Learning About Interoception

The not interception system: Most data processing in the brain is unconscious -- more recent estimates put conscious processing at about 10-fold higher than the numbers shown for at least some of the kinds of conscious processing

Interoception is the process sensing of the internal state of one's body. It is different from processing external (non-self) inputs such as vision, hearing, touch or smell because the inputs arise in the body itself, not from non-self stimuli outside the body. Interoception is currently hypothesized to be a fundamental source or influence on (i) motivation, (ii) emotions and feelings and the behaviors they generate, (iii) social cognition, and (iv) self-awareness. Inputs to the brain can arise from the various body areas and sources shown below.

Much of the knowledge about interoception arose in the last 20 years or so. A recent study described brain scanning data to help identify the area of the brain that receives inputs from the heart and lungs when a person experiences heart palpitation and labored breathing (dyspnea) associated with panic.[1] The scan data showed that a specific area of the brain (right mid-insular cortex) 'lit up' when subjects experienced palpitation and dyspnea.

In this study, the subjects in the experiments did not experience emotions (anxiety or happiness) and only felt palpitation and dyspnea.

Interoception research focuses on the role of body monitoring in brain function. This research is shaping perception of the brain and internal signals from the body as a highly integrated system that influences emotion and behavior. Dysfunction or mistakes in interpreting internal states, or a disconnect between the body's signals and the brain's interpretation and prediction of those signals, have been suggested to underlie some mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), autism spectrum disorders, somatic symptom disorder, and illness anxiety disorder.

Footnote:
1. The authors summarize their results like this: "The mid-insula findings in the present study are especially noteworthy because it has been identified as the most commonly activated insula subregion across all prior studies of cardiac interoception involving directed attention to heartbeat sensations under resting physiological conditions (Schulz, 2016) (Figure 5a). Furthermore, our replication of asymmetric right insula activation during sympathetic stimulation, and hemispheric switching to include left insula activation during the recovery period, corroborates prior animal findings and a theoretical perspective positing a critical role of the right and left insula for mapping sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, respectively (Oppenheimer and Cechetto, 2016). Taken together, these findings represent compelling evidence that the right mid-insula is a key node in the interoceptive attentional network, one that is essential for both stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and goal-directed (top-down) sympathetic viscerosensation."

B&B orig: 7/5/19

Some Observations On Lying In Politics

Hannah Arendt’s 1975 book, Crises of the Republic, consists of four essays that describe Arendt’s view on American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The essays are Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. The comments here are from Lying in Politics. That essay was inspired by the release of the Pentagon Papers and it explores an explanation for government deception about the Vietnam War in light of the information the Pentagon Papers revealed.

Wikipedia on the Pentagon Papers: “The Pentagon papers is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration ‘systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.’ ”

Excerpts from Lying in Politics (empahsis added):

Secrecy--what diplomatically is called “discretion,” as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government­--and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth-the ability to lie--and the capacity to change facts--the ability to act--are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.

Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of false­hoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt--as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.

The results of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are tenable enough, but lasting deception is not among them. There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. Truth or falsehood-it does not matter which any more, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.

Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality--which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise--into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency

Arendt argues that lying becomes counterproductive for the liar once (i) politics has obliterated any distinction between truth and lies, and (ii) belief in lies is a matter of life and death. Once politics has reached that level of degeneration, what comes next arguably is chaos and conflict. If that is true, and despite being awash in an ocean of lies, Americans can still call out political lies as lies and survive. Some might lose their jobs, but at least so far, they won't be forced into poverty, jailed or murdered.

The good news: That implies, (1) American politics still has a fair amount of degenerating to do, and (2) it must lead to an authoritarian government, presumably oversees by a dictator-president. To make belief in lies a matter of survival seems to require a dictator willing to silence opposition by force.

If that logic is sound, we're still in good shape because people can call out President Trump's lies and other political lies and survive.

B&B orig: 7/6/19

Teaching Global Warming in a Deep Red State

One of the best apparent ways to nudge societies toward long-term survival, sustainability and a reasonable level of well-being seems to be via public education. As time passes, the value of teaching important topics and critical thinking skills is increasingly important. The problem is that public education is politicized for some topics and that makes it difficult or impossible to teach in some places. Global warming is one of those topics.

The Washington Post reports on the care needed to teach global warming to public school children in Oklahoma:

The students didn’t know it yet, but they were about to engage in some myth-busting about perhaps the biggest menace to their futures: climate change.

[Melissa] Lau, 42, has taught science for seven years at Piedmont Intermediate School, which is housed in an airy, modern building overlooking a wheat field and serves predominantly middle-class families, many of whom work in the oil and gas industry. For much of that time, she has sought to acquaint students with the basics of the planet’s warming.

