Three Quick and Easy Ways to Quiet Your Mind

Neuroscience tells us that, to be more productive and creative, we need to give our brains a break. It's the quiet mind that produces the best insights. But it's a challenge to take that sort of time off in the midst of a busy day. Here are three specific, quick, and easy ways to build purposeful break time into your day.
Quick Meditation

New research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggests that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation might make your brain bigger, faster, and "younger". As lead researcher Eileen Luders explains, "it appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain."

Tip: If you commute via public transportation (or even if you're a passenger in a car pool) use the time to close your eyes for 10 minutes. If you drive, leave a little early, park, and spend 10 minutes in the car before you walk into work. Choose a very specific image, such as a waterfall, beach, or tree, and try to focus on it alone. If other thoughts get in the way, gently push them aside. Do this once or twice per day. The goal is to let your mind achieve a sense of relaxed awareness.

Pulsing

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, renown for his research and theories on expertise, points out that top performers in fields ranging from music to science to sports tend to work in approximately 90-minute cycles and then take a break. We are designed to pulse, to move between spending and renewing energy. Pulsing is the simplest, easiest, most immediate way to build breaks into your day.

Tip: Download a "break-reminder" utility, such as Scirocco or Healthy Hints, and set it to ping you every 90 minutes. Focus hard on a particular task until that cue. And then take a walk, talk to a colleague, doodle, or listen to music. Do anything that renews you and gives you a "second wind," even if you think you don't need it. You do. Five minutes later, get back to work.

Daydream Walks

Most people have heard the story about how 3M's Arthur Fry came up with the idea for the Post-it note: he was daydreaming in church. Jonathan Schooler, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara, has repeatedly shown that people like Fry who daydream and let their minds wander score higher on creativity tests. What separates this from meditation is that, instead of emptying your mind, you're letting it fill up with random thoughts. The trick is to remain aware enough to recognize a sudden insight when it comes.

Tip: Start by taking 20 minutes, two days a week during your lunch break to take a stroll and daydream. Think about anything you want besides work—a beach vacation, building your dream house, playing shortstop for the Yankees, whatever. Ramp it up to three or four days a week. The next time someone catches you daydreaming on the job and asks you why you're not working, tell them that in fact you're tapping into your creative brain.

Contributed by Matthew E. May

Finding Meaning at Work, Even When Your Job Is Dull

Do you experience meaning at work — or just emptiness?

In the United States people spend on average 35 – 40 hours working every week. That's some 80,000 hours during a career — more time than you will spend with your kids probably. Beyond the paycheck, what does work give you? Few questions could be more important. It is sad to walk through life and experience work as empty, dreadful, a chore — sapping energy out of your body and soul. Yet many employees do, as evidenced by one large-scale study showing that only 31% of employees were engaged.

Work can, however, provide an array of meaningful experiences, even though many employees do not enjoy those in their current job. So, what are the sources of meaningful experiences at work?

We have compiled a list based on our reading of literature in organization behavior and psychology. Many theories speak to meaning at work, including need-based, motivational, status, power, and community theories. The phrase "meaning at work" refers to a person's experience of something meaningful — something of value — that work provides. That is not the same as "meaningful work," which refers to the task itself. Work is a social arena that provides other kinds of meaningful experiences as well.

Before we run through the list, it is important to note;

Different people look for different types of meanings;
Different workplaces provide different meanings.

Purpose

1. Contributions beyond yourself. The people at Kiva, a non-profit, channel micro-loans to poor people who can use the money to get a small business going and improve their lives. Their work clearly has a greater purpose — that of helping people in need. This taps into a longing to have a meaningful life defined as making contributions beyond oneself.

The problem is, however, that most work doesn't have such a higher purpose, either because work is basically mundane or because — let's face it — the company doesn't really have a social mission. Critics like Umair Haque argue that work that involves selling yet more burgers, sugar water, fashion clothes and the like has no broader purpose whatsoever. In this view, Coke's "Open Happiness" is just a slogan devoid of meaning. However, as Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer argue, much work can be infused with some level of purpose. Companies that make real efforts in social responsibilities do this; for example, Danone, the $25-billion large and highly successful consumer goods company selling yogurt, has defined their business as providing healthy foods (which led them to sell off their biscuit business). The litmus test here is whether employees experience that their work makes positive contributions to others. Then they experience meaning at work.

