Psych-Out

Nature loves deception.  She weaves camouflage.  Encourages disguise.  Elaborate games of hide and seek are played out in rain forests, deserts, and suburban backyards for her creatures to secure mates, food, status, and safety. Everything from orchids, to moths, to we humans.

All of us deceive — big deceptions, little deceptions. Who hasn’t exaggerated a resume, or hidden feelings from a friend, boss, or spouse.  Then there’s the excuse as to why you didn’t get that report in on time.  Try to live a full day of nothing but the truth.  You’d be impossible to your loved ones.  Impossible to yourself.

Biologist Robert Trivers wrote, “One of the most important things to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not systems for the dissemination of the truth.”  Animal signals convey correct information, misinformation, or both.

Nature has given we humans an even more clever deceptive capacity – self-deception.  We not only hide our truths from others, we are masters at hiding it from ourselves.  Biologists consider self-deception an elaboration and improvement in our deceptive abilities.  It provides a much needed check on our self-awareness.

As important as self-awareness is to both our well-being, and getting along with our loved ones, it also has its shadow. Awareness of every single motive, of all the biological/physiological mechanisms and sensory signals bombarding us would paralyze our capacity to act decisively.  We’d never do the things we need to survive, to mate, to improve our lot in life.

It’s dog eat dog out there.  With every attempt to get ahead, there’s a potential rival out there with the intent to get there first, or at least thwart your attempts.  Want that job?  That mate?  Money back on your tax return?

Trivers writes, “Self-deception renders the deception being practiced unconscious to the practitioner, thereby hiding from other individuals the subtle signs of self-knowledge that may give away the deception being practiced.”

We play hide and seek with our own motives.  Like expert investigators, we’ll build a case to support some action — a case that is so convincing that we  can keep even ourselves in the dark about what we’re doing, and why!

We spin stories to deceive others and ourselves, so we can bypass conscience and self-awareness;  so, we can get what we want comfortably. When was the last story you told where you were the villain, and someone else the hero?  How many times in our stories of some misdeed are we the wronged party?

With many of our motives remaining unconsciousness, we are thus better able to hide deception’s signals.  In essence, we increase the probabilities of meeting some need without the telltale signals that accompany our sometimes burdensome awareness. We even create entire belief systems with hidden self-serving biases.

As Triver’s writes, “The more skillfully these self-serving components are hidden from both the self and others, the more difficult it will be to counter them.”

Some common forms of self-deception:

Beneffectance: We all tell our stories as being beneficial and effective. We exaggerate our own role in a beneficial outcome, and minimize our responsibility when things go wrong.

Exaggeration: repeated tales of humanitarian accomplishments grow in the retelling.  Memory can always be counted on to supply the new facts.

Illusion of consistency:  We rewrite past experiences to make them seem consistent with present realities.  Consistency gives the illusion that we make very few mistakes. We even add details to memories to alter new information that may be potentially derogatory.

Perception of relationships: We are altruistic.  It’s someone else who is selfish.

Perceptual defense and perceptual vigilance: We see what we wish to see. We eagerly embrace any information that is self-satisfying.  And, if it’s not? We have built in biases that will make it seem that way.

The best we can do?   Own that we are one of nature’s creatures.  Be honest, about our wonderfully irritating capacity, to tell stories that deceive ourselves as well as deceiving others..
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Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.

Ali accepts Foreman’s blows

“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules.”  Baltasar Gracián

Nothing can be more disarming than restraint in the face of powerful forces you can’t control.  To simply lay against the ropes.  Hold back.  Let the forces around you work themselves out.  Sometimes it means accepting the blows, while protecting yourself in the best way possible until the time is right for you to act.  The right time to make your move.

No one thinks of the courage, strength, and fortitude that restraint requires of us.  Our instincts compel us to act quickly in face of perceived threat or danger.  Push out, quickly.  Fight or flee.  Our evolutionary heritage has wired us with the decision rule, “it’s better to be wrong and act quickly, than to weigh it all out to be accurate.”  In the wilds, the time you take for accuracy, could be the last time you see.  When running from lions, it’s a great strategy.

But what if you’re in the ring and there’s no running, no readily available escape.  And what if to fight, at least at that moment, puts you in even greater jeopardy.  It takes over-riding millions of years of evolutionary programming to lay back, protect yourself, and wait.

