Bring on the documentaries

I was in my junior year of college when Carl Sagan's Cosmos first aired.  I, and several of my friends, were absolutely riveted.  After each episode we'd eagerly discuss what we'd learned, what amazing stuff about the universe Dr. Sagan had expounded upon.  I was blown away both by the visual artistry (although it looks antiquated today, back in 1980 it was seriously impressive), and by the music, which was and is absolutely stunning.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I also remember, however, the backlash Sagan himself received from other scientists.  He was derided as a "popularizer," scorned as someone who presented pretty pictures and watered down, common-language analogies rather than actual hard science.

I thought this was pretty mean-spirited, but I didn't realize how common that perception was in the scientific world.  Four years later, as a graduate student in oceanography at the University of Washington, I found out that there was really only one pair of words that was considered so vulgar that no one was allowed to utter it: "Jacques Cousteau."  Cousteau was an object of derision, not a "real scientist" at all, just a guy who spoke in a cheesy French accent and liked to get filmed while scuba diving.  In fact, my adviser once told me that he made a point of never accepting a graduate student who mentioned Cousteau's name in their interview.

So this irritation with people who make science accessible to the layperson runs deep, although I have to hope that this is changing, with a few truly first-rate scientists writing books to bring the latest research to the masses (Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, and Lawrence Kraus come to mind).

It's a good thing.  Because to judge from a piece of research published this week in Advances in Political Psychology, there's more to be gained from popularizing science than just encouraging children to pursue science as a career; fostering a fundamental curiosity about nature is essential to eradicating biased thinking across the board.

Called "Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing," the paper, written by Dan Kahan of Yale University et al., looks at how best to move people from leaning on their own preconceived notions to evaluating the strength of claims based on evidence.  The research looked at how watching science documentaries engenders a curiosity about how the world works, and correlates with a lower likelihood of biases in arguments on subjects like anthropogenic climate change.

Kahan spoke with Chris Mooney, science writer over at The Washington Post, and explained what the research by his team had shown.  "It just so happened that, when we looked at the characteristics of [people who watch science documentaries], they seemed to be distinct politically," Kahan said.  "They stood out by being, as a group, less likely to feed the current polarization of political opinion on scientific matters such as climate change.  The data we’ve collected furnish a strong basis for viewing science curiosity as an important individual difference in cognitive style that interacts in a distinctive way with political information processing."

The most fascinating part of the research is that the difference doesn't seem to be related to scientific training, but scientific curiosity.  Having established a scale for measuring curiosity, Kahan et al. looked at both liberals and conservatives and assessed them for biased thinking.  Mooney writes:

Armed with the scientific curiosity scale, Kahan’s new study first demonstrated that while liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans with higher levels of proficiency in scientific thinking (which he calls “ordinary science intelligence”) tend to become more polarized and divided over the scientifically supported risks involved in both climate change and fracking, Democrats and Republicans with higher levels of science curiosity don’t.  Rather, for both groups, the more curious they are, the more their perceptions of the risks tend to increase...  [T]he study also contained an experiment, demonstrating that being possessed of heightened levels of scientific curiosity appeared to make political partisans more likely to read scientific information that went against their predilections.

The final statement is, to me, the most important.  An absolutely critical feature of the scientific view of the world is the ability to continually question one's base assumptions, and to look at the data with a skeptical eye.  And I am not using the word "skeptical" to mean "doubting," the way you hear people talk about "climate change skeptics" (a phrase that makes my skin crawl; no actual skeptic could consider the evidence about climate change questionable).  I am using "skeptical" in its literal sense, which means giving a rigorous look at the data from every angle, considering what it's telling you and examining the meaning of any trends that you happen to observe.  Which, of course, means entertaining the possibility that your prior understanding may be incorrect.  To me, there is no better indication of a truly scientific mind than when someone says, "Well, after examining the evidence, turns out I was wrong about that after all."

So we should be thankful for the popularizers, who follow in a long tradition of work by such greats as Sagan and Richard Feynman.  Children need to have their curiosity about the universe piqued early, and the flames fanned further by watching cool science shows that open their eyes to what a fascinating place we live in.  Think about what it would be like if we had a nation full of people who were committed to looking at the world through the lenses of evidence, logic, and critical thinking instead of prejudice and stubborn adherence to their own biases.