Self-realization

2. Learning. Many MBA graduates flock to McKinsey, BCG and other consultancies so that they can rapidly acquire valuable skills. General Electric is renowned for developing general managers; and people who want to become marketers crave to learn that trade at Procter & Gamble. Work offers opportunities to learn, expand the horizon, and improve self-awareness. This kind of personal growth is meaningful.

3. Accomplishment. Work is a place to accomplish things and be recognized, which leads to greater satisfaction, confidence and self-worth. In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi we see Japan's greatest sushi chef devote his life to making perfect sushi. Well, some critics like Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times say there isn't a real social mission here. But, from watching the movie, his quest for perfection — to make better sushi, all the time — gives his life a deep sense of meaning. And for Jiro, the work itself — making the sushi — gives him a deep intrinsic satisfaction.

Prestige

4. Status. At cocktail parties, a frequent question is, "where do you work?" The ability to rattle of a name like "Oh, I am a doctor at Harvard Medical School" oozes status. For some, that moment is worth all the grueling nightshifts. A high-status organization confers respect, recognition, and a sense of worth on employees, and that provides meaning at work for some.

5. Power. As Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria wrote about in their book Driven, for those drawn to power, work provides an arena for acquiring and exercising power. You may not be one of those, but if you are, you experience work as meaningful because you have and can use power.


Social

6. Belonging to a community. Companies like Southwest Airlines go out of their way to create a company atmosphere where people feel they belong. In a society where people increasingly are bowling alone, people crave a place where they can forge friendships and experience a sense of community. The workplace can complement or even be a substitute for other communities (family, the neighborhood, clubs etc.). Workplaces that provide a sense of community give people meaning.

7. Agency. Employees experience meaning at work when what they do actually matters for the organization — when their ideas are listened to and when they see that their contributions has an impact on how the place performs. A sense of real involvement gives people meaning.

8. Autonomy. As Dan Pink shows in his book Drive, autonomy is a great intrinsic motivator. Some people are drawn to certain kinds of work that provides a great deal of autonomy — the absence of others who tell you what to do, and the freedom to do your own work and master your task. For example, entrepreneurs frequently go into business by themselves so that they can be their own boss. This kind of freedom gives work meaning.
There are no doubt other sources as well, but these eight seem to be especially important.

Which of these are important to you? And which does your current workplace give you?

The more of these is not necessarily better. Experiencing one deeply may just be enough. But it's an issue if you don't experience any of these.

Contribution by by MORTEN HANSEN AND DACHEl KELTNER

120 seconds to reduce stress

Prevention

When we were 5, we might have sucked our thumbs for stress relief. As adults, many of us self-soothe with junk food, a glass (or two) of wine, maybe some mindless TV. But those are fixes that don't actually fix anything. Luckily, recent studies reveal some easy ways to lift your spirits and lower your stress that actually create positive shifts in your brain and body. "Stress triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which can damage our brains and weaken our cardiovascular and immune systems over time," says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD.

We asked experts for their best instant mood boosters, backed by the latest research in nutrition, psychology, and neuroscience. Follow these tips and you'll be saying "aah" in no time.

Put on a Happy Face
Smiling soothes you, even if you're just going through the motions. A University of Wisconsin study found that people who'd had Botox injections were less prone to anger because they couldn't express it. What's the lesson? Just fake it till you make it.

Think: Hot Hands
When fear and anxiety take hold, the nervous system directs blood flow to the largest muscles, an evolutionary response to protect against physical danger. This redirected flow often results in cold hands. So when you warm them, that automatically signals your nervous system that it's OK to calm down, says neuropsychologist Marsha Lucas, PhD. "Even simply visualizing warm hands can be enough to help turn off the fight-or-flight reaction," she says.

Donate Some Dollars
Giving money to a good cause makes you feel better than buying a pair of designer jeans--and studies prove it, say Elizabeth Dunn, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, PhD, of Harvard Business School. Plus, you don't have to be a millionaire to enjoy this karmic boost. The researchers learned that those who gave even $5 to someone else felt measurably better than those who bought themselves a treat instead.

7 Ways To Beat Stress Fat

Load Up on Whole Grains
"If you're feeling grumpy, the best idea is to eat an all-carb whole grain snack and you should feel happier within a half hour," says nutritionist Elizabeth Somer, RD, the author of Eat Your Way to Sexy. "The carbs raise blood sugar, which boosts serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with calm, positive feelings that last." Aim for 30 g of carbs: 4 cups of air-popped popcorn or half of a whole wheat English muffin (but not a bag of Chips Ahoy) will do the trick, Somer says.

