Quirky Little Things

"Bering in Mind" Has Gone Live

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:19:34 +0000

This is just a quick note to say that I will be posting somewhat less frequently on PT Blogs. I know, I know, you're crying your eyes out. But before you do anything rash, rest assured I'm not going far away. The reason for the slow-down is that I've just signed a contract with Scientific American to author a regular column titled "Bering in Mind" and will need to juggle my extra writing time sensibly. This new column at sciam.com will be similar to my PT Blogs postings -- focusing on quirky little things about human nature -- but will be more disciplined and, more importantly, edited.

Here's the descriptive blurb to run with the first few installments of the new column:

In this new column hosted by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University, Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as "Bering in Mind" tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature.

Meanwhile, I'll keep my PT blog up-and-running and will periodically post here as well, particularly to call your attention to news items and new research findings I think would be of more "mental health and well-being" interest to readers of Psychology Today.

For those who've read my PT blog in the past, thanks for your time, readership, and thoughtful comments. I've enjoyed getting to know you through this online community and I hope you'll become readers of my new column at sciam.com too.

Potato Chip Gods

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:07:21 +0000

Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie's classic book Faces in the Clouds presents the fascinating thesis that religious thought is the accidental by-product of an evolved psychological system that's been designed to detect signs of other creatures in the natural environment. In the evolutionary past, Guthrie says, our ancestors needed to be especially vigilant of potential threats in the environment; these threats included not only predatory animals but, perhaps even more significantly, other people as well.

The general idea makes good sense adaptively. If you're out for a hike in the Sierra Nevada and in the distance ahead you make out an ambiguous object--could be an oddly shaped boulder, could be a snoozing Grizzly Bear--you'd be much better off erring on the side of the carnivorous 900-pound beast than the agglutination of phosphate. Since our brains have been hardwired to scan our surroundings for animals and other people then, argues Guthrie, it's quite by evolutionary accident that today we see Jesus Christ's face in the fur of a kitten born in the suburbs of South Bend or his mother Mary in the glass panel of a television cabinet in the Philippines.

It's not just religious concepts that trigger these false alarms, of course. Abraham Lincoln has made his appearance on many a potato chip over the years. Nor are these misattributions always fodder for fools. In Belfast there's a rocky mountainside on the city's northerly skyline that vaguely resembles the head of a giant with his neck craned back so that his nose touches the clouds. Legend has it that this resting colossus inspired Jonathan Swift to write his famous Lilliput scene in Gulliver's Travels.

Religious People Aren't as Scientifically Naive as We Think

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:44:18 +0000

University of Michigan psychologist Susan Gelman and her colleagues have been exploring people’s causal reasoning about illness. These researchers have found that, at least when it comes to what goes on in our own heads, there’s not much of a conflict between religion and science. Sure, that bad case of strep throat your kid got right before your scheduled vacation to Barbados was caused by her chewing on a virus-laden pencil she’d borrowed in math class. And of course, waking up to that enormous zit at the end of your nose on the day of your big interview was caused by that new moisturiser you took a chance on. You’re not delusional: you know your basic science. But that doesn’t mean God’s not trying to tell you something by—what’s the best word here—‘authoring’ these events. Perhaps He didn’t want you lounging on that sundrenched beach because you’d have stepped on an HIV-infected needle half-buried in the sand. Or maybe God didn’t like the fact that you’d been so boastful about landing that job interview and thought you could do with a bit of humbling, so he turned you into Rudolph for a few days.

Gelman refers to this way of thinking as “co-existence reasoning,” where natural, scientific forces are viewed as directly causing a certain event, but supernatural forces are perceived simultaneously as somehow blowing life into this science. Another way to say this is that science and God often co-exist harmoniously in the same mindset, with science acting ‘proximally’ and God acting ‘distally.’ Working out the mechanical intricacies of precisely how they’re related to one another is another matter. In the case of the blemish that ruined your career prospects, did God whisper in your ear to pick up that particular brand of moisturiser while you were standing in the store aisle, perhaps seducing you to try something new by making just the right soundtrack come over the store’s speakers as you stood there deliberating between products? did He cause the manufacturing technician in Singapore to glance down at her wristwatch and put one grain too many of a certain chemical in that particular jar of moisturiser, a grain that subsequently lodged into an unfortunately placed pore?