On the night of Octoer 20, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, one of the greatest and most cunning fighters ever, Muhammad Ali, came to such a moment.  After the first round, Ali came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t master his opponent, the powerful George Forman, by taking him head on.  He couldn’t out punch him.  Forman was far stronger.  He couldn’t out dance him.  Foreman was far younger, and would endlessly stalk him.  He couldn’t intimidate him.  Foreman was confident and fearless.

Foreman had dominated every opponent who had entered the ring with him.  He’d readily knocked out Joe Fraziar and Ken Norton.  Two boxers who had handed Ali his only losses.

Foreman crushes Joe Frazier

What strategy did Ali come to?  He laid against the ropes and waited.  The famous Rope-a-Dope.  It’s unimaginable to think of the blows Ali suffered for three rounds.  Foreman owned arguably one of the most powerful punches of any boxer in history.  The continuous volley of blows to Ali’s gut and head were punishing, even as Ali did the best he could to protect himself.

But Ali waited.  He waited knowing that eventually Foreman’s force would punch itself out.  All he had to do was survive until that time.

Of course, most of us aren’t boxers in a ring.  But in our day to day there are times when we find ourselves against the ropes with no place to go, and lashing out would make matters even worse.  There are forces around us we can’t seem to control.  Sometimes, the best strategy?   Hold back.  Restraint.

By the 8th round Foreman had punched himself out.  In one of the most amazing moments in boxing history, George Foreman was knocked out.  As the old saying goes, “Time and I can take on any two.”

from When We Were Kings,  Ali masters the beast in Zaire (Watch it!)

Samual Awaking Eli,  George de la Tour

2:48 am.  For no apparent reason, we’ve awakened.  “Four more hours,” we think, then toss to our other side.  If lucky, sleep overtakes us for the rest of the night.  If not, we lay there fretting about the loss of sleep, thus cheating ourselves – not of sleep, but of the wee hours.

Segmented sleep may be more natural to us than a continuous eight hours. In his book At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”

Anthropologist Carol Worthman studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations where artificial light is minimal, if not absent all together.  From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.  Other anthropologists have found that in some African villages, Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, life after midnight is surprisingly lively with newly roused adults and children.

Could it be that there was an evolutionary advantage to segmented sleep?  Life in the open savannas was brimming with nocturnal predators.  Periods of nightly awakening may have been crucial to our survival.

The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. As part of the experiment, he let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted.

By the fourth week, subjects averaged 3-5 hours of solid sleep, followed by an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness.  Then, they returned to sleep for another 3-5 hour sleep period.  Such a pattern of interrupted sleep has been observed in other wild animals.

What did our pre-modern european relatives do during that time of our first awakening, or as some would call it, the watch?  First of all, few of us fretted.  We viewed that time as natural to our nocturnal stirrings.  We’d smoke tobacco.  Tend a fire.  Pray.  Study.   Talk with our bedmate.  Copulate.  Some of us would leave our beds;  some would not.  Benjamin Franklin would take “cold air baths” or sit naked in his chamber and read, or write.

Godfried Schlalcken (1643-1706)

It was a time for magic, for mischief, for light domestic work, or for reflection. This time “twixt sleepe and wake” is semi-conscious.  As Nathaniel Hawthorn insisted in The Haunted Mind, it was a time “where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly present.”  In 1692, the Hammersmith minister John Wade complained it was a time of “unsettled independent thoughts,”  “vain unprofitable musing,”  and “devising mischief.”

Dr. Wehr likens this intermittent period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness with a physiology all its own.  In the wee hours, silence is magnified, our thoughts concoct schemes and plans, we pull together far reaching connections, and our minds seem as if primed for self- reflection.

Maria Magdalena, George de la Tour

Next time you awaken in those wee hours – slip out of bed, wander the darkness of your house, sit in your favorite chair, perhaps light a candle, or brew a cup of tea.  Take out that notebook and draw, or write in your journal.  Soak in the sensibility of that forgotten segment of time lost to our age of time schedules, computer screens, i-phones, 24-hour cable news, and artificial light.  Tell yourself that it’s not a time of lost sleep, but merely the night’s first awakening.

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Read: Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close.  W.W. Norton & Co.  2005.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. This slogan was uttered by Timothy Leary to 30,000 hippies in Golden State Park. It was 1967 — prelude to the Summer of Love. Hippie culture and the language of psychedelia broke from our television sets right into our suburban living rooms.

The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of Silicon. Where once LSD and psilocybin churned the neural circuitry of a few hippie brains, now my entire species is being doused by the continuous humming, buzzing and bleeping of pockets, purses, and hip-holsters alive with electronic gadgetry. Cellphone? Check. Blackberry? Check. I-pod? You betcha!