It's a nice possibility to think about, isn't it?

East vs. West

When I travel, one thing that appalls me is when I see someone living up to the Ugly American stereotype.

Such as the Bermuda-shorts-and-tucked-in-plaid-shirt 60-something I saw in Finland walk right out into traffic, expecting everyone to stop for him because he'd seen an ice cream shop across the street he wanted to visit.  When horns blew, he snarled, "Learn how to drive" -- never once recognizing that it was only the fact that they knew how to drive that kept them from running him over.

I know all Americans aren't like that (fortunately), and in fact, more of them are respectful of other cultures than not.  After all, why travel if what you want is to have things exactly like you have them at home?  Still, I think there's a real undercurrent of "We're the Best" running through the American psyche.  Add that to the exceptionalism that was rampant in Western Europe's colonial days, and you have what cultural psychologists call the "West vs. the Rest" phenomenon.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'd always kind of accepted this idea based on nothing but my own anecdotal experiences while traveling, and (in fact) I didn't even think to question whether it had ever been studied.  For example, when I was in Malaysia three years ago, the culture seemed so radically different from mine that it was hard not to come to the conclusion that culturally, we have little in common.  So it was with great interest that I read a paper I stumbled across a couple of days ago that was published just this week in The Journal of Experimental Psychology.  Called "Beyond the 'East-West' Dichotomy: Global Variation in Cultural Models of Selfhood," the study, conducted by cultural psychologist Vivian Vignoles of the University of Sussex et al., blows away the myth that there is some sort of huge cultural divide between the West and the rest of the world.

The idea that Vignoles et al. looked at was the specific part of this belief that has to do with how people view their connections to others, and the idea that the cultures of the West tend to emphasize independence, while the cultures of the East value interdependence.  The study was exhaustive, involving 73 researchers and more than 10,000 test subjects in 35 different nations.  And what they found was twofold: that comparing East vs. West, we're more alike than we are different; and that even so, there is tremendous cultural variation within both East and West.

"Self-perceptions influence our social relationships, health and lifestyle choices, community engagement, political actions, and ultimately our own and others' well-being," Vignoles explains in an interview in Phys.org.  "Our new research provides a much richer and more accurate picture of cultural diversity in self-perceptions than was previously available.  It shows that when we label a cultural group as 'individualist' or 'collectivist', this can lead us to make a lot of false assumptions about how people in that group will see themselves, and so we may wrongly predict how they might respond to our communications or interventions."

Considering how important global understanding is these days -- and the risks and potential cost of misunderstanding -- it is essential that our leaders understand this point.

"Our findings suggest that members of Western cultures tend to view themselves as more self-directed, unique and self-expressive than those from some, but not all other parts of the non-western world," Vignoles says, "and they do not typically view themselves as more self-interested or self-reliant. Western cultural groups are not an 'exception' but form part of the kaleidoscope of cultural diversity."

Further, the tendency of Westerners to view everyone else as homogeneous "foreigners" is equally inaccurate.  "Cultural groups in other parts of the world have distinct models of selfhood that are poorly reflected by previous models of culture and self-perceptions," says Vignoles.  "In fact, the prevailing cultural models of selfhood in Middle Eastern, East Asian, Sub-Saharan African or Latin American world regions are at least as different from each other as they each are from the Western model."

It brings to mind the old Vulcan award from Star Trek, called the IDIC, given to individuals who had made significant contributions to interstellar amity.  (Okay, I'm a nerd, deal with it.)  IDIC stands for "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations."  Turns out that we don't have to go any further than our own Earth to find such diversity -- and that in that diversity, we have far more common ground than many of us imagine.

After school Satan

I don't know about you, but I get tired fighting the same battles over and over.

I'm all for treating people with respect regardless of whether or not they agree with me, but at some point, it's a sore temptation, after the 4,583rd time of explaining something patiently and calmly and receiving the same damn stupid response, to scream, "ARE YOU A MORON?  OR WHAT?" right in their faces.