But engaging in this sort of regressive causal analysis isn’t exactly something religious people are prone to doing. In fact, they couldn’t care less whether God did it through telepathy, by interfering with the airwaves, or by waving His magic wand over the tip of your nose. Rather, they just want to know what He meant by it. Their minds leap to the “why” of it. In contrast, the “how” never even enters the picture, and if it does, only as an afterthought.

There's a lot of empirical work that needs to be done still on this general topic -- but I've a hunch it's this cognitive tension between the "why" and "how" that uniquely breeds atheists.

'Tis the Season: The Psychology Behind Christmas Cards

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:44:34 +0000

Stasis makes me antsy. As a consequence, I’ve cycled through a lot of different houses over the past few years. Rather strange houses. I’ve lived in everything from a tacky condominium in Boca Raton, a renovated bowling alley apartment in Fayetteville, a secluded log cabin in the middle of the Ozark Forest, an old terraced flat overlooking the Atlantic, to my present house, a somewhat bland townhouse with a view to the cemetery across the road, where the tombstones are so close I can tell you from my living room window the date Edward Sullivan died (Feb 18, 1932). I haven’t lost any money with all this moving; I haven’t gained much either, just sort of broke even. It terms of resale strategy, my only buying philosophy is to purchase in the niche market, which means that while most people are going to be put-off on your house because of some odd feature or other, there’s always a strong contingency who fall in love with it just because of it. (At least that’s what I thought prior to this last graveyard house, which I can’t unload now. But I blame the credit crunch, not the corpses.) Each house was great while it lasted. The flat overlooking the ocean was lovely, until I left the window upstairs open one day and a giant seagull flew in while I was away. I had two cats at the time. Let’s just say it looked like I came home to a crime scene.

Anyway, with all this moving around, I’ve also had my share of neighbours. And since I’ve lived in each house at least a year, I’ve run into the same awkward conundrum every December. Should I send Christmas cards to these people, or not? I’m not exactly unfriendly, but neither am I the most sociable person in the world. I bought the log cabin in the woods during a particularly reclusive phase. I think it had something to do with being gay and living in Arkansas at the time. I wasn’t so much in the closet as I was a panic room. But even then, I felt this pressure to be neighbourly with my only two neighbours in a 5-mile radius. And so I looked up their names and stuck generic Christmas cards in each of their mailboxes. Boy was that a mistake. When you live in the middle of nowhere, you tend not to expect a lot of company. So when I was eating scrambled eggs in my underwear around noon the next day and an old woman with her middle-aged daughter came by to personally thank me for the card, the exchange was a little weird. And the other neighbour, who I thought was “just” a schizophrenic with PTSD from serving in the Vietnam war, turned out actually to be a fugitive from Illinois suspected in the disappearance of his ex-wife and living under an alias while trading in semi-automatic weapons and pitbulls. Nice enough guy, though. He, too, stopped by to thank me for the card and held my ear for a good two hours about government conspiracies and spying satellites camouflaged as stars.

I guess I always viewed non-familial Christmas cards as an arms-length way of saying to the other person, “Look, in case I ever, God forbid, need help in an emergency, could you lend me a hand? Remember that Christmas card I sent you? Until then, let’s just give the peremptory smile and wave as the situation demands, shall we.” Don’t get me wrong, I like getting them. But I know some people take this Christmas card thing really seriously.

There have been two notable psychological studies involving Christmas card behaviour. One is a 2000 article published by sociologist Jenifer Kunz from West Texas A&M University in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. The author randomly selected almost 600 names from a directory listing in her area that included names, addresses and occupations of residents within the city limits. She sent Christmas cards to these people, either fancy commercial cards or cheap, hand-written “Merry Christmas” cards on a square of red or green. Half of the receivers were “high status” people (lawyers, doctors, CEOs, CPAs, etc.) and the rest “low status” individuals (“those with obvious blue collar occupations”). Kunz also manipulated the social status of the alleged sender. Half of the recipients received a card from a “Dr.” So-and-So and the remaining half just the first name of the sender. The researcher then sat back and counted up the responses that came in. Only 20% of those who received the stranger’s cards responded by returning a Christmas card, letter, or telephone call to the unknown sender. But people were significantly more likely (78% vs. 22%) to respond to the high status (i.e., “Dr.”) sender. There was also a slight trend for low status receivers to respond more frequently to high status senders than those in their own social class. These general findings support Kunz’s basic “upward mobility” hypothesis that Christmas card behaviour reflects the standard dynamics of social competition. I guess it also explains why these blue-collar neighbours of mine showed up on my doorstep in the woods back in Arkansas.

