Stop the Killer Rocks

The job of saving humanity from extinction currently falls to no one. NASA and other organizations should take it on

Over the past couple of years the U.S. space program has gone through a huge shake-up, leaving the nation’s goals in space unclear. I have a suggestion. NASA, working with other national space agencies and private organizations, should take on the job of ensuring that no destructive asteroid ever hits Earth on our watch. What project is more worthwhile in the long term or aweinspiring in the short term than protecting humanity from ruin?

At first glance, asteroids may seem like a distant threat. But the hazard is well documented, and the consequences could not be more severe. The history of life on Earth has been shaped by asteroid impacts. One million of them wider than 40 meters in diameter orbit the sun in our vicinity, by some estimates. An asteroid of that size struck Earth over Siberia in 1908 and laid waste an area 150 times larger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb did. The odds of a repeat in this century are about 50 percent. On the larger end, asteroids greater than about one kilometer across would have global effects that threaten human civilization.

The first step in prevention is prediction. We must find, track and predict the future trajectory of those million near-Earth objects. Astronomers have already catalogued the orbits of most of the kilometer-scale objects they think are out there, and none are known that will hit Earth in the next 100 years. Yet the great majority of smaller ones, those big enough to destroy a country or unleash a tsunami that devastates coastal cities, remain untracked. This unfinished business should be tackled next.

Asteroids are warmer than the background sky and therefore stand out in the infrared. Telescopes have blind spots, however: they cannot look in the direction of the sun, which limits the effectiveness of telescopes stationed on or near Earth. The National Research Council recommended in 2009 that NASA place an infrared survey spacecraft in a Venuslike orbit around the sun. As it looked outward, away from the sun, the observatory would spot asteroids that go unseen from Earth. Once completed, such a survey would remain valid for about a century— the timescale on which the measured orbits begin to change because of gravitational interactions with planets—before we would have to do it again. The cost of such a mission would be several hundred million dollars—expensive, to be sure, but a bargain compared with NASA’s current budget, let alone the damage of an asteroid strike.

Should astronomers find an asteroid on a collision course, our task would be to reach out and alter its orbit to prevent that impact. If we find the asteroid early enough (decades ahead of its projected impact), several existing technologies might work: tow it, ram it, nuke it or employ some combination. (My colleagues and I used to advocate pushing on the asteroid with a rocket but recent results on asteroid properties and orbits have made us reconsider.)

Yet no one is really sure whether these options would actually work. Surely the time to test them is before they are needed for real. NASA and other organizations should build and try out a system to deflect a nonthreatening asteroid in a controllable way. Given that astronomers have not even begun a complete asteroid survey, there is a real risk they will find an incoming asteroid before we have time to do a dry run. So this work must begin now. It would not take large increases to NASA’s budget.

All civilizations that inhabit planetary systems must eventually deal with the asteroid threat, or they will go the way of the dinosaurs. We need to predict in advance when impacts are going to occur and, if necessary, shift the orbits of threatening asteroids. In effect, we must change the evolution of the solar system.

Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine

The Real Science behind Scientology

It’s not what you think

In the 1990s I had the opportunity to dine with the late musician Isaac Hayes, whose career fortunes had just made a stunning turnabout upward, which he attributed to Scientology. It was a glowing testimonial by a sincere follower of the Church, but is it evidence that Scientology works? Two recently published books argue that there is no science in Scientology, only quasireligious doctrines wrapped in New Age flapdoodle masquerading as science. The Church of Scientology, by Hugh B. Urban, professor of religious studies at Ohio State University, is the most scholarly treatment of the organization to date, and investigative journalist Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology is an electrifying read that includes eye-popping and well-documented tales of billion-year contracts, aggressive recruitment programs and abuse of staffers.

The problem with testimonials is that they do not constitute evidence in science. As social psychologist Carol Tavris told me, “Every therapy produces enthusiastic testimonials because of the justification-of-effort effect. Anyone who invests time and money and effort in a therapy will say it helped. Scientology might have helped Isaac Hayes, just as psychoanalysis and bungee jumping might have helped others, but that doesn’t mean the intervention was the reason. To know if there is anything special about Scientology, you need to do controlled studies—randomly assigning people to Scientology or a control group (or a different therapy) for the same problem.” To my knowledge, no such study has been conducted. The real science behind Scientology seems to be an understanding of the very human need, as social animals, to be part of a supportive group—and the willingness of people to pay handsomely for it.

If Scientology is not a science, is it even a religion? Well, it does have its own creation myth. Around 75 million years ago Xenu, the ruler of a Galactic Confederation of 76 planets, transported billions of his charges in spaceships similar to DC-8 jets to a planet called Teegeeack (Earth). There they were placed near volcanoes and killed by exploding hydrogen bombs, after which their “thetans” (souls) remained to inhabit the bodies of future earthlings, causing humans today great spiritual harm and unhappiness that can be remedied through special techniques involving an Electropsychometer (E-meter) in a process called auditing.

Thanks to the Internet, this story—previously revealed only to those who paid many thousands of dollars in courses to reach Operating Thetan Level III (OT III) of Scientology—is now so widely known that it was even featured in a 2005 episode of the animated TV series South Park. In fact, according to numerous Web postings by ex-Scientologists, documents from court cases involving followers who reached OT III and abundant books and articles by exmembers who heard the story firsthand and corroborate the details, this is Scientology’s Genesis. So did its founder, writer L. Ron Hubbard, just make it all up—as legend has it—to create a religion that was more lucrative than producing science fiction?

