WOMEN IN SCIENCE and...(an illuminating conjunction)!

One of a series of 36 posters by Pamela Davis Kivelson for the PDK Poster Project on Women in Science.

The title of the article on women in science was a little bit odd, "Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?" and there were some other clues as well. But my misgivings were allayed by the following sentence that appeared close to the beginning. "The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, sensible answer." I experienced a pleasurable crisp feeling as I read that.

I have been somewhat less condemning of the Lawrence Summers escapade (transcripts of his comments) than most of my colleagues at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis. (See also) As a scientist I feel that even controversial, "politically incorrect" data should get an airing, especially if it speaks to critical cultural controversies. However, I have to acknowledge that I cannot say how I would have reacted had I been at his presentation.

The facts seem clearly stated in the third paragraph of the article. “ Women comprise just 19% of tenure-track professors in math, 11% in physics, 10% in computer science, and 10% in engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 25% of the Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences---way up from the 4% of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields." This apparently clear statement of the facts along with the crisp sentence cited above helped set me up (primed me) to be more accepting of the author's argument than I otherwise might have been.

She argues that the low percentage of women in these fields reflects the female tendency to prefer careers connected to nurturing. She cites, for example, a survey in which 1500 professors (gender breakdown not given) were asked what accounts for the low percentage of women and 74% chalked it up to differences in interests. She also cites work by Baron-Cohen suggesting that autism is the far end of the male spectrum. He feels that the male brain on average is wired to be better at systematizing and the female brain better at empathizing.

In a skillfully presented case, the author suggests that the campaign to get more women in these as well as other aspects of science is not just a con, but a juggernaut completely out of control. Those on the gender equality in the sciences bandwagon have hoodwinked university presidents, the NSF, and now even Congress into making a nonexistent problem a cause célèbre. A Title IX program for the physical sciences analogous to the Title IX program for sports is in effect (although its requirements have apparently been unevenly enforced). They have been able to do this, she claims, because of:

… a body of feminist research that purports to prove (emphasis added) that women suffer from “hidden bias.” This research, artfully (emphasis added) presented with no critics or skeptics present, can be persuasive. A brief look at it helps explain the mind-set of the critics and their supporters. But it is a highly ironic story. For the three recognized canons of literature are, in key respects, travesties of the scientific method, and they have been publicized and promoted in ways that ignore elementary standards of transparency in objectivity.

Since I only had the information the author gave me, at first reading I found her arguments plausible against two of the three sources used to bolster the feminists perspective (see below however). Introducing the third source, she wrote “How in the face of women's clear tendencies to choose other careers and more balanced lifestyles, can one reasonably attribute the scarcity of women in science and engineering to unconscious bias and sexist discrimination? Valian showed the way.” Quoting Valian, she continues:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action...[and being] assertive, instrumental, and task oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different: it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.

Continuing to describe Valian's work, she says:

Valian does not deny that schemas have a foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and their effect. Our society, she says, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop "a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement." All this inevitably result in a permanently unfair advantage for men.

I recognized some deep resonance with Valian’s claims. However just as I was starting to reconsider the easy pass I was giving the argument of the author of the article I was reading, I learned about mandatory gender bias workshops in which interactive theater about exaggerated situations is used to try to raise the consciousness of physicists and engineers who get government grants. This did seem over-the-top. I was also kept in line by a report of a Title IX review requiring a female physics professor to make a list of all the equipment in the lab and indicate whether women were allowed to use each item.

I finished the article and then noticed that what I had been reading was published in the American Enterprise Institute bimonthly newsletter. I also recognized that the author Christina Hoff Sommers had written an intensely antifeminist book (while claiming herself as a true feminist). Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

In retrospect, the last paragraph of the article made perfect sense.Sommer's wrote, "Americans scientific excellence is a precious natural resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation's health and safety" She then points out that people from MIT have started more than 5000 companies in the past 50 years. She asks, "Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?"

Cooperative science works, and more of it sounds great to me. Moreover, as current events strongly argue, the well-being of our economy and our health and safety as citizens depends considerably more on having leaders capable of objectivity and willing to assure adequate government regulation and than it does on resisting any hypothetical decline in scientific and technological innovation that having more women in these fields might bring. Besides having more women might increase innovation!