Another influential Christmas card study, this one rather well-known, was done by anthropologists Russell Hill from Durham University and Robin Dunbar, now at Oxford. The Human Nature study was meant to provide an empirical test of the latter’s hypothesis that among species that live in intense social groups, such as humans and other primates, there are real constraints on the size of social networks due to basic information processing demands. Dunbar essentially developed a formula whereby the size of the neocortex in any given species can be used to predict the default size of the social group for an individual member of that species. Based on this formula, Dunbar reasoned that humans should live in social groups of about 130-150 individuals (which includes people we value and consider important), since beyond this the brain cannot keep accurate track of relational vicissitudes and the cognitive system is taxed. And here’s where the Christmas card bit comes in. The authors sent out questionnaires to potential participants during the holiday season. The respondents were asked to think about the people they were sending Christmas cards to, and for each of these receivers, to note down the distance of that person, the nature of the relationship (family, work colleague, friend, neighbour), social status (single individual vs. couple vs. family), the last contact they’d had, and their emotional closeness to the receiver on a scale of 0 (not close at all) to 10 (extremely close).

Here’s what Hill and Dunbar found. Forty-three participants actually completed the questionnaires and returned them to the investigators. The total number of Christmas cards sent out among this group was 2,984 cards, with a mean number of 68 cards. Keeping in mind that many cards were sent to couples and families, the average network size worked out to 154 people. But since sometimes the senders actively contacted only a targeted member of the family rather than the entire household, the corrected mean was actually 125 people. This was almost bulls-eye specific for Dunbar’s estimate. Other significant findings to emerge from this study were that from about the age of 30 or so, couples and families make up a higher proportion of the social network. But the network size remains constant throughout the life course (presumably, one just has fewer single friends). Hill and Dunbar also looked at the size of “sympathy groups” (particular people in the social network from whom one would seek advice, support, or help in times of severe emotional or financial distress) and found some tangential support in their study that this number hovers between about 12-15 people.

It’s a pain in the ass, really, but I guess I’ll send a few cards out this year. If only I remember my neighbour’s wife’s name.

Let's Talk About the Dead

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:37:07 +0000

One of the more peculiar findings to emerge from my laboratory over the past few years is what I've termed the posthumous effect, the tendency to psychologically alter our perceptions of the recently dead in a favourable direction.

In one study, participants were misled to think we were investigating how physical appearance influences people's judgments of others. Forty-seven undergraduate students from the University of Arkansas were shown "head shots" of three male strangers. In reality, I'd selected these photos - matched on physical attractiveness - from a generic image bank, but the participants were told these images were actual students of a UK-based colleague who was collaborating with us on the project. In a nutshell, we asked participants to rate these strangers on a number of desirable (e.g., "trustworthy," "intelligent") and undesirable (e.g., "hypocritical," "conceited") traits. This 38-item scale consisted of three separate subscales: traits dealing with Kindness and Morality (e.g., "generous"), Achievement-Relatedness (e.g., "hardworking"), and Social Skills (e.g., "affable"). One week later, participants returned and were told, "now that you've had a chance to think about your ratings, we want to give you a chance to re-rate the photos in case you have changed your mind." So this second phase of the study was identical to the first, with one exception. Prior to being shown one of the photographs (chosen at random) the researcher casually informed the participant that the individual shown in the photo had died over the weekend, but that he should be rated as though he were still alive.

And here's why the data are peculiar -- or at least not easily explained. We expected to see ratings from all three subscales shift toward more favourable evaluations for the dead character (which would reflect something like a general "don't speak ill of the dead" phenomenon), but in fact the only significant change between the two sessions (Week 2 - Week 1) was for traits on the Kindness and Morality subscale. In other words, the dead guy, but not the other two guys, became a better human being in the raters' opinion over the course of this week. But death didn't make him, say, any more industrious or improve his social skills.

In a second study, we analysed nearly 500 obituaries published in The New York Times to see if this selective posthumous effect -- emphasizing kindness and morality, but not necessarily other positive traits of the decedent -- occurred similarly in the real world. Indeed, the similarity here with the experimental study was uncanny. We first isolated 744 trait-related terms occurring in the obituaries of 311 men and 185 women; of these, 58.6% were prosocial/morally relevant, 22.2% dealt with achievement oriented behaviours, and 19.2% made reference to the person's social skills.

