Reading fiction ‘improves empathy’, study finds

The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.

One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathising with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.

I’ve been repeating this to myself recently:

“The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you’ve lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.”

Others:

“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

“If you think you know what the hell is going on, you’re probably full of shit.”

Interesting: Who Runs the World ? – Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control

In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.

New rule.  If the Republican base ever complains about something, it is always something they want to do themselves.  So death panels=a secret desire to kill people off.   Calling something unconstitutional is really the desire to merge church and state. I’m not nearly as repulsed by people cheering the death penalty – because that’s cheering vengeance, that’s cheering the death of a potentially horrible person.  But someone who’s a mere victim of circumstance?  I’ll go Godwin: these people want to come as close to concentration camps that kill people off without having any actual camps.  Here are the number of ways this is sickening.

1. The pro-life party wants government intervention to save an unborn baby, but no government intervention to save an adult.

2. The reason that a healthy person might not buy insurance is because he couldn’t afford it. So “personal responsibility” here is a person choosing to pay for food and shelter first.

3. A perfectly healthy person can get struck with cancer or get hit by a car.  Neither which is the person’s fault, but he should be made to suffer more because he has no money.

4. The party of God says that God makes things happen – so if you’re poor and get cancer, you must deserve it.

Andrew Sullivan’s got a nice post on Republicanism as Religion.

[The current GOP] can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

If your view of conservatism is one rooted in an instinctual, but agile, defense of tradition, in a belief in practical wisdom that alters constantly with circumstance, in moderation and the defense of the middle class as the stabilizing ballast of democracy, in limited but strong government … then the GOP is no longer your party (or mine).

Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don’t even listen.

Think of Michele Bachmann’s wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear – and it has building for a decade and a half, because I’ve seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars – is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

He ends with a defense of Obama: “If you ask why I remain such a strong Obama supporter, it is because I see him as that rare individual able to withstand the zeal without becoming a zealot in response, and to overcome the recklessness of pure religious ideology with pragmatism, civility and reason.”

As disappointed I have been with Obama, he is more than the lesser of two evils. Even if you concede that both parties are controlled by Wall St., one party is also controlled by religion. Even if a President Perry enacted the EXACT same policies as Obama, his presence on the world stage legitimizes fundamentalism. Corporate fundamentalism is bad. Corporate fundamentalism + religious fundamentalism is worse. And the right are more corporate fundamentalists because of that religious influence. As much as you might want to say that there’s no difference between the two parties, that just isn’t true.  That Obama can rely on the insanity of the Republican Party to take the Democratic party further to the right is aggravating, but it’s still to the left of religious fascism.

Meanwhile, Don Campbell has a nice post about creeping fascism as portrayed in fiction at Apex (nice too because it mentions TABOTD):

In 1935 Doubleday published the novel It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. The plot may sound familiar to you. A populist politician, one whose ideas supposedly reflect those of the common man, rises to power. He himself is viewed as a somewhat average Joe, charismatic and easy to listen to. He makes promises that the ordinary citizen finds attractive and thus they elect him president. As he takes control, his tenure rapidly becomes dictatorial. Dissent is outlawed, political enemies are removed to camps, Congress is eliminated. Outrage is met with martial law and still many support him for his patriotism and ideals.

If it sounds like Nazi Germany, that’s because it was a novel written to parallel Hitler’s rise to power well before World War II kicked into high gear, but set in the United States. Many people were convinced such a thing could never happen on American soil, but Lewis understood the ease with which such things can be accepted by the unsuspecting. Before the truth is realized, it’s often too late. Hitler did not seize power, he was given power. The people supported him at the beginning and they went on supporting him, making excuses for his actions, well after it was obvious what he was really up to.

Read on.

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines “low-information voter” – or, perhaps, “misinformation voter.”

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to “share their feelings” about their “faith” in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs – economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism – come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes – at least in the minds of followers – all three of the GOP’s main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too bad! But don’t forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP’s fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter – God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass – and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? – we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Whole thing is worth reading.

This is worth watching (via).

