Science & Self-improvement

I was planning to include here an article about a fable by Aesop when I found that Gilbert K. Chesterton had written a preface to the Fables that says some things that I would like first to mention because they are coincident with my reasons to publish the article.

Fables, says Chesterton, are “truisms,” that is, truths that are self-evident, that do not need demonstration. He calls truisms, “tremendous truths.” He says that in the language of fables “are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men.” I will leave aside the reasons that Chesterton gives about why these truths had to be written as fables, which are an interesting subject in itself. I was impacted by his conclusion that “man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths.”

I was always certain that important truths are simple truths, and fascinated with what is called “common sense.” I automatically mistrust any explanation that I find too long and involved. I have always preferred a simple fable to a complicated philosophical reasoning. May be it is a defect of mine, but I was glad when I read that Chesterton thought that fables are characterized by “firm foundations of common sense,” and “shrewd shots at uncommon sense.”

You may guess that Chesterton is one of my preferred writers if you recall that in his well-known series on Father Brown he always makes simple explanations triumph over complicated ones. Anyway, here is the fable.

The fox and the grapes

A hungry Fox saw some fine bunches of Grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis, and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach: so he gave up trying, and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those Grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”

What this fable has to do with self-improvement is that it shows a common mechanism called “rationalization.” It is a common pitfall that we must try to avoid as much as we can because it goes against our correct perception of what is reality. The right perception of reality is one of the premises of self-improvement.

In this case, the fox assumed that the grapes were sour because it was masking reality in order to heal its damaged ego. Rationalization can take many forms, some of them very difficult to detect. I said before that I preferred a simple explanation to a complicated one, and I also said that the great truths are simple. Somebody can argue that the second statement is a consequence of my incapacity to follow complex argumentation.

Self-examination must be a permanent concern if one is interested in having a right perception of reality. One of the most difficult tasks in self-improvement is to discern what you can really achieve, and what is out of your reach. Many times, only experimentation will tell.

There are many times when an expression is coined that it is not a particularly fortunate choice. I think that is the case of the adjective “gifted” when applied to intelligent people. I know that many people don’t pay attention to the use of words because they think that how a thing is called doesn’t matter whilst we all know what we are talking about. I, however, think that words are important because they have not only to do with meaning (what is called the semantics of a word), but also with emotions.

Many words, particularly adjectives but also nouns, carry an emotional payload. In last times, there has been a trend to replace certain words by other thought to be more politically correct. An example are words used to refer to mental disorders. In the first decades of the 20th century, a person who was mentally troubled could be called in a serious non-fiction book a “lunatic.” Nowadays, this would be shocking for our 21st century sensibility.

Later in the 20th century, around the 60s, a new set of words was in common use to refer to people who had psychological troubles, like “psychotic” or “psychopath.” The kind of troubles that affected people had also suffered an evolution (of which I may talk in some other moment), and the technical words that psychiatrists used to refer to them had changed to reflect that evolution. However, the dean of American psychiatrists complained that the technical terms were used by lay people with pejorative purposes. They no longer meant simply psychiatric illness, but something despised.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American English gives these definitions:

gift (ABILITY): a special or unusual ability; a talent
He has a gift for music — he plays the piano and sings beautifully.

gifted : having a special ability
a gifted artist
(Gifted can also be used more generally to mean intelligent or having a great range of abilities.)

The American Heritage Dictionary gives these definitions:

gift : Something that is bestowed voluntarily and without compensation.
The act, right, or power of giving.
A talent, endowment, aptitude, or inclination.

gifted : Endowed with great natural ability, intelligence, or talent:
a gifted child; a gifted pianist.
Revealing special talent: a gifted rendition of the aria.

As it can be seen, the question of intelligence is mentioned only tangentially, and in the best case at the same level that singing or playing the piano beautifully. You may say that a dictionary of general usage is not an authoritative source on a technical term, but with what I am concerned here is not with the technical use, but precisely the usage that common people do of this term.

