“The Hippie Temptation”: An Angst-Ridden CBS TV Show Warns of the Risks of LSD (1976)

in History, Music, Psychology, Television | October 22nd, 2021

To lyser­gic acid diethy­lamide, bet­ter known as LSD, we owe much of what has endured from West­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry: con­sid­er, for instance, the lat­ter half of the Bea­t­les’ oeu­vre. In Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, Ian Mac­Don­ald describes LSD as “a pow­er­ful hal­lu­cino­gen whose func­tion is tem­porar­i­ly to dis­miss the brain’s neur­al concierge, leav­ing the mind to cope as it can with sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion which mean­while enters with­out pri­or arrange­ment — an uncen­sored expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty which pro­found­ly alters one’s out­look on it.”

So pro­found is that alter­ation that some came to believe in a utopia achiev­able through uni­ver­sal inges­tion of the drug: “If there be nec­es­sary rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­ca,” declared Allen Gins­berg, “it will come this way.” But most Amer­i­cans did­n’t see it quite the same way. It was for them that CBS made its broad­cast “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion.” Aired in August 1967, three months after the release of Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Heart’s Club Band, it con­sti­tutes an exposé of LSD-fueled youth cul­ture as it effer­vesced at the time in and around San Fran­cis­co’s coun­ter­cul­tur­al mec­ca of Haight-Ash­bury.

“The hip­pies present a strange prob­lem,” says cor­re­spon­dent Har­ry Rea­son­er, lat­er known as the host of 60 Min­utes. “Our soci­ety has pro­duced them. There they are, in rapid­ly increas­ing num­bers. And yet there seem to be very few def­i­nite ideas behind the super­fi­cial glit­ter of their dress and behav­ior.” In search of the core of the hip­pie ide­ol­o­gy, which seems out­ward­ly to involve “stand­ing apart from soci­ety by means of mutu­al help and love,” Rea­son­er and his col­lab­o­ra­tors delve into the nature of LSD, whose users “may see a wild com­plex­i­ty of images, hear a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of sounds. This is called ‘tak­ing an acid trip.’ ”

Alas, “for many, the price of tak­ing the short­cut to dis­cov­ery the hip­pies put for­ward turns out to be very high.” A young doc­tor from UCLA’s neu­ropsy­chi­atric insti­tute named Duke Fish­er argues that most LSD users “talk about lov­ing human­i­ty in gen­er­al, an all-encom­pass­ing love of the world, but they have a great deal of dif­fi­cul­ty lov­ing one oth­er per­son, or lov­ing that spe­cif­ic thing.” Also includ­ed in “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion” are inter­views with young peo­ple (albeit ones clean­er-cut than the aver­age denizen of late-60s Haight-Ash­bury) placed into med­ical facil­i­ties due to hal­lu­cino­gen-relat­ed mishaps, includ­ing sui­cide attempts.

“There is the real dan­ger that more and more young peo­ple may fol­low the call to turn on, tune in, drop out,” Rea­son­er declares, in keep­ing with the broad­cast’s por­ten­tous tone. Even then there were signs of what Mac­Don­ald calls “the hip­pie coun­ter­cul­ture’s incip­i­ent com­mer­cial­iza­tion and impend­ing decline into hard drugs.” But to this day, “that there was indeed some­thing unusu­al in the air can still be heard from many of the records of the peri­od: a light, joy­ous opti­mism with a tan­gi­ble spir­i­tu­al aura and a thrilling­ly fresh infor­mal­i­ty” — a qual­i­ty Mac­Don­ald finds con­cen­trat­ed in the work of not just The Bea­t­les but the Grate­ful Dead, who sit for an inter­view in “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion.” LSD may no longer be as tempt­ing as it was half a cen­tu­ry ago, but many of the cre­ations it inspired then still have us hooked today.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

