Your Brain on Fiction

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.


Annie Murphy Paul is the author, most recently, of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”

How does the human brain decide which memories to store?

In a year alone, we experience hundreds of thousands of small events that have the potential to become memories. Yet our brain will only store a certain number of these memories (or at least only allow us access to some of them).

How does the brain decide which memories are stored?

The brain uses a number of automatic mechanisms to determine what information to retain. Everything else naturally fades away.

The brain's overriding principle, given to it from millions of years of evolution, is to retain whatever is likely to be useful later for long-term survival. Since the future utility of information is impossible to predict, the brain uses a number of heuristics that have been honed over the millenia.

Here are some of the most well studied:

Repetition

This is probably #1. Things that happen repeatedly are either highly significant or irrelevant. However even if they are irrelevant -- like the background noise that you tune out -- they must be identified so that they can be removed from perception. When studying for a test, students often use repetition to activate the brain's importance circuits.


Primacy and Recency

Things that happened first are often more important because they predict what comes later. And things that happened most recently are often the most relevant because they are closest to the present. Things in the middle tend to get forgotten. This is why so many presentations start and end with an overview of the key points.


Surprise

Anything that is unusual stands out. This can include an uncanny coincidence or an event that led to something unpredicted. An entertaining science teacher will ask students to guess what will happen and then show that the opposite happens. Setting up the experience of surprise increases retention. If you are thinking of calling someone and the phone rings and its them, you will remember that for a long time because the coincidence is so unusual, while forgetting all the times you thought of calling them and the phone didn't ring.


Emotional Impact

Emotions are one of the ways the brain prioritizes perception and action. Emotions are a way of assessing and categorizing situations according to their role in our instinctual survival program. A moment correlated with a strong emotional state will be retained for a long time, which is why, for example leading up to a car accident, people have the memory of time slowing down and noticing every detail. Time didn't actually slow down -- it's just that a lot of detail got recorded and so the event is remembered this way.


Leads to positive or negative outcome

The systems in the brain that learn behaviors and habits are especially tuned to the eventual outcome of an action or perception. This is why addictive activities such as gambling can be so tenacious. With a slot machine, most of the time nothing happens, but sometimes the bells ring and the sign flashes "winner!". Each dose of "reward" ensures that more quarters go into the machine. Addictive drugs like nicotine and cocaine activate reward circuits directly, causing everything that led up to taking the drug to be given automatic priority by the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter central to signaling reward and activating procedural memory formation. When something leads to a strongly unpleasant outcome, emotional circuits label the preceding events as fearful.

Enhancing Old Memories

A drug that can make your old memories like new

There are drugs that help you remember what you learn, and ones that erase your memory. But until now, there have no substances with the power to enhance and strengthen old memories hovering on the brink of being forgotten. Now a group of neuroscientsts say they've isolated a single enzyme in the brain that can help long-term memories remain crisp.

Reut Shema and her colleagues knew that the enzyme PKMzeta helped maintain the long-term storage of memories in the brain. But recently they discovered that boosting levels of PKMzeta helped rats recall, in great detail, events they'd experienced many days beforehand. Lowering levels of the enzyme caused the rats to forget old memories more quickly. What's remarkable about this discovery is that the enzyme can help the animals recall these old memories even if they weren't boosting their levels of PKMzeta at the time the memories were formed.

A release about the study, published today in Science, explains:

Shema and colleagues now show that overexpressing the enzyme in the insular cortex region of the rat brain can strengthen more than one memory at a time and improve memories that were established months before the enzyme experiment.

If the same treatment works for humans, we could be looking at a way to deal with age-related memory loss. And a way to help us recall information we once knew intimately, but which has grown cloudy as the years have passed.

You can read the authors' full account of their experiments and how the enzyme works, in Science.

A Secret Language Code

Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals to Gareth Cook the hidden meaning of pronouns


Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content. And in his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he argues that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?

PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.

Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.

As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts -- blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.

COOK: What would make you think that the use of pronouns would be meaningful?

