Stripping Memories of Emotion

Fascinating article in Discover on a new technique for helping people with post-traumatic stress disorder. In effect, the method uses emotion-suppressing drugs to record unemotional memories over the emotionally charges ones that create so much pain:

More than a year after her accident, Magil saw Brunet’s ad for an experimental treatment for PTSD, and she volunteered. She took a low dose of a common blood-pressure drug, propranolol, that reduces activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that processes emotions. Then she listened to a taped re-creation of her car accident. She had relived that day in her mind a thousand times. The difference this time was that the drug broke the link between her factual memory and her emotional memory. Propranolol blocks the action of adrenaline, so it prevented her from tensing up and getting anxious. By having Magil think about the accident while the drug was in her body, Brunet hoped to permanently change how she remembered the crash. It worked. She did not forget the accident but was actively able to reshape her memory of the event, stripping away the terror while leaving the facts behind.

Brunet’s experiment emerges from one of the most exciting and controversial recent findings in neuroscience: that we alter our memories just by remembering them. Karim Nader of McGill—the scientist who made this discovery—hopes it means that people with PTSD can cure themselves by editing their memories. Altering remembered thoughts might also liberate people imprisoned by anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, even addiction. “There is no such thing as a pharmacological cure in psychiatry,” Brunet says. “But we may be on the verge of changing that.”

Of course if this works as well as suggested here it could be put to some strange uses, but for a moment I choose to celebrate the possibly therapeutic value.

The Future Gets a Little Creepier

From Science News:

Scientists Give Flies False Memories

By directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.

Small World

Wonderful online exhibit of the winners from Nikon's annual micro-photography contest. This image shows crystals of doxorubin. The one below shows mouse cells in which the structural proteins have been excited so that they glow.

Take Note, Wayward Children

Here's the strategy, kids: if you do something bad, consider hiding for so long that your parents think you are missing and mount a search effort. When you emerge from your hiding place they will be so happy to see you that they will completely forget what you did before you disappeared:

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — For hours on Thursday, people around the country were gripped by television images of a homemade silver balloon careening through the skies near here, whooshing over fields and trees and yards with a 6-year-old boy believed inside.

A search party was readied — on foot, on horseback, in helicopters loaded with infrared sensors — to scour the aircraft’s path of more than 60 miles, some terrified that the boy might have fallen from his accidental perch.

In the early afternoon, the balloon landed near Denver International Airport, but the boy was not in it. At last, near dusk, he was found, hiding in a box in his family’s garage attic, fearful his father would be angry at him for touching the flying machine his father had built in their backyard.

Don't Ask Don't Tell in Action

From an email to Andrew Sullivan:

I was an active duty Navy officer from 1990-95 stationed on a Ticonderoga Class cruiser based in Norfolk, and in spite of being fairly liberal and the son of hard-core Kennedy Democrats, I was a bit skeptical of gays in the military (military cohesion and all that) and thought DADT was a decent compromise. That is, I was a supporter until I actually had to participate in a discharge hearing for one of my sailors.

A hard working young Boatswain's Mate Seaman (E2) in my Division was arrested for underage drinking at a gay bar in Norfolk. The authorities, as they are prone to do in military towns, turned him over to the base for disciplinary action. At the time, I did not think much of the raid, as I was fairly fresh out of college where underage drinking raids occurred all the time. In hind sight though, it was clearly a witch hunt as I never recall a straight bar being raided for underage drinking. I assumed it would be the usual drinking related discipline we doled out all the time (restriction to the ship, classes on drinking, etc.) however once the base legal office got involved it turned into a hearing on his sexuality.

The shipboard legal officer (not an attorney, but ostensibly his defense lawyer) started the process and it became very clear this policy was, in a word, stupid. His entire chain of command from his Leading Petty Officer (E5) to his Chief Petty Officer (E7) to me, his Division Officer, gave him stellar reviews and testified to his hard work and excellent seamanship. To see these salty, blue collar guys give impassioned defenses of this sailor was eye-opening to say the least. They could not have cared less what he did or whom he spent time with on liberty, but they wanted him to stay part of our crew. I cannot recall exactly how he defended himself, but I do recall that he essentially had no options - it was a done deal. Our CO had no option either and I could tell it tore him up. The sailor was discharged with an OTH (Other Than Honorable). . . . We simply cannot afford to lose quality members of our Armed Forces.

Is the Taliban a Threat?

