Thinkologist: The Dudley Lynch Blog on Brain Change

The physicist-turned-healer (G*d rest his soul—he’s no longer with us) fulminated against eating too much garlic. He said gorging on “the stinking rose” is a very bad thing for the brain.

He reasoned this way:

Garlic contains a poison called sulfone hydroxyl. The sulfone hydroxyl ion, he alleged, can penetrate the brain’s blood barrier. Heavy garlic eaters, he warned, should be prepared instantly to lose millions of the very cells that link the brain halves. Loss of those cells, he averred, will lead to “desynchronization of the left and right brain hemispheres”—AND WE ALL KNOW HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS!!!

I’m afraid I find this one of those “time-to-debunk” moments. About the garlic, that is. But not about the idea of brain lateralization.

Debunk it all you want but the idea of finding value in looking at what the brain halves are and represent and do isn’t going away. Not in the popular news. Not in the cultural and worldview wars. Not even in the medical and other scientific literature. The concept is simply too useful. In illustration, argumentation and calculation, there’s nothing quite as easy as “cleaving the apple”—that is, dividing things in half. Dichotomizing.

[In the interest of full disclosure, let me say right away that most of Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up assessment models have important right brain/left brain components.]

The brain forever has dichotomies on its mind
The ancient Taoists did it with yin/yang. Religious types with good/evil. Philosophers with mind/matter. Particle scientists with wave/particle. Psychologists with nature/nurture. Law officers with good cop/bad cop. On and on and on. You just had to know that it was only a matter of time before “dualism”—or … harrumph! … co-eternal binary opposition—infested neuro discussions like kudzu.

Maybe, as one thoughtful observer has suggested, even as old dualisms get knocked down, “it seems that there is something about the wiring of the brain that leads to new dualisms springing up.” Talk about Whack-a-Mole!

That was certainly what the late George Kelly, the father of personal construct psychology, thought. “Our psychological geometry is a geometry of dichotomies [italics mine] rather than the geometry of areas envisioned by the classical logic of concepts, or the geometry of lines envisioned by classical mathematical geometries.” (Double harrumph!)

So what’s been happening lately in the popularized right brain/left brain arena? No mystery there. Same thing that’s been going on ever since the late Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy. As usual, at least in literary and salon circles and the post-modernist-influenced domains of academia, friends of the right brain have been kicking the glial cells out of the left brain.

Bashing in the name of balance
Consider the late Dr. Leonard Shlain. The San Francisco surgeon first graced us with Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. Then he weighed in with The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Shlain’s bias was not even thinly veiled: he thought the left hemisphere of the brain had run amok for 5,000 years, and it was time to put it in its place. In fact, he argued that this is happening as we, the people, move away from dependence on the left brain’s fixation on its symbolic unit of choice: the alphabet. And move toward the right brain’s symbolic unit of choice. The image.

If Shlain had done surgery the way he went after the—quote—linear, abstract, logical pro-masculine left hemisphere and extolled the praises of the—quote—holistic, visually oriented, iconic pro-feminine right hemisphere in his books, they just might have considered removing all sharp-edged objects before letting him in the O.R. In fact, by the time he got to the end of Alphabet/Goddess, he seemed to recognize that he had “expended considerable ink bashing the left brain.” So he pleaded for a balance in using both sides of the brain, despite such a stance having so clearly eluded him in his writings on the subject.

But then Shlain’s love affair with the right brain paled in comparison to Iain McGilchrist’s. A London psychiatrist, McGilchrist wrote the recently published The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

In an interview just out on the blog Bookslut [Editor’s note: If you think her naming choice was piquant, wait ‘til you see her logo!], McGilchrist anguished over having had to take so many risks in his 600-page tome. For example, after castigating left brain researchers for thinking about the two sides of the brain as machines, he took the risk of turning the hemispheres into personalities, “with desires and values of their own….” And promptly uses this literary license to—right!—bash the glial cells out of the left brain personality.

Left brain origins for post-modernism?
He told Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin: “The left hemisphere sees only a very simple version of reality, is black and white in its view, tends to arrogant certainty, a view that it ‘knows it all already’ and doesn’t have to listen to anything new, and is in denial about its own short-comings. And it has a tendency to paranoia if it feels its position is being threatened….

“I do find it very hard to be optimistic at present, because, as I say in the book, the left hemisphere’s view pretends to have it all sown up, and people are taken in by that, especially when it appears to come from the mouth of ‘science’ (usually biologists—the discoveries of physicists forced them long ago to abandon the Victorian mechanistic model, but the life sciences are slow in catching up). Not that the current arts scene is much better—post-modernism is no challenge to the left hemisphere’s view, but, as I suggest, an expression of it.”

And while it is less pugnacious, we shouldn’t overlook neuropsychiatrist Michael R. Trimble’s The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief. More cautious than some of the brain wars’ luminaries, Dr. Trimble nevertheless focuses lovingly on what he calls the “seven L’s”—Language, Laudation, Lying, Laughter, Lachrymation, Lyric and Love. And each of these, he asserts, is “quintessentially driven by the right hemisphere.”

So the debate over which brain half is on top and which is to blame for the things humans do and which needs to be encouraged to contribute more or contribute less and how well they are connected and so forth continues unabated. And it’s not just the cultural warriors interested in doing the math.

Using your earlobes to tug your brain into shape
Professor Yash Gupta at Johns Hopkins’ B-school cites Apple Computer’s ability to use both its left and right brains as the reason for much of its success. A researcher at Cleveland Clinic thinks autism may be a result of the brain halves’ inability to “talk” adequately with each other. Humpback whales have been found to be either left-handed or right-handed (and probably right/left-brained, too). And the halves of songbirds’ brains don’t “lateralize” normally, or their voices, if they don’t get a chance to imitate the vocalizations of their caregivers in infancy.

So what’s a body to do if it feels its brain halves are not sufficiently in sync—that is, aren’t “balanced,” to use a favorite right brain way of phrasing it?

Well, there’s always Master Choa Kok Sui’s “superbrain yoga” exercise. It involves crossing your arms, tugging on your earlobes and doing deep-knee squats for three minutes, five if you can. Details are here.

Just please don’t eat the daisies—or overdose on the garlic.

______________

At Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up, we came early to the right brain/left brain party and plan to stay late. Talking about brain habits and choices this way is simply too valuable and constructive to our clients to ignore. So all of our personal and team assessments seek to get the brain to think more constructively about itself. Look in the mirror. Take the measure of not only its halves but its wholes. When you are ready to experience the power of knowing your own brain, we recommend starting with The BrainMap®, which is available both online and in paper versions. For more information, please go here.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. That means every blogger and her bird dog are thinking about sex. But then, who needs Valentine’s Day as an excuse to think about sex?

The brain—as every psychobabble and (as you are seeing) thinking-skills aficionado is sure to remind you eventually—is arguably our major sex organ. So it should be no surprise that sex is never far removed from our thoughts. Which is amazing, since, as one scientist has noted, nobody is ever known to have died from a lack of it.

How far removed?

Well, that’s been a lively sex-on-the-brain issue lately. An online polling company (not to be confused with “a major scientific research institute”) has claimed that a typical male thinks about having sexual intercourse (not to be confused with a hug or a handshake) an average of 13 times a day, or about 5,000 times per year. A typical female? Only five times daily, or about 2,000 times per year. On average, how often do men actually have sex? About twice a week, this outfit reports.

One reason women don’t have more of it may be due to what often seems to be foremost on their mind when they do think about having sex. Condoms.

Men’s issue bloggers know to expect a deluge of comment any time they mention the “c” word. One frustrated respondent wrote, “Picture wrapping your vagina in a Walmart bag before sex, and you’ll have some idea of how condoms can feel at their worst.” One comment about condoms is sure to followed by another, not infrequently from a woman reader. The above male comment prompted this female comment, “I mean, couldn’t I at least wrap my you-know in a bag from, say… IKEA?” Another shared, “Oddly enough, the biggest condom whiners I’ve ever been with both had STDs that could’ve been prevented if they’d wrapped up their junk.”

How big an issue is it to get a condom on a male when the lovers aren’t in a long-term, committed relationship? This devilishly clever, potentially offensive (so be warned!) piece of French graffiti animation about AIDS prevention probably offers a solid clue.

All of which is to observe that the subject of sex and the brain is as controversial as ever. But that’s not to say that we aren’t beginning to clarify some important matters:

Good sex (and good jazz) requires the prefrontal cortex to take a powder.
Specifically, the left lateral orbitofrontal and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortexes. The former policies self-control over basic drives like sex. The latter can lead to a suspension of judgment and reflection. Diminish both their outputs, and you can apparently liberate the libido. Brain imaging studies show deactivation of the same areas of the brain in jazz musicians. Ergo, good sex is really a zonked-out brain improvisating! The “play” question then becomes do you screw or do you riff?