Plug in, turn up, and tune out suburbia. And suburbia is everywhere.

Now, I’m not a Luddite grinding my axe in anticipation of some anti-technology uprising. But something is unsettling about all this bleeping. As a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed a drastic rise in psychological troubles tied directly to the hows, whens, and whys of technology usage. Whether it be cyber-gaming, cyber-love, endless interruptions of one’s personal life by e-mail, cellphones and text messages, people feel their flesh-and-blood lives have indeed been broken into. One personal friend of mine counted with horror that he’d spent the equivalent of a full seven months out of his year locked inside that 3 by 4 foot space around his computer screen. (And that didn’t include work hours!)

Who needs LSD? We have Youtube.

Age of Aquarius, from electronica

It was Marshall McLuhan who taught us how the form of a medium, more than its content, alters our senses. All of this electric circuitry plugged into our ears and before our eyes has morphed into an extension of our central nervous systems - a kind of technological skin we can now wear to restaurants. We even live our lives and conduct our relationships inside of these gadgets.

How many times have I tried to leave my cell phone at home, or not check my e-mail for the umpteenth time, or avoid plugging into one of the many technological contraptions that I keep around for my comfort and entertainment, only to find myself feeling as if tweaked by a phantom limb. Try it. Notice how long before the panic sets in.

I braced myself. I committed. My cellphone would remain on SILENT. No walking, nor driving when using it - and away from public. I’d portion my e-mail to twice a day. And watch that internet surfing! For the first 36 hours I went through something I can only characterize as withdrawal - anxiety, restlessness, emotional hand-wringing. But once I slipped free from the urgings of my technological skin to graft itself back in, low and behold, it’s as if I’d awakened to my real skin. I came to an eerie sensation that I’d come back into my body.

Beam me back down, Scottie.

Timothy Leary’s slogan didn’t really mean that we should drop out of the world and do a lot of drugs. His urging was that we do what it takes to open our minds to everything in and around us.

Tune in — interact with the world. Externalize, look around.

Turn on — activate your neural and genetic equipment. Access the layers of consciousness that are available by virtue of your human wiring.

Drop out — free yourself from all those unconscious and involuntary commitments not of your choosing. Amen!

We humans evolved over a span of a few million years hunting and gathering within wide-opened African savannas. Our senses evolved to respond to a simpler, yet more physically demanding pleistocene world. We’ve plugged ourselves into all of these comfort-gadgets for only a microsecond in relative time. Our genetic wiring has not adjusted. It’s making us all a little crazy.

Still, technology is not a devil I’ll ever want to exorcise completely, even if I could. These layers of technological devices are woven intricately into my day to day, and I must admit their benefits. No, this is a devil with whom I’ll have to dance. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing on a computer to ever go back.

Besides, where would I stop if gripped by some whack-brained effort to extricate myself completely? The manual typewriter? The quill? Chisel and stone? And how I still love surfing YouTube, and the intimacy of my I-pod where I can saunter down the street shuffling from Sinatra, to Talib Kwali, to Zepplin and Incubus. As for the cell-phone, nothing frees me up more when I need to touch base with my kids or confirm whether it’s chicken breast “with or without the bone.” It’s time for a strategy — for hard fought middle ground.

Marshall McLuhan reminded, “there is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” For me I need stop and think at every point when I have that urge to plug in. It’s to be my new norm, not an exception — to live more hours unplugged than plugged so I not forget the play of the flesh and blood world upon my senses.

What’s that? It’s a real voice. A real set of eyes. A real person un-mediated by some byte of technological wizardry. Everyday I remind myself with this reworked mantra from the Summer of Love, “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Face-to-face eye-gazing.  Remember that?

So when that cell phone rings or that e-mail flags demanding some immediate response? “Sorry, man - you’ll have to improvise. I’m unplugged, right now.”

from “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…

For tens of thousands of years, we humans chased gazelles.  We wove baskets.  We sharpened sticks, chiseled stones, buried our dead with our bare hands.  We ate grasses, seeds, berries and nuts.  And, if our chase was successful, we tore into the succulent flank of that speared gazelle.  We harnessed fire for warmth and protection, and eventually learned to coax it from the earth using sticks, stone and dried grass.   The sight of fire mesmerizes us, still – ancestral memory encoded mysteriously in our DNA.

