Grammar wars

In linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.  The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be.  The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.

Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong."  I have to admit that I'm more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot."  Drives me nuts.  And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.

It's "all right," dammit.

However, some research just published in Nature last week shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.

In "Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania describe that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.

The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled."  The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist because they're common; less common words, like "turf" -- which used to pluralize to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular plural, and eventually the regular plural ("turfs") takes over.

The research by Newberry et al. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness.  They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call stochastic drift, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study.  "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.  The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember.  But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."

So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail.  It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English are the result of such mangling; both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire").  "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called back formation -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction.  A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle.  (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English yanks words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)

Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry."  It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to.  But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot."  A line has to be drawn somewhere.

The persistence of belief

Two studies published last week were profoundly discouraging to people like me, who spend a lot of time trying to promote skepticism and critical thinking, and squelching loopy claims.

The first was a study of American beliefs done at Chapman University.  The study found that:

• 55% of the Americans surveyed believed in ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis
• 52% believed in ghosts, hauntings, or evil spirits
• 35% believed that aliens visited the Earth long ago and influenced ancient civilizations
• 26% believe that aliens are still visiting the Earth
• 25% believe in telekinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind
• 19% believe that psychics can foresee the future
• 16% believe Bigfoot is real

Only a quarter of the people surveyed held no paranormal beliefs whatsoever.

If that's not discouraging enough, compare that to a Gallup poll this year that found only 19% of the Americans surveyed believed that evolution exists and operates through purely natural forces.  So yes: apparently more Americans believe Carrie is a historical documentary than believe in non-god-driven evolutionary biology.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then we had a paper called "Poor Metacognitive Awareness of Belief Change," by Michael B. Wolfe and Todd J. Williams of Grand Valley State University, that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.  This study found that yes, you can sometimes change people's opinions with the facts.  They gave people (actual) studies to read showing that spanking is a lousy method of discipline -- it simply doesn't work, and has a number of well-documented bad side effects on children.  (And don't even start with me about "I was spanked as a child and I'm fine."  If that's true, I'm glad you turned out okay, but you should appreciate the fact that you were lucky -- the research is absolutely unequivocal about the negative effects and poor efficacy of spanking.)

And some people did change their minds.  Which is encouraging.  But when the subjects were questioned afterwards, the researchers found that the ones whose stance changed tended to misremember their original beliefs.

In other words: they reported that their beliefs hadn't shifted much, that apropos of their new position, they knew it all along.

The authors write:

When people change beliefs as a result of reading a text, are they aware of these changes?...  [T]he relationship between the belief consistency of the text read and accuracy of belief recollections was mediated by belief change.  This belief memory bias was independent of on-line text processing and comprehension measures, and indicates poor metacognitive awareness of belief change.

Which is frustrating.  The implication is that most of us have such poor self-awareness that we don't even notice when our opinions change.  I suppose it's natural enough; it's hard for all of us to say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong."

But for cryin' in the sink, learning how to admit error is part of growing up.  The world is a complex, counterintuitive place, and we have fallible sensory organs and brains, so of course we're going to get it wrong sometimes.  Because of that, we have to learn not only to admit error, but to examine our own beliefs and biases with a high-power lens.  If you don't periodically look at your own most dearly-held beliefs and ask, "Could I be wrong about this?  How could I tell?  And what would that mean?", you are stumbling around in the dark with no clear way of figuring out where you've made a mistake.

So we skeptics have to toil on.  I'm not saying I'm right about everything -- far from it -- but I will maintain that skepticism, logic, and science are the best ways of sifting fact from fiction.  It's disappointing that we're still a nation where every other person you meet believes in haunted houses, but there is a remedy.  And if, as the second study suggests, the people we convince end up saying, "Meh, I never really believed in ghosts in the first place," I can accept that as the next best outcome to an outright admission of error.

Living the dream

Last night I dreamed I was in my classroom.  It wasn't my real classroom, however -- it looked like a 19th century lecture hall.  Wooden desks, old cabinets containing jars with ground-glass stoppers, various pieces of equipment of uncertain purpose, some of which looked like (and may in fact have been) torture equipment.  My son lived in an apartment above my classroom, with his wife, which is especially curious because he's not married.  I was teaching a lesson on the reproductive systems of monkeys, but my students weren't listening.  Also, my son kept coming out on the balcony (of course there was a balcony) and interrupting my lecture to ask me questions about the rules of rugby.

