I wrote recently about the adaptation of various Eastern spiritual practices by Westerners, and how in the process these practices became more or less belief-free techniques for living a better life within the limitations of being thinking meat. This story from Science Daily is a good example of what I was talking about.

Past research has suggested that when people contemplate their own mortality, they tend to become more biased and judgmental. The idea is that when people feel uneasy about facing death, they are more strongly inclined to defend the beliefs that give them some feeling of stability. However, new research has found that more mindful people were more tolerant of different world views than less mindful people after being reminded of their mortality (specifically, they had to write about what would happen to their bodies after they died). (The Science Daily story and the abstract of the paper don’t say how they determined who was more mindful, and the paper is not available for free, so I can’t find out; I’m guessing they chose people who regularly practiced mindfulness meditation.) Mindfulness involves a calm acceptance of reality that might help people face even the threat of death more open-mindedly.

I wonder if, by extension, people who regularly practice mindfulness might be less inclined to give the expected knee-jerk response when faced with political rhetoric designed to push people’s fear buttons. My own attempts at mindfulness are quite amateurish, but my understanding of the concept is that it can give you an instant of decision before you fall heedlessly into your typical reaction to something, which can be useful if your typical reaction is not helpful. That little bit of freedom to choose a response might make quite a difference. Christopher Hitchens described us as “partly rational animals with adrenal glands that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too small.” Maybe mindfulness helps us give the prefrontal lobes an edge over the adrenal glands?

The complete citation is:

Christopher P. Niemiec, Kirk Warren Brown, Todd B. Kashdan, Philip J. Cozzolino, William E. Breen, Chantal Levesque-Bristol, Richard M. Ryan. Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010, 99 (2):344.

I’m reading Philip Goldberg’s American Veda, and I’m noticing some interesting things about the ways that Westerners think about the Eastern spiritual ideas they adopt (and adapt).

For example, a chapter about several high-profile guru scandals concludes with some thoughts on how these scandals, painful as they were for many of the people involved, helped spiritual seekers become more savvy. Despite the continuing presence of “dewy-eyed zeal” around gurus, Goldberg says that Westerners looking to Eastern spiritualities for guidance have become “more autonomous” and “less vulnerable to flawed gurus and oppressive institutions.” One reason for this, he suggests, is the ability to look at gurus as practitioners of a science of consciousness rather than as religious figures, so “their teachings can be viewed not as divine truths but as hypotheses to be tested” (and presumably rejected if they are found wanting).

What I am curious about is whether it is something intrinsic to Eastern spirituality that enables Westerners to view its teachings as hypotheses to be tested, or whether this is possible because most Westerners were not raised to view its teachings, practices, and leaders as sacred or in touch with the divine. (I suppose it might be some of both.) The Catholic sex scandals come to mind here; people who demand that the pope be called before an international court for his part in the cover-up are denounced by some as disrespectful, but it’s hard to see on what possible grounds the pope could have earned the right not to be held responsible other than simply by being a religious figure that people have been taught not to question. What would it take for a culture-wide shift, in the more religious parts of the West, to the belief that Western religious teachings and leaders should be evaluated by the same standards of agreement with physical reality and decent behavior as other beliefs and people?

Another interesting example is the Western attitude toward meditation and yoga. The mainstream scientific establishment has focused on the health benefits of these practices, both physical and mental (reducing the stress response, lowering blood pressure, increasing the ability to focus, etc.). For many Westerners, yoga means only the postures, whereas in its homeland, the postures are only one part of the practice of yoga. Some yoga advocates and meditators don’t approve of this stripping away of the spiritual qualities of these practices. (The description of this in the book reminded me a bit of the Christians who complain about the largely secular meaning of Christmas to many people.) To me, though, this development strikes me as being positive overall. For those who seek transcendence, I can’t imagine it’s hard to find someone who will offer to help you get there. For those who don’t, narrowing the focus to the physical and mental effects is a way to understand and apply some useful things the species has learned about how to live well in a human body with a human mind, while dropping (or relegating to the status of myths) the parts that contradict what we know about how the world works. And again, I wonder if it’s easier to follow this process, which in my opinion is beneficial on the whole, with a religion that you were not raised in.

This article from Science News Daily uses the lovely phrase “sleep fragility” to describe the unlovely phenomenon of sleep that is vulnerable to disruption. Researchers examined subtle changes in the brain’s alpha rhythm and found that these changes are a good indicator of times when sleep is more likely to be interrupted by noises or other stimuli from the outside world.