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Without thinking more about the article, I went on to my real task for the evening. It was once again rereading a paper by John Bargh and Melissa Fergerson on the automaticity of higher mental processes. They reviewed studies showing that researchers can prime all kinds of higher level behavior most of us generally assume depends primarily on conscious processes. For example just by giving subjects scrambled sentences containing several words relating to a stereotype they can prime subjects to identify with a stereotype and thereby influence their behavior. In one study subjects were primed with the stereotype of university professor or hooligan. In a second apparently unrelated task, those primed with the professor stereotype answered more Trivial Pursuit questions than those primed with hooligan.

Even as I have appreciated the growing body of work in Social Psychology on automatic behavior, I have been a bit resistant to it. For one thing, it seems that random priming influences would more or less cancel out in real life. Also this work is often used to make the point that introspection is useless since our behavior is governed by extraneous influences of which we are unaware. Certainly introspection, like anything else, has its limits, but it is often invaluable.

That night the words of the article almost danced on the page. I really got it, or the version of it that makes sense to me. Even very subtle consistent environmental influences can over time have a powerful and long-lasting effect on the psyche. Once again, the message about the power of conditioning hit home. Wow!



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The next morning as I lay in bed, I was quite astonished when I recognized the relevance of the work on automaticity to the women in science problem. No wonder the words danced on the page! The women in science article had in a sense primed me to get the social psychology material on environmental priming (and vice versa as well--- why not reverse priming since things stick around in our head?).

As I lay there, my thoughts kept coming back to the female junior physics professor who Sommers claimed had been required to list for Title IX reviewers whether women were allowed to use each piece of equipment. I wondered whether she had instead been asked to report, on the basis of equipment logs, the percentage of time women got to use important pieces of equipment versus men? Such a question could provide data on one aspect of potential implicit gender bias in laboratories. (The other question, if it makes sense that all, would look at explicit bias.) So I decided to check out Sommers sources. Yes, I found that the female junior physics professor, not shy about her hostility to Title IX review,really did tell a reporter for Science Magazine that she was required to list all her equipment and say if female lab members could use each piece. (I still suspect this is not the whole story.)

I will not consider the second gender-bias-in-science source Sommers critiques, as the story is too convoluted. However Sommers was less than judicious in her comments about the summary of the in-house MIT report made available to the public---which was what got the "gender equality in science" movement going in the first place. For example, she quotes from an ungenerous source, conservative anti-feminist Judith Kleinfeld who calls it “junk science” for not obtaining confidential informationin some cases and not revealing it in others.

In contrast I was struck by the judicious and sincere tone of the report. For example, on page 8, it says, “Data reviews revealed that in some departments, men and women faculty appear to share equally in material resources and rewards, in others they did not.”

Sommers in addition claims that the summary, which was publicized as showing objectively that there was a woman in science problem, failed to do so. I disagree since it documented the most important piece of information. It shows that from 1985-1994 the proportion of women in senior faculty positions in MIT’s School of Science remained constant at roughly 8%.

She also suggests the authors of the report might be misconstruing the broader problem in a critical way. Quoting from the report, she writes: [The summary concedes]“Junior women felt included and supported by their departments." Sommers continues: "Instead of acknowledging that the problem might be generational and confined to a small group of senior women from three departments, Hopkins and the other authors of the report claimed that the Junior women were naïve and simply did not know what was in store for them: [Again quoting the report] "Each generation of young women began... by believing that gender discrimination was solved in the previous generation and would not touch them.”

Quite to the contrary, the scientists place this paradox close to the core of their understanding of the problem. It is what we call the glass ceiling.

An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result. (p. 9: from section called: What the Committee Learned)

Implicit gender bias increases as women climb the academic latter . [From the summary of the report by the chair of the MIT faculty, p. 3:] "It was only when they came together, and with persistence and integrity, that they saw that as their careers advanced something else besides competence came into play, which for them meant an accumulation of slight disadvantages, with just the opposite for their male colleagues.

Two other paragraphs struck me as I read the report, especially after having "got" the work on priming.

...While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances." Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful, but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty in the light of obvious goodwill. Like many discoveries, at first it is startling and unexpected. Once you "get it," it seems almost obvious. Of (p.10-11: from section called: How Did Inequality Come about? “Gender Discrimination” in 1999).

