn’t they be able to fly?”

Walk away, Stephen. Just walk away.

1. Loss aversion: people really, really hate to lose something they already have and will forego even favorable risks to avoid it.

2. Regression to the mean: an especially strong performance is likely to be followed by a weaker performance and vice versa.

Off the top of my head, I’d add Confirmation Bias and the tendency for humans to project themselves onto their environment. Any other ideas?

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father.

Most of this is not new. My first encounter with these arguments was in 2001′s The Myth of Monogamy, which is a popularization of much of the science involved. Basically, female animals frequently have more control over mate choice than was previously believed, and will frequently exercise that control before going on to choose a mate to raise offspring with.

But Ryan and Jethá take it a step farther:

Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

I’m always worried when we start trying to tie evolution to modern morality. Perhaps, as the authors point out, we’re as sexually rambunctious as the bonobos. But we’ve surrounded ourselves with a very complex culture, and we’re just as much social and cultural beings as we are sexual ones.

I’ll admit, I’m defensive. I’ve just celebrated ten years of monogamy. Of course, the authors don’t do much to help. Consider this analogy for accepting the costs of going against our polygamous nature:

For example, you might happily choose to work the night shift, but the resulting disruption of your circadian clock will increase your risk of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, gastric disorders, and so on no matter how committed you are to your decision. Similarly, we can choose to wear tight corsets, or ill-fitting shoes, or to live on chili-dogs and ice cream, but because all these behaviors run counter to our evolved nature they will cost us over time.

Gosh, thanks.

I believe that the authors are correct that our evolution has given us instincts that leave us more suited for serial monogamy. But I think it would be wrong to conclude that we’re all that beholden to those instincts.

Humans are varied and flexible creatures, and each of us will deal with our instincts in our own way. Some will ignore them, some will go with them, and some will subvert them. While I agree its best to be aware of them, I suspect that we shouldn’t be drawing too many conclusions from our evolutionary past about our current behavior.

From this perspective, religion is not innate, but rather a cultural development that we might call “cognitive-emotional cheesecake”. I adapt this metaphor from Steven Pinker’s claim that music is not innate, but rather amounts to “auditory cheesecake”. A preference for cheesecake is not innate, since cheesecake did not exist during the early stages of human development. But preferences for sugar and fat are innate, and cheesecake cleverly combines them in an appealing way. Similarly, I conjecture, religion is appealing because it combines the psychological needs for explanations and emotional reassurance.

Paul Thagard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.

There’s just something about the phrase “cognitive-emotional cheesecake” …

… to these books about self-help. Self-help is a multi billion dollar industry in America, selling millions of books. Here are a few that take a look at the movement from the outside.

Legacy of the Occult

Pullquote: ”The leaders in [New Thought] have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.”
William James

In his work Occult America, Mitch Horowitz traces the origins of “self-help” back to one Phineas Quimby. Quimby was a clockmaker suffering from tuberculosis in 1830′s New England. He noticed that carriage rides in the country side both lightened his spirits to relieved his symptoms. He became convinced that the two were connected: our thoughts and emotions affect our physical state. He developed this idea into what is now called the “new thought” movement.

Horowitz thesis is that certain “occult” ideas were influential in American history and have been absorbed by mainstream culture. Quimby fits in this loosely, since he was influenced by Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism, but his ideas don’t seem to connect to them directly and don’t seem particularly “occult”. One of Quimby’s accomplishments was to mentor Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to form the Christian Science movement. However, after Quimby died Eddy cut all ties to his memory.

Occult America is largely anecdotal, and sometimes seems to be a string of biographies rather than a history of intellectual influence. Still, in one long chapter Horowitz follows the proponents of New Thought from Quimby to Norman Vincent Peale, and shows how the New Thought idea that positive thoughts magically create positive outcomes has become the backbone of the American self-help market.

Positive Thinking Conquers the World

Pullquote: I didn’t mind dying, but the idea that I should do so while clutching a teddy and with a sweet little smile on my face – well, no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.
Barbara Ehrenreich

Picking up where Horowitz leaves off is Barbara Ehrenreich, with her new book Bright-Sided. Ehrenreich agrees that the modern self-help movement is rooted in Quimby’s New Thought ideas. However, her primary goal is to show just how far the self-help movement has spread into modern American culture.

Ehrenreich first encountered the influence of the Self-help movement when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ehrenreich describes how she was bombarded with pink ribbons and positive messages, all supposedly to promote positive outcomes. Ehrenreich, who actually has a Ph.D. In cellular biology, did some research of her own. She found that the positive thinking crowd was on very shaky grounds, medically speaking.

Ehrenreich goes on to show how deeply rooted self-help philosophy has become in American business and religion. Particularly disturbing is how deeply self-help has merged with corporate management philosophy, producing huge profits for those scientists and “scientists” who offer dubious advice that accords with New Thought.

A journalist, Ehrenreich does a good job with reporting and wry observations, and her biology degree gives her chapter on breast cancer an interesting clinical touch. Bright Sided is an excellent overview of the full scope of the self-help movement.