Don’t hug the lug unless you are serious, sister!
Why not? The Big O’s. Oxytocin and the ovaries. One expert has issued this caution to women: “The effects of oxytocin can be incredibly disarming to a woman. Female animals injected with the stuff seem to throw caution to the wind and cuddle up with the first available male. And that is why, when women ask me for advice about men, I warn them, ‘Don’t hug the guy unless you plan to trust him.’” The ovaries produce testosterone. One woman with “arousal dysfunction” joined a scientific trial where some participants wore a testosterone patch. She blamed the patch when she suddenly had a desire to throw herself into the arms of a cousin at a funeral. The problem? Her patch was a placebo. The testosterone was of her own making.*

The Mars versus Venus thing is a brain issue.
Bestselling author John Gray was on the right track: men and women are from different planets. Their brains, that is. And the list of male-female brain differences is growing ever longer. Researchers are astonished that this hasn’t been realized sooner. But then most test subjects—human or animal—have been male. For example, only now are we realizing that women get better pain relief from the opioid painkiller nalbuphine and men from morphine. “It’s scandalous,” one Canadian researcher says. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.” Often, men don’t understand brain differences as they affect sex, either. Therapists still marvel at how quickly the male brain can begin to suspect that its female partner is having an affair if she’s just not in the mood. (After all, if she doesn’t want sex with him, it must be because she’s getting it somewhere else.)

Forget the G spot. Think B spot.
This just in!!! A new study of 1,800 women at King’s College, London, suggests that the legendary G spot (a supposedly bean-sized vaginal area said to be the female body’s prime erogenous zone) is a myth. But never mind. Dr. Daniel Amen is a clinical psychologist and brain-imaging junkie. He wants to show you some pitchers. (No, not dirty ones.) Pictures that suggest that the right temporal lobe—Amen’s B spot—is “the seat of orgasms.” (You can learn more in his book, Sex on the Brain: 12 Lessons To Enhance Your Love Life.) The B spot, the good doc says, is what can make love dangerous. He likes to talk about former astronaut Lisa Nowak. She donned adult diapers so she could drive hundreds of miles nonstop to confront a romantic rival. Amen thinks going into space may have affected her B spot!

The brain just can’t let the subject go.
And I’m not even going near the sex-on-the-brain problems of Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, David Vitter or Elliot Spitzer. Instead, I’m going to talk about the compulsions of the Christian housewife who blogs at “Beyond the Pale.” On Dec. 16, she asked, “Is there sex in heaven?” Jesus never said never, she noted. Good thing, too. “[If] he’d flat-out said, ‘Well, kids, tough break, but no one will be gettin’ wichoo in heaven,’ all kinds of sex-crazed flaky goobers like me would say, ‘Seriously?…. Lemme get back to you on that salvation thing, Jesus…….’” On Jan. 13, she was back with “More sex in heaven.” Reassuring her readers that going to heaven doesn’t mean you are going to end up being a “little Hindu floaty thing.” Good thing, too. She said, “[If] MB wants to be a floaty thing in heaven, I am going to be royally pissed. I need the feel of his arms available for me forever.” MB is her husband.  (”My Beloved.”)

But I can’t be all serious all the time about the subject of Valentine’s Day and sex-on-the-brain. I have to tell you one joke.

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and his wife are visiting a poultry farm.

During the tour, Mrs. Coolidge inquires of the farmer how his farm has managed to produce so many fertile eggs with so few roosters. The farmer proudly explains that his roosters perform their duty dozens of times each day.

“Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” pointedly replies the First Lady.

The President, overhearing the remark, asks the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”

“No,” replies the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”

“Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” replies the President.

I don’t know whether President and Mrs. Coolidge ever actually visited a poultry farm or had such a conversation with its owner. But the Coolidge Effect—named after the joke—is real. Human males who ejaculate ususally can’t have sex with the same female without a rest. But if a different female enters the picture (and the room) right away … well, hello, Mr. President! More physical and emotional complications in the ever-winding road that has emerged to keep our species around.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

_________
*Actually, as one neuropsychologist has explained, the sex-on-the-female-brain thing is a bit more complicated. Let’s say a woman spots someone interesting. The picture travels the lateral geniculate nucleus to her visual cortex, which evaluates the “mate potential.” If it’s a go, the news is sent to the signal-boosting amygdala, which passes the spark to the hormone-controlling hypothalamus. The word next goes to the ovaries, for a release of testosterone. That’s when the left lateral orbitofrontal and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex get involved, shutting down inhibitions, judgment and reflection. Or something like that. At least when it’s a male being eyed by the female.

In the early fall of 2008, my colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I promoted a new book idea to some of Madison Avenue’s top literary agents. Soon, we were being greeted every few days by a sound familiar to writers: a Bronx cheer.

We have no book to offer you. But I thought you might want to add an “Amen” or two as you sampled our sense of concern, our passion and our outrage at what has been allowed to happen to the United States of America. Here are a few excerpts from our sample chapter.

© 2008-2009 Dudley Lynch and Paul L. Kordis
This is not a book about niceties. No “read” for the squeamish. Or for those who prefer the status quo. Because we are here to alert you to no less than an approaching national cataclysm.

We seek to make a near-airtight case that our nation’s continued existence as the world’s foremost beacon of freedom and opportunity is in severe jeopardy. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently, and be vigilant around anyone who tries. America stands at the edge of the chasm, teetering. The once-strong flame of state viewed from afar as that of a country and a people without historical peer, not even close, is flickering. An ill wind blows over the enterprise called the United States, and our country and our people are in serious peril. Make no mistake. If “business as usual” continues, the U.S. of A. is almost certain to go the way of the Titantic. Proud, boastful, mighty, capable and resting on the bottom. America, the Beautiful, will be toast.

This has happened—is happening—for the most part because much of our legacy, rights, laws, resources, strengths and trust is being steadily expropriated by powerful elites centered in big government, big business and big religion. It is an extraordinary set of puppet masters. One unlike any other oligarchy that has ever coalesced for the purpose of pulling America’s economic and political strings.

America’s most wealthy and most pythonic have been running this country like it was a Monaco-on-the-Potomac instead of the world’s most visible (and once most viable) democracy. They control our economy and corporations, our politics, our government, our media and many of our other institutions, including the so-called spiritual. We find the fingerprints of this hyper-powerful, hyper-wealthy clique time and again at the site of America’s economic disasters, great societal imbalances and crimes against the people and the republic, not to mention the rest of the world.

####
We ordinary folks understand what the “elite deviants” who have been calling the shots and squandering our national identity, integrity, heritage and wealth don’t. And that is this. Once upon a time, a parade of experimenters that stretches backwards into the mists of antiquity (and includes America’s founders) spent three or four thousand years trying to figure out how to make a society come together. And hang together. And thrive and strive always to do better for its citizens.

And figure it out they did!

They pretty much solved the big equations and argued out the fine points. They wrote it all down. As a consequence, an extraordinary place called America appeared on the scene a little more than two centuries ago. This neophyte of a polity across the ocean blue—this outlander to the world’s established orders—had its ups and downs. Its doubts. Its discouraging moments. Its brushes big-time with disaster. And yet, by the third quartile of the 20th Century, America had proved something more convincingly than any other major society before it. America proved that the great theorists and experimenters of human organizing over the eons had, indeed, gotten it right.

And then what did we do?

In a mere heartbeat in historical time, we promptly forgot nearly everything we’d learned! This is such an astounding demonstration of national amnesia and irresponsibility that it bears repeating: we humans spent thousands of years figuring out how to create the best large-sized, self-renewing, fairest-to-all-concerned society the world had ever seen. And then, in a few short years, we Americans promptly forgot nearly everything the risk-takers and civic savants of the ages had taught us!

Forgot it!

Squandered our advantage, debased our achievements. Thumbed our noses at our planetary neighbors. Ignored our most vulnerable and poorest. Mechanized the “bio-cide” of our other earth-mate species. And then left our covenants and promises strewn across the commonweal of our once great land like so-much broken pottery.

We elevated corporations over individuals (by abandoning our anti-trust laws and watering down our laws and regulations and turning a blind eye to the egregious and never-ending misdeeds of giant companies).

We jettisoned fiscal responsibility (by letting Congress and the White House spend at will).

We sold out our workers and their families (by allowing our unions to be destroyed and our companies to be sold and opening our borders profligately to predatory importers).

We thumbed our noses at poor people (by cutting or failing to fund the programs they depended on to stay healthy and try to improve their plight).

We made higher education ever more expensive (by letting college tuitions and fees soar and refusing adequate public funding).

We permitted the dumbing down and debasement of our news media and what they report (by allowing extreme consolidation of ownership, allowing the media’s owners to meddle in the newsroom and removing requirements for fair use of the public’s airways).

We forgot what religion is really supposed to be about (by politicizing our religious institutions and building the walls between us and our neighbors of faith and unfaith ever higher).

We let our public places and shared spaces go to pot (by failing to maintain our infrastructure).

We saved nary a penny for a rainy day either as a person or as a people (by becoming the largest borrowers in history).

We poisoned the immense good will that many other peoples of the world held for us (by acting the bully and petulantly telling everyone else it was our way or the highway).

That, just for starters.

####
Can America be fixed?

Test the air.

Can you sense it? Can you feel it?

