Hair apparent

One of the most frustrating things about being a skeptic is that you're never truly done putting nonsense to rest.

And I'm not even talking about nonsense in general.  Of course, humans will continue to come up with goofy ideas.  It's kind of our raison d'être.  I'm talking about specific pieces of nonsense that, no matter how thoroughly or how often they're debunked, refuse to die.

We saw one example of that last week -- the ridiculous "your name's deep meaning" generators -- but there are plenty of others.  And just yesterday, I ran into one of the most persistent.  I've seen various forms of it for years, but this time, it took the form of a jpg with a photograph of a young, handsome, long-haired (presumably) Native American man gazing soulfully out at us, and the following text, which I've shortened for brevity's sake:

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Vietnam War.

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hairstyle is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue.  Back in the Vietnam War however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical Hospital.  He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government.  He was in shock from the contents.  What he read in those documents completely changed his life.  From that moment on my conservative husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again.  What is more, the VA Medical Center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.  As I read the documents, I learned why.  It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain.  They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities.  Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’, their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas.  Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests.  They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut.  Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores.  Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores...

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years.  Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural.  Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive.  Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.  The body has a reason for every part of itself. 

 Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ’feelers’ or ’antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment.  This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out.

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems.  It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.  It contributes to sexual frustration.

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error.  It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us.  When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Well.  Let's take a closer look at this esoteric information hidden since the Vietnam War that is so incredibly top-secret and arcane that you'd only find it if you did a fifteen-second Google search for "the truth about long hair."

First, the alleged controlled experiments using Native trackers in the military never happened.  F. Lee Reynolds, of the United States Army Center for Military History, was asked to look into the claim and see if there was anything to it, and responded that the story was "pure mythology." 

The whole thing apparently didn't originate anywhere even remotely military.  It was dreamed up in toto in 2010 by one David "Avocado" Wolfe, an American conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, alt-med proponent, and raw food advocate, who is also noted for saying that "gravity is a toxin" and that "water would levitate right off the Earth if the oceans weren't salty" and that solar panels drain the Sun's power.

So we're not exactly talking about someone with a shit tonne of credibility, here.

There's no doubt that in a lot of cultures, men wear their hair long, and forcing them to cut it can cause some distress, but it has nothing to do with stopping them from "receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment."  If this was true, bald people would be significantly stupider than people with full heads of hair, and all you have to do is compare John Fetterman (bald) with Marjorie Taylor Greene (full head of hair) to see this can't be true, because you will find that Fetterman is a pretty smart guy while Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have the IQ of a PopTart.  

Hair does increase your skin sensitivity some, but it is not an "extension of the nervous system," much less "exteriorized nerves."  Hair is made of strands of keratin -- i.e., not living cells.  Can you imagine how much getting a haircut would hurt if it was actually living tissue?

And if anecdotal evidence counts for anything, I can vouch first-hand for the fact that long hair does diddly-squat for your perceptivity.  I've had long hair during three periods in my life -- like, down to the middle of my back -- and I can state authoritatively that during those times, I was not receiving magical signals from the Earth Spirits or whatnot, nor was my rather abysmal sense of direction any better than usual.  Mostly what it turned out to be was a confounded nuisance, because my hair is really thick and gets curly when it's long, so in even a mild breeze I ended up looking like this guy:

Well, I have better teeth than he does.

I now have my hair really short, which is far more comfortable when it's hot, and I haven't noticed any significant impairment of my spatial awareness.

Oh, and Kirlian photography is not picking up "electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain."  It's a photograph of the static electrical discharge emitted by an object when you place it in contact with a high-voltage source.  You can take a Kirlian photograph of a dead leaf, and last time I checked, dead leaves (1) are unable to send and receive transmissions from the environment, (2) have very poor tracking skills, and (3) don't have hair.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter.

Anyhow, the claim is patently absurd, but that hasn't stopped it from circulating, and (like the fake name meaning generators) seems to be coming around once again.  It'd be really nice if you see it posted somewhere, you'd send them a link to this post, or at least respond "This is bullshit" (feel free to reword if that's a bit harsh for you).  I don't know if my feeble efforts to stop the flow of nonsense online will do much good, but you do what you can.

Even if you're all "numbed out" from wearing your hair short.

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Expanding the umwelt

The concept of the umwelt is a little mind-boggling.

It's defined as "the world as perceived by a particular organism."  In superficial terms we know that a dog must perceive life differently than we do.  For example, we know their senses of smell are a lot more keen than ours are, but the magnitude is staggering.  They have about fifty times the number of olfactory receptors than we do (three hundred million as compared to six million), so their world must be as vivid a tapestry of smells as ours is a tapestry of sights and sounds.

