Basically, I’m a skeptic on most matters in the so-called “woo-woo” department of human inquiry, ranging from religion to UFOs to telekinesis to, yes, even the chiropractic theory. But I’m not a ragin’ Cajun on such topics. It’s true that I once refused to permit a renter of our conference center to do a firewalk because I feared liability for injury to her participants. But I also defied advice from friends in the medical community for years and chose as my personal physician a Doctor of Osteopathy over an M.D. because (1) I thought him to be a better healer than any M.D. I’d ever sought out and (2) he was a whiz at “popping” the pain out of my back with his hands-on manipulative techniques.

Thus when a dear friend insisted the other day that the wife and I just had to watch a movie called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? (also variously known as What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, What the Bleep Do We Know! or WTFDWK?) with her because the flick had literally reordered her personal reality, my reaction was, “What the heck—why not?”

My viewing of WTFDWK? lasted approximately four minutes, and then I had to bail before I barfed. This is definitely woo-woo stuff, and in my opinion, nowhere near very good woo-woo stuff. I apologized to our friend and mumbled something about a long-standing pathological need for structure, especially in the story lines of films I’m viewing.

But then no sooner was WTFDWK? receding in my memory than another of my favorite people urged a new book on me called Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind by Joe Dispenza. A quick check of Dr. Dispenza’s credentials (he’s a chiropractor) indicated that he was one of the interviewees in WTFDWK?. With that discovery, I surrendered. It appeared that God was sending me a sign that I ought to take a closer look at this, and I have.

Now, the idea that we each create our own reality is at least as old as the first onlooker to report a miracle, but it is an idea that seems to wax and wane, cycle-like, in human affairs.

If we were doing an documentary called What tнe⃗ #$*! D⃗ө ωΣ (k)πow!? and not the psycho-spiritual propaganda piece that WTFDWK? is, the story line for this latest recycling could very well begin with an invitation made by the Dalai Lama in 1992 to a Harvard-trained neuroscientist named Richard Davidson. When Davidson got a close look at the renowned Buddhist spiritual leader’s monks at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, he quickly invited them to his own digs—the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior in Madison, WI.

Davidson was soon reporting that the Dalai’s monks, each of whom had meditated on compassion and love for more than 10,000 hours, were demonstrably and permanently altering their brain when given meditative assignments. (A control group also altered their brains—or at least their brain waves—while meditating but only temporarily.)

Davidson published his research findings in 1994 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and by 2006, TIME was naming him one of the ten most influential people of the year because of his research.

But research into what?

Neuroplasticity!!! That’s really what all this is about. Finally, after nearly a century, we have Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the run, Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize. This Spanish neuroanatomist froze reality in brain research labs for much of a century with this sentence: “In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable.” Translation: the adult brain is hardwired and not susceptible to change. Ever.

Now, we know that’s nonsense. New discoveries are being made every day of just how neuronally plastic the brain really can be. The Dalai Lama is so excited by evidence that the mind can change the brain to some extent that he’s now apparently sponsoring yearly meetings of Buddhist monks and leading neuroscientists to discuss the latest changes in neuroplasticity. The Dharamsala conferences so excited Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley that she’s now written two books on how the mind and the brain interact. Her latest—Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves—barely made it out before an even better book by New York research psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science.”

So can the mind actually do things like “will” the brain to grow new nerve cells when old ones get damaged? The sources we consulted say the current evidence for neurogenesis is restricted to the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. While I’m not a brain scientist or even a science writer who follows this field closely, I suspect that the field of neuroplasticity is just now taking baby steps. There are some wonderful anecdotal triumphs, as book writers like Begley and Doidge recount, often inspiringly. People with damaged inner ear nerves getting relief from dizziness. A stroke victim again able to walk. People rechanneling serious compulsive urges by actually altering their brains’ neuronal circuitry.

Throw them a little evidence, and you just had to know that the people featured in WTFDWK? would not be able to resist mixing in quantum mechanics, transcendental meditation, alternative realities, water crystals and channeling with the 35,000-year-old warrior spirit Ramtha. (Dr. Dispenza, the chiropractor, incidentally, is a teacher at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.)