By 1999 when the summary of the 1995 report was released as a result of its recommendations the percentage of female tenured faculty at MIT in the sciences had increased to 13%, representing a 40% increase. However as far as I can ascertain, the percentage seems to have remained relatively steady since. Certainly there are fewer women than men who want to go into these fields, no doubt in part because of innate preferences. But implicit bias against women in science, which women as well as men harbor, exacerbates the situation. (By the way, you might might want to test and see if you have unconscious bias that associates science more with men than women.)

Finally this brings us back to those over-the-top workshops on gender bias mandated by Title IX. Implicit gender bias, like other implicit bias, is nearly impossible for us to become aware of on our own. Workshops on gender bias using interactive theater and exaggerated situations, rather than indicating a feminist agenda out of control, may make sense as a way to shake up implicit as well as explicit bias. However I feel it might be even more important to have workshops in junior high, high school, and college that help counteract the bias against becoming a scientist in the young women themselves harbor.

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.

EINSTEIN'S INTUITION

After reading Isaacson's book on Einstein, which I heartily recommend, I picked up a book I took out of the library a while ago and kept renewing. It is called Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, by William Hermanns. Until Einstein came alive for me, came out from behind the myth thanks to Isaacson, I had no mental place for it.

It consists of four interviews with Einstein by Dr. Hermanns, who was initially Einstein's fellow Berliner and then his fellow exile. Hermanns is a sociologist and poet, who has strong mystical leanings and little understanding of physics. The first interview takes place in Berlin as the Nazis are gaining strength and becomes entwined with marching Brownshirts. It is both a wonderfully and terrifyingly bizarre piece, and it would make a striking movie or perhaps play.

The next three interviews take place in the United States during and after the war. Although lacking the drama of the first, they are equally informative. Hermanns continually goads Einstein to talk about things that he is not comfortable talking about, such as mysticism, and then pokes fun at his own obtuseness for continuing to press him. Nonetheless Einstein reveals a great deal to him. The interviews contain a treasure trove of information about Einstein's understanding of intuition. I thought I had the intuition bug, Einstein had it even worse!

Intuition can take many different forms. I identified deeply with a portion of what Einstein said about it. "Yes that's what it's like for me," I found myself saying with wonderment and even delight at the recognition. This kinship to some of what Einstein evoked no doubt comes from the fact that we share a personality type.

After I finished the book, I copied down some quotes I found particularly moving or informative. By putting them one after the other and pondering them a bit I came to see that they formed a coherent, profound, and provocative worldview.

Intuition for Einstein—be it about cosmic law or about predicting the outcome of the Second World War—is intimately connected with feeling. Many associate both feeling and intuition with the gut. But for Einstein, intuition is grounded primarily in the feeling of the heart—in its receptivity and its tendency to move out. It depends on a deep caring and receptivity that pushes him to go beyond what is currently known or thought or happening in order make contact with the cosmic order.

The following passage comes when Einstein and Herrmanns are talking about the Nazis and the flaw in the German national character that lead to Hitler's appeal.

Einstein nodded: he was a good listener. After a pause he said, "The cosmic man must be restored, the whole man who is made in the image and likeness of the arch-force, which you may call God. This man thinks with his heart and not with party dogma. As I've explained before, there is an order in the universe – a cosmic order – and humans have the possibility of understanding these laws."
Einstein leaned back in his chair; so did I,putting my writing pad on my knees. He added, "I have no doubt that the allies will win the war."
I smiled, "Oh, you are my prophet again."
"Prophet or not," he scratched his head, "what I say is more often felt through intuition than thought through intellect."

Hermanns is constantly pushing Einstein to acknowledge his inherent mysticism. He succeeds in getting Einstein to say something that probably few scientists today would say—that there is a vital force or energy in creation. Einstein is willing to associate energy with what are generally seen as spiritual concepts.

I pulled out some notes. "Once, in England, I was at dinner with people highly trained in meditation, among them Professor Suzuki who asked me to ask you if spiritual vibrations and electricity have the same original cause or force."
"I believe," Einstein answered, "that energy is the basic force in creation. My friend Bergson calls it élan vital, the Hindus call it prana."

This acknowledgment of at least certain types of energy that cannot, or not yet, be measured by instruments is noteworthy but it is perhaps not completely surprising. Einstein was responsible for showing us that matter and energy are interchangeable. He understood empiricism to be only a tool of intuition. Finally like Spinoza, he saw God, the universe, and all of life as a harmonious whole.