While it might be possible to imagine what it's like to have an enhanced sense, what about having a sense we lack entirely?  A number of animals, including sharks, platypuses, and knifefish, have an ability to sense electric fields, so the voltage change in the water around them registers as a sensory input, just as light or sound or taste does for us.  They use this sense to locate prey, because the neuromuscular systems of the animals they're hunting create a weak electrical discharge, which all of these animals can "see."

In the amazing 2015 TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?",  neuroscientist David Eagleman explores what it would be like to expand our umwelt.  He has designed a vest, to be worn against the skin, that has a series of motors that create tiny vibrations.  The vest's input can be whatever you want; in one demonstration, sounds picked up by a microphone are the input used to create a pattern of vibrations on the chest and back.  With only a couple of days of training, a profoundly deaf individual was able to translate the patterns into a perception of the sounds, and correctly identify spoken words.

His brain had basically taken a different peripheral input device and plugged it into the auditory cortex!

Experiments with other "peripherals" have included using a pattern of weak electrical tingles transmitted onto the tongue via a horseshoe-shaped flat piece of metal to allow blind people to navigate around objects while walking, and even get good enough with it that they can throw an object into a basket.  One of Eagleman's experiments with the vest trained people using an input from an unidentified source -- all they did was press one of a pair of buttons and found out if their choice was right:

A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds.  Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice.  He doesn't know what's going on.  He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second.  Now, here's the thing: the subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press.  He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions.  And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not.  And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umwelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet.

The wildest thing is that the peripheral you add doesn't have to be input; it can be output.  Two different papers, both in the journal Science, have shown that you can add an output device, and like with the inputs -- all it takes is a little training.

In the first, "A Brain-Computer Interface that Evokes Tactile Sensations Improves Robotic Arm Control," test subjects have a computer interface device implanted into their brain, which then translates thoughts into movements of a robotic arm, analogous to what an intact neuromuscular system is doing to our actual arms.  This has been doable for a while, but the advance in this study is that the robotic arm has sensors that provide feedback, again just like our own systems do when working properly.  Think about picking up a coffee cup; you adjust the pressure and position of your grip because you're constantly getting feedback, like the temperature of the cup, the weight and balance, whether your fingers are hanging on well or slipping, and so forth.

Here, the feedback provided by the sensors on the robotic arm cut in half the time taken for doing an action without mishap!  The brain once again picked up very quickly how to use the additional information to make the output go more smoothly.

In the second, people were trained with a "third thumb" -- an artificial extra digit strapped to the hand on the pinky-finger side.  It's controlled by pressure sensors under the toes, so you're using your feet to move something attached to your hand while simultaneously using your brain to control your other hand movements, which seems impossibly complicated.  But within a day, test subjects could perform tasks like building a tower from wooden blocks using the augmented hand... even when distracted or blindfolded!

Study author Paulina Kieliba, of University College - London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said, "Body augmentation could one day be valuable to society in numerous ways, such as enabling a surgeon to get by without an assistant, or a factory worker to work more efficiently.  This line of work could revolutionize the concept of prosthetics, and it could help someone who permanently or temporarily can only use one hand, to do everything with that hand.  But to get there, we need to continue researching the complicated, interdisciplinary questions of how these devices interact with our brains."

Co-author Tamar Makin summed it up: "Evolution hasn’t prepared us to use an extra body part, and we have found that to extend our abilities in new and unexpected ways, the brain adapts the representation of the biological body."

I think what amazes me most about all this is the flexibility of the brain.  The fact that it can adjust to such radical changes in inputs and outputs is phenomenal.  Me, I'm waiting for something like Tony Stark's suit in Iron Man.  That'd not only allow me to fight crime, but it'd make yard chores a hell of a lot easier.

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A little life, rounded with a sleep

An unsolved mystery of biology is the question of why we -- and just about every other animal studied -- have to sleep.

I've looked at this issue before here at Skeptophilia, and from the research I've read, we're no closer to a definitive answer.  There's the physical rest aspect, of course, but I think we can all attest that when you're exhausted, you don't recover equally well by sitting quietly awake for two hours or by taking a two-hour nap.  (In fact, if you're like me, when you're exhausted, sitting quietly for two hours without falling asleep is damn near impossible.)  There's some indication that sleep, especially the REM (rapid eye movement) stage wherein we dream, is critical for memory consolidation.  Other studies have found that during sleep, potentially toxic metabolic byproducts are cleared from the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, so sleep may act as a time for cleaning house.