Aldous Hux­ley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

When the Grate­ful Dead Per­formed on Hugh Hefner’s Play­boy After Dark & Secret­ly Dosed Every­one With LSD (1969)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: The Real Perceptual Disorder That May Have Shaped Lewis Carroll’s Creative World

in Literature, Neuroscience, Psychology | September 16th, 2021

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land isn’t just a beloved chil­dren’s sto­ry: it’s also a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal  syn­drome. Or rather the words “Alice in Won­der­land,” as Lewis Car­rol­l’s book is com­mon­ly known, have also become attached to a con­di­tion that, though not harm­ful in itself, caus­es dis­tor­tions in the suf­fer­er’s per­cep­tion of real­i­ty. Oth­er names include dys­metrop­sia or Tod­d’s syn­drome, the lat­ter of which pays trib­ute to the con­sul­tant psy­chi­a­trist John Todd, who defined the dis­or­der in 1955. He described his patients as see­ing some objects as much larg­er than they real­ly were and oth­er objects as much small­er, result­ing in chal­lenges not entire­ly unlike those faced by Alice when put by Car­roll through her grow­ing-and-shrink­ing paces.

Todd also sug­gest­ed that Car­roll had writ­ten from expe­ri­ence, draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from the hal­lu­ci­na­tions he expe­ri­enced when afflict­ed with what he called “bil­ious headache.”  The trans­for­ma­tions Alice feels her­self under­go­ing after she drinks from the “DRINK ME” bot­tle and eats the “EAT ME” cake are now known, in the neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, as macrop­sia and microp­sia.

“I was in the kitchen talk­ing to my wife,” writes nov­el­ist Craig Rus­sell of one of his own bouts of the lat­ter. “I was huge­ly ani­mat­ed and full of ener­gy, hav­ing just put three days’ worth of writ­ing on the page in one morn­ing and was burst­ing with ideas for new books. Then, quite calm­ly, I explained to my wife that half her face had dis­ap­peared. As I looked around me, bits of the world were miss­ing too.”

Though “many have spec­u­lat­ed that Lewis Car­roll took some kind of mind-alter­ing drug and based the Alice books on his hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ences,” writes Rus­sell, “the truth is that he too suf­fered from the con­di­tion, but in a more severe and pro­tract­ed way,” com­bined with ocu­lar migraine. Rus­sell also notes that the sci-fi vision­ary Philip K. Dick, though “nev­er diag­nosed as suf­fer­ing from migrain­ous aura or tem­po­ral lobe epilep­sy,” left behind a body of work that has has giv­en rise to “a grow­ing belief that the expe­ri­ences he described were attrib­ut­able to the lat­ter, par­tic­u­lar­ly.” Suit­ably, clas­sic Alice in Won­der­land syn­drome “tends to be much more com­mon in child­hood” and dis­ap­pear in matu­ri­ty. One suf­fer­er doc­u­ment­ed in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture is just six years old, younger even than Car­rol­l’s eter­nal lit­tle girl — pre­sum­ably, an eter­nal seer of real­i­ty in her own way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Beau­ti­ful 1870 Visu­al­iza­tion of the Hal­lu­ci­na­tions That Come Before a Migraine

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Ralph Steadman’s Warped Illus­tra­tions of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on the Story’s 150th Anniver­sary

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why Do We Dream?: An Animated Lesson

in Neuroscience, Psychology | September 8th, 2021

Why do we dream? It’s a ques­tion sci­ence still can’t answer, says the TED-Ed les­son above by Amy Adkins. Many neu­ro­sci­en­tists cur­rent­ly make sense of dream­ing as a way for the brain to con­sol­i­date mem­o­ry at night. “This may include reor­ga­niz­ing and recod­ing mem­o­ries in rela­tion to emo­tion­al dri­ves,” writes com­pu­ta­tion­al neu­ro­sci­en­tist Paul King, “as well as trans­fer­ring mem­o­ries between brain regions.” You might imag­ine a defrag­ging hard dri­ve, the sort­ing and fil­ing process hap­pen­ing while a com­put­er sleeps.

But the brain is not a com­put­er. Impor­tant ques­tions remain. Why do dreams have such a pow­er­ful hold on us, not only indi­vid­u­al­ly, but — as a recent project col­lect­ing COVID dreams explores — col­lec­tive­ly? Are dreams no more than gib­ber­ish, the men­tal detri­tus of the day, or do they con­vey impor­tant mes­sages to our con­scious minds? Sev­er­al mil­len­nia before Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams, “Mesopotami­an kings record­ed and inter­pret­ed their dreams on wax tablets.” A thou­sand years lat­er, Egyp­tians cat­a­logued one hun­dred of the most com­mon dreams and their mean­ings in a dream book.