PENNEBAKER: Never in a million years would I have thought that pronouns would be a worthwhile research topic. I ran study after study and initially found large and unexpected differences between people in their pronoun use. In hindsight, I think I ignored the findings because they didn’’t make sense. One day, I lined up about 5 experiments that I had conducted and every one revealed the same effects. It was that day that I finally admitted to myself that pronouns must be meaningful.

COOK: What differences have you found between men and women?

PENNEBAKER: Almost everything you think you know is probably wrong. Take this little test. Who uses the following words more, women or men?

> 1st person singular (I, me, my)
> 1st person plural (we, us our)
> articles (a, an, the)
> emotion words (e.g., happy, sad, love, hate)
> cognitive words (e.g., because, reason, think, believe)
> social words (e.g., he, she, friend, cousin)

Most people assume that men use I-words and cognitive words more than women and that women use we-words, emotions, and social words more than men. Bad news. You were right if you guessed that women use social words more. However, women use I-words and cognitive words at far higher rates than men. There are no reliable differences between men and women for use of we-words or emotion words (OK, those were trick questions). And men use articles more than women, when you might guess there’d be no difference.

These differences hold up across written and spoken language and most other languages that we have studied. You can’t help but marvel at the fact that we are all bombarded by words from women and men every day of our lives and most of us have never “heard” these sex differences in language. Part of the problem is that our brains aren’t wired to listen to pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other “junk” words. When we listen to another person, we typically focus on what they are saying rather than how they are saying it.

Men and women use language differently because they negotiate their worlds differently. Across dozens and dozens of studies, women tend to talk more about other human beings. Men, on the other hand, are more interested in concrete objects and things. To talk about human relationships requires social and cognitive words. To talk about concrete objects, you need concrete nouns which typically demand the use of articles.

No matter what your sex, if you have to explain that Sally is leaving her husband because of her new lover, you have to make references to all the actors and you have to do some fairly complex cognitive analyses. If you have to explain why your carburetor in your car is broken, your causal analysis will likely be relatively pallid and will involve referring to concrete nouns.

COOK: You write about using this to analyze historical documents. Do you think this tool might be of any use to historians or biographers?

PENNEBAKER: Historians and biographers should jump on this new technology. The recent release of the Google Books Project should be required reading for everyone in the humanities. For the first time in the history of the world, there are methods by which to analyze tremendously large and complex written works by authors from all over the world going back centuries. We can begin to see how thinking, emotional expression, and social relations evolve as a function of world-wide events. The possibilities are breathtaking.

In my own work, we have analyzed the collected works of poets, playwrights, and novelists going back to the 1500s to see how their writing changed as they got older. We’ve compared the pronoun use of suicidal versus non-suicidal poets. Basically, poets who eventually commit suicide use I-words more than non-suicidal poets.
The analysis of language style can also serve as a psychological window into authors and their relationships. We have analyzed the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and compared it with the history of their marriage. Same thing with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Using a method we call Language Style Matching, we can isolate changes in the couples’ relationships.

COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?

PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.

COOK: And what have you found?

PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

COOK: Does your work have any application in lie detection?

PENNEBAKER: It does. Several labs, including ours, have now conducted studies to evaluate the prospect of building a linguistic lie detector. The preliminary findings are promising. In controlled studies, we can catch lying about 67% of the time where 50% is chance. Humans, reading the same transcripts, only catch lying 53% of the time. This is actually quite impressive unless you are a person in the judicial system. If you are waiting for a language-based system to catch real world lying at rates of 90 or 95 percent of the time, it won’t happen in your lifetime. It’s simply too complicated.

COOK: What are you looking into now? Where do you see the field going in the future?

PENNEBAKER: One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?

I think one advantage I have had in my career is that I’ve got a short attention span. If something new and exciting bubbles up in our data, I will likely drop what I’m doing and try to understand it. It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Contributor: Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe.

Buff Your Brain

Brain training to sharpen memory. Aerobic exercise to preserve gray matter. Meditation to hone connections between reason and emotion.

