The Way the Mind Works: Screens, Walls, and My Uncle Manny

Credit: Joseph A Carr-From Wikipedia article on Telephone Swithboards

I was speaking with my (almost) 97-year-old Uncle Manny recently, who lives in Florida. As we often do, we were talking about the old days when he and my father, who died a number of years ago, were boys. We were marveling at how easy it had become to stay in touch since then. The telegraph replaced letters as the only way to reach across distances, and then came the phone.

He told me that his grandfather had one of the first phones in the neighborhood. It was a pay phone of sorts. Neighbors could come and deposit their nickels to make a phone call. The phone company charged a set fee and also got a percentage of the take; my great grandfather got to keep the rest.

We discussed how phone technology had changed---from operators, like Lily Thomlin's "Ernestine," who connected calls on a switchboard, to rotary dial phones. He reminded me of how for a number years if you wanted to make a call overseas, you had to tell an operator, she would place it for you, and then call you back when she had the other party on the line.

We continued with touchtone phones, then cell phones and e-mails. (Great site on history of the telephone ) Keeping on with technological progress and communication, I told him about the voice activated wordprocessor I use because a repetitive strain injury limits my ability to type. It's called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. You can begin using Dragon right away to type text, but it takes awhile to learn to some of the more subtle maneuvers connected with word processing, such as formatting and moving files around. (See Voters Beware: A True Fable to learn about some of its more disarming idiosyncrasies.) It's taken a year or so, but I've now become quite good with it and can do most of what I want to.


One of the ways Dragon lets you move the pointer around on the screen is by saying commands like "start scrolling down," "move mouse right," "move mouse left." When you want the pointer/mouse to stop you simply say "stop." It can be a little tricky to get it to stop just where you want it to, because the voice recognition adds a delay. So you need to say stop just a little before hand.

I had an unusual experience the other day that suggests that technological innovation can go two ways. It seems as if my friend Dragon NaturallySpeaking is beginning to rewire my brain. I had been working very hard that day and late in the afternoon I slipped out to go to my local Whole Foods to go grocery shopping. I was going up and down the aisles, perhaps thinking about my work, while grabbing what I needed. I was in the frozen food aisle when apparently some part of my mind feared that another shopper going the other way down the aisle would soon be in danger of colliding her cart with mine. All of a sudden I found myself saying “stop,” but not to her, or even to her cart. Instead I was talking to an invisible screen, and rather quietly in my flat Dragon voice, which I doubt she even heard. Nonetheless she stopped at the entrance to the little cheese alley and no collision occurred.

I came to full alertness when I recognized what had happened and furthermore that she wasn't even really that close. I felt equal measures of amusement at what had happened and concern for my poor addled brain.

My uncle and I had a good laugh about my mistaking real-life for virtual reality. Then he said, "That reminds me of a story. I'm not sure exactly why it's coming to mind, but somehow it seems to fit."

"Former President Eisenhower went to visit Israel and was shown around by Golda Meyer. They went to the Wailing Wall, where he saw religious Jews in prayer shawls dovening, or moving back and forth as they prayed. He also saw people slipping scraps of paper into the cracks between the stones. Intrigued he asked Golda what was going on. She explained that they were leaving prayers on these scraps of paper.

Eisenhower said he would also like to leave one. He wrote something on a piece of paper and placed in the wall.

Golda tried to contain her curiosity, but eventually it got the best of her. She said, "Mr. President, excuse me for asking, but I am most curious about what you prayed for."

Eisenhower answered, "I asked for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

"Ah, Mr. President," Golda answered, "you know of course you are praying to a wall."

Additional thoughts: I don't for a minute believe that my "intervention" was the critical factor in averting a collision. But at the same time, I trust these unconscious responses, especially as they relate to traffic. See Running in Herds, Traffic, and Intuition. Not only do we read momentum, like other animals, we also read intention, and from many different cues. We somehow know, for the most part, if someone we are observing is planning to keep on going, or if they are thinking about making a turn. Nonetheless I would put my money on the fact that the woman just remembered at that moment she needed some cheese. At the same time some trouble-making part of my mind just won't let go of the possibility that something about “my response” to this situation---since she was looking right at me---triggered her stop.

While speaking to Manny again a few days ago, I learned that the Eisenhower/Golda Meier story I had heard for the first time from him was in fact very well-known a number of years back. Intriguingly, even though the story has faded, the situation it captured is unchanged. Everything moves on—technology gallops along, good stories are forgotten. Yet(as Golda intuited) the Israeli Palestinian situation remains essentially frozen in time.