Instead of printing the legend as fact, I recently interviewed the acclaimed science-fiction author Harlan Ellison, who told me he was at the birth of Scientology. At a meeting in New York City of a sci-fi writers’ group called the Hydra Club, Hubbard was complaining to L. Sprague de Camp and the others about writing for a penny a word. “Lester del Rey then said half-jokingly, ‘What you really ought to do is create a religion because it will be tax-free,’ and at that point everyone in the room started chiming in with ideas for this new religion. So the idea was a Gestalt that Ron caught on to and assimilated the details. He then wrote it up as ‘Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind’ and sold it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who published it in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950.”

To be fair, Scientology’s Xenu story is no more scientifically untenable than other faiths’ origin myths. If there is no testable means of determining which creation cosmogony is correct, perhaps they are all astounding science fictions.

Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine

Bigger Plates, More Food— Or Is It the Other Way Around?

When the same set of data yields opposite conclusions

A recent study by researchers at the University of Utah suggested that the amount of food diners in a restaurant consumed was influenced by fork size. I haven’t seen details of the study, but it does remind me that people can draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same raw data by altering definitions ever so slightly. If only such contradictory results were contrived and isolated phenomena, but they’re not.

When dealing with weakly correlated quantities, we often can come up with spurious trends and associations by artfully defining the size of the categories we use. This has been done recently in studies of violent crime to show that certain categories of crime were changing in the desired direction, and I intend to illustrate the point here with a similar story.

Using the fork study for inspiration only, let’s see how small variations in definitions can make all the difference. Imagine 10 diners at a buffet and consider the possible influence of plate size on how much they consume. Three diners were provided with plates that were deemed small, say, less than 8 inches in diameter, and they consumed 9, 11 and 10 ounces of food, for an average of 10 ounces. Now further assume that four diners were provided with medium-size plates, say, between 8 and 11 inches in diameter, and they consumed 18, 7, 15 and 4 ounces of food, for an average of 11 ounces.

Finally, we’ll assume that the remaining three diners were provided with plates deemed large, say, larger than 11 inches in diameter, and they consumed 13, 11 and 12 ounces, for an average of 12 ounces.

Spot the trend? As the plate sizes increased from small to medium to large, the average amount consumed increased from 10 to 11 to 12 ounces. Aha, a nice result! But wait. What if the medium-size plates were very slightly redefined to be between
8.2 and 10.8 inches, and the small and large plates were redefined accordingly? And what if this redefinition resulted in the misclassification of two diners? The diner who ate 18 ounces of food was actually provided with a small plate (say, 8.1 inches in diameter), and the diner who ate only 4 ounces was actually provided with a large plate (say, 10.9 inches in diameter).

Let’s do the numbers once again under this assumption. Four (rather than three) diners were provided with small plates, and they consumed 9, 11, 10 and 18 ounces of food, for an average of 12 ounces. Two (rather than four) diners were provided with medium-size plates, and they consumed 7 and 15 ounces of food, for an average of 11 ounces. Four (rather than two) were provided with large plates, and they consumed 4, 13, 11 and 12 ounces of food, for an average of 10 ounces.

Spot the trend? As the plate sizes increased from small to medium to large, the average
amount consumed decreased from 12 to 11 to 10 ounces. Aha, a nice result! Moreover, small samples are not the problem here. A large number of data points make this sleight of hand even easier because it provides more opportunity to fiddle with the categories. Anyone for sunspot intensity or Super Bowl outcomes?

Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine

Exposure to the chemicals in everyday objects poses a hidden health threat

Toxins All around Us

Susan starts her day by jogging to the edge of town, cutting back through a cornfield for an herbal tea at the downtown Starbucks and heading home for a shower. It sounds like a healthy morning routine, but Susan is in fact exposing herself to a rogue’s gallery of chemicals: pesticides and herbicides on the corn, plasticizers in her tea cup, and the wide array of ingredients used to perfume her soap and enhance the performance of her shampoo and moisturizer. Most of these exposures are so low as to be considered trivial, but they are not trivial at all—especially considering that Susan is six weeks pregnant.

Scientists have become increasingly worried that even extremely low levels of some environmental contaminants may have significant damaging effects on our bodies—and that fetuses are particularly vulnerable to such assaults. Some of the chemicals that are all around us have the ability to interfere with our endocrine systems, which regulate the hormones that control our weight, our biorhythms and our reproduction. Synthetic hormones are used clinically to prevent pregnancy, control insulin levels in diabetics, compensate for a deficient thyroid gland and alleviate menopausal symptoms. You wouldn’t think of taking these drugs without a prescription, but we unwittingly do something similar every day. An increasing number of clinicians and scientists are becoming convinced that these chemical exposures contribute to obesity, endometriosis, diabetes, autism, allergies, cancer and other diseases. Laboratory studies—mainly in mice but sometimes in human subjects— have demonstrated that low levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals induce subtle changes in the developing fetus that have profound health effects in adulthood and even on subsequent generations. The chemicals an expecting mother takes into her body during the course of a typical day may affect her children and her grandchildren.

This isn’t just a lab experiment: we have lived it. Many of us born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were exposed in utero to diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a synthetic estrogen prescribed to pregnant women in a mistaken attempt to prevent miscarriage. An article in the June issue of the New England Journal of Medicine called the lessons learned about the effects of fetal human exposures to DES on adult disease “powerful.”

