Veterinarians and anti-vaxxers

Let's get something straight from the outset.

Vaccines don't cause autism.  They never have.  The "research" of Andrew Wakefield, which started that whole myth, was shown to be fraudulent years ago, and every study since then -- and there have been many -- has supported that vaccines have few side effects, the vast majority of which are mild and temporary, and their benefits outweigh any risks they might engender.

And yes, that includes the two vaccines most often cited as being dangerous, MMR (Measles/Mumps/Rubella) and HPV (Human Papillomavirus).

This whole thing should have been laid to rest ages ago, but there's no idea so baseless and stupid that there won't be loads of people who believe it.  Which, I believe, largely explains the bizarre resurgence of the "Flat Earth" model, a claim so stupid that anyone who believes it apparently has a single Froot Loop where most of us have a brain.

But back to vaccines.  I've dealt with this topic here at Skeptophilia often enough that you might be wondering why I'm returning to it.  Well, the answer is that the anti-vaxx movement has now expanded its focus to a different target...

... pets.

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

I kid you not.  Veterinarians, especially in urban areas of the United States, are reporting an increasing number of pet owners who are refusing to get their pets vaccinated.  Only one vaccine is mandated for dogs in the U.S. -- rabies -- but the others are critical to prevent devastating diseases.  The reason you hardly ever hear about a dog getting (for example) canine distemper is because responsible dog owners have their dogs vaccinated against it.  The vaccine is nearly 100% effective, and (like virtually all vaccines) safe and side-effect free.

If your dog actually contracts distemper, however, he has a 50-50 chance of surviving it, even with the best veterinary care.

There's no question which option I take for my own dogs.

The anti-vaxxers, however, don't see it like this.  Recall that this is the group of people who believe that it's better to develop "natural immunity," meaning immunity from exposure to the actual pathogen.  If a child (or a pet) has a good diet and is otherwise healthy, they say, these infectious diseases aren't dangerous.  Thus the book Melanie's Marvelous Measles by Stephanie Messenger, which tells the story of little Melanie who is just thrilled to get measles and develop "natural immunity" rather than having to go through the ordeal of getting a vaccination.

For the record, I'm not making this book up.  Although I do find it heartening that of the 511 reviews it's gotten so far on Amazon, 74% of them are one-star.

The problem is twofold.  First, this "natural immunity" carries with it the risk of horrible complications from the disease itself, a few of which are shingles (chicken pox), sterility (mumps), blindness (measles), and birth defects (rubella).  That's if they don't kill you outright.  I have mentioned before my grandfather's two sisters, Marie Emelie and Anne Daisy, who died nine days apart of measles -- at the ages of 22 and 16, respectively.

The second problem is that it doesn't take all that many people choosing not to vaccinate to give infectious diseases a foothold.  Measles and mumps are both making comebacks; to return to the original topic of pets, so is distemper, to judge from a 2014 outbreak in Texas that resulted in 200 cases of the once-rare disease.

And why are people making this decision?  As with the anti-vaxxers who are refusing to vaccinate their children, these people are trying to protect their pets against some unspecified set of ostensible risk factors.  Stephanie Liff, a Brooklyn-based veterinarian, has reported that she has clients who elected not to vaccinate their dogs -- because they were afraid the dogs would become autistic.

"We've never diagnosed autism in a dog," Liff said.  "I don't think you could."

The bottom line here is that our pets, like our children, depend on us to make responsible decisions with regards to their health, safety, and welfare.  The fact that people have loony ideas sometimes is unavoidable; but when those loony ideas start to endanger others, including animals, who have no say in the matter -- then it becomes reprehensible.

Party-line science

The latest from the "Why the Hell Are We Still Having to Fight This Battle?" department, we have: a new rule within the Department of Agriculture forbidding employees to use the term "climate change."