Dig in the Dirt
According to a 2011 Dutch study published in the Journal of Health Psychology, 30 minutes of gardening reduces stress levels more effectively than 30 minutes of reading quietly in a room. The researchers say it's the result of physical activity. But perhaps the secret lies in the dirt itself. A few studies have shown a link between a common bacterium (M. vaccae) found in garden soil and increased serotonin levels, meaning less anxiety and better concentration. Gardeners may inhale this bacterium while digging in the soil.

Give Yourself a Hug
When you think negatively about yourself, the brain's amygdala sends signals that increase blood pressure and raise adrenaline and cortisol levels. Researcher Kristin Neff, PhD, at the University of Texas, recommends the "surreptitious self-hug"--wrapping your arms around yourself and squeezing. Even your own touch releases oxytocin and other biochemicals that promote well-being.

Focus on the Exhale
We've all heard that deep breathing is crucial to feeling tranquil, but the most important part of it is breathing out, Dr. Hanson says: "When you elongate your exhalations, you spark your parasympathetic nervous system, which slows down your heart rate." Take three long exhalations, making them twice as long as your inhalation.

Just Move It--A Little
John Ratey, MD, a Harvard Medical School professor and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, says just 2 minutes of exercise is enough to change your mood, as long as you raise your heart rate. "Anything from squats to jumping jacks supplies a surge of neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin--the same targets as antidepressants," he says.

Be a Jaw Dropper
"Relaxing your tongue and jaw sends a message to your brain stem and limbic system to turn off the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol," says Dr. Lucas. Simply let your tongue go limp in your mouth, and then open your mouth slightly, which will instantly loosen up your jaw. "These exercises help bring our parasympathetic nervous system online, which tells our bodies to rest and restore," Dr. Lucas says.

Think Sensually
Next time you're feeling frazzled, try a tactile solution. During peak moments of stress, endorphins released into the brain relieve pain and begin a recovery period. Doing things that feel good physically--such as taking a warm shower or listening to a favorite piece of music--mimics this process and shuts down the stress deluge.

Fatten Up That Latte
When stress makes you unfocused, caffeine's stimulating qualities may promote a can-do attitude. "To supersize that good feeling, drink your coffee with a little bit of organic whole milk instead of fat free. The extra protein and fat make you feel more satiated and therefore calmer," says Drew Ramsey, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Nibble on Chocolate
"A Johns Hopkins University study found that the taste of sweetness on your tongue causes a surge of feel-good endorphins," Somer says. Also, dark chocolate contains compounds called flavonoids that also affect mood: According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, cocoa flavonoids improved both mental acuity and attitude.

Additionally, in a 2009 study by the American Chemical Society, eating a mere 1.4 ounces of dark chocolate daily lowered stress hormone levels. The key is to limit yourself to just a few bites, since the sugar in chocolate can cause a crash later. "Plus, when you binge on anything, your blood is diverted to your gut away from your brain and muscles, which leaves you feeling tired," Somer says.

Beef It Up
A burger isn't all bad, as long as it's made from grass-fed beef. That's because pastured beef is high in conjugated linoleic acid, a fat that fights cancer and belly fat and has also been shown to protect brain cells from worry, Dr. Ramsey says. Grass-fed beef also supplies a good dose of iron, which may boost your energy levels. "As many as 15% of women ages 20 to 40 are iron deficient, and most iron-deficient people are tired and stressed," Dr. Ramsey says.

Contribution by Jessica Baumgardner

A great mental exercise to sharpen your brain

Research has shown that exercising your mind contributes to your mental health and well being. While physical activity has been shown to aid in sharpening our minds and recall, simple mental exercises can help us to remain sharp and improve memory as we age.

Try doing this mental exercise over a 4 week period and you should notice an improvement in your short and long term memory.

When you are ready to go to sleep, go over what you did that day from the time you got up until you get into bed. Start with the time you awoke, got out of bed, follow your entire day step by step until the time you went back to bed. Try to recall as much detail as possible, visualizing in your mind each and every step from beginning to end. In the beginning, you probably wont remember much detail, and you’ll probably move rapidly from task to task or think of the day in large periods of time. However, try to slow down and remember as much as you can to take in as much detail as you can. With time and practice, you will notice significant improvement in your recall of events and details throughout the day.

