The Terrors of Sleep Paralysis

Imagine living in medieval times, when weird and unexplained phenomena, especially those related to strange subjective experiences (such as feeling that you're being suffocated by demons in your sleep), were seen as indications and evidence of malevolent spiritual forces at work. In the famous Bull of 1484, for instance, Pope Innocent VIII (don't you love the irony of these names?) declared that:

members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women [among many other evil things].

As Carl Sagan recounts in his book, The Demon Haunted World, "with this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless 'witches' all over Europe." This would lead to the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (the "Hammer of Witches"), one of the most vile, irrational, fearsome and cruel documents in all of human history. There's a chance even Hitler might have shuddered at it... Yay religion!?

Fortunately, and as usual, science has helped to shed some light on this otherwise dark and obscure phenomenon, saving people from medieval persecution and from forced mental institutionalization by discovering some of the underlying mechanisms at work, as well as their ubiquity because, believe it or not, it happens to most of us...

If you know someone whose life has been affected by the fear that they are being visited by probing aliens or haunted by evil spirits in the middle of the night, you might want to show them this video and assuage those feelings of fear and anguish...

And in case you are not aware of the distinction between an incubus and a succubus, and assuming these demons were not gay, incubi were 'seducers' of women, while succubi were 'seducers' of men, although if they're having their way with you while you're paralyzed, I'm not sure that would really count as 'seduction'...

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"To This Day" ... for the Bullied and Beautiful

The saying goes that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me... I've broken my bones before, a couple of ribs, but there are forms of pain that are orders of magnitude worse, and which leave scars that last much longer, but that no one can see because they are not branded in your body; they are branded in your memory and soul...

Despite the amazing things that we have in this world, and despite the amazing things people do to help and inspire each other, there is still a very large amount of cruelty inflicted on people, especially the ones least able to cope with it. And even when we're not directly cruel, we are often indifferent, apathetic, and we blind ourselves to the cries of help that people who are drowning are barely able to make audible.

This poem, by Shane Koyczan, is dedicated to those people:

Sometimes, when the pain is too much, people jump off the cliff... but sometimes they fall because they've been brought to the brink and got pushed off by cruelty and indifference...

Do your part to bring light and laughter to people's lives...

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Dan Ariely - The Truth about Dishonesty

If I were to ask you if you are an honest person, chances are that you'd say yes. Yet, if we look at the details of your everyday behavior with a magnifying glass, we'd most likely discover all sorts of ways in which you lie, cheat and steal, on a regular basis! Notice the irony? In answering a question about your own honesty, you behave dishonestly! Well, it's not quite that straightforward. It's not so much that you'd be lying to me; it's more that you'd be lying to yourself, and then to the rest of us as a consequence.

Our minds have an incredible capacity for compartmentalization: we separate into distinct groups instances of what ought to be logically identical situations, such as when you create the double standard that it's okay for you to take home some office supplies from work, but that it's not okay to steal an equivalent amount of money from the petty cash box. The other thing we're really good at in this context is rationalization: when confronted with our dishonesty, we are masters at justifying our behavior and turning it around to sound heroic: "it's okay for me to illegally download music because that means I'm standing up for freedom and fighting the corruption of multi-billion dollar music label companies, so if you think about it, I'm kind of a moral hero."

Well, in the following RSA animated presentation, Dan Ariely shares some of the fascinating findings of how everyday people like you and me cheat all the time, and what might be some useful mechanisms we can use to decrease our own corruption.

If you liked that, you might also like to check our our selection of TED Talk presentations.

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5 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know about People

If you haven't already, at some point in your life you will most likely have to deliver some sort of presentation to an audience. And if you want it to go well, you need to make sure you know your material inside and out. But while mere knowledge and understanding of the material are necessary conditions for a successful presentation, they are not sufficient.

Remember that you are speaking to an audience, and for your presentation to make an impact on them, you have to understand some things about how their minds work, and find that sweet spot between saying the things you want to say and how those things will resonate with them, so here are 5 things to keep in mind:

If it's nervousness that gets you, just picture your audience naked... and if you're a guy, and your audience consists of really hot women, you might want to make sure there's a podium in front of you, just in case :p

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Steven Pinker on Taboos, Political Correctness and Dissent

It's Steven Pinker... he's got things to say, and you already know that whether you agree with his views or not, he's always interesting to listen to, and he always manages to stimulate you to think about those interesting things yourself, so why not have a listen to a few things he has to say?