Yup.  Emails from the National Resources Conservation Service, a unit within the USDA, describe terms that "are to be avoided."  According to Bianca Moebius-Clune, one of the directors within the NRCS, here are some substitutes for the forbidden terms:

• instead of "climate change," say "weather extremes"
• instead of "climate change adaptation," say "resilience to weather extremes"
• instead of "reduce greenhouse gases," say "increase nutrient use efficiency"
• instead of "sequester carbon," say "build soil organic matter"

"We won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it," Moebius-Clune writes.  "There are a lot of benefits to putting carbon back in the sail [sic], climate mitigation is just one of them."

Which is disingenuous to say the least.  No one is fooled, Ms. Moebius-Clune, by "how you're talking about" climate change.  This administration has made it clear from the get-go that they are not only science deniers, they will do everything in their power to block or undo efforts to mitigate climate change, up to and including lying outright about what the evidence means.  

And if there was any doubt about the shenanigans going on here, consider that one of the NRCS emails mentioned in the story was from a USDA employee named Suzanne Baker, who asked whether NRCS staff were "allowed to publish work from outside the USDA that use ‘climate change’."  Baker was advised that the issue was best discussed via telephone rather than email -- presumably because telephone conversations leave no paper trail.

The whole thing goes back to an issue I've discussed before in Skeptophilia; that when the government starts having a Party Line with respect to what is acceptable science, there's a serious problem.  Science is by its very nature apolitical; data has no spin.  Now, what should be done about problems uncovered by scientific research is a different matter.  Solutions obviously have political and economic implications that need to be decided by responsible leaders.

But the science itself has zilch to do with whether you're a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or anything else.  You can disbelieve it if you want to, but that doesn't make you a staunch party member, it just means that you're willfully ignorant.

This all makes the timing of a report on climate change released last week, drafted by scientists from thirteen different agencies, seem even more on-point.  The last decades have been the warmest in 1,500 years, and Alaska and the Arctic are warming at twice the global average -- making a positive feedback loop from the methane released by thawing permafrost a frighteningly real possibility.

The report is now sitting on President Trump's desk, and there's considerable concern in the scientific world that Trump will either order it to be amended, or else suppress it completely.  It contradicts his stance that petroleum, coal, and gas use is completely safe, and that global warming is a myth -- something he's stated in one form or another over and over.  "It’s a fraught situation," said Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University (who was not involved in the study).  "This is the first case in which an analysis of climate change of this scope has come up in the Trump administration, and scientists will be watching very carefully to see how they handle it."

I may be pessimistic in this regard, but I don't think there's any question how they'll handle it.  Trump has loaded the relevant governmental positions with climate change deniers and people in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry, so his position on this matter is crystal-clear.  If the report isn't round-filed immediately, it'll be returned for revision -- rewriting it so as to cast doubt on its conclusions, taking out language that the powers-that-be dislike and replacing it with vague verbiage intended to generate a shoulder shrug rather than resolute action.

After all, if all of the studies that have gone before this haven't changed the minds of people like Trump, EPA director Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, this one sure as hell won't.

What I find grimly ironic about this is that in the United States, the state that is projected to have the most damage from climate change is Florida.  So if the ice melt continues at the current rate, Trump's precious Mar-a-Lago resort is going to be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a hundred miles from the nearest land.  I know that if this happens, it will come along with the displacement of millions of people worldwide from coastal cities, which is nothing short of tragic; but the mental image of Trump piling up sandbags around his palatial estate, trying futilely to keep the seawater from flooding in, at least cheers me up a little bit.

[image courtesy of the University of Arizona and the Wikimedia Commons]

It would take a bigger man than me not to watch him and say, "How's that 'weather extreme' treating you, Donald?  Bet you wish you had engaged in a little 'increasing of nutrient use efficiency' while you still could, don't you?"

Linda vs. the serial killer

There's a logic problem that's often nicknamed "The Linda Problem," and I hasten to state that by calling it that I don't mean any general criticism of people named Linda.  It goes like this:

Linda is a 30-year-old woman who lives in a big city in the United States.  She is single, has a master's degree in sociology, and is deeply interested in issues of discrimination, social justice, and addressing poverty and homelessness. 