Or all three.  And probably others.  But even if these are partial answers to the conundrum of sleep, they leave a number of facets of the sleep cycle unaccounted for.  Why, for example, does sleep need vary so greatly?  Elephants in the wild sleep about two hours a day; lions, on the other end of the spectrum, snooze for eighteen to twenty hours a day.  Famously, dolphins and whales do something even stranger.  They let half of their brain sleep at a time -- one side becomes quiescent, then that side wakes up and the other one takes a nap.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Recent studies have shown that however far you go down the animal-brainpower-scale, they still sleep.  Insects and other arthropods sleep.  Even roundworms do.  One difficulty is that at that stage, it's a little hard to define what sleep is; certainly, the mental activity isn't going to be closely analogous to what goes on in a human's brain during the sleep cycle.  So most biologists use a functional definition: sleep is occurring if (1) the animal becomes quiet and hard to rouse, (2) the behavior is on some kind of a circadian rhythm, and (3) if you disturb the animal's sleep one day, they make up for it by sleeping longer the next day (something called sleep homeostasis).  These are sufficient to differentiate it from other behaviors that might mimic some aspects of true sleep -- hibernation, coma, anesthetization, inebriation, fainting, and so on.

This generates a fascinating result when you look at some of the simplest animals in the world; because a recent paper in the journal Science Advances has demonstrated that by this definition, hydras sleep.

Hydras are a group of freshwater animals in the Phylum Cnidaria, and thus are related to jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals.  This generates a difficulty if you try to apply any brain-based evolutionary reason for the ubiquity of sleep, because hydras don't have a brain.  They have a decentralized nerve net with no central nervous system whatsoever.  And yet, they undergo behavior that meet all three of the criteria of the functional definition for sleep.

This not only raises some interesting questions about the purpose of sleep, it brings up an entirely different one for the evolutionary biologists.  When did sleep evolve?  There's a general rule that the more ubiquitous a feature is (be it an organ, a protein, a gene, a behavior, whatever), the older it is evolutionarily and the more important it is to survival.  By this argument, sleep is really critical (which we already sort of knew), and it's really old.  Hydras are almost as distant as you can get from mammals on the family tree of Kingdom Animalia; our last common ancestor with hydras lived at least five hundred million years ago.  Amongst animals, only sponges are more distantly related.  It is possible that sleep is not a conserved feature -- that it was evolved independently on more than one of the branches of the family tree -- but in my mind, given the fact that every animal studied shows sleep behavior, it seems like it requires a great many more ad hoc assumptions to claim that sleep evolved over and over than it does to assert that we all inherited it from a common ancestor a very long time ago.

Nota bene: you might be thinking that the same could be said for the presence of eyes, but eyes almost certainly evolved separately in different groups.  We can tell this because however functionally similar the eyes of (for example) humans, flies, flatworms, and squids are, they are structurally different.  It may be that they all come from a common ancestor with light-sensing patches of some sort, but if so, in the interim each branch of Kingdom Animalia refined those structures in entirely different ways.  The same, by the way, is true of wings and the presence of flight in a number of different animal groups.

So the discovery that hydras sleep makes a curious question even curiouser.  Clearly, if sleep aids higher brain functioning and memory consolidation in humans, those were advantages it gained us much later, because as I mentioned, hydras don't even have brains.  The presence of sleep behavior in hydras and other simple animals points to it having a function in maintaining metabolism, so perhaps the "sleep as time to clean house" answer will turn out to be closer to the universal answer.

And who knows?  Maybe the next thing they'll find out is that sponges sleep, or that amoebas sleep.  At that point, we'll have a whole new set of questions, because those are organisms that not only lack a brain, but don't have nerves at all.  But given the ubiquity of snoozing in the animal kingdom, I actually wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The postman always rings twice

When I started this blog ten years ago, I knew that I was gonna get hate mail.  It was inevitable, given my own strong opinions and the nature of the topics I write on.  I try to be as fair as I can, but I have no particular problem with identifying bullshit as such, and that has the effect of pissing a lot of people off.

 The thing that never fails to amaze me, though, is which posts get people stirred up.  I wrote a post comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, and nary a peep.  And yesterday I get two -- count 'em, two -- vitriolic screeds, both from posts I did ages ago -- one from the post I did in 2013 about the claim that hair is basically extended nerve endings, and the other about the claim I looked at a year earlier that there are giant glass pyramids on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that collect and focus cosmic ray energy.