In the U.S., two federal agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, are responsible for banning dangerous chemicals and making sure that chemicals in our food and drugs have been thoroughly tested. Scientists and clinicians across diverse disciplines are concerned that the efforts of the EPA and the FDA are insufficient in the face of the complex cocktail of chemicals in our environment. Updating a proposal from last year, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced legislation this year to create the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011. If enacted, chemical companies would be required to demonstrate the safety of their products before marketing them. This is perfectly logical, but it calls for a suitable screening-and-testing program for endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The need for such tests has been recognized for more than a decade, but no one has yet devised a sound testing protocol.

Regulators also cannot interpret the mounting evidence from laboratory studies, many of which use techniques and methods of analysis that weren’t even dreamed of when toxicology testing protocols were developed in the 1950s. It’s like providing a horse breeder with genetic sequence data for five stallions and asking him or her to pick the best horse. Interpreting the data would require a broad range of clinical and scientific experience.

That’s why professional societies representing more than 40,000 scientists wrote a letter to the FDA and EPA offering their expertise. The agencies should take them up on it. Academic scientists and clinicians need a place at the table with government and industry scientists. We owe it to mothers everywhere, who want to give their babies the best possible chance of growing into healthy adults.

Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine

Can people ever lose their fingerprints?

Fingerprints can indeed be removed, both intentionally and unintentionally. The May 2009 issue of the Annals of Oncology reported (online) a striking example of the latter case: a 62-year-old man from Singapore was detained while traveling to the U.S. because a routine fingerprint scan showed that he actually had none.

The man, identified only as Mr. S, had been taking the chemotherapy drug capecitabine (brand name Xeloda) to keep head and neck cancer in check. The medication gave him a moderate case of hand-foot syndrome (also called chemotherapy-induced acral erythema), which can cause swelling, pain and peeling on the palms and soles of the feet—and, apparently, loss of fingerprints. Mr. S, who was freed when officials decided he was not a security risk, says he had not noticed that his fingerprints had vanished before he set out on his trip. After the incident, Mr. S’s physician, who authored the paper, found informal online mentions of other chemo patients complaining of lost fingerprints.

Edward P. Richards, director of the Program in Law, Science and Public Health at Louisiana State University, says that other diseases, rashes and the like can have the same effect. “Just a good case of poison ivy would do it.” But he observes that “left alone, your skin replaces at a fairly good rate, so unless you’ve done permanent damage to the tissue, it will regenerate.”

Kasey Wertheim, who is president of Complete Consultants Worldwide and has done forensic and biometric work for the U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin, says that the people who most often lose their fingerprints seem to be bricklayers, who wear down print ridges handling rough, heavy materials, as well as “people who work with lime [calcium oxide], because it’s really basic and dissolves the layers of the skin.” Secretaries may also have their prints obliterated, he adds, “because they deal with paper all day. The constant handling of paper tends to wear down the ridge detail.”

“Also,” Wertheim, notes, “the elasticity of skin decreases with age, so a lot of senior citizens have prints that are difficult to capture. The ridges get thicker; the height between the top of the ridge and the bottom of the furrow gets narrow, so there’s less prominence.” Burning—with heat or chemicals—can blot out fingerprints as well, but then the resulting scars can become a unique identifier.

Wertheim says that many cases of intentional fingerprint mutilation have been documented. Usually in these instances, people damage the layer of skin that forms the “template” for the fingerprint and the epidermis at the surface.

The first case of documented fingerprint mutilation, he points out, was back in 1934, by Theodore “Handsome Jack” Klutas, who was head of a gang known as the College Kidnappers. “When the police finally caught up with him, Klutas went for his gun, and the police returned fire, killing him,” Wertheim recounts. “When they compared his postmortem fingerprints, police found that each of his prints had been cut by a knife, resulting in semicircular scars around each fingerprint. Although he was glorified in the media, it was an amateur job; the procedure left more than enough ridge detail to identify him.”

Source of Information :  Scientific American Magazine February 2010

Hearing with Skin

Saying words such as punt, tackle and kick produces a puff of air that helps the listener distinguish words with similar letter sounds, even though the puffs are so subtle that they go unnoticed. Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia set out to determine if these puffs enhance auditory perception. They had 66 participants listen to recorded sounds while receiving light, imperceptible bursts of air from thin tubes placed either over their hand or neck or in their ear.

In some cases, puffs came with the appropriate sounds (“pa” and “ta”), at other times not (“ba” and “da”). Without any puffs, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when heard with an accompanying air puff over the hand or neck. No improvement took place, however, when an air puff went into the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.

The opposite effect occurred when the volunteers received a puff with the inappropriate sounds “ba” and “da”: the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds came with puffs. The researchers described their work, which might lead to improved hearing aids, in the November 26 Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

Source of Information :  Scientific American Magazine February 2010

Testosterone-Fueled Sociability

Do those with more testosterone coursing through their bodies make riskier, more aggressive decisions? To test the popular idea, researchers from Switzerland and the U.K. gave 121 women either 0.5 milligram of the hormone or a placebo and had them play an ultimatum bargaining game in pairs. With real money on the line, one player of the pair had to propose how to split the funds. The other player could reject the offer if she thought it unfair—and if the game ended in a stalemate, no money was distributed.

Given the common wisdom about testosterone, the players who had gotten the testosterone boost should be more likely to take a riskier, more antisocial approach and make a lowball offer in an effort to keep more of the pot. The behavior of the test subjects, however, did not confirm the stereotypes, according to results published online December 8 by Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). Those who had received testosterone actually made higher offers than those who had gotten the placebo.