It all sounds great, but there’s something that has long bothered us about the growing number of studies pinpointing ways to buff your brain: they don’t go far enough. Sure, exercises to improve memory are better for your brain than, say, watching reality TV, but the most you’re going to gain is more reliable access to knowledge already scattered around your cerebral cortex. If the information isn’t in there, no amount of brain training will tell you how the Federal Reserve system functions, why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the significance of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, or why Word just crashed. Not to mention the kind of information that could significantly improve your day-to-day life: wouldn’t it be wonderful to understand and remember more of what you read and hear (what’s the catch with annuities again?), to learn—and retain—new skills to improve your job prospects (animated Power-Points!), and to connect bits of knowledge to, say, discern what makes your boss tick.

Yet that’s what we all want—to know more, to understand more deeply, to make greater creative leaps, to retain what we read, to see connections invisible to others—not merely to make the most of what we have between our ears now, but to be, in a word, smarter. By raising our mental game we would be able to pick out the most significant data in a company’s annual report, see immediately when a marketer or advertisement is conning us (“increase the molecular structure” of water to make it healthier for your Siamese fighting fish, as one bottler promises? Don’t think so), understand medical studies relevant to what ails us, grasp the significance of the euro meltdown to our retirement savings, and make smarter decisions in work, love, and life.


As we dug into the latest research in neurobiology and cognitive science for this second annual installment of the Newsweek/Daily Beast guide to being smarter in the new year, one discovery from 2011 therefore stood out above all the others: that IQ, long thought to be largely unchangeable after early childhood, can in fact be raised. And not by a niggling point or two. According to a groundbreaking study published this fall in Nature, IQ can rise by a staggering 21 points over four years—or fall by 18.

A higher IQ can get you more than admission to Mensa and bragging rights on online-dating sites. IQ, measured by a battery of tests of working memory, spatial skills, and pattern recognition, among others, captures a wide range of cognitive skills, from spatial to verbal to analytical and beyond. Twenty points is “a huge difference,” says cognitive scientist Cathy Price of University College London, who led the research. “If an individual moved from an IQ of 110 to an IQ of 130 they’d go from being ‘average’ to ‘gifted.’ And if they moved from 104 to 84 they’d go from being high average to below average.” Her study was conducted on people ages 12 to 20, but given recent discoveries about the capacity of the brain to change—a property called neuroplasticity—and to create new neurons well into one’s 60s and 70s, Price believes the results hold for everyone. “My best guess is that performance on IQ tests could change meaningfully in adult years” too, she says. “The same degree of plasticity [as seen in young adults] may be present throughout life.”

In their recently published study, Price and her colleagues documented how IQ changes are linked to structural changes in the brain. In the 39 percent of subjects whose verbal IQ changed significantly, before-and-after brain scans showed a corresponding change in the density and volume of gray matter (the number of neurons) in a region of the left motor cortex that is activated by naming, reading, and speaking. In the 21 percent whose nonverbal IQ (any problem-solving unrelated to language, such as spatial reasoning) rose or fell, so did the density of gray matter in the anterior cerebellum, which is associated with moving the hand. Although most of us think of motor skills and cognitive skills as like oil and water, in fact a number of studies have found that refining your sensory-motor skills can bolster cognitive ones. No one knows exactly why, but it may be that the two brain systems are more interconnected than we realize. So learn to knit, or listen to classical music, or master juggling, and you might be raising your IQ.

January 1, 2012 - Newsweek

Why do some people never get depressed?

Confronted with some of life's upsetting experiences - marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind - many people become depressed. But others don't. Why is this?

A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as "resilience".

According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale.

"At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they'll develop a mental health problem," she says.

"At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic." Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle.

But what is this resilience? Is it something we inherit or do we learn it? Can it be traced in the chemistry of the brain? Or in its wiring, or its electrical activity? And if we lack it, can we acquire it?

The answer, regrettably, to all those questions is much the same. We don't really know. But we'd like to, and we need to. According to the World Health Organization, depression affects just over 120 million people worldwide.

