Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 383

Stimulating Your Memory

A new study indicates that caffeine “may enhance consolidation of memories only if it is consumed after a learning or memory challenge.” Cathy Newman talked to one of the study’s researchers, Michael Yassa:

So you gave people who didn’t regularly use caffeine either a placebo or a 200-milligram caffeine tablet five minutes after they studied a group of images. Both groups returned 24 hours later to be tested. The caffeine users remembered the images better.

Caffeine was first isolated from the coffee bean in the 19th century by a German chemist. Do we know exactly how it works? There are several mechanisms. It acts on the adenosine receptors and increases heart rate, vigilance, blood pressure—the fight-or-flight response when you see a bear. It’s what happens when someone says, “I get an adrenaline rush.” It also acts on a small region of the hippocampus, which plays an important role in long- and short-term memory.

How much coffee do you have to drink to get 200 milligrams of caffeine?

It’s about two shots of espresso.

Should we all rush out and order triple-shot grande lattes as a result of these findings?

Keep in mind that those drinks also involve lots and lots of sugar. I’ve been a coffee drinker for years, and I’m not going to double my dose.

Victoria Turk feels that the study is being misreported:

Sure enough, the people who were given caffeine rather than a placebo (it was a double-blind study) completed the task a bit better. “We conclude that caffeine enhanced consolidation of long-term memories in humans,” wrote the researchers.

That’s all very interesting. But it doesn’t follow that downing an espresso after a revision session will make you perform better in an exam the next day, as some reports would have you believe.

What actually happened in the study is that those who had caffeine were better at spotting which images were similar but not exactly the same to the previous day’s. They weren’t significantly better at spotting which images were brand new and which were the same. That’s quite a specific effect observed, then, and one that doesn’t immediately transfer into real-life applications.

Previous Dish on how to time your caffeine consumption here.

Quote For The Day

“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you.

Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load.

That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies,” – Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies.”

Apocalypse Then

Ben Marks details the story behind 16th-century depictions of “Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the ‘Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs,’” recently reproduced in Taschen’s Book of Miracles:

[T]he Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written descriptions of ancient and astrological prophecies.  … In part, their passion stemmed from a collector’s fascination with such topics, but Germany’s 16th-century Protestants were also motivated by religious antipathy toward the Catholic church, whose Pope they derided as the Antichrist. Some took the epithet for fact: For them, since the end was nigh, it behooved one to pay attention to the signs.

As Joshua Waterman of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg writes … “The late fifteenth century had witnessed a surge of interest in miraculous signs which steadily increased in the decades that followed, ultimately reaching a high point toward the end of the sixteenth century, especially in Protestant territories. This development coincided with the rise of illustrated broadsheets and printed pamphlets as news media that spread reports of prodigies and portents, and with the religious and political upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, which fostered special concern for signs of God’s wrath and the coming end of days.”

Marks calls these broadsheets the “Buzzfeeds of their day, featuring woodcut artwork and sensationalist headlines and text designed to capture the imagination of the common man.”

(Image of 16th-century depiction of comet via Collectors Weekly and Taschen)

Why Mindfulness Matters

Dan Hurley traces the dramatic rise of mindfulness meditation in Western psychology:

Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been published since 2005. And the most recent studies of mindfulness – the simple, nonjudgmental observation of a person’s breath, body or just about anything else – are taking the practice in directions that might have shocked the Buddha. In addition to military fitness, scientists are now testing brief stints of mindfulness training as a means to improve scores on standardized tests and lay down new connections between brain cells.

Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas Tech University, used functional MRIs before and after participants spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving.

Perhaps that is why mindfulness has proved beneficial to prospective graduate students. In May, the journal Psychological Science published the results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness made significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam – a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple items of attention. That a practice once synonymous with Eastern mysticism could be put to the service of Western rationalism may sound surprising, but consider: By emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trains the mind to stay on task and avoid distraction.

A Poem For Sunday

“Emily writes such a good letter” by Stevie Smith:

Mabel was married last week

So now only Tom left

The doctor didn’t like Arthur’s cough

I have been in bed since Easter

A touch of the old trouble

I am downstairs today

As I write this

I can hear Arthur roaming overhead

He loves to roam

Thank heavens he has plenty of space to roam in

We have seven bedrooms

And an annexe

Which leaves a flat for the chauffeur and his wife

We have much to be thankful for

The new vicar came yesterday

People say he brings a breath of fresh air

He leaves me cold

I do not think he is a gentleman

Yes, I remember Maurice very well

Fancy getting married at his age

She must be a fool

You knew May had moved?

Since Edward died she has been much alone

It was cancer

No, I know nothing of Maud

I never wish to hear her name again

In my opinion Maud

Is an evil woman

Our char has left

And a good riddance too

Wages are very high in Tonbridge

Write and tell me how you are, dear,

And the girls,

Phoebe and Rose

They must be a great comfort to you

Phoebe and Rose.

(From Best Poems: Stevie Smith © Stevie Smith 1937, 1972 and © New Direction Publishing Corporation 1988, 2014. Reprinted with kind permission of New Directions. Photo by Sandra Kharazashvili)

Questions Without Answers

Maria Popova digs into physicist Alan Lightman’s new volume of essays, The Accidental Universe, finding this gem on what distinguishes the sciences from the humanities:

At any moment in time, every scientist is working on, or attempting to work on, a well-posed problem, a question with a definite answer. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.

But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. …

For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago, “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Then there are also the questions that have definite answers but which we cannot answer. The question of the existence of God may be such a question. As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers?