Evidently, the testosterone-fueled proposals reduced bargaining conflicts and facilitated the exchange. Those with more of the hormone may have been acting out of a desire to maintain their images by avoiding rejection. The results do not necessarily mean that testosterone has no role in complicating social negotiations, but such a contribution is likely to be more complex than previously thought.

Foods That Increase Testosterone

Source of Information :  Scientific American Magazine February 2010

A Universal Course for Dealing with Death

Legions of mental and medical health professionals who work with the elderly memorize this acronym: DABDA. It stands for the five stages of coping with death popularized by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the late 1960s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages describe a sequence of transitions that all people supposedly pass through on finding out they are about to die. According to Kübler-Ross, when we learn of our impending demise, we first tell ourselves it is not happening (denial), then become angry at the realization that it actually is (anger), next search in vain for a way to postpone the death, perhaps until we can accomplish a desired goal (bargaining), later become sad as the awareness that we are dying sets in (depression), and finally come to grips with our inevitable demise and accept it with equanimity (acceptance).

Many medical, nursing and social work students in North America and Britain learn about Kübler-Ross’s stages as part of their professional training. These stages also pervade our culture and now extend beyond death in the popular mind-set to the psychological processing of grief from any significant disappointment. In the sitcom Frasier, the main character passes through all five stages of grief after losing his job as a radio talk-show psychologist. And in The Simpsons, Homer experiences the same sequence of emotions in a matter of seconds after a doctor informs him (erroneously) that he is dying.

Despite its popularity, Kübler-Ross’s theory is surprisingly devoid of scientific support. Studies reveal that many dying patients skip one or more Kübler-Ross stages or even pass through the stages in reverse order. For example, some people initially accept their own deaths but enter denial later. Nor does research bear out the validity for these stages for grief. Not all people experience depression or marked distress after the loss of loved ones, including partners or family members to whom they were deeply attached, according to research by Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno and his colleagues. Moreover, in a 2007 study of 233 Connecticut residents who had recently lost a spouse, acceptance, not denial, was the predominant initial reaction following loss. Kübler-Ross stages may be appealing because they offer a sense of predictability over an event that is out of our control. The idea that the frightening experience of death can be boiled down to a set series of defined stages that culminate in tranquility is reassuring. In truth, however, the process of dying does not follow the same path for all of us, no more than does the process of living. We can all be fooled by psychomythology, because so many of its falsehoods dovetail with our intuitions, hunches and experiences. Thus, scrutinizing popular psychology claims can provide a new window onto our mental worlds and enable us to make better life decisions. As paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould reminded us, debunking a myth necessarily unveils an underlying truth, thereby allowing us to attune our expectations more squarely with reality. In this way, taking on psychomythology, example by example, can transform us into better informed and educated citizens.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

Older and Sadder

Think of someone who is depressed, cantankerous, lonely, sexually inactive and forgetful. Did an elderly person come to mind? In one survey, 65 percent of psychology students agreed that “most older people are lonely and isolated,” and in another survey, 64 percent of medical students agreed that “major depression is more prevalent among the elderly than among younger persons.” Exposure to dubious media depictions of the aged begins early in life. In a study of Disney children’s films, investigators found that 42 percent of elderly characters are portrayed in a less than positive light and as forgetful or crotchety.
Such unflattering renderings also pervade films aimed at adolescents. In a study of popular teen movies, most elderly characters exhibited some negative characteristics, and a fifth fulfilled only off-putting stereotypes.

Contradicting these representations, one research team surveyed adults between the ages of 21 and 40 or older than 60 about their own happiness as well as about their assessment of the happiness of the average person at their current age, aged 30 and aged 70. Young adults predicted that people would become less happy as they got older. Yet older adults were actually happier than younger respondents. Population-based surveys reveal that rates of depression are highest in those between the ages of 25 and 45 and that the happiest group overall is men aged 65 and older. Happiness increases through the late 60s and perhaps even 70s. In one study of 28,000 Americans, a third of 88-year-olds reported being “very happy,” and the happiest individuals surveyed were the oldest. Indeed, the odds of being happy increased 5 percent with every decade Interestingly, research by Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen demonstrates that compared with younger people, older people are more likely to recall positive than negative information, perhaps accounting partly for their often surprisingly rosy outlook on life. Older people are not generally lacking in sexual desire either. In a national survey, more than three quarters of men aged 75 to 85 and half of their female counterparts reported interest in sex.

Moreover, 73 percent of people between the ages of 57 and 64 were sexually active, as were 53 percent of those 64 to 74 years old. Among 75- to 85-year-olds, 26 percent said they were sexually active. Finally, cognitive abilities do not fade dramatically with age. We do experience some memory loss as the years pass, especially minor forgetfulness and difficulty retrieving words while speaking. Our ability to manipulate numbers, objects and images may also decline some in our later years. But even at age 80, in the absence of serious illness affecting the brain, general intelligence and verbal abilities are not much worse than they were decades earlier. Furthermore, research on creative accomplishments indicates that in some disciplines, such as history or fiction writing, many people produce their best work in their 50s or even decades later. Thus, to tweak an old saying, “You can teach an old dog new tricks … and a lot more.”