The ancients were con­vinced their dreams car­ried mes­sages from beyond their con­scious­ness. Many mod­ern the­o­rists begin­ning with Freud have seen dreams as pure­ly self-ref­er­en­tial, and neu­rot­ic. “We dream,” the les­son notes, “to ful­fill our wish­es.” Instead of mes­sages from the gods, dreams are sym­bol­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion from uncon­scious repressed dri­ves. Or, “we dream to remem­ber,” as some con­tem­po­rary neu­ro­sci­en­tists claim, or “we dream to for­get” as a neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal the­o­ry called “reverse learn­ing” argued in 1983. Dreams are exer­cis­es for the brain, rehearsals, night­time prob­lem solv­ing … the les­son touch­es briefly on each of these the­o­ries in turn.

But what­ev­er answers sci­ence pro­vides will hard­ly sat­is­fy human curios­i­ty about the con­tent of our dreams. For this, per­haps, we should look else­where. We might turn, for exam­ple, to the Muse­um of Dreams, “a hub for explor­ing the social and polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of dream-life.” Philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries of dream­ing are all spec­u­la­tive. “Rather than seek a defin­i­tive expla­na­tion, the Museum’s goal is to explore the gen­er­a­tive and per­for­ma­tive nature of dream-life — all the remark­able ways peo­ple have put their dreams to work.” Before we share and, yes, inter­pret our dreams with oth­ers, they remain, in Toni Morrison’s words, “unspeak­able things unspo­ken.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Our Dreams Pre­dict the Future? Vladimir Nabokov Spent Three Months Test­ing That The­o­ry in 1964

Do Octopi Dream? An Aston­ish­ing Nature Doc­u­men­tary Sug­gests They Do

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Alan Alda: 3 Ways to Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Will Understand You

in Life, Psychology | August 20th, 2021

In need of some­one to per­form surgery in a com­bat zone, you prob­a­bly would­n’t choose Alan Alda, no mat­ter how many times you’ve seen him do it on tele­vi­sion. This sounds obvi­ous to those of us who believe that actors don’t know how to do any­thing at all. But a per­former like Alda does­n’t become a cul­tur­al icon by acci­dent: his par­tic­u­lar skill set has enabled him not just to com­mu­ni­cate with mil­lions at a time through film and tele­vi­sion, but also to nav­i­gate his off­screen and per­son­al life with a cer­tain adept­ness. In the Big Think video above, he reveals three of his own long-relied-upon strate­gies to “express your thoughts so that every­one will under­stand you.”

“I don’t real­ly like tips,” Alda declares. Stan­dard pub­lic-speak­ing advice holds that you should “vary the pace of your speech, vary the vol­ume,” for exam­ple, but while sound in them­selves, those strate­gies exe­cut­ed mechan­i­cal­ly get to be “kind of bor­ing.” Rather than oper­at­ing accord­ing to a fixed play­book, as Alda sees it, your vari­a­tions in pace and vol­ume — or your ges­tures, move­ments around the stage, and every­thing else — should occur organ­i­cal­ly, as a prod­uct of “how you’re talk­ing and relat­ing” to your audi­ence. A skilled speak­er does­n’t fol­low rules per se, but gauges and responds dynam­i­cal­ly to the lis­ten­er’s under­stand­ing even as he speaks.

But if pressed, Alda can pro­vide three tips “that I do kind of fol­low.” These he calls “the three rules of three”: first, “I try only to say three impor­tant things when I talk to peo­ple”; sec­ond, “If I have a dif­fi­cult thing to under­stand, if there’s some­thing I think is not going to be easy to get, I try to say it in three dif­fer­ent ways”; third, ” I try to say it three times through the talk.” He gets deep­er into his per­son­al the­o­ries of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the sec­ond video below, begin­ning with a slight­ly con­trar­i­an defense of jar­gon: “When peo­ple in the same pro­fes­sion have a word that stands for five pages of writ­ten knowl­edge, why say five pages of stuff when you can say one word?” The trou­ble comes when words get so spe­cial­ized that they hin­der com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions.

