Fascinating read: Norman Doidge is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself (Penguin).

http://www.youtube.co...


Alternate meet up site (why not, it's free):

http://torontolinkup....


Life-coaching?

http://www.landmarked...

Another recommendation from our discussions?

Don't worry, be happy

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues for a return to the wisdom of the ancients in The Happiness Hypothesis. Forget metaphors of information processing, says James Flint, it's all a question of horses and chariots

http://www.guardian.c...

* James Flint
* The Guardian, Saturday 22 July 2006
* Article history

The Happiness Hypothesis
by Jonathan Haidt
320pp, William Heinemann, £18.99

The idea of the "divided self" is nothing new. Forget RD Laing: Buddha compared the experience of being human to that of a trainer (rationality) sitting astride an elephant (animal impulse); Plato to that of a charioteer (the rational mind) trying to control two horses, a noble one pulling to the right and a libidinal one pulling to the left. And of course there's Freud's Victorian version: the mind as buggy in the bucket seat of which "the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits on the backseat lecturing the driver on what he's doing wrong".

In the late 20th century these pictures were dismissed by many in the social sciences and replaced with metaphors of information processing and rational consumption, metaphors which in turn reflected the preoccupations of their time. When Jonathan Haidt suggests that we now abandon these and return to the idea of elephant and rider as a template for the workings of the mind, it seems at first blush rather an unpromising start to a book purporting to tell us how to be happy. But unlike so many of the world's purveyors of self-help and lifestyle philosophy, not to mention its economists and computational psychologists, Haidt knows what he's talking about. Thanks to having taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 20 years he has a deep understanding of his subject. He adds to that the distinction of being broadly right.

What horses and chariots and elephants with riders draw attention to, he argues, is something that psychologists have only recently begun to realise: "that there are really two information processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes".

You can do a lot with automatic processes. You can navigate by the stars (migrating birds), fight wars and run fungus farms (ants), even make tools (early hominids). The mechanism central to all of these highly specialised automatic systems is dopamine release, little bursts of this neurotransmitter being the way the brain rewards animals for doing things (like eating, building nests and having sex) that are good for the survival of our genes.

Controlled processing, however, is an altogether more slippery - and rarer - beast. To start with, it requires language. "You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex or to analyse the causes of past successes and failures, you need words."

But automatic processes have been around for millennia, giving them plenty of time to perfect themselves. Higher cortical functioning came on the scene only around 40,000 years or so ago, and is weak and buggy by comparison. This, Haidt points out, "helps to explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, maths and chess problems as well as any human can" but no robot that can walk in the woods as well as a six-year-old child.

So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?

The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.

It doesn't help that, despite being big and lumbering and bent on being alpha animal, the elephant is also a total scaredy-cat. A "negativity bias" against strange people and new experiences is built into the actual structure of the brain (in the way the amygdala and thalamus are wired), but though this might be annoying, it does make sense: "If you were designing the mind of a fish, would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats?" Of course not. Miss a chance for a meal and the likelihood is that another one will be along in a while. Miss the sign of a nearby predator and it's game over.

Having thus developed his metaphor into a detailed and robustly argued picture of the mind, Haidt then takes us on an extraordinary journey. On the way he explains why meditation, cognitive therapy and Prozac are all extremely sensible ways to treat depression, why Buddhism is an over-reaction to the state of things, in what way religion is a canny cultural solution to the problems of group selection in evolution, why lovers often behave like children and what this means, how gossip is the key to human culture, and why journalists are miserable. He also has a stab at explaining the current political divide in US politics, though this is one of the very few moments in the book when things begin to sound a little glib. That aside, I don't think I've ever read a book that laid out the contemporary understanding of the human condition with such simple clarity and sense.

· James Flint's The Book of Ash is published by Viking

Analyzing level of empathy:
http://umichisr.qualt....

Today’s college kids are 40-per-cent less empathetic, study finds

http://www.theglobean....
Today’s college students are 40-per-cent less empathetic than those of the 1980s and 1990s, says a University of Michigan study that analyzed the personality tests of 13,737 students over 30 years.

The influx of callous reality TV shows and the astronomical growth of social networking and texting – technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging – may be to blame, the authors hypothesize.

They examined 72 studies of American college students, mean age 20, from 1979 to 2009. All of them had taken the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which looks at empathic concern, an emotional response to the distress of others, and “perspective-taking,” or the ability to imagine another person’s perspective.

In previous studies, people who scored higher on empathic concern were more likely to have returned incorrect change, carried a stranger’s belongings, let somebody ahead of them in line, given money to a homeless person or looked after a friend’s plant or pet. Crisis-help-line volunteers had significantly higher scores for perspective-taking and empathic concern than a control group.