And if you want a longer (and hilarious) treatment of these and other related questions, don't forget you can find his lecture on cursing, veiled threats and other fascinating ways in which our use of language sometimes betrays certain aspects of how our minds work, in this fascinating lecture.

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Abusive Obsessive-Compulsive Has to Punch Wife Exactly 20 Times

You're probably already aware that having a mental disorder is a nightmare in its own right, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to have multiple mental disorders at once? The folks at The Onion have:

In that case, if she's not making mistakes in sets of 20 all at once, the beatings are kind of her fault, right? :)

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Manuel Lima - The Power of Networks

The art and science of formal classification owes its origin to the great philosopher Aristotle, who conceived of a conceptual tree whose trunk and branches denote different divisions of ontology, hierarchies of being, logical and natural relations, etc. This tree metaphor became ubiquitous until very recently. It's been used to map historical and genealogical changes and hierarchies among subjects ranging from family blood lines to languages, the history of religious evolution, biological taxonomies, scientific branches, corporate maps, etc. Darwin, of course, famously used such a tree to explain his idea of common ancestry.

Helpful as it's been, and given current levels of computational power, the traditional genealogical tree may no longer be the most useful took for mapping out various sorts of relationships. In the following fascinating RSA Animate presentation, Manuel Lima explores the power of network visualization.

That blithely romanticized ending didn't quite do it for me, but the entire presentation did get me thinking about the mathematical explanatory power of fractals...

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Jonathan Haidt - Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence

Among my favorite books of all time, Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" must be way up there. When it comes to massive and repeated assaults of intellectual stimulation, these books will give you a mindgasm. Hamilton's idea, and popularized by Dawkins, that the gene is the ultimate unit of selection, is an extremely fruitful and elegant way to explain otherwise counter-intuitive biological adaptations.

And yet, I don't think the selfish gene hypothesis captures the entirety of the idea of the unit of selection. I subscribe to multi-level selection theory, which has been spearheaded over the last few decades almost single-handedly by David Sloan Wilson (from whom I actually learned the stuff). As its name suggests, this broader theory argues that natural selection can take place at the level of genes, individual organisms or even groups, provided certain conditions are met.

When it comes to the evolutionary study of religion, there are various sorts of hypotheses. Dennett seems to favor a meme-based approach; Dawkins likes to think that it's either a programming bug or simply a byproduct of some other adaptation; and others think that religion is a legitimate adaptation on its own right. One of the most interesting (and possibly correct) hypotheses about the evolution of religion, you will not be surprised to hear, is Wilson's group selection theory: while competition is not always best within groups (because free-riders will exploit the nice altruistic suckers and drive them to extinction), it is extremely efficient when it comes to competition between groups. So, while religion may not always be all that good for the individual members of a religion, it definitely gives strength, resources, cohesion and power to groups. This might also be why religious people can't shut up about their beliefs :)

Anyway, in this somewhat bizarre TEDTalk presentation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, while trying to say something profound about religion and self-transcendence, actually has more interesting stuff to say about group selection.

Try explaining massive-scale war on the selfish gene hypothesis... possible, but not entirely convincing.

If you're curious about David Sloan Wilson's approach to the scientific study of religion, you might want to check out this fascinating lecture.

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Brené Brown - Listening to Shame

Just a bit over a year ago, I posted an incredible TEDTalk presentation by Brené Brown on the important relationship between wholeheartedness and vulnerability. That entry was, and still is, particularly important to me personally because of certain events and circumstances in my own life that I'm still struggling to resolve.

One of the things I find especially inspiring about Brown is the way her research contrasts and conflicts with her own innate temperament: she's not a cheery, free or open person by nature, and yet when confronted with the findings of her research (and she is forced to either attempt to reconcile her natural proclivities with the findings from her work, or stick to her intuitive guns and remain safe in her solipsistic bubble), hard as it might be, she bursts that bubble open and takes the plunge that will either liberate her or destroy her... or both.

Well, here she is again with that striking wisdom and insight that forces us to confront our own demons and test whether we can become the kind of persons we aspire to be, and possibly maybe even harvest the incredible fruits that such personal and existential risks offer... if we're not destroyed in the process...

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Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature

Having just published a voluminous book whose title was inspired by the immortal words of a guy who met his tragic end by having his brains blown out in public :), Steven Pinker argues that despite some obvious fluctuation, violence has seen an overall historical decline over the past few thousand years, and that we are living today in the least violent era our species has ever seen.