From Fafblog:

Q: Is the Taliban a threat?
A: Of course. The Taliban is an ongoing threat to our ongoing mission to eliminate the Taliban.
Q: And if we fail to eliminate the Taliban?
A: We cannot fail to eliminate the Taliban, as long as the Taliban continues to provide safe havens and training grounds for the Taliban.
Q: And the Taliban, of course, offers aid and comfort to the ever-dangerous Taliban.
A: Such is the deadly circle of terror.
Q: Is Belgium a threat?

Pep Bonet

While perusing the web site of the Eugene Smith fund, I stumbled across these amazing photographs by Pep Bonet of young men in Sierra Leone who had lost legs in the war but refused to be defeated by their loss.

He wrote of this work,

I first went there a year after the peace agreement was signed, to produce a photo essay of "Faith" for the World Press Photo Masterclass. I hooked up with groups of kids who were the most affected by the war, but who had emerged as the strongest. Young people who were amputated and blinded bouncing back to demand the chances that were stolen from them. Former child soldiers, not long before members of rebel gangs, now transforming themselves into proper police and security forces. Even kids who lost their minds in the war and living in a mental home, succeeding to return to the world of the sane.

Lu Guang, Pollution in China

Chinese photographer Lu Guang has just won a grant from the W. Eugene Smith Fund for his work documenting the effects of pollution in China. The NY Times has a slide show.

I didn't travel to the worst of China's cities, but I did experience the yellow haze of Beijing, which made it hard to get a clear photograph of the street from my 15th-floor hotel window, and I saw the Yangtze River turned into a gigantic barge port, lined with piles of sand, gravel and coal that stretched for miles.

Modernity is purchased at a high cost.

We Are Creating the Enemy

Robert Pape observes in the NY Times that the more troops we send to Afghanistan, and the more bombs we drop, the more people join the Taliban and the more suicide bombers step forward:

Then, in 2005, the United States and NATO began to systematically extend their military presence across Afghanistan. The goals were to defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time, eradicate poppy crops and encourage local support for the central government. Western forces were deployed in all major regions, including the Pashtun areas in the south and east, and today have ballooned to more than 100,000 troops.

As Western occupation grew, the use of the two most worrisome forms of terrorism in Afghanistan — suicide attacks and homemade bombs — escalated in parallel. There were no recorded suicide attacks in Afghanistan before 2001. According to data I have collected, in the immediate aftermath of America’s conquest, the nation experienced only a small number: none in 2002, two in 2003, five in 2004 and nine in 2005.

But in 2006, suicide attacks began to increase by an order of magnitude — with 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first half of 2009. Moreover, the overwhelming percentage of the suicide attacks (80 percent) has been against United States and allied troops or their bases rather than Afghan civilians, and nearly all (95 percent) carried out by Afghans.

You know, people hate for their countries to be occupied by foreign troops, and they hate it when their neighbors and relations become the victims of "collateral damage" caused by foreigners' bombs. The best thing we could do to help the situation in Afghanistan is pull our troops out.

A Nice Little Find

A spear point from one of our sites near Williamsport, probably about 2500 years old. I was quite pleased.

Rubens the Spy

Proof that men with good taste in women lead more exciting lives.

The Lunacy of "Zero Tolerance"

From the NY Times, the latest outrage to spring from the insane fad for "zero tolerance" policies in schools:

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

A six-year-old child, suspended for 45 days for carrying his multi-purpose tool to school. And this is supposed to prevent future Columbine-style shootings?

This whole business grows from a suspicion that somewhere, somehow, somebody is encouraging delinquency by not being tough enough. We have to have minimum sentencing guidelines because judges aren't tough enough. We have to have "three strikes" laws because otherwise we might coddle repeat offenders. And we need "zero tolerance" rules in schools because otherwise soft-hearted teachers and principles might smile and say "tut-tut" to a kid who brings a knife to school, and the next thing you know the whole school is overrun by violent gangs.

Still, some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.

Because, see, school principals are complete morons who can't tell the difference between a six-year-old who just joined the Cub Scouts and troubled kid looking for a fight.

I suppose there is also the "do something" phenomenon, that is, school administrators feel like that they have to have an answer to the question, "what have you done to make our schools safer?" But they think up some creative lies instead of burdening us with this kind of crap?

