Just Do It

If you can do it, should do it, and want to do it, what are you waiting for? Many things in life that we excuse or misplace blame for are not created by what we do but by what we fail to do. Maybe we just procrastinate and just don’t get around to action. Or maybe it’s just a thought, something that we think would be nice to do, but we just aren’t serious about it.

What keeps us from action? Can, should, and want ought to be pretty compelling. I was recently asked by a group of editors to write a chapter on the “Neurobiology of Agency,” for a scholarly book. Don’t worry. I won’t burden you here with what I am writing for the book chapter. But that task has caused me to reflect on agency from the perspective of  the everyday issues of what we do and fail to do.

Some possible answers come from my own experience. One excuse is that we just can’t seem to find the time. That won’t wash. Whatever we do in life, we have found or made time for. Final choices are matters of priority, and sometimes we don’t prioritize well.

Fear is an obvious cause. There are many kinds of fear that cause inaction. There is:

•        Fear of failure.
•        Fear of being different or out-of-step.
•        Fear of rejection.
•        Even fear of success.  

Fear of failure arises from self-doubt. We may think we don’t know enough, don’t have enough time or energy, or lack ability, resources, and help. The cure for such fear is to learn what is needed, make the time, pump ourselves up emotionally so we will have the energy, hone our relevant skill set, and hustle for resources and help. These things can be demanding. It is no wonder there are so many things we can, should, and want to do but don’t do.

All our life, beginning with school, we are conditioned to consider failure as a bad thing. But failure is often a good, even necessary, thing. The ratio between failures and successes for any given person is rather stable. Thus, if you want more successes, you need to make more failures. Even the corporate world recognizes this principle, and the most innovative companies practice it. Jeff Dyer, in his book The Innovator’s DNA, says the key to business success is to “fail often, fail fast, fail cheap.” It’s o.k. to fail, as long as you learn from it. Our mantra should be: “Keep tweaking until it works.” This is exactly how Edison invented the light bulb. Most other inventors and creative people in general have operated with the same mantra.

Fear of being different leads to social pathology. It can cause people to join groups, causes, and lifestyles that are not be good for them or even harmful. The corollary is that bad social commitments make it harder to experience better alternatives. Not everyone can be a leader, who by definition is different from the crowd. But all of us are better off when we are our own person, march to our own drummer, become “captain of our own soul.”

Fear of being different often arises from personal insecurity and lack of confidence. These are crippling emotions and one’s life can never be fully actualized until they are overcome. This comes to the matter of self-esteem. One thing many people don’t realize is that self-esteem has two quite distinct components: self-worth and self-confidence. Self-worth is given (by being valued and loved by others, by God). Self-confidence cannot be given−it has to be earned. People who lack the confidence to “put themselves on the line” deny themselves opportunities to enjoy the fruits of success. Their life becomes a vicious cycle that begins with lack of confidence, lack of agency, lack of success, and increased justification not to be confident.

If we are different, the in-crowd may reject us. Rejection is certainly depressing. Nobody in his right mind wants to be depressed. But no life can be fulfilling when it is lived to satisfy the opinions others may have of us. We need to be true to ourselves, to trust in our values and standards. If who we are is not worthy of such trust, we can certainly fix that. This dictum lies at the heart of Socrates’ great admonition: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Fear of success is often learned by watching how others have failed to adjust to success. Witness the entertainment celebrities who end up committing suicide. Most of us probably know personally some people who have become conceited, aloof, condescending, arrogant, or otherwise unlikable as a result of their success. We don’t want that to happen to us. When we surrender to our fear of success, we affirm our lack of trust in ourselves. Do we really need to reinforce such lack of self-trust?

So, when life offers you the chance to do something you can, should, and want to do, just DO IT!

More on the matter of excuses and blame can be found in Dr. Klemm’s book, Blame Game. How To Win It, available at Amazon and bookstores.

Victims or Just Damn Lucky?