This point has been reached with Franklin Graham.  Franklin is the son of evangelical preacher Billy Graham, for whom I've always had a lot of respect even though we see eye to eye on basically nothing.  The elder Graham always seemed to me kind and compassionate and well-spoken, and respectful of others even when he disagreed with them.  The younger Graham, however, gives every evidence of being a snarling, frothing religious extremist.

And also not very smart.  I, personally, don't think "Separation of Church and State" is that hard a concept.  Simply put, if it's government sponsored or paid for by tax dollars, religion should keep its nose out -- or, if one religion is allowed in, they all should have equal access (as should atheism and agnosticism).  But since the people who are for breaking down the barrier between church and state generally are only talking about one church (guess which one), that distinction has to be explained over and over and over again.

This time, the whole thing got started because of Child Evangelism Fellowship's sponsorship of "Good News Clubs" in elementary schools, aimed at getting the evangelical Christian message out to young kids in public schools.  This caused some secular groups to sponsor "Better News Clubs" about rationalism and skepticism, but those never really got much press.

What caught people's attention was when the Satanists got involved.

The Satanic Temple is now sponsoring "After School Satan Clubs" (affectionately known as ASS Clubs) in all elementary schools that have a Good News Club.  And lest you think it will involve sacrificing goats or something, here's their message:

It’s important that children be given an opportunity to realize that the evangelical materials now creeping into their schools are representative of but one religious opinion amongst many.  While the Good News Clubs focus on indoctrination, instilling them with a fear of Hell and God’s wrath, After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us.  We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors.

To which I can only respond: Booyah.

I would attend solely on the basis of the fact that their poster kicks ASS.

Well, far be it from someone like Franklin Graham to get the point of this -- which is not to turn kids into practicing Satanists, but to (1) teach them about critical thinking, and (2) to illustrate why Separation of Church and State is there in the first place.  And it's not like this hasn't happened (lots of times) before, from Satanists and atheists pushing to give invocations at government meetings, to the guy who insisted that a rainbow-colored Festivus pole be erected in the Florida State Capitol Building alongside the Christmas tree.

Graham, however, does not appear to be intelligent enough to comprehend the fact that just as he would not want his kids railroaded into becoming atheists (or Satanists) in public school, I would not want mine sitting in a room with a Christian proselytizer.

"Pray for parents and school leadership to have wisdom to refuse these After School Satan Clubs!" Graham tweeted, along with a message that good Christians must work against "the devastating effects of secularism everywhere" and pray that Satanic Temple leader Lucien Greaves see the error of his ways and devote his life to Jesus.

This puts school administrators in an interesting bind.  The ones who okayed the Good News Clubs are now in the position of having to approve the After School Satan Clubs, or deny them both -- else they're very likely to be facing a lawsuit from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  And for all of Graham's sputtering, nothing's going to change the fact that right now, any administrator who keeps the Christian clubs and denies the Satanist ones is in breach of Separation of Church and State.

But since Graham hasn't caught on to that the previous times it's happened, I'm not expecting him to now.

Pandering to anti-science

Is it too much to ask for that we have some political candidates who unequivocally respect science?

In casting about for who else might be out there running for president other than The Big Two, I initially considered Jill Stein, nominee of the Green Party.  Stein has attractive ideas about fracking (against) and renewable energy (for), and I thought she might be worth supporting, not that she has a snowball's chance in hell of winning.  But a closer look indicated that either she's pandering to the anti-science cadre on the far left, or else she's an anti-science loon herself.

Dr. Jill Stein [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with her attitudes toward vaccines.  Here's a direct quote from Stein on the topic:

I don’t know if we have an “official” stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point.  According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn’t allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of.  In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs.  In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs.  So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US.  So who wouldn’t be skeptical?  I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial complex. 

Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health.  Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like smallpox and polio.  In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced.  Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them.

Which sounds like waffling to me.  How about coming right out and saying, "Vaccines are safe, effective, and have saved thousands of lives.  End of discussion."  Worse still, as was pointed out over at SkepticalRaptor, she's wrong about the regulation of vaccines:

The FDA advisory committee for vaccines contains 17 members, all but two are academics with impeccable research and science credentials.  The other two, admittedly are from Big Pharma, but they also have impressive scientific backgrounds, and to impugn their character or any of the 17 others, is borderline libel. 

