The face in the mirror

Like many people, I've at times been in the position of having to interact with narcissists.

I'll not name names, but two, in particular, stand out.  One of them frequently said things like, "What I say is the law of the land" (without any apparent awareness of irony, because this is also an excellent example of someone being a Big Fish in a Little Pond).  This individual did have "advisors" -- for a time I was one of them -- while in point of fact never actually taking a single piece of advice or admitting to being wrong about anything.  Ever.  Worse, every interaction became about being perceived as the most knowledgeable, smart, funny, edgy, savvy person in the room, so every conversation turned into a battle for dominance, unless you refused to play (which, eventually, is what I did).

The second had a different strategy, albeit one that still resulted in the role of Center of the Entire Fucking Universe.  For this person, negative attention caused a complete emotional breakdown, which resulted in everyone having to circle the wagons simply to restore order.  Worse still was when something this individual said made me upset; because then, the focus shifted to someone else's needs, which was completely unacceptable.  My expression of annoyance, anger, or frustration was turned around into my having unreasonable expectations, which precipitated another emotional breakdown, returning me to the role of caregiver and he-who-pours-oil-on-the-waters.

It's a relief that neither of these two are part of my life any more, because being around narcissists is, among other things, absolutely exhausting.  The incessant focus on self means that no one else's needs, and often no one else's opinions, ever get heard.  Both of these people did considerable damage to others around them, without there ever being any sign of concern for the chaos they were sowing or the emotional scars they were inflicting.  (There was plenty of deflection of the blame toward the ones who were hurt, however; "it's their own fault" was another phrase I heard numerous times.)  Worst of all, neither one had any apparent awareness of being narcissistic.  I heard both expressing, at one time or another, how puzzling and unfair it was that they couldn't keep friends or maintain good relationships with business associates.

Funny how that happens when you don't consider anyone but yourself, and funnier still that neither one ever seemed to realize what the common factor in all of their difficulties was.

This lack of self-awareness makes narcissism difficult to study, because it's hard to analyze a condition that the patient doesn't know (s)he's got.  But a team at the University of Graz (Austria), led by psychologist Emanuel Jauk, has not only looked at what it means to be narcissistic -- they've done neuroimaging studies to see what's going on in a narcissist's brain.  The result was an eye-opening paper that appeared in Nature.

"Narcissism is a topic of increasing interest to science and the public, probably because cultural changes in the past decades favor narcissistic behavior," Jauk says.  "Our study was aimed at taking a closer look at the self-image of narcissistic individuals using neuroscience, which might help to unveil its less conscious aspects."

The results were fascinating.  In the authors' words:

Subclinical narcissism is a personality trait with two faces: According to social-cognitive theories it is associated with grandiosity and feelings of superiority, whereas psychodynamic theories emphasize vulnerable aspects like fluctuating self-esteem and emotional conflicts...  While social-cognitive theory would predict that self-relevant processing should be accompanied by brain activity in reward-related areas in narcissistic individuals, psychodynamic theory would suggest that it should be accompanied by activation in regions pointing to negative affect or emotional conflict.  In this study, extreme groups of high and low narcissistic individuals performed a visual self-recognition paradigm during fMRI.  Viewing one’s own face (as compared to faces of friends and strangers) was accompanied by greater activation of the dorsal and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in highly narcissistic men.  These results suggest that highly narcissistic men experience greater negative affect or emotional conflict during self-relevant processing and point to vulnerable aspects of subclinical narcissism that might not be apparent in self-report research.

The upshot is that this study suggests narcissism doesn't result in feelings of pleasure when you think of or view yourself; it increases your anxiety.  "Narcissism," Jauk explains, "in terms of an inflated self-view, goes along with negative affect towards the self on an involuntary level."

Which certainly makes sense given my interactions with narcissists.  Above all, neither of the individuals I mentioned ever seemed all that happy.  It appeared that the returning focus on self came out of insecurity, fear, and anxiety rather than conceit -- that it was more about reassurance than it was about praise.

So the condition itself is a little misnamed, isn't it?  The word "narcissism" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was a young man whose appearance was so beautiful that he fell in love with a reflection of himself, and couldn't tear his eyes away -- he eventually pined away and died, and the gods took pity on him and turned him into the flower that now bears his name.

Narcissus by Caravaggio (1598)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reality is sadder.  Narcissists, apparently, think of themselves not out of self-love, but out of a constant uneasy sense that they aren't actually beautiful, intelligent, competent, or desirable.

Which is kind of a miserable way to live.  Knowing this defuses a lot of the anger I harbor from my experiences with the narcissists I described earlier.  For all of their desperation for attention, at their core they were unhappy, deeply fearful people.

The authors make reference to an alternate version of the Narcissus myth that is more in line with what true narcissists experience.  They write:

In another prominent version by Pausanias, the myth has a different ending: Narcissus is gazing at himself, when suddenly a leaf falls into the water and distorts the image.  Narcissus is shocked by the ugliness of his mirror image, which ultimately leads him to death.

 This more tragic ending is much closer to what the study found:

Considering the two versions of the ancient myth of Narcissus, our results are in favor of the less prominent version, in which Narcissus is shocked to death by the ugliness of his mirror image when a leaf drops into the water.  This myth can be seen to metaphorically reflect the ongoing critical self-monitoring that narcissists display when confronted with self-relevant material, presumably due to a lowered intrinsic coupling between self-representation and self-reward/liking.