The nature versus nurture argument has been around since at least ancient Egyptian times. Both our genetic inheritance and what we experience shape the development of self, according to the deceptively thorough book by psychologist and science author, Robert Ornstein. I say deceptive, because Ornstein provides no recognition, much less discussion, that we humans can choose many of the experiences that determine what we become. Moreover, at the time of his book’s publishing, the scientific world did not know that even the nature side of the argument was historically flawed. Geneticists are now learning that our choices of experiences regulate how our genetic endowment is expressed.

Ornstein argues persuasively, but with little objective evidence, that for any key dimension of person-hood or behavior, everybody operates around an immutable set point. He fails to recognize that a person can change the set point. Though it is not easy, people can change their set point dramatically: witness the reformed addict, the religious convert, or the ner-do-well who becomes a tycoon.

Ornstein’s thinking blind spot is typical of the age we live in. People who struggle with life are regarded as victims, while people who achieve are just damn lucky. From this perspective, people shoulder no blame or guilt for being dysfunctional nor credit for being successful.

The bias against personal accountability is enshrined in the current notion among scientists and social scholars that even when people make choices, they do not choose freely. What we choose to do is driven by unconscious drives arising from biology or the programming imposed by life experience. People are biological robots. I argue against this view in my recent book, Atoms of Mind.

The biological robot bias is revealed in a recent research report in a premier science journal. The authors conducted economic game experiments to explain what causes people in conditions of scarcity to make poor decisions. The reality behind this study is that people in poverty generally do make bad choices that perpetuate their poverty. They play the lottery, borrow too much, are unwilling to pay for preventive health services or education,  or save for specific future needs, and may even fail to enroll in government assistance programs. The usual explanation is that such maladaptive behavior is caused by the circumstances of poverty, such as poor health, lack of education, and the like.

The authors, from the School of Business at the University of Chicago, tested the idea that it is scarcity itself that drives poor choices. Their experiments were based on giving varying spending “rich” or “poor” allowances for experimental subjects to allocate in common TV game-show formats such as Wheel of Fortune or video games.  The allowances were distributed as “paychecks” across multiple rounds of the games. Games were structured so that players could sometimes borrow against future earnings or save for future rounds. In one experiment, participants were allocated a certain number of guesses in word puzzles (84 for the poor; 280 for the rich), The poor engaged more deeply in the game and borrowed more. Subsequent cognitive tests showed they were more mentally fatigued despite spending less time in the game. Another experiment used a video game in which participants had a fixed number of shots from a slingshot (30 for poor, 150 for rich). The poor spent more time aiming each shot and borrowed more when the game allowed it (actually the rich never accumulated a debt).

The results were interpreted to show that scarcity produces a focusing effect. The poor pay more attention to the options and become more mentally exhausted. Scarcity clearly promoted borrowing, which proved to be counter-productive. The poor did not adjust their borrowing as they accumulated debt, but as their budgets shrunk, they gradually increased borrowing relative to their remaining budget. The poor were more likely to neglect the opportunities of future rounds and borrow away from them. The poor performed better when they could not borrow.

In sum, scarcity changed behavior for the worse. The poor were more intensely engaged in the games but the focus on some issues came at the expense of neglecting others, such as ignoring the real cost of borrowing.

Thus, the researchers implicitly concluded that the poor in the real world are victims of their state of scarcity. Scarcity drives the poor to make unwise choices that keep them trapped in poverty. The possibility that the poor have the power to change their behavior was never considered. The authors conclude that the poor cannot change their poor choices.

The solution advocated is wise government policy that manipulates the poor in ways that limit the opportunity to make bad choices. For example, policy should aim at reducing the number of decisions the poor have to make by simplifying their economic choices, enrolling them in savings programs by default, making it more difficult to borrow, advertising to get them to sign up for relief programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and the like. The nanny state needs not only to provide for the poor, but also to intercede so the poor are not allowed to make so many bad choices.

Of course, we have known of government solutions to poverty for a long time. There is Marxism, which says take from the rich to give to the poor and its near-relative, Socialism, which re-distribute wealth and make everybody equally poor by not allowing anybody to get rich from ownership of business. There is Fascism, in which dictators decide which companies can prosper and limit the number of rich to those who are lackeys of the government. There is U.S. “state-ism” which employs some measure of all the others, but in less draconian ways.

