Daily Archives: 17 Nov 08

The New Post Racial Politics

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Sam Smith:

“With the resignation by Obama of his Senate seat we now find ourselves with our first black president-elect and not one black senator. If the Senate was representative of our national demographics, there would be 12 black senators. Over the past century there have been 78 years without a black senator. A reminder that breaking the glass ceiling does not necessarily unlock the doors.”

via Undernews

Paranoia on the rise, experts say

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Paranoia

“Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought.

According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College and the author of a book on the subject.

Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily.

“We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it,” said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands…”

via Las Vegas Sun

Midnight Hour

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“Bush has entered into his own midnight period, and it promises to be a dark time indeed. Among the many new regulations—or, rather, deregulations—the Administration has proposed are rules that would:

  • make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins,
  • eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries,
  • and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them.

Other midnight regulations in the works include

  • rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act,
  • rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave
  • and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act.

Most regulations are subject to public input; such is the sense of urgency that the Administration has brought to the task of despoliation that the Interior Department completed its “review” of two hundred thousand public comments on the endangered-species rules in just four days, a feat that, one congressional aide calculated, required each staff member involved to read through comments at the rate of seven per minute. “So little time, so much damage” is how the Times recently put it.”

via The New Yorker

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Cortex, Volume 44, Issue 10 (November-December 2008)

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Example of a subject in a Ganzfeld experiment.Ganzfeld experiment

This is a special issue on the ‘Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs’

Contents include:

  • The paranormal mind: How the study of anomalous experiences and beliefs may inform cognitive neuroscience (Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr)
  • Visual attentional capture predicts belief in a meaningful world (Paola Bressan, Peter Kramer, Mara Germani)
  • Sentences with core knowledge violations increase the size of N400 among paranormal believers (Marjaana Lindeman, Sebastian Cederström, Petteri Simola, Anni Simula, Sara Ollikainen, Tapani Riekki)
  • Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness (Sophie Fyfe, Claire Williams, Oliver J. Mason, Graham J. Pickup)
  • Believing in paranormal phenomena: Relations to asymmetry of body and brain (Günter Schulter, Ilona Papousek)
  • Paranormal experience and the COMT dopaminergic gene: A preliminary attempt to associate phenotype with genotype using an underlying brain theory (Amir Raz, Terence Hines, John Fossella, Daniella Castro)
  • Event-related potential correlates of paranormal ideation and unusual experiences (Alex Sumich, Veena Kumari, Evian Gordon, Nigel Tunstall, Michael Brammer)
  • The transliminal brain at rest: Baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity (Jessica I. Fleck, Deborah L. Green, Jennifer L. Stevenson, Lisa Payne, Edward M. Bowden, Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios)
  • Ganzfeld-induced hallucinatory experience, its phenomenology and cerebral electrophysiology (Jirí Wackermann, Peter Pütz, Carsten Allefeld)
  • Magical ideation and hyperacusis (Stéphanie Dubal, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon)
  • Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience (Christopher C. French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton, Rachel Fox, Michael A. Thalbourne)

Highlights include:

  • part of the variance of strength of belief in paranormal phenomena can be explained by patterns of functional hemispheric asymmetry that may be related to perturbations during fetal development
  • an inconclusive attempt to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and for a polymorphism that is positively correlated with suggestibility.
  • a study concluding that (a) religious people have a stronger belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, indicative of a more general tendency to maintain strong schemata, and that (b) this belief leads them to suppress, ignore, or forget information that has demonstrably captured their attention, but happens to be inconsistent with their schemata.
  • electrophysiological findings suggesting that paranormalideation may be associated with alteration in contextual updating processes, and that nusual experiences may reflect altered sensory/early-attention (N100) mechanisms.
  • EEG patterns of subjects with high levels of belief in paranormal phenomena and more frequent unusual experiences were similar to those found in schizophrenic-spectrum disorders.
  • People reporting contact with aliens (‘Experiencers’), compared with matched controls, were found to show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis.
Related:

Team of Frenemies

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Maureen Dowd:

“Running for the Senate and the presidency, Hillary felt entitled to get money, endorsements and support because she was the wife of Bill Clinton — and at times the victim of Bill Clinton.

If she became secretary of state, she would be getting the job despite her husband — and because of her own transformation in the primaries from a legacy applicant to a scrappy one.”

via NY Times op-ed