I have my hunches about why this morality-specific attribution shift occurs, none that I'd stake my career on at this early stage in the game, though. But if these data are indeed borne out in future studies and are cross-culturally replicated (even among groups that allegedly don't believe in an afterlife), then it may be that dying is the ultimate way to win friends and influence people. Those small acts of kindness you do today might not pay off immediately, but you may start earning profits from them as soon as the rigor mortis sets in. And this comment isn't entirely tongue-in-cheek, either, since your posthumous reputation can have genuine effects on your inclusive genetic fitness.

Here's the article in full as it appeared in Human Nature in 2005.

Impostor!

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:26:35 +0000

I don't know what it says about me that as a thirteen-year-old boy my favourite television show was The Golden Girls, but like many fans I was saddened earlier this year to learn of the death of Estelle Getty, who played the sassy Sicilian octogenarian Sophia Petrillo in this long-lived series. Given her obvious talent and inimitable delivery on screen, you might be surprised that Estelle Getty felt like a fraud as an actress. Here's what she said in a 1988 interview with Entertainment Tonight:

"I'm awed every day of my life. I think, this is Bea Arthur, this is Betty White. This is a big hit #1 show in the country. I'm afraid. I live with fear as a constant companion. Can I do this week after week? Am I good enough? Will I be able to pull it off this week? Will I be able to fool them again? And every day I'm a little scared. And every Friday I'm scared out of my wits. I keep thinking, I can't believe I'm in this. Wait till they find out I can't do it."

Now, I've never been on an 80's television series, nor has my name been stitched into the fabric of popular culture as a beloved character actress, but I have a pretty good sense of what Estelle Getty is talking about here. Years ago I interviewed for a position on the faculty of psychology at Harvard University. My selection committee comprised Steven Pinker, Susan Carey, and Elizabeth Spelke and in terms of stature in the field of psychological science, Pinker is something like the equivalent of Bea Arthur and Carey is a good analogy for Betty White. (Comparing Spelke to Rue McClanahan requires a bit more shoehorning, but you get the idea.) One of the reasons I botched the interview was because I couldn't get over the fact that I'd actually pulled this much off. I mean these are all-star celebrity researchers, bona fide superheroes of psychology who'd achieved posterity. And, in my mind at least, I was a third-rate academic, who'd cavalierly graduated at the bottom of his high school class, earned a PhD from a university most people have never heard of, and who'd been toiling away in obscurity at the University of Arkansas as an assistant professor. Like Estelle Getty at her initial casting call, I felt like a charlatan, a ruse, a fake at Harvard. An impostor. Actually, I suspect I was, since in the end they didn't offer me the post.

But what Estelle and I describe is a psychological experience known as the impostor phenomenon (IP), defined by Georgia State University psychologists Joe Langford and Pauline Clance as, "believing that one's accomplishments came about not through genuine ability, but as a result of having been lucky, having worked harder than others, or having manipulated other people's impressions." Here are some more basic facts about IP:

• Impostors attribute their successes to attributes unrelated to the actual talent required for their success, such as personal charm or attractiveness. Some people who experience IP are especially prone to 'chameleon-type' behaviours, modifying their attitudes and actions in ways that foster approval from onlookers. (I inherited from my salesman father a rather chronic but often disingenuous smile, which seems to have a mind of its own.)

• Although early research suggested women are more likely than men to feel like impostors given the lower expectations of success for the former, subsequent studies revealed no difference between the sexes. However, IP appears to express itself differently in men and women. Women tend to be less "playful" (doing things just for fun) and less sociable. Female impostors are also usually extra cautious and averse to risks, whereas men who experience IP tend to score high in impulsivity, express a strong need for change and a low need for order. (Suffice it to say that I've bought and sold 7 houses over the past 4 years and I haven't balanced my check book since 1994.)

• People who experience IP don't simply have low self-esteem in general, but only negative feelings about the self in relation to their particular area of success. And introverts - who are often shy, anxious and lacking in confidence - are more likely than extroverts to feel like phonies, presumably because they're less expressive and more prone to keeping their 'private self' hidden from others. (You may think you know me....)

• When impostors do fail, their reaction displays a stereotypical pattern: they withdraw from the task, blame themselves for the failure, and experience anxiety and shame. Impostors often need to come across as smart or intelligent in front of an audience; women impostors view intelligence as a fixed entity (either one's clever or not, no room for argument) rather than a malleable quality.