A few years ago, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, a leading researcher in the alien encounter phenomenon, approached me after seeing my recent film The Jew in the Lotus. He wanted me to consider making a movie about encounters with these alien life forms. I told him no. I knew next to nothing about alien abduction, had no interest and thought it was all rather foolish. Then, he invited me to meet some of the people who claim to have had these experiences. They seemed rather normal and spoke about their feelings of connection and longing for these uninvited intruders to return. I had stumbled into a world filled by people who had been touched by something … and had their lives blown apart because of it. I was mesmerized. I feel that I was abducted by John Mack.

This started my journey into the lives and minds of alleged abductees around the world, and into my own personal journey through skepticism, fear, insomnia, fascination, confusion and led to many many questions.

These “experiencers,” as many of them call themselves, bring with them reports of missing time, bodily probing, sperm extraction, impregnation, a strange project to create a hybrid/alien-human race and apocalyptic warnings. According to various studies, the number of people world wide reporting alien abductions reaches into the hundreds of thousands. As there is no conclusive physical proof, the debate as to whether these stories are true or not could go on forever. Instead, I became more interested in the people — those who have had their lives both torn apart and transformed by this experience.

Fascinating stuff (via):

Vivisecting Verses – DARPA Investigates the Neurobiology of Narratives

DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.

We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age.

More: Are Myths And Stories A National Security Issue?

Here is a description of the workshop:

“The impact of narratives on human psychology ranges widely from what events we remember most easily to our choices about important foundational behaviors to include our degree of trust in others. Since the brain is the proximate cause of our actions, narratives have a direct impact on the neurobiological processes of both the senders and receivers of them. Understanding how narratives inform neurobiological processes is critical if we are to ascertain what effect narratives have on the psychology and neurobiology of human choices and behaviors, and can assist in everything ranging from exploring how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is influenced by event repetition to better understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.

To stimulate discussion and research on these issues, the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a workshop, Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The workshop is intended as a sequel to one held February 28, 2011, which explored the nature of narratives, their role in security contexts, and methods for analyzing them quantitatively. This workshop will establish fertile ground for connecting our understanding of the neurobiology of narratives with models, simulations and sensors salient to security concerns. Accordingly, it focuses on surveying the neurobiological processes related to narratives, bridging the cognitive neurosciences and the story stimulus.

This workshop has five mutually reinforcing and overlapping goals:

To assay narrative effects on our basic neurochemistry

To understand narrative impact on the neurobiology of memory, learning and identity

To assess narrative influence on the neurobiology of emotions

To examine how narratives influence moral neurobiology

To survey how narratives modulate other brain mechanisms related to social cognition”

Big news: Michele Bachmann believes in God. I am continually mystified by what sparks outrage. While I’m glad Bachmann’s recent statement on the hurricane is bringing attention to her fanaticism, the statement itself is so unsurprising that it’s perplexing that people suddenly care. She said:

I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’

In response, Anne Rice (a believer who rails against the hate-based policies of the Christian right) said on Facebook:

Michele Bachmann has insulted God with her statements, and the families and loved ones of those who died as the result of Hurricane Irene, and all those thousands suffering now because of the storm. This is shameless conduct on the part of a politician. Her career in the public arena should be brief.

So I’m a bit confused. If God exists and has his/her/its hand in events – how is the hurricane not God’s will? Everything is God’s will, or Satan’s – whichever, there’s a theological basis to events.
It would be surprising if Michele Bachmann didn’t believe this. I guess it’s insulting because God would never do anything bad, and the bad stuff is the devil’s work. Except when people are faced with tragedy, the response is often, “God works in mysterious ways.” Bad things are also done by God – so Michele Bachmann’s statement is entirely consistent with mainstream Christian belief.

I get that a politician shouldn’t say these things – why try to fix anything if it’s all God’s will. But Anne Rice seems to say that a believer shouldn’t even believe these things, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s the basis to Christianity. God does bad things to test our faith:

For he breaks me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause.

Michele Bachmann believes this happened. Even if she thinks this is allegory, she believes that this is something that God’s capable. So the spin is actually worse than the original statement:

Michele Bachmann’s press secretary characterized comments by the Republican presidential candidate, when she said Hurricane Irene was a message to Washington, as a joke.

“Obviously she was saying it in jest,” Alice Stewart told TalkingPointsMemo Monday.

Michele Bachmann just called her faith a joke.

This just gets crazier, and more entertaining…

(via)