Science of the SpiritS


Bulb

Advice from medieval monks about how to reduce digital distractions

monk
Medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating. And concentration was their lifelong work! Their tech was obviously different from ours. But their anxiety about distraction was not. They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even once you finally settled on something to read, it was easy to get bored and turn to something else. They were frustrated by their desire to stare out of the window, or to constantly check on the time (in their case, with the Sun as their clock), or to think about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God. They even worried about getting distracted in their dreams.

Sometimes they accused demons of making their minds wander. Sometimes they blamed the body's base instincts. But the mind was the root problem: it is an inherently jumpy thing. John Cassian, whose thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks, knew this problem all too well. He complained that the mind 'seems driven by random incursions'. It 'wanders around like it were drunk'. It would think about something else while it prayed and sang. It would meander into its future plans or past regrets in the middle of its reading. It couldn't even stay focused on its own entertainment - let alone the difficult ideas that called for serious concentration.

Arrow Up

At what age is our sense of optimism at its highest?

optimist smiling woman
Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. But what about optimism?

New research published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science offers an in-depth look at how our sense of optimism evolves as we age.

To study this question, researchers at the University of California Davis analyzed data from a large sample of Mexican-Americans between the ages of 26 and 71. At four time points across a seven-year period, participants were asked to complete the Life Orientation Test, a widely used and validated measure of optimism. The Life Orientation Test consists of six questions, listed below:
  1. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.
  2. If something can go wrong for me, it will.
  3. I'm always optimistic about my future.
  4. I hardly ever expect things to go my way.
  5. I rarely count on good things happening to me.
  6. Overall, I expect more good things to happen to me than bad.

Comment: See also:


Cross

No, secular humanism is not another religion

faith in science sign
These days you can dismiss anything you don't like by calling it "a religion." Science, for instance, has been deemed essentially religious, despite the huge difference between a method of finding truth based on empirical verification and one based on unevidenced faith, revelation, authority, and scripture. Atheism, the direct opposite of religion, has also been characterized in this way, though believers who criticize secular worldviews as religious seem unaware of the irony of implying, "See - you're just as bad as we are!" Even environmentalism has been described as a religion.

The latest false analogy between religious and nonreligious belief systems is John Staddon's essay "Is Secular Humanism a Religion?" for Quillette. Staddon's answer is "Yes," but his reasoning is bizarre. One would think that it should be "Clearly not" for, after all, "secular" means "not religious," and secular humanism is an areligious philosophy whose goal is to advance human welfare and morality without invoking gods or the supernatural.


Comment: Indeed. Coyne might not like it, but calling secular humanism a religion is an insult to religions. But then again, calling religions science is an insult to sciences. The fact is, both have their advantages, and one without the other is the height of folly. Unfortunately, Coyne is just fine revelling in his own folly. He's a Darwinist, after all.


Nevertheless, Staddon makes an oddly tendentious argument for the religious character of secular humanism. After first giving a three-part definition of religion, he then admits that secular humanism violates two of the parts. That itself should have put paid to his claim. But he persists, arguing that secular humanism is still religious because, like some religions, it has a moral code that impels action. (He notes, however, that a secular moral code is inferior because it's based not on superstition but on reason, and leads to unpalatable views.) In other words, he argues that secular humanism is religious because it embraces secular morality.


Comment: Neither Staddon nor Coyne are entirely correct here. The fact that secular humanism embraces a weak-sauce secular morality just makes it something akin to a bad religion.


Better Earth

Meaning in our lives matters

night sky stars
© Greg Rakozy
Everyone seems to be talking about meaning at the moment. Many appreciate that our lives need some kind of existential structure-cultural worldviews, social roles, and goals that give us purpose. Some speculate that we are suffering a crisis of meaning in the modern Western world for a variety of reasons including increased social alienation, automation, and the decline of religion. Others believe that meaning comes from within the individual, that we can abandon traditional beliefs, duties, and attachments and fashion our own existential framework. Some argue that meaning isn't really that important at all and that we should instead focus solely on practical concerns such as physical health, economics, education, and the environment. As a behavioral scientist who has spent nearly two decades conducting research in existential psychology, I have some thoughts on why we should care about meaning and how modern life challenges our search for it.

First, meaning is important. Perceptions of meaning in life influence a wide range of life outcomes. People who have a strong sense of meaning in life, compared to those who lack meaning, are less vulnerable to mental health problems, more responsive to treatment when they do face mental health problems, better able to cope with trauma and loss, less inclined to abuse drugs and alcohol, less likely to desire, attempt, or die by suicide, less hostile and aggressive towards others, physically healthier, and live longer.