I do understand that there are issues about fairness, and I know some schools adopted stricter guidelines when they found that black kids were suspended more often than white kids for the same offenses. But that is not a good enough reason to remove human judgment from the equation, because without some element of judgment, we get lunacy. Suspending good kids from school is not only harmful and stupid, it feeds the belief that government is some kind of out of control monster. And that hurts everybody but Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

The Museum Problem

Travel and Leisure has come out with a rather strange list of the "world's coolest buildings." Of course, one of them is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and it's pretty hard to argue with this building's designation as "cool." Whether it is a good museum, or even more a good model for other museums, is another question:

The first glimpse of Guggenheim Bilbao’s rippling titanium walls in 1997 was a game-changer. Never again would paintings be displayed in humdrum hallways.

But "humdrum hallways" are good places to look at paintings, and bizarre spaces full of curving titanium surfaces are not. Is an art museum supposed to be a place to look at lots of art by many artists, or a single giant work of sculpture?

And then, in a comment on the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, the other problem with recent museums:

Packed with 1,200 years of sextants, silk carpets, and elaborately detailed pitchers, the Museum of Islamic Art dedicates only 10 percent of its space to galleries. Much else is left open, like a soaring 164-foot central atrium topped with a tiny round skylight that evokes the Cairo mosque on which the stone building was modeled.

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC has this same problem, that only 10 percent or so of its space is devoted to galleries. Which may make for cool architecture but is very frustrating for people who actually want to look at objects. The museum is controversial for the content of some of its exhibits, but none of the exhibits bothered me so much as the huge waste of space.

(Note to my children's teachers, who insist that they learn to say "Native Americans": notice that this institution, planned, run, and designed by Indians, is called the Museum of the American Indian. I have never met an actual Indian who wanted to be called a Native American, and I work with Indians all the time. "Native Americans" is a bit of white liberal claptrap.)

Guantanamo Update

Just a note here that the Obama administration is acting rather strangely in regards to the Guantanamo detainees. They are allowing habeas corpus trials to go forward, which I guess is a good thing, but on the other hand their attorneys are still taking the position of the Bush administration, that is, they are opposing all releases. So far 38 cases have been tried, and the judges, almost all of them Bush appointees, have found that there are no grounds whatsoever for holding 30 of the 38. The worst of the worst, indeed. The Obama administration is still refusing to allow any discussion of the methods used to obtain the evidence they introduce, and we know that much of it comes from torture. They are still holding very tightly to the hedge of "state secrets" the Bush people created to shield their crimes.

I think they are doing this from a desire to retain control of the situation. Obama thinks it should be up to him to decide which Bush officials should be prosecuted for wrongdoing, and when. But once federal judges get their hands on the secret evidence of torture and lies, they could order their own investigations, as the judge in the Moussavi case ordered the investigation of why the videotapes of interrogations were destroyed.

I can't say I am surprised at the generally cautious way Obama has approached all of these matters -- they are very explosive, and he seems to be a cautious man -- but I am a little disappointed.

A Republic, if You Can Keep It

When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention, according to an old story, an onlooker asked him what kind of government the delegates had created. He answered, "a Republic, if you can keep it."

This has been on my mind lately because of the situation in Afghanistan. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating an Afghan republic, but in the long run we cannot keep it. Only the Afghans can do that. I think it is long past time we said to the Afghans what Franklin said to his fellow Americans -- our part is done, and now it is up to you.

Where the Wild Things Are

The approaching movie version of Where the Wild Things Are has a lot of people thinking and writing about the original. In the NY Times, Bruce Handy notes that while he loves the book now, he didn't much care for it as a child and neither of his children likes it, either.

What an empowering, psychologically astute parable about a child learning that his anger, while sometimes overwhelming and scary, can be safely expressed and eventually conquered, I thought, when I had occasion to reread the book in my 30s. But as a child myself, without benefit of personal insights subsequently gleaned from more than a decade of talk therapy, I had been left cold. . . .

I loved it as a child and still love it. I think it was my favorite picture book from the time I first read it, and it certainly is now. I know no story more powerfully magical. Only one of my children has loved it, though, my second son Thomas. The others actively resisted my attempts to reread it. This gives me an idea about why some kids like it more than others. Of my children, only Thomas shares my intense love of fantasy. He likes nothing better than to disappear into an imagined world full of magic and monsters. His favorite book is The Hobbit, he has watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies at least a dozen times, he has seen every episode of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he has worn out our copy of Oblivion, the XBox game that is most like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure. So I think that Thomas loves Where the Wild Things Are for the same reason I did: because the hero Max finds a magical world of adventure in his own bedroom and sails to a land of wonder and back without even missing dinner. Now I get the parable about anger that Handy describes, but I'm not sure I did as a child. And I would say that as in a fairy tale or one of Aesop's fables, the moral lesson gives structure to the story but does not account for its appeal. The appeal is in the magic, and in the flow of words that tumble by like the ocean with its private boat, leading us away to a place of wonders.