Regardless of which government “isms” exist, we seem to live in a world in which personal responsibility no longer matters. It isn’t expected, and we don’t get much of it as a result. If you are poor, it is not your fault, but the fault of your genes or bad luck or exploitation by the rich. Only government can save us from ourselves. But who saves us from government?

Who wants to be saved from government? Around the world, and now in the U.S., more people want more government, not less. Government can protect us from ourselves. We no longer shoulder the burden of being “masters of our fate, Captains of our destiny.” The corollary is that we may have less opportunity to benefit from being our own Captain.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Atoms of Mind. New York: Springer Publishing.

Ornstein, Robert. 1995. The Roots of the Self. New York: Harper Collins.

Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., and Shafir, E. 2012. Some consequences of having too little. Science. 338: 682-685.

Gene Research Shows the Truth of Proverbs 23:7

“Don’t blame me. I got my meanness from your side of the family.” …
“I got my stubbornness from Uncle Joe.” … 
“I can’t help it; that’s just the way I am.”

Blaming your genes can make a handy excuse. It is also highly misleading. A decade-long international research collaboration involving 442 scientists in 32 worldwide institutions now makes obsolete the original scientific views about DNA and genes. This research initiative, called ENCODE, was initiated and largely funded by the Genome Research Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Just this week, some 30 groundbreaking publications have appeared in premier journals such as Nature and Science.

This accumulated mountain of data unequivocally demonstrates that most of our genes do not code for RNA that translates into proteins used by the body. True, the ENCODE project confirmed that there are about 21,000 traditional protein-coding genes, but they constitute only about 3% of the human genome. Until now, all the other DNA was thought to be “junk DNA,” presumably left over from ancient ancestors with no function in today’s evolved species.

ENCODE scientists have discovered that about 80% of the human genome does have function, but that DNA transcribes RNA as end  products that regulate the expression of protein-coding genes. When a protein-coding gene is expressed, its double helix strands of DNA become unzipped to expose the coding nucleotides so they can translate the code into the RNA that will then translate the code into the various proteins used by the body. Most of the DNA previously thought to be “junk” has now been revealed to regulate gene expression by way of enhancing or suppressing gene expression or shielding protein-coding DNA.

Over 18,000 species of regulatory RNA have been described. Clusters of regulatory genes are found throughout the chromosomes, and they very often regulate non-adjacent genes, often working with other regulatory genes as a team.

These new findings cause some scientists to assert a need to redefine what a gene is. The basic unit of heredity, they say, is not DNA, but rather its RNA transcripts. Why is this new view important? Production of regulatory RNA is governed by the environment, not your biological inheritance. These “epigenetic” influences include things like what you eat, your bodily activities, what you think, and the feedback from how you behave. For example, a muscle body builder, through intense exercise, causes expression of genes to make extraordinary muscle mass. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger before, during, and after his body building career. He had the same protein coding genes all along, but their expression changed by what he chose to do.

What this says is that you can control the expression of your genes by the choices you make and by what you think and do. Most of us are born with a genome that can generate a happy and productive life. Whether that happens or not depends on how our choices and actions affect gene expression.

So, next time you are tempted to blame your genes for a bad outcome, consider what role you played in the expression of those genes. Science is showing the truth of Proverbs  (chapter 23 verse 7),

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Source:

Pennizi, Elizabeth (2012). ENCODE project write eulogy for junk DNA. Science. 337: 1159-1161.

Learning to Make Bad Choices

Every day, people make choices among options they may have never experienced. Yet, they can make such choices rapidly, even confidently—yet unwisely. Whether good or bad, the choices are likely to be biased from past learning conditions,

Research is now clarifying how biased choices are made. All choices, biased or not, are influenced by the values we place on alternative choice options. If a past choice led to a good outcome, people are biased to make that choice again because a positive value has been attached to it.

If in a current situation where there is no past relevant experience, we can still make a choice easily. To do that, we must be able to assign positive value to the choice made. But how can that be done in the absence of past experience? It now appears from recent experiments that such decisions can guided by past memory associations.