• An impostor's sense of worth and importance is unusually dependent on others' feedback. (This one reminds me of 17th century Baroque painter Caravaggio, a bad-tempered genius who allegedly once tore up one of his masterpieces at a slight word of criticism.) Langford and Clance say that impostors "have a strong need to protect themselves from narcissistic injury."

• Impostors often resort to self-deprecation and avoid the attention of others. (Have I told you yet how much I dislike myself? In any event, I hope you're not reading this.)

Estelle Getty wasn't an impostor, of course. She was a brilliant, Emmy-Award winning actress. I suspect deep down I'm not entirely a phony either, though if were to begin talking about my successes I'd just turn my own stomach with nauseating lines of braggadocio, and if there's anything I can't stand more than an impostor, it's a braggart. Ugh, it's a no-win situation for us impostors, isn't it.

Know Thyself, to No Avail

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:37:13 +0000

Yesterday I participated in ‘The Battle of Ideas Festival' in London, where along with three other panelists I debated the impossibly broad question "Does evolution determine human behaviour?" As usual, I'd not prepared enough for the talk, and found myself muttering some nonsense on-stage that the audience graciously suffered. But here's what I should have said:

Many evolutionary theorists struggle to articulate a non-determinist morality that allows any room for free will. This is because, when followed to its full, logical conclusion, evolutionary psychology can lead only to a deterministic moral philosophy. This is not to say that evolutionary processes themselves are deterministic. They are dynamic. But when it comes to the discrete social behaviours of individual human beings, and the psychological forces that are responsible for such behaviours, the subjective self is impotent to affect the person's biological destiny.

If a married, middle-aged man hires a prostitute, it is because the decision is in accordance with his present physiology, which arises as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular inherited genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of related traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Furthermore, this man's brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioural algorithms that respond, either normally or in error, in ways that favoured genetic fitness in the ancestral past.
In the example, this man's self merely plays the role of a spectactor in his body's sexual affairs. Thus there is no-one here to hold personally accountable for his behaviour even though he may be exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted disease and exploiting a drug addict for his own pleasure. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general human nature. Here, the self is a deluded homunculus that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.

If there is, in reality, no free will, then the individual stands outside of judgment. Attributing responsibility to others becomes a meaningless convention that reflects only a naïve psychology of the causes of their behaviours.

But I don't suspect I've convinced you.

Con Artists in the Crib

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:51:14 +0000

Evolutionary psychology isn't all about sex. It all extrapolates to reproductive success eventually, but in my opinion some of the most interesting proposed psychological adaptations are far removed from the textbook miscellany of waist-to-hip ratios, facial symmetries, mate retention, and sexual pageantry.

For example, I'm writing this brief post while on a flight to London, and two rows behind me an infant is screaming its little head off. Its cry sounds sickly, brachial and hoarse, and as my fellow passengers squirm uneasily in their seats and turn the pages of their in-flight magazines at a slightly irritated pace, I'm reminded of a certain adaptationist theory about infant crying from my graduate student days.

The theory goes something like this. The acoustic characteristics of distress cries in infants are specially designed to dupe caregivers into responding quickly. Now the baby behind me sounds like he's about to have a stroke at this rate, but he's also exhibiting that hallmark display of the proposed adaptation, which is a rapid, gasping inhalation between bursts of loud crying. Psychologist Nick Thompson from Clark University has postulated this ‘pitch-to-cry' ratio deceives parents into thinking that the baby is suffering some sort of respiratory distress, which in turn triggers a prompt caregiving response. The idea is that natural selection favoured those infants whose cries mimicked choking sounds because by simulating hyperventilation adults were more vigilant to their needs. As a consequence, these babies (which were our ancestors) would have been less likely to find themselves left alone or with strangers for long periods of time, placed in genuine harm's way.

But I don't know what's going on with this baby, poor dear. It's going to be a long flight.

No, Einstein Didn't Believe in the Afterlife....

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:41:34 +0000

Recently I published an article in Scientific American Mind entitled "Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death." The article summarises a body of research -- both my own and the findings of other researchers --that has led me as a psychological scientist to believe that the afterlife is a bizarre illusion promulgated by the human mind. My central argument, which I've also articulated in more formal scientific outlets, is that whenever we begin to conceptualise the afterlife, or to imagine what it will be ‘like' to be dead, our only cognitive recourse is to project ourselves into the impossible simulation of a conscious person looking around and taking stock of our ‘afterlife' surroundings. But in order to take stock of where and what you are after you've died, you'd rather need a working, functional brain. This is why I say in the article that you'll never know that you've died; at the very least a cerebral cortex is required to harbour propositional knowledge, including the knowledge that by all appearances you've kicked the bucket. Even using such terms as the nothing-‘ness' of death betrays the illusion that death is a ‘state' of unending blackness.