Which makes me feel like narcissists, despite the considerable harm they can do, are more to be pitied than scorned.

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Exploding the birth-order myth

How often have you heard a friend mention an odd characteristic of a mutual acquaintance, and follow it up with a statement like, "Well, he's a middle child," leaving you both nodding knowingly as if that explained it?

Conscientious, strong-willed eldest children.  Lost, rebellious middles.  Immature, demanding youngests.  Then there's my situation -- the spoiled, tightly-wound only children, who were doted upon by their parents and had their every whim met immediately.

I know that wasn't really true in my case; far from being overprotected, my youth was more a case of free-range parenting of a child who was damn close to feral.  After school, and all summer long, my parents' style could be summed up as "Be back by dinner and try not to break any bones.  Either yours or anyone else's."  So I knew that at least from a sample size of one, there was something wrong with the birth-order-determines-personality model.

Even seeing other exceptions here and there never left me confident enough to contradict the prevailing wisdom.  After all, the plural of anecdote is not data.  But now a pair of studies has conclusively disproven the connection between birth order and... anything.

In the first, a trio of psychologists at the University of Leipzig analyzed personality assessments for a huge sample size (they had data for over 20,000 individuals), looking for how they scored on what are called the "Big Five" features of personality -- extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and imagination.  They found no correlation whatsoever between birth order and any of those. In their words:

[W]e consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination.  On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

A similar, but much larger study done at the University of Illinois -- this one of 377,000 high school students -- also found no correlation whatsoever:

We would have to say that, to the extent that these effect sizes are accurate estimates of the true effect, birth order does not seem to be an important consideration for understanding either the development of personality traits or the development of intelligence in the between-family context.  One needs only to look at the “confounds,” such as parental socio-economic status and gender, for factors that warrant much more attention given the magnitude of their effects relative to the effects of birth order.

So if there really is nothing to the birth-order effect, why is it such a persistent myth?  I think there are two things going on, here.  One is that during childhood, older children differ in maturity from their younger siblings because... well, they're older.  Of course a fifteen-year-old is going to be more conscientious and articulate than his seven-year-old brother.  There'd be something seriously wrong if he weren't.  So we tend to see any differences that exist between siblings and interpret them in light of the model we already had, thus reinforcing the model itself -- even if it's wrong.

Because that's the second problem -- our old arch-nemesis confirmation bias.  Once we think we know what's going on, our confidence in it becomes unshakable.  I have to wonder how many people are reading this post, and thinking, "Yes, but for my own kids, the birth-order effect works.  So I still believe it."  It's a natural enough human tendency.

On the other hand, I think you have to admit that your own personal family's characteristics really aren't going to call into question a scholarly analysis of 377,000 people.

So that's pretty much that.  No more blaming your appreciation of fart jokes on being an immature youngest child.  And my friends and family will have to cast around for a different explanation for why I'm as neurotic as I am.  There probably is an explanation, but my being an only child isn't it.

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What's bred in the bone

See this innocent-looking face?

This is Cleo.  She's a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed (the name means "underbrush dog" because they were used for hunting small game in overgrown places).  We adopted her from a rescue facility in December, and she has settled right into our home, including becoming best buds with our other dog, a big, goofy pittie mix named Guinness.

Cleo is sweet, charming, funny, playful, and cuddly.  However, she is also stubborn, independent, willful, and has zero interest in learning commands for rewards.  For any rewards.  She is the only dog I have ever met who is completely unmotivated by food.  She sort of likes cheese, so that occasionally works, but she approaches everything with the attitude, "I'm doing this only because I want to.  And if I don't want to, even cheese doesn't tempt me."

For example, shortly after we adopted her, we installed a dog door (once it became obvious that she wanted in and out dozens of times a day).  And for weeks, she steadfastly refused to use it.  We were becoming convinced that she wasn't smart enough to figure out how it worked.  Turns out she understood perfectly well, she just didn't want to.  Last week she started using the dog door -- going through it, both directions, as if it was nothing.  Apparently she wasn't going to do it until she made it clear to us that it was her decision.

Then there's her volubility.  There's a phenomenon called the "Shiba scream," which was one of many things we didn't find out about her breed until after we adopted her.  When she's excited by something good like my wife pulling into the driveway, or there's a red-alert situation like the FedEx guy or a cyclist going past or a squirrel farting somewhere in the next county, she goes -- and this is as accurate a transcription of it as I can manage -- "ruff ruff ruff rrrrOOOWWRRROOO WAAAAAHHWAAH WAAHWAAH."  She also barks when she's excited, or (especially) when she wants something and we are not providing it right away as we, of course, should.  This includes taking her on a walk at two in the morning, a habit that led my wife to christen her "Demon-Spawn Dog," or, more succinctly, "Beelzebark."

It's not that we don't love her, or don't appreciate her positive qualities, of which there are lots.  Something my wife and I have said about 358 times since adopting her is, "She is so cute -- fortunately for her."  It turns out we're not alone in this experience of Shiba Inus.  Here's what the site Shiba Rescue has to say:

In their eyes, Shibas can take on the world no matter how big the foe or the task.  They are dominant with other dogs and do not usually get along well with other "bossy" dogs of the same sex.  Many Shibas will, however, get along great with another dog or cat that agrees the Shiba is boss.