After that, it got a little weird.

Neuroscientists have been trying to figure out the physiological function of dreams for years.  The contention is that they must be doing something important, because they're so ubiquitous.  Judging from my own dogs, even other species dream.  Sometimes they have exciting dreams, with muted little barks and twitching paws, often ending in a growl and a shake of the head, as if they're killing some poor defenseless prey; other times they have placid dreams, eliciting a sigh and a wagging tail, which ranks right up there amongst the cutest things I've ever seen.

But what purpose dreams serve has been elusive.  There's some contention that dreaming might help consolidate memory; that it may help to eliminate old synaptic connections that are no longer useful; and that it might function to reset neurotransmitter receptors, especially those connected with the neurotransmitter dopamine.  But last week, some neuropsychologists at Rutgers University have found evidence of yet another function of dreaming; making people less likely to overreact in scary situations.

Tom Merry, "Gladstone Dreams About Queen Victoria's Dinner" (1886) [image courtesy of the Wellcome Library Gallery and the Wikimedia Commons]

In "Baseline Levels of Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep May Protect Against Excessive Activity in Fear-Related Neural Circuitry," by Itamar Lerner, Shira M. Lupkin, Neha Sinha, Alan Tsai, and Mark A. Gluck, we learn that people who have been deprived of REM (rapid eye movement, the phase of sleep where dreaming occurs) are more likely to experience extreme anxiety and PTSD-like symptoms than people who have been REMing normally, as well as higher activity in the amygdala -- the part of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, and anger.

The authors write:

Sleep, and particularly rapid-eye movement sleep (REM), has been implicated in the modulation of neural activity following fear conditioning and extinction in both human and animal studies.  It has long been presumed that such effects play a role in the formation and persistence of Post-Traumatic-Stress-disorder, of which sleep impairments are a core feature.  However, to date, few studies have thoroughly examined the potential effects of sleep prior to conditioning on subsequent acquisition of fear learning in humans.  Further, these studies have been restricted to analyzing the effects of a single night of sleep—thus assuming a state-like relationship between the two.  In the current study, we employed long-term mobile sleep monitoring and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to explore whether trait-like variations in sleep patterns, measured in advance in both male and female participants, predict subsequent patterns of neural activity during fear learning.  Our results indicate that higher baseline levels of REM sleep predict reduced fear-related activity in, and connectivity between, the hippocampus, amygdala and ventromedial PFC during conditioning.  Additionally, Skin-Conductance-Responses (SCR) were weakly correlated to the activity in the amygdala.  Conversely, there was no direct correlation between REM sleep and SCR, indicating that REM may only modulate fear acquisition indirectly.  In a follow-up experiment, we show that these results are replicable, though to a lesser extent, when measuring sleep over a single night just prior to conditioning.  As such, baseline sleep parameters may be able to serve as biomarkers for resilience, or lack thereof, to trauma.

Which I find pretty fascinating.  I had sleep problems for years, finally (at least in part) resolved after a visit to a sleep lab and a prescription for a CPAP machine.  Turns out I have obstructive sleep apnea, apparently due to a narrow tracheal opening, and was waking up 23 times an hour.  I'm still not a really sound sleeper, but I feel like at least I'm not sleepwalking through life the way I was, pre-CPAP.  I also suffer from pretty severe social anxiety, and although I'm not convinced that the two are related, it is curious that the researchers found that a lack of REM ramps up anxiety.

However, even after fixing my apnea, my nights are still disturbed by bizarre dreams, for no particularly apparent reason.  I don't dream about things I'm anxious over, for the most part; my dreams are often weird and disjointed, with scenarios that make sense while I'm dreaming and seem ridiculous once I'm awake.  But what does it all mean?  I am extremely dubious about those "Your Dreams Interpreted" books that tell you that if you dream about a horse, it means you are secretly in love with your neighbor.  (I just made that up.  I have no idea what those books say about dreaming about horses, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to go find out.)  In any case, it's highly unlikely that even a symbolic interpretation of dream imagery would be consistent from person to person.

