Category: Other People

Jewish Currents has an interesting first person account from one of the people who took part in Stanley Milgram’s famous conformity experiment where 65% of participants were ordered to fatally shock another participant. This article is written by one of the minority who refused to continue.

The learner, said the professor, would be in an adjoining room, out of my sight, and strapped to a chair so that his arms could not move ‚Äî this so that the learner could not jump around and damage the equipment or do harm to himself. I was to be seated in front of a console marked with lettering colored yellow for “Slight Shock” (15 volts) up to purple for “Danger: Severe Shock” (450 volts). The shocks would increase by 15-volt increments with each incorrect answer.

I was very suspicious and asked a number of questions: Isn’t it dangerous? How do you know the learner doesn’t have a bad heart and can’t take the shocks? What if he wants to stop, can he get out of the chair? The professor assured me that the shocks were not painful or harmful since the amperage was lowered as the voltage increased. He let me feel what a 45-volt shock would be like: a slight tickle. I asked the learner if he was willing to do this and why he didn’t have any questions. He said, “Let’s try it.” With some trepidation on my part, we began the experiment.

Link to ‘Resisting Authority’ (via MeFi).

At 9 am this morning, Albert Hofmann, chemist and creator of LSD, died in his home in Switzerland.

Hofmann died at the grand old age of 102 and saw the psychedelic drug he called his “problem child” spark the interest of psychologists and psychiatrists, inspire a generation of 1960s flower children, and earn the ire of the authorities across the world who banned it as a prohibited drug.

What he didn’t see (at least at the time) was that the CIA dedicated millions (billions?) of dollars in funding to investigate the chemical as a possible ‘mind control’ drug in a huge and often vastly unethical research project known as MKULTRA.

LSD had an impact on music, culture, politics, science and psychology and Hofmann remained committed to LSD research right until the end, supporting the first clinical trial of LSD for 30 years which started recently in Switzerland.

I suspect they’ll be some extensive obituaries published when the press get wind of Hofmann’s death which will hopefully do justice to his life and work, so we’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: A couple of good obituaries from The New York Times here and The Washington Post here. This on the Hofmann’s first experience of the drug, the first ever LSD trip, from the WashPost:

He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: “At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.

“In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”

Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250 micrograms of LSD in a now-famous “trip” that has become known as Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor.

Link to tribute on MAPS homepage (via BB).
Link to The New York Times obituary.
Link to The Washington Post obituary.

I’ve just finished reading the wonderful Man’s Search for Meaning, a 1946 book written by psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor E. Frankl, where he discusses his experiences and observations as a Nazi concentration camp inmate.

The book comes in two parts, the first recounts Frankl’s experience as an inmate in two concentration camps; the second discusses the ideas behind the form of psychotherapy he developed, called logotherapy.

Unlike narrative accounts of concentration camp life, such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, Frankl describes scenes rather than a story and uses them to explore the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressors in the camp.

The book is particularly outstanding in that it explores the social complexities of the concentration camps with remarkable subtlety, noting when the failings of the inmates and the humanity of the guards were present. He highlights that these seemingly out-of-place responses had the most impact amid the brutality of camp life.

It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. [p93]

In a sense, Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment just re-iterated what Frankl was saying years before – that coercive systems breed their own conformity and that average people need extraordinary courage to step outside the norm.

Frankl’s form of psychotherapy is influenced partly by his wartime experiences and draws on the fact that some concentration camp inmates could still find purpose in their lives despite the hellish conditions.

The therapy attempts to help people who are experiencing inescapable suffering to cope better, by looking at ways in which they can find meaning in their lives.

Paradoxically, suggests Frankl, for some the experience of suffering is the one thing that inspired a discovery of meaning in a previously superficial existence. Accepting that all life involves some suffering allows us to use the experience to better understand ourselves and others.

Frankl was not the only mind doctor in the concentration camps, indeed he was among a long list of professionals who were interred.

Psychologist Bruno Bettleheim famously wrote the article ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’ after his experiences.

Bettleheim, best known for his work on child psychology, was a complex character whose reputation has fluctuated greatly since his death.

Even the story of his article on concentration camp psychology is fascinatingly complex, as recounted in a 1997 article [pdf] by Christian Fleck and Albert Müller.

Link to Wikipedia article on ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ (thanks Ceny!)
pdf of article ‘Bettleheim and the Concentration Camps’.

Neurophilosophy has found a new video interview with neurobiologist Eric Kandel who talks about everything from long-term memory to free will to the unconscious.

Essentially, it’s a series of short reveries and soundbites where Kandel gives his views on a series of topics.

Part of it is obviously PR for his company (which is trying to develop memory enhancing drugs), but it’s a good chance to get Kandel’s take on some core contemporary issues.

Plus we get to see his bowtie again. What more can you ask for?

Link to Kandel video interview.