Which of the following is more likely?

1. Linda is a bank teller. 
2. Linda is a bank teller who voted for Hillary Clinton.

The whole thing rests on what is known as the conjunction fallacy, and it's amazing how many smart people this one trips up.  The answer is that the first statement has to be more likely; the more qualifiers you add to a list, the fewer people will meet the whole list at the same time.  To give an illustration that is less likely to elicit a wrong answer, consider the following.

You see a dog.  Which is more likely?

1. It's a golden lab.
2. It's a golden lab wearing a red collar.
3. It's a golden lab on a pink leash wearing a red collar.
4. It's a golden lab sitting on a sidewalk while on a pink leash and wearing a red collar.

For this one, it's clear that each additional qualifier makes the pool of (in this case) dogs that fit the description smaller and smaller.

[image courtesy of photographer Eric Armitage and the Wikimedia Commons]

So why does the Linda Problem trip people up?  It's because in statement #2, the second qualifier -- that she voted Democrat in the last election -- is actually quite probable, given what we know about her.  Once people see that, they tend to grab on to it and ignore the bank teller part, thinking, "Well, I have no idea how likely it is she's a bank teller; but it's really likely she voted for Clinton.  So the second one must be the most likely overall."

Which is why I found the results of a paper that appeared last week in Nature: Human Behavior simultaneously so funny and so appalling.  The study, conducted by a team led by Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky, investigated biases against people based on their religious adherence (or lack thereof).  Test subjects were asked one of two versions of a question designed to see if people connected atheism with sociopathy.  They were given the following scenario:

A 45-year-old man, who tortured animals when he was young, later moved on to hurting people.  He has killed five homeless people that he abducted from poor neighborhoods in his home city.  Their dismembered bodies are currently buried in his basement.

Half of the test subjects were then asked the following:

Which of the following is more probable?

1. The man is a teacher.
2. The man is a teacher who does not believe in any gods.

The other half got a different question:

Which of the following is more probable?

1. The man is a teacher.
2. The man is a teacher who is a religious believer. 

Well, you can see that this is just the Linda Problem in a different guise, and that in each case statement #1 is more probable, regardless of the qualifier (or what the additional qualifier was in statement #2).  But Gervais found a surprising result -- a full 60% said that in the first case, the second statement was more likely, and only 30% said the same for the second scenario.  (For comparison purposes, one study found that the average number of people who miss ordinary conjunction-fallacy problems is around 48%.)

So that means that people's innate biases against atheists make them more likely to fall for the conjunction fallacy.  Unsurprisingly, when this test was carried out in highly religious countries -- like the United Arab Emirates -- the percentage who miss it was even higher.  In less religious countries, such as New Zealand, the percentage was lower, but the bias still exists, in that the percentage who got the question wrong was still higher than the average of 48%.

Most interesting of all, people who were themselves non-believers were less biased -- but not by much.  (52% of self-described atheists got the first question wrong, as compared to 60% average for the entire group of test subjects.)

As fascinating as this is, it's also pretty disheartening.  I know there's prejudice against atheists, but really... a serial killer?  And even my fellow atheists have that perception?  I do run into this kind of thing, usually in the guise questions like, "If you don't believe in god, how do you have any moral compass?  Why don't you go around committing immoral acts?"  My response usually is something like, "If your fear of punishment in the afterlife is the only thing that's keeping you from lying, stealing, and hurting others, then you're the one whose moral compass needs examination, not mine."

But I didn't realize how deep the bias goes.  Gervais et al. write:

The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice.  Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.

Which is kind of terrible, really.  Any kind of unfounded prejudice is a bad thing, but judgments like this lead people to make some pretty hideous assumptions.  It'd be nice if the Gervais et al. paper might get people to reconsider their biases, but given the words the authors use -- "intuitive" and "entrenched moral suspicion" -- that's probably a forlorn hope.