Baby-step times are nearly always heady times. (In our Brain Technologies seminars, we usually call this the “naïve enthusiasm” stage of the discovery process.) There is absolutely nowhere near enough evidence to suggest, as a New York Times’ book reviewer (an M.D., no less!) put it, “the electronic circuits in a small lump of grayish tissue are perfectly accessible, it turns out, to any passing handyman with the right tools.” That’s simply far too great a leap to be made at this point.

And the claims made in WTFDWK?—judging from numerous reports by film watchers with less sensitive barf calibrations than mine—are even more outlandish. But this much is believable: one more time, the brain, and nature, and the reality of all realities has proven much more interesting and much less limited than we have imagined for most of history, modern scientific history included.

Go here to check out various titles on brain neuroplasticity and related topics:

By Norman Doidge The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

By Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

By Sharon Begley Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves

By B. Alan Wallace Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

By Joe Dispenza. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on the WTFDWK? movie: What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Here is Wikipedia’s entry on the new science of “brain malleability”: Neuroplasticity

If you know where to look and what to look for, the blogosphere has been ablaze with this discussion for some time. What’s new is that support for view No. 2 is now coming from some of the strangest places. Like, for example, The University of Chicago’s business and law schools.

For decades, The U. of Chicago has been a stronghold for academics defending laizze-faire capitalism. Until his death last year, it was the hangout for the world’s most influential modern spokesperson for marketplace-dominated economics, Nobel-Prize-winner Milton Friedman. Dr. Friedman was a forceful believer in viewpoint No. 1. He had an unshakable faith in the marketplace’s ability to decide what people want and how best to give it to them.

Here’s a sample of Friedman’s bias on the subject: “What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Bingo! The battle is joined! Do guns kill people or do people kill people?

Now come two U. of Chicago faculty members—one from the B-school and the other from law—who are insistent that policymakers, both public and private, acknowledge that humans are imperfect decision-makers. And that in many instances and in large numbers, humans need a little nudge, without coercion, to make decisions that will leave them or people they are charged with helping better off.

“Nudge” is really the operative word here. Cass Sunstein (the law professor) and Richard Thaler (the business professor) are now writing a book with the title of Nudge, which will be about their idea of “libertarian paternalism” and the economics of nudging.

On his blog, Sunstein has explained “libertarian paternalism” this way: “The basic idea is that private and public institutions might nudge people in directions that will make their lives go better, without eliminating freedom of choice. The paternalism consists in the nudge; the libertarianism consists in the insistence on freedom, and on imposing little or no cost on those who seek to go their own way.”

Two examples often cited by Sunstein and and Thaler involve ways to help people increase savings. As Thaler wrote on a Wall Street Journal blog recently, “The first [approach] is to enroll people, automatically, into savings plans—while allowing them to opt out. The second is the Save More Tomorrow plan, which allows employees to commit themselves now to increasing their savings rates later, when they get raises. Both approaches have been remarkably successful.”

In his column, “Economix,” New York Times writer David Leonhardt has said he sees two big ways that “libertarian paternalism” can work its nudging magic on human brains.

One is to help the brain cut through the confusion of complexity and information overload. He cites an experiment in North Carolina’s largest school district. Parents in the district were confused by all the information available in a school choice program as they sought to decide where they wanted their children to be enrolled. Aided by three Yale University researchers, the district offered parents a little nudge. Thousands of parents were given a sheet listing a single test score—the average of the math and reading scores—for each available school. Immediately, parents began enrolling their school in the schools with the highest scores, which is the whole point of school choice.

Leonhardt’s other expectation is that libertarian paternalism will help the brain remember to do what’s best. He tells about Dr. Michael Gropper’s nudging rule at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco.

It’s common knowledge that patients on ventilators need to spend most of their time sitting up. Otherwise, it’s much too easy for germs to migrate from their stomachs up to their mouths and breathing tubes and into their lungs. But because so many activities involving critical ill patients require that they be lying down, nurses and aides often forget to elevate a patient when they are finished. So Dr. Gropper made a new nudging rule: unless there is a doctor’s order to the contrary, every patient on a ventilator must be sitting up.

The result: the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia at the hospital has fallen more than 40 percent since 2005.