This basic mental exercise has the following benefits:

1. It will improve your memory.

2. Your ability to visualize will improve.

3. You will improve your concentration.

4. You will be more in the moment throughout the day. Because you know you will be recalling your day later, you pay more attention to details throughout the day.

5. Your power of observation will improve. You will probably find yourself during the day performing a modified recall of your day to date because you know that later than night you will be trying to recall it again.

6. You will likely fall asleep faster because your mind will get tired much like counting sheep at night in order to fall asleep.

Contribution by Rober Glatter, MD at Forbes

A Note on Common Minds

Contribution by Alex Provan

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the standard model of physics gathered dust and the field moved from front-page philosophy into the murk of mathematics, neuroscience emerged as the discipline most likely to demystify the natural world—or at least one particularly interesting element of it, ourselves. Modern physics had seemingly gone from promising a holistic explanation for why things are the way they are to suggesting that the universe is fundamentally inscrutable, its mysteries multiplying with each discovery. Neuroscience, meanwhile, turned inward—mirroring the putative narcissism of the era—and strived to reveal the immaculate mechanics lodged within our skulls. This nascent discipline cannibalized psychology, linguistics, and sociology, planting flags in far-flung realms of academia, medicine, and law. Today neuroscience is a central prism through which nearly all aspects of life are regarded.

With the popularization of functional MRI (fMRI) technology, the workings of the brain began to be broadcast in color, with cartoonish images of neural activity accompanying newspaper and television reports on the efforts of researchers to explain our most intimate drives, locate our souls, read our minds. Though neuroscience has provided a preeminent narrative of the twenty-first-century self—look to the nonfiction best seller lists for evidence of its reach—the discipline is still in its infancy and its promises remain largely unfulfilled; the workings of the brain are, of course, far from wholly comprehended by researchers, much less the public. We now know more about diseases and disorders like epilepsy, aphasia, Alzheimer’s, and Tourette’s syndrome than ever before, but none have been cured. We have an inkling of the cognitive processes that beget consciousness, which is both a product and central feature of the brain; but philosophers and neuroscientists alike still have trouble defining, much less locating, the phenomenon and explaining the emergence of subjectivity—if not the more mundane matter of self-awareness. (Even if we could define consciousness, we might not be able to understand it except at the level of the neuron’s cytoskeleton, through quantum mechanics—the physics for which is incomplete. Or our brains might be unconsciously following a program so complex that we could never grasp the entire thing at once. If so, one could theoretically simulate cognition, or at least the underlying processes, though not without an excellent quantum mechanical computer.) We have not found the brain’s “God spot” or “buy button.”

“Common Minds,” a series of essays and conversations on the contemporary infatuation with the brain, will address the limits of neuroscience and how the knowledge produced by researchers and clinicians operates in other realms of culture and society. “Common Minds” was coedited by Dawn Chan and is being published in issues 17 and 18 of Triple Canopy. The series aims to facilitate discussion about ideas that are too rarely scrutinized outside of a specialized setting, despite their sweeping effect. Recent criticism in magazines and academic journals has justifiably deflated—and perhaps tempered public enthusiasm for—the tumid, reductive claims of pop-science scribes. But such venues tend be dominated by professional journalists and scientists debunking other professional journalists and scientists. Departing from the conventions of this discourse, Triple Canopy has invited artists, poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, and psychologists to contribute analytic essays, linguistic compendia, and prose poems; a video rumination on blindness and perception, a collage-survey of the persistent vocabulary of phrenology, and a two-thousand-year genealogy of images of the brain.

In preparing this series, we considered how psychoanalysis became a prevailing cultural narrative in the 1960s and ‘70s and how profoundly it altered the way we construct our own experiences and selves. The standard model may have imparted an all-encompassing theory of the natural world, but to most people that theory is incomprehensible. And those who do understand know that the failure to reconcile the general theory of relativity and quantum theory—the so-called macro and micro worlds—keeps the model incomplete. As such, the standard model speaks to ontology only indirectly. Psychoanalytic theory proffered a softer science, a framework for interpreting—if not resolutely explaining—our thoughts and behaviors, which could be elaborated as a worldview. Even if many who invoked Freud had little purchase on psychoanalysis beyond the rudiments, they could assimilate that worldview (which was confirmed in their own daily lives).