That may sound ridiculous to you, what with the world wars of the 20th century and our increasing technological capabilities to wreak havoc in scales our predecessors couldn't have dreamed of, but Pinker is no dummy who argues in lazy generalizations, and he's got plenty of corroborating evidence to make his point.

More interestingly, perhaps, is why violence has declined over time, and if you're already familiar with Pinker's work, you know things are about to get interesting when he starts invoking philosophy, history, evolutionary psychology, economics, cognitive psychology, rational-decision theory and other fascinating disciplines. And as if that weren't stimulating enough, the lecture is followed by a discussion with Matt Ridley and some Q&A.

For more, check out the Steven Pinker tag.

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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

"Our conceptions of human nature affect every aspect of our lives, from the way we raise our children to the political movements we embrace. Yet, just as science is bringing us into a golden age of understanding human nature, many people are hostile to the idea. They fear that a biological understanding of the mind will be used to justify inequality, subvert social change, dissolve personal responsibility and strip life of meaning and purpose.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker (bestselling author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought, and The Better Angels of Our Nature) explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings.

He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmatic myths: The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), The Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and The Ghost in the Machine (each of us has an immaterial soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.

Pinker tries to inject calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from scientific discoveries about human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.

Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hard-headed analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts."

Don't you feel just a little bit smarter now? :)

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You Are Not So Smart - PRO-CRAS-TI-NATION

One of my favorite blogs out there is You Are Not So Smart. Based on scientific developments in fields like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, it's a fun and accessible exploration of the many ways in which our minds predictably fail us because of the many cognitive biases to which we are naturally prone and the logical fallacies we commit without even realizing it.

If you consistently manage to make the same wrong choice, for instance, the problem might have more to do with the fact that you don't understand the problem and/or yourself (and how your animal mind works) well enough to figure out what approach to take than with things like will power, self-control or even luck. One of the ways out of these mental traps is to engage in some metacognition: thinking about the process of thinking itself, but you need some background knowledge, and that's exactly what you can find in the blog, or soon, in its upcoming book.

Anyway, here's a taste of the awesomeness, explaining why we procrastinate, and how we might be able to go about avoiding this fun but ultimately self-defeating habit.

I won't be mad if anyone wants to get me a copy of the book when it comes out :)

Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" (previously featured here) is also a great read.

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Paul Bloom - Essentialism and The Origins of Pleasure

If I tried to sell you the painting to the right for a hefty sum, I'm pretty sure you'd think it wasn't worth your time, or that I was trying to pull your leg. Never mind the artistic talent and effort that indubitably went into the piece, you'd argue it's obviously a forgery and hence not worth very much. But why should that matter?

In the following TEDTalk presentation, and using famous and fascinating examples from scientific studies and experiments, psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are natural-born essentialists: we project meaning to our experiences way beyond the information we receive from our senses. Of course, Hume and Kant made that point about 300 years ago, but sometimes it takes science a little while (or a few centuries) to catch up to philosophy :)

Anyway, this is why the placebo effect is so powerful, why our expectations shade our perceptual experiences (like why we think more expensive stuff tastes better) and why we hold on to superstitious beliefs such as the idea that objects have some unchanging essence or sine qua non that gives them their unique identity. And it all starts with a hilarious story about that Nazi bastard Hermann Goering...

And if you want to see how easily people can be fooled by fancy names and brands, check out how Penn & Teller do it.

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Robert Sapolsky - Are Humans Just Another Primate?

Every time scientists have tried to come up with a set of defining characteristics of what it means to be human, subsequent observation has revealed that there are other species who share those features previously thought to be unique to us...

We are faced with a puzzle: on the one hand, given our shared evolutionary history, we should expect to be quite similar to our evolutionary cousins; on the other hand, given our close genetic relatedness to chimps and bonobos, we should be more similar to them than we actually are. So what gives?

In the following absolutely fascinating presentation, Robert Sapolsky deploys a brief intro into many now classic scientific experiments. Armed with this evidence, he organizes the ways in which we are similar to other species, and how sometimes we take those similarities to hitherto unknown extremes. In the end, he posits his thoughts about some abilities and quirks that may not have any counterpart in the animal kingdom. Agree or disagree, this talk is certainly worth watching.

If you can't get enough Sapolsky, watch him talk about the weird world of toxoplasmosis, or listen to him explain how hormones can affect our minds.