Memories certainly modulate value assignment and thus decision-making. In one recent study, brain-scan imaging of humans has revealed that giving people monetary rewards activates a pre-established network of memories that spread the positive value of reward to non-rewarded items stored in memory. This creates a bias for later decisions to choose non-rewarded items.

As an aside, the study revealed that a key structure involved in memory formation, the hippocampus, predicts choice bias. It appears that activity in the hippocampus, as revealed in brain scans, helps to spread the reward value among memories of items that had never been rewarded, and thus bias future choices for these non-rewarded items.

The rationale for the study began with the authors’ realization of how the hippocampus helps to form memories. It encodes relationships between items and events to form a remembered association. Later, when an item is recalled, the hippocampus can automatically reactive the neural representation of the associated item. Here then might be a way that the hippocampus could re-allocate reward value when a past situation is recalled.

The choice task had three stages. First, the subjects had to learn association between paired items. They were shown a series of pairs of images, first one and then the other. Next was a reward phase, in which half of the second stimuli were rewarded with money. Thus, subjects  unconsciously learned a response to value those stimuli that were directly rewarded.  The researchers expected that the non-rewarded member of the pair might pick up some value by virtue of being associated with the rewarded member of the pair. If so, a bias might have been created for these non-rewarded items in future choice situations. Indeed, that is what they found in a later test in which only the first member of each pair was presented and subjects were asked to pick the preferred items. If no transfer of value had occurred in the prior learning, the choices would have been evenly divided. But that is not what was found. Subjects more often than chance preferred the stimuli that had previously been paired with a rewarded second stimulus.

Why is this important to the issue of blame? This issue was never considered by the authors. But to extrapolate from the experiment, we could conclude that sometimes we may blame a bad choice on the wrong cause. The real cause may have been our own bias for making a bad choice, in which we had erroneously assigned value on the basis of some past associations with experiences that were rewarded. That bias may have been created by some past experiences in which we had inappropriately assigned a high value to certain choice options that did not deserve such value.

So, for example, we might have had a past experience in which a good thing happened at the same time as other events which had no learned value or even negative value. But the value of the good thing spreads to bias attitudes toward the other events. In the future, in a different circumstance, we might unwisely choose the previously low-value option.

Here is a common example. Suppose we have a dear friend who we have found to offer a valuable relationship. We meet the dear friend’s associates, who may be unseemly characters that would make poor choices for us to value as friends. Yet, the value we attached to the dear friend spills over to the others and makes us less likely to be critical of them. Thus, we might start running with a bad crowd of people that get us into trouble. When we get into trouble, we likely will place the blame in the wrong place, without realizing it all started with the bias created in us by the value we had placed in our dear friend.

You can probably conjure your own examples. This whole process of learned bias can affect every aspect of our life. It is important for us to be more aware of our biases and the true value of our choice options.

Source:

Wimmer, G. E. and Shohamy, D. (2012). Preference by association: how memory mechanisms in the hippocampus bias decisions. Science. 338: 270-273.

Are Humans Just Blameless Robots?

Ever make a really stupid decision? Or said something embarrassing? Or did something you were later ashamed of? I guess maybe we all have. Maybe you even committed a crime.

Not to worry. It’s not your fault, according to a growing body of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. These learned people tell us that humans do not make conscious intentions, decisions, or choices. Those are all made by our robotic unconscious mind, which makes its intentions, decisions, or choices known after the fact to conscious mind.

I wrote an earlier blog on this subject (http://brainblogger.com/2010/10/25/free-will-is-not-an-illusion/), but want to explore it some more because the growing acceptance of blamelessness is having serious consequences in our schools, courts, and in politics.

This idea has actually been around for a long time, apparently 2000 years according to Roskies (2010). But the modern father of the robot view was Ben Libet, who in the 1980s, performed some simple experiments that he and most others interpreted to support the robot view. Basically, he showed that brain signs of a decision to press a button appeared a fraction of a second before the experimental subject said a decision had been made―thus unconscious mind made the decision and later made conscious mind aware of it.

