Ted Olson’s Arkansas problem: “Despite his evasive disavowals, Salon investigations showed the right-wing consigliere was deeply involved in a sordid plot to bring down

President Clinton.” Salon

Studies Conflict on Whether Homosexuals Can Change. Robert Spitzer’s controversial study, reported last week, is widely criticized. [via Fred Lapides]

Psychiatrists analyze Harry Potter in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans, concluding he’s a good model of psychological health in the face of adversity. Salon And The analysts continue their discussion of The Sopranos‘ penultimate episode of the season:

‘When I was training to become an analyst, I had a supervisor with

impeccable Viennese credentials who taught me a very important

concept. And the fact that he put it in German made it that much

more authoritative. At a crucial point in a treatment, he told me, the

patient gains Krankheitseinsicht–which roughly means “insight

into one’s illness.” At that moment a person really becomes a patient,

an ally who has joined you in trying to understand the nature of that

“illness.”

Until then, people often try to explain their troubles in terms of such

factors as ill luck, their stupid boss, their nagging spouse, the

capitalist system, an unjust world–in short, on some aspect of

external reality. While many of these complaints aren’t often true,

it’s only after a person has realized that there is something in their

inner world that causes them to continuously recreate unhappy

situations that therapeutic transformation can begin. The task then

for therapist and patient is to understand the psychological template

inside of the patient that he or she repeatedly imposes on external

reality.’ Slate

Indian caste shows link to Europeans. “A study has shown that people in higher ranks of the Indian

caste system are more closely related to Europeans than

Asians.

Experts now believe Europeans moved into India about

5,000 years ago, helped put the caste system in place and

put themselves at the top.

The genetic differences between social levels are still clear

because inter-caste marriages are frowned upon in Indian

culture.” Ananova

First Cells, Then Species, Now the Web: “As the Internet continues to proliferate, it

has become natural to think of it

biologically — as a flourishing ecosystem of

computers or a sprawling brain of

Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix

and match metaphors, it is hard to escape

the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting

scientists with something new to prod and understand.” New York Times

Have goat, will travel. “A goat seems to have been the

must-have accessory for any prehistoric

farmer with wanderlust. Patterns of

genetic variation in modern goats reveal

that, although they were domesticated in

several places, the descendents of these

pioneers have since intermingled,

interbred and spread far and wide, to a

far greater extent than other livestock

species.

Goats are the ideal travelling

companions: they laugh in the face of

harsh environments and will eat just

about anything. Plus, their small size

provides greater commercial flexibility…” Nature

Contrasts between male and female orgasm

They said it couldn’t happen. “Suddenly, we find that there are at least two genetically

modified babies in the world, alive and well and having their

diapers changed like other babies everywhere.

Except that while every other toddler on the planet carries the

genes from just two parents, these infants carry extra DNA

from a third parent. How alarmed should we be?” New Scientist editorial

Scientists find biological reality behind religious experience. ‘In a quiet laboratory, Andrew Newberg

takes photographs of what believers call the

presence of God.

The young neurologist invites Buddhists and

Franciscan nuns to meditate and pray in a

secluded room. Then, at the peak of their

devotions, he injects a tracer that travels to

the brain and reveals its activity at the

moment of transcendence.

A pattern has emerged from Professor Newberg’s experiments. There is a small

region near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person’s spatial

orientation, the sense of where one’s body ends and the world begins. During

intense prayer or meditation, and for unknown reasons, this region becomes a

quiet oasis of inactivity.

“It creates a blurring of the self-other relationship,” said Professor Newberg, an

assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work appears in

Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.’ Sydney Morning Herald

Dreams to Nightmares: “Predictions of exciting discoveries

in dream research are

over-optimistic, says Chiara

Portas, the British neurologist

whose research is being used to

back such claims. Her retort

comes in response to a

suggestion, which claims to be

based on her research, that it

should soon be possible to

correlate brain-activation patterns with the cognitive content

of dreams.” BioMedNet

A series of questions ensues:

Does ‘Empty Nose Syndrome’ Exist? “Surgery to remove nasal tissue is being blamed for a debilitating syndrome.

But specialists hotly debate whether the procedure is to blame.” LATimes

Can Science Explain Everything? Anything? by theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg. “Description” vs. “explanation.”

It might be supposed that something is explained when we find its cause, but an influential 1913

paper by Bertrand Russell had argued that “the word ’cause’ is so inextricably bound up with

misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary

desirable.”2 This left philosophers like Wittgenstein with only one candidate for a distinction between

explanation and description, one that is teleological, defining an explanation as a statement of the

purpose of the thing explained.

E.M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread gives a good example of teleology making the

difference between description and explanation. Philip is trying to find out why his friend Caroline

helped to bring about a marriage between Philip’s sister and a young Italian man of whom Philip’s

family disapproves. After Caroline reports all the conversations she had with Philip’s sister, Philip

says, “What you have given me is a description, not an explanation.” Everyone knows what Philip

means by this—in asking for an explanation, he wants to learn Caroline’s purposes. There is no

purpose revealed in the laws of nature, and not knowing any other way of distinguishing description

and explanation, Wittgenstein and my friend had concluded that these laws could not be

explanations. Perhaps some of those who say that science describes but does not explain mean also

to compare science unfavorably with theology, which they imagine to explain things by reference to

some sort of divine purpose, a task declined by science. New York Review of Books

Is it bad memory, or a trick your brain plays? “Worried baby boomers who can’t remember where they put the keys may

fear they’re looking at a future of dementia, or at least one of elderly

befuddlement. But Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter says it’s not

necessarily so. The blips and gaps of memory that plague people as they

age are normal, and may even be vital to a sharp mind.

In his new book, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and

Remembers, Schacter offers insight into common

malfunctions of the mind.” USAToday