On a bigger scale, however, there is remarkable consistency in dream content from person to person.  We all have dreams of being chased, falling, flying, being in embarrassing situations, being in erotic situations.  But when you slice them more finely, the specifics of dreams vary greatly, even with people who are in the same circumstances, making it pretty unlikely that there's any kind of one-to-one correlation between dream imagery and events in real life.

So the study by Lerner et al. is fascinating, but doesn't really explain the content of dreams, nor why they can be so absolutely convincing when you're in them, and entirely absurd after you wake up.  But I better wrap this up.  I gotta go do some research in case Lucas wants to chat with me, because I might be able to hold my own when the topic is monkey junk, but I know bugger-all about rugby.

Rock recordings

I find it a little astonishing that after seven years in the business of blogging about scoffing at the paranormal, I can still run into claims I've never heard of before.

This just happened yesterday, when a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email with a link and a message saying, "What the hell is this?"  And thus I was introduced to the wacky claim that has become known as the "Stone Tape Theory."

First off, for the good of the order, let me officially lodge a complaint about calling this a "theory."  "Theory" has to be one of the most misused words in the English language, and that misuse never fails to get my goat.  Which explains why I become apoplectic with rage when someone says about evolution, "It's only a theory," as if the word meant "some loopy claim I came up with two nights ago in the corner pub after my third pint of beer, and which could as easily be wrong as right."

To a scientist, a theory is a system of ideas, supported by all the available evidence, that explains a natural phenomenon.  Saying "evolution is a theory" isn't an insult; it means "evolution is the best model we have."  If something is a theory, it's passed the test of scientific inquiry, and holds up to scrutiny.

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system, what is the "Stone Tape" thing?  It's an explanation of hauntings and other paranormal phenomena, which claims that they occur because a powerfully emotional or traumatic event happened on the site -- and those emotions were somehow transferred to the soil, rocks, trees, and so on that surround it.  That's why, proponents say, hauntings often cease when the building in which they occur is remodeled or torn down; you've gotten rid of the object(s) on which the events were imprinted.

[image courtesy of photographer Russ Hamer and the Wikimedia Commons]

So hauntings aren't actual spirits (whatever the hell an "actual spirit" would be).  There's no awareness or anything.  What you're seeing and hearing is like playing back a poorly-recorded tape of the events in question -- a sort of residuum of electrical energy from the emotions of the people in question.

I have a few responses to all this, as you might imagine.

First, if the electrical energy from our brain when we experience strong emotions was able to be "imprinted" on inanimate matter, you have to wonder why (1) it doesn't happen all the time, and (2) you don't get instant replays from people, including yourself, who are still alive.  For example, if all it took were strong emotions, you'd think there would be a residue of dismay from my AP classes when I passed back their first quiz, and that now every time I went into the room, there would be ghostly silhouettes of 21 students with ghastly expressions, murmuring, "I guess I better study next time."

But I've never heard of anything like this happening.  However, that is small potatoes compared to my other question, which is: how on earth could your emotional energy "imprint" on a rock?  I have some quartz crystals on the shelf in my classroom, and I decided this morning to spend five minutes thinking rageful thoughts at them.  I thought that since they were crystals, it might work better, because crystals, you know?  But afterwards there was no change in the quartz, no sense of having my anger re-radiated back out at me.  They looked exactly the same as before, and didn't seem at all flustered.

I got the same results with my coffee cup, a bag of potting soil, and a deer skull that sits on top of one of my glassware cabinets.

So we're confronted with this little problem called "lack of a mechanism."  There's no way that the tiny changes in electrical field generated by your thoughts -- changes that are small enough that you need a sensitive machine, an electroencephalogram, to detect -- could cause any changes in the matter in the area.  I have the same objection to claims of psychokinesis; the Law of Conservation of Energy, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, would imply that if you used your psychic powers to lift (say) a car, you would have to expend as much mental energy as the increase in gravitational potential energy the car experiences by being up in the air.

Which is a huge amount, something you can infer from imagining what would happen if the car suddenly released that potential energy by falling on you.

So I'm not buying either the Stone Tape *grumble, grumble* "Theory" or claims of psychokinesis.  Not only is there no evidence that either one exists, there's no plausible mechanism by which either could occur without breaking basically every law of physics in the book.