Alpha waves appear in electroencephalograms (EEGs) or magnetoencephalograms (MEGs) and are typically associated with wakeful relaxation. However, they also occur during sleep, although they aren’t visible to the eye in an EEG but must be revealed by mathematical analysis. In the study described in Science News Daily, sleeping volunteers were exposed to typical background sounds that can interrupt sleep; the sounds were repeated at increasing volume until their sleep was disrupted, as indicated by their EEGs. When alpha wave activity was stronger, their sleep was disturbed by quieter sounds. In other words, the alpha wave activity was correlated with more fragile sleep.

Sometimes I’m apt to drift up to the surface of sleep; it feels just like that, like something in my mind is too light and restless to stay submerged, and I keep floating to the surface. It’s not a whole lot of fun, but I like knowing a little more about what electrical activity is likely to be going on in my brain when it happens. (I wish I knew why, though!) And the researchers who have done this work say that it could be the first step toward finding ways to apply sleeping medications or other treatments that would kick in only when sleep is most fragile, rather than knocking the brain out entirely for the whole night. (I like the word “sledgehammer” that one of the scientists uses to describe sleeping pills; that’s one reason I’m generally reluctant to use them, because I don’t like to sedate my brain to that degree.)

The research is reported in Covert Waking Brain Activity Reveals Instantaneous Sleep Depth, by Scott M. McKinney et al. PLOS One 6(3), e17351, 2011.

Although I do not believe in any of the gods proposed by the world’s religions, I do have feelings of wonder, awe, connectedness, and transcendence that might reasonably be described as “spiritual.” However, describing and sharing these feelings in the absence of belief in a deity can be difficult. For one thing, as soon as you use the word “spiritual” to describe yourself, the word “supernatural” comes to many minds. And in my experience, there is some reason for this: the word “spiritual” is too often connected with some kind of belief in the supernatural, AKA woo (or in the longer but in my opinion more descriptive version, mumbo-jumbo). It’s enough to make an atheistic primate wonder whether it’s time to stop using the word “spiritual” altogether.

I’ve long been interested in certain Eastern ideas of spirituality, which often seem to offer practical advice for living well without a lot of dogma (at least as they have been presented in the West). As a bonus, some of these approaches also treat the body gently, as something to be cherished, rather than as an enemy to be conquered or disciplined. (The word for this in the Catholicism of my girlhood was “mortified,” as in “the mortification of the flesh.” Ugh.) The problem is that you can generally only get so far into any reading on Buddhism or yoga before bumping up painfully against woo (reincarnation, karma as a true causative agent, levitation) or a renunciatory spirit (celibacy, avoiding alcohol) that is one of the more unfortunate aspects of religion, IMO. If enlightenment is attainable only on the mountaintop away from real life, it has little value for me. (I have found a few non-mumbo-jumbo books about Buddhism and mindfulness; see the list at the bottom of this post.)

So I was very interested in Philip Goldberg’s American Veda, which chronicles the spread of Eastern spiritual concepts in America, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to today. (He specifically investigates only the broader spiritual concepts of what he refers to as Vedanta-Yoga—e.g., “one truth, many paths”—rather than religious ceremonies, deities, and such.) I may have more to say on the book as a whole later. For now, I’m going to focus a couple of things that struck me for what they say about how science is related to Eastern spiritual ideas.

In a chapter on the founding of the Esalen Institute, the famed retreat center that explores humanistic spirituality, Goldberg quoted Jeffry Kripal as saying that Esalen offers

“a kind of secular mysticism that is deeply conversant with democracy, religious pluralism, and modern science.”

Sounds good, especially when compared to fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Islam, which are often opposed to religious pluralism and/or modern science. There are echoes elsewhere in the book of this suggestion that Eastern spirituality is suitable for a modern secular society. However, a little later, in a chapter on the influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru to the stars, most notably the Beatles), Goldberg quotes Harry Oldmeadow, a theorist of religion:

“The interest in Eastern spirituality met some deep yearning for a vision of reality deeper, richer, more adequate, more attuned to the fullness of human experience, than the impoverished world view offered by a scientifically-grounded humanism.”