Shibas always like to be in charge; their favorite word is "mine."  Although not "barky" dogs, they do yodel and scream anytime they feel they are being violated, such as nail trimming, bathing, and leash training.  Shibas can be runners.  The Shiba Inu is a natural hunter.  Given a chance, Shibas will take off in search of game.  It is advisable to never trust your Shiba off-lead unless in a fenced yard.

The Shiba's least favorite word is "come."  They will usually take your number and get back to you, when called.

Shibas have a mind of their own.  While it is possible to obedience train a Shiba, it is a challenge.  Tell him to sit and he sits . . . sometimes.  If there is something in it for him, and it is convenient at the time.

The first thing I thought after reading this (besides "Amen!") was how interesting it is that you can characterize an entire breed like this, irrespective of how an individual animal was raised.  Not that prior treatment is inconsequential; one thing that Cleo still exhibits is wariness from having been abused as a puppy (you'll notice if you look closely at the photograph that she's missing her left eye).  But the fact that you can draw a detailed picture of a typical Shiba personality like this indicates something fascinating -- that a great deal of dog behavior is controlled by genetics, not by training.

Way back in 2008, a paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics considered this phenomenon, and suggested that these kinds of behavioral trends are caused by a fairly small number of genes (and speculated that the same sort of thing may be true of human personality types).  A more recent 2019 study looked specifically at canine aggression and fearfulness, and found that those have between sixty and seventy percent heritability.  Consider how many breeds you characterize in a word or two  -- the friendliness of Golden Labs, the intelligence and always-on-the-job attitude of a Border Collie, the aggressiveness (despite its size) of a Chihuahua.  And Shibas are not the only ones who have built-in, almost certainly genetic, difficult behaviors; a friend of mine once told me that if you want an exercise in frustration, try to house-train a Cocker Spaniel.  This kind of thing has an unfortunate effect on dog owners who are unprepared or uninformed.  A particularly sad example is that after the movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians aired, there was a run on Dalmatian puppies -- and six months later, an influx of Dalmatians being given up at shelters.  Far from the cute, cuddly stereotype of the puppies from the movie, as a breed Dalmatians tend to be high-stung, nervous, reserved, and aggressive; they are considered to be one of the top-ten breeds most likely to bite, and a great many of the people who adopted a Dalmatian puppy very quickly regretted their choice.

I say this knowing, of course, that "unprepared and uninformed" is a pretty good description of my wife and I when we adopted Cleo.  However, in our defense I have to add that we're experienced dog owners with a history of adopting rescues, just about all of whom have had bad pasts and the attendant behavior problems -- and we have yet to own a dog who hasn't turned out to be a wonderful and charming, if quirky, companion.  We strongly believe that pet adoption is forever; if you can't commit, don't adopt.  (I do reconsider that stance on occasion when Cleo starts screaming in the middle of the night, but those lapses are short-lived.)

So we're not expecting Cleo's personality to change, and indeed, we don't want it to.  She's a charmer even when she's being a pain in the ass.  We'd like to modify some of it -- such as the twice-aforementioned barking for something in the wee hours -- but by and large, those kinds of characteristics are what make dogs interesting.

It reminds me of the famous quote from John Heywood, "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."  There's a lot of truth to that, for better or worse.  For better at the moment; right now, Cleo is cuddled up at the foot of the bed, paws twitching as she dreams of chasing squirrels.  And she's already become part of the family, difficulties and all.  Whatever the source, each dog's personality is as rich and varied as each person's is, something I've come to appreciate more and more with every dog we've adopted.  And we've always been rewarded tenfold by having pets -- receiving love for kindness, devotion for care, deep trust for patience.

For me, that makes it all worthwhile.

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Sweet synchrony

I really am extraordinarily lucky.

Following the breakup of my (all things considered) disaster of a first marriage, I had pretty much figured that was it for romantic entanglements.  Then in November of 1999, a mutual friend introduced me to a woman named Carol who loved travel, dogs, birdwatching, music, the outdoors, and red wine, saying that there was no way two people so similar shouldn't get together.  With some hesitation -- both due to my earlier decision to avoid dating, and a hefty dose of social awkwardness -- I asked her out.

It soon became obvious we were soulmates.  We'd only been dating for six weeks when I said, just making a joke, "I'm going to take a trip to Iceland -- want to come with me?"  I was fully expecting her to say, "Iceland?  Why the hell would anyone go to Iceland?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

Our courtship was, in many ways, a comedy of errors, appropriate enough in retrospect given the screwball comedy our life together has turned out to be.  Our second trip overseas, to Belize, was great fun -- till we (and everyone else in the camp where we were staying) simultaneously got food poisoning.  It only lasted twelve hours, but was absolutely the sickest I've ever felt.  I won't go into gruesome details, but I'll just say that after we recovered, Carol remarked that if two people can coexist in a small cabin while elbowing each other out of the way every fifteen minutes to make it to the bathroom in time, without one of them killing the other, it has to be a match made in heaven.

I agreed.  After two more years of wild adventures (and no repeats of the Belize incident, fortunately), in July of 2002, we decided to make that match permanent.

Kind of amazing how well I clean up, honestly.

Now, almost twenty years later, we've only discovered more and more ways we're similar.  I can't tell you the number of times one of us has said something completely random, and the other has looked shocked and said, "I was just about to say exactly the same thing."  We are alike in good ways and bad -- we've also frequently remarked about how our less-praiseworthy habits reinforce each other.  This is particularly obvious when it comes to tidiness.  We've been told that our décor style is called "shabby chic."  I don't know about the "chic" part, but we've got "shabby" locked up.  Our approach to housekeeping can best be described as "There appears to have been a struggle."