On this next-to-last week of the school year, Lau was squeezing in a lesson exploring the link between increased carbon emissions and extreme weather events such as floods and hurricanes. A goal was to give students the knowledge to debunk the argument often made by climate change deniers that a few frigid days disprove climate change; even in a warming climate, there will still be many cold days.

The science behind climate change is complicated and evolving, and most teachers aren’t prepared to teach it well. Many textbooks don’t touch the topic, according to science educators.

Then there are the politics, especially in ruby-red Oklahoma. Educators here say they occasionally receive questions and pushback from parents when classes cover climate change. A state agency funded by the oil and gas industry pumps money into teacher training and classroom materials, including books featuring a cartoon character called Petro Pete, with the goal of promoting fossil fuels. State lawmakers also routinely introduce bills that critics say would encourage teachers to spread misinformation on evolution and climate change.

“Every year, we have to fight one or two bills,” Lau said. But she added that even here in Oklahoma, there's a growing hunger for accurate information on climate change, saying: “I don't get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it's getting harder and harder to deny.”

Teaching about climate change got a boost six years ago with the release of the Next Generation Science Standards, which instruct teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes beginning in middle school. To date, 20 states plus the District have adopted the standards, and many other states have embraced a modified version. All told, 37 states and the District recognize human-caused climate change in their science standards, says the National Center for Science Education.

Oklahoma’s standards are based on the Next Generation Science Standards, but while they discuss human effects on the environment, they do not directly attribute climate change to human activities. Even so, some state legislators called the language on climate science “one-sided.”

Jewel, the sixth-grader, said the second day of the lesson left her more worried about the Earth’s warming. “Now that I know more about the facts of climate change, it’s a little bit easier to believe,” she said. “It feels like more of a threat.”

Her classmate Dan Nguyen had a darker outlook. “Now, I’m thinking that we’re in a crisis.” It made him a little angry, he said, and he felt people “should be more careful of what they are doing, what they are using.”

Dan’s fears aside, there’s something of a disconnect between the urgency of the scientific view of climate crisis and the relatively dispassionate manner in which Lau must talk about it. Globally, children have been among those raising the alarm on climate change and calling for action, through a lawsuit and school walkouts. But Lau’s students are still young, far from voting age, and she says she has to tread carefully, to find a way to teach the subject “compassionately but head-on.”

The good news is that it has become significantly harder for climate science deniers to deny the climate situation. Petro Pete and the “other side” appears to be increasingly less plausible and influential.

B&B orig: 7/8/19

Socialism vs. Capitalism

This applies to tyrants on the political left, right and everywhere else

If you Google "capitalism definition" and "socialism definition", these are the definitions one gets: Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state

Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

My limited knowledge of history and political theory tells me that, with few exceptions, what is taken to be real capitalism and socialism seem to look more alike than different from the point of view of the individual citizen. Even the elites and the wealthy have lives that look very similar, e.g., they control power and wealth and have more freedom and privilege than the masses.

I am aware that the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, are not at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, but instead closely resemble one another, like the ends of a horseshoe. Can one argue that capitalism and socialism as defined above fit the horseshoe theory, if not a circle or near-circle theory, at least for average people, if not for everyone? Is that perception of reality an illusion?

Western European countries seem to be hybrid capitalist-socialist and their governments seem to generally work pretty well for most average people. For those countries, it isn't clear to me what proportion of overall individual well-being and freedom comes from capitalism and what from socialism. It probably varies among the different countries.

Capitalist, socialist and hybrid capitalist-socialist countries can be so corrupt as to be fairly considered kleptocracies and/or tyrannies. The Google definitions of capitalism and socialism do not specify that a country has to be (1) mostly honest or corrupt, or (2) mostly democratic or authoritarian. History seems to show that some capitalist and socialist countries have been highly corrupt and/or authoritarian, or even totalitarian.

Can a person logically argue that capitalism and socialism are really beside the point, and essentially they are about the same, at least for average people? If one assumes that rich and other elites nearly always have great power, wealth and freedom, what's left is to look at how the different governments affect average people and their well-being.

A key pro-capitalist argument holds that capitalism is better at generating wealth and the historical record seems to support that. But if wealth inequality is high, regardless of a capitalist or socialist source, most average people apparently will live in poverty and misery.

Is the fundamental political and social disagreement not one of socialism vs capitalism, but instead a disagreement over other things, including distribution of wealth, how much regulation should there be, amount of personal freedom, individual and social well-being, e.g., happiness, and truth vs lies?

This is true

B&B orig: 7/8/19