Fall Flowers

The cosmos that survived Thursday's windstorm have finally come into full bloom.

These are my semi-wild mums, which somehow replaced the pincushion garden center mums I planted in these beds years ago. I love these hardy little monsters.

Humility?

A while back, General Stanley McChrystal gave a speech that created a little flap about whether he was putting too much pressure on the President to endorse his strategy. Less noticed, but called out here by Joe Klein, was his assessment of how difficult it is going to be to defeat the Taliban:

He gave two examples. The first was digging a well: "How could you do anything wrong by digging a well to give people clean water?" Well, you could create new enemies by where you dug the well and who controlled it. You could lose a village by trying to help it. And then there was the matter of what he called COIN mathematics. If there are 10 Taliban and you kill two, how many do you have left? Eight, perhaps. Or there might be two, because six of the remaining eight decide it's just not worth fighting anymore. Or you might have 20 because the brothers and cousins of the two dead fighters decide to take vengeance. "When I am asked what approach we should take in Afghanistan," General Stanley McChrystal concluded, "I say humility."

But sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan isn't humility, it's hubris. We cannot, and I say absolutely cannot no matter how many troops we send, turn Afghanistan into some kind of model democratic state. It's a fairy tale. We may, if we hang around long enough, see a decline in violence for a while, but then few wars stay hot continuously for a decade. We cannot resolve the underlying conflicts. We should be focusing all our attention on getting out as fast as possible.

More is Not Better

From an excellent NPR story on the puzzling regional variations in health care; there are adjacent towns with similar populations in which some medical procedures are performed five times as often in one as in the other. And more procedures does not lead to better care:

A couple of years ago Keller and some colleagues did an elegant study of one kind of back surgery in Maine, a procedure called discectomy. Keller found communities in Maine that had high rates of this surgery, communities with low rates, and communities that were somewhere in the middle. Then he followed patients who had had surgery in those communities over a five-year period to see how they fared. Keller says the conclusion was undeniable.

"In the high rate of surgery overall, the patient outcomes were the least good of those three categories. In the middle rates, the outcomes of the patients were in the middle. And in the low-rate areas — less frequent operations per capita — the outcomes were the best."

The reason that areas with more back surgery did worse, Keller says, is that doctors in those areas were operating on people whose issues were less severe; that is, patients who might not have been good candidates for an operation. So the problems associated with the surgery probably outweighed the problems of their actual sickness. For them, more wasn't better.

White House Art

Every new first couple gets to redecorate the White House with pieces that government museums own but don't have on display, and I am sad to report that the Obamas have made some atrocious choices, like this field of blue blotches by Alma Thomas. The thing looks like a magic eye stereogram, but it isn't.

Soccer Sisters

Behind the line of grownups watching the boys play soccer, the girls make friends.

Undulatus Asperatus

Meteorologists are considering defining a new type of cloud, Asperatus. They sure look cool.

Tragic Humanism

Terry Eagleton:

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst.

The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

Knowing vs. Knowing

The British Psychological Society asked a bunch of psychologists to describe "one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves." Many of the responses are like these:

David Buss: One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated.

Norbert Schwartz: One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me.

In other words, being an expert in how the mind works doesn't help much in making your own mind work better.

Advice for Doctors, Nurses, and the Rest of Us

"When in doubt, be human."

--Dr. Alfred Shulman

Indignation

Theodore Dalrymple, former prison doctor and now professional curmudgeon, confesses to his love of indignation:

I once had a patient who had had the words ‘Fuck off’ tattooed on his forehead in mirror writing. When I asked him for the reason for this, he said that it was to wake him up in the morning when he looked at himself in the glass. It never failed, he said.

Newspapers perform more or less the same function for me. There is always something in them to irritate me profoundly, and there is nothing quite like irritation to get the juices circulating and the mind working. . . .