But along the way we've had a huge amount of fun, even if finding out visitors are coming induces a panicked frenzy of vacuuming, mopping, sweeping away cobwebs, and putting away piles of books, art work, pottery, dog toys, and weird assorted souvenirs from various trips that have been strewn about for months.  But you can only do so much.  Even afterward, our house looks like a poorly-maintained museum.

On a trip to Canada a couple of years ago, while visiting an antique store.  The cobbler's bench in front of us is now our coffee table.

The adventures have never stopped.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Mevagissey, Cornwall, England

I still periodically find it baffling that she puts up with my rather squirrelly personality, navigating my yo-yoing moods with apparent aplomb.  All I know is what I started out with: I am damn lucky.

And I found out just day before yesterday that our rapport forecasts a long and happy future.  According to a study of 154 couples published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, couples who have the kind of spark Carol and I have tend to gain both in satisfaction and longevity.

"Couples in the study varied greatly in... measures of positivity resonance, with some couples showing dozens of moments of emotional and physiological synchrony and others showing few or none," said psychologist Robert Levenson, of the University of California - Berkeley, who co-authored the study.  "We focused on those fleeting moments when you light up together and experience sudden joy, closeness and intimacy.  What we found is that having these brief shared moments, known as ‘positivity resonance,’ is a powerful predictor of how healthy we’re going to be in the future and how long we’ll live."

Which is cheering.  Even more fascinating is that that resonance goes all the way down to the physiological level -- couples who scored high on the assessment not only synchronized such obvious social cues as smiling and laughing, their heartbeats and breathing synchronized, as did their blood levels of such powerful (positive) mood regulators as serotonin and oxytocin.

So this all bodes well for Carol and me.  That said, I have to say that there are ways we're not alike; for example, our approach to shopping.

Carol will comparison-shop for paper towels.  I, on the other hand, am so impulsive I'm flat-out dangerous to have by your side when there's a big purchase.  Part of it is that I loathe shopping so much that I'll do damn near anything, including paying twice as much as I should, just to get it over with.  I really related to the anecdote that humor writer Dave Barry tells, when he and his wife were looking for a house to buy:

Dave Barry:  This is just perfect!  I love it!  I think this is ideal, don't you, dear?

His wife:  We're still in the real estate office.

In any case, the similarities vastly outweigh the differences, and even our unfortunate shared tendencies, not to mention our differences, are ameliorated by the fact that we're both pretty accepting of each other's foibles.  So the Levenson et al. study is really immensely cheering.  I'm looking forward to many more years together, traveling, playing with dogs, drinking wine, and navigating our way through the chaos of our shabby chic lives.

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Personality in music

A few weeks ago I was in my office working, and while writing on my computer I was listening to the London Symphony Orchestra (under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle) performing Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

It's a profound, beautiful, disturbing work.  But it's not everyone's cup of tea.  My wife came in to ask me a question while it was playing, and  as she walked into my office she said, "What the hell are you listening to?"  [Nota bene: she said it with a smile on her face; it was curiosity, not criticism.  We've known for years that we have very, very different tastes in music, and each of us finds it more interesting than off-putting when the other is listening to, and enjoying, some oddball piece.]

But to say that Stravinsky is not on my wife's "favorite composer list" is a bit of an understatement.  To her, it sounded a bit like a random note generator, and definitely didn't have the thrilling impact it has on me.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've been curious for years about where tastes in music come from.  My own playlist is wildly eclectic; when I put my iTunes on shuffle, I can end up with musical whiplash, going from Bach directly to Nine Inch Nails.  But why (for example) does my taste differ so completely from my wife's, when in so many other ways we're similar?  I know my own preferences are for music with strong rhythms, unexpected or odd harmonies, and an emotional edginess.  ("Music with teeth," I call it.)  That's true regardless of genre. 

But why?  What is it about my personality that makes my heart pound when I listen to Shostakovich, but leaves me yawning when I listen to Mozart?

Turns out there was a study done about this very question five years ago, led by the same person who led the research I described in yesterday's post, about the psychological effects of making music in groups -- David Greenberg, then of the University of Cambridge, now at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.  I found out about it because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post, and sent me an email saying, "You think that's cool, take a look at what else this guy has done," along with a link to a paper in the journal Social, Psychological, and Personality Science entitled, "The Song is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality."  The paper so directly addresses the question I've wondered about for ages that I'm kind of stunned I'd never run across it before.

What Greenberg et al. did was look at three musical attributes in pieces from various genres:

1. Arousal -- intense, forceful, abrasive, thrilling vs. gentle, calming, mellow
2. Valence -- fun, lively, enthusiastic, joyful, happy vs. depressing, sad
3. Depth -- intelligent, sophisticated, inspiring, complex, poetic, thoughtful vs. light, entertaining, simple, "party" or "dance" music

These broke down into 38 different descriptors, and the first thing the researchers did was to have judges evaluate 102 different pieces of music from various genres with respect to each descriptor.

After generating composite scores for each attribute, the 102 pieces were thrown out to a total of 9,454 participants.  Each participant gave each piece a rating, and also took a psychological/personality assessment.