Actually, there are lots of flaws in this experiment and its interpretation, which were pointed out by several scholars in the succeeding years. In 2010, I summarized these objections and added some of my own in a review of the subject. My criticisms focus on three main points: 1) timing of when a free-will event occurs requires introspection, and other research shows that introspective estimates of event timing are not accurate, 2) simple finger movements may be performed without much conscious thought and certainly are not representative of the conscious decisions and choices required in high-speed conversation or situations where the unconscious mind cannot know ahead of time what to do, and 3) the brain activity  measures used were primitive and incomplete. I identified 12 categories of what I regarded as flawed thinking about free will.

Conflicting evidence was available too. Christoph Herrmann and colleagues had reported a study in which subjects were instructed to press one of two buttons, depending on the presented stimulus. They found neural activity preceding the motor response, similar to Libet's experiments. However, this activity was already present prior to stimulus presentation, and thus before participants could decide which button to press. They therefore concluded that this activity does not specifically determine behavior, but more likely reflects a general expectation or preparation for making a choice.

The major flaw in the robot theory is the assumption that conscious choice is a point process that can be quantified in fractions of one second. Yet, real-world willed actions are not instantaneous but often smeared out over long periods of time. In addition, there is overwhelming evidence of a substantial lag between when a conscious decision or choice is made and when it becomes recognized as such.

Soon after my paper, several investigators reported studies that challenged the robot view. For example, Trevena and Miller modified the Libet design to include instructing subjects to occasionally make a decision not to press the button. They saw the same antecedent brain activity irrespective of whether the decision was to move or not to move. Clearly, the antecedent brain activity is not specific to intention to move. The results do not, however, rule out the possibility that unconscious mind makes all decisions (including not to move, in this case),

So, just what does this activity prior to conscious realization represent? No one really knows. In all likelihood, it can reflect the initiation of actions consciously chosen prior to the experiment, or as I put it, consciously following the experimental protocol’s “rules of the game.”  The participants’ reported decision time may just reflect the conscious confirming recognition and re-approval of the initiated action. Sheffield and colleagues (2011) recently showed that neurons can integrate spikes over a period of minutes, slowly reaching a threshold that later produces persistent activity without any additional input.

First of all, I find it interesting that this question is even discussed by any scholars other than philosophers.  This is because free will is not a scientific question. Science requires that an idea or hypothesis has to be framed as falsifiable. Is any theory about free will really falsifiable?  I would argue that this is a metaphysical question and one for which we lack the tools to fully understand.  Like Immanuel Kant, I think we will always be blinded by the spectacles of our own human reason.

Secondly, to hold the robot view, especially on the basis of problematic evidence, is personally and socially unwise, even dangerous. And the problem is that laymen increasingly seem to embrace the position of the scholars. In such areas as education, criminal justice, and politics, personal responsibility is old fashioned, so yesterday.

Take education. Everybody recognizes that schools are in trouble. But nobody holds students and their parents responsible for poor performance. No, the blame is placed on insufficient funding, teachers, school boards, state and local government.

Take criminal justice. It is growing practice among defense attorneys to seize upon any indication of a brain dysfunction to get their client off or have a reduced sentence. Judges and juries often buy the argument. The latest science fad of brain scans has hit the courtrooms. If a scan is different from normal, that must then be reason for the crime. For example, one survey of a few murderers showed that they had abnormal brain scans. That was interpreted to explain the crimes. But nobody raised the possibility that the abnormal brain scan might have been caused by what the murder thought and did over the many years before the crime. This, despite the clearly established fact that what a person experiences, thinks, and does changes the brain structurally and chemically.

Then, there is politics. Democrats are big on “social justice” and particularly encourage people to think of themselves as members of a group that is unfairly treated.  Life is not fair, and if people can be convinced they are victims of one sort or another, politicians get votes by appealing to them as their protector. So the mantra goes like this: blacks and Hispanics are oppressed by Anglo racists, the poor by exploiting rich people, workers by greedy business owners, women by chauvinistic men, gays by homophobic straights, college students by those who set tuition rates. Everybody is encouraged to think of themselves as members of an oppressed group, bitter and envious, and in need of help from liberal politicians to get justice.

It is very comforting to believe that the adversities of life or even your own poor choices are not your fault. If you are not responsible, you get to blame something or somebody else. How convenient.