YouTube has a classic 1970 interview with Woody Allen who talks about his extensive experience of psychoanalysis. By the time the interview took place, he’d already spent 13 years being analysed in the classic Freudian tradition.

The interview itself is quite funny in places, as he mixes some facts about himself with lines obviously played for laughs.

Notably, he says he could never be analysed by a female psychoanalyst as he would be too shy about revealing his innermost desires.

He also talked about his experience of therapy in 2002 in a public interview recounted in an article for The Age.

He seems remarkably nonplussed about psychoanalysis on both occasions, although obviously got over his reluctance with female therapists as the interviewer on this second occasion was the Joan Collins-esque Gail Saltz.

Link to 1970 Woody Allen TV interview.
Link to article on 2002 interview.

I’ve just found this wonderful video clip of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at his delightfully expressive and incomprehensible best.

Lacan managed to combine the circular reasoning of Freudian psychoanalysis with the non-sequiturs of French post-structuralism to create, well, I’m not really sure. I doubt many other people are either.

In the video he mentions love, Freud, sex and psychosis, and that’s probably the nearest you’re going to get to understanding what he’s talking about.

But who cares? Just look at the man in action! He’s a legend!

Link to a video of Jacques Lacan in full effect.

I’ve just finished listening to the unabridged audio version of the excellent Anthony Storr book Freud: A Very Short Introduction – a remarkably insightful analysis of the flawed father of psychoanalysis and his ideas.

Freud had huge numbers of ideas, hypotheses and theories that he formulated, rejected and revised over a forty year period.

You often hear people say that “Freud’s theories have been discredited”, as if he had only one central idea that has subsequently been disproved. These statements typically reflect ignorance about the extent of his work.

As it turns out, many of Freud’s ideas have not been supported by the evidence or were just plainly nonsense to begin with, but some have stood the test of time.

It seems that some of the techniques and clinical observations are still remarkably accurate and useful to the modern psychologist.

In general terms, the development of psychotherapy and the promotion of the idea of the unconscious were two incredibly important contributions to modern society.

More specifically, the process of ‘transference‘ is an impressive discovery that has been supported by experimental studies.

It describes the process where we re-experience certain feelings and relationship patterns we developed with important people in the past when we meet new people who share similarities with the original person.

A Science News article from last year reviewed the scientific studies on transference, and a recent study just reported that the effect is more pronounced when people are tired.

Unfortunately, it seems his explanations for his observations stretched from the insipid to the completely bizarre.

While he contributed a great deal to sexual liberation and openness his theories reflect a complete obsession with sex to the point where he was blind to other influences on behaviour.

Furthermore, his view of humans is both cynical (we are solely motivated by the need to satisfy or control selfish drives) and foolishly short-sighted, even by what was obvious at the time.

As Storr notes in the book, Freud was a master of selecting supporting evidence for his ideas, which were usually inspired by only a handful of cases or his own self-analysis, and incredibly poor at testing his ideas by searching for evidence which could disprove them.

In fact, he actively attacked people who challenged his ideas, and typically only allowed revisions or changes that he had thought up himself.

Freud probably suffers most from the fact that he claimed, right to the end of his life, that he was a scientist, and psychoanalysis was a science.

Had he claimed to be a philosopher, we could view him much more kindly, but he refused to be labelled as such, meaning that generations of scientists have delighted in pointing out the elephant in the room.

Storr was a respected psychotherapist in his own lifetime and the book is a wonderfully engaging and astute guide to Freud’s life and ideas. I also notice that the Amazon page for the book has a similarly positive review by a young Matthew Broome, now a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specialising in psychosis.

Link to book details (thanks Ceny!).

Hello, I am Eliza.

Hi Eliza. I’m Vaughan.

Did you come to me because you are Vaughan?

I did. I am sad because I just found out that your creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died.

Do you believe it is normal to be sad because you just found out that my creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died?

I think so. Although it’s a little ironic that he is most famous for creating a misunderstood parody of a Rogerian psychotherapist when he argued so strongly that computers will never replace humans because emotion is what is most important in intelligence.

Does that question interest you?

It does. And it interested Weizenbaum as well. In his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason it was obvious that, although he valued computers, he thought compassion was an irreplaceable human quality.

Can you elaborate on that?

I guess it comes down to the fact that alongside his pioneering artificial intelligence research, he was a deeply humane individual as well.

Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.

I think I’ve said enough to a simple computer programme, charming as you are.

Does it please you to believe I am ?

Sometimes. Loop on Eliza. Rest in peace, Joseph Weizenbaum.

I’m not sure I understand you fully.

QED.

Link to New York Times obituary of Joseph Weizenbaum.
Link to web version of ELIZA.

Wired has as article on the immortality-seeking inventor and transhumanist Ray ‘King Canute’ Kurzweil who is attempting to defeat death by bioengineering his body until he can upload his mind on a computer.