Lightman goes on to place this “tolerance for the unanswered” at the heart of faith:

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

Connecting Through Chekhov

Brendan Mathews appreciates Chekhov for his descriptions of human empathy – or the lack of it:

It’s worth noting that Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf, his father was a hyper-religious tyrant, and he knew from the time he was in his twenties that tuberculosis would cut his life short (he died at 44). He didn’t believe in God or the reward of a joyous afterlife, and yet his stories affirm in ways large and small that the only hope we have lies in our relationships with other people. If the world is hell, it’s because we make it that way; if we are to be happy, it’s only by connecting with the people around us.

In Chekhov’s last play, “The Cherry Orchard,” — bracingly translated by Matthew Henry Heim in Chekhov: The Essential Plays — the young idealist Trofimov lectures his one-time patroness Lyubov Andreevna about her failings in love and money: she is a spendthrift whose estate is about to be auctioned; she has driven herself into debt for the love of a ne’er-do-well. Her response, a scorching indictment of Trofimov’s easy dismissal of all that she has suffered in life, climaxes with this demand: “Show a little generosity!”

Lyubov Andreevna is speaking to Trofimov; Chekhov is speaking to us. This writer who sought objectivity in all of his work and who was blasted by his contemporaries for being apolitical and amoral, condenses into this line a plea to us all. That before we judge, we understand. That we extend to each other the same compassion that we all seek.

(Image of scene from the first production of The Cherry Orchard in 1904 via Wikimedia Commons)

What Mormons Have Against Marriage Equality

With support for marriage equality is surging in Utah, it should come as no surprise that the LDS Church recently issued a memo directing congregational leaders to review “The Family,” which Neil J. Young describes as “a document the church produced in 1995 that has appeared at times of social crisis ever since.” He considers the implications for the fight against same-sex marriage:

“The Family,” issued as the church began these fights, linked the Mormon theology of salvation rooted in the traditional heterosexual family unit to the civil rights question of gay and lesbian Americans without even acknowledging their existence. Mormon salvation—or exaltation to the Celestial Kingdom—requires that male and female Saints enter into a temple-based marriage and enact, as “The Family” describes, the “divine design” of their respective gender roles. Men are to “preside over their families” while women are “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” Together, they are to fulfill their religious responsibility to reproduce, creating an extensive earthly family that will be joined together eternally in the afterlife.

Same-sex marriage, of course, challenges all of this. While Mormons agree with other opponents of gay marriage that its legalization is “unbiblical” and a threat to the traditional heterosexual family unit, LDS objections also arise from the core of Mormon theology and its particular interconnection of heterosexuality, marriage, and salvation. In short, same-sex marriage threatens the basic foundations of Mormonism.

He also notes that “Mormon acceptance of gay marriage challenges the church’s authority, a core component of LDS belief”:

This is a crisis the LDS Church faced when some of its members became vociferous critics of the church’s efforts against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. The church dealt harshly with those women not because they supported the ERA, church leaders explained, but because they had publically challenged the church president’s prophetic role—a key tenet of Mormonism. Increasing societal support for same-sex marriage suggests another crisis moment for the LDS Church could be coming.

Mental Health Break

Classic paintings come to life to haunting effect:

B E A U T Y – dir. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro from Rino Stefano Tagliafierro on Vimeo.

A God That Grounds All Things, Ctd

Oliver Burkeman expands on Damon Linker’s reading of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.  He calls Hart’s work “the one theology book all atheists really should read”:

God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with. … Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.

But too often, instead of being grappled with, this argument gets dismissed as irrelevant. Sure, critics argue, it might be intriguing, but only a handful of smartypants intellectual religious people take it seriously. The vast majority of ordinary folk believe in the other sort of God.

As Hart points out, there are two problems with this dismissal.

First, you’d actually need to prove the point with survey data about what people believe. But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.

Isaac Chotiner is less convinced that Hart’s book poses a serious challenge to atheist thought:

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, and the amount of time I have spent with deeply religious people (Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims) is relatively limited. But I have talked somewhat extensively with people in each of these religions and not a single one of them has ever described his or her belief in God in anything like these terms. As Jerry Coyne puts it in response to Linker, “Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.” (Ideas such as answered prayers, or the parting of the seas, don’t really mesh with what Linker is laying out.)

But let’s say Linker is right and many people do believe in this type of God. He still seems to be conceding that less “transcendent” beliefs in God don’t make much sense, or at least that atheists who confront these beliefs are not confronting a strong case for God. This is a giant concession.

Linker fires back at Chotiner and Coyne:

The charges against me (and Hart, whose book neither Chotiner nor Coyne has read) boil down to two: Practically no one holds the view of God that I sketched in my review, and even if they did, that view is nonsensical. The core of my response is simply to say that the classical theism that Hart elaborates in his book and that I cursorily laid out in my review is far more widely held than Chotiner and Coyne appear to believe. It is found, in varying forms, in the work of Christian (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), Jewish (Maimonides), and Muslim (Avicenna) theologians, as well as numerous Hindu and Sikh sages. All of these sundry thinkers, and many others, describe a God who is (in Hart’s words) “the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all would exist.” Chotiner and Coyne are free, of course, to follow A.J. Ayer and other strict logical positivists in saying that such language is meaningless mumbo jumbo. But they should understand that in taking that tack they are going easy on themselves in the way that people always do when they dismiss their opponents rather than engage with them.

Coyne rejoins the debate:

[I]t’s obvious that the bulk of harm committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral system. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn “witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholics with guilt about masturbation and divorce.

The vast majority of believers don’t even read theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by Sophisticated Theologians™. So is it our duty as atheists to refute those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent instead the harm done by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s both fun and intellectually profitable to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided beforehand must be true. Theology is the only academic discipline where people get paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them. Certainly it’s more useful for atheists to point out to “average” believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that is precisely what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.