A stirring. A breeze amid the stagnancy. Your authors believe they can feel such a ripple. A zephyr that signals an awakening. If this promising murmur in the wind can be upgraded to a mighty blow, can be expanded and accelerated and soon, then it is not quixotic to predict the possibility of another kind of finish to the game of chicken America is playing with its fate. A marathon race to the checkered flag along the edge of the abyss that the good guys and gals can win.

Your authors believe such an outcome is possible. We also believe this. If this hopeful breeze becomes a mighty force, it will be because this we of modest footprints and ordinary wing spans—We, the People—have remembered our civics lessons. Our history lessons. Our spiritual lessons. All at a time when the puppet masters at the very top of America’s pecking order of power and privilege will have gone right on thinking they need a civics lesson, history lesson or a Bible, Torah or Koran lesson like they need a hole in their Pucci money bag.

####
You may question whether things are really as bad as we are claiming. Whether it really is much closer to midnight than morning in America. Whether as a nation, we are truly driving without headlights in the dark. Whether our country’s problems are realistically approaching irresolvable overload. Whether Americans have gotten it so wrong that we may never again get it right.

We are prepared to show you a picture of the jeopardy America is in so scarifying and ominous you may find it hard to fall sleep tonight.

We realize that we, as authors, must provide you with convincing answers. Answers based on the evidence. We also want you to feel and appreciate our own love for this country. Understand what we want it to be for our children and grandchildren. And share our unshakable belief that America is in great peril. Share our belief that it is worth saving. And come to see that only you, the “ordinary” people of this most extraordinary land, can save it.

Our one best hope is a radical and rapid return to normal. We must resuscitate the ideal. Remember the story. Restore the dream. Reclaim and refortify America’s soul. And we must equip We, the People, to unscrew a royally, totally screwed-over republic by taking back the memory, the promise, the foundation.

Because freedom isn’t ringing. Alabaster cities aren’t gleaming. Most Americans are no longer dreaming the dream. More than it ever has before, your country needs you in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel and steering the people’s bus. America is badly broken. Only you can fix it. And there’s not a lot of time left to do it.

####
So Paul and I were thinking 15 months ago. In the interim, very little has happened to change our minds. As the New Year of 2010 approaches, whether a citizen of America or not, we invite you to do all you can to sense the stirring, find the breeze, encourage the ripple, fan the zephyr of what has been lost. And may your God or the operative force that animates your dearest hopes and dreams bless us all!

Friends of ours told us the other night about their grandson, now 7, who lives just down the street from them. That means he spends a lot of nights at their place, school nights included. And that means either his grandmother or his granddad (but usually his grandmother) is freighted with the task of rousting him for school in the morning.

While getting him awake is not often a problem, his grandparents say, getting his feet on the floor usually is. He loves to lay in bed, eyes wide open, eyes very active in fact. Looking first in one direction, then another, though almost never at you. Ask him what he’s doing, and you are inviting a minor Vesuvius of emotion, they report. “You are interrupting my story!” they say he’ll protest. It is clear that their grandson does not like his story-making interrupted. And I’ve come to realize that few of us do.

I’m going to assume that most of the emotion is being generated by his right hemisphere, which is irritated that its understanding of what the left side of his brain is currently up to has been disrupted. That’s because for a lot of things, until the left side of our brain supplies an explanation, the right side is left pretty much without one. This, at least, is what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggested years ago, and continues to suggest, with his theory of the interpreter.

Residing in the left hemisphere—or so “split brain” expert Gazzaniga concluded, as he explained (among many other places) in The Mind’s Past (page 174)—“The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness.”

Ever since reading Dr. Gazzaniga’s theory of the interpreter, I’ve tended to tell anyone curious about what I do professionally that I’m a deadly serious student of the stories people tell themselves and others to explain who they are. You can notice this persistent thread running through nearly all of our models, books and assessment tools here at Brain Me Up. And few things interest me more than the “core” story people tell about themselves.

I’ve concluded that there aren’t very many core stories. And that understanding what your core story is and admitting to its realities, and constantly assessing when and where it makes sense to submit to guidance from your core story, are crucial to being an effective human. (Of course, not every core story equips its user to know or even to care whether they are an effective human as well as some core stories do.)

Any scholar or researcher who professes to be a “developmental” person, following how one person over time and how all persons over the generational expanses of time, assemble and enable and sometimes limit their personal qualities and skills, is hard at work seeking to understand the stories people tell themselves and others in an effort to explain who they are.

Years ago, I was introduced to the pioneering, self-described “biopsychosocial” theory of self-explanatory storytelling of the late Clare W. Graves, the American psychologist. I’ve yet to discover a better model. So I’ve spent much of my career seeking to make his model—which is sometimes called “the theory of everything” and can quickly overload anyone who comes to it just wanting to know a little bit about a few things—more accessible to ordinary souls.

I love all my model-children equally, but first among equals is the schematic that Dr. Paul Kordis and I put together a couple of decades ago and still continue to expand. That would be the water creatures model that was the focus of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin.

The users of the Carp story explain themselves to themselves as perennial victims. They see the world as being against them, and much of the time, they can be forgiven for thinking so. Life is hard. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to bootstrap one’s way upward economically, socially and culturally. There are more Carp storytellers on earth than any other kind. The Carp story reeks with vulnerability. Where it is heavily in use, there is often much resentment and anger and suffering. Can IEDs, suicide bombers, child and spousal abuse, public protests that turn bloody and political Tea Parties that turn shrill and accusatory be far behind?

Next comes the Shark storyteller. The user of the Shark story usually feels entitled. And often for good reason. They hold most of the cards and many of the marbles. The easiest way to learn how to tell the Shark story is to be the daughter or son of someone who told it well. In the 21st Century, the most formidable redoubt of the Shark storyteller is the major corporation and governments and other agglomerates (like universities) that act like one. It is important to the Shark story user to appear confident, in the know, on top of things, and really a pretty good Jane or Joe. Funny thing, though, how often Shark waters turn bloody, good Jane, good Joe or not.

Someone who isn’t forced by dire life circumstances to use the Carp story and who has the sensibilities to understand what a dead-end the Shark story tends to be often gravitates toward a much more fructiferous story. In fact, it sometimes seems to me like the brain has suddenly discovered itself when it arrives at the ability to tell this next story. That’s because, welcome improvement that it is, the new story and its user soon seem to be surrounded by wretched excess. Not by money, necessarily, although users of this story often do well enough. But a wretched excess of ideas, possibilities, symbols, connections and desires. Originally, Dr. Kordis and I called this the Pseudo-Enlightened Carp story. But we eventually came to realize that this was probably too harsh and an unnecessary diversion.

Because in being censorious of the premature assumption by persons suddenly able to tell this story that they have arrived at enlightenment, we were probably steering people away from a realization that they are very close now—psychologically, operationally—to a radically new, fecund, competent kind of story that people on the planet increasingly needed to hear and to which they need to self-adapt.

And so we changed the name of this new story to First Dolphin. It is only a beginning, important as it turns out to be. Truth be known and acknowledged, the First Dolphin story is the story being told of themselves by many of the people who are now feverishly connecting through Facebook and Twitter, who are raising the alarums about global ecological injury, who are scanning the heavens for signs of other intelligent “beings” in the universe, who are protesting against the treatment of the Carp storytellers and the abuses of the Shark storytellers and propagating the desire for a fairer, safer, more peaceful world.

Users of the First Dolphin story are nowhere near being able to live up to all their precepts or deliver on all their promises. But their story is a great improvement. And a critical spawning grounds. Already, at Brain Me Up, we are tracking two additional stories that have grown from the First Dolphin’s: the stories of the Prime Dolphin and of the Deep See Change Dolphin. It is one of these stories that, if the audacious theories of The Singulatarians come to pass, is most likely going to be the leading candidate for implantation in the “mind” of the artificial intelligence that they are predicting is destined to exceed our own.

But enough for now. If you’d like to know which of these stories you currently use to explain to yourself and others who you are—well, that’s the intended function of our newest Brain Me Up assessment. It’s called the Yo!Dolphin!™ Worldview Survey. Go here to know more. Be assured, our purpose is helping you understand and put to good use your life-story-making, not interrupt it, whether you are lying in bed musing about it or have your feet on the floor.

I don’t often experience writer’s block. Sleeping on a topic overnight is nearly always enough to return a free flow of ideas and images. But it was not working that way with this thing called The Singularity. For days, I tried without success to tie a literary bow around a supposition that had fast become a phenomenon that is now on the verge of becoming the first Great Technological Religion. In repeated stare-downs with my computer screen, I lost.

In a moment, I’ll share what finally dissolved the plaque in my creative arteries on this subject, but first I may need to introduce you to the current high drama and low wattage of the whole Singularity debate.

The word first appeared in a 1993 essay written by a California math professor, Vernor Steffen Vinge. The full title was “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Professor Vinge was not the first to raise the issue. But he was the first to supply a name worthy of building a whole “end of the world at least as we know it”-fearing movement around this idea: that computer and other technologies are hurdling toward a time when humans may not be the smartest intelligences on the planet. Why? Because some kind of artificial intelligence (“AI”) will have surpassed us, bringing an end to the human era.