In a perfect decision-making world, say Sustein and Thaler, the brain would have complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and no lack of willpower. In the real world, people must use brains that have limited information-processing abilities, willpower, memory and attention spans. Therefore, a little non-coercive nudge at the right time can make a huge difference, sometimes immediately, sometimes a long ways down the road.

Sustein writes, “Libertarian paternalism is hardly a panacea, and a lot of work remains to be done. But it might be worth thinking about how the basic approach can be applied to such diverse problems as savings, prescription drug plans, social security reform, obesity, school choice, preparation for natural disasters, and safety on the highways.”

I’d have to say that the proof is in the results, and the early returns for nudging look good. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise would appear, or so it seems to me, to have a rampant case of ideology.

Carl Sustein and Richard Thaler first published their ideas on libertarian paternalism in a working paper in April, 2003: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron

Go here for David Leonhardt’s article: Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge

Dr. Sustein writes about his nudging ideas on the University of Chicago Law School’s faculty blog: Libertarian Paternalism

Dr. Thaler debates libertarian paternalism with Mario Rizzo, professor of economics at New York University, on the Online Wall Street Journal: Should Politics Nudge People To Make Certain Choices?

A writer for The Economist and its readers discuss libertarian paternalism: I’m your new legislator, but you can call me “Daddy”

Jim Holt writes about libertarian paternalism in The New York Times Magazine : The New, Soft Paternalism”

While it’s no secret that I generally find this President’s mental performance ranking somewhere between the ludicrous and the phantasmagorical, I’ve not given much ”ink” to BDS-type analyses to now.

But the presidential behaviors that have been the focus of such studies show no signs of improving. Deep soul-searching and insightful self-learning are not taking place for the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and aren’t like to. And the costs and the dangers of the psychological dynamics driving The Decider have grown. So it is time. Bring your spelunker’s headlamp because we are going inside the topic of the psyches of leaders.

It is not necessary to read all the studies of the President’s psychology to get the gist of their arguments and observations. Read one, and you’ve pretty much gotten the general drift of them all.

Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President is as good as any. This book was written by Justin Frank, a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center. The likely reasons for Mr. Bush’s unresolved psychological issues are all there: the absentee father, the authoritarian mother, the likely hyperactivity and dyslexia, the competition between siblings and the need to compete with his father’s yawning successes, the multi-generational poor parenting skills of his family, the lack of unconditional love, the out-sized privileges of his elite slice of society with few, consistent countervailing sources of wise guidance, correction and personal counsel—it’s all there. And so are the likely consequences: his drinking, his bullying and bellicosity, his constant lying, his religiosity and rigidity, his youthful cruelty to playmates, classmates and animals and now to his perceived international enemies. And, of course, his all-consuming sense of incompetence and inadequacy. It’s very troubling to realize that such a troubled youngster grew into such a troubled man who has now led his powerful country and the rest of the world down such a troubled path.

But as I refreshed my memory of all this, rather than a growing anger, I found myself with a certain empathy for this incorrigibly dysfunctional thinker who has visited such unnecessary pain and waste on the people he purports to serve.

As we all do, George W. Bush deserves considerable understanding and sympathy for his psychological shortcomings.

I’ve rarely found myself more moved than when reading of how Mr. Bush learned, at the age of six, that his sister, Robin, 4, was dead. When Robin was diagnosed with leukemia, George’s mother and dad left him in Texas for six months while they sought a cure for Robin in eastern U.S. hospitals. When she died, they didn’t tell young George at first. No one did. He didn’t realize that he no longer had a sister until he ran up to the family car upon his parents’ return to Houston and realized that his sister was not in the back seat. Mr. Bush would recall, “Minutes before I had a little sister, and now I didn’t. Forty-six years later, those moments remain the starkest memory of my childhood….” He didn’t add that he had no time to grieve for his beloved Robin. His mother battled depression and indeed her hair turned prematurely gray after Robin’s death. Son George had nightmares anchored in this, and possibly still does. Mr. Bush says the rest of his childhood was a happy blur, and it may have been. But I doubt it, frankly. I suspect this story is symbolic of more than only the events surrounding one four-year-old’s tragic passing.