On the other hand, if the next time I'm putting away glassware, the deer skull tumbles off the shelf and conks me in the head, I suppose it will serve me right.

Candy bars for Satan

Happy Halloween to all of my loyal readers.  I'm saying this because "Happy Scary Day Of Your Choice" sounds ridiculous, so if you don't celebrate Halloween, you can feel free to get your knickers in a twist.

Because it's a day long associated with legends about ghosts and hauntings and demons and so on, Halloween is not a big favorite with the ultrareligious types.  It's interesting, however, that the day itself has a (sort of) Christian origin; in the Celtic calendar, there were twelve months of thirty days each, which left five days at the end that belonged to no month.  Because of this, they were thought to be days when all of the natural laws were suspended, the dead came back to life, and other special offers.  The culmination was the last of the five days, Samhain, on which your local priest was supposed to get together with the pious members of the village and fight back the forces of evil, after which there was a big celebration complete with high-fives about how they beat the hell out of the demons yet again.  This practice was later co-opted by kids, who would disguise themselves as demons and go from door to door, demanding a gift (a treat) in exchange for their not vandalizing your house (a trick).

The next day, November 1 (All Saints Day) was a holy day, celebrating the start of the new year and the triumph of good over evil, and a time to remember the dead, at least the ones who were buried on sanctified ground.  All Saints Day is sometimes called "All Hallows Day," so the day before is "Hallow's Eve."

And thus Halloween was born.

[image courtesy of photographer Jarek Tuszynski and the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole thing has a connection to some at-least-sort-of-Christian mythology, although its roots go back much further, to the pagan rites of the ancient Celts.  I suppose I can see how the ultrareligious would object to the whole thing.  But this still doesn't explain Linda Harvey, televangelist and founder of Mission:America, who said last week that you should definitely not let your kids participate in trick-or-treating, because it could...

... turn them gay.

I kid you not.  Harvey said:

Yes, America’s recent exaltation of Halloween as a festival second only to Christmas owes a lot to promotion by homosexuals and their new favorite comrades — gender-confused males and females. 

And as usual, the “LGBTQ” folks have no problem using any tool, Halloween included, to corrupt children.

How did she figure all this out?  It's hard to say, although she says she escaped from the magnetic lure of evil only by the skin of her teeth:

When I was 14, I had my own bizarre encounter with the enemy spirit world by experimenting with a Ouija board.  Since my parents were Episcopalians, I received no warnings of spiritual danger because at that time, they lacked a mature, informed level of faith. 

But when my friend and I asked the “board” questions, some unseen force pushed the pointer around.  At times, our fingers were hanging on for dear life as it flew around the board, often spelling out messages. 

I had little biblical background to understand what this presence surely was.  Now, I can only thank God for mercifully protecting me from being drawn more deeply into this spooky and alluring world where the unseen has real, tangible power.

What "this presence" was is the well-studied ideomotor effect, where people's conscious or subconscious thoughts drive their bodies to respond, often in such a way that it feels "reflexive" or out of their control.  So there's nothing much to a Ouija board, and it's only able to tell us what we already knew (or what we might imagine).  No evil "presence" required.

Oh, and Linda: that's a hell of a dig at the Episcopalians, not to mention your own parents.  I guess "ecumenism" forms no part of your religious practice, then?  Nor familial respect?

Fortunately for Linda and her followers, there's an alternate celebration available.  It's called -- and I am so not making this up -- "JesusWeen."  The idea is instead of dressing up in costume and getting candy on the evening of October 31, you dress in conservative clothing and pass out religious study materials.

I just bet the neighborhood kids are going to be busting down the front door to participate in that.

Anyhow, if you're planning on going out trick-or-treating tonight, be ready for attacks from Satan and coming back gay.  I guess we all have to decide what kind of risks we're willing to take.  And this is just me, but if I heard that a neighbor was passing out full-sized Mounds bars, I would throw caution to the wind with respect to either of these.

I saw the light

We are currently in the middle of an early nor'easter, which is supposed to bring rain, wind, lightning, and thunder to us well into midday, which is probably why I was thinking this morning about the subject of Lights in the Sky.