Dr. Vinge is now retired. But his Singularity idea has become another of those Californications that is sucking the air out of intellectually tinged, futuristically oriented salons and saloons faster than a speeding epiphany. The relentless personality under the hood of the Singularity phenomenon is a talented 61-year-old inventor and big-screen-thinking, oft-honored futurist from New York City and MIT named Ray Kurzweil.

Where “My Way” Is the Theme Song
The Singularity movement has just finished what one irreverent observer called Kurzweil’s “yearly Sinatra at Caesar’s.” He was referring to Singularity Summit 2009 (the first was in 2006 and before this one, all had been in California) at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City. Between 800 and 900 enthusiasts paid $498 each to listen to 25 notables, including Kurzweil, on such subjects as The Singularity, transhumanism and consciousness.

I wasn’t there, but bloggers who were say Kurzweil wasn’t physically at the top of his game this year, but his importance, his mesmerizing slides and his beliefs were as central as ever.

Futurist Kurzweil believes with all his heart that unimaginably powerful computers are soon going to be able to simulate the human brain, then far surpass it. He even has the year pegged for this to happen: 2029. He thinks great, wondrous, positive things will be possible for humanity because of this new capability. If you track Kurzweil’s day-to-day activities and influence, you quickly realize that he’s not so much Singularity’s prophet as its evangelist. His zeal is messianic. And he’s constantly on the prowl for new believers in a funky techno-fringe movement that is definitely showing legs.

Consider these developments:

• No less than four documentary movies will be released within a year’s time on The Singularity. One debuted last April at the Tribeca Film Festival and also was shown a couple of weeks ago at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Transcendent Man features or rather lionizes—who else?—Ray Kurzweil. The film is loosely based on his book, The Singularity Is Near. Movies called The Singularity Film and The Singularity Is Near are due out shortly; We Are the Singularity is still in production. One admiring critic writes of Transcendent Man, “[The] film is as much about Ray Kurzweil as it is about the Singularity. In fact, much of the film is concerned with whether or not Kurzweil’s predictions stem from psychological pressures in his life.” [Oh, my! Oh, no! How many times have we seen a movement that influences the fate of millions turn out to be the personification of one man’s neuroses?!!]

• Meanwhile, the debate continues over how soon will be the first and only coming of The Singularity (otherwise it would be named something like The Multilarity or perhaps just The Hilarity). At the Y, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel gave voice to his nightmare that The Singularity may take too long, leaving the world economy short of cash. Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and one of the movement’s most articulate voices, continues to warn that “a singleton, a Maximillian, an unrivaled superintelligence, a transcending upload”—you name it—could arrive very quickly and covertly. Vernor Vinge continues to say between 2005 and 2030. That means it could conceivably arrive (gasp!) on Dec. 21, 2012, bringing a boffo ending to the Mayan calendar, as some boffoyans are predicting. And, of course, Kurzweil’s charts says 2029.

• Science fiction writers continue to flee from the potential taint of having been believed to have authored the phrase, “the Rapture of the Nerds.” The Rapture, of course, is some fundamentalist Christians’ idea of a jolly good ending to the human adventure. Righteous people will ascend to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to suffer. It’s probably the Singulatarians’ own fault that their ending sometimes gets mistaken for “those other people’s” ending. They can’t even talk about endings in general without “listing some ways in which the singularity and the rapture do resemble each other.”

• The Best and the Brightest among the Singulatarians don’t help much when they try to clear the air. For instance, there is this effort by Matt Mahoney, a plain-spoken Florida computer scientist, to explain why the people who are promoting the idea of a Friendly AI (an artificial intelligence that likes people) are the Don Quixotes of the 21st Century. “I do not believe the Singularity will be an apocalypse,” says Mahoney. “It will be invisible; a barrier you cannot look beyond from either side. A godlike intelligence could no more make its presence known to you than you could make your presence known to the bacteria in your gut. Asking what we should do [to try and insure a “friendly” AI] would be like bacteria asking how they can evolve into humans who won’t use antibiotics.” Thanks, Dr. Mahoney. We’re feeling better already!

• Philosopher Anders Sandberg can’t quit obsessing over the fact that the only way to AI is through the human brain. That’s because our brain is the only available working example of natural intelligence. And not just “the brain” is necessary but it will need to be a single, particular brain whose personality the great, incoming artificial brain apes. Popsci.com commentator Stuart Fox puckishly says this probably means copying the brain of a volunteer for scientific tests, which is usually “a half stoned, cash-strapped, college student.” Fox adds, “I think avoiding destruction at the hands of artificial intelligence could mean convincing a computer hardwired for a love of Asher Roth, keg stands and pornography to concentrate on helping mankind.” His suggestion for getting humanity out of The Singularity alive: “[Keep] letting our robot overlord beat us at beer pong.” (This is also the guy who says that if and when the AI of The Singularity shows up, he just hopes “it doesn’t run on Windows.”)

• Whether there is going to be a Singularity, and when, and to what ends does indeed seem to correlate closely to the personality of the explainer or predictor, whether it is overlord Kurzweil or someone else. For example, Vernor Vinge is a libertarian, who tends to be intensely optimistic, likes power cut and dried and maximally left in the hands of the individual. No doubt, he really does expect the Singularity no later than 2030, bar nothing. On the other hand, James J. Hughes, an ordained Buddhist monk, wants to make sure that a sense of “radical democracy”—which sees safe, self-controllable human enhancement technologies guaranteed for everyone—is embedded in the artificial intelligence on the other side of The Singularity. One has to wonder how long it will take for the Great AI that the Singulatarians say is coming to splinter and start forming opposing political parties.

• It may be that the penultimate act of the Singulatarians is to throw The Party to End All Parties. It should be a doozy. Because you don’t have thoughts and beliefs like the Singulatarians without a personal right-angle-to-the-rest-of-humanity bend in your booties. The Singularity remains an obscurity to the masses in no small part because the Singulatarians’ irreverence. Like calling the Christian God “a big authoritarian alpha monkey.” Or denouncing Howard Gardner’s popular theory of multiple intelligences as “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” Or suggesting that most of today’s computer software is “s***”. No wonder that when the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies was pondering speakers for its upcoming confab on The Singularity, among other topics, it added a comic book culture expert, the author of New Flesh A GoGo and one of the writers for TV’s Hercules and Xena, among other presenters.

All of the individuals quoted above and a lengthy parade of other highly opinionated folks (mostly males) who typically have scientific backgrounds (and often an “engineering” mentality) and who tend to see the world through “survival of the smartest” lenses are the people doing most of the talking today about The Singularity. It is a bewildering and ultimately stultifying babel of voices and opinions based on very little hard evidence and huge skeins of science-fiction-like supposition. I was about hit delete on the whole shrill cacophony of imaginings and outcome electioneering that I’d collected when I came across a comment from one of the more sane and even-keeled Singulatarian voices.

That would be the voice of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a co-founder and research fellow of the Singularity Institute.

He writes, “A good deal of the material I have ever produced—specifically, everything dated 2002 or earlier—I now consider completely obsolete.”

As a non-scientific observer of what’s being said and written about The Singularity at the moment, making a similar declaration would seem to be a great idea for most everyone who has voiced an opinion thus far. I suspect it’s still going to be awhile before anyone has an idea about The Singularity worth keeping.

I’ve had a lifelong patchiness in my relationship to science fiction. In the up part of the cycle, I devour it and read—or watch—little else. Once I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune saga novels, with their giant, spice-protecting sandworms in the deserts of Arrakis and all else, I had to read them all, and did so with dispatch. Ditto with most of Robert Heinlein’s books and to a lesser extent, Arthur C. Clarke’s and Isaac Asimov’s (at least, his sci-fi stuff). And then in the down part of the cycle, I’m deaf and blind to the genre.

This bipolar irregularity no doubt caused me to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as a sci-fic fan and may have caused me to miss a unique opportunity as a writer. Because one of the greats of American science fiction writing joined the English faculty of my alma mater, Eastern New Mexico University, while I was enrolled there. It was a small school, but even so, I still blew right past the fact that I could have studied science fiction writing as taught by one of the winners of the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grand Master of Science Fiction Writing award. The first honoree was Heinlein. The second was Jack Williamson of Elida, New Mexico.

Lately, I’ve been away. Again. Though I am aware of the availability of new sci-fi TV series like Fringe, Heroes and FlashForward, nothing has really captivated me sci-fi-wise on the TV screen or book page since The X-Files.

And probably this sleeping dog would still be slumbering had not an odd-sounding post showed up the other day in a Yahoo Group I belong to. The writer is a highly placed government bureaucrat. A really powerful one in scientific research circles, if for no other reason because he presides over who gets multi-million-dollar government research grants. So he’s an accomplished veteran at eviscerating claims by others with whom he disagrees, and he does so regularly in this online community. But here he was, speaking with an unaccustomed tentativeness approaching raw awe.