Whenever I am in France, I read the French newspapers. There is always plenty in them to infuriate me, and so they are well worth the reading; for it must be confessed that indignation is one of the most rewarding of all emotions, as well as one that automatically gives meaning to life. When one is indignant, one does not wonder what life is for or about, the immensity of the universe does not trouble one, and the profound and unanswerable questions of the metaphysics of morals are held temporarily in abeyance.

I used to share this sentiment. I used to read things that I knew would offend me, seeking offense, and of course I found it. I reveled in intellectual condescension, moral superiority, and social snobbery. The pronouncements of idiots delighted me, and the actions of trashy people made me laugh.

I decided, though, that the whole business was at best a waste of energy and possibly a real danger to my soul. I now believe that a taste for indignation corrupts our judgment, and easy condemnation of others corrodes our morals. The root of any true morality is compassion, coupled to a sense of our own weakness. Not that I don't have opinions -- as anyone who reads this blog knows, I have a great many. I believe firmly that many ideas are stupid and many actions wrong. But I do not think that anger, mockery, or scorn are the right responses to human foibles.

And, honestly, I do not find that giving up the pleasure of indignation makes me less happy. I find, instead, that compassion releases me from anger, and that letting go of anger makes me much more pleased with myself and the world. To go about in a state of fury may have sharpened my wits for debate, but the price was constant tension and outbursts of anger and gloom. For me, at least, the Buddha was right: the way to happiness is compassion. I believe that indignation is something like bacon, or whiskey. A little may make you smile, but too much for too long and you have ruined your body, or your life.

Limits

“Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country. . . . This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”

--George Kennan, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1966

The Libertarian Experiment, Continued

Interesting NY Times article about Mohamed Aden, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22 but returned to Somalia 15 years later when the elders of his tribe offered to make him their leader. He has been finding the job easier than he expected:

But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said.

And for all you former and current Minnesotans out there:

“We needed a man of peace and he is from a peaceful place, Minnesota,” said one elder, Mohamed Ali Farah.

Williamsport

I'm working now up on the C&O Canal in Williamsport, Maryland. Williamsport was near the midpoint of the canal, and it was one of the three major ports along it. The other two were Cumberland at the western end, which is way out in the middle of nowhere, and Georgetown, DC at the eastern end, where it is too expensive to acquire land. So the National Park Service has planned since the 1970s to make Williamsport into a center for interpreting how the canal worked. This pictured shows the boat basin known late in the canal's history as the Cushwa Basin, after the owners of the warehouse that still stands beside it. When the NPS acquired the canal, this was a muddy, trash-strewn hole, and its excavation and rewatering were part of the first phase of the Williamsport restoration.

The next phase is to rewater a mile or so of the canal, including a lock and the aqueduct across Conococheague Creek, and then have boat rides. The construction might involve disturbing a couple of known archaeological sites, and right now we are testing part of a prehistoric site along the canal. This site includes a surface layer full of artifacts dating to the Late Woodland period, AD 1000 to 1550, and, we think, another occupation layer about 4 feet down. Not sure how old that is, but as a guess maybe 4000 years. Here my crew is opening a test unit into the edge of the river terrace. We found a lot of small potsherds and a couple of broken stone tools in the upper levels, but we haven't reached the lower occupation surface yet. The weather for the past few days has been wonderful, dry, partly sunny and about 70 degrees. On days like this, finding artifacts in the woods, archaeology is a wonderful thing.

Loneliness and Craigslist

Another answer to the problem of loneliness in the modern world: using Craigslist to put together a group of like-minded people to share a house:

The impetus for the group home or collective they hope to form is less about finances — though it is true that pooling resources yields better real estate — and more about community building. Indeed, Ms. Berger and others seem to share the ideals of the old-fashioned communes of yore, except that their groups are tiny, urban-centric and linked to outside interests like fixing bikes or, here in New York City, membership in the Park Slope food co-op. And like communes, many collectives give themselves names: The House of Tiny Egos (a name that’s decidedly more evocative than, say, Findhorn, that of the hoary Scottish commune) is a five-person collective in a century-old brick bungalow in Bed-Stuy. Not only do they aim to remain of the world, they hope for a convenient location, one that’s near all the major subway stops.

Are their numbers surging? Hard to tell, though people who study more traditional “intentional communities” — that is, any group of individuals living together with shared values, as in a commune or collective — say that they are demonstrably on the rise. Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, said his nonprofit’s database has swelled from 614 communities in 2005 to more than 1,300 this year.