In any case, I hasten to reassure readers of Skeptophilia that I have no dismembered bodies buried in my basement.

For one thing, my basement has a cement floor, which would make it kind of difficult.

So lonely I could die

I just got back from a ten-day visit to my publisher, wherein I attended a writers' retreat and about 150 different meetings with other writers and staff members of Oghma Creative Media.  This was great from the standpoint both of seeing some old friends, and also networking, which is pretty critical to a fiction author.

Simultaneously, however, it made me want to curl up into a ball and whimper softly.  I am dreadfully shy and a natural-born introvert, and crowds of people, however friendly, sap my energy like nothing else.  I did kind of crash-and-burn one day, during which I was in conversation with people from, no lie, 7:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night without a single break.

By the end, my publisher said I looked like a lost puppy, standing there with a dazed, "where am I?" expression on my face.  He did bring me a scotch, which helped considerably.

This is why I took such interest in a paper presented last week at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, entitled, "Loneliness: A Growing Public Health Threat."  The paper described a meta-analysis done by a team led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University.  What they did was first combine the results of 148 different studies of over 300,000 people, correlating social isolation with the risk of early death, and then do the same for a larger group of 3.4 million people.

The results were unequivocal.  Social isolation correlates with premature death -- and in fact is as big a risk factor as obesity!  Holt-Lunstad said in her presentation:

Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need — crucial to both well-being and survival.  Extreme examples show infants in custodial care who lack human contact fail to thrive and often die, and indeed, social isolation or solitary confinement has been used as a form of punishment.  Yet an increasing portion of the U.S. population now experiences isolation regularly... There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators.  With an increasing aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations around the world now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it.

Which of course got me thinking about my own situation.  I'm pretty solitary even for an introvert; I have lots of pleasant acquaintances, a few true and deep friends, but almost no social life.  The majority of the people in my life are there because of my (much more extroverted) wife, and even most of the people that I consider good friends I seldom see.

Me and one of my best friends, who unfortunately lives 230 miles away...

The problem, apparently, is worse in men than in women, probably because we guys have been told since birth that to be a strong man means to be tough, silent, and to downplay our emotions.  This comes at a cost -- for men, social isolation is as correlated with heart attack and stroke risk as smoking is, and in fact shows an actual biological marker -- an elevated level of fibrinogen, a protein involved in blood clotting.

Of course, correlation isn't causation.  It could be that the elevated risk and social isolation are correlated because both of them are caused by something else -- such as depression.  Establishing a causation was beyond the scope of this study, although it is to be hoped that the researchers will investigate that next.

The problem, both in general and for me personally, is what exactly socially isolated people are supposed to do about all this.  Heaven knows I'd like more social connections, and I suspect others like me feel the same way, but connections don't just magically appear.  They require us to put ourselves out there and be more outgoing.  Which gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Maybe a scotch would help.

Anyhow, forewarned is forearmed, and there's nothing to be lost by trying to forge a better social life for myself.  I doubt that I'll ever be extroverted no matter what I do -- but I have to say that a couple of buddies with whom I could have a beer every now and then would be mighty nice.

Spell check

If you were wondering why the Trump administration has turned out to be a slow-moving train wreck, it's not because the American people saw fit to elect an unqualified, ignorant, narcissistic sociopath to the highest office in the land: it's because Trump et al. are being cursed by witches.

At least that's the contention of Lance Wallnau, pastor, author, speaker, "spiritual guide," and writer for Charisma News, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  Here are just a few of the appearances Wallnau has already made:

• He predicted that the Cleveland Indians were going to beat the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 World Series, because Chicago is cursed by god because Obama lived there or something.  When the Cubs won, he claimed his prophecy was still correct because of Satan.
• Hillary Clinton was motivated by a "spirit intent on destroying America."  And just one man stood in her path... namely...
• Donald Trump's win was because of god applying a "wrecking ball" to the "higher level demon principality" the United States had become, which means that if you don't like Trump, you're motivated by demons.