His story had to do with his viewing the second of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies, the ones in which post-apocalyptic artificially intelligent machines seek to exterminate what is left of a human race. What totally “creeped” him out about this movie, said this Washington bureaucrat, was that it contained several scenes that tracked real events and people in his life and career so faithfully and accurately that it felt like he was being spied on. Fresh on his mind, too, was one of the findings of his agency about good predictors of which emerging technologies would pan out (and should be funded) and which wouldn’t (and shouldn’t be). One finding was that new technologies treated as being favorable to humans in science fiction plots “somehow mysteriously prospered more than you would have expected.” (I’m not posting a link to his comments, since the group is private.)

I don’t know whether he was being spied on or not (he thinks not, after thinking about it.) But what about the U.S. government’s finding that if science fiction thinks well of something being possible in the real world, it has a better than otherwise chance of really happening? Does, in fact, science fiction have a good track record of predicting anything? And does, in fact, anyone take science fiction very seriously anymore? I went looking for answers or, at minimum, opinions. Here’s a CliffsNotes’ version of what I found:

Science fiction requires an optimistic audience, so in a world of growing pessimism, as a viable literary category, science fiction may be dying.
This is the view of George R. R. Martin, who writes both sci-fi and fantasy novels. Sci-fi was in its heydays in the 1950s and 1960s, he observes. The future was an appealing place—one some people couldn’t wait to get to. They thought that their children and grandchildren would be better off and happier there. Now he says, people worry about ecological problems, global warming, the growing instability of the world with nuclear proliferation. He says, “People no longer believe on some level that the future is going to be a good place and they prefer to read about other times and other places that are maybe not so scary as science fiction.”

The real and the fictional worlds have become so interwoven that good sci-fi writing gets lost in the hoopla, the buncombe and macabre of the potentially real. The new ABC series, FlashForward, is based on Canadian sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer’s acclaimed book of that title. In it, two scientists at the European CERN particule accelerator accidentally transport the world’s consciousness 21 years into the future, then return it a couple of minutes later. Naturally, the sudden memories of what is to be terrorize humanity. The best-seller thriller Angels and Demons has Vatican City under threat from a bomb made of anti-matter stolen from CERN. Another best-seller, Blasphemy, has a mad physicist trying to use a CERN-like particle accelerator to talk with God. Then along comes two halfway reputable physicists with a real theory about an experiment CERN hopes to do with its problem-beset new accelerator. They believe that the illusive sub-atomic particle, the Higgs boson, may be so “abhorrent to nature” that it could cause the natural world to try to reverse-engineer reality and wipe out the experimental apparatus trying to create it. They suggest that this might explain the serious mishaps that have struck the Swiss project. So … which is “the science fiction”?

Even science fiction writers have been disappointed that more of their predictions and expectations have not panned out. One candid enough to say so is the oft-honored Frederik Pohl, who has written sci-fi for more than 70 years (he celebrates birthday No. 90 on November 26). Very little of what science fiction has described, he says, has come to pass. “You can’t jump into your spaceship and fly off to Mars and have adventures with six-limbed green Martians, riding floats. It isn’t going to happen. There aren’t any,” he says. “I’m really kind of disappointed. I wish that we had had the right kind of spacecraft. And it doesn’t look like now they’re ever going to happen, or at least not in the immediate future, by which I mean, the time before the sun goes out.”

No matter how hard they try, writers of science fiction can’t escape the influence of the bigger social trends (biases, political correctnesses) of their times. And this isn’t necessarily good for their work. Sci-fi/fantasy writer Jo Walton makes this case in talking about Heinlein’s juvenile work, Time for the Stars, published in 1956. She suggests if Heinlein had written the work recently, “it would have been a different book in almost every way.” For example, earthlings wouldn’t be going out to exploit the galaxy. Earth would be dying because of global warming and pollution, not simple over-population. The book would focus on relationships, not adventure. Characters would have more sex, treated very differently. The odd incestuous relationship between Tom and his great-great-niece Vicky would be more explicitly sexualized at long distance and contain more angst. Says Walton, “I’d read it, but I probably wouldn’t keep coming back to it.” In other words, its topicality would have diminished its appeal, something some critics suggest is happening a lot to science fiction these days.

Prophesy and prophets that take themselves seriously—Nostrademas included—are usually delusional, but some science fiction reader/critics are concerned that sci-fi writers not back away from the prophetical challenge. James Wallace Harris worries, “Personally, I think science fiction is at a turning point—at a cusp—like when a religion turns from revelation to dogma.” He is captivated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s arguments in The Black Swan against trying to predict the future. (The black swan is Taleb’s brilliant metaphor for a future that seems to be predictable only in hindsight.) But Harris is also concerned that science fiction writers not discount their value as writers of philosophical fiction. That is, fiction that helps us imagine purposeful “black swans” useful in explaining why our species may be the first to come fully awake (in Harris’s words) “in the infinite foam of multiverse reality.”

And all this doesn’t really begin to do justice to the cacophonous debate under way about the health, the role, the purity (or the contamination), the state and the fate or the coolness or uncoolness of science fiction today. Is it true that science fiction has become too feminine in no small part because its ranks have been invaded by feminists? Is it true that science fiction perennially “eats its best”—that is, automatically redefines its most talented writers as being writers of some other type of literature the moment they become recognized or canonized? Is it true that some of the best sci-fi writers—Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood—are, or were, right to resist the idea that they write science fiction at all?

Obviously a lot has been going on since I last paid much attention. I think I’ll go rent a copy of Blade Runner and get back in the hunt.

You don’t have to spend much time googling or digging—or doing that old-fashioned thing: reading a book—these days to realize that the brain is often up to its usual tricks when the subject is neuroscientific research.

That is, the brain is simply going about its business. Sometimes, it lights up like a Christmas tree on the fMRI screens when asked to perform some task, or doesn’t light up much at all, or lights up in surprising locales or surprises researchers by not lighting up where they had hoped or thought it would.

At that point, all interpreters can do is to argue their feelings and biases about what it all means. Of course, that’s what humans, including scientific researchers, have always done where the brain is concerned. And we don’t seem to be getting much closer to crossing the Rubicon—or maybe we should say past the Albatross—of how to explain what we see when we map what researchers call “the subject’s neural state.”

Take, for example, Stanford economist Douglas Bernheim’s point in a just published American Economic Journal article that is causing waves in the new field of “neuroeconomics.” Dr. Bernheim wants to be optimistic about neuroeconomics but isn’t yet. This is because of the circular nature of using brain data to measure something subjective. Happiness, for example.

Brain research still needs the tongue
Bernheim’s article and his point about circularity drew the attention of the two Northwestern University economists who write the “Cheap Talk” blog: “Since neural states don’t come ready-made with labels, we need some independent measurement of well-being to correlate with. That is, we have to ask the subject. Let’s assume we make sufficiently many observations coupled with “are you happy now?” questions to identify exactly the happy states. What will we have accomplished then? We will simply have catalogued and translated subjective welfare statements. And using this catalogue adds nothing new.” Which is the central problem of a lot of expensive brain research.

The researchers who were seeking a “God” spot in the brain encountered a similar obstacle. Well, actually, they encountered several. Their goal was to pinpoint what part of the brain “correlates” with a mystical experience. Or at least the most intense Christian-type mystical experience that could be remembered by the Carmelite nuns who participated in the experiment.

Did anything on the fMRI screen light up? Absolutely. There was significant brain activity observed in the nuns’ right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, left brainstem and the extra-striate visual cortex. So, forget “God” spot and think “God” network!

But once again, this wasn’t the primary issue stumping the band. Clever though the experiment was, it didn’t—and couldn’t—tell us anything about God, such as, whether there is One. Just as with the happiness question, the only way we can really learn “something about God” is to ask individuals who think they know something. And you really don’t need fMRI experiments to do that. As one poetic critic put it, those who use fMRI, or brain, imaging to study the God issue still can’t “bridge the gap between the spiritual and the mundane.”

This observer added, “Until they do, there is simply no way to know whether the brain’s response to a religious experience is quantitatively different than its response to any of the deeply meaningful stimuli that surround our daily lives.”

Brain Magic for Investors Still Undiscovered?
Indeed, it is all too easy to get egg on one’s face by rushing in where old salts or your bitterest enemies know better than to tread. Alas, that appears to be what some of my favorite “neurosociety” advocates have done with some of their claims about the value of behavioral finance, neuroeconomics and the new “science of irrationality” in stock picking.

Russell Fuller and Richard Thaler are the brains behind Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, Inc., of San Mateo, CA, and a couple of investment portfolios set up to “exploit insights from behavioral finance.” The funds are called the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Growth Fund and the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund. The core idea is to avoid the consequences of this: “Under certain conditions behavioral biases cause market participants to misprocess information in the financial markets.”

So how are Dr. Fuller’s and Dr. Thaler’s funds doing in their quest to use behavioral finance discoveries to guide their trading decisions. Not well … and their enemies are gloating. One of the most outspoken is Paul B. Farrell, who writes the blog “MarketWatch.” He had named Fuller’s and Thaler’s funds “the Obama Nudgers Funds.” This is because Thaler co-authored the best-selling book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness with Cass Sunstein, who is now high up in the Obama White House.