At its worst, jar­gon becomes a tool of dom­i­nance: “I’m smart; I talk like this,” its users imply, “You can’t real­ly talk like this, so you’re not as smart as me.” But when we active­ly sim­pli­fy our lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate to the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence, we can dis­cov­er “what are the con­cepts that real­ly mat­ter” beneath the jar­gon. All the bet­ter if we can tell a dra­mat­ic sto­ry to illus­trate our point, as Alda does at the end of the video. It involves a med­ical stu­dent con­vey­ing a patien­t’s diag­no­sis more effec­tive­ly than his super­vi­sor, all thanks to his expe­ri­ence with the kind of “mir­ror­ing” exer­cis­es famil­iar to every stu­dent of act­ing. A doc­tor who can com­mu­ni­cate is always prefer­able to one who can’t; even a real-life Hawk­eye, after all, needs to make him­self under­stood once in a while.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Sci­en­tists How to Com­mu­ni­cate Their Ideas

What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Win­ner at Alan Alda’s Sci­ence Video Com­pe­ti­tion

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

Charles & Ray Eames’ A Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Primer Explains the Key to Clear Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the Mod­ern Age (1953)

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

How to Get Over the Anx­i­ety of Pub­lic Speak­ing?: Watch the Stan­ford Video, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” Viewed Already 15 Mil­lion Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Make Body Language Your Superpower: A 15-Minute Primer on Body Language & Public Speaking from Stanford Business School

in Psychology, Stanford | August 19th, 2021

A few years ago, the idea of “pow­er pos­es” — that is, phys­i­cal stances that increase the dynamism of one’s per­son­al­i­ty — gained a great many adher­ents in a very short time, but not long there­after emerged doubts as to its sci­en­tif­ic sound­ness. Nev­er­the­less, while stand­ing with your hands on your hips may not change who you are, we can fair­ly claim that such a thing as body lan­guage does exist. And in that lan­guage, cer­tain bod­i­ly arrange­ments com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter mes­sages than oth­ers: accord­ing to the pre­sen­ters of the talk above, keep­ing your hands pow­er-poseish­ly on your hips is actu­al­ly a text­book bad pub­lic-speak­ing posi­tion, down there with shov­ing them in your pock­ets or clasp­ing them before you in the dread­ed “fig leaf.”

Now viewed well over 5.5 mil­lion times, “Make Body Lan­guage Your Super­pow­er” was orig­i­nal­ly deliv­ered as the final project of a team of grad­u­ate stu­dents at Stan­ford’s Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness. That same insti­tu­tion gave us lec­tur­er Matt Abra­hams’ talk “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” which, with its 23 mil­lion views and count­ing, sug­gests its cam­pus pos­sess­es a lit­er­al fount of pub­lic-speak­ing wis­dom.

Work­ing as a team, these stu­dents keep it short and sim­ple, accom­pa­ny­ing their talk with take­away-announc­ing Pow­er­point slides (“1. Pos­ture breeds suc­cess, 2. Ges­tures strength­en our mes­sage, 3. The audi­ence’s body mat­ters too”) and even a video clip that vivid­ly illus­trates what not to do: in this case, with a fid­gety, rota­tion-heavy turn on stage by Armaged­don and Trans­form­ers auteur Michael Bay.

Though we can’t hear what Bay is say­ing, we could­n’t be blamed for assum­ing it’s not the truth. That owes not so much to the Hol­ly­wood pen­chant for dis­sim­u­la­tion and hyper­bole as it does to his par­tic­u­lar stances, ges­tures, and per­am­bu­la­tions, all of a kind that primes our sub­con­scious­ness to expect lies. “We all want to avoid our own Michael Bay moments when we com­mu­ni­cate,” says one of the pre­sen­ters, but even when we take pains to tell the truth, the whole truth, and noth­ing but the truth, the defen­sive pos­tures into which many of us instinc­tive­ly retreat can under­cut our efforts. “Decod­ing Decep­tive Body Lan­guage,” the talk just above, can help us learn both to iden­ti­fy the impres­sion of dis­hon­esty and to avoid giv­ing it our­selves. Not that it’s always easy: as the exam­ple of Bill Clin­ton under­scores in both these pre­sen­ta­tions, even mas­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tors have their slip-ups.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Get Over the Anx­i­ety of Pub­lic Speak­ing?: Watch the Stan­ford Video, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” Viewed Already 15 Mil­lion Times