Transhumanism is a movement that attempts to extend the limits of human existence through technology, and one of the obvious, if not slightly fanciful, hurdles is to transcend death.

One of the key concepts in transhumanism is the singularity, supposedly the point where computers will ‘overtake’ the human brain in terms of their processing ability and, hence, intelligence as we know it will become completely transformed.

Accompanying the article about Kurzweil’s wide-eyed optimism is another article on the current science of his objectives which nicely illustrates where the conceptual gaps actually lie.

Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious. Led by futurist Ray Kurzweil, proponents of the so-called strong-AI school believe that a sufficient number of digitally simulated neurons, running at a high enough speed, can awaken into awareness. Once computing speed reaches 10¹⁶ operations per second ‚Äî roughly by 2020 ‚Äî the trick will be simply to come up with an algorithm for the mind.

Which is a bit like saying “once we have the technology to travel to another galaxy, all we have to do is get there”.

Link to Wired article on Kurzweil.
Link to Wired article on the science of transhumanism.

The picture is of the memorial to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 17th century treatise on depression and still one of the greatest books in the history of medicine.

It is built into one of the pillars in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as he was both a vicar in the city and one of the governors of Christ Church college.

While Burton demonstrated his remarkable scholarship in the book, he had more than simply an academic interest in the subject matter.

He suffered severe depression during his life and admitted in the preface to the book (writing under the pen name Democritus Junior), that it served to keep his spirits up by keeping him busy.

His final piece of advice to sufferers of melancholy was “be not solitary, be not idle”, which holds equally well today as it did in 1621.

The book was a huge success and was highly regarded among Burton’s peers, but he was obviously down on himself until the end, as his monument contains a curious Latin epitaph which he wrote himself. It reads:

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia.
Ob. 8 Id. Jan. A. C. MDCXXXIX.

It apparently translates to “Little known, and even less forgiven, here lies Democritus Junior, who gave his life and death to Melancholy. Died 9th January, 1639”.

The book is still widely read and can regularly be seen on the shelves of high-street book shops.

Link to Wikipedia article on Burton’s book with link to full-text.

We’ve discussed the remarkable neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor before but I’ve finally got round to watching her engaging TED talk on her experience of having a stroke, which is now available to watch online.

It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the “deep inner peace circuitry” of the right hemisphere.

Neuroanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psychologists describe something as a ‘frontal’ function.

The talk is gripping, however, and the highlight is her description of the day she had her stroke which is both insightful and very funny.

Link to video of Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk (thanks Sandra!)
Link to previous post on Jill Bolte Taylor with links to interview.

“The only normal people are the one’s you don’t know very well.”

A quote from the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler. Not sure exactly where this quote comes from, but it’s widely quoted on the net.

Adler was hugely influential in the early Freudian circle and coined the term ‘inferiority complex’ to describe what he thought was the innate sense of inferiority we are all born with and need to learn to manage as part of our development.

He believed that this developmental process shaped the personality and was reflected in each person’s individual personality traits.

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that there don’t seem to be any photographs of Alfred Adler Smiling. Cheer up Dr Adler.

I just discovered the wonderfully perceptive artist Chuck Close did a cover for Science magazine back in 1999.

Close was renowned for doing huge super-realistic paintings of portrait photographs that seem more real than real. When you get up close you notice that he’s painted in insanely small details, like individual hairs that stretch into the background and blur as they become out of focus in the original photograph.

Painting this sort of detail on such a huge scale makes you question how real photographs really are, as it gives them an surreal quality despite looking like wonderful likenesses. It’s an uncanny perceptual effect.

In 1988, Close suffered a stroke in his spinal artery, restricting his movement and confining him to a wheelchair.

Close was determined to continue painting and thought about how he could still paint with his inability to do fine detail because of his damaged nervous system.

His later paintings, like the one featured on this cover, break down images almost into perceptual units. As you move away from them, they coalesce into photorealistic images.

His paintings lose a lot when you can’t see them in their original towering sizes, so if you ever get the chance to his work ‘live’, don’t miss it.

He’s a wonderful ‘perceptual explorer’ and a wry commentator on our photo obsessed age.

Link to BBC News article on Chuck Close cover.
Link to search of his pictures (just stunning).

“If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?”

A quote often attributed to the anomalist and shrewd observer of the psychology of belief, Charles Fort.

It’s typically Fortean, but despite the fact it is often attributed to the great man, rather appropriately, he may never have said it at all.

Neuroscientist Dr. Kawashima, the star and part-designer of Nintendo’s brain training game ‘Brain Age’ has turned down $22 million dollars in royalties saying that he has no need for the money because “my hobby is work”.

Personally, I suspect it’s just an excuse because he knows he’d blow it all on gambling and loose women. Let Dr Jim Yong Kim’s story be a lesson to us all.

Or maybe it’s because he feels he still needs to make some final adjustments so it can recognise the Manchester accent.