Farrell’s glee is at observing that the Obama Nudgers Funds have been outperformed in by 1-year returns, 3-year annualized returns and 5-year annualized returns by what Farrell calls “the Lazy Portfolios.” These are eight well-diversified portfolios of no-load index funds that strive to cut operating cost, trading action and taxes to a bare minimum (near zero). For the uninitiated, this means the “behavioral finance” guys are doing worse—sometimes much worse—than funds that do next to nothing investment-management-wise, behavioral or otherwise. It’s a quite normal outcome for investment managers, but an embarrassing one for brain studies iconoclasts who were hoping to do better.

That’s also what the “neurosociety” crowd (and you can include the Thinkologist in the group) are seeking to avoid: making unwitting or unnecessary mistakes by correcting blind behaviors caused by the workings of a brain we’ve misjudged, ignored or known far too little about before. But we’re just getting started at this, something we need to be reminded of often.

A lot going on—with the best yet to come
Even as passionate an advocate as Zack Lynch (no relation to this blogger), author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World, admits that we are only in the beginning stages of the revolution he thinks is coming. He doesn’t believe it will reach critical mass in the public’s opinion (creating a perceptual shift toward a neurocosmos viewpoint) until the 2030s. Another neuroevangelist thinks we are 50 years away from a time when our new knowledge of things neuro will have thoroughly permeated and penetrated our lives and technologies.

But I’m personally encouraged at growing discoveries and inquiries of the new approaches to neuroscience.

For example, there is growing evidence that, as one CalTech researcher put it,
“We are biologically primed to be moral.” To be altruistic, to enforce fairness norms even when we have to pay a price ourselves.

I’m excited by the new brain studies on willpower and self-control. For example, we’re learning, or so the experts say, that if you overload certain areas of the brain, you weaken people’s abilities to resist temptation, such as eating foods that aren’t good for them. The challenge, obviously, is to avoid the overload. Our new pictures of the brain “pigging out” will help us figure out how best to model, and then to thwart, this self-destructive brain behavior.

Needed: cheaper toys and a comprehensive theory
The question of how to respond to the needs of the world’s have-nots in a neuro revolution is increasingly on our minds, and for all our self-protection, it needs to be. In one breath, one neuroethics expert noted that Olympic training programs are now using fMRI scans to correlate areas of depression and negativity in their athletes’ brains. In the next, she told about learning on a recent trip to Africa that the entire country of Uganda only has one fMRI machine.

I like the neurological nudgers’ idea of building in little pushes to get people’s brains to do the right thing or avoid the wrong thing—like getting hospital workers to wash their hands more often or putting warning bulbs in view in our homes to signal when we are using too much energy. The nudge factor is looking to be more and more important as we learn how quickly our mind quits thinking strategically, if it thinks strategically at all. And how little it really knows about what it really wants.

One thing is clear. The rush is on by “neuro” researchers to find tie-ins to the larger picture of what humans do—often together—with their brains.

That was made clear by this year’s Society for Neuroeconomics conference, which has just ended in Evanston, IL. One observer called this year’s program remarkably different from last year’s. “Much less rat studies and a lot of papers and posters on social interactions in humans,” he noted.

Now if fMRI manufacturers can just get the prices on their machines low enough to where everyone—including Olympics coaches in Uganda—can afford them. And if we can learn enough from reading our new brain pictures to move toward producing a dependable “unified theory” about what it all means where the grey matter meets the road.

About Twitter: some can and some can’t. Those who can, in some fashion or another, have been doing it all along, because, at its most basic, tweeting is gossiping. Those who can’t do it well simply won’t, at least for long. According to the Nielson Company, that includes about 60 percent of those who at first thought they could, and would. But they quit when they realized that, for some folks, tweeting is the imagination’s equivalent of gout. On average, Nielson says discovering that takes about a month.

I’m not sure which camp I’m going to end up in. Along with 25 million others, there is now a Twitter account with my company’s monicker on it. I’m going to see how quickly I can get the hang—if I can get the hang—of producing worthwhile “thoughtoids” of 140 characters or less. But at the moment, I’m having fun as a Twitter groupie, hanging out at the edges of the microblogging movement and pondering profundities from the company executives like this one: “You don’t make time for Twitter—you grout your day with it,”

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone often says short things like that. Or like this: “Tiny bits of information can have profound impact.”

Well, yes, even Plato understood what yelling “Fire!” in a crowd can do. (Plato would not have liked Twitter. Remember, he was against writing things down at all, fearing we’d lose the ability to remember.)

A “tweetiquette” learning curve
Even among proponents of tweeting, there is already ample criticism of bad tweeting habits and practices. For example, Irish telecom entrepreneur Pat Phelan’s Apoplexy Meter shoots off the scale when he hears sellers of software programs promise to ensnare “10,000 Twitter followers for you in 30 days.” He calls such marketers “Social Meeja” (for social media, natch) whores.”

Already, there are rules of tweetiquette. The author of “The Twidiot’s Guide to Twitter Etiquette” suggests things like, “Don’t think that you are a celebrity when you hit thirty followers.” And there’s scads of advice on what it takes to build a decent Twitter following. “Social Meeja” expert Mike Prasad told one of those Rehab-Sundays-at-the-Pool-like “140” conferences in LA the other day that all it takes is a “great product and some ingenuity to build a decent following on Twitter.” Computer games expert Jeff Greenspeak opines that tweets works best if you just “take a specific, funny angle and stick to it.”

How will you know that you are getting the hang of it? Greenspeak says you’ll begin to make mental note of things that you want to tweet rather than blog. Like the other day, he overheard a co-worker dining out in Cologne complain—seriously—how annoyed she was that most German restaurant menus were in German. For a budding Twitter carnivore, that’s tweet meat.

So what do really good tweets read like?

Before sharing some examples that get kudos from both cognoscenti and rift raft, perhaps it would help to share some examples that get brickbats from everyone.

Good tweeters are probably born, not made
I snared these barf stirrers from a site called tweetingtoohard.com, where you can vote for your “tops in tastelessness” favorites. Here are tweet writers whose creations did well with voters:

• The Mary Kay executive who tweeted: “I make multi-million $ decisions on a regular basis—why is it soooo difficult to decide what to do with my hair?”

• The rich broad who shared, “OMG i was saying how i couldn’t afford the gas to fly daddy’s jet to the riviera this summer, and this barista totally rolled her eyes at me.”

• The narcissist who prattled, “The people who say I’m arrogant and shallow don’t see me when I’m at home with my wife. Did I mention that she’s a former swimsuit model?”

In visiting a site called Best Tweets, I noticed a couple of things about tweet writers who draw raves—and followers. I’m not taking about the rich and famous like Britney Spears (3,888,252 followers) and Ashton Kutcher (1,000,000+ followers) but simply tweeters who seem to have the knack for tweeting. I think you’ll agree that it helps if (1) you have a sense either of humor or the ironic and/or (2) if you are a natural born storyteller.

For example, there’s @badbanana, a blogger named Tim Siedell (maybe), who comes up with tweets like “The Kindle version of Dan Brown’s new book is outselling the hard copy on Amazon. Meaning nobody wants to be seen reading it.” And, “I question the president’s decision to start a trade war with China this close to Christmas stocking stuffer season.” And, “Hugh Hefner is getting a divorce? Well, there goes his conservative Catholic fan base.” Is this guy one of Jay Leno’s writers or what?

Tweeterers are young, but not too young
There is @Blue_Crab (probably a young woman but who knows?), who writes stuff like “I swear, if it’s not one thing, it’s my mother.” And, “So I sat on the baby and it just wriggled and screamed until the tequila hit. Babysitting is hard.” Or Adam Isacson (@adamisacson), a policy wonk on Latin America, who pens “smile if you love archness” gems like this one: “I honked and flipped someone off while listening to the Dalai Lama’s book on CD, and I–well, I think I attained enlightenment.”

There’s this one from @donchiefnerd, which I love: “Ahmadinejad!” “Ahmadidtooejad!” “Ahmadinejad!” “Ahmadidtooejad!” I hate it when 6 year olds debate world politics.” And @trelvix’s “Sarah Palin will speak in Hong Kong on Thursday.This’ll be the former governor’s first trip to Europe since visiting Maine in April.” And @secretsquirrel’s “Unemployment: discovering you can put spreadable cheese on both sides of your toast & wondering if there’s a way to patent it.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the average age of Twitter users is 31. When Pear Analytics studied a sample of 2,000 tweets, most of what it found was trivial: spam, self-promotion, pointless babble and tidbits of chit-chat (and some news, too!) . The other day investors coughed up another $100 million for Twitter executives and staff in that giant industrial warehouse in San Francisco to play around with. And the company does have goals, such as the announced desire to reach a billion users and become “the pulse of the planet.”

Does brain research offer any ideas on why Twitter has expanded so rapidly—and on whether it will continue to do so?

Yes, but most of it is inferential and not directly produced by studying the effects of tweeting. A primary reason why tweeting is like gossiping is because both trigger the feel-good hormone progesterone. But Twitter can overstimulate your brain, too, (the scientific term is “continuous partial attention”), and always being “on” can affect the brain like smoking pot or missing a night’s sleep. It subtracts IQ and interferes with focus.