The first one lambasted me for not going out and doing a study on the topic myself before criticizing it, despite the fact that the story I was responding to had no evidence presented whatsoever except for an alleged study by someone whose name was changed to protect privacy.  Because, presumably, studying hair is frowned upon by the scientific community and could result in death threats, or something.  The original article was also laced with claims that were demonstrably false (such as that hair "emits electromagnetic energy"). But I guess my pointing this out pasted a target on my chest:

Humans have predators in the natural world...you're trying to say that our primitive ancestors were as lazy and non-attentive as some random douche canoe 'skeptic' on his computer, shovelling Bugles into his mouth in his Family Guy jammie pants?  HA!  No.  They slept in fucking trees to stay alive (hence the hypnic jerk) and had to intuit and be aware of their surroundings.

No, what I'm saying is that hair, being dead strands of keratin, are not nerves.  Keep your eye on the ball, here.  Also, being that I spent years teaching a neuroscience class, I'm well aware that we have sense organs, and the evolutionary origins thereof.

You honestly believe that there is NO WAY somebody with longer hair might be able to sense changes in the wind, movements from other animals around them, foreign predatory energy (as in E=MC squared) approaching?  REALLY?  It makes SO much sense, that it warrants a study, and it should be done.

Actually, if you'll read what I wrote, you'll see that I did say that hair increases skin sensitivity, and that whiskers in many animals function as tactile sensors.  And did you really just say that Einstein's mass/energy equivalence has something to do with picking up "foreign predatory energy?"

And as far as this warranting a study, I'll simply quote Christopher Hitchens: "What is asserted without proof may be dismissed without proof."

You clearly have no fucking CLUE what you're talking about, and that's coming from somebody who actually comes from the scientific community.  Stop trying to play scientist; you're bad at it.  So many of you Atheist/skeptics/whatever say the things you BELIEVE a scientist would say, when they would NEVER say it; you don't have the knowledge to back a claim, and just go around saying something is bullshit because you think it makes you appear intelligent...but something you clearly don't know is that an actual researcher or scientist would know WITHOUT A DOUBT that something was correct or incorrect before saying so. 

Cf. my earlier comment about my teaching neuroscience. Your move.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The second one, about the ocean floor pyramids, was, if possible, even snarkier.  It began as follows:

The thing that makes me fucking angry about idiots like yourself is that you dismiss stuff you've never seen.

Another quote comes to mind, this one from Delos McKown, to wit: "The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike."  But point made. I've never been to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  Do continue.

If something doesn't fit the way you think the world is, you say it doesn't exist, piss on it, and walk away. 

It's hard to see how I'd piss on something that doesn't exist.  Even worse, how I'd piss on a nonexistent object that's not at the bottom of the Atlantic.  But all purely mechanical problems aside, I guess I was a little dismissive.

How do you know what the effects of cosmic rays are on the energy of the planet?  You talk like you have proof that pyramids couldn't be channelers of energy, but you can't prove it because you never leave your fucking armchair long enough to do anything but scoff.

I get out of my armchair pretty frequently, actually.  As far as how I know what cosmic rays can and cannot do, I once again feel obliged to point out that I have a degree in physics, teaching certificates in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and the ability to read.  Those put together give me at least a reasonably good ability to understand actual science.

And another thing: there's this fallacy called "shifting the burden of proof."  If you make an outrageous statement -- such as there being giant glass pyramids in the ocean that focus quantum energy frequency vibrations -- it is not the responsibility of those who say "bullshit" to prove they don't exist.

The pyramid guy ended by saying:

I bet you don't even have the balls to post this comment on your blog.  People like you hate it when you're challenged, because you want to be right without doing any work.  Anyhow, fuck you.

You're right that I'm not posting it, because it is, as you point out, my blog.  (Although I am writing an entire post about it instead, the irony of which does not escape me.)  Let me be plain about this: commenting is a privilege, not a right.  I'm happy to post contrary points-of-view -- not that I enjoy being wrong, mind you, but having new information brought to light is how we learn.  I've more than once printed retractions when I have been dead wrong, an experience which is profoundly humbling but is necessary for honesty's sake.

But it's a little frustrating to be accused of being a shallow-minded scoffer by people who retort with shallow-minded scoffing.  If someone has legitimate science -- not just a screaming post of "it could be so, and you can't prove it isn't, so fuck you!" -- I'm happy to listen.

Until then, I'm sticking with my original stance, and don't expect me to rise to the bait and argue with you.   Or even post your comment.  Call me a douche canoe skeptic, but there you are.

In any case: keep those cards and letters coming.  I'm not fond of hate mail, but as Brendan Behan put it, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  

So I tend to agree with Captain Jack Sparrow.  If people are sending me hate mail, at least they're reading what I write, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]