I initially interpreted the first quote as implying that people were actively seeking a spirituality that was compatible with other things they valued, e.g., science and democracy. The second quote seemed contradictory: it seemed almost to imply that even if people accept science and humanism, despite the relatively shallow, less adequate world view they offer, they remain hungry for something more. I’ve encountered this attitude before, and I still find it discouraging. Some of my most powerful feelings of wonder, and some of the deepest, richest, most mind-opening thoughts I know, are profoundly connected with our scientific understanding of the world. To me, the quest for an adequate spirituality is about finding a way to make room in my life for those feelings and nurture the experiences that give rise to them (not getting too caught up in the daily round of work and chores) and trying to share them with others. It is not about supplementing the inadequacies of a scientific-humanist world view because I don’t find that world view inadequate.

Goldberg’s book is not specifically about science and Eastern spirituality (although he does have a chapter about that topic, which I’m just about to read), and he certainly doesn’t delve very deeply into what “compatibility with science” might really mean. The people and events he describes often seem to involve a fair amount of woo (e.g., after making a hit with transcendental meditation, the Maharishi went on in the 1970s to try to train people to levitate). The picture overall is fascinating but definitely not one of a mumbo-jumbo-free spirituality, and reading this book is leading me once again to question my use of the word “spiritual” in connection with myself. I’d love to hear what others think. Do you describe yourself as spiritual or as “spiritual but not religious”? Do you think it makes sense for atheists/agnostics to describe themselves as spiritual? I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who grew up with the original ideas behind Eastern spirituality and religion in these ideas’ native habitat.

Here are the non-mumbo-jumbo books on Eastern spirituality:

• Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, by Stephen Batchelor
• Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, by Stephen Batchelor
• The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity and Passion, by David Brazier
• Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness, by Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston
• Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness, by James H. Austin
• Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, by Rick Hanson

I’m interested in some of the mental constructs that thinking meat has created, like science or art or religion. I’m particularly interested in areas where these things intersect: what science has to say about how and why we create and enjoy art, for example, and, on the other hand, art that is based on scientific ideas or scientific data. Another particularly exciting intersection these days is the relationship between the world views and approaches of science and religion. In the past, I haven’t exactly hidden the fact that I’m an atheist, but I haven’t been explicit about it either. Consider me fully out of the closet.

By “atheist” I mean that I see no reason to believe in any of the deities proposed by the world’s religions, and that I believe that the physical world is all there is: we do not have supernatural souls that predate or outlive the body, and every phenomenon we experience, from hunger to love to lust to transcendence, is based firmly in the physical world. I’m not unsympathetic to metaphorical uses of the word “god” in the sense Einstein used it, as a description of the sum total of the universe and its laws, but overall I tend to avoid such use myself. The main reason for this is that I believe it can foster confusion. Also, in my own case, I found myself using it that way to try to build a bridge between myself and people who believe in a more traditional god. This eventually began to strike me as a dishonest attempt to gloss over a deep difference in world view, and it became important to me to articulate my views more clearly.

The decision to be direct about my views on this topic coincides with a gradual realization that in order to understand each other and live together well, humans should be able to respectfully and honestly discuss religious ideas with the same rigor and intellectual standards we bring to discussions of any other aspect of the world or of human behavior. We can’t leave a large chunk of human behavior outside of the realm of rational discussion. I’d also say that as a species, we would be much more successful at getting along with each other and not trashing our planet if our actions and decisions were evidence-based and concerned solely with what we know about the physical world here and now (which of course includes the emotional world of human interactions and relationships).

Steven Pinker, in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proposes an explanation of how human intelligence evolved. He begins by noting that Charles Darwin had no problem believing that intelligence could be explained by evolutionary theory. However, Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at the idea of natural selection around the same time as Darwin, thought that because abstract reasoning would have been of no use to prehistoric humans, intelligence must have been the work of a superior being rather than solely the result of natural processes. Scientists have sided with Darwin, but Wallace’s point about the dubious adaptive value of higher cognitive functions to earlier humans is worth examining. Pinker offers an explanation of how we gained our unique profile of cognitive capabilities.

The explanation rests on two things: the idea that we evolved to fit a cognitive niche, and our capacity for metaphorical abstraction. The concept of a cognitive niche originated with John Tooby and Irven DeVore; the basic idea is that we brought to the evolutionary arms race the rudiments of several characteristics that allowed us to exploit other organisms by reasoning and information-sharing rather than by sheerly physical or chemical means (running faster, producing toxins as plants do, etc.). Once we began to move into this niche, new possibilities opened up, and a host of peculiarly human traits likely co-evolved. Pinker emphasizes three traits: the smarts needed to develop and use tools, the capacity for cooperation with those to whom we are not related, and the capacity for the uniquely human combinatorial system of grammatical language.