Does Jill Stein have any evidence whatsoever that those 17 scientists are all handed bribes by Big Pharma to vote against the safety of American children?  Well, does she? 

Then, there's the Green Party's official platform, which explicitly supports homeopathy and other useless treatment modalities:

Chronic conditions are often best cured by alternative medicine.  We support the teaching, funding and practice of holistic health approaches and, as appropriate, the use of complementary and alternative therapies such as herbal medicines, homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine and other healing approaches.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  In a recent forum, Stein went on record as saying that wifi should be removed from schools because of its effects on children's brains:

We should not be subjecting kids' brains to that.  We don't follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless.  Maybe not good enough.  Because it's really hard to study this stuff.  You make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many of them die.  This is the paradigm for how public health works in this country.  This is outrageous.  This is why we need to take back not just our schools, but take back the whole system of how we create health, how we protect health, and our research institutions as well, to be publicly funded and publicly accountable as well.  We've lost trust in our regulatory agencies, when the vice president of Monsanto is in charge of the... not the DEA, which is it... the FDA.

Well, no, it's actually not hard at all to study this stuff.  There have been dozens of well-controlled studies of the dangers of wifi, and all of them have found... nothing.  According to the World Health Organization:

From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF signals produced by base stations.  Since wireless networks produce generally lower RF signals than base stations, no adverse health effects are expected from exposure to them...  Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.

 And once again, her defense for her views jumps to claiming that Evil Corporations Run Everything, so q.e.d., and (of course) finishes up with the argumentum ad Monsantum -- which in this case isn't even correct.  The current commissioner of the FDA is Dr. Robert Califf, who does have ties (as a paid consultant) to the pharmaceuticals industry, but has no connection whatsoever to Monsanto.

Worse still, did I mention that Jill Stein is a doctor herself?

Look, it's not that I expect a political candidate to be perfect, or to line up exactly with my own views on how things should go.  All of politics is a compromise.  But one thing I'm not willing to compromise is that anyone I support needs to respect science.  The fact that Dr. Jill Stein is not willing to go on record as declaring support for scientific findings that have been verified over and over smacks either of pandering to a vocal minority of far-left anti-science types, or of willful ignorance.  And in neither case can I vote for her in good conscience.

The universality of prejudice

One of the most insidious of biases is the perception that you are not biased.

Of course everyone else has their blind spots, their misapprehensions, their unquestioned assumptions about the world.  You, on the other hand?  You see the world through these perfectly clear lenses.  As Kathryn Schulz put it in her phenomenal TED Talk "On Being Wrong," "Of course we all accept that we're fallible, that we make mistakes in the abstract sense.  But try to think of one thing, one single thing, that you're wrong about now?  You can't do it."

Social psychologists Mark Brandt (of Tilburg University in the Netherlands) and Jarret Crawford (of the College of New Jersey) published a study this week in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science that delivers a death blow to this perception, and underscores the fact that none of us are free from prejudice.  Our sense that prejudice is the bailiwick of the unintelligent turns out to be less than a half truth.  Your level of cognitive ability doesn't predict whether or not you're prejudiced -- it only predicts the sorts of things you're likely to be prejudiced about.

Through an analysis of survey data from 5,914 people in the United States, Brandt and Crawford drew conclusions that should give all of us pause.  Their results, which seem to be robust, indicate that people of low cognitive ability (as assessed by a test of verbal ability) tend to express prejudice toward groups perceived as liberal or unconventional (such as gays and atheists) and also groups for which membership is not a choice (such as ethnic minorities).  People of high cognitive ability are not less prejudiced, they simply show the opposite pattern -- showing prejudice toward groups perceived as conservative or conventional, and for which membership is by choice (such as Christians, Republicans, the military, and big business).

"There are a variety of belief systems and personality traits that people often think protect them from expressing prejudice," Brandt explains.  "In our prior work we found that people high and low in the personality trait of openness to experience show very consistent links between seeing a group as ‘different from us’ and expressing prejudice towards that group.  The same appears to be true for cognitive ability.