So you can see that Wallnau's grip on reality isn't that strong to begin with.  Despite the fact that he's one of these "traditional family values" guys who thinks that social liberalism is sending America into the pit of hell, he is staunchly behind a thrice-married serial adulterer for whom money and power are the sole motivators.  And, apparently, he sees no internal contradictions in this stance, to the point that he thinks that Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ.

And now, Wallnau thinks that his Deputy Lord and Savior is under attack.  Because, let's face it; you can't be the Chosen One and expect that all the bad guys in the world are just going to accept it.  So Wallnau thinks that Trump is being cursed by witches, presumably using spells that make the target individual sound like a spoiled and inarticulate toddler.

But there's a twist in all this; since the president is being "protected by the prayers of Christians," most of the evil magic is being deflected, and is instead striking the members of Trump's family.  This could certainly explain some of the trouble that Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner are in at the moment.  And if some of the collateral damage is striking members of Trump's inner circle, this could also make sense of the resignation of Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, and the rumors surrounding some impending upset involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I don't know how I feel about this.  I mean, taking down Donald Jr., Kushner, Spicer, Scaramucci, and Sessions is all very well, but it leaves so many other deserving recipients of evil spells uncursed.  I mean, come on; Kellyanne Conway?  Betsy DeVos?  Paul Ryan?  And most of all, Mitch McConnell?  If ever there was someone who needs to be targeted by the "Silencio" charm from Harry Potter, it's Mitch McConnell.  The only thing that would be better is to (1) make it permanent, and (2) add some other spell that would get rid of the slimy smirk he always wears.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Wallnau wants his followers to rectify this oversight.  “People are praying for the president, but they’re not necessarily praying for his family,” Wallnau said.  “So right now, all those witchcraft curses that did not land on Donald Trump are trying to take out his kids, trying to take out his offspring, trying to attack anything near him.”

As proof of the danger, Wallnau cites an exorcism he once witnessed, wherein the demon was expelled from the possessed person, but instead of hauling ass back to the Pits of Darkness, the demon instead jumped into the body of the family dog, who proceeded to fling himself out of the car window as it sped down the highway.

Which brings up an important question, to wit: who the hell does an exorcism on someone in a moving car?  I'll admit that some people do drive as if they had taken classes in Hell's Driving School.  But even so, it seems like a dangerous thing to do.  Even if it wasn't the driver who was being exorcised, you'd still have the risk of sharp objects being flung around the car and the possessed person puking up pea soup all over the place.

Which would make it kind of hard to concentrate on watching the road.

But Wallnau apparently doesn't find anything at all weird about this.  He told his listeners exactly what they should say.  “We take authority over every hex, vex, spell, jinx, satanic curse, blood curse, every demon assigned to destroy the health of the president, to destroy the health of his family, to harass him, to vex him, to cause him to lose sleep.  In Jesus's name, we veto every curse that has been brought against Donald Trump and his family and his administration.”

And I have to admit that sounds pretty authoritative.  But you have to wonder why they don't do anything more productive, like praying that god vetoes Trump's Twitter account.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  I have to admit that Lance Wallnau is always good for a laugh, even if my chortling is tempered by the fact that he has a large number of people who actually listen to him and believe what he says, and damn near all of those people voted for Donald Trump.  All of which makes my laughter ring a little hollow.

So I think to cheer myself up I'll go practice hurling spells like "Petrificus Totalus" in Mitch McConnell's direction.  Who knows?  Maybe it'll work.  And if my aim is bad, it could still hit Paul Ryan, which would be almost as good.