Einstein looked through the window and seemed to mumble more to the trees than to me, "I believe that I have cosmic religious feelings. I never could grasp how one could satisfy these feelings by praying to limited objects. The tree outside is life, a statue is dead. The whole of nature is life, and life, as I observe it, rejects a God resembling man. I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life."
He turned to me and smiled, "Matter, too, has life: it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don't speculate on what will happen to me. I live here , and my responsibility is in this world now..."

Experiencing the universe as a harmonious whole, there is no reason to fear either life or death. True religion depends only on holding the world in a receptive, caring, and judicious way—on conscience. This opens the door to intuition, which allows at least Einstein to glimpse the law conformability of the universe (and the rest of us too, although no doubt somewhat more dimly).

"The truly religious man has no fear of life and no fear of death—and certainly no blind faith: his faith must be in his conscience. Then he will have the intuition to observe and judge what happens around him. Then, he can acknowledge that everything unfolds true to strict natural law, sometimes with tremendous speed."

As a part of the cosmic order, certainly Einstein, and perhaps all of us, have a purpose which we can recognize with our intuition. Since our instructions or purpose comes from this harmonious whole, we are participating in eternity in the present.

"Indeed, it is not intellect, [which means book knowledge and empiricism for him], but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his real purpose in this life... I do not need any promise of eternity to be happy… my eternity is now. I have only one interest: to fill my purpose here where I am. This purpose is not given to me by my parents or my surroundings. It is induced by some unknown factors. These factors make me part of eternity. In this sense I am a mystic...”

As an inherent part of this totality, we are much larger than we usually experience. Einstein's religion, like Spinoza's, is that the universe is rational. The highest calling is to ponder its laws. Our usual ways of knowing are crude and cannot comprehend the coherence and beauty of the universe. Only the heart with its intuition can lead us beyond what we know of the universe and of ourselves.

Einstein leaned forward, "… it is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God—that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that its highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and: second that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and
serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads
us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe."

Although intuition is what allows us to move forward—is the most important part of thinking—it alone is not enough. Knowledge also has its place, but intuition is the gatekeeper at the most critical juncture. Even though the workings of intuition remain mysterious, it is a reality.

"Isn't truth inherent in man?" I interjected. "You once told me that progress is made only by intuition, and not by the accumulation of knowledge."
"It's not as simple as that," replied Einstein. "Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's life, however where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why but one must accept intuition as a fact."

Subliminal Perception---Old Hat or is There Something New?

There it was again and even more starkly put! "Researchers have found the first physiological evidence that subliminal images do registers subconsciously. Brain scans showed that even though volunteers were not aware of the series of quickly flashed images their visual-processing centers activated in response to the picture. The study from University College London did not address whether subliminal images could influence thought or behavior."

This time it appeared in Scientific American Mind, a relatively new spin off from Scientific American. A more complete PR blurb titled "Subliminal Advertising Leaves its Mark on the Brain" had come across my computer before. I read it quickly and considered putting it on the blog, since intuition may sometimes involve subliminal perception. It wasn't because I thought physiological evidence for subliminal perception was news. Rather it was for what appeared to be two almost contradictory reasons. It seemed an example of PR on overdrive and it provided an interesting summary of state of the art knowledge of subliminal perception.

I was under the impression that there was scads of evidence that subliminally presented images register on the brain. It seems to me that a full bibliography would take many pages, and that is probably an understatement. I’m not talking about subliminally presented pictures of popcorn at a movie theater increasing popcorn sales, nor flashing the RATS part of “Bureaucrats” in a separate frame in a Republican attack ad affecting votes. To the best of my knowledge such things have not been shown. This does not necessarily mean they cannot occur. (Related effects have been shown. For example, well-established work by Zajonc shows that picture flashed subliminally can influence subsequent preferences. The devil, as usual, must be in the details.)

Support for subliminal perception comes from brain imaging studies as well as behavioral studies. For example, a landmark paper published in 1998 demonstrated that presenting subjects with subliminal pictures of faces with fearful expressions activates their amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear (Whalen et. al.) . A 2005 study went much further. It showed that threatening words that do not come to awareness nonetheless generate relatively long-lasting activity in the amygdala. Interestingly the amygdala did not begin to respond until about 800 milliseconds later (Naccache at al.). This delay makes sense when you think about it because words have to go through several levels of processing before their meaning is extracted.