Incidentally, if you really want to get a deeper understanding of the ideas in the movement, I’d recommend Robert M. Price’s Top Secret. Price deconstructs the major books of modern pop psychology, religion and self-help.

I need self-esteem, quick!

Pullquote: Fantasizing about heaven on earth may bring a smile to your face, but it is unlikely to help transform your dreams into reality.
Richard Wiseman

Completely different in its way is Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds. Wiseman is a skeptic and a frequent guest of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, so he’s quick to criticize most of the works in the self-help genre. In their place, he offers a number of quick lessons drawn from current research that have proven helpful in promoting happiness, boosting creativity and reducing stress.

It turns out that sharing your problems with a sympathetic ear is actually less helpful that writing them down. Brainstorming is less effective that coming up with ideas beforehand. To relieve stress, get a pet. 59 Seconds reads like a combination of a science popularization and a self-help book, which is what it is. But it’s self-help based on current psychological research, rather that the thoughts of a 19th century clockmaker.

There. Three books that I trust you won’t find on Oprah’s reading list. Enjoy.

Richard Wiseman did a study on “lucky” & “unlucky” people. I found his analysis fascinating:

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Wiseman created a “luck school” to see if he could train people to be luckier. He succeeded:

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school”, she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

Here’s his conclusion:

Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

That’s the kind of person I want to be, and I’ve noticed the more I am like that, the more opportunities seem to come my way.

Do you think of yourself as lucky or unlucky? Do you agree that your personality and perspective in life affects that view?

Overcoming personal bias can be one of the most difficult tasks in searching for the truth. The particular experiences and influences in our lives are – to a large degree – out of our control and yet they play a huge role in shaping our beliefs. And it’s not as though we can reboot our lives, remove the biasing agent, and see what we end up believing (we would also have to do it a few hundred times so we can get a decent confidence interval).

A first step is acknowledging our biasing factors, but how do we wrap our minds around it?  Alicorn at Less Wrong gives a great example:

During one of my epistemology classes, my professor admitted (I can’t recall the context) that his opinions on the topic would probably be different had he attended a different graduate school.

What a peculiar thing for an epistemologist to admit!

Of course, on the one hand, he’s almost certainly right. Schools have their cultures, their traditional views, their favorite literature providers, their set of available teachers…
<snip>
But on the other hand… but… but…

But how can he say that, and look so undubiously at the views he picked up this way?

It’s an uncomfortable position.  Now, for all I know, the professor was discussing preferences and not an objective truth claim. I don’t have as big of a problem with the notion that, had I been raised in the South, I would find grits more delicious than waffles (how absurd!). It’s more of a problem when we acknowledge that personal factors are affecting our so-called universal claims of objective truth.

As usual, my mind took the question to religion.  Most people continue to believe the religion they were taught as a child. As it happens, I was raised in a secular household without much discussion of God and grew up to be an atheist. But let’s revisit the scenario in which I was raised in the South (eating foul grits). If I had been raised by Evangelical Christians would I still be an atheist today? It’s conceivable that I would be a Christian apologist, writing philosophical papers for God’s existence and arguing on blogs. That image troubles me – and not just because it’s at odds with what I think right now. I want to be confident that my beliefs are an accurate reflection of reality, not the result of where I was born. The counter factual makes me wonder.

It’s difficult not to sound hypocritical. I believe that, by coincidence, I was raised by parents who were correct. But I’ve heard religious people of all faiths say similar things. What can we do to cut through the biasing influence of our upbringing? How can I be confident that, unlike them, I really WAS coincidentally born into a household which was correct? Obviously, this question applies to everyone, not just me and not just atheists.

All I can see to do is foster critical thinking skills – the conscious effort to overcome bias. I’m trying my best to keep an open mind, give other views a fair hearing, and pursue the truth. So far, as I’ve done that, I’ve found the evidence for the existence of gods to be pathetically flimsy.  I know I can never fully free myself of bias, but at least I’m doing what I can.  It’s my impression that as people learn critical thinking skills, they’re more likely to become atheists. That certainly boosts my confidence.

I know many of you had religious influences growing up and would have a completely different perspective on the issue. I would love your take.

Why are dirty underwear, mutant clover, and amputated mammal appendages associated with good fortune?  How did humans develop our “lucky” rituals? And why are they usually gross when you think about them? I hope to address two of these three questions, read on to find out which.

A lucky charm I made in college: card laminated with a 4-leaf clover

Tonight I will be watching my beloved Baltimore Ravens playing the Cleveland Browns on Monday Night Football.  It should be an easy game but I don’t want to leave anything to chance (my fantasy team also needs a strong showing from the Baltimore defense).  I’ll be doing everything in my power to help my team win: that is, nothing in particular.

I am on the record publicly disbelieving in luck.  But I am fascinated by the power the belief in luck has over us.  Even very rational and scientific people have rituals and “lucky’ charms.  As Neils Bohr is credited with saying, “I don’t believe in luck, but I hear it works even if you don’t believe.”

Why are we so beholden to the belief in luck?