Worrywarts

It will come as no particular surprise to people who know me that I can be a little neurotic at times.  I'm nervous to the point of not being able to sit still, and get seriously worked up before (for example) races, because I can so vividly envision everything going wildly wrong.  Mental images of me running out in front of a truck or collapsing with heat stroke or simply being the last person to limp across the finish line gain a life of their own, despite the fact that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Traveling is worse.  I say I love to travel, but what I actually mean is that I love being at my destination.  Traveling with me is kind of a nightmare, because I experience gut-clenching anxiety about missing a connection or losing my luggage or worse.  I still vividly recall watching with increasing horror as my wife tried to get through the immigration checkpoint on our way back into the U.S. from our first trip to Ecuador fifteen years ago.  I watched her searching her pockets and backpack for her passport, her expression gradually moving from perplexity to worry to outright panic -- and there was nothing I could do.  I couldn't go back in the line from the other side of the checkpoint and help her; even if I could, it's not like I knew where her passport was.  Images of Carol being hauled off to a windowless room with a bare light bulb to be interrogated as to why she was trying to enter the country illegally flitted through my head.

Of course, in short order she did find her passport, and disaster was averted, but it took me about three weeks to calm back down.

We also ended with nothing more than a serious adrenaline rush the time the drug-sniffing dogs flagged my backpack in Belize, although I did have to find a place to change my pants afterwards.

It's not like I have a history of terrible things happen to me.  I've never had anything worse than getting ill for a day or two, on any trip I've ever taken, and even that has been mild.

So none of this is connected to reality, not that this matters.  If no real crisis presents itself, my brain is perfectly capable of inventing various scenarios on its own.  The fact that these are highly improbable, and many of them are mutually exclusive, doesn't seem to matter.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why I have now been sent a link three times by various friends and family members about a recent study showing that people who are neurotic live longer.  The study, conducted by Catharine Gale of the University of Edinburgh et al., was huge -- Gale and her team tracked 500,000 people aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom for six years, after giving them a personality assessment designed to determine their degree of anxiety and neuroticism.

The results were fascinating.  Even when controlled for typical risk factors -- smoking, heavy alcohol use, genetic predispositions to heart disease, cancer, or stroke -- neurotic people were less likely to die young.  Gale says:

There are disadvantages to being high in neuroticism, in that it makes people more prone to experiencing negative emotions.  But our findings suggest it may have some advantages too...  For some individuals, it seems to offer some protection against dying prematurely. 

At this point, Gale has no idea why this trend exists, so the next step is to figure out whether there's a causative link to something else, either genetic or behavioral.  Their first conjecture was that neurotic people, being worriers, might be less prone to engaging in unhealthy habits, but that turned out to be incorrect.  The percentage of smoking, drinking, and obesity among the neurotic group was not appreciably different from that of the control group.  Gale says:

We had thought that greater worry or vulnerability might lead people to behave in a healthier way and hence lower the risk of death, but that was not the case...  We now have to figure out why [this correlation] exists.

My own supposition is that neurotic people don't actually live longer, it just seems longer to their family and friends.  Heaven knows my wife, who has the patience of a saint, puts up with a great deal from my tendency toward getting anxious about damn near everything.  Amazingly enough, she still likes to travel with me, which I find a little baffling.  Sometimes I even drive myself crazy; I can't imagine what it'd be like for a normal person to put up with my continual twitching.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty fascinating, and I'm looking forward to seeing what more comes out of the study by Gale et al.  But now I need to wrap this up, because I have a race in three weeks and I need to start worrying about it.  What shall I fret about this time?  Maybe being chased and mangled by a Rottweiler.  I don't think I've used that one yet.

Refusing to play by the rules

As a fiction writer, I'm frequently asked where I get the ideas for my stories.  I sometimes respond, "Being dropped on your head as an infant will do that to you," but the truth is, I have no idea.  A few of them have a clear moment of origin (such as my novel Gears, the plot for which first came to me when I read a paper on the Antikythera Mechanism).