Unconscious cognition has become a hot area of research. Researchers are interested in the topic for itself, and also because it is an approach to trying to understanding consciousness. To understand consciousness it helps to compare it to something. Often some kind of stimulus is presented that does not come to awareness ---for example because is flashed for too short a time. The brain activity is then compared to the brain activity when the stimulus is allowed to come to awareness. The difference is an indication of the neural activity associated with consciousness--- or the neural correlates of consciousness, as they are called.

It turns out that there are a number of ways to be sure visual images do not come to awareness---besides flashing them for too short a time. These techniques are called “masking.” In one technique a brief stimuli is presented and then an additional one is presented for roughly twice as long right afterwards. The second stimulus assures that the initial one does not come to consciousness. This is called backward masking. In another technique called the attention blink, attending to an initial conscious stimulus prevents another one presented from 200 to 800 milliseconds later from coming to consciousness. The University College of London experiment, by Bahrami et. al., used yet another technique. They presented faint pictures of tools to one eye and a continuous stream of high-contrast masks to the other eye, which suppresses conscious awareness of the tools.

This lab is very reputable, so I decided to read the paper. I am delighted I did. It confirmed something very subtle about the role of attention in subliminal perception---something well worth contemplating.

The researchers presented the faint images of tools under two different conditions. In the first, subjects were engaged in a relatively easy task---picking out a specific letter, such as a “T” from a continuous visual display of letter. In the second they were engaged in a more difficult task requiring more focused concentration---picking out a letter of a specific color, say a blue T. With the easy but not the hard task, activity associated with the tools showed up on the primary visual cortex. This suggests that information impinging on the retina at least under these conditions is only forwarded to the part of the brain that registers visual experience when the demands on attention are relatively light.

Researchers used to think that subliminal perception was independent of attention. Not only can attentional load interfere with sensory information coming to consciousness (check this out), it can also interfere with it even being recorded by the brain. Indeed the title of the paper---which unfortunately was not mentioned in either PR blurb---is "Attentional Load Modulates Response of Human Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli." (Other experiments had suggested this but had not proved it conclusively.)

How might the effect work? We have at least a partial answer. The brain is densely interconnected both within its different regions and between them. This allows it to integrate incoming information from the environment with other information. Sensory signals from the retina go through a relay station, in the thalamus---called the LGN, or lateral geniculate nucleus---on their way to the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain. It turns out that roughly 80% of the LGN's input is from higher brain centers. So, when demands on attention are high, subliminal sensory input somehow can get stopped at the LGN and will not advance to the visual cortex.

With respect to intuition one might be tempted to conclude that subliminal information only registers in the brain proper when it is not otherwise engaged in a demanding task. But is this really a fair conclusion? Let’s change the situation a little bit. For example, say faint pictures of enchiladas are flashed to hungry subjects who love Mexican food or frothing glasses of beer to thirsty beer-loving subjects ---under the same two conditions. Or how about instead flashing a definitive pictorial clue to an engaging and difficult insight problem the subject was given the night before. I have a strong hunch that at least the first two of these high valance, or emotionally charged, stimuli would compete more effectively with the ongoing attentional load and at least register in the visual center in brain. The third is a bit more complex. Especially here, I can hardly wait to see what happens.

FOOD AND THE SPIRIT (or Re-Dedicating my Dissertation Twenty Seven Years Later)

I have a rare chance to make up for a lost opportunity. I had wanted to dedicate my PhD thesis to Julia Child. The topic had nothing to do with cooking, at least in the way the word cooking is generally used. I was studying how digestive enzymes, which are large proteins that break down the food we eat, get from the pancreas where they are made into the gut.

Instead when push came to shove I decided to dedicate it to my younger brother. He had died my junior year in college of cystic fibrosis, just shy of the age of thirteen. Cystic fibrosis is a disease in which digestive enzyme secretion is impaired and children cannot breakdown the food they eat. That's him below at my older brother's wedding---capturing the action. Had Bruce lived, he---not I---would have been the scientist in the family. Not least because my dissertation happened to be on digestive enzyme secretion, it seemed right to dedicate it to Bruce. I am glad I did.