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

One Drink, One Drunk

Can ex-alcoholics eventually drink in moderation without succumbing to their old addiction? One survey of more than 3,000 people reveals that only 29 percent of Americans think they can. This perception dovetails with the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) slogan, “One drink, one drunk.” AA’s familiar 12-step program encourages members to admit that they are powerless over alcohol. Treatment programs premised on the 12 steps boast recovery rates as high as 85 percent. But here’s the rub: as many as two thirds of drinkers drop out within three months of joining AA, and AA helps only about a fifth of people abstain completely from alcohol. Claims that some people with a history of alcoholism can safely engage in “controlled drinking” have generated a firestorm of controversy. Yet a 2001– 2002 National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism survey of more than 40,000 adults revealed that 18 percent of one-time alcoholics could drink in moderation without abusing alcohol, challenging the popular assumption that abstinence is a necessary goal for all alcoholics.

Further, researchers have found that behavioral self-control training programs, in which moderate drinking is the goal, are at least as effective as those that use the 12-step method. In these restraint-centered programs, therapists train people to monitor their drinking, set limits for their alcohol consumption, control their rate of drinking and reward their progress. These programs also teach coping skills that help participants “wait out” the urge to drink and to avoid situations that tempt them to drink. Such tactics do not work for everyone. Studies suggest that if individuals are severely dependent on alcohol, have a long history of unhealthy drinking, and experience physical and psychological problems from drinking, they are probably best off seeking treatment programs that advocate abstinence. Nevertheless controlled drinking is probably a feasible goal for some ex-alcoholics. Indeed, problem drinkers may seek help earlier if they know that complete abstinence from alcohol is not the only alternative. Indeed, controlled drinking may be especially worth considering for patients for whom abstinence-oriented programs have repeatedly failed to work.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

Positive Thinking Cures Cancer

In the book 9 Steps for Reversing or Preventing Cancer and Other Diseases (Career Press, 2004), Shivani Goodman argues that her cancer was the product of negative thought patterns—in this case, her subconscious rejection of being a woman. Once she identified her toxic attitudes, Goodman claims, she changed them into healing approaches that created “radiant health.” Numerous selfhelp books similarly imply that a positive attitude can stop cancer in its tracks or at least slow its progression.

Most women who have survived cancer seem to agree. According to surveys,
40 to 65 percent of survivors believe their cancers were caused by stress, and between 60 and 94 percent think they became cancer-free because of their positive attitude.

The weight of the evidence, however, fails to support the notion that optimism is a salve for cancer. Most studies find no connection between cancer risk and either stress or emotions. In fact, in several investigations, researchers observed a lower risk of breast cancer among women who experienced relatively high stress in their jobs, compared with women who experienced relatively low job stress. Scientists have also consistently failed to turn up an association between positive attitude and cancer survival.

For such reasons, journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich adopts a decidedly skeptical stance on the power of mind-set over healing in her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books, 2009). Further, Ehrenreich rails against the “cancer culture” that pressures people with cancer to believe that being upbeat and cheerful will heal them or at least ennoble them as human beings. Instead Ehrenreich urges people with breast cancer to adopt an attitude of “vigilant realism” and not to bury themselves under a cosmetic veil of cheer. The impotence of a positive outlook in the face of physical ailments calls into question the medical value of support groups and the emotional assistance they provide. Early preliminary studies seemed to suggest that participating in such groups helps to prolong life. But more recent and scientifically solid research, reviewed by University of Pennsylvania psychologist James Coyne and his colleagues, showed that psychological interventions (including support groups) do not extend the lives of cancer patients, although they can enhance their quality of life. People with cancer can relieve their physical and emotional burdens by seeking quality medical and psychological care, connecting with friends and family, and finding meaning and purpose in every moment. They can also take comfort in the now well-established finding that their attitudes, emotions and stressful experiences are not to blame for their illness.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

Different Strokes for Different Pupils

In the story “Parents of Nasal Learners Demand Odor-Based Curriculum,” writers at the satirical newspaper The Onion poked fun at the idea that a teaching style exists to unlock every underperforming student’s latent potential. An expert quoted in the story observed that “nasal learners often have difficulty concentrating and dislike doing homework. . . . If your child fits this description, I would strongly urge you to get him or her tested for a possible nasal orientation.”

Plug the words “learning styles” into an Internet search engine, and you’ll find scores of Web sites purporting to diagnose your preferred learning style in a matter of minutes. These sites are premised on a widely accepted claim: students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles. The popularity of this view is understandable. Rather than implying that some students are better or worse learners overall, it suggests that all students can learn well, perhaps equally well, given just the right teaching style. This idea has become a truism in much of recent educational theory and practice. It has been extolled in many popular books and in workshops that attract hundreds of teachers and principals. In some schools, teachers have even started giving children T-shirts emblazoned with one of the letters V, A and K, which stand for three widely accepted learning styles: visual, auditory and kinesthetic.

Yet studies show that students’ learning styles are difficult to reliably identify, largely because they often differ greatly across situations. A child might display one style in art class, say, and a different one when trying to learn math.

Moreover, from the 1970s onward, most investigations have failed to show that matching teaching styles to learning styles works: for example, it does not improve students’ grades in most cases. Instead certain general teaching approaches— such as setting high expectations for students and providing them with the motivation and skills to attain them— usually yield better results than other strategies, regardless of students’ learning styles.