Superstitious Pigeons

The famous psychologist BF Skinner once did an experiment on hungry pigeons. In one test, he conditioned them to react to the word “peck” or “turn” and rewarded the correct behavior by giving them food. Interestingly, they would perform the action more if the reward happened at a variable rate – not every time the bird pecked, but every three times or ten times. Their behavior was used to learn about the human capacity for conditioning – slot machines are so addictive because they operate on the same principle.

What was more interesting was another experiment in which the researchers rewarded the pigeons at intervals that had no connection to what the birds were doing. The pigeons instinctively try to repeat whatever action they did which caused the food to come. Superstitions arose:

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.

How cool is that?

Superstitious Humans

She’s either doing the Gangsta Lean or trying to make her ball move

Are we better than the pigeons? Well, yes, in various ways, but not when it comes to the superstition.  Our brains evolved with the strong urge to see causation and pattern.  It’s how we learn about the world.

But we get a lot of false positives.  Even for things out of our control, there’s still the impulse to do what you can to affect the world.  A classic example is in bowling.  It’s extremely common for people to lean one way or the other in a desperate attempt to make their ball stay out of the gutter.  Why do they do it?  No doubt in the past the ball curved while someone was leaning that way and they unconsciously made a connection.  I’ve caught myself doing it, and it… feels right.  I feel like I’m affecting the ball even though I rationally know I’m not.  The urge to find causation is that strong.

Bowling is a particular case in which the actions taken after the ball is thrown have nothing to do with the result. Other rituals might genuinely have an effect – but on the person’s confidence, not on external reality. An athlete wearing the same dirty underwear before playing in a baseball series might be more relaxed and confident, leading to better performance. The connection between the underwear and the win is reinforced, and forms an upward spiral.

Perhaps a hiker found a clover with four leaves instead of the normal three and picked it up for the novelty, only to have good fortune later in the day. A faulty connection is made and a superstition is born.

Don’t ask me about the rabbit’s foot; I have no idea where that sick idea came from.

Religious Implications

Daniel Dennett makes the point in Breaking the Spell that this tendency could explain many religious rituals.  If a society doesn’t understand what caused the rain to come, elaborate rain dances will follow. As time goes on and the illusion of causation is semi-reinforced by random events, the rituals get more and more elaborate.

How many times have you heard someone say “I prayed for my brother to get better and his fever went away! Explain THAT!” If the human mind is frantically figuring out possible ways to understand and affect the world, faulty connections like this are very likely. We just have to foster better understanding and internalization of probability, the scientific method, and psychology.

What superstitions did you used to (or still do) practice?

Here’s a test I’m trying tonight: every time I take a drink of beer, I expect the Ravens to have a good play. It’s for science!

I’m always astounded at how poor data-gathering devices we humans are.  Forget all the hallucinations and misinterpretations, we simply don’t notice or retain most of what happens around us.  Here’s a great demonstration (via Richard Wiseman’s blog)

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is one of the reasons we developed the scientific method. Trusting our senses and powers of observation failed us too many times. We recognize our own shortcomings and try to overcome them.

Can you tell the difference between Aliens and Demons?  If you were visited in the night by an intelligent, non-human entity, could you really distinguish between them?  (In a sidenote I’m not addressing right now, how would you know the voice in your head is God and not a tricky demon?  How do you know devils can’t impersonate voices?)

Although nobody would know it in an age with laptops and cell phones, I’m in New York City right now. I hopped on a bus to go see my sister Julia Galef give a presentation on rationality – my first post was written while on the BoltBus, actually. The talk was entitled “Aliens, Psychics and Ghosts, Oh My! Or, How Our Brains Fool Us Into Believing Strange Things.” I thoroughly enjoyed it.

John Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting “The Nightmare” is now seen as a classic account of sleep paralysis accredited to a demon

One interesting point was that while reports of alien abductions are a relatively new phenomenon, the psychological reasons behind such hallucinations are not.  However, instead of blaming aliens, people used to blame the bad boys of the supernatural world: Demons.

In “alien abductions”, people tend to report waking up, feeling pinned down and unable to move, seeing visions of visitors, and often experiencing sexual stimulation. These are the familiar symptoms of sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations.

During sleep, the brain stops controlling the muscles – that’s why we don’t flail around in our sleep as we act out our dreams. Sometimes when woken from a deep sleep, the brain doesn’t immediately retake control, leaving the poor person both awake and unable to move (This has happened to me, and I was lucid enough to recognize what was happening.  It was a fascinating experience.)   It can be particularly difficult to breathe.   When woken up from a deep sleep, a person is also prone to vivid hallucinations. This combination explains the commonly heard reports of alien abductions.

But before aliens, people interpreted those perceptions as demons – same symptoms, different supernatural explanation.  Online Etymology says the term “Nightmare” originally meant “an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation”.  Sound familiar?

John Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” shows an evil-looking imp sitting on a woman’s chest while she lies in bed. Psychologists now believe it to be an early representation of sleep paralysis.  It’s telling that the same evidence can fit seamlessly into countless supernatural  theories.

How cool is it that we can look at ancient experiences people thought were supernatural and explain them in scientific ways?  Epilepsy, schizophrenia, sleep paralysis, oxygen/sensory/nutritional deprivation… The gaps keep getting smaller and there’s less and less room for God.