Then the researchers started looking for correlations.

The results are downright fascinating, and I refer you to the paper itself for the full lowdown.  But here are a few of the connections they found:

Agreeableness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal and valence in music and positively associated with depth...  [P]reference for arousal was positively associated with modesty but negatively associated with trust, morality, altruism, cooperation, and sympathy.  Valence was negatively associated with modesty.  Preference for depth was positively associated with cooperation but negatively associated with modesty...  Conscientiousness was negatively associated with preferences for arousal in music and negatively associated with depth...  [In fact] arousal was negatively associated with all the conscientiousness facets [in personality] except for self-discipline.  Valence was positively associated with self-efficacy and cautiousness, and depth was positively associated with all of the conscientiousness facets except for self-discipline.

What this study would say about my own personality, given my love for The Rite of Spring, has been left as an exercise for the reader.

I was also fascinated by their look at what personality correlates exist in people who have diverse tastes in music as compared to those who have strong genre preferences.  Apparently, we people who listen as often to metal as to classical score high in measures of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and low in neuroticism.  So... yay?  I've always thought of myself as being something of a neurotic introvert, so I have to admit this one came as a bit of a surprise, although by my own assessment I'm pretty open, agreeable, and conscientious.  I guess on balance, this one works as well.  And despite coming from totally different genres, mood-wise there's a lot of commonality between Stravinsky and The Hu, an amazing Mongolian metal band whose song "Wolf Totem" is one of my favorite tunes to listen to while running:

So maybe the genre isn't as important as the emotional content.

In any case, I thought the whole thing was fascinating, and the entire paper is well worth reading.  Music affects a great many of us on a completely visceral level, and it's unsurprising that just about every culture in the world makes music in some form or another.  The fact that what music we respond to is a reflection of who we are is perhaps unsurprising, but it's kind of cool that we can find out a little about ourselves by looking at our playlists. 

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Memento mori

A man is discussing his fears about dying with his parish priest.

"Father," he says, "I'd be able to relax a little if I knew more about what heaven's like.  I mean, I love baseball... do you think there's baseball in heaven?"

The priest says, "Let me pray on the matter, my son."

So at their next meeting, the priest says, "I have good news and bad news...  The good news is, there is baseball in heaven."

The man gave him a relieved smile.  "So, what's the bad news?"

"You're playing shortstop on Friday."

*rimshot*

The vast majority of us aren't in any particular rush to die, and would go to significant lengths to postpone the event.  Even people who believe in a pleasant afterlife -- with or without baseball -- are usually just fine waiting as long as possible to get there.

And beyond our own fears about dying, there's the pain of grief and loss to our loved ones.  The idea that we're well and truly gone -- either off in some version of heaven, or else gone completely -- is understandably devastating to the people who care about us.

Well, with a machine-learning chatbot-based piece of software from Microsoft, maybe gone isn't forever, after all.

Carstian Luyckx, Memento Mori (ca. 1650) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What this piece of software does is to go through your emails, text messages, and social media posts, and pulls out what you might call "elements of style" -- typical word choice, sentence structure, use of figurative language, use of humor, and so on.  Once sufficient data is given to it, it can then "converse" with your friends and family in a way that is damn near indistinguishable from the real you, which in my case would probably involve being unapologetically nerdy, having a seriously warped sense of humor, and saying "fuck" a lot.

If you find this idea kind of repellent, you're not alone.  Once I'm gone, I really don't want anyone digitally reincarnating me; because, after all, it isn't me you'd be talking to.  The conscious part of me isn't there, it's just a convincing mimic, taking input from what you say, cranking through an algorithm, and producing an appropriate output based on the patterns of speech it learned.

But.

This brings up the time-honored question of what consciousness actually is, something that has been debated endlessly by far wiser heads than mine.  In what way are our brains not doing the same thing?  When you say, "Hi, Gordon, how's it going?", aren't my neural firing patterns zinging about in a purely mechanistic fashion until I come up with, "Just fine, how are you?"  Even a lot of us who don't explicitly believe in a "soul" or a "spirit," something that has an independent existence outside of our physical bodies, get a little twitchy about our own conscious experience.

So if an AI could mimic my responses perfectly -- and admittedly, the Microsoft chatbot is still fairly rudimentary -- how is that AI not me?

*brief pause to give my teddy bear a hug*

Myself, I wouldn't find a chatbot version of my deceased loved one at all comforting, however convincing it sounded.  Apparently there's even been some work on having the software scan through your photographs, and creating an animated avatar to go along with your verbal responses, and I find that even worse.  As hard as it is to lose someone you care about, it seems to me better to accept that death is part of the human condition, to grieve and honor your loved one in whatever way seems appropriate, and then get on with your own lives.

So please: once I'm gone, leave me to Rest In Peace.  No digital resuscitation, thanks.  To me, the Vikings had the right idea.  When I die, put my body on a boat, set fire to it, and push it out into the ocean.  Then afterward, have a wild party on the beach in my honor, with plenty of wine, music, dancing, and drunken debauchery.  This is probably illegal, but I can't think of a better sendoff.

After that, just remember me fondly, read what I wrote, recall all the good times, and get on with living.  Maybe there's an afterlife and maybe there isn't, but there's one thing just about all of us would agree on: the life we have right now is too precious to waste.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

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

A portrait in black-and-white

My mother was born Marguerite Thérèse Ayo in the little town of Schriever, Louisiana, on August 10, 1920, exactly a hundred years ago.  She was the middle of three children.  Her father was an insurance salesman, a kind, soft-spoken man who was absent from the home a good bit of the time.  Her mother -- typical of the time -- was a stay-at-home mom, and from what I've heard was an exacting, demanding woman who expected her children to be perfect.