How to Speak: Watch the Lec­ture on Effec­tive Com­mu­ni­ca­tion That Became an MIT Tra­di­tion for Over 40 Years

Can You Spot Liars Through Their Body Lan­guage? A For­mer FBI Agent Breaks Down the Clues in Non-Ver­bal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

How to Sound Smart in a TED Talk: A Fun­ny Primer by Sat­ur­day Night Live‘s Will Stephen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Take an Intellectual Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

in Computer Science, Creativity, Math, MIT, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology | August 2nd, 2021

In 1979, math­e­mati­cian Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Esch­er, and com­pos­er J.S. Bach walked into a book title, and you may well know the rest. Dou­glas R. Hof­s­tadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: an Eter­nal Gold­en Braid, his first book, thence­forth (and hence­forth) known as GEB. The extra­or­di­nary work is not a trea­tise on math­e­mat­ics, art, or music, but an essay on cog­ni­tion through an explo­ration of all three — and of for­mal sys­tems, recur­sion, self-ref­er­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, etc. Its pub­lish­er set­tled on the pithy descrip­tion, “a metaphor­i­cal fugue on minds and machines in the spir­it of Lewis Car­roll.”

GEB attempt­ed to reveal the mind at work; the minds of extra­or­di­nary indi­vid­u­als, for sure, but also all human minds, which behave in sim­i­lar­ly unfath­omable ways. One might also describe the book as oper­at­ing in the spir­it — and the prac­tice — of Her­man Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a nov­el Hesse wrote in response to the data-dri­ven machi­na­tions of fas­cism and their threat to an intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion he held par­tic­u­lar­ly dear. An alter­nate title (and key phrase in the book) Mag­is­ter Ludi, puns on both “game” and “school,” and alludes to the impor­tance of play and free asso­ci­a­tion in the life of the mind.

Hesse’s eso­teric game, writes his biog­ra­ph­er Ralph Freed­man, con­sists of “con­tem­pla­tion, the secrets of the Chi­nese I Ching and West­ern math­e­mat­ics and music” and seems sim­i­lar enough to Hof­s­tadter’s approach and that of the instruc­tors of MIT’s open course, Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey. Offered through the High School Stud­ies Pro­gram as a non-cred­it enrich­ment course, it promis­es “an intel­lec­tu­al vaca­tion” through “Zen Bud­dhism, Log­ic, Meta­math­e­mat­ics, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Recur­sion, Com­plex Sys­tems, Con­scious­ness, Music and Art.”

Stu­dents will not study direct­ly the work of Gödel, Esch­er, and Bach but rather “find their spir­its aboard our men­tal ship,” the course descrip­tion notes, through con­tem­pla­tions of canons, fugues, strange loops, and tan­gled hier­ar­chies. How do mean­ing and form arise in sys­tems like math and music? What is the rela­tion­ship of fig­ure to ground in art? “Can recur­sion explain cre­ativ­i­ty,” as one of the course notes asks. Hof­s­tadter him­self has pur­sued the ques­tion beyond the entrench­ment of AI research in big data and brute force machine learn­ing. For all his daunt­ing eru­di­tion and chal­leng­ing syn­the­ses, we must remem­ber that he is play­ing a high­ly intel­lec­tu­al game, one that repli­cates his own expe­ri­ence of think­ing.