I am going to proffer my own solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. How about if everyone on both sides started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to help prevent repetitive strain injury. After all real-life reality, virtual reality, and metaphoric reality are all likely equidistant from each other.

Thank You Michael Chertoff: Intuition, Gut Feelings, and the Bush Administration

Thank you Michael Chertoff. I’ve been waiting for the chance to write about this administration and intuition. So you had a gut feeling that the Islamic terrorists are going to attack us soon. Don't we all. (Picture of Mr Chertoff and his gut from http://tildology.com/category/michael-chertoff/)

Yes you have access to more information than the rest of us. You could be integrating this below awareness and coming up with something more significant than the vague feeling we all have---even though you say there was nothing specific besides increased activity in Al Qaeda training camps. But balancing this is the proclivity of this administration to play the fear card when they want to change the subject. More and more Republicans are falling off the Iraq war bandwagon. Seems to me if this gut feeling were anything other than a political ploy you would have raised the terror level to the next color---silly as that might be. Instead you just tried to raise the fear level.

Whether or not you actually had a gut feeling about this---you are only a bit player. But your boss Bush is known for going with his gut and he has consequently helped give intuition somewhat of a bad name. I feel a need to defend my topic of study against his now infamous incompetence and the incompetence of most everyone on whom he depends.

Intuition has a very complex relationship to gut feelings. (For another take on this relationship from a different perspective---see Reason vs. Intuition.) The intuition of Bush and his administration seems effective only when geared to winning power. I would even say it is magnificent on that score. They are incredibly inventive, even uncanny in their judgment here. Also they appear to leave no stone unturned in their desire to seek their own political advantage. But their intuition doesn’t seem to work very well for them when the task is instead to look after the best interests of the country. Their gut feelings and whatever else they integrate into their decisions have been for the most part wrong and very often spectacularly so---with disastrous results.

I suspect part of the problem is lack of motivation at the deepest level. They seem not to care about the well-being of the country--- and certainly not about governing as an art. Instead it is all about their raw power. How could their gut feelings work so well for them some of the time and not at all at other times?

Gut feelings are grounded in emotions. Although emotions get a bad rap, they are essential to us. They are evolution's way of assuring that our survival needs are taken care of so that we will survive and even thrive. As Spinoza pointed out---way before Darwin--- thriving is our basic task as biological organisms, and emotions play an important role in this task---up to a point.

Emotions are closely coupled to biological drives at least to begin with---such as the need to satisfy hunger, avoid danger, to reproduce, and to gather information about the world. But with time, the positive or negative arousal---or constellation of bodily feelings---associated with different emotions get connected to many other things. Largely without our awareness, these bodily feelings have an important role in guiding behavior and decision-making ----just as is true with other animals. A recent NYT article titled Who's Minding the Mind? summarizes some recent work showing that experimenters can manipulate our unconscious feelings without our awareness and thereby affect our subsequent behavior---at least to a certain degree.

What these positive and negative feelings get connected to over time depends on the interaction of individual biology, training and education, and of course the vagaries of chance. Emotions eventually come to determine our most basic values--- what motivates us, or is important to us---what we care about. But these do not necessarily correspond to what we hold as values at a conscious level, although they might. Rather these unconscious values are reflected in some underlying consistency that characterizes our behavior over time--- and they can be very different.

Gut feelings are thus a generic term for largely unconscious bodily feelings that direct behavior according to our values. (The work of Antonio Damasio has been very important in establishing the importance of somatic feelings to decision-making.) The bottom line is that for the most part we only have trustworthy gut feelings about things that are important to us at this unconscious level---which I will stress again may or may not correspond to what at a conscious level we hold to be our values.

Bush and his lackeys care about power, not about governing or even about Democracy. (Who with a deep interest in democracy would label themselves “The Decider?”) When Bush goes with his gut about anything other than what bears on accumulating power, as far as I can ascertain, he is not interested in the subject. He seems to have instead simply incorporated into his visceral guidance system the need to further the aims of others who are likely to advance his power.

Our strange and dangerous President is unusually lacking in that aspect of emotion that motivates us to be interested in the world and its workings in what seems to be at first glance a more or less non-partisan way. Yet in the long run this capacity to be interested for interests’ sake has had an essential role in our survival both as individuals and as a species. It has certainly been responsible for our collective scientific endeavor and our technological prowess, which (at least up to this point) have been important to our ability to thrive.

Power, of course, like gut feeling and its relationship to intuition is a many sided issue. Technological power (independent of the uses which some put it to) is a less raw kind of power than the kind that tends to motivate the bullies of this world---such as George Bush. Alas his favorite nickname in some circles “the Chimp,” is surprisingly apt (with apologies of course to many Chimpanzees). Like many others, my gut feelings tell me that any President whose need for power may know no bounds is just as dangerous to America as an external attack.