Meaning likely contributes to many of these outcomes because of its motivational power. When people feel meaningful, they are inspired, energized, and optimistic. In addition, life is full of temptations and distractions. It is easy to privilege immediate preference and pleasure over the longer term pursuits that promote physical, mental, and social health, particularly if these pursuits are difficult or unpleasant. In such situations, meaning is a vital psychological resource. It helps people regulate their behavior in constructive ways. For instance, a recent study.1 of physically inactive adults who had the intention to increase physical activity found that they were more likely to visit fitness centers and exercise for longer periods of time if they had meaning on their minds.

As another way to examine the potential motivational power of meaning, my colleagues and I have been conducting studies on how mentally revisiting meaningful past experiences (nostalgic reflection) influences motivation and goal pursuit using diverse empirical methods involving self-report, behavioral, observational, and neuroscientific measures. We find that when people mentally revisit cherished life experiences -meaningful memories- they subsequently feel more motivated to actively pursue life goals, especially if those goals are focused on friendship, family, and community.2 They also generally feel more inspired3 and display patterns of neuro-electrical activity4 consistent with a motivational model of meaning.

This brings us to the idea that we are facing or approaching a crisis of meaning in the modern Western world. Some have argued that the secularization of society has created a great existential vulnerability for Westerners. Religion offers a particularly powerful existential framework; a large body of research makes clear that the devoutly religious are less vulnerable to feelings of meaninglessness and related anxieties. However, religion's influence in the West is diminishing. The United States is often thought of as an especially religious Western nation but in surveys asking Americans what gives their lives meaning, few mention religion, faith, or spirituality. Regardless of what one thinks about religion, understanding what meaning is really about and why the devoutly religious experience the highest levels of it can help us better understand the existential challenges of our time.

Meaning is deeply social. The more people feel strongly connected to others, the more they perceive life as meaningful. Social exclusion, ostracism, and loneliness all lead to feelings of meaninglessness. And people's most cherished and meaning-affirming nostalgic memories typically involve close relationships. Religion is a powerful source of meaning, in part, because it shepherds people toward each other.

Critically, it is insufficient to describe meaning as simply the result of being socially accepted or even loved. Research indicates that meaning is ultimately about mattering, feeling socially significant.5 It hinges on the belief that one's actions make a difference. In other words, humans don't simply need social connections. We long to feel truly valued and needed by others. People can feel meaningless even if they know others care deeply about them. Having social relationships is necessary but not sufficient. People need to matter. In fact, the opposite of feeling like one matters is feeling like a burden, which is a major risk factor for suicide, in part, because it leads to meaninglessness.6

Religion isn't just like any organization or group that affords people the opportunity to socialize. Religion promotes a deeper feeling of mattering by teaching adherents that they have social duties to family, friends, and even strangers. Religious faith is an invisible thread that weaves individuals together into moral communities.

The spiritual and supernatural dimensions of religion are also very much focused on mattering. Many believers view their lives as having teleological meaning, a purpose devised by God. Afterlife beliefs are also ultimately social beliefs regarding meaningful relationships that transcend the limits of material existence. Even among the religious who don't believe or have doubts about an afterlife or the validity of specific religious stories, the family and community life that religion helps foster and the knowledge that they are part of a social and cultural institution that existed before and will continue to exist after their brief mortal lives help provide a sense of mattering.

I'm not suggesting religion doesn't also contribute to social problems. It is a complex concept that is shaped by both bottom-up cognitive processes within individual brains and top-down socio-cultural and economic forces. However, even critics of religion should be able to acknowledge the existential roles it plays for our species and see that many who have rejected the old faiths are seeking secular substitutes.

Understanding the psychology of religion and the changing religious social landscape is important but the decline of religion is just one part of a larger story about the decline of the traditional social and cultural structures that have long sustained meaning by giving people that vital feeling that they matter. I propose that the rise of liberalism, and more specifically, individualism, is at the heart of this story.

Liberalism is an existential paradox. By unshackling humans from traditional cultural and social structures, it has freed us to pursue aspirations and experiences based on our own personal interests. This liberation has allowed many to explore a wider range of paths to meaning but it has also unrooted many from the most reliable sources of meaning. It has ushered in an era of individualism. The more people privilege an individual self (a self defined by personal attributes and interests) over an interdependent self (a self defined by cultural roles and duties), the more vulnerable they are to feeling like they don't matter, that they lack social significance.

This may help explain not just why religious people perceive life as more meaningful than those who are less religious but also why conservatives across Europe, Canada, and the United States perceive life as more meaningful than liberals in these countries.7 Importantly, this relationship between conservatism and meaning remains even when accounting for differences in religiosity, is tied more to social conservatism than economic conservatism, and becomes particularly strong at higher levels conservatism. In general, the more people are rooted in traditional social and cultural structures, the more they view life as meaningful.