Hof­s­tadter sug­gests that before we can under­stand intel­li­gence, we must first under­stand cre­ativ­i­ty. It may reveal its secrets in com­par­a­tive analy­ses of the high­est forms of intel­lec­tu­al play, where we see the clever for­mal rules that gov­ern the mind’s oper­a­tions; the blind alleys that explain its fail­ures and lim­i­ta­tions; and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever actu­al­ly repro­duc­ing work­ings in a machine. Watch the lec­tures above, grab a copy of Hofstadter’s book, and find course notes, read­ings, and oth­er resources for the fas­ci­nat­ing course Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey archived here. The course will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

The Mir­ror­ing Mind: An Espres­so-Fueled Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dou­glas Hofstadter’s Ground­break­ing Ideas

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Are We All Getting More Depressed?: A New Study Analyzing 14 Million Books, Written Over 160 Years, Finds the Language of Depression Steadily Rising

in Data, Psychology | July 28th, 2021


The rela­tions between thought, lan­guage, and mood have become sub­jects of study for sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic fields of late. Some of the con­clu­sions seem to echo reli­gious notions from mil­len­nia ago. “As a man thin­keth, so he is,” for exam­ple, pro­claims a famous verse in Proverbs (one that helped spawn a self-help move­ment in 1903). Pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy might agree. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” says one trans­la­tion of the Bud­dhist Dhamma­pa­da, a sen­ti­ment that cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py might endorse.

But the insights of these tra­di­tions — and of social psy­chol­o­gy — also show that we’re embed­ded in webs of con­nec­tion: we don’t only think alone; we think — and talk and write and read — with oth­ers. Exter­nal cir­cum­stances influ­ence mood as well as inter­nal states of mind. Approach­ing these ques­tions dif­fer­ent­ly, researchers at the Lud­dy School of Infor­mat­ics, Com­put­ing, and Engi­neer­ing at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty asked, “Can entire soci­eties become more or less depressed over time?,” and is it pos­si­ble to read col­lec­tive changes in mood in the writ­ten lan­guages of the past cen­tu­ry or so?

The team of sci­en­tists, led by Johan Bollen, Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of infor­mat­ics and com­put­ing, took a nov­el approach that brings togeth­er tools from at least two fields: large-scale data analy­sis and cog­ni­tive-behav­ioral ther­a­py (CBT). Since diag­nos­tic cri­te­ria for mea­sur­ing depres­sion have only been around for the past 40 years, the ques­tion seemed to resist lon­gi­tu­di­nal study. But CBT pro­vid­ed a means of ana­lyz­ing lan­guage for mark­ers of “cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tions” — think­ing that skews in over­ly neg­a­tive ways. “Lan­guage is close­ly inter­twined with this dynam­ic” of thought and mood, the researchers write in their study, “His­tor­i­cal lan­guage records reveal a surge of cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tions in recent decades,” pub­lished just last month in PNAS.

Choos­ing three lan­guages, Eng­lish (US), Ger­man, and Span­ish, the team looked for “short sequences of one to five words (n‑grams), labeled cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tion schema­ta (CDS).” These words and phras­es express neg­a­tive thought process­es like “cat­a­stro­phiz­ing,” “dichoto­mous rea­son­ing,” “dis­qual­i­fy­ing the pos­i­tive,” etc. Then, the researchers iden­ti­fied the preva­lence of such lan­guage in a col­lec­tion of over 14 mil­lion books pub­lished between 1855 and 2019 and uploaded to Google Books. The study con­trolled for lan­guage and syn­tax changes dur­ing that time and account­ed for the increase in tech­ni­cal and non-fic­tion books pub­lished (though it did not dis­tin­guish between lit­er­ary gen­res).

What the sci­en­tists found in all three lan­guages was a dis­tinc­tive “‘hock­ey stick’ pat­tern” — a sharp uptick in the lan­guage of depres­sion after 1980 and into the present time. The only spikes that come close on the time­line occur in Eng­lish lan­guage books dur­ing the Gild­ed Age and books pub­lished in Ger­man dur­ing and imme­di­ate­ly after World War II. (High­ly inter­est­ing, if unsur­pris­ing, find­ings.) Why the sud­den, steep climb in lan­guage sig­ni­fy­ing depres­sive think­ing? Does it actu­al­ly mark a col­lec­tive shift in mood, or show how his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed groups have had more access to pub­lish­ing in the past forty years, and have expressed less sat­is­fac­tion with the sta­tus quo?