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I was recently in Prague where I visited the Museum of Communism. The exhibit about the secret police stressed that wiretapping under communism, in contrast to what happens in Democratic Countries, required no court order!

Cool Like Who?

Experimenters trained a high-status female chimpanzee to drop her tokens into a bucket---rather than a container with a tube---to get a reward. All the other chimpanzees followed her and dropped their tokens in the bucket to get a reward. A low status-female eventually realized that she would get a reward even if she dropped her tokens in the container with the tube. No one followed her.

So here's the twist. Forget the experimenters,
since they have nothing to do with actual culture. This is what the cultural anthropologists found.

The low-status female used to favor the bucket that all the others dropped their tokens in--- actually she was the first one to drop her tokens there. The high-status female is not really a very adventurous type since she is uncomfortable getting too far out in front of the crowd. Rather she is skilled at picking up on emerging trends. In fact, she began by followed the low-status female to the bucket she was favoring and doing what she did. But since the high-status female is by definition Ms. Popular Culture, whatever she does is cool. She and everyone else who just fell in line put on their sexy shades and stood around feeling real cool.

The low-status female was not interested in being cool. A curious type, she got bored doing the same thing all the time. “Been there done that. This no longer seems to fit. I need to broaden my horizons,” she thought to herself. Besides, she didn’t particularly like wearing shades; they block out too much light and restrict depth of vision. So she followed the beat of her own drum and went to check out the other side.

Voters Beware---A True Fable

Because of a repetitive strain injury, I use a voice activated word processing program. Sometimes it misunderstands me, especially when I don't speak clearly or have a cold. At other times the program actually inserts words unbidden on the screen while I am sitting at the computer with the microphone on, silently thinking. Its preferred words to sneak in are “he,” “she,” and “and.”

The word “and” seems to be a wildcard; maybe it's the sound of ringing in my computers ears. I suspect that “he,” comes from heavier than usual breathing on my part, while “she” comes from inadvertent sniffling or sighing. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since sometimes five “he”-s or “she”-s in a row mysteriously appear on the screen. On occasion I have even found a whole line of “he he he he” or “she she she.” Perhaps it is my word processor trying to parse the sound of the wind ---heeeee or sheeee.

A couple of weeks ago out of the blue my friend and word processor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, inserted the word “Bush” extraneously in mid-sentence. Unfortunately I didn't catch it until after I sent the file to a group of people. Intriguingly Dragon inserted “Bush” just before it wrote---at my request---“radical re-contextualization.”

When I finally did catch the mistake, I kept looking at it---because it seemed somehow to fit. Certainly Bush has radically re-contextualized the political landscape. To my thinking this has not for the better.

The truth is that even though I study intuition, I'm not ready to have my voice activated word processor read my (unconscious) mind---especially when the addition is off-topic. Of course, I do have to admit I am obsessed about this midterm election. In any case I am greatly relieved to report that the word “Bush” did not make sense in the larger context of the sentence or the paragraph, at least as far as I can tell.

Just a few minutes ago--- Dragon did it again! But this time instead of the word “Bush” it inserted the word “Reagan”-- it was in fact the possessive form, “Reagan's.” But Reagan's what?

I don't know because I erased it in horror. I wish I hadn’t, because it too might have had contained some little nugget of suggestive voice-activated word processor, self-activated wisdom. But horrified I was because Reagan started this radical re-contextualization of the political landscape, and because this is beginning to look like a trend.

Being a sensible person, I looked for another reason. I had no success; intead it got worse. I can conceive that the wind sometimes sounds may sound like “Bush”--- “wussh.” Yet by no stretch of the imagination does the wind ever sound like “Reagan’s.”

Maybe Diebold slipped a short bit of code into my Dragon software that biases it towards hearing ambiguous words, or even silence, as the name of conservative icons? Perhaps the Diebold people are working with the Dragon people? Perhaps the Diebold people even surreptitiously inserted it into a recent Dragon automatic update in time for the election?

My rational mind says forget it. But something in me says don't be so quick---only forget it provisionally. In fact, at some level, I can't help myself. I am waiting to see if in the next year or so my Dragon proves its lack of bias by spewing forth unbidden “Obama,” “Hillary,” “Gore,” “Kerry,” or “Edwards.” To give it lots of leeway and help restore the world to its right order, I will also accept “Clinton,” “Roosevelt,” “Kennedy,” “Truman,” “Carter,” or even “LBJ.”