"Whereas prior work by others found that people with low cognitive ability express more prejudice, we found that this is limited to only some target groups.  For other target groups the relationship was in the opposite direction.  For these groups, people with high levels of cognitive ability expressed more prejudice.  So, cognitive ability also does not seem to make people immune to expressing prejudice."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's a finding that's well worth keeping in mind.  The key seems to be not in eliminating prejudice (a goal that is probably impossible) but in placing our prejudices out in the open where we can keep an eye on them.  If I (for example) have the inclination to believe that Democrats are wishy-washy bleeding hearts who don't give a rat's ass about national security, it's important for me to keep that bias in my conscious mind -- and to listen more carefully to Democrats when they speak, because I'm more likely to let my assumptions do the thinking for me.  

Even more critical, though, is to keep biases in mind when you're listening to someone you're inclined to agree with.  If, on the other hand, you're prone to thinking that Democrat = correct, be on your guard, because that assumption of righteousness is going to blind you to what you're actually being told.  How many times have we given a pass to someone who has turned out to be spouting nonsense, simply because (s)he belongs to the same political party, religion, or ethnic group as we do?

The bottom line is, be aware of your biases, and don't be afraid to challenge them.  Keep your brain turned on.  The human mind is rife with prejudice, unquestioned assumptions, and sloppy thinking, and that's not just true of the people you disagree with.  It's all of us, all of the time.  The best thinkers aren't the ones who expunge all such mental murk from their brains; they're just the ones who are the most determined to question their own mental set rather than assuming that it must be right about everything.

Sovereign criminals

Hi all... a quick Public Service Announcement before I get to today's post.

My publisher has set up a Facebook fan page for me, where I'll be periodically posting teasers from my fiction, announcing new releases, and discussing writing, reading, and the meaning of life.  I welcome you all to join it and participate -- I'll be checking it often and would love to have some interesting conversations going.  It's called The Bonnet Conspiracy (a nod to Skeptophilia's content) -- head over there and join if you're interested.  Hope to see you there!

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You probably remember Ryan and Ammon Bundy, sons of Cliven Bundy, who decided to protest government interference in grazing rights by taking over a bird sanctuary in Oregon.

The Bundys and other members of Yokel Haram occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Sanctuary Headquarters for several weeks before the Feds shot and killed one of them (he was in the process of drawing a gun while running a roadblock) and the remainder decided that discretion was the better part of valor and gave themselves up.

The problem is (from the Bundys' standpoint, at least), "giving up" doesn't mean "all is forgiven."  They're facing multiple felony charges, and since they weren't trying to be sneaky about what they were doing, there is ample evidence for the prosecution to capitalize upon.  So you're an anti-government whackjob who has been caught dead to rights in armed occupation of a federally-owned building -- what do you do?

You claim that you're a sovereign citizen over whom the government has no jurisdiction, of course.

Ryan Bundy has filed several legal statements intended to communicate that he believes that the authorities have no right to press charges against him.  The statements, though, all sound like this:

i; ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent; and;,. 

And this:

i; ryan c, man, accept no offer of representation, as no man is qualified to represent i; and; i; ryan c, man, will hold any man liable, in his/her private capacity, for any burden, placed upon i, man, by any man, by way of representation of i; and;,.

Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress explains that the use of lower case, the semicolons, and the other weird structure is a hallmark of legal statements from the "Sovereign Citizen" movement, which claims that governments, laws, state and federal boundaries, and so on and so forth are meaningless, and that the rights of the individual cannot be impinged upon by anything or anybody.  They also have this wacky idea that there is a "shadow government," formed of a secret cabal of bad guys (who sound an awful lot like the Illuminati), who are really running the whole show, and who get their hooks into you every time you file any document with the government -- including birth and marriage certificates, applications for driver's licenses, tax forms, and the census.  They then use your documentation as collateral for borrowing money from their evil cohorts around the world to fund their nefarious doings.

Why my birth certificate should be worth anything to a super-secret ring of evildoers in, say, Azerbaijan is kind of a mystery.  But apparently it is.  So therefore lower case letters and semicolons and armed occupation of bird sanctuaries.

Ryan Bundy [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, trying to escape prosecution by declaring himself an idiot isn't the only thing he's been doing.  Since he's been in jail, he's been stockpiling food (once a survivalist, always a survivalist, I guess), and took a bedsheet and braided it into a rope in an apparent plan for an escape attempt.  The guards objected, oddly enough.  Brought before the judge to defend himself against charges of attempted escape, he said that he was just "a rancher, trying to practice braiding rope."