While they are care­ful to empha­size that they “make no causal claims” in the study, the researchers have some ideas about what’s hap­pened, observ­ing for exam­ple:

The US surge in CDS preva­lence coin­cides with the late 1970s when wages stopped track­ing increas­ing work pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. This trend was asso­ci­at­ed with ris­es in income inequal­i­ty to recent lev­els not seen since the 1930s. This phe­nom­e­non has been observed for most devel­oped economies, includ­ing Ger­many, Spain and Latin Amer­i­ca.

Oth­er fac­tors cit­ed include the devel­op­ment of the World Wide Web and its facil­i­ta­tion of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, “in par­tic­u­lar us-vs.-them think­ing… dichoto­mous rea­son­ing,” and oth­er mal­adap­tive thought pat­terns that accom­pa­ny depres­sion. The scale of these devel­op­ments might be enough to explain a major col­lec­tive rise in depres­sion, but one com­menter offers an addi­tion­al gloss:

The globe is *Lit­er­al­ly* on fire, or his­tor­i­cal­ly flood­ing — Mul­ti­ple eco­nom­ic crash­es bare­ly decades apart — a ghost town of a hous­ing mar­ket — a mul­ti-year glob­al pan­dem­ic — wealth con­cen­tra­tion at the .01% lev­el — ter­ri­ble pay/COL equa­tions — block­ing unionization/workers rights — abu­sive mil­i­ta­rized police, with­out the restraint or train­ing of actu­al mil­i­tary —  You can’t afford X for a month­ly mort­gage pay­ment!  Pay 1.5x for rent instead! — end­less wars for the last… 30…years? 50 if we include stuff like Korea, Cold War, Viet­nam… How far has the IMC been milk­ing the gov for funds to make the rich rich­er? Oh, and a bil­lion­aire 3‑way space race to deter­mine who’s got the biggest “rock­et”

These sound like rea­sons for glob­al depres­sion indeed, but the arrow could also go the oth­er way: maybe cat­a­stroph­ic rea­son­ing pro­duced actu­al cat­a­stro­phes; black and white think­ing led to end­less wars, etc…. More study is need­ed, says Bollen and his col­leagues, yet it seems prob­a­ble, giv­en the data, that “large pop­u­la­tions are increas­ing­ly stressed by per­va­sive cul­tur­al, eco­nom­ic, and social changes” — changes occur­ring more rapid­ly, fre­quent­ly, and with greater impact on our dai­ly lives than ever before. Read the full study at PNAS. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

A Uni­fied The­o­ry of Men­tal Ill­ness: How Every­thing from Addic­tion to Depres­sion Can Be Explained by the Con­cept of “Cap­ture”

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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B.F. Skinner Demonstrates His “Teaching Machine,” the 1950s Automated Learning Device

in Education, History, Psychology | July 15th, 2021

The name B.F. Skin­ner often pro­vokes dark­ly humor­ous ref­er­ences to such bizarre ideas as “Skin­ner box­es,” which put babies in cage-like cribs, and put the cribs in win­dows as if they were air-con­di­tion­ers, leav­ing the poor infants to raise them­selves. Skin­ner was hard­ly alone in con­duct­ing exper­i­ments that flout­ed, if not fla­grant­ly ignored, the eth­i­cal con­cerns now cen­tral to exper­i­men­ta­tion on humans. The code of con­duct on tor­ture and abuse that osten­si­bly gov­erns mem­bers of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion did not exist. Rad­i­cal behav­ior­ists like Skin­ner were redefin­ing the field. His work has come to stand for some of its worst abus­es.

But Skin­ner has been mis­char­ac­ter­ized in the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of his ideas — a pop­u­lar­iza­tion, it’s true, in which he enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly took part. The actu­al “Skin­ner box” was cru­el enough — an elec­tri­fied cage for ani­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion — but it was not the infant win­dow box that often goes by the name. This was, instead, called an “air­crib” or “baby-ten­der,” and it was loaded with crea­ture com­forts like cli­mate con­trol and a com­ple­ment of toys. “In our com­part­ment,” Skin­ner wrote in a 1945 Ladies Home Jour­nal arti­cle, “the wak­ing hours are invari­ably active and hap­py ones.” Describ­ing his first test sub­ject, his own child, he wrote, “our baby acquit­ted an amus­ing, almost ape­like skill in the use of her feet.”

