Our Forests at Risk: For lovers of wilderness, this is an emergency.

Get involved; bowing to public pressure, the administration has just extended the comment period through November 15. Check out what is at stake and send your own message directly to the relevant decision makers today.

Boing boing pointed to this New Scientist article showing measurable changes in brain function under hypnosis. It is described as significant because it shows that hypnosis is not just a parlor trick performed by stage magicians. But it has long been recognized that it is a truly altered state of consciousness, so it should surprise no one that it produces frank alterations in brain function. Readers of FmH will know that I am enamored of and tend to link to functional MRI studies that show which brain regions are active during particular cognitive tasks. For me, the accumulating evidence of localization of a given cognitive function is much more important than what I consider the trivial finding that brain function is altered when you perform the task. Yeah, so?

I haven’t read the research paper but the New Scientist article doesn’t describe the experimental design in enough detail to help me understand hypnosis any better. It does not even describe the nature of the cognitive taks that was used, called the Stroop test. Here is a link to a description of the Stroop, which essentiallly involves being given a list of color names printed in colored ink. A given word is printed in a color different from the color it names; for instance the word “blue” may be printed in orange. The test is a measure of a person’s ability to operate under conditions of cognitive interference, in that you must name the colors of the words successive cards without reading the words. It is not as easy as you think. In the current fMRI study, subjects performed the Stroop test first unhypnotized, and then again hypnotized; the performance of ‘suggestible’ (easily hypnotized) subjects was compared with those who were less susceptible to hypnosis. The susceptible group showed greater activation in the anterior cingulate gyrus and the left prefrontal cortex when performing the task under hypnosis. The New Scientist article does a further disservice of making some pat pronouncements about what these two implicated brain regions ‘do’. In fact, just as the cognitive changes in hypnosis are quite abit more complicated than you think, so too are the information-processing roles of these brain regions.

Graphic artists putting their art where their mouth is; “15 designers and artists using their time and talent to help bring about change.” (via Booknotes)

This is what Rafe Colburn has to say about the Bush National Guard issue. As usual, I think it is plain-speaking truth:

I would add that the Democrats could make hay if they pointed out that Kerry was staying above the fray and refraining from mudslinging in the way Bush has been doing with the Swift Boat issue. There’s an old neurolinguistic programming strategem called ‘talking in quotes’, in which you can both get your criticism across and yet maintain plausible deniability. Kerry should be saying, “Notice I’m not saying ‘Bush shirked his military duty and they’re concealing and lying about it’ the way he is talking about my war record in Vietnam. My campaign is about the issues, his is about diversion from his record.” See how that works? The criticism is ‘in quotes’ but Kerry’s not saying it.

Besides, although it appears to be counterintuitive, Kerry would do better taking a page from Karl Rove’s play book by attacking Bush’s perceived strengths rather than his recognized weaknesses. It is a simple issue to grasp; if someone hasn’t already gotten, or doesn’t care, that Bush was a shirker during Vietnam, there’s little chance of changing their mind at this stage and, as Coburn points out, it matters little. But taking the country down the drain during the past three and a half years in office is a different matter.