Neuroscience awkwardly straddles these two bodies of knowledge, in terms of the potential to link visceral experience to vanguard science in the construction of a more or less complete picture of the world—inasmuch as the world is a construct of our own cognitive faculties (and therefore a projection of biology). And yet generally, especially in nonclinical settings, what neuroscience has to offer is interpretation, not explanation. And too often the two are confused.

In March 2008, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience published an article called “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” which grappled with the question of why people are much more likely to believe a statement when it includes a neuroscience gloss and fail to recognize when that information is illogical or irrelevant. The researchers asked subjects to evaluate various descriptions of psychological phenomena, both inaccurate and accurate, with and without perfunctory references to neural circuitry. For instance, they were told that “the curse of knowledge”—the tendency to assume other people know what you do and are ignorant of what you don’t know—arises from our innate inability to judge others and that brain scans reveal the curse “happens because of the frontal lobe brain circuitry known to be involved in self-knowledge.” Subjects found that such bilge made circular arguments “significantly more satisfying.”

To most people, neuroscience supplies a skein of novelty and credibility to propositions that might otherwise appear unoriginal or even outlandish. Among the beneficiaries of the public’s susceptibility to science-inflected language and imagery are neuromarketing companies wielding brain scans to help clients sell everything from politicians to Super Bowl ads to social media campaigns. For example, MindSign Neuromarketing’s “neurocinema” service will “take your trailer or spot and show you what parts or scenes cause activation (good) and what parts cause deactivation (bad).” Many in the humanities have responded by insinuating neuroscience into their work—the so-called cognitive turn, which has given rise to disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, and neuroethics.

For the most part, neuroscience has given us an empirical basis for assertions made decades or centuries ago by linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and ophthalmologists. And yet one effect of the rapid rise of neuroscience is the comparative diminution (and, coincidentally, defunding) of the very branches of science and the humanities upon which the discipline draws. The result is a creeping assumption that the brain makes the mind. “Although we do not know how, it is widely accepted that a complete neural explanation is, in principle, possible,” writes psychologist William Uttal in Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011). “Those who labor in the laboratory rarely make this monistic assumption explicit, and yet few cognitive neuroscientists would challenge this fundamental idea.” The guiding principle of much contemporary neuroscience is “without any compelling empirical foundation.”

The work in “Common Minds” aims to disclose and debunk, but more orthogonally than polemically, by charting the origins of the brain-as-computer metaphor, considering fMRI scans as part of the history of photography, evaluating the claims of neuroscience alongside the observations of seventeenth-century Japanese anatomical illustrators, and so on. To us, this work is itself a strike against biological reductionism. There have been many enthralling, if provisional, discoveries regarding the unconscious processes underlying our behavior, the adaptive and plastic nature of the brain, and the relationship between vision and cognition. But what, besides consciousness, prompts such efforts, impels us to engineer experiments, parse data, invent theories? The core of who we are and why we do what we do—that union of memory, consciousness, and the body that marks us as human, grounding our various representations of the world in what Kant called a “single common subject”—remains obscure.

“Common Minds” questions the expectation of revelation, especially as advanced by popular neuroscience books that mostly work to inspire awe by assigning biological explanations to every aspect of our behavior. The brain “is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us,” writes David Eagleman in Incognito: The Brains Behind the Mind (2012). Eagleman’s book is wrenchingly typical for making unconscious mechanics responsible for the preponderance of what we do and say and for obscuring certain material facts that suggest otherwise. For instance, Eagleman uses Ulysses to analyze the housing bubble: By bounding himself in anticipation of his ship passing the Sirens, Ulysses shorted the same “instant-gratification circuits” that produced the subprime-mortgage crisis. But this account neglects predatory lending practices and the failure of government regulation—anything besides the cognitive processes of homeowners.