As automation expands, marriage declines, and people have fewer or no children, the opportunities to feel like one matters narrow. In their recent article, The Twilight of Liberalism, psychologists Bo and Ben Winegard articulate how the elite class are best equipped to navigate the modern world that was fashioned by liberalism. Perhaps the elite are also better able to find meaning in the modern world to the extent they can maintain the belief that their work still matters or can use their economic advantages to attract mates and form families. (Despite the fact that past generations had families in much harsher and uncertain conditions, in our liberal individualistic society, many young adults are convinced that they shouldn't form families at all or unless the timing and conditions feel ideal for them.)

Still, even the most educationally and economically privileged among us cannot fully evade the existential cost of individualism and may be especially vulnerable to certain existential threats. In fact, though people in rich countries report higher life satisfaction than those in poor countries, those in poor countries report greater meaning in life, and have lower rates of suicide.8

The Western liberal elite champion cultural diversity and travel the world to sample other cultures, all while imagining they don't need one, as if they are gods, not mere mortal cultural animals. But we are all cultural animals. And it is those who have done everything they can to reject and dismantle traditional cultural structures who are often the most existentially anxious and desperately searching for meaning, which makes them especially susceptible to extreme ideologies. Regardless of the underlying causes of our modern existential struggles, the success of efforts to solve them will depend on the extent to which these efforts offer people a way to play a significant role in a meaningful cultural drama. Without meaning, people won't be motivated to solve the other challenges our species faces.

Clay Routledge is a Quillette columnist and professor of psychology at North Dakota State University. You can follow him on Twitter @clayroutledge

Comment: See also:


Brain

New study offers peek inside the brain during psychedelic hallucinations

brain neurons synapses hallucination
A new study by University of Oregon researchers offers clues to what happens in the brain when mice are given an LSD-like drug experience.

The research, done in the lab of Cris Niell, a professor in the Department of Biology and researcher in the Institute of Neuroscience, was part of a larger, ongoing effort to explore, at a basic scientific level, the mystery of vision and how people perceive the world around them. Instead of flooding the brain with stimuli, the drug appeared to reduce neuron activity, suggesting that hallucinations stem from too little stimulation rather than too much.

In the National Institutes of Health-funded study, Niell's team focused on the effects of the hallucinogen because it acts on a specific receptor, serotonin-2A, that is tied to altered perceptions in both psychedelic drug use and in schizophrenia.

"Our results do not yet provide a complete explanation of hallucinations," Niell said. "This is an early explanation of what is going on with individual neurons in one particular brain region."

Hallucinations are thought to result from a mismatch between what people actually see and how their brains interpret it.

Comment: It's not just mice. Humans on psychedelics also show overall reduced brain activity. See, for example: This might support the idea that psychedelics reduce the mind's dependency on the brain as a channel for sense-derived information. As the senses and the brain decrease their activity, the activity of the mind increases, weakening the hold that the senses have on the essentially image-producing tendency of the mind. Edward Kelly, co-author of the article linked above, calls this "oneiric" activity, because it resembles dreaming, and suggests that may be the fundamental mode of consciousness. The mind dreams; the senses and brain focus that dreaming on objective, physical reality.


People 2

Study finds that women - but not men - seek to actively punish sexualized women

jealous woman
© Photographee.eu
New research has found evidence that both men and women are prejudiced towards sexualized women. But only women are willing to endure a cost to themselves to punish a woman who appears to be promiscuous. The findings appear in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Across cultures, women and girls have been subjected to various attempts to control their sexuality. This has included slut shaming, female genital cutting, and honor killings.

The researchers from the University of Warwick wanted to better understand what motivates individuals to suppress female - but not male - sexuality. "If society is to understand and overcome the sexual double standard, interventionists should seek to uncover how men and women vary in their attitudes towards sexualized women," they explained.

In the study, participants played one of three kinds of economic decision-making games. The participants were led to believe they were playing against a female opponent in real-time, but were actually only interacting with computerized responses.

Info

Theories of consciousness and reincarnation

Consciousness and Reincarnation
© Pixabay
Theories of consciousness range from the purely scientific - that personal consciousness, as we know it, is a mechanism of unique neural connections molded by genetics and experience - to the spiritual, which argue the existence of a non-corporeal component to life: the soul. Still other thinkers - like Roger Penrose - theorize that consciousness and human creativity may require a new science altogether; that, as Penrose and Hameroff (2014) put it, "consciousness results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise physical laws not yet fully understood."