This confusion between intellectual capacity and talent is particularly regrettable because it emphasizes performance and not potential. A singer that does not sing cannot be a gifted singer because nobody can know if he sings well or bad. However, he may not suffer for this circumstance. On the contrary, an intelligent person that does not give any evidence of his intelligence can be called a gifted person, and will have the same (or more) troubles than if he does.

In 1954 Abraham H. Maslow published a book called Motivation and Personality. The world was just emerging of that great conflagration known as World War II; historically, this period was called the Cold War. The views on what man and psychology are were very different from what they are now. Maslow’s book became a landmark of what was later known as the humanistic school of psychology, and some terms he coined like “self-actualization” are now used by everyone. Humanistic psychology was promoted as the Third Force, that is, an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis that were the strongest schools at the moment.

Maslow proposed that man is driven by a hierarchy of needs. From bottom to top, physical, security, social, esteem, and self-actualization needs conformed a triangle that was supposed to motivate man’s behavior. A person was in condition to attempt the satisfaction of needs at a given level only when he had resolved all his needs at lower levels. For instance, a person could only begin to care about being socially accepted once he had managed to get a shelter. Not everyone was supposed to satisfy all the needs in this scale.

As any pioneer work, Maslow’s proposal has received criticisms that range from its whole conception to minor details. The order, the number, and the universality of his needs have been challenged, as well as the rigorous precedence with which they were to be fulfilled. Other psychologists have claimed that needs should be ordered in another way, that there are missing needs, and that they do not apply to all men in all the world. The idea that a level should be fully completed before ascending to the next has been also in dispute.

Whether or not Maslow’s pyramid is adjusted to reality (and it probably is not), its broad framework served to start a significant movement that was a departure from the orientations that psychology had held up to the moment. This was amply recognized by his colleagues, who elected him as president of the American Psychological Association in 1967. His work as a founder of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, along with Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and others, and at the Esalen Institute in California, allowed him to occupy a position from where to disseminate his theories.

Central to Maslow’s framework was the concept of self-actualization. Although itself controversial, this concept has been an inspiration for many people. Maslow argued that inside each of us there is a potentiality that must be actualized, that is, brought to reality; hence the name “self-actualization.” He defined it as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” This can be related with the so-called “acorn theory,” which maintains that everybody is like an acorn that, if and when it grows, can only become an oak tree.

Maslow put self-actualization at the peak of his scale, where only few people could reach. He gave Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others, as examples of self-actualized people. I think that if one takes a close look at the biographies of some of these personalities one could find them actually failing to meet Maslow’s requirements. One must be obliged to conclude that the description that Maslow gives of the self-actualized person is so idealized that even these outstanding people could only fulfill it partially.

In 2005 Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, gave a lecture at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. In that occasion, he suggested a healthy dose of skepticism toward religious pronouncements. Science can overturn spiritual teachings, he said, but people can benefit from scientific understanding without losing faith. This is important because in the United States of America it is still been fought a battle between those that want to put in practice a religion-free science education and those fundamentalist Christians that refuse to accept the theory of evolution because it threatens their beliefs. The conference was attended by nearly 14,000 people, most of them watching TV screens in other rooms.

The Dalai Lama also emphasized that religion can help science, not just hinder it. He urged neuroscientists not to discount the role of Buddhist traditions on the brain, specifically meditation. The neuroscientists in the auditorium responded with approval, especially those who have examined the effects of meditation. Bruce F. O’Hara, of the University of Kentucky, has found that meditation improves the performance of sleep-deprived individuals about as much as drinking a cup of coffee does. Olivia Carter, of Harvard University, works on meditation’s effect on perception. She said that it should not matter that the observations associated with meditation arise through introspection or contemplation, as long as the observations can be used to generate objective testable predictions.