Left to right: my aunt Florence, my grandmother (Flora (Meyer-Lévy) Ayo), my uncle Sidney, and my mom.  

The photograph above speaks volumes.  According to my mother, when the film was developed, Florence was the only one who met with approval.  Sidney's belt end had flopped down and my mom's stockings were wrinkled at the knees, something they heard about every time my grandmother looked at this photograph.  My mom had a bad case of middle-child syndrome -- her older sister was the picture of etiquette and academic success, and her younger brother got away with murder because he was the youngest and the only boy.  My mom never felt like she could measure up.

My mom at about 12

Historian Arnold Toynbee famously said "Life is just one damned thing after another," and that was certainly true in my mom's case.  When I think of what happened to her over her more than eight decades of life, what strikes me is that she got knocked down again and again by circumstances outside her control.  As I mentioned, she never got much approval from either parent.  When she was 17, her mother had a stroke at the young age of 44, and it changed her already difficult personality for the worse -- now she was largely housebound, had difficulty walking and talking, and found fault with everything and everyone.

My mom, age around 18

My mom escaped by marrying my dad, then a private in the Marine Corps.  It was the first years of World War II and my dad ended up stationed in Hawaii (in fact, they were in Honolulu and heard the bombs striking Pearl Harbor).  In 1945 my sister Margaret Mary was born -- but she was premature and had Rh-incompatibility syndrome, then a dire and life-threatening emergency, and only lived nine days.

My grandmother had a second stroke and died shortly after the war ended.  My parents had neither the resources nor the opportunity to return to Louisiana for the funeral, and in traditional Cajun culture, not going to a close relative's funeral is about as disrespectful as you can get.  Everyone said they understood, but my mom never forgave herself.

My mom shortly after the end of the war

Over the next decade, my dad was bounced around from military base to military base.  For three years, in the 1950s, he lived on a base in Japan.  Left alone at home, my mom did the best she could, and that was when she found her true passion -- art.  She learned painting, sculpture, and (especially) ceramics, and created some amazing works in porcelain.  Here's one of her bone china dolls:

The lace itself is made of bone china.  Don't ask me how she did it.

My parents wanted children, and after the loss of my sister, they tried.  No luck.  Doctors' visits showed nothing physically wrong with either one, but no success.  Fifteen years after my sister's death, my mom was forty years old and had resigned herself to being childless.  She was preparing to throw herself into becoming a full-time studio artist...

... when I came along.

Me and my mom, June of 1961

I won't say I wasn't wanted; but when my parents said I was their "mistake," it was only half kidding.  I busted up my mother's plans of being a full-time artist without even knowing I'd done it.  Then in late 1961, shortly after this photo was taken, my dad got transferred -- to Reykjavík, Iceland.  Back then enlisted men couldn't bring their families along to most overseas assignments, so for two years my mom and I only saw my dad when he was on furlough.  She and I moved in with her father, who had by then remarried.

Imagine it.  You're a forty-year-old with your only child, and you have to move back to your father's house and live with him and with a stepmother whom you frankly detest.  Once again, fate had given her a good gut punch.

This is where it gets complicated, because my mom honestly tried to jump into her new role as mother as well as she could.  But our relationship was fractious pretty much from the beginning.  I was about as opposite to her picture of "the perfect son" as it's possible to be.  She wanted a tough, independent, all-American boy, who was a solid-B student and played baseball and went fishing and hunting on the weekend.  She got me -- a bookish, nearsighted, sensitive dreamer who wanted to spend his time reading and making up stories, who hated team sports with a passion and whose idea of athletics was going on a solo five-mile run.  Despite my being reasonably smart, she couldn't even brag about my academic prowess -- my grades yo-yoed all over the place, depending on whether I liked the teacher and whether during that grading period I'd focused on learning about the Franco-Prussian War instead of inventing characters to send on adventures in time and space.

Plus, there was the problem that she and I never honestly understood each other, not on any kind of deep level.  She was a devout Roman Catholic; I was a doubter pretty much the moment I was old enough to consider the question.  She had an innate respect for authority; my general attitude toward authority was "either earn my respect, or go to hell."  She was a staunch conservative; I was born leaning to the left.  She liked everything in black-and-white -- people were good or bad, a thing was true or not, an action was right or it was wrong.  Me, I saw (and still see) pretty much everything in shades of gray.

It was almost like she and I didn't speak the same language.

My dad was stationed for a time in Charleston, West Virginia, and we lived in the town of St. Albans, where my mom met a neighbor named Garnett Mudd, the woman my mom called "the only real friend I ever had."  They were kindred spirits, especially in their love of gardening, and I remember Garnett as being a wise and gentle person with wide-ranging knowledge and a brilliant sense of humor.  Then -- my parents got transferred again, and they had to leave West Virginia.  And as if this wasn't bad enough, six months after they moved away, Garnett was walking home from the school where she taught and died of a massive heart attack at the age of 57. 

And once again, my mom's world closed in on her a little more.