The article has generated a lot of good, heated discussion, both on the Scientific American website and elsewhere. I'm very happy that it has people talking openly and personally about the subject of death and the afterlife. But I must say, some of the comments are very, very odd. A little hostile too. People can be so touchy about their souls. In an earlier post I mentioned that I was a shoulder-shrugging atheist, which means I'm not easily riled up over the question of whether God, souls, and the afterlife are truly real. I assume they're not, because this is the hallmark of parsimonious science. But quite honestly I don't care. I find it much more interesting, and more in keeping with my training, to examine the nature of the psychological processes that allow us to think about questions like God and souls in the first place.

The problem is that many people can't get past the primary syllogism contained in the article. The mind is what the brain does, the brain stops working at death, therefore the feeling that the mind survives death is a psychological illusion. It really is that simple.

I've rounded up some of my favourite negative responses to the article, or at least the most entertaining ones, along with a few quick replies. Typos are intact (in fact what's perhaps even more disconcerting to me than the fact most people are so averse to logic is the sobering realisation that their grammar is so poor.) Since my blog is here at PT rather than over at Scientific American, it's just easier this way.

Enjoy.

**********************************************

"in an 11 dimensional universe, its foolish and egotistical to think that life and conciousness only occur in 3."

****I've absolutely no idea what this means. Do you? I do talk a lot, though I don't see what that has to do with anything. But I think the above comment comes across as effective to detractors because it puts me in my place.

"There's a fallacy at the basis of this argument: you are correlating the existence of a mind with the existence of a brain. Where's your evidence that there's a causal relationship between the two?"

****It's called cognitive neuroscience.

"Mr. Bering, the point of your article is that we can't imagine death because we haven't experienced it? You are one smart scholar."

****Thank you (takes bow).

"Since we haven't a clue what consciousness is, all articles like this one, that profess implicitly to know something that can only be determined if we do know what consciousness is are mental masturbation."

*****You say that like it's a bad thing. But anyway the hard problem of consciousness (qualia are generated from physical matter and so on) is mostly a question of *how* not whether subjective states are produced by the brain. I'm not sure it's such a hard problem anyway. Philosophers enjoy their mysteries.

"If you'd simply take the time to research, there are literally thousands of excellent, substantial examples of "dead" people who have identified themselves through more than name and have spoken very clearly and candidly to someone who is still physically present in this world."

****Strangely enough I couldn't find any such articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals I frequent.

"You want to know what its like to be dead? Think of what it was like before you were born and there you go. Nothingness forever."

*****This theme came up quite frequently in the comments section -- that the afterlife is ‘like' the state prior to conception. But of course it's the same cognitive hurdle at heart. One of my doctoral students, Natalie Emmons, is ankle-deep in data collection on this very topic, studying how children and adults intuitively reason about their own minds before birth.

"Seriously. If the second law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, what does that say about your "soul"? If brain activity is an electrical impulse flowing across a synapse, what happens to that energy when you die?"

****The same thing that happens to the energy you burn when you're doing cardios, but I don't think there's a heaven for metabolised fat. By the way, Einstein is often misquoted as endorsing belief in an afterlife, when in fact he thought the idea that personal consciousness survives death preposterous.

"My theory is that our minds are energy and that since energy is never created nor destroyed, our personalities existed before birth into the present form and continue to exist after the death of this form. Perhaps young children are more in touch with this 'memory' than adults are. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult to imagine not existing even after death. There is a part of our personality that knows that we have always been and will always be."

****See how frequently this ‘energy' construct crops up in discussions of the afterlife? I find that interesting.

"Those steeped in science have to realize there are things that just can't be explained away. All explanations of what happens after we die, whether it be organized religion or this articles of this type, are simply means of dealing with the insecurity of not knowing."

****In other words, ‘we can never know so don't bother asking.' This is the sort of anti-reductionist, anti-intellectual nonsense that has psychological science so far behind in understanding supernatural beliefs.

"When you really take the time and do specialized research in what happens when you physically die (not bone headed dogmatic science) to say we don't survive becomes a ludicrous ill informed statement. I 'stumbledupon' this article and realize it is for a closed mind science types so I knew after the heading the outcome. If you believe you die and that's it end of you forever then no one can change your mind except yourself. The author is a believer and will always be in this life...."

