Psych-Out

Okay, so my son sags his pants. When I was 15, the hem of my raggedy bell-bottoms dragged under my shoes. A dozen fights with horrified mom and dad. A dozen garbage rescues. In all primate species — whether we’re talking about humans, baboons, or macaques– the young are most likely to have the accident doing some foolhardy thing, while their elders shake their heads and cluck “I told you so.”

Ahhhh…those foolhardy skater dudes!

And yet, it’s the young who often push the world forward. Alexander the Great founded his first colony at the age of 16. Joan of Arc led the French army before the age of 20. The Beatles were 17 year old kids when they took the world by storm in 1960 and changed the sound of pop music forever.

1960 Beatles — and we’d never be the same

Something new? It’s not mom and pop who embrace it. It’s the same with all primates. When japanese snow monkeys discovered washing food in seawater, it was the youngsters who picked up the practice. The old folks looked on dumbfounded, if they looked on at all. Have a computer problem? Who would you trust more, the retired accountant across the road, or your 14 year old saggy panted son?

Snow Monkey at play

Some researchers point to the prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to be not yet fully formed in the teen brain. As a result, teens may find it difficult to override certain impulses in face of logic. Researcher Robert Epstein says not so fast. Correlation does not mean causation. According to him, the idea of a teen brain different from an adult brain is “a hoax, pushed to some extent by drug companies who are funding research.” Research in mental functioning has shown that teens are as competent as adults across a wide range of abilities. Studies of intelligence, perceptual abilities and memory function show that teens, in fact, are in many instances far superior to adults.

Paul Anka croons Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”??

One thing for sure, all social primates have evolved a tendency for its youngsters to take off into the wilds and leave the safety of their own group. In chimps it would be the girls. In the Old World monkeys, like baboons, it’s the boys. According to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, “It’s a simple fact driven by genetics and evolution: if everyone stayed on, matured, and reproduced there, and if their kids stayed on, and their kids’ kids too, then ultimately everyone would be pretty closely related.” (Sapolsky p. 78) Genetically, not a good idea.

Still, what’s going on in our primate genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters to make us hit the road? Why would we risk predators, disease, and loneliness? Animals hate novelty. And according to basic behaviorist theories, we tend to do things for which we are rewarded and tend to avoid things for which we get punished. And it’s not that we primates are pushed out. We choose it!

“We don’t know,” Sapolsky admits. “But we do know that following this urge is one of the most resonantly primate of acts. A young male baboon stands riveted at the river’s edge…To hell with logic and sensible behavior, to hell with tradition and respecting your elders, to hell with this drab little town, and to hell with that knot of fear in my stomach.”

Extreme bikers raising the hair on the back of your neck.

So, next time you see a teen with his jeans sagged down to his knees and grinding his skateboard down a handrail, smile and recognize that it’s his version of setting out into the open savanna. He’s following a deep seated urge as old as the hills and programmed somewhere deeply in his other set of genes.

Skateboarder Rodney Mullens — sagged pants and all

“Smells like Teen Spirit” Take 2 — String Quartet Tribute

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Epstein, Robert. “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 18, No. 2 (2007): 57-63.

Sabbagh, Leslie. “The Teen Brain, Hard At Work,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 17, No. 4 (2006): 21-25.

Sapolsky, Robert M. The Trouble With Testosterone. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

Henry Miller photo

“I have no money, no resouces, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Happiness. Even as we chase it, we look upon it with suspicion. In the movie Annie Hall, Alvy (Woody Allen) runs across what looks like a happy couple.

Alvy: You look like a really happy couple? Are you?
Woman: Yeah.
Alvy: Yeah? So, how do you count for it?
Woman: I am very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Man: And I’m exactly the same way.

Happiness is not the domain of idiots, but that of the man/woman willing to throw him or herself into the mix of life’s uncertainties. Yoshida Kenko wrote, “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” If you get what Kenko is saying, then you may be able to grasp what it takes to be happy.

Happiness scrapes against our species’ natural inclination toward dissatisfaction. More food. More money. Sounds good, yet the gratification we feel from more and more only becomes less and less. On the other hand, if you let your guard down and things get bad enough, you can be taken out of the game completely.

from Garden of Earthly Delights (Hell), Hieronymus Bosch

It’s a sad fact of life — bad outcomes outnumber good ones. Loss gathers far more of our attention, than success. Our perceptual and emotional circuitry tends more toward fixating on our problems than celebrating our victories. Our inherent penchant for dissatisfaction is even encoded in our language. There are far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.

If survival is deep inside our genetic programming, then being able to anticipate danger (even if wrong) is the best strategy. Enjoy those figs by the newly found watering hole too long, that saber-tooth tiger might jump out and make that fig your last. Remember, our genes only “care” for our well-being only so much as we can do the things we need to do to survive, mate, and pass those genes on. Feeling good about it all after the fact is incidental.