Important, but destined to fade?
Like Google, Twitter’s look and MO are streamlined. Fewer pictures, fewer words. The brain likes this. It means you get stuff quicker than you expected, and this triggers dopamine, another feel-good neurochemical that shows up when outcomes “are better than predicted.” On the other hand, Twitter is addictive. It seems to trigger seeking behaviors—as in always seeking the next fix, the newest buzz.

60 Minutes and Vanity Fair announced the first result from a new monthly U.S. poll the other day. The age cohort most likely to view Twitter as an “important new tool” was the 18-to-29 group (22 percent). However, this age bracket also was the highest to deem Twitter “a fad that will fade” (51 percent). The poll’s experts were puzzled. They noted, “In other words, the 18-to-29s believe in Twitter’s importance and its inevitable obsolescence, making them … what? Brooding and pessimistic? Wise beyond their years? Too busy tweeting to grasp the question?”

I just don’t sense that Twitter provides anything all that essential to the new communications mix even though it can be entertaining, some times informational and on a few occasions may turn out to have planetary significance as an early-warning, quick-alert service. So I suspect it will turn out to be more Alka-Seltzer than Viagra. The thing you have to discover is whether there’s enough people out there who can benefit from frequent reminders of who, what and/or where you are who really want you in their face that often.

In the early 1990s, we traveled around Europe together for several weeks. Mostly by train, a few times by car, as we produced business seminars. He was a brainy, ambitious, sparely worded chap. A sly sense of humor: dry, cowboy-ish. Very good English, too, polished during an extended sojourn in America—he once addressed the downtown Los Angeles Rotary Club—but still clearly accented.

I have no idea why, or even how, he killed himself. The terse account on the Internet of his demise had to be run through Babel Fish because I don’t read the language. What was originally written was short and circumspect, and the machine translation is even less revealing.

It is probably safe to say that my ex-seminar-producing partner felt deeply unhappy and concluded that the paralyzing stalemate that his living had become wasn’t going to yield. So, tragically, he ended his life.

There are signs everywhere that a lot of people are unhappy. And there plenty of people around who are asking why and suggesting steps for them to take and, increasingly, for their governments to take, to make happiness more accessible and widespread. Some are claiming that in places like the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany, happiness has been stagnating for years.

An “enlightened” idea that bombed—for a while
As is often the case on matters of the public good, Europeans seem to be ahead of Americans and much of the rest of the world in their levels of official wonderment about how to help people be happier.

In Britain, for example, there is Sir Richard Layard, the economist sometimes known as the “happiness czar.” Layard never misses a chance to campaign vigorously for his Principle of the Greatest Happiness.

He explains, “This says that I should aim to produce the most happiness I can in the world and, above all, the least misery.”

The idea sounds irrefutable and self-evidently right. And actually, it has been around for almost three centuries. Jurist Jeremy Bentham promoted it about the time America was born. As with Layard, Bentham advocated actions that increase everyone’s pleasure and decrease everyone’s pain. The concept caught on widely—and was called the most noble discovery of the Enlightenment.

But then, in one of history’s extraordinary ironies, no less than Bentham’s own godson, whom he raised, reversed all that, at least for a time. John Stuart Mill tried living his young life by such a precept, and it nearly killed him. Mill was contemplating suicide when he discovered the Romantics—the Coleridges and Wordsworths—and came to this conclusion, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Gross national product is out, bonheur is in
Mill concluded that happiness is like a crab—it approaches you sideways. He thought deliberately pursuing happiness was a deal-killer, a fool’s errand.

To measure happiness, you must first decide what happiness is, Mill concluded. He thought happiness is impossible to pin down. He put in a good word for pain, too. For example, falling in love often brings pain, but it is a part of any rich life. So Bentham’s single-minded “principle of utility” faded in economics and politics, buried by Mill’s “let happiness find you” arguments.

That was then, though. And this is now. There has come to be what is sometimes called “the science of happiness.” Even governments are starting to move into the picture or make noises like they’d like to.

In France last week, President Nicholas Sarcozy’s top-drawer commission to study what governments should be doing to make people happier released its report. Essentially, it called on governments to “help people produce the most happiness you can in the world and, above all, the least misery.” From now on, Sarcozy says that economic progress in France will be measured not by GNP (gross national product) but by “bonheur” (happiness). “The [banking] crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so,” he said, happily.

So we’ve come full circle. And if you are trying to decide how to be happy, a very full circle it is. It can be a very confusing one, too. Because neoBenthamism has become very John-Stuart-Mill-like in its variety. That is, it has a kind of anything goes, laissez faire spirit about it.

Prescribed routes to happiness that take many paths
There is happiness psychologist Dr. Robert Holden, who says he can make happy optimists of clinical depressives simply by getting them to laugh or simulate laugher for 20 minutes a day and think positive thoughts all day long. Hypnotist Paul McKenna’s “Endorphin Button” exercise is quicker. You recall happy times, enhance the colors in your memory and squeeze your thumb and index finger together five times.

Neuroscientist Dr. Nick Lavidis had an epiphany while strolling through Yosemite National Park. The smell of freshly cut grass produced pleasant feelings. So Lavidis now markets a room spray that—you guessed it!—releases a chemical like that in grass cuttings. Lavidis says it stimulates the hippocampus, improving our memory functions and good feelings.

Sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler believe social relationships can cause happiness to be passed from person to person like they were contagious viruses. They got the idea by studying the famed Framingham Heart Study, which started following 15,000 people back in 1948. Your happiness can not only affect your friends but also friends of your friends. And get this: it may affect your friends’ friends, even if it didn’t affect your friends! (Unhappily, bad habits are also transmitted this way, too. Like obesity, smoking or using harmful drugs.)

In his book on college students and achievement, Derek Bok, the former Harvard University president, flagged three consequences of poor health as producing long-lasting unhappiness: mental illness (notably depression), chronic pain and sleep deprivation (notably insomnia). He said these “afflict a surprising number of people and have a marked and continuing effect on well-being.’’

Speaking of Harvard University, a study there has been tracking hundreds of students for more than 70 years. Researchers have concluded that seven major factors are most likely to produce happy old-timers: mature adaptations (or the ability to respond well to problems), education, a stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.

The “I’m OK, You’re OK” view of happiness
Numerous studies have suggested that childless couples experience more enjoyable times and fewer stressful ones than couples with children. The enjoyable-times penalty from having children is even greater for women. But if producing successful, happy, productive children makes you happy, having a family is a happiness no-brainer.

And that’s the anti-Benthamic rub to bringing any real coherence to the happiness movement: one person’s happiness maker may be another person’s pleasure eraser.

All of which causes experts like Dr. Caroline West to adjudge the Bentham-versus-Mill controversy a wash. West teaches a popular course called “The Philosophy of Happiness” at the University of Sydney. She says:

“We’re inclined to think that there is something that happiness really is. If we only knew which of enjoyment and aspiration-fulfillment happiness really was, then we would know what to be basing these and other important life decisions on. The problem is that there isn’t an answer to the question of what happiness really is. And there’s certainly no answer that everyone will agree with.

“What one person means by ‘happiness’ can be completely different to what the next person means, far more different than we commonly imagine…. Happiness can be used to refer a momentary sensation, such as pleasure or enjoyment. Or it might refer to an enduring mood, such as tranquility or contentment. Or believing that one’s desires are being achieved, or the actual achievement of one’s desires. Or believing one’s life as a whole is going well, in terms of one’s own priorities. Or leading a life that is considered to be—from some objective standpoint—worthwhile.”

I would wish that my former seminar partner and I could have talked about some of this. In his right mind, he would have enjoyed the discussion. On the trains of Europe in those yesteryear travels, we talked about a lot of things. I particularly remember one animated discussion on a long trip between Mannheim and the Polish border about John Galt’s radio speech in Atlas Shrugged. There was much, we both agreed, in the speech that spoke to our own sensibilities and ideals.

What I would liked to have shared with my friend
If he had asked on those trips about my personal thoughts on being happy, I’d probably have said things like this:

Remember that happiness ebbs and flows. People have a range of happiness and move up and down in it. Of course, some are simply congenitally and seemingly forever joyous. And then the happiness capacity of others appears to vacillate somewhere between a passing break in the clouds and a murderous funk. The rest of us are somewhere in between and usually make do.

Brain chemistry is important but it isn’t everything. If you need antidepressants to ward off danger to yourself, hurry on to your physician. But remember that time can be a potent healer, too. And that learning is not a pain-free zone. An irreducible side effect of the good-feelings-from-the-medicine-cabinet drugs is that they close certain self-correcting and insight-filled windows on the mind and soul.

Few actions in life encourage expanded happiness and satisfaction more than “willing” oneself to initiate positive self-change. It’s both an art and a science. A key element is often pro-actively seeking out increased connectivity of the right kind—finding people you can be close to or at least be around who don’t mind you being happier.

Find your own happiness rhythms and honor them. Give into the highs and enjoy them to the fullest. Accept the lows and understand that they are almost certain to pass. Then view and treat the in-betweens as the times when you are cleaning up the messes left over from previous train wrecks or wrong track choices and preparing for the arrival of the next great moments.