The topic had also come up a few days ago in a conversation with a student, a young man who shares my skeptical outlook.  He showed me a video montage he'd found on YouTube of recent UFO sightings, and laughingly described a conversation he'd had with a friend who evidently liked the "alien spacecraft" hypothesis so much that he needed some reminding of what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.  In any case, I decided to do a little research regarding mysterious lights.

[image courtesy of photographer Andy Pham and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, allow me to state up front that although several of these are as-yet unexplained, I strongly believe that they all have perfectly natural explanations.  The rush to blame any odd phenomenon on the paranormal is a tendency I've blogged about before, and I wouldn't want anyone to interpret my love of a mystery as an unwarranted attribution of these occurrences to ghosts, demons, or Little Green Men.

That disclaimer made, here are a few examples of odd light phenomena that I found out about.  I've included links for each of them that you should peruse if you want more information.

The Hessdalen Light has been seen since the 1940s in the valley of Hessdalen in Norway. It's a stationary, bright white or yellow light, floating above the ground, sometimes remaining visible for over an hour. With such a cooperative phenomenon, you would think it would be easily explained; but despite the efforts of scientists, who have been studying the Hessdalen Light for decades, there is yet to be a convincing explanation.  Hypotheses abound: that it is the combustion of dust from the valley floor; that it is a stable plasma, ionized by the decay of radon from minerals in the valley; or even that it is an electrical discharge from piezoelectric compression of quartz crystals in the underlying rock.  None of these is completely convincing, and the Hessdalen Light remains one of the most puzzling natural phenomena I know of.

Similarly peculiar are the Brown Mountain Lights, near Brown Mountain in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina.  These brightly-colored lights have been seen since the early 20th century, usually hovering near the horizon, and skeptics have claimed that they are the headlights of a train or automobiles, as there is a highway and a train track fairly near to the site where the lights are most often seen.  However, when a flood washed out the train overpass and rendered the highway impassable, the lights continued to be seen.  They're still seen today, apparently most commonly between September and November.

Likely to be a combination of lights from a highway and an atmospheric condition are the Paulding Lights, of Paulding, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  This phenomenon is the subject of a variety of YouTube videos (search for "Paulding Lights" and you'll find a bunch), and in fact became the topic of an episode of Fact or Faked: The Paranormal Files on the Syfy Channel.  The FOF people, as you might predict, concluded that it was "unexplained."  However, after doing some digging myself, I found that researchers had concluded that the mysterious lights seen near Paulding were due to automobile headlights refracting through an inversion layer -- a layer of cool air near the ground bounded by warmer air above.  So I will respectfully disagree with the investigators on FOF and place this one in the file labeled "Probably Solved."

The Gurdon Light, of Gurdon, Arkansas, is one that has a lot of supernatural folklore attached to it.   It's a bobbing light seen in a wooded area near railroad tracks, and the legend is that it is a lantern held by a ghostly man who had been killed by a train.  Needless to say, I'm not buying that, and the information I found indicates that this one is fairly poorly documented -- leading me to surmise that it can be explained by nothing more than the overactive imagination of the superstitious.  Nonetheless, Gurdon remains a popular destination -- on Halloween.

Lastly, we return to Norway for what is in my opinion the best documented of these occurrences -- the Norwegian Spiral Anomaly of 2009.  (Do check out this link, which has excellent photographs and video of this strange and beautiful phenomenon.)  On the 9th of December in 2009, thousands of people all over central Norway took photographs and video footage of a spiral light in the sky, with a blue-green filament coming from its center, that opened up into a black hole.  Naturally, there was a rush to explain it as visitation by aliens, or as a physics experiment gone very wrong that had resulted in the formation of an actual black hole.  A more conventional explanation -- that it was a spiral vapor trail left by a failed flight of a Russian Bulava missile -- is only partially convincing; there was a missile test that day, and simulations of the pattern made by the ignited fuel from a spinning missile did form a spiral pattern, but the Spiral Anomaly looked essentially the same from all observation points, and this would not be true if it had been a missile vapor trail (some people would have seen it center-on, others from the side, etc.).  In my mind, it's still a mystery, and remains one of the most recorded, and most perplexing, light phenomena I've ever heard of.

So, there you have it; some reasons to keep your eye on the sky.  And even if I'm in no rush to attribute any of these to spirits or alien spacecraft, I have to admit that they are intriguing.  And there's something in all of us that loves a good mystery, isn't there?