For the layperson, however, theories raise more questions than they answer, offering little comfort in confronting the essential human questions of "what makes me me?" and, more poignantly, "what happens to to me when I die?" The latter question is arguably the real question of consciousness, as it comes as a result of recognizing the presence of one's own subjective cognition/individual consciousness and the realization that said consciousness erodes and eventually ceases with the end of physical life... or seems to. It's an existential black mirror; the dark side of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Without a cohesive understanding of or agreement on the mechanics and laws of consciousness, that question can't be answered. It cannot even be presumed to have an answer awaiting after death, for if death is the absolute negation of consciousness - if you cease to be when you cease to think - then there is no "finding out" after we die: there's just the vacuum of not-being, a state of statelessness.

In the midst of these theories, however, are those that believe in a kind of recycling of consciousness: that individual selves may be reincarnated in new bodies, sometimes retaining scraps of memory - and even physical features - from the lives they lived before. One of the most prominent proponents of that theory was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who worked for five decades at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, where he founded the Division of Perceptual Studies, which studies "phenomena related to consciousness clearly functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, as well as phenomena that are directly suggestive of post-mortem survival of consciousness." Beginning in 1960, Stevenson traveled the world investigating thousands cases of reincarnation, documenting his findings and eventually writing several books on the subject, including his groundbreaking work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and the massive, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The book documents 200 different cases of children - often from very remote areas of the world - who had memories and birthmarks that corresponded with those of deceased people whose lives they claimed to have lived before. Some, who claimed to have died violently, had birthmarks or physical defects where the deceased had suffered a mortal injury, while others suffered from phobias relating to their past death.

Cross

Scientists concede that religion is good for your health

religion positive impact health
“Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide. Several studies have shown that addressing the spiritual needs of the patient may enhance recovery from illness.”
Theologists, scientists and thought leaders have attempted for centuries to understand the impact that religion can have on human beings; both mentally and physically. And it is commonly accepted around that world that religion and spirituality are among the most important of cultural factors - giving structure and meaning to behaviors, value systems and experiences.

Thus, there is ample reason to believe that faith in a higher power is associated with health, and in a positive way. For example, researchers at the Mayo Clinic concluded, "Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide. Several studies have shown that addressing the spiritual needs of the patient may enhance recovery from illness."

Which is why it is surprising in 2019 that there is still little quantitative research published in peer-reviewed journals exploring the relationship between spirituality, religiosity and health. A primary reason for the lack of institutional knowledge in this area of study is that as the centuries have progressed, scholars in fields of medicine, public health, psychology, sociology, spirituality, religion, economics and law, have all gone to distinct silos. Subsequently, there is a growing body of research, but it exists in disparate fields, with little overlap addressing the implications of health and health care. There is also much contention about working definitions of terms like "religious" and "spiritual," making research difficult to standardize and impossible to randomize.

Comment:


SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Suffering To Be Happy: The Fool's Paradise of Feeling Good

mindmatters happiness
© SOTT
Today's Western cultural landscape seems to give us all the wrong messages of what happiness is, and how one should go about attaining it; we're programmed for unhappiness and seemingly trapped in ways of thinking and being that only make for more unhappiness! On this week's MindMatters we discuss John F. Schumaker's book In Search of Happiness - Understanding An Endangered State of Mind and delve into what happiness actually is, what it isn't - and some of the perennial values which nurture the meaning in our lives that deep happiness is quite often an outgrowth of.

On this week's show we'll also be looking at what some great minds had to say on bringing happiness about. Everyone wants to 'be happy,' but how does this feeling really come about and what, if anything, is the process to be engaged that could make it available to us? Can happiness even be experienced without knowing its opposite - and how willing are we to sacrifice short term gratification for the deeper more fulfilling life that nurtures true happiness. Join us this week as we put away the happy pills, the happy meals, the happy faces, and choose to suffer through a more objective understanding of a mostly elusive state of mind.


Running Time: 01:10:42

Download: MP3 - 64.7 MB


Bulb

Schools in England will have mindfulness and meditation added to the curriculum

mindful meditation
Most of the time, when children act out by kicking and screaming expletives, it is because they do not understand what they are going through, and cannot find a better way to release their feelings. When a child acts out, know that it is most likely because they are struggling to understand complex emotions that they are feeling for the first time in their lives.

Schools in England have started to tackle this problem in a new way, and that is by teaching mindfulness and meditation in the classroom to improve the youth's overall mental health. In 370 schools across the country, children will be taught how to meditate, techniques for muscle relaxation and breathing exercises for mindfulness. The secondary school students will also get a more hands-on education to learn about awareness and how to increase this in their everyday lives. This program is being done under the mental health study that the British government is running up until 2021.

Comment: Children need more meditation and less stimulation