He discusses briefly how various quirks of the human organism (for example, our relatively long childhoods and long lives, our cultural differences) could have arisen as a result of the development of these capabilities, and also some of the factors that might have predisposed us toward moving into the cognitive niche (prehensile hands, the inclusion of meat in the diet, living in groups).

This is interesting for several reasons. For one, it’s intuitively appealing (to me, at least) to think of a multitude of interwoven causes for something as complex as human intelligence rather than a single development on which everything else hinged. Also, this theory might explain very nicely why we seem to share some capabilities with other animals, things that were once thought to be uniquely human (compassion for conspecifics, tool use, etc.), but we are the only ones to have such well-developed versions of them and to have them all in combination. Pinker also mentions that we test and fine-tune our strategies on the fly within our own lifetimes rather than relying on the much slower pace of evolutionary change to develop responses to environmental challenges or changes in the organisms we eat or otherwise exploit:

Because humans develop offenses in real time that other organ-
isms can defend themselves against only in evolutionary time,
humans have a tremendous advantage in evolutionary arms races.

This seems to explain why we are uniquely destructive as well, and it gives us (although we should already know this) an extraordinary responsibility.

I was also struck by the following:

The selection pressures that the theory invokes are straight-
forward and do not depend on some highly specific behavior (e.g.,
using projectile weapons, keeping track of wandering children) or
environment (e.g., a particular change in climate), none of which
were likely to be in place over the millions of years in which modern
humans evolved their large brains and complex tools. Instead it
invokes the intrinsic advantages of know-how, cooperation, and
communication that we recognize uncontroversially in the con-
temporary world.

This seems to sidestep my objections to the way evolutionary psychologists sometimes seek to explain our behavior and the way they assume there was a single environment that definitively shaped everything about us.

You still have to wonder how we developed the ability to understand and use things that our ancestors had no pressing need for (differential equations, the concept of the state). That’s where the idea of metaphorical abstraction comes in. Basically, this means that we are able to take relationships that apply to space and force and then abstract them out to apply to other things. Our language is full of such metaphorical uses; when the Dow goes up, it doesn’t really ascend skyward, for example (although when it falls we do sometimes seem to hear a certain sickening thud). These metaphors reveal that we have pressed various physical concepts into use in novel ways. The power of this is that it allows us to mentally combine and manipulate abstractions. He gives lots of interesting references to the literature on this capability.

The article also offers some insight into how the theory of the cognitive niche could be tested, which I find exciting:

The theory can be tested more rigorously, moreover, using the family of relatively new techniques that detect “footprints of selection” in the human genome (by, for example, comparing rates of nonsynonymous and synonymous base pair substitutions or the amounts of variation in a gene within and across species). The theory predicts that there are many genes that were selected in the lineage leading to modern humans whose effects are concentrated in intelligence, language, or sociality. Working backward, it predicts that any genes discovered in modern humans to have
disproportionate effects in intelligence, language, or sociality (that is, that do not merely affect overall growth or health) will be found to have been a target of selection. This would differentiate the theory from those that invoke a single macromutation, or genetic changes that affected only global properties of the brain like overall size, or those that attribute all of the complexity and differentiation of
human social, cognitive, or linguistic behavior to cultural evolution.

However, Jerry Coyne, in his blog Why Evolution is True discusses this paper and goes into some very interesting details on why such testing would be difficult.

In short, Pinker’s paper is full of meaty food for thought and discussion, and it also offers a way to look for evidence, problematic though that may be. Fascinating stuff! The full citation is:

Steven Pinker, The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 11, 2010; 107 (Supplement 2): 8993–8999. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914630107

You may remember hearing about work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these aspects, and those who are politically conservative tend to consider them all. (Liberals emphasize caring for others/avoiding harm and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives also consider in-group loyalty, purity, and authority/respect.) A new study expands our knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and political views.

The new work looks at several of the Big Five personality traits: Openness/Intellect, two different aspects of Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness), and the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness. Previous work had indicated that a conservative political outlook was negatively correlated with Openness/Intellect and positively correlated with Conscientiousness. The current work adds a little nuance: the negative correlation between conservatism and Openness/Intellect still holds, and a positive correlation between Orderliness (rather than overall Conscientiousness) was found. Furthermore, a liberal/egalitarian outlook was linked to higher levels of Compassion and a conservative/traditional outlook with higher levels of Politeness.