****Oh, I don't know. I might change my mind at the very last minute. But don't judge me on the basis of my deathbed conversion. I probably won't be very lucid then.

"While this article has merit, it only looks at the physical aspect of a human being. Are we not spiritual beings as well, with a soul?"

****No. But I've nothing against you thinking that we are.

"The mind is what the brain does." This is demonstrably false. There are multiple documented cases of patients with extreme hydrocephalus that has destroyed 90%+ of the brain still having normal intelligence. This fact alone demonstrates that mind is not tied to brain."

****This is an empirical question. We can remove your brain bit by bit, and see whether you have any intelligence left once it's all gone.

"It really is interesting that so many people speculate about life after death and come up with so many different ideas, when all one has to do it look in the Bible for the answer. It's all there and not at all hard to see what happens. \\it's all to do with wheather you want to go to heaven or should I say the word, hell. For those who haven,t closed their minds off, the choice is made of wheather you accept what Jesus did on the Cross for you or not. By asking His forgiveness for sin in our life, we can receive eternal life with Him.. John 3:16."

****My mother always said, ‘if it sounds too good to be true...' True, she was a Jew.....

"You have yet to learn the ultimate truth."

****OK, Socrates.

"I encourage you to pay attention to the "gut feeling" or inner voice that is trying to help answer these questions. The answers lie within us all. I personally, without any doubt...know that life does indeed go on. Not as we understand it or know it...but we do not die!"

****Yes, because certainly your inner voice is infallible.

"Hi. Well, How can the authoress speak with conviction, and knowing,? Experience is a great teacher.. Why have a brain at all if there is nothing beyond this life? Why love? Everything is energy. yes, my brain..is physical..it will rot when I die...but my soul/spirit..the light in me goes on! I know this as I have seen animals that have passed, as well as people.NO ONE can tell me differently..I experienced it. I hope everyone can be open to experience the beauty and love, here in physical, and beyond. . Until we as individuals experience some aspect of all that is, we will always wonder."

****Only to say I'm no authoress. It's OK. Jesse is such an androgynous name. Energy again.

"If you take into an account the documented experiences of people describing events that occurs when they cerebral functions are stopped, you may find the theory of a conciousness solely created by the
brain invalid. The brain only adds physical expirience to something more complex and extended. Obiously when the brain dies that physical expirience cese but not the rest of the expirience which resides in other energy level of existence."

****Energy, energy, energy....

"It is pure blasphemy not to believe in life after death...i dont think any psychological theory can ever prove anything against it...its all crap...its like hypnotising into believing that everything finishes into eternal nothingness...thats not true...our existence is of two kinds the physical and that of the soul...the soul never dies, no scientific bullshit can ever deny that!"

****Shhh, settle down now, everything's going to be OK, lady.

Finally, we might all take a lesson from this last commentator, who is more on par with my own personal philosophy on the subject of life and death:

"There seems to be evidence that the Universe existed before I became aware of it. I assume it will still exist after I am no longer aware. While aware of it I try and enjoy a good lunch every day."

****Exactly. And add a can of Red Bull to make the most of it.

I Hope You're Reading This, Lady (But You're Probably Not)

Jesse Bering, Ph.D. — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:53:40 +0000

I'm the sort who'd typically come to the defense of mistreated employees whenever some crass, verbally abusive jackass of a customer starts giving them a hard time. The customer isn't always right. Problems inevitably arise, it's usually not the individual employee's fault, they're just doing their jobs. Having said that, yesterday at Stansted Airport my student Beth Heywood and I experienced an "interactional service failure" with a certain airline representative and if the world didn't frown upon such things, I'd have gladly inflicted catastrophic damage upon this woman.

To borrow a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, killing being out of the question, I'm doing the next best in this post. Beth and I told her "we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make her name stink from one end of London to the other. If she had any friends or any credit, we undertook that she should lose them." (Well not so much those exact words really but something with a similarly vindictive flavour.) Now this particular airline, which shall go unnamed, but to give this post a certain readability I'll simply refer to as Ryanair, which we can also pretend is based in Dublin, is notorious for its appalling customer service practices - including charging disabled passengers for use of its wheelchairs and providing neither an 800 telephone number nor email address for contacting them for complaints but instead only a premium rate call service - and which The Economist remarked had a "deserved reputation for nastiness." (The businessman sitting next to me said he'd overheard an employee of theirs referring to us passengers as "self-loading cargo.")