"We think about a fifth of the UK population will suffer from depression at some point in their lifetime," says Bill Deakin, professor of psychiatry at Manchester University. Worryingly, he adds that more people are getting depressed now than in the past, and that it is beginning to affect younger people.

With the support of the Medical Research Council, Bill Deakin, Rebecca Elliott and their colleagues are peering into the brain, trying to fathom the origins and nature of resilience. They think that a better understanding of it might pay dividends in helping those who lack it.

The subjects of their study are a mixed bunch - intentionally so. Some have suffered bouts of depression, others have not. Some have had more than their share of adverse life events, while others have had an easier time of it.

In knowing where to start looking for the differences that might underpin resilience to depression the Manchester group has the advantage of being able to draw on previous work that has investigated resilience to post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, says Bill Deakin, has pointed them to several relevant features of brain function. They include cognitive flexibility - our capacity to adapt our thinking to different situations - and also the extent to which our brains concentrate on processing and remembering happy, as opposed to sad, information.

Emotional memory

Each subject in the Manchester study has been allocated to one of four groups based on the four possible combinations of high and low life stress, with or without depression. All have given saliva samples from which their stress hormone levels can be measured, and many of them will undergo a brain scan.

A scanning technique much used by brain researchers called functional magnetic resonance imaging allows them to see which parts of the brain are active while subjects are performing specific tasks.

"In one task we give them pictures to look at which are emotionally charged," says Rebecca Elliot. "They have to memorise them." Shortly afterward they're shown these pictures again, with others, and have to identify those they've seen already. "This probes emotional memory - how well people remember material which has an emotional component to it."

The research is not yet complete, so Rebecca Elliott can't say whether there are distinct differences in brain function between the groups. But there are encouraging hints, such as the correlations she's finding between the psychological measurements of her subjects' resilience and how they perform on some of the tests.

"For example, our early data suggest that people who are more resilient are more likely to recognise happy faces and less likely to recognise sad or fearful faces. The more resilient someone is, the better they remember positive words and pictures."

Precisely how a clinician might eventually use whatever the Manchester research reveals about our brain activity is still an open question. What we refer to as resilience is the outcome of a complex and continuing set of interactions between our genes, our body chemistry, the wiring of our brains, and our life experiences.

But broadly speaking, the hope is that an understanding of the brain activity that underpins resilience might offer pointers towards new treatments, or better ways of using existing ones.

A resilience pill?

Bill Deakin talks of using brain scanning to create what he calls a "neuroscientific profile" of an individual's problem. This might be used to identify relevant aims and goals in deciding on the best treatment.

A patient may turn out to have normally functioning cognitive flexibility but a tendency to dwell on sad thoughts. "This might allow you to tailor-make a therapy to reduce the likelihood of a further episode of depression," says Deakin. In the first instance this would most likely be a talking therapy of some kind.

Responding to the suggestion that a drug, a daily "resilience pill", tailored to our brain activity or chemistry might be a useful development, Rebecca Elliott is cautious. "I suppose this is something that would theoretically be possible," she says. "Whether people would be willing to take that kind of drug, I'm not sure."

But whatever the means, finding some way to boost resilience is an ambition well worth pursuing. To be assured of that you have only to compare Aeron's experiences with those of Pauline, another of the Manchester research subjects.

While out of work, struggling financially, and single-handedly responsible for three children, Pauline had several bouts of depression during which she felt completely isolated. "And emotionally I was very detached. I would come in and sit on my bed and cry. And when it got so bad I didn't want to be with the children, that's when I went to the doctor."

No clinician can yet prescribe what she most needs - resilience. But one day… maybe.

By Geoff Watts
BBC World Service

How to manage a business in 2012.

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows. You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds. You still only have two cows.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you
want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive..

NORWEGIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. The state collects one cow as tax and splits the cow into three parts.
They give the three parts to three other people and tax them 40%.
The state is surprised when the three parts rot and do not produce any milk,
so they take half of your remaining cow and split it into two parts
They are again surprised when the parts do not produce any milk and immediately
launch a political campaign against you for having lost three perfectly good cows and
for being a tax evasive wasteful capitalist pig.