A sugar pill for creativity

Following hard on the heels of a post about the possibility of creativity existing in a machine (and how we could tell if it did), today we look at recent research from the Weizmann Institute of Science (of Rehovot, Israel) showing that your creativity can be increased...

... by a placebo.

In a paper released last month, neuroscientists Liron Rozenkrantz, Avraham E. Mayo, Tomer Ilan, Yuval Hart, Lior Noy, and Uri Alon used three standard measures of creativity -- the creative foraging game, alternate uses test, and Torrance test of creative thinking -- to see if subjects' creativity levels improved if they were given a vial of a cinnamon-scented liquid to sniff beforehand.  The interesting thing is that the aromatic chemical in the liquid isn't neuroactive, but some of the test subjects' creativity improved anyhow.

As long as they were told ahead of time that's the effect it would have.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors write:

Creativity is the ability to generate ideas, solutions or insights that are new and potentially useful.  Creativity is often viewed as a trait characteristic of a person; however, creativity can also be viewed as a state, affected by expectation and motivation...  

We find that placebo can enhance the originality aspect of creativity...  What are the psychological mechanisms that allow placebo to increase the originality aspect of creativity?  There are at least two possibilities. The first mechanism is based on extensive research by Amabile and Deci and Ryan, that suggests that creativity is modulated by motivation.  Extrinsic motivators were shown to be mostly detrimental to creativity, whereas intrinsic motivation is conductive to and strongly associated with creative abilities.  A key factor in intrinsic motivation, according to self-determination theory, is the belief in one’s competence.  For example subjects who practiced encouraging statements (related to self-confidence, releasing anxieties etc.) and omitted self-incapacitating statements showed improved creativity scores.  This is in line with the verbal suggestion in our study that the odorant increases creativity, which may have made subjects feel more competent.  Additional components of intrinsic motivation, such as social relatedness, may also have been increased by experimenter effects in the present study, by the experimenter’s perceived interest in the effects of the odorant. 

A second possible psychological mechanism of placebo, as suggested by Weger et al., is to weaken inhibitory mechanisms that normally impair performance.  Creativity was found to increase in several studies that tested conditions with reduced inhibitions, such as alcohol consumption.  Wieth and Zacks showed that creative problem solving was improved when participants were tested during non-optimal times of day, and suggested that this is due to reduced inhibitory control... This effect was suggested to be in line with paradoxical functional facilitation theory, which attributes improved performance of damaged nervous system to release from inhibition. Informal notions in improvisation theatre suggest that the inner critic is a source of inhibition that limits creativity.  The verbal suggestion made in our study that the odorant increases creativity and reduces inhibitions may thus work through a reduced-inhibition mechanism and/or by increasing belief in one’s competence.

So this suggests that there are two outcomes, here:

• Anything that works to increase your confidence in your own creativity will improve your ability.  This undoubtedly varies greatly from person to person, but it does make me wonder if all of the happy-talk "self-affirmation" stuff, which I had previously derided as pop psychology, might not have something to it.
• Ernest Hemingway may have been right when he said, "Write drunk, edit sober."

I can say from my own experience that frustration is the thing that kills my creativity the fastest.  Whether with music or writing (my two main creative outlets), if I start becoming frustrated with my skill, output, or proficiency, all it serves is to get in my way and make things worse.  I used to grit my teeth and try to plow through it, but I learned that this only tightened the downward spiral -- once frustration has set in, every fumbled note, every clumsy sentence, only serves to further shut me down.  The only solution was to leave the instrument or the keyboard behind -- not easy to do for a tightly-wound type-A personality like myself -- and do something completely different, preferably something active like going running.

Afterwards, it was amazing how the cogs had been loosened and the cobwebs blown away.  With writer's block, I often found that it was while I was running that the solution to whatever plot point I was wrestling with suddenly came to me, seemingly out of nowhere.  The research by Rosenkrantz et al. suggests that the loss of inhibition and cessation of negative self-talk from switching gears entirely might have been what shook the ideas free.

In any case, it's fascinating to find how malleable our minds are, how amenable to suggestion.  It also brings to mind the 2010 study that found that placebos work even when subjects know they're being given a placebo -- and makes me wonder if I should take a good whiff of cinnamon before I next sit down to write.