Central though it seems to be to the failure of Mr. Bush’s presidency, his personal psychology may be the lesser part of the psychological story about this Administration and its deadly, corrosive, unresolved Iraqi War. The bigger picture is one of those Pogo-like “I have seen the enemy and it is I” issues. This is an argument that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Price-winning economist and expert on human decision-making, and a colleague made in the January/February issues of Foreign Policy. Each of their points is capable of giving emotionally balanced individuals much to reflect on.

Here are key points that they made, and some of their commentary:

• People are prone to exaggerate their strengths. “[This] optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisers who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war.”

• People don’t consider what others are feeling and facing when they attempt to interpret the other party’s behaviors. “Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person’s nature, character or persistent motives.”

• People are equally bad at understanding how they appear to others. “This bias can manifest itself at critical stages in international crises,” such as when the U.S. misjudged how China might interpret the fact that U.S. forces were moving toward China on the Korean Peninsula in that 1950’s era conflict. [Or when Mr. Bush and his advisers misjudged how the Arab world would greet their involvement in Iraq.]

• People are excessively optimistic. “Psychological research has show that a large majority of people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success.”

• People are prone to an “illusion of control.” “They consistently exaggerate the amount of control they have over outcomes that are important to them—even when the outcomes are in fact random or determined by other forces.”

• The optimistic bias and the illusion of control are contagious forces in the run-up to conflict. “Optimistic generals will be found, usually on both sides, before the beginning of every military conflict.”

• People are gloomy when evaluating another side’s concessions. “The very fact that a concession is offered by somebody perceived as hostile undermines the content of the proposal.”

• People have a deep-seated aversion to cutting their losses. This tendency to avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential gain keeps conflicts going longer than they should by other measures. The situation is made worse by “the fact that for the leaders who have led their nation to the brink of defeat, consequences of giving up will usually not be worse if the conflict is prolonged, even if they are worse for the citizens they lead.”

These kinds of predictable decision-making errors—what psychologists call biases—are why “policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisers more than the doves,” these experts suggest. And understanding these biases “can at least help ensure that the hawks don’t win more arguments than they should.”

So the problem is not just Mr. Bush’s psychology. The problem is also our human psychology in general. And thus the problem is not going to go away when Mr. Bush leaves office. The problem may never go away. That’s a thought that left me in need of fresh air and a walk in the sunshine after doing this bit of research. And more determined than ever to do what I can to insist that people pay attention to what their brain is doing to what their mind is thinking and deciding.

Purchase Justin Frank’s book here: Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President

For an extensive discussion of the Bush family’s psychology from a “centrist” perspective, go here: George Bush, Father & Son: 18 Psychological Keys

Read Daniel Kahneman’s and Jonathan Renshon’s Foreign Policy article here: Why Hawks Win

A mentat was a citizen especially trained to think. And think, as the late John Wayne might have drawled, “Damn well!” If Herbert’s mentats understood anything, they understood that thinking is the art and science of understanding what leads to consequences and how to produce—or avoid—them. Mentats were trained to be asking continually what needs to happen, with as few preconceptions as possible, searching all the while for living principles and the broadest possible sweep in the universe.

“Above all else,” wrote Herbert, “the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

“The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in this universe. He must remain capable of saying: ‘There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.’

“The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: ‘Now what is this thing doing?’”

If I had a corps of mentats at my disposal, I’d immediately assign at least one each to:

• replace Karl Rove.
• advise Howard Dean.
• consult with the moderates in Iran on regime change.
• plan next year’s manufacture of flu vaccines.
• help Big Oil get its greed back in bounds and its planning in gear.
• redesign the establishment of the post-Saddam Iraqi nation.
• start a Commission on Multilateral Religious Disarmament at the U.N.
• explain to the chancellors and presidents of the top 100 U.S. universities why their Lexus-in-every-lab policies are ruining American higher education.
• help China’s ruling elite arrive at a faster understanding of their world responsibilities than the U.S. Congress has arrived at any understanding of its world responsibilities.
• lobby Florida to close the doors.
• persuade President Bush to put his presidential library in New Orleans.
• draft a rationale for a 100-year moratorium on manned space travel.
• design a new way to transport people that people really like.
• convince state legislatures that Daylight Savings Time is a nutty idea.

And on and on.

Sigh. So much for mentats to do.