Skin­ner was not a soul­less mon­ster who put babies in cages, but he also did not under­stand mam­malian babies’ need for phys­i­cal touch. Like­wise, when it came to edu­ca­tion, Skin­ner had ideas that can seem con­trary to what we know works best, name­ly a vari­ety of meth­ods that hon­or dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles and abil­i­ties. Edu­ca­tors in the 1950s embraced far more reg­i­ment­ed prac­tices, and Skin­ner believed humans could be trained just like oth­er ani­mals. He treat­ed an ear­ly exper­i­ment in class­room tech­nol­o­gy just like an exper­i­ment teach­ing pigeons to play ping-pong. It was, in fact, “the foun­da­tion for his edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy,” says edu­ca­tion jour­nal­ist Audrey Wat­ters, “that we’ll build machines and they’ll give stu­dents — just like pigeons — pos­i­tive rein­force­ment and stu­dents — just like pigeons — will learn new skills.”

To this end, Skin­ner cre­at­ed what he called the Teach­ing Machine in 1954 while he taught psy­chol­o­gy at Har­vard. He was hard­ly the first to design such a device, but he was the first to invent a machine based on behav­ior­ist prin­ci­ples, as Abhishek Solan­ki explains in a Medi­um arti­cle:

The teach­ing machine was com­posed of main­ly a pro­gram, which was a sys­tem of com­bined teach­ing and test items that car­ried the stu­dent grad­u­al­ly through the mate­r­i­al to be learned. The “machine” was com­posed of a fill-in-the-blank method on either a work­book or on a com­put­er. If the stu­dent was cor­rect, he/she got rein­force­ment and moved on to the next ques­tion. If the answer was incor­rect, the stu­dent stud­ied the cor­rect answer to increas­ing the chances of get­ting rein­forced next time.

Con­sist­ing of a wood­en box, a met­al lid with cutouts, and var­i­ous paper discs with ques­tions and answers writ­ten on them, the machine did adjust for dif­fer­ent stu­dents’ needs, in a way. Skin­ner “not­ed that the learn­ing process should be divid­ed into a large num­ber of very small steps and rein­force­ment must be depen­dent upon the com­ple­tion of each step. He believed this was the best pos­si­ble arrange­ment for learn­ing because it took into account the rate of learn­ing for each indi­vid­ual stu­dent.” He was again inspired by his own chil­dren, com­ing up with the machine after vis­it­ing his daugh­ter’s school and decid­ing he could improve on things.

The method and means of learn­ing, as you’ll see in the demon­stra­tion films above, were not indi­vid­u­al­ized. “There was very, very lit­tle free­dom in Skin­ner’s vision,” says Wat­ters. “Indeed Skin­ner wrote a very well-known book, Beyond Free­dom and Dig­ni­ty in the ear­ly 1970s, in which he said free­dom does­n’t exist.” While Skin­ner’s machine did­n’t itself become wide­ly used, his ideas about edu­ca­tion, and edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy, are still very much with us. We see Skin­ner’s machine “tak­ing new forms with adap­tive teach­ing and e‑learning,” writes Solan­ki.

And we see the dark­er side of his design in class­room tech­nol­o­gy, says Wat­ters, in an indus­try that prof­its from alien­at­ing, one-size-fits all ed-tech solu­tions. But she also sees “stu­dents who are resist­ing and com­mu­ni­ties who are build­ing prac­tices that serve their needs rather than serv­ing the needs of engi­neers.” Skin­ner’s the­o­ries of con­di­tion­ing were and are incred­i­bly per­sua­sive, but his reduc­tive views of human nature seem to leave out more than they explain. Learn more about the his­to­ry of teach­ing machines in Wat­ters’ new book, Teach­ing Machines: The His­to­ry of Per­son­al­ized Learn­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Lit­tle Albert Exper­i­ment: The Per­verse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of San­ta Claus & Bun­nies

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Lin­guis­tic The­o­ry, Nar­rat­ed by The X‑Files‘ Gillian Ander­son

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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