My dad retired in 1967 and we moved back to his home town of Lafayette, Louisiana.  For a year I lived with my paternal grandmother -- ostensibly because they were in the process of building a house and the little room they rented didn't have space for me, but I think honestly it was mostly because my mom was having trouble dealing with me.  This led to another fractious relationship -- between my mom and her mother-in-law.  In retrospect, I have to admit my paternal grandmother wasn't an easy person.  I idolized her, but she and my mom never got along -- as far as I've heard, right from the start.  The fact that I preferred being with my grandmother has to have rankled.  Whatever the cause, pretty much every time they were together, there was an argument, and no matter how petty the cause, neither one would ever give the other an inch.

It was during this time that my mom developed rheumatoid arthritis, a horrible disease that gradually robbed her of her mobility, and worse, of her ability to use her hands.  Her art became less a joy than a painful frustration.  I remember her during my teenage years as being in perpetual pain.  By then, we were at continual loggerheads over just about everything.  So on top of the usual teenage angst, stubbornness, and rebellion, there was a good dose of spite in my behavior -- of my doing things deliberately to set her off.

You'd think she'd have looked forward to my moving out, but when I was looking at colleges, my parents were adamant that I attend the University of Louisiana, in my home town, live at home rather than in the dorms, and commute.  Considering my attitude, to this day I don't know why they didn't hand me my suitcase and say "good riddance" to me.  I also don't know why I didn't push harder to move away.  Having space from each other would have done all of us a world of good, I think.  But she pressed, and I caved, and in what I think is one of the worst personal mistakes I've ever made, I stayed at home while going to college.  During a time when most people are dating, partying, and forming friendships, I had a nearly zero social life.  I had some friends I saw at school; but after class was over, I went home and stayed home.  And still my mom and I frayed each other on a daily basis.

I finally moved away after graduation in 1982, because I'd met the woman who would become my first wife.  It is not an exaggeration to say that my mom and Anne loathed each other.  My mom, who prided herself on following the rules of etiquette, could barely say a polite word to Anne about anything.  To be fair, Anne was far from blameless herself; my first marriage was, in a word, a mistake, which is another topic in and of itself.  But by that time I was desperate to get out, and Anne was my ticket -- to her home town of Seattle, Washington.

Visits home were few, tense, and as short as we could make them for propriety's sake.  From the outside, everything probably looked hunky-dory -- my mom told friends and neighbors about her pride when I got my teaching license and landed my first full-time teaching position, then when my two sons were born.  But the fact remained that we just didn't understand each other, and conversations were like walking in a minefield.  By this time we were usually able to avoid arguments, largely because we rarely talked about anything more meaningful than how the boys were doing and how my job was going.

Ultimately Anne and I divorced, and a few years later, I remarried to Carol, two of the only things I've ever done that met with my mom's 100% unequivocal approval.  (I still recall that when Carol and I were dating, in 2001, she had a business trip that would take her through Lafayette, and she bravely arranged to visit my parents.  I was a nervous wreck until the visit was over -- but to Carol's credit and my complete shock, it was a resounding success.)  My dad died of a stroke on July 4, 2004, and my mom followed eight months later, on February 19, 2005.

My mom with her two grandsons in the Blue Dog Café, Lafayette, Louisiana, in December 2004, three months before her death at age 84

Thinking about my mother on what would be her hundredth birthday, I'm experiencing mixed emotions.  I feel sorry for all the adversity she faced during her life -- it seemed like fate dealt her blow after blow, and as soon as she stood up from one knockdown, she was hit again from a different direction.  I have a lot of regret for not working harder to get along with her, for not realizing at the time how much of our rough relationship was because of the emotional pain she'd endured.  I don't know that even in the best of circumstances, we'd ever have been close -- it's hard to imagine two people so different ever really understanding each other -- but I know I could have done much better, and if I could sit down now and talk with her about it, I think she'd have to admit she could have, too.

Still, we were both doing the best we knew how at the time.  Suffice it to say that in our own fashion, and to the extent we could, we loved each other.

Happy birthday, Mom.  As hard as it was on both of us sometimes, I wish I could say it to you in person.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

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

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Being a fiction writer, I think about villains a lot.

Of course, the proper word is "antagonist," but "villain" is a lot more evocative, bringing to mind such characters as the the dastardly Snidely Whiplash from the brilliant Adventures of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties.

Left to right: Snidely Whiplash, Dudley Doright, Fair Nell Fenwick, and Dudley's horse, who is named... Horse.  They just don't write comedy like that any more.

One of the things that I've always tried to do with the villains in my own novels is to make them three-dimensional.  I don't like stories where the villains are just evil because they're evil (unless it's for comedic effect, like Mr. Whiplash).  My college creative writing teacher, Dr. Bernice Webb (one of the formative influences on my writing) told us, "Every villain is the hero of his own story," and that has stuck with me.

Of course, that doesn't mean you need to sympathize with the motivation the villain has, whether it be money, sex, power, revenge, or whatever.  For example, I find this villain one of the most deeply repulsive characters ever invented, because what motivates her is pure sadism:

But it works because we've all known people like her, who use their power to hurt people simply because they can, who take pleasure in making their subordinates' lives miserable -- and because of that twist in their personality, a frightening number of them become bosses, teachers, and political leaders.