So his "you can't tell me what to do" strategy seems to be falling on deaf ears so far.  Not that it'll discourage him from trying.  These types don't give up, even though the funny thing is, the sovereign citizen defense never works.  Ask actor Wesley Snipes, who tried it to avoid prosecution for tax evasion.  The judge basically said, "Nice try.  Next time try looking up the definition of the word 'jurisdiction.'  See you in three years."

So I don't expect that it's going to work any better for Bundy et al.  It's a fittingly loony postscript on an event that was pretty surreal from the outset.  You have to wonder how he's going to act once he gets to prison, which seems like the likeliest outcome.  "I refuse to share a cell.  Sovereign citizens require private quarters, as befits someone who rules his own destiny.  And steak for dinner every night."

To which I expect the warden will respond, "What we have here is... a failure to communicate."

Misery loves creativity

I have bad news for those of you who enjoy being creative: a new study has suggested that a key ingredient in crafting timeless masterpieces is unhappiness.

As a fiction writer, I've been fascinated for years with the question of where creativity comes from.  While some of the ideas that have inspired my writing come from readily identifiable sources, a lot of my stories had their genesis in the mysterious "it just popped into my head" phenomenon.  I've talked to a lot of writers about this, and many of them have had the experience of feeling as if their inspiration came, literally, from outside of their own minds.

And like many writers (and artists and musicians) I have had serious dry spells, when the inspiration simply didn't want to come.  I keep writing through those -- I've found that the best way to push through writer's block is to throw some discipline at it -- but I won't say that what I produce during those times has much of the spark I look for when I critique my own work.  The best writing comes during times when the ideas leap into my mind unannounced, from heaven-only-knows-where.

This new study indicates that what I may be missing in my life is a good dose of plain, old-fashioned misery.

Entitled "How Are You, My Dearest Mozart?  Well-being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers Based on their Letters," the paper published this week in the Review of Economics and Statistics by economist and statistician Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark analyzes the letters and diaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt, and attempts to correlate the use of words indicating level of well-being with their productivity.

Not only their productivity in quantity, but in quality.  He looked at the timing of composition of works that "made a significant contribution to the classical canon," not just how many compositions they'd been able to churn out per month.  And the highest productivity, both in quality and quantity, came during the times these composers were most likely to use words like "sadness," "hurt," "grief," and "nervous."

"An increase in negative emotions by about 36.7 percent inspires one additional important composition the following year," Borowiecki writes.  "Since depression is strongly related to sadness, and is sometimes even defined as a state of chronic sadness, this result comes very close to previous claims made by psychologists that depression leads to increased creativity."

Factors that tended to decrease creative output were being in a happy marriage and finding a permanent position with its attendant job security.

Don't tell him to cheer up -- maybe he's working on a masterpiece.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I don't know about you, but I find this result kind of... depressing.  Is the reason I've had the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly recently every time I sit down to get some writing done on my current work-in-progress simply because I'm enjoying the summer too much?  Should I tell my wife that I'm sick of her being nice to me and bringing me glasses of wine and giving me shoulder rubs, that it'd be better for my muse if she gave me the silent treatment?  Maybe even the companionship of my dog is dampening my creativity.  Maybe I should get a pet that is perfectly content viewing me with disdain, or even ignoring my existence completely.

Like a cat, or something.

As interesting as this study is, I'm not sure that's the approach, frankly.  All of us creative types see ebbs and flows of our output, and the fact that the last few weeks have been pretty serious low tide shouldn't concern me.  Nor, I think, should it make me seek out ways to be more miserable.  It might be that the dark side of human existence can generate beautiful works of art, writing, or music -- listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata for a wonderful example of heart-wringing pathos -- but without joy as an inspiration, we'd never have had the "Bergamasca" from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, my vote for one of the most purely exuberant moments in all of classical music.

So it's a mixed bag, as you might expect.  The most creative minds weave the entirety of human experience into their works, and draw on all aspects of emotion to color what they create.  We may be no closer to understanding where creativity itself comes from, but if we can take our pain and sometimes distill it into something beautiful, at least it gives us something to carry us forward when we're at our lowest points.