“Level” is a key word here, it seems to me. With personality traits, everyone falls somewhere on a continuum, so even those who are, say, profoundly introverted still enjoy spending time with others—just not nearly as much as those who are highly extroverted. So these differences are not apples and oranges, exactly; we should in theory be able to find some common ground and at least understand the other side’s point of view, even if we disagree with the degree to which they emphasize one thing or another. This article from Science Daily closes with a quote from one of the new study’s authors to the effect that we appear to need both the liberal and the conservative mindset in any society.

So why are these differences in mindset so sharply and painfully divisive in US politics at the moment? I think part of what is going on is that because political views are linked to personality traits, they often feel like self-obvious views of how the world is and how things work. They’re taken for granted like the water a fish swims in. It can be very difficult to examine them rationally and be prepared to compromise to accommodate the fact that the world and how it works look very different from behind another set of genetic and environmental influences. This leaves aside nasty tactics such as dishonesty or pandering to prejudice, ignorance, or selfishness, the need for an educated citizenry to make a democracy work, and things like the confirmation bias, which tends to make us notice the evidence that confirms our views and discount the evidence against them. I think all these other things come into play partly because our beliefs about the relative importance of fairness, order, or compassion are so inherent to us that we have a hard time taking other rankings of them seriously. I don’t know if it’s a failure of the melting pot, a failure of education, or some more fundamental human flaw, but somehow we haven’t really developed the capacity to use both mindsets productively rather than set them at each other’s throats. Maybe they can’t be consciously accommodated in a single society but must battle it out, back and forth, over and over again?

Oh, yeah. The paper itself is:
J. B. Hirsh, C. G. DeYoung, Xiaowen Xu, J. B. Peterson. Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010; 36(5): 655. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210366854

There are those who say that the development of agriculture was a bad idea. It’s about 12,000 years too late to do anything about it, and as I sit here in an artificially lit room late at night with my laptop connected to the wide world and my stomach pleasantly full of smoked salmon and petite syrah, both of which come from far away (not to mention my blood pressure nicely under control due to medication), I have to say that the civilization that sprang from agriculture is not altogether undesirable. On the other hand, earlier this evening I looked at a heartbreaking series of recent photos from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s enough to make me wonder if even the greatest achievements of the human mind, which have been possible only through the development of a way to accumulate our knowledge from generation to generation (i.e., civilization) are worth the destruction we have wrought.

Those reservations have to do with our effect on the planet, though. The arguments about agriculture being a bad idea have to do with its effect on humans, and that is the central point of a new book by Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. Wells, a geneticist, directs the Genographic Project, which uses DNA samples from humans worldwide to trace the story of our migrations out of Africa and across the planet.

I haven’t read Pandora’s Seed yet, but an essay Wells wrote for Seed Magazine sparked my interest. After noting the current rapid pace of change and describing some of the ills of westernized societies, which are on the rise in developing countries, he writes:

This seemingly inexorable march toward western unhealthiness made me wonder why it happened in the first place. Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?

I would really like to know the answer to this question, or even an explanation that might hint at an answer, but I guess I’ll have to read the book, because the article doesn’t really give one. He talks about how we adapted biologically to the changes in our lifestyle, mentioning the accelerated rate of change in our DNA in the last 10,000 years compared to the previous 500,000, which is interesting stuff. I’m assuming the point here is that cultural evolution moves so fast that it outstrips the capacity of biological evolution to keep up because the latter moves much more slowly even at this accelerated pace. Wells mentions a cycle that repeats over and over again in human history but doesn’t really explain what it is and how it is relevant to this problem.

The essay focuses on three challenges we face that evidently are discussed in the last section of Wells’s book: our ability to engineer our genes, climate change; and the fact that we live in a networked world that has, as he describes it, resulted in the loss of “the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.” Regarding this last problem, he says: “Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.”

My hackles rose when he described the down side of secular rationality as the “loss of faith and certainty.” I was reminded of something Richard Feynman said: “I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” And as I wrote recently, I consider the loss of faith to be a step forward. On the other hand, Wells has traveled to remote corners of the world to gather DNA samples, so I’d like to know more about how he sees this loss of faith and certainty playing out in the lives of people around the world, and whether he has any thoughts on how that “inclusive mythos” might be crafted. There certainly are growing pains involved in growing out of faith-based certainty and into a more nuanced, reality-based view of human knowledge about the world, in individual lifetimes and in the lifetime of the species. I hope he’s not saying that these growing pains are not worth the resulting process of maturation.

In short, the essay generated more questions than answers for me, so I will have to read the book and see what it’s all about. Another book on the pile, oh boy!