In terms of how the brain works, unconscious and conscious minds interact and share duties. Unconscious mind governs simple or well-learned tasks, like habits or ingrained prejudices, while conscious mind deals with tasks that are complex or novel, like first learning to ride a bike or play sheet music."

We do often act like robots driven by our unconscious drives when we act out of habit, prejudice, or prior conditioning. But we should and can be responsible for what we make of our brains and for the choices in life we make. In a free-will world, people can choose to extricate themselves from many kinds of misfortune―not to mention make the right choices that can prevent misfortune.

Brain activity causes other brain activity that results in intentions, decisions, choices, and assorted behaviors. Consciousness arises from and is part of brain activity. Therefore, the brain activity of consciousness can cause and modify other brain activity. People are personally responsible because they have a conscious mind with the power to program the brain and its unconscious mind.

Sources:

Herrmann, C. S. et al (2008). Analysis of a choice-reaction task yields a new interpretation of Libet’s experiments. International J. Psychophysiology. 67: 151-157.

Klemm, W. R. (2010). Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Roskies, A. L. (2010). Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will. In W. Sinnott-

Armstrong & L. Nadel (Eds.), Conscious will and responsibility (pp. 11-22). New York:

Oxford University Press.

Sheffield, M. E. et al. (2011). Slow integration leads to persistent action potential firing in distal axons of coupled interneurons. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 200-207. doi:10.1038/nn.2728

Trevena, J., and Miller, J. (2010). Brain preparation before a voluntary action: evidence against unconscious movement initiation. Consciousness and Cognition. 19 (1): 447-456.

Political Liberals: Hidden Agendas That Go With Disbelief in Personal Responsibility

The latest mass-murder episode at a Batman movie premier raised once again the argument that people are compelled by bad brains to do bad things. Academics, scientists, philosophers, and political liberals increasingly endorse the view that humans do not have free will―that it is an illusion. The idea is that genes, neurotransmitters, and life experiences make us what we are. They should not be blamed for the bad they do, nor do they deserve credit for the good. So, it is convenient to claim when things go wrong, it is not our fault. Holding that premise requires also to make excuses for others who do wrong or bad things.

Likewise, if you believe there is no free will, you can't take credit for your success. This notion resonates with President Obama’s recent claim that entrepreneurs don’t deserve credit for their business success. He said they could not have done it without the government, citing for example the Internet. Actually, government did not create the Internet, and certainly not Al Gore. The Internet arose from the invention of the TCP protocol by Vinton Cerf, the concept of hyperlinks by Tim Berners-Lee, and the implementation of the Ethernet precursor by Xerox.

Those who want to believe that free will is an illusion turn to science, which in recent years has generated a host of research reports claiming to have provided evidence that all our actions are subconsciously generated and our notions of free will are illusory. I, and others before me, have pointed out flaws in the design and interpretation of this research (Klemm, 2010). Since my critical review, several new reports have presented evidence that also refute the notion of illusory free will. Yet the illusory free-will crowd clings to its unproven position. Why is that?

What I have most recently started to realize is that those who push the idea of illusory free will may have hidden ideological agendas, which even they may not realize. For example, I am struck by how often these zombians, as I like to call them, seem compelled to tell us they are atheists. Why does this matter? On the surface, atheism does not seem to compel a disbelief in free will. But maybe it does. Virtually all religions hold that there is a God who holds humans responsible for their beliefs and moral codes. Thus, it is convenient for those who don’t like the challenge of being held responsible for their actions to reject religion. That gets them off the accountability hook. So, there seems to be some sort of synergistic relationship between disbelief in God and disbelief in free will.

A similar synergism may exist in politics. It may not be an accident that many zombians are intellectually elite and politically liberal. In tune with President Obama, they seem to hold that people don’t deserve their misfortune, nor have they earned their success. It seems that most of the academics, scientists, and philosophers in this elite group also believe that free will does not exist. Thus, any disparities in life status and wealth are inherently unfair, and it is government’s job to expand welfare to the poor and redistribute the wealth of the successful. It harkens back to the old Marxist doctrine that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”). We should note also that atheism is a cornerstone of Marxist doctrine.

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.