Rather than trouble what neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran calls our “cognitive state of grace” in relation to other species, such books tend to strip away the construction of subjective experience from objective reality in order to reveal the gears at work and marvel at the mechanics. The conscious mind becomes an evolutionary product of these unconscious operations; it is dismissed as an incidental aspect of the brain, a tool for achieving certain rarefied tasks. (Aside from being the basis of higher-level thinking, consciousness is the crux of the liberal democratic project. The terminal point of which might be the erosion of the free, autonomous political subject, in favor of a biologically constituted self, which has dramatic implications for the exercise of power and the production of social life.) Authors are expected to edify initiates while catering to their relative ignorance, acquaint them with the basics of brain functioning but not muddle the material with too much neuroanatomy. Often this means pitching a ream of case studies and summaries of academic papers as a “journey,” “search,” or “quest.” At the end of the road there tends to be either a solution to everyday problems—leadership, love, sales, addiction, productivity—or a sense of pure wonder. Dwelling on the magic of cognition, while insisting on its biological basis, returns the brain to a fantastical realm just as it is being demystified.

The quest for a purely biological account of consciousness seems, paradoxically, to point to something about our cognitive configuration that eludes such an understanding. Neuroscience has illuminated the brain’s constant efforts to make sense of the world, to form an astonishingly coherent narrative out of a welter of information. Our eyes capture fragments of objects in mere moments—fleeting records of passing cars, gathering clouds, familiar faces—which are strung together by the brain, giving the impression of a continuous visual flow. Cognition is enabled by regular communication between different regions of the brain, a kind of discourse between neuronal factions that, over a lifetime, actually restructures the brain, in what neuroscientist J. P. Changeux has labeled “the Darwinism of the synapses.” Furthermore, the brain develops a model of the outside world that enables it to anticipate rather than merely respond to sensory data. We are, in effect, always constructing the setting of our own story just before it happens. Somehow this seemingly effortless assembly of memories and impressions inspires the vague but tenacious belief in the presence within us of something that exceeds our circuitry, a more or less authentic self. And this self seems to be as real, if not more real, than anything else in the world.

Neuroscience: Under Attack

THIS fall, science writers have made sport of yet another instance of bad neuroscience. The culprit this time is Naomi Wolf; her new book, “Vagina,” has been roundly drubbed for misrepresenting the brain and neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin.

Earlier in the year, Chris Mooney raised similar ire with the book “The Republican Brain,” which claims that Republicans are genetically different from — and, many readers deduced, lesser to — Democrats. “If Mooney’s argument sounds familiar to you, it should,” scoffed two science writers. “It’s called ‘eugenics,’ and it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior.”

Sharp words from disapproving science writers are but the tip of the hippocampus: today’s pop neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences, is under a much larger attack.

Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.

A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.

As a journalist and cultural critic, I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.

Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.

A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

The problem isn’t solely that self-appointed scientists often jump to faulty conclusions about neuroscience. It’s also that they are part of a larger cultural tendency, in which neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic, literary and journalistic interpretations of experience. A number of the neuro doubters are also humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines, creating phenomena like neuro law, which, in part, uses the evidence of damaged brains as the basis for legal defense of people accused of heinous crimes, or neuroaesthetics, a trendy blend of art history and neuroscience.

It’s not hard to understand why neuroscience is so appealing. We all seek shortcuts to enlightenment. It’s reassuring to believe that brain images and machine analysis will reveal the fundamental truth about our minds and their contents. But as the neuro doubters make plain, we may be asking too much of neuroscience, expecting that its explanations will be definitive. Yet it’s hard to imagine that any functional magnetic resonance imaging or chemical map will ever explain “The Golden Bowl” or heaven. Or that brain imaging, no matter how sophisticated and precise, will ever tell us what women really want.

The Art of Positive Skepticism

In the late 1500’s, everyone believed Aristotle’s claim that heavy objects fell faster than light ones. That is, everyone except Galileo. To test Aristotle’s claim, Galileo dropped two balls of differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And guess what? They both hit the ground at the same time! For challenging Aristotle’s authority, Galileo was fired from his job. But for his place in history, he showed us that testing human claims should be the mediator of all truth.

Fast forward to modern times. Challenging commonly held assumptions about computers and human behavior, Steve Jobs lost his job with Apple in 1985. Returning 12 years later, he changed the way people use technology by testing the truth of other people’s claims. As a result, history considers Jobs one of the most innovative minds of the 21st century.

Galileo and Jobs were skeptics. They had developed habits of thinking that challenged what appeared to be reliable facts. They understood that testing assumptions over human authority led to greater understanding, innovation, and creativity.

It’s easy to confuse being a skeptic with being a cynic. So let’s define the terms.