Intimately, we knew wind, rain, ice, and unbearable heat.  We huddled together under canopies of stars – the wisest among us could see patterns and shapes in the specks of myriad lights to help us navigate where we were and where we were going.  We migrated hundreds of miles by foot, the trip taking weeks, if not years, chasing elk, or sunshine, or rain clouds, or our sixth sense that water was somewhere across that barren plain.  Pools, lakes, rivers and streams were our lifeblood.  Even now the sound of water draws us in – irresistibly.

One zen mondo goes:

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘That is the way.’

Listen to the sound of rushing water

For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in small bands of foragers, gatherers, and hunters amidst wide-opened savannas.  Survival depended upon cunning, group living, and an intimate knowing about the natural world. Steven Pinker wrote, “Life for foragers (including our ancestors) is a camping trip that never ends, but without the space blankets, Swiss Army knives, and freeze-dried pasta al pesto.”  (Pinker, How the Mind Works p.188)  We weren’t the fastest or the strongest.  We had no claws, wings, nor gills.  Instead, we lived in packs of a hundred or so, walked upright, anticipated the future in days, weeks and months, and evolved a miraculous set of hands with their opposable thumbs.

It’s been estimated that our earliest ancestors first sharpened sticks 6 million years ago, first carved stone tools 2-3 million years ago.  We tamed fire 1.8 million years ago.  We adorned our clothes with red ochre 250,000 years ago, painted cave walls 40,000 years ago, and began to domesticate plants and animals a mere 12-15,000 years ago.

Cave painting, Lascaux, France - 15,000 years ago

Our modern age with its artificial light, trains, jetliners, fast food restaurants, tools, plastic containers, guns, bombs, computers, cities of millions — where space per person is measured in feet as opposed to thousands of miles — is less than 1 percent of 1 percent of our time on earth. Its advantages and conveniences are unparalleled in human history. We don’t die of diseases that would have cut short our lives by decades.  We aren’t eaten by predators, or die too soon from the ravages of some unfortunate fall. We can cross the planet in the time it takes to eat three meals, and not have to take one step outside into the snow, rain, or unbearable heat.

Yet, rates of depression tend to be lowest in hunter-gatherer or purely agricultural societies, higher in industrial societies, and highest in societies  in transition.  We are both industrial AND in transition.  (Transition to what, we don’t yet know.)  Our life speed and modern worries are somehow incompatible with the millions of years under which our sensibilities evolved.  Our age has been dubbed the Age of Anxiety for a reason.

The Industrial Society, by Manuel Balea.  (See all his work at Manuel Balea at www.photo.net)

Andrew Solomon wrote in Noonday Demon, “In the wild, animals tend to have momentary awful situations and then to resolve it by surviving or dying.  Except for persistent hunger, there is no chronic stress.  Wild animals do not take on jobs that they regret;  do not force themselves to interact calmly, year after year, with those they dislike;  do not have child custody battles.”  (Solomon,  p.407)

Think of these pleasures from our pleistocene past and their capacity to draw our troubles away, if even for an instant:

A walk in the woods,
Coming upon a vista, or wide opened clearing,
Sitting by a river,
Climbing a tree,
The smell of grass after a summer rain,
Looking up into a starry night,
Staring into a fire,
Napping beneath a tree,
Spotting the track of an animal,
Cupping mud, clay, or fresh soil in the palm of our hands,
Potting, weaving, widdling a stick,
Cracking a nut,
Throwing a rock and watching it sail through the air,
Burying our toes in the sand,
The sight of a wild animal crossing our path,
Suddenly breaking out into a run…

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…

It’s in our animal heritage to size each other up – the guy down the street with the new BMW;  the co-worker who just received the promotion.   Then, there’s your friend who’s wife suddenly up and left.  What’s up with that?

We watch.  We listen.  We exchange stories.  Then, we spin it inside our heads.  Morning, noon, and night our thoughts are abuzz with people. What will he do if I don’t get my report in on time?   How could they pass me over for that ditz, Sara?  What did Michael mean by that remark about me?  The storyline behind it all – how do I measure up?  And why?

We are endowed with a craving for status.  It shows itself in our need to be seen as attractive, successful, well-connected, and smart.  And if we fall short — what’s gone wrong and how do we get there.

Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga observed, “When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares…You think about status.  You think about where you are in relation to your peers.  You’re thinking about your spouse, about your kids, about your boss.  Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent thinking about other people’s thoughts about you, their intentions…” (1)

In his play No Exit, Sartre wrote, “hell is other people.”  No.  Hell is our continual need to compare ourselves with other people.  Compare down, we feel better.  (Poor Joe.  Three kids.  Lost his job.)  Compare up, we feel worse.  (Lakefront property, a new girlfriend half his age, AND a new boat?!)  And unfortunately, most of the time, we compare up.

Animals raise their status by exaggerating their size.  They balloon, bristle, bellow, ruff, and rear. We have symbols of status.  Cars.  Jewelry.  Clothing.  Name-dropping.  Suntans.  Tell the right story, you improve your reputation, or tear down that of a rival.   “Try to look like the people above you;  if your at the top, try to look different from the people below you.”  (Quenton Bell, On Human finery.)  Our versions of ruffs, balloons, and bellows. (2)

“Look at me!  Not only is mine bigger, but I’m just plain better!”

There’s a cost, however.  Think of the peacock’s tail.  It may impresses the peahen, yes.  But, that great fan consumes nutrients, hinders movements, and attracts predators.  Some theorists propose that the display evolved precisely because of its cost.  Only the healthiest animals can afford them.  Like the peacock, our drive for status and reputation consumes energy – emotional energy, financial energy, and psychological energy.

For we humans, just because something’s part of some biological heritage doesn’t mean we have to play the game. Just because Jack down the hall is expending precious energy bellowing, doesn’t mean I have to.  We can ask ourselves is that big truck really worth it?  Does that story the guy is telling about himself have any real meaning to my life? Look around.  Most of our worry about status happens between our ears inside our own heads.   We can often choose not to play certain games that are part of our evolutionary heritage.   As psychologists Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran have pointed out, “our conscious mind may not have free will, but it does certainly have free won’t.”

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(1) Seed. “The Seed Salon: Tom Wolfe & Michael Gazzaniga,” Seed 17 (2008): pgs 41-46.

(2)Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton & C., Inc, 1997.

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).

When was the last time you felt that zing in your step? Sitting in front of a TV devouring a bag of chips? Or, when challenging your strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, or capacity to build or create. It’s in our wiring to run, to lift, to hike, to climb, and work with our hands. Motion thrills us. We can become drenched in a glow of pleasure and satisfaction when we solve complex problems with our bodies.

From our earliest beginnings, we have scavenged, foraged, hunted, and migrated. We’ve populated every climate and terrain — a feat no other species can claim. For tens of thousands of years we beat unfathomable odds — defeating ice, torential rains, droughts, predators, mountain ranges, and raging waterways. How? By flaking stones, hollowing tree trunks, throwing spears, cutting branches, gathering fruits, mending hides, tying knots, and building fires.

We were groomed by natural selection and the forces of nature not only to survive, but to thrive in lands of scarcity, unpredictability, and danger. 2 million years of it. We’ve populated lands as varied as the savanna’s of Africa, the deserts of Arabia, the rain forests of Indochina, the frozen arctic ice scapes of Siberia and Alaska, the vast open plains of the Americas.

Today, however, we can spend months with our only physical challenge being a couple dozen daily walks to and from our refrigerators, cars, and computer screens. We can migrate from Detroit to Hong Kong in a comfortable 72 degrees, never to sweat, freeze, or feel a single raindrop moisten our skin. No one wants to turn back the time and return to the hardship and strife of our ancestors. Yet, has something been lost to us living in a world so stripped of physical challenge?

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has theorized that what we’ve gained in convenience we may have lost in activities that boost psychological resilience. Our brain’s reward circuitry exhibits far more activity when we expend effort to obtain a reward, than when there’s no expenditure of effort at all. Both physical and mental effort strengthens our brain’s reward-pleasure circuitry. Although we crave leisure, we are truly happier when engaging complex challenges.

Our brain’s pleasure/reward circuitry is dependent upon a neurotransmitter called dopamine and its corresponding dopamine receptors. When we exert ourselves in anticipation of that sought-after reward, happy dopamine pours into the system. This neuro-activity is what brings about that feeling of self-satisfaction. When we live a life that requires less and less physical effort, our dopaminergic system shrinks. Our reward circuitry fires less often and with less zing, perhaps making us more prone to depression, anxiety, and day-to-day numbness

You want to give your life a boost? Seek out activities that challenge and engage both your mind and body. Rock climb. Canoe. Garden. Take up pottery, tennis, woodworking, or slight-of-hand magic. Buy a motorcycle and let the wind blow across your face. Baby, we were born to run.

Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run