To the extent that the “matching” approach encourages educators to teach to students’ intellectual strengths rather than their weaknesses, it may actually backfire. In the long run, students need to learn to compensate for their shortcomings, not avoid them.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

Blowing Our Tops Defuses Anger

People often opine that releasing anger is healthier than bottling it up. In one survey, 66 percent of university undergraduates agreed that expressing pentup anger is a good way of tamping down aggression. This belief dates back at least to Aristotle, who observed that viewing tragic plays affords the opportunity for catharsis, a cleansing of anger and other negative emotions. Popular media also assure us that anger is a monster we must tame by “letting off steam,” “blowing our top” and “getting things off our chest.” In the
2003 movie Anger Management, the meek hero (played by Adam Sandler) is falsely accused of “air rage” on a flight, causing a judge to order him to attend an anger management group run by psychiatrist Buddy Rydell (played by Jack Nicholson). At Rydell’s suggestion, Sandler’s character tosses dodgeballs at schoolchildren and throws golf clubs to purge his anger.

Rydell’s advice echoes the counsel of many self-help authors. One suggested that rather than “holding in poisonous anger,” it is better to “punch a pillow or a punching bag. And while you do it, yell and curse and moan and holler.” Some popular therapies encourage clients to scream, hit pillows or throw balls against walls when they get angry. Practitioners of Arthur Janov’s “primal therapy,” popularly called primal scream therapy, believe that psychologically disturbed adults must bellow at the top of their lungs or somehow otherwise release the emotional pain stemming either from the trauma of birth or from childhood neglect or suffering.

Yet more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger actually amplifies aggression. In one study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them became more critical of that person than did their counterparts who did not pound nails. Other research shows that playing aggressive sports, such as football, actually boosts self-reported hostility. And a review of 35 studies by psychologist Craig Anderson of Iowa State University and psychologist Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor suggests that playing violent video games such as Manhunt, in which participants rate assassinations on a five-point scale, heightens aggression in the laboratory and in everyday social situations.

Psychologist Jill Littrell of Georgia State University concludes from a published review of the literature that expressing anger is helpful only when accompanied by constructive problem solving or communication designed to reduce frustration or address the immediate source of the anger. So if we are upset with our partner for repeatedly ignoring our feelings, shouting at him or her is unlikely to make us feel better, let alone improve the situation. But calmly and assertively expressing our resentment (“I realize you probably aren’t being insensitive on purpose, but when you act that way, I don’t feel close to you”) can often take the sting out of anger.

Why is this myth so popular? People probably attribute the fact that they feel better after expressing anger to catharsis, rather than to the anger subsiding on its own, which it almost always does. Odds are, they would have felt better if they had merely waited out their anger.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

Programs of Persuasion

Psychologist Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University has spent his entire career observing influence techniques not just in the lab but also in the real world. Cialdini has published his conclusions in a book, Influence: Science and Practice, fifth edition (Allyn & Bacon, 2008), where he identifies six core principles of social influence—all of which, he argues, have evolutionary underpinnings reaching far back into our ancestral history.

These core principles are as follows:

1. Reciprocity—we feel obligated to return favors.

2. Liking—we have a tendency to say yes to people whom we like.

3. Scarcity—we place more value on things that are in short supply.

4. Social proof—we look at what others are doing when we’re not sure what to do ourselves.

5. Authority—we listen to experts and those in positions of power.

6. Commitment and consistency—we like to be true to our word and finish what we’ve started.

All of these principles tap (somewhat self-evidently given their evolutionary origins), one way or another, into issues of primeval survival—issues that in the 21st century are perhaps recapitulated a little more often than we think. What will happen if I don’t fill up with gas? we mutter to ourselves in a fuel crisis (scarcity). Or at dinner: everyone else is using that funny-shaped spoon with the hook, so it’s got to be right. Right? (Social proof.) Because of this evolutionary lineage and of the strategies’ explicit connection to ostensibly individual reward systems, they are all subsumed within the supersuasion model under the broader, more generic principle of perceived self-interest.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - Empathy

In the summer of 1941 Sergeant James Allen Ward was awarded a Victoria Cross for bravery for clambering onto the wing of his Wellington bomber and, while flying 13,000 feet above the North Sea, extinguishing a fire in the starboard engine. He was secured, at the time, by just a single rope tied around his waist. Some time later Winston Churchill summoned the shy and swashbuckling New Zealander to Number 10 Downing Street to congratulate him on his exploits. They got off to a shaky start. The fearless, daredevil airman, tongue-tied in the presence of the prime minister, was completely unable to field even the simplest of questions put to him. Churchill tried something different. “You must feel very humble and awkward in my presence,” he began. “Yes, sir,” replied Ward. “I do.” “Then you can imagine,” Churchill said, “how humble and awkward I feel in yours.”

A brilliant double stroke of empathy—feeling the discomfort of his visitor and recasting it as though begging for the visitor to feel his—showed Churchill at his most disarming and persuasive. A warm, empathetic style will often convince people of your best intentions and bring them onboard. Empathy has been shown to be important in the doctor-patient relationship, in which physicians have to convince patients that they care about them and have their best interests at heart. This tactic not only makes for good medicine, it also has been shown to protect doctors from malpractice lawsuits.

In 2002 Nalini Ambady, now a professor of psychology at Tufts University, divided physicians into two groups: those who’d been dragged through the court and those who hadn’t. She made audiotapes of the doctors and their patients in session and then played the tapes to a group of students. The students were asked to determine which doctors had been sued. But there was a catch. For each of the recordings the output was “content-filtered.” All the students could hear was prosody: muffled, low-frequency garble, as if they were listening underwater. How, linguistically, would the doctors measure up? Could the students, on the basis of intonation alone, somehow distinguish one group from another? The results were unequivocal: they could tell them a mile off. The doctors who had been sued sounded way more self-important. They had a dominant, hostile, less empathic conversational style—whereas those who had not been sued sounded warmer. Forgive and forget? Live and let live? Only, it seems, if I like you.