Understand that if you find happiness, it’s going to have to be on your terms. Happiness is not a pure quality. It is a concoction of tradeoffs negotiated between the self that you ideally wish to be and the self that bumps its nose against a surprise-prone, often uncooperative world every day. You need to find your own personal recipe for responding to this mix, or it will never work or taste right.

The current moment can be a real shrew. It lies a lot. It may profess to own you soul and marrow and insist it will never let go. When it says that, look it in the eye and spit in its face. And remind yourself that in a few hours, or a few days, or a few months, you will most likely be restored and healed but the current moment will be nothing but a smear on a neuron, if that.

Get really, really good at the inner art of cleaning the slate. I’m not into meditating but I’m told by those who are that this can be very effective mental squeegee. What I often do is switch gears. Spring the unexpected on my mind. Read the unpredictable book. Watch another culture’s films. Visit a restaurant in a part of town that our neighbors or usual crowd wouldn’t think of being seen in. Or sometimes, just book a trio of big Ryder or Penske rental trucks and move half-way across the U.S. And watch from the corner of my eyes for the happiness crab to again sidle into view.

What my erstwhile European colleague and friend—may he gently rest in peace—would have thought of John Stuart Mill’s advice in those final moments, I have no idea. When you can see no light at the tunnel’s end, it probably doesn’t help to be told to forget happiness and just get on with living the best way you know how. But it’s probably good advice at most other times. Happiness may show up anyway. And even if it doesn’t, you’ll be a lot less unhappy at not having found all the happiness you think you deserve.

Trust is a precious metal in my periodic table of people qualities, although I tend toward optimism that it can be justified. As readers of Dr. Paul Kordis’ and my book, Strategy of the Dolphin, know, it is a worldview thing with me. Evil, stupidity and blind belief show up much too often to treat trustworthiness as child’s play. Such qualities offend my desire for … well, competence and fairness. So I don’t bestow trust automatically, and I counsel others not to.

For example, I don’t trust automobile dealers. Not a single one of the lot, anywhere on Earth—not a whit. There is nothing in my experience or observation that indicates they deserve to be trusted. The car lots and auto showrooms of the world are marinated in greed, untruths and shady gamesmanship.

For similar reasons, I do not trust big-time politicians. Not a single one, anywhere on Earth. Now, there are some whom I admire more than others. But I don’t fully trust any of them, and you shouldn’t either. Because sooner or later, every prominent politician’s integrity goes on the auction block. And nearly all will claim righteousness or feign piety or swear ignorance or innocence when they sell out, and very few ever get indicted or penalized.

Admire Their Courage, But Be Cautious of Their Power
I do not trust cops. Not a single one, anywhere on Earth. I often admire their courage. And I find their job so fascinating that one of my favorite TV shows is Fox’s “Cops,” on Saturday night. But when you are in the clutches of a policeperson, for a brief but parlous time, you are at their total mercy. For that instant, they can be judge, jury and executioner. You can die, or be beaten, or be framed for a crime on the mere whim of the person behind the badge, and many victims around the world are, every day.

I do not trust ministers, priests, imams or rabbis. Probably most clergy people I’ve met are “good people,” and I’ve liked some of the ones I’ve known best a great deal. They often act sacrificially in admirable ways. They can provide wise, helpful counsel for many at difficult moments. But none I’ve ever met would I trust fully with my deepest questions about what it all means. Those who profess to respect my questioning show suspicions of being in camouflage; those who oppose it can be downright scary.

And now I must confess to a growing distrust of what I’ve come to call the New TrustMe Gurus of the business marketplace. There has been an explosion of them. They are promoting and peddling everything from nasal sprays to social networks and networking to books that tout things like the Joseph D. Pistone technique for winning friends and influencing people.

You may remember Pistone. He was the FBI agent who spent six years infiltrating the Bonanno crime family. In their new best-selling book, Trust Agents, digital marketing consultants Chris Brogan and Julien Smith admire how Pistone, using the alias of Donnie Brasco, won the Mafia’s trust by simply hanging around bars until the goons came to accept him as part of the scene. The point Trust Agents’ authors wish to make: you need to build up trust with your target markets before you make your move, not as you are making it.

Go Straight to the Heart of the Matter: the Pituitary Gland
Now, I’m willing to concede that many of the techniques in Trust Agents have value and are ethically light years ahead of the methods being advocated by some of the promoters of oxytocin, the “love hormone.”

Researchers from Zurich to Atlanta to Houston to Los Angeles are captivated these days by what happens when they squirt a few atomized drops of oxytocin into people’s (and rodents’) noses.

Oxytocin (not to be confused with oxycontin, a morphine-like drug associated with the death of DJ AM) is the short polypeptide hormone released by the pituitary gland. Within a few minutes of inhaling the drug in sufficient quantity, trust becomes a five-letter word for everything from let’s make a date (or set one for nuptials) to where did you want me to sign to let’s spray the whole Middle East with this stuff. The New-Age-in-a-spray-bottle effect seems to last for two to four hours.

Liquid Trust® was reputedly the first oxytocin spray on the market. (There is now also a Liquid Trust Enhanced.) Sellers of LT have this advice for their business customers: “Use Liquid Trust in creative ways around your workplace. Before important presentations or meetings, spray some Liquid Trust around your desk or conference room [sic] see the magic happen. You could even spray some on memos or reports that you have to hand to your manager! Although they cannot smell it, Liquid Trust is there and working to increase trust in you.” [Go here for more tips, like spraying LT on thank you cards to your clients.]

The Trust Equation Is Still the Same: Stand and Deliver
However, it is neither the outpouring of glib “Chicken Soup for the Marketer” books nor the wretched excesses of the new Mary Kays of the oxytocin receptor industry that has triggered my disgruntlement for the new TrustMe movement in business. I’m simply disappointed that trust has been monetized and commodified and its pursuit irrationally “scaled” to the point where it is sure to be devalued when the trust bubble implodes.

The newly evangelical TrustMe movement in business simply isn’t producing. I know this because people who keep making me promises as part of the new TrustMe clique simply aren’t delivering, not any more than before. Tantalizing hints of imminent breakthrough developments tipple off the lips and fingertips as easily as ever—never to be heard of again, just as before. Expressions and pledges of networking solidarity arrive en masse, only to wither like last week’s flower bouquet. It’s the same old, same old, not the New Millennium.

What I think has happened is this: the TrustMe/social networking edifice is built on sands underlain by the same old human deep-water rip tides and whirlpools, and nobody has been doing any real core-sampling. While the neurocortex poses, the limbic circle and the reptilian brain continue to dispose.

Trust is still what our deepest instincts have always said it is: a very small circle. Earning trust still requires what it has always required: showing over time that you can deliver consistently on honest promises. You can have a thousand people in your LinkedIn network and three thousand Twitter followers and Facebook friends out the kazoo, and nothing fundamental about the trust equation changes. Commit + follow-through, again and again = trust.

The Danger is Seeing Trust as a Numbers Game
Meanwhile, the demands of all that networking have made it nearly impossible for more and more of us to carry out the basics that can, over time, lead to the kind of trust that the new TrustMe business and social networking movement has been hoping to benefit from.

The experts call this “strategic trust.” This develops slowly, usually requiring years. It is very fragile, and can disappear in a finger’s snap. It happens, if it happens, because people stay around. They keep their promises. They radiate dependability and integrity in their actions. They reveal more and more of themselves and eventually, over time, become a “sum that is greater than the parts” in the experience and expectations of people for whom they count and on whom they count.

Few things are more fragile and require more tending than strategic trust. I’m not seeing very much of that emerging from the new TrustMe movement, and I don’t expect that it will. And that’s going to be very disappointing to a lot of folks.

They bought into the idea that trust-building can be a numbers game. And that being trusted is something that can be demonstrated and benefited from by showing up more and more often along the long tail of the Internet. By the time they figure out the truth, the authors of things like Trust Agents and the inventors of Liquid Trust will be long gone. And with them will go the only money anyone will make out of all this talk about how important it is to send word at the speed of light to an ever-growing myriad of message addicts (or message ignorers) of just how trustworthy you are.

Trust Values Are Eroding, Across the Board and the Seas
While Nero is fiddling, Rome shows signs of burning down. In its summer report on the top 10 trends for 2010, McKinsey, the big consulting company, says trust in business is declining. McKinsey points out that falling trust levels increase transaction costs, lower brand values and bring greater difficulties attracting customers and retaining talent.

Dr. Eric Uslander, the trust-studying scholar at the University of Maryland-College Park, says generalized levels of trust have been declining in the United States for more than 30 years. The decline is substantial. While not the same as “strategic trust,” generalized trust is a barometer of sorts for the overall economic health of a society and its business environment. In poorer countries, both strategic and generalized levels of trust are abominable, and getting no better. This is, of course, one of the chief reasons that they are poor.

So trust is as important as ever. Too important, I think, to be left to the TrustMe Movement. This is my advice: don’t put a lot of trust, time or money in following the TrustMe hype. The last thing you need to do is let the TrustMe folks cause you to devote so much time to trying to network with people you hope you can trust and who will end up trusting you that you have no time to prove yourself trustworthy. Call that a fatal attraction to trying to do trust on the cheap.