The good news? We are the only species who can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But happiness takes work. It takes imagination and inner mettle to hold to it. At times, it is grainy and hard-edged, at others graceful and flowing.

Happiness is neither simple nor shallow. It requires a wide lens to navigate the complex, sometimes dismal horizon. The truly happy person owns his choices, without blame, while throwing himself at life in full view of this world’s nastiness, stupidity, and sorrow. She meets her fair share of grief, sadness, and trauma along the way. His ache is no less.

Henry Miller & friend

But one thing that seems to separate out the truly happy from the rest of us is the capacity to see something else beyond the immediate struggle. Within has been cultivated the deep abiding belief that with enough resilience, creativity, and capacity to endure, there is a way through. Happiness requires a refusal to resign oneself in face of whatever dark clouds break the horizon.

“The aim of life is to live, and live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Yes, Mr. Miller. Yes.

Henry Miller. Does this sound like happiest man alive? Perhaps, yes.

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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self: a Psychology for the Third Millennium. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Foster, Rick & Hicks, Greg. How We Choose to be Happy. New York: Perigee Books, 1999.

Wiederman, Michael. “Why It’s So Hard to be Happy,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007): 36-43.

Tarot. Astrology. Mind-reading. Channeling. Make these claims to a magician, and be prepared to dodge his bite. In the magician’s world, psychics are at worst liars, cheats, and swindlers who prey on people’s pain. At best, they are self-deceived charlatans — highly intuitive, perhaps –but gullible to their own trickery. (Watch accompanying videos as much for their entertainment value.)

Illusionist Chriss Angel takes on paranormalist James Callahan. (See James Callahan’s full performance by pressing here.)

The fight is as bitter as that between mongoose and cobra. If you’re a psychic in the company of a magician be prepared for the challenge – “dare to show me your psychic gift and I’ll dare to expose the man behind your curtain.” From Houdini’s challenge to famed spiritualist Mina Crandon, to the Amazing Randi dogging psychic healer Doris Collins. Through misdirection, switching, hypnosis, cold reading, and other forms of trickery, contemporary magicians and illusionists such as Penn & Teller, Chriss Angel, David Blaine, and Derren Brown can make a skeptic out of the most die-hard believer.

Mentalist Derren Brown demonstrates “cold reading” technique (click twice for youtube video)

We are most vulnerable when we are in pain. We will turn anywhere for comfort. Sometimes in spite of ourselves, we will choose to believe the comforting wish, over a crueler truth. The shadow side to our capacity to imagine is that we are prey to illusions and unsubstantiated beliefs. A case can be made, albeit an arguable one, that it’s these very illusions that help us endure through troubled, uncertain times, and sometimes to keep us pushing forward when the odds are clearly against us.

David Blaine turns coffee to money. Better than water to wine?

What we perceive about the world doesn’t have to be accurate, only “good enough.” Good enough so we can feed ourselves, protect ourselves, and mate. Throughout two million years of evolutionary history, survival depended on quick judgments. We sacrificed accuracy for reactions that increased the odds we’d not only save our own skins, but also feel better inside our skins when times were hard, cold, and cruel. It’s better to be wrong and safe, mated, fed, certain, and un-alone, than to strive for accuracy and end up dead.

rotating snake illusion

Sight is powerful to belief, even if what we see isn’t exactly what’s before us. (See some interesting optical illusions.) We don’t always see what’s there, but what we expect to see. Or, we tell ourselves a good story that confirms what we most hope, or most fear.

Moreover, we are not prone to being skeptics about our own beliefs. We are given to snap judgments. We are bad at estimating probabilities. We fail to understand that mysterious coincidences are far more likely than we want to believe. (Did you know that in a room or office of 23 people there’s a 50-50 chance that two of those people will share the same birthday?) We look only to confirm that which we want to believe, not seek the evidence against. One of the hardest things in the world for our minds to do is to look for information that disproves the stories and beliefs from which we draw comfort and strength.

James Randi and psychic Maureen Flynn

The psychic upholds our need for comfort in the thought that there’s a place beyond this world and, indeed, we are not alone. The magician will bring doubt to our beliefs in ghosts, spirits, reading the future in the stars, and then show you the trick — “Anything they can do, I can do and better.” Theirs is a complex, illusory reality filled with trickery, misdirection, and disguises. “Face it,” they seem to say, “you are on your own.”

Penn & Teller’s 7 basic principles of magic

The magician’s challenge is as much toward you and me. Be skeptical of what you see. Look for the man behind the curtain. If you see hoof prints think first of horses, even if you’ve come to believe that unicorns do, in fact, exist. (1)

Astrology? Watch at your own risk. (Click twice for youtube video)
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1) Cognitive scientists and visual neuroscientists are now utilizing magicians and their tricks to study such phenomena as visual tracking, attention, and awareness. Stephen Macknik, Ph.D., director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, and Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience, are working with magicians James Randi (The Amazing Randi), Teller (of Penn & Teller), Apollo Robbins, Mac King and John Thomson (The Great Tomsoni).