The position of incongruity at the center of the SPICE model reflects its centrality to the idea of supersuasion. From calming someone down to raising someone’s spirits, from closing the deal to trying to bum a quarter from strangers on the street, defiance of expectation, script reversal, antithesis—call it what you will—lies at the very heart of supersuasion. Not only does incongruity enhance the aesthetic prowess of simplicity, it also knocks out the brain’s surveillance mechanisms and thereby enables the rest of the SPICE task force to secretly slip in under the radar and hotwire our neural pleasure centers.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - Confidence

Confidence, misplaced or otherwise, is catching. It’s a privileged, though sometimes precarious, condition, fiercely independent of reality, that’s transmitted sub-radar from one individual to another via language, belief and appearance. It’s why con men enjoy their appellation, and why McDonald’s and Nike bring out ads that declare “Just Do It” and “I’m Loving It,” as opposed to ads that say “I’m Thinking about It” or “I Kind of Like It.” Influence without confidence is about as useful as an inflatable dartboard.

Our reliance on confidence to help divine correctness— our deployment, that is, of a confidence heuristic—has been demonstrated in the lab. In 2008 Hilke Plassman, now associate professor of marketing at INSEAD Business School near Paris, sneakily switched the price tags on bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. For some it was valued at $10, for others at $90.

Would the difference in price be reflected in a difference in taste? It sure would. Volunteers rated the $90 bottle considerably more drinkable than the $10 bottle—even though both bottles, unbeknownst to them, contained exactly the same wine. And that wasn’t all. Subsequently, during a functional MRI scan Plassman found that this simple sleight of mind was actually reflected anatomically, in neural activity deep within the brain. Not only did the “cheaper” wine taste cheaper and the “dearer” one, well, dearer; the supposedly more expensive wine generated increased activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that responds to pleasurable experiences.

Similar results have also been found with experts. In 2001 cognitive psychologist Frédéric Brochet, then at the oenology research and teaching unit at the University of Bordeaux in France, took a midrange Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One was a labeled as a splendid grand cru, the other as a vin du table. Would the wine buffs smell a rat? Not a chance. Despite the fact that, just as in the Plassman study, they were actually being served the same vintage, the experts appraised the different bottles differently.

The grand cru was described as “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” whereas the vin du table was evaluated less salubriously—as “weak, short, light, flat and faulty.” Confidence is a wormhole into truth. In ambiguous, dynamic or fluid situations, not only does it have the right air—it also has the air of being right.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - Fetal Attraction

Let’s say you found a wallet on the street. What would you do? Take it to the nearest police station? Mail it back to the owner? Keep it? The answer, it emerges, depends less on a question of individual morality and a great deal more on our collective evolutionary heritage. In 2009 psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in England left a bunch of wallets on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, each of which contained one of four photographs: a happy family, a cute puppy, an elderly couple and a smiling baby. Which ones, he wondered, would be most likely to find their way home? There was no doubting the outcome: 88 percent of the wallets containing the picture of the smiling baby were returned, beating all the others out of sight. The result, according to Wiseman, is not surprising. “The baby kicks off a caring feeling in people,” he says, a nurturing instinct toward vulnerable infants that has evolved to safeguard the survival of future generations.

In 2009 Melanie Glocker of the Institute of Neural and Behavioral Biology at the University of Muenster in Germany flashed pictures of newborns to a group of childless women while they underwent functional MRI. Using a special imageediting program, Glocker manipulated the pictures so that some of the infant faces incorporated higher “baby schema” values (large, round eyes; round, chubby face) whereas some had lower values (smaller eyes; narrower face). It wasn’t just the program that was eye-opening. Results revealed that the faces with higher baby schema values precipitated an increase in activity not just in the amygdale (the brain’s emotional control tower) but also in the nucleus accumbens, a key structure of the mesocorticolimbic system that mediates reward. Similar findings to Glocker’s have also been demonstrated acoustically. Kerstin Sander of the Leibnitz Institute for Neurobiology in Germany compared amygdala responses to infants and adults crying and discovered something extraordinary: a 900 percent increase for babies. Additional research has taken things one stage further and revealed that although preverbal infant vocalizations do indeed increase amygdala activation, it is sudden and unexpected changes in crying pitch that convey the most emotion—further support for the role of incongruity in supersuasion.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - Incongruity

The persuasive power of humor is second to none. If someone can make you laugh while trying to change your mind, chances are they’re on to a winner. Not long ago in London, I walked past a homeless man selling a copy of the magazine the Big Issue, the proceeds of which go toward helping those living on the street. “Free delivery within 10 feet!” he called out. I bought one on the spot. Precisely why humor is so powerful an influencer is an interesting question. The answer lies in one of its key ingredients, incongruity. The best jokes are the ones we don’t see coming, and because we don’t see them coming, they violate expectation.