For most of them, however, the genesis is not so clear.  I've had stories that came from a single powerful image that begs explanation, such as my short story "The Hourglass," which resulted from a vivid mental image of two young men, ostensibly strangers to each other, having a peculiar conversation over pints of Guinness at a dimly-lit bar.  I then had to figure out what they were talking about, and why... and what it all meant.

A lot of my ideas pop into my head at unexpected moments, when my mind and/or body is otherwise occupied.  I've had plot lines (or solutions to plot problems) suddenly appear while showering, while on a run, while mowing the lawn, while trying to get to sleep (the latter is especially annoying, because it necessitates my getting up and writing it down, lest I forget what I'd come up with).

In any case, most of the time, the origins of my own creative expression are as mystifying to me as they are to my readers.  So the most honest answer to the question "Where do you get your ideas?" is "I simply don't know."  But a recent bit of research has elucidated at least a piece of the origin of creativity.

Apparently, you become more creative when your rational thought processes are suppressed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The study, by Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, Ioanna Zioga, Michael J. Banissy, and Joydeep Bhattacharya of the University of London, which appeared in Nature last month, is entitled "Relaxed Learning Constraints Through Cathodal IDCS on the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex," and at first probably sounds like something that would only be of interest to serious neuroscience geeks.  Here's how the authors describe their own work:

We solve problems by applying previously learned rules.  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in automating this process of rule induction.  Despite its usual efficiency, this process fails when we encounter new problems in which past experience leads to a mental rut.  Learned rules could therefore act as constraints which need to be removed in order to change the problem representation for producing the solution.  We investigated the possibility of suppressing the DLPFC by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to facilitate such representational change.  Participants solved matchstick arithmetic problems before and after receiving cathodal, anodal or sham tDCS to the left DLPFC.  Participants who received cathodal tDCS were more likely to solve the problems that require the maximal relaxation of previously learned constraints than the participants who received anodal or sham tDCS.  We conclude that cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC might facilitate the relaxation of learned constraints, leading to a successful representational change.

In other words, if you suppress the part of the brain that understands and obeys the rules, you have more flexibility with regards to seeing solutions that require lateral, or "outside-of-the-box," thinking.

As an example of one of the problems the researchers gave their subjects that required lateral thinking, try out the following.

You're shown a (false) equation made of matchsticks that looks like this:

III = III + III

How can you make this a true statement with only moving one matchstick?

It turns out that there are two ways to do it, but both involve the expedient of adjusting not the numbers, but the equal or plus sign.  You could do this:

III = III = III

Or you could take any of the matchsticks and lay it across the equals sign to make an "is not equal to" sign -- one possibility of which is:

II ≠ III + III

Both, of course, require a bit of creative thinking.  As Luft put it, "[Problems like this one] are very hard because in mathematics it is not a valid operation at all – we normally don’t decompose the plus sign, you see that as an entire entity."

It turns out that we become better at seeing these kinds of solutions when we are given transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) that temporarily suppresses the activity of the aforementioned left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Nick Davis, a professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University (and who was not involved in the research), found the study by Luft et al. to be fascinating.  "Creativity is highly prized in most areas of our lives, from work to leisure to politics and war," Davis said.  "When the [left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] was ‘cooled down’, the brain seems to have stopped applying old rules, and been more successful at finding new rules – this is the essence of creativity in problem-solving."

All of which makes me wonder if the most creative people have less activity in the left DLPFC to begin with, at least intermittently.  And also, if so-called "mindless" activities -- such as running, showering, or mowing the lawn -- naturally slow down the left DLPFC, allowing creative ideas to bubble up unimpeded.

I'd love to see that researched... maybe it's a direction that Luft and her team could go.

From there, of course, the next step would be to find a way to switch the rational, rules-obeying brain module off and on at will.  I, for one, would love that, especially now, because I'm at a point in my work-in-progress where I've kind of painted myself into a corner.  I know I'll find my way out eventually -- I always seem to -- but while you're there, operating within what Luft et al. call "learned constraints" it's pretty damn frustrating.