The reason this whole villainous topic comes up is because of a study published in the journal Psychological Science this week called "Can Bad Be Good?  The Attraction of a Darker Self," by Rebecca Krause and Derek Rucker, both of Northwestern University.  In a fascinating study of the responses of over 235,000 test subjects to fictional characters, Krause and Rucker found that people are sometimes attracted to villains -- and the attraction is stronger if the villain contains positive characteristics they share.

For example, Lord Voldemort was ruthless and cruel, but he also was intelligent and ambitious -- character traits that in a better person are considered virtuous.  The Joker is an essentially amoral character who has no problem killing people, but his daring, his spontaneity, his quirkiness, and his sense of humor are all attractive characteristics.  Professor Moriarty is an out-and-out lunatic -- especially as played by Andrew Scott in the series Sherlock -- but he's brilliant, clever, inventive, and fearless.

And what Krause and Rucker found was that spontaneous and quirky people (as measured by personality assessments) tended to like characters like The Joker, but not characters like the humorless Lord Voldemort.  Despite his being essentially evil, Moriarty appealed to people who like puzzles and intellectual games -- but those same people weren't so taken with the more ham-handed approach of a character like Darth Vader.

"Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us," said study co-author Rucker, in an interview in the Bulletin for the Association of Psychological Science.  "Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite."

What seems to be going on here is that we can admire or appreciate a villain who is similar to us in positive ways -- but since the character is fictional, it doesn't damage our own self-image as it would if the villain was a real person harming other real people, or (worse) if we shared the villain's negative traits as well.

"Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves," said study lead author Rebecca Krause.  "When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them."

Which makes me wonder about myself, because my all-time favorite villain is Missy from Doctor Who.  

Okay, she does some really awful things, is erratic and unpredictable and has very little concern about human life -- but she's brilliant, and has a wild sense of humor, deep curiosity about all the craziness that she's immersed in, and poignant grief over the loss of her home on Gallifrey.  Played by the stupendous Michelle Gomez, Missy is a complex and compelling character I just love to hate.

What that says about me, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand, I still fucking loathe Dolores Umbridge.  That woman deserved to get eaten, one bite at a time, by Hagrid's hippogriff Buckbeak.  Being sent to Azkaban at the end of the last movie was too good a fate for her.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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

To see ourselves

The brilliant Scottish poet Robert Burns packed a lot of truth in these four lines:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

It's almost a cliché that we don't see ourselves very accurately, both in the positive and negative sense.  We sometimes overestimate our own capacities (resulting in the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency of people to think they understand things way better than they actually do).  At the same time, we often undersell our own abilities, lacking confidence in areas where we really are talented -- sometimes through false modesty, but sometimes because we really, honestly don't realize that we have an unusual skill.

I remember this last bit happening to me.  I have one ability my wife calls my "superpower" -- I remember melodies, essentially indefinitely.  The craziest example of this happened when I was taking a Balkan dance class when I was in my early twenties, and heard a tune I really liked.  I was going to ask the instructor what the name of the tune was, but clean forgot (so remembering other things is not really my forté).  But I remembered the tune itself, after hearing it only a couple of times while we were learning the dance that went with it.

Fast forward thirty years.  I was at Lark Camp, a week-long folk music gathering in the Mendocino Redwoods, and I was heading to lunch when I heard a fiddler and an accordion player playing a tune.  My ears perked up immediately.

There was no doubt in my mind.  That was "my" dance tune.

Turns out it's a Serbian melody called Bojarka.  (If you want to hear it, here's a lovely live performance of it by flutist Bora Dugić.)  I had remembered it, without trying or even playing it again, for thirty years.

What's funny is that I never thought there was anything particularly unusual about this.  With no context, I always simply assumed everyone could do it.  It was only when I started playing with other musicians that I found that my musical memory was pretty uncommon.  (It bears mention, however, that my remembering a tune doesn't mean I can play it perfectly.  Technically, I'm an average musician at best.)

This all comes up because of a recent study that looked at how our close friends think of us -- and even more interestingly, what their brains look like when they're doing it -- and suggests that our pals are way more aware of our core strengths, flaws, talents, and personalities than we might have thought.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons FOTO:FORTEPAN / Korenchy László, Portrait, woman, mirror, reflection, smile, headscarf Fortepan 29523, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "The Neural Representation of Self is Recapitulated in the Brains of Friends: A Round-Robin fMRI Study," which appeared this week in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Robert Chavez and Dylan Wagner of Ohio State University took a group of eleven close friends and had each of them think about first themselves then the ten others, one at a time, evaluating each on the degree of accuracy of forty-eight different descriptors (including lonely, sad, cold, lazy, overcritical, trustworthy, enthusiastic, clumsy, fashionable, helpful, smart, punctual, and nice), and while they were doing this task an fMRI machine was recording how their brains responded.  The results were nothing short of fascinating.  The authors write:

Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC [medial prefrontal cortex] during a person’s self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person.  Moreover, the similarity of neural self–other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self–other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session.  These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others.

So while everyone doesn't see you completely accurately, in aggregate your friends have a pretty clear picture of you.

"Each one of your friends gets to see a slightly different side of you," said study lead author Robert Chavez.  "When you put them all together, it is a better approximation of how you see yourself than any one person individually."

So Robert Burns's famous quip is both true and misleading; the way others see us is largely accurate, but if you take a large enough sample size, it agrees pretty well with how we see ourselves.  We may not be so unaware of our own foibles and unusual skills as it might appear at first, and it seems like our attempts to hide who we truly are from our friends aren't quite as successful as we like to think.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

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