Sara W. Lazar of Harvard Medical School remarks that not all scientists are equally as open to testing Buddhist meditation practices. She encountered mainstream scientists who do not meditate but are very curious and open, and other ones who are still unwilling to even consider the possibility that meditation might have some positive effects. Lazar has found that meditation may help prevent the rate of cortical thinning with age. Brain scans show that as people get older, the white matter typically degenerates. This material envelops the neurons and helps them work more efficiently. Lazar discovered that older people that meditate have active cortical regions that are comparable to those of younger people that do not meditate.

Such a discovery should not have been too surprising, according to neuroscientist Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco. He explains that the brain typically responds to repetitive use by thickening the cortex in the relevant area–for example, people who play the piano have more cortex associated with that skill. Recent studies, he says, indicate that changes produced by mental exercises in many respects parallel those produced by actual exercise.

Merzenich finds intriguing the idea of science studying the influence of faith on the brain. Images of the brain have shown that an area in the frontal cortex is activated in response to how strongly someone believes an answer to be correct. Merzenich presumes that this activation reflects the brain’s decision that one’s conclusion is correct, whether it is or not. This kind of findings reinforces what the Dalai Lama says about the importance on maintaining an open mind concerning the relationship between science and religion.

Intelligence means different things to different people: being able to think quickly, learning new languages, or mastering a new musical instrument. When a survey in the late 1980s asked two dozen experts to define intelligence, the result was two dozen different definitions. Intellectual ability is a complex phenomenon, influenced by environmental and biological factors during development from child to adult. Some of the questions that researchers try to solve are: What is the nature of intelligence? Can intelligence be increased? Can it be measured?

The main method of studying intelligence has been the psychometric approach. Various intelligence tests are used to obtain the IQ of the person. IQ comes from “intelligence quotient,” which was once obtained by dividing a person’s “mental age” by his actual age. This particular procedure is no longer used, but the term IQ is still commonly utilized to refer to the scores obtained on intelligence tests. These scores are normally converted to a scale where the mean is 100 and standard deviation is 15. Ninety-five percent of the population scores within two standard deviations above and below the mean (70-130).

Can IQs be increased? Some studies have shown that preschoolers exposed for one to two years to environments rich in stimulation had IQ scores higher than their peers who were not exposed to similar environments. These increases were by several IQ points, but were found to be temporary, fading by the time the children had finished elementary school. However, even though measured IQ was not permanently raised, these children tended to perform better in school than a control group.

So, it would appear that some cognitive functions were improved, suggesting that stimulation is a key factor in increasing cognitive performance, whether an increase in measurable IQ is detected or not. It can be thought that continued exposure to enriched environments would prolong this positive effect. Recent studies in neuroscience have shown that, at least in the visual system, neuronal synapses that are presented with high levels of stimulation tend to grow and expand, as opposed to those that receive only background input.

Another study that has received a considerable amount of attention is that of the Mozart effect. Researchers showed that college students that listened to a sonata from Mozart before taking a reasoning test performed better on the test than control students. The effect, however, lasted only for fifteen minutes and seemed to be specific to the piece of music used-there was not a similar effect with Beethoven music, for instance. Also, the results showed to be difficult to replicate.

These results are limited to very specific circumstances and the effects were temporary, but one can make an analogy with those obtained by physical exercise, which are also largely temporary. Various forms of mental exercise may be important in maintaining and potentially improving cognitive function. Solving puzzles, reading, learning new languages, or even a musical instrument may all have positive effects for adults as well as children.

It seems unlikely, based on current knowledge, that measured IQ can be increased permanently, as IQs had shown to be relatively stable after childhood. But other supporting factors of cognitive function may be enhanced, thus optimizing overall mental performance. It’s known that severe malnutrition during a child’s development can have negative effects on intelligence, and the brain requires nutrients to function properly on a daily basis. Physical exercise itself seems to have a positive effect on mental performance. Aerobic exercise appears to increase memory retention and has been shown to improve some types of creative problem solving. Exercise can also help to relieve stress, and stress has been shown to have a negative impact on learning and memory. Other relaxation techniques, such as meditation, are also useful.