The researchers found a 48-per-cent decrease in empathic concern and a 34-per-cent decrease in perspective-taking between 1979 and 2009. In particular, post-millennial students were far less likely to agree with statements such as, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

“Young adults today comprise one of the most self-concerned, competitive, confident, and individualistic cohorts in recent history,” the researchers write, referring to the “Me Generation.”

They note that the most sizable empathy drop came after 2000 as social networks such as Facebook and MySpace began to flourish. These “physically distant online environments” allowed people to “lionize their own lives” and “functionally create a buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or even at times, inflict pain upon others.”

The authors cite a 2005 study that found significant decreases in empathic concern and perspective-taking among a longitudinal sample of medical interns from the start of their internships in 2000 to completion three years later. They also point to the recent case of a New York medical student who posed smiling, giving a thumbs-up, with a cadaver, a photo that later circulated on Facebook.

Other cited studies reveal that more young adults are living alone, and more are materialistic. Both conditions are linked to lower empathy, the authors argue. Also on the rise is narcissism, a trait that has people viewing others in terms of their utility.

“Not surprisingly, this growing emphasis on the self has also come with a decreased emphasis on others,” the authors write.

In the case of students who were attending college after the year 2000, developmental factors may be at play, says lead author Sara Konrath, an assistant professor at the university’s Institute for Social Research.

“These kids were born around 1980. It could be a change in parenting style. … Kids are getting the implicit message from parents that success is what really matters. It’s hard to spend your life pursuing success and at the same time pursue empathy, because empathy takes work.”

Mary Gordon, the Toronto founder and president of Roots of Empathy, also blames a “poverty of time” in families.

“You have to experience empathy to continue to develop it. If children don’t have enough opportunity and parents don’t have enough time to be with their children, it’s really difficult,” she said.

The non-profit organization offers an experiential learning program to students from kindergarten to Grade 8 to help beef up children’s “emotional literacy.” School officials typically call the organization after they’ve seen a spike in bullying. (The program was offered in 13,000 Canadian classrooms this year.)

“When you have social change, the children are always the canaries in the mine shaft,” Ms. Gordon said.

The program invites a neighbourhood parent and infant to visit a classroom 27 times over the school year, along with a special instructor.

“They are coached in observing the baby, understanding its feelings and what’s going between the baby and the parent, which is the attachment relationship, the template for every other relationship in life. The baby is a launch pad.”

Although psychiatrists still squabble over the definition of empathy, Ms. Gordon puts it simply as “understanding how another person feels.” She said the younger children who partake in the program quickly come to realize that “the baby has feelings, and that we’re all grown-up babies.”

Although Prof. Konrath is concerned about the empathy gap, not least of all because it’s a key symptom of autism and sociopathy, she says programs such as Roots of Empathy make her optimistic.

“Empathy is kind of like exercise: People who are low in empathy are a little bit out of shape, and people who are high in empathy are practicing it a lot. The hopeful part of me wants people going to the empathy gym.”
To test your level of empathy and compare how you scored to the average empathy level of college students, click here.

Starship Mechanic
In other news, younger people are apparently also demonstrating an inability to argue a point properly, and instead show a propensity for arbitrarily dismissing anything that does not suit their personal beliefs.
If the article is to be faulted for anything, it should be faulted not for pointing out a worrisome trend, but for blaming MySpace and FaceBook without any real evidence other than the turning point of the year 2000. That was also the year that right-wing politics in America really took off, with George W. Bush getting into office and the sharp increase in popularity of far-right politics in general. Right-wing politics are all about the same basic theme: "lower my taxes, I don't give a damn what happens to everyone else".
In short, while university students have grown more selfish and narcissistic, I would argue that their parents have also grown more selfish and narcissistic.

Perhaps empathy is more likely to flourish when people are taught from a young age to care for others. If, on the other hand, you are taught that you are the center of the universe, your parents exist only to indulge you, and other people are there to compete for the limited goodies the world offers, you're likely to develop a kind of bunker mentality of self-involvement. Add to that the paranoia resulting from messages about terrorism, conspiracies, the colossal cheating that leads to bigger bonuses instead of punishment for corporate CEOs, an empathetic person of integrity is looked upon as a naive fool rather than a good citizen. Stick in a few more reports blaming everything on one segment of society (the immigrants, the Boomers, Gen X or Y) and you foster even more suspicion and hatred. I'm not a religious person, but we need something to replace the institutions that dealt with issues of morality.