And if you're outside the US and can't watch Hulu, you can also find the talk in the FORA.tv site.
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David Brooks - The Social Animal

Our mastery over the physical world over the past few centuries has been based on our newly acquired ability to understand the structural intricacies of that world. Understanding that world has required that we make certain reductive assumptions about how it works, and although they have been incredibly fertile, many of these assumptions, especially when applied to our understanding of human nature itself, have turned out to be rather simplistic, mechanistic and individualistic.

As David Brooks explains in the following thought-provoking and funny TEDTalk presentation, because of our intellectual drive toward quantification, we've focused a lot of attention on those aspects of our humanity that can be measured while ignoring many of the more subtle, rich and complex intricacies of what it means not only to be human but to be a social animal.

Drawing on insights from philosophers like Aristotle and David Hume, and from the cognitive and neurosciences, Brooks attempts to lay the foundation for certain concepts that could provide the basis for a more enriched and nuanced understanding of who we are, as well as set the stage to solve many of our economic and political challenges.

And for similarly relevant entries, check out Daniel Pink on our carrots-and-sticks incentives mentality, or Matthew Taylor on 21st century enlightenment.
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The Strange Power of the Placebo Effect

When it comes to the human body, it's taken a few millennia to have a pretty good understanding of the basic anatomy and physiology involved, but by now we do know many of the mechanisms at work. Here is a short history of the study of the nervous system, for instance.

When it comes to the mind however, and especially to the relationship between mind and body, we're still pretty clueless. The placebo effect is a case in point: your mind can trick itself into feeling better all by itself and without realizing it (and it can even produce physical effects, like changes in plasma levels in your body). Though we are learning more and more about the correlation between our expectations and certain outcomes, we still have no clue precisely how this happens.

Nevertheless, the discoveries currently being made are still fascinating. You might not think so, but as the following animation by Dr. Funk shows, it turns out placebo capsules are stronger than placebo pills, placebo injections are stronger than placebo capsules, and placebo surgeries are more powerful than placebo injections... and of course, they're all fake, but the effects are real. Weird, isn't it?

And if you want to learn about the Nocebo effect (the placebo effect's evil twin), check out this ridiculously fun exposition by Ben Goldacre.
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Brené Brown - Wholeheartedness and Vulnerability

As I've been trying to make sense of certain aspect of my life recently, I've been surprised -and horrified- to notice my feelings swinging like a pendulum, going from one extreme to another, taking me along for a ride I could only experience as an unwilling spectator. While I normally don't actually attempt to be in control, I normally feel in control, so this sudden turn of events, needless to say, has been less than welcome. I'm used to feeling confident and independent, like an overflowing cup that's impervious to insult or injury because it just continues to overflow with abundance and awesomeness (yes, I'm used to loving myself).

Recent developments, however, have wounded that perception, and I've noticed revealing in me an instinct of self-preservation and self-defense that, while biologically understandable and possibly necessary, goes against my conception of the kind of person I'd like to be. I've been watching myself, against my own better judgment and against my own will, succumb to the weight of suffering and injustice and slowly become someone else...

I'm not sure how to escape this downward spiral, but I'm considering a few strategies: reflect on the ideals I'd like to embody, engage in physical activity, remind myself of that possibility in the writings of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and -the most frightening- take that leap into the abyss in virtue of the absurd, against all rationality and probability and safety...

As the following TEDTalk presentation by Brené Brown shows in a moving and funny way, happiness stems not only from the recognition that life is messy, but from our ability to authentically embrace those social aspects we can't always understand.

Connection is achieved by those who have the courage to be compassionate and by those who have the courage to become vulnerable...

Check out some entries on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard or more TEDTalks.
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Barry Schwarts on Aristotle and Practical Wisdom

In his famous Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient philosopher Aristotle argued that ethics is not an exact science, and that looking for mathematical precision in such a discipline is bound both to fail and to distort ethics itself.

Instead of thinking of ethical principles as rules that everyone ought to follow categorically, as more modern philosophers have argued, Aristotle was deeply concerned with the role of judgment and flexibility in our moral assessments. Aristotle's concern was not with rules (or misguided incentives) but with character and virtue. Since ethics for Aristotle is about living a good life (and not just blindly following a set of maxims or working for the sake of bonuses), different circumstances may require that our choices vary accordingly, and deciding what to do will require that we apply some practical wisdom to our endeavors.

In the following thought-provoking TEDTalk presentation, and using a number of powerful examples, Barry Schwartz makes a very compelling case for the many ways in which a return to Aristotle and virtue ethics may just literally save the world and help us see again what really matters.

Check out more on the awesomeness of Aristotle.
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