The truth is I'd been warned against using Ryanair, but when my secretary booked this flight from Belfast City to Stansted I thought to myself, honestly, how bad can they be? People are just overreacting. As passengers we've grown accustomed to being pampered; it's a budget airline so a compromise in service for low cost and timely flights - which Ryanair boasts having - is probably justifiable. But boy was I wrong.

It takes a lot for me to lose my temper, so if you can picture me, normally so quiet, shy and reserved that I'm often asked to repeat myself, standing in a crowded queue and heckling this vile blonde employee who'd offended me, you'll get a sense of just how furious I'd become. What did she do that was so bad? She and a colleague snarkily responded to our initially innocent, smiling request for help (I'd misplaced my confirmation number, which I'd never needed for any other airline since it's easily enough located by a swipe of my passport or credit card from the electronic kiosk) by telling me to get in line with all of the others who'd similarly neglected to print out their tickets, a line two hundred passengers deep, moving at a snail's pace, and which clearly would have me miss my flight home - where incidentally my dogs were busy tearing up the house. She added coldly that it would cost me £4 to retrieve this confirmation number and it was required for check-in.

Now maybe it was the fact that I'd woken up at 5am that morning to catch my flight and was still digesting a dubious ham and cheese croissant from the train station, or maybe I was suffering from my typical sugar free Red Bull withdrawal, or perhaps I was still drowsy with ill-deserved delusions of grandeur from sitting at High Table at Cambridge the evening before (an interesting experience I'll save for another post) and operating with a bloated sense of self-importance - probably some combination of all of these things, I suspect. Still, I'd not been expecting such a bristly response and such a scandalous practice of Ryanair imposing additional hidden costs on its customers. When I said, still smiling, but growing moodier by the minute, that seems unfair to me, they responded: "You wouldn't go on a bus without your ticket now, would you, Sir?" Um, apparently you're missing the idea of an ‘electronic ticket' I said, but alas they'd built up a rehearsed script against all such complaints, we were but cattle to them, and soon enough I found myself cursing them under my breath and huffing off to join all the other poor saps in line (Beth, if you're wondering, meanwhile headed on to the gate, since she was much more prepared than I and had printed off her confirmation number).

Ryanair is the type of company that, when you're burned and so tell them you'll never be using their services again, has its employees respond, eh, who cares, you're only one person, plenty more suckers out there. So there I am, standing in line fuming with all of these other passengers, most of them exhausted, disgruntled, and anxiously looking at their watches, when this same cur of a customer service agent starts barking out names for a flight to Dublin, which is about to leave. "What about Belfast?" I shouted out. The woman, if you could call her that, clearly heard me, eyeing me as one of those difficult customers from before. She proceeded to completely ignore me. Charming. I asked about the Belfast flight so many times she nastily responded "I heard you" and trotted off to a coworker where they started giggling about God knows what, probably eating babies and torturing puppies. Not only did I wish on her miserable and vulgar existence everlasting torment and suffering at that instant - and if you're wondering if I mean that, I really, really do - I endeavoured to get her name one way or the other and ruin her career.

But there was no time. I barely made my flight as it was, though actually I weighed over in my head whether it was worth missing my flight just so I could stay and track down her identity. Soon enough I noticed how my passionate hatred of this one person, this nasty, horrible woman, had generalised to everybody I saw wearing a Ryanair uniform - the perky and slightly clueless gate agent, the otherwise friendly flight crew, even the stereotypically salt-and-pepper headed, coffee drinking pilots. In the back of my mind they were all in cahoots with her. Intellectually I could differentiate one person from the next, and I knew that there were probably decent, if somewhat naïve, people somewhere in that Pinto of the sky company. But emotionally this one bad apple tainted my perception of everyone associated with the airline.

Retail managers and business owners take heed. There's ample psychological research demonstrating precisely this effect: If your customers feel rudely, condescendingly or dismissively treated by even one of your frontline employees, you're likely to lose their patronage (and of course their money) forever. In the emotionally flooded minds of your customers, that pompous, arrogant waiter is your restaurant; that eye-rolling, vacuous teenager behind the counter is your store; that rude or forgetful secretary is your company. In my case, I will do my part, as I hope you'll do yours, to spread the word that Ryanair is the worst airline currently in operation in all of Europe, all because this one employee in Stansted treated me and other passengers like scum. She's just one customer service agent among many that this company, as another penny-scrimping tactic, failed to train on the importance of being polite.