Our brains do a double take. And in that fraction of a second, while their backs, so to speak, are turned, our brains are open to suggestion. The neurology of incongruity—what happens inside the brain as it is doing a double take—is well documented. Single cell recordings in monkeys show that the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, is more sensitive to unexpected than expected presentations of both positive and negative stimuli. In humans, intracranial EEG recordings reveal increased activation in both the amygdala and the temporoparietal junction, a structure involved in novelty detection, on exposure to unusual events. Such findings confirm that incongruity not only gains our attention (a crucial component of any effective persuasion—just ask the guy in business class who complained about his dinner) but that it also lobs a stun grenade between our ears. It disables cognitive functioning and compromises, for a brief but critical time window, our neural homeland security.

Yet incongruity isn’t just about distraction. It’s also about reframing—as a study by social psychologist David Strohmetz and his co-authors at Monmouth University demonstrated rather fiendishly in 2002. The study in question was conducted in a restaurant, and Strohmetz began by dividing diners up into three groups, according to how many candies the waiter handed out with the check. To one group of diners the waiter gave one candy. To another, he gave two. And to the third—and this is where it gets interesting—he did the following. First he gave out one candy and then walked away . . . then turned back around, as if he had changed his mind, and added another. So one group got one candy. And two groups got two. But the two who got two were given them in different ways. (I hope you’re paying attention—there’s a test later.)

Did the number of candies and the manner in which they were allocated bear any relation to tip size? You bet it did. Compared with a control group of diners who got no candies at all (charming), those who got one tipped, on average, 3.3 percent higher. Similarly, those who got two candies tipped 14.1 percent higher. But the biggest increase was shown by those who received first one candy, then another—a biblical escalation of philanthropic zeal 23 percent greater than their uncandied brethren. That unexpected change of heart completely reframed the situation. It instigated a whole new way of appraising the interaction. He’s giving us special treatment, the diners thought to themselves. Let’s give him something back.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - The Persuasion Instinct

“You looking at my girl?” How many times has that particular question drawn an evening out to a close? Not so with elephants. During the mating season young male elephants, when they inadvertently encroach on females in estrus, give off what is known as an innocent scent, an olfactory signal to adult bull elephants that they are going to toe the line. How many times have houseguests outstayed their welcome, because despite all your hints they somehow just didn’t get that it was time to go? Not so with the thorny acacia tree of Central Africa. When insects start feeding on the thorny acacia too greedily, it produces a toxin that turns Michelin-starred leaves into pig swill. Not only that, it also gives off an odor, warning nearby acacias to put up the shutters themselves: an arboreal, chemical Twitter that there’s a freeloader doing the rounds. Examples such as these provide a pretty good flavor of how persuasion works in the animal kingdom. And it leaves what we humans do in the dust. There are no mixed messages, no beating around the bush (unless that bush happens to belong to a cassowary in which case the phrase takes on a different, more ominous meaning) and no sitting down over coffee to talk about it. Instead, in the absence of consciousness and those ephemeral containers of meaning we call words, animals rely on what ethologists call key stimuli: environmental triggers (such as the innocent scent in elephants and the not so innocent scent in acacias) that initiate, when they are activated, instinctive behavioral responses.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010

The Power to Persuade - Perceived Self-Interest

Several million years ago, when social networking was even more important than Facebook and Twitter are today, the facility to be true to one’s word, and to return favors accordingly, was synonymous with group cohesion. With individual cohesion, too: in the days before welfare and pest control, being ostracized was fatal.

But old evolutionary habits die hard—and the spectral remnants of exigencies past hover like neural phantoms on the dark, primeval stairwells of the brain. Take loyalty cards, for example. In 2006 psychologists Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze of the Wharton School of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania presented the patrons of a car wash with two different types of voucher—each of which, when completed, entitled the beneficiary to a free visit. In both cases, eight stamps (corresponding to eight visits) were required to redeem the offer. But the vouchers differed from each other in one important feature. One consisted of eight blank circles, whereas the other consisted of 10, with the first two circles already voided out. Which of the vouchers do you think proved the more effective? You got it—the one with the first two stamps thrown in ostensibly “for free.” Of the customers given the 10-circle voucher, 34 percent fulfilled the promotional requirements and returned to the garage the stipulated eight times to claim their free car wash, compared with just 19 percent of the customers who weren’t on the empirical fast track. Even though the offer was exactly the same for both groups—customers had to visit the car wash on eight occasions to earn their freebie—those initial two tokens created a powerful illusion: not only of something for nothing (a gesture of corporate goodwill triggering reciprocity) but also of client commitment.

On receiving the vouchers that apparently gave them a two-point lead, customers thought to themselves: “Hey, I’m a fifth of the way there already. I might as well keep going.” And so they were far more likely to continue with the scheme than those who had started supposedly from scratch. This voucher trick is all about the art of framing— the presentation of information in a way that maximizes positive outcomes. And framing isn’t just confined to advertising. Politicians do it. Attorneys do it. We all do it. The key, as a persuader, is to present things in such a way that they appear to be not in your own best interests—but in those of whom you’re trying to influence. Take, for example, the story of King Louis XI of France, a staunch believer in astrology.

When a courtier correctly predicted the death of a member of his imperial household, the king worried that having such a powerful seer in his court might pose a threat to his authority. He summoned the man, planning to have him thrown to his death from a window ledge. But first he addressed him gravely. “You claim to be able to interpret the heavens,” King Louis said, “and to know the fate of others So tell me: What fate will befall you, and how long do you have to live?”

The oracle thought carefully for a moment. Then he smiled. “I shall meet my end,” he replied, “just three days before Your Majesty meets his.” A perfect, if apocryphal, example of the courtier using perceived self-interest on the king’s part as a way to save his own life.

Source of Information : Scientific American Mind March-April 2010