A cynic distrusts most information they see or hear, particularly when it challenges their own belief system. Most often, cynics hold views that cannot be changed by contrary evidence. Thus, they often become intolerant of other people’s ideas. It’s not difficult to find cynics everywhere in our society, from the halls of Congress to our own family dinner tables. People who are driven by inflexible beliefs rarely think like Galileo or Jobs.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is a key part of critical thinking – a goal of education. The term skeptic is derived from the Greek skeptikos, meaning “to inquire” or “look around.” Skeptics requires additional evidence before accepting someone’s claims as true. They are willing to challenge the status quo with open-minded, deep questioning of authority.

In today’s complex world, skeptics and cynics are often hard to differentiate. While the ability to challenge human authority has led to important innovation and reform, it has also made it possible, for a price, to prove our “rightness.” Oftentimes, what appear to be legitimate studies are manipulated to support a particular idea or outcome that a company, individual, or government believes is the truth.

And herein lays the dilemma of our modern day quest for certainty. When we can no longer be objective “inquirers” because we have already decided the truth, then we create a culture of cynicism instead of skepticism. Is this the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children?

If we model skepticism instead of cynicism, our children would inherit a world that would be less dependent on power and authority and more dependent on critical thinking and good judgment. Adolescents and young adults would be capable of questioning the reliability of what they think or hear. They would learn to believe in their natural abilities to facilitate positive change through intellectual inquiry. They would become discerning consumers of ideas rather than passive accepters of other people’s visions of certainty.

How we adults model the art of positive skepticism not only helps us make better informed decisions but also shows our children how to think for themselves. And, if kids learn to think for themselves, they learn to believe in themselves!

Five Ways to Model Positive Skepticism



Be a Deception-Detector

People constantly make claims that affect our daily lives. From those selling products and services to candidates running for political offices, we are barraged with decisions that require us to act. Thomas Kida, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, shows how easily we can be fooled and why we should learn to think like a scientist.

Challenge claims by asking for evidence. Ask questions like, “What makes you think this way?” “What assumptions have you based your claim upon?” “What facts or research support your ideas?” “Are there facts or studies that dispute your claim?”

Doubt

Constant streams of commercial messages, TV news, and campaign ads try to tell us how to think. When we allow others to think for us, we become vulnerable to indoctrination, propaganda, and powerful emotional appeals. In her book, Descartes’s Method of Doubt, Janet Broughton examined the important role that doubt plays in our quest for truth.

Recognize the limits to anyone’s claims of truth! Look below the surface rather than accepting ideas at face value. Ask yourself questions like, “What is the logic of this argument?” Listen to yourself when something doesn’t feel right!

Play Devil’s Advocate

Part of being a good skeptic is learning to play a devil’s advocate role. Take a position you don’t necessarily agree with, just for the sake of argument. This doesn’t have to be combative. You can simply say “In order to understand this idea better; let me play the devil’s advocate.” Putting your mind to work poking holes in what you think might be a good idea can lead to greater understanding of a problem. Playing devil’s advocate is a great way to teach children how to see another person’s perspective.

Use Logic and Intuition

We are persuaded to doubt or believe other people’s claims through logic and intuition, and most of us tend to rely heavily on one type of thinking or the other. Whether you are a logical or intuitive thinker, it’s helpful to alternate between these two qualities of mind. In his book, Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow says, “Doubting and believing are among the most powerful root acts we can perform with our minds.” We become better thinkers when we deploy doubting and believing more consciously through the use of logic and intuition rather than by chance.

Be a Bias-Detector

One of the most important tasks of a true skeptic is to determine whether sources of information and analysis are impartial. This is a trait that serves us well when we turn on the television. If we only listen to one channel, or our favorite news commentator, we’ll likely be persuaded by biased or emotional appeals. Ask yourself, “What’s the other side of this story?” “Is this one person’s story or does it apply to thousands of people?" “Is there an underlying belief or assumption being made that reflects this reporter’s ideology?”

R.M. Dawes’ points out in his book, Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally, that emotional appeals and story-based thinking often lead to faulty reasoning. The point in detecting bias is to be able to identify messages that are intended to persuade rather than inform us.

Positive skepticism leads to better problem-solving, innovation, and creativity! It also helps develop our abilities to think critically about the world around us! Do you agree? Feel free to poke some holes in my thinking!

By Marilyn Price-Mitchell