I was drawn to the idea of dedicating my dissertation to Julia because learning to cook from her exceptional cookbook gave me the courage I needed to go into science. An intuitive type, I had always been a bit spacey. I had assiduously avoided serious science, and especially laboratory science, feeling it alien to the likes of me. Learning to cook in the years just after college under Julia’s tutelage gave me confidence in my ability to weigh and measure. She did much more; she helped ground me in the world of sensation and also introduced me to the pursuit of excellence.

Though nominally I was teaching, my real job---and joy---was cooking. In the beginning my love affair with Julia and fine food took place in a tiny closet of a kitchen with no counter space what-so-ever and only a 2 x 2.5 foot table. Nonetheless I followed almost every step of her recipes as if they were sacred texts that held the secret to life. In some sense to me that's just what they were--- and I suspect I was not the only one. Julia opened this country up to the joys of the palate and much more.

I wonder did Julia serve as a stepping stone into science for anyone else---or am I the only one? As a youngster I knew science was supposed to be about observing the natural world, but little I saw jibed with what scientists supposedly said--- like apples and feathers falling at the same rate. At another level the control and precision that experiments required was not associated with women for me. Women didn't control the environment, men did. I don't think a male Julia Child, clarity, nonchalance, breathiness and all, would have had the same influence on me. Because Julia was a woman, she gave me permission; once I had begun to master French Cooking, the possibility of mastering other things became real to me as well.

My skill with cooking eventually went beyond just following Julia’s instructions. As I mentioned in my last post "Intuition and Brussels Sprouts," sometimes when I put myself in a special non–thinking but completely attentive state while adjusting the seasoning of the dish, I would know just when it was enough. Cooking tends to involve great deal of implicit learning, unconscious information processing, and expertise. However the connection between cooking and intuition is even deeper.

Years ago, when a friend and I were traveling together throughout Western US and Canada, she taught me to choose restaurants by their signs. It turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb--- a restaurant with an appealing sign generally had correspondingly good food. Over the years, I have thought a lot about what this special something is that goes beyond good design.

Sometimes even a very simple restaurant sign or simple cooking rises to the level of art. Like all art, it depends on a combination of knowledge, skill, and creativity that ‘cook’ together below awareness---in short on intuition. Yet I feel that artistic quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain a sign that draws you into a restaurant or the good food that so often goes with it. Sometimes a sign that bespeaks good food to me can by no stretch of the imagination be called art.

I suspect some even more basic intuitive alchemy connects the sign an owner of a restaurant chooses to hang to invite people in and the food they prepare. Both share an inherent movement or dynamism that appeals and sometimes even fascinates. We feel enriched by looking at them or tasting them—and perhaps especially when the dynamism is ‘oh so subtle.’ (It might come from a just barely perceptible rhythm to the lettering or composition.) The sign forms an appealing as well as self-sustaining, or continuing, pattern in space--- and the food an appealing and self-sustaining pattern of tastes. These patterns resonate with something etched in the human spirit. To the extent we linger with them, they connect us more deeply to ourselves and also at the same time connect us to something larger than ourselves.

On Julia's website at the Smithsonian below a picture of her in the kitchen in France where she first started to cook is a quote from her “The whole thing was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me." Food is the most direct way we take in the external world and make it part of ourselves. Much of the time we eat without awareness. We are just following our biological imperative to survive. But when we do it with consciousness, this transmutation of world into self can also become a bridge between the sensual and spiritual. To begin with, as the tradition of saying grace highlights, we appreciate the bounty of the earth.

When the food is really delicious---to the extent we savor it--- we are also led into different and more rarefied realms of appreciation and even joy. The cook who pats herself on the back for making a wonderful new dish, in addition to appreciating her own skills, is celebrating---even when she doesn't know it---the slightly enlarged world of nuanced experience her own intuition has opened for herself and guests. (Of course, this opening might instead depend on the intuition of others codified in a recipe, combined with her skill.) When she makes and serves an old favorite, she revisits that special place again.

If you want to get heightened sense of the way food can carry one beyond oneself to new places, you might try a radical experiment---eating a wonderful meal in the company of friends in complete silence. It is hardly anti-social! Rather to the extent one remains present, it leads to an intensified experience of both food and friends. “It is the nectar.” as a friend who I convinced to lunch in silence on the veranda of a lovely restaurant in Italy during a busy conference said. Alas, Julia opened the possibility of experiencing this nectar for so many of us.

Had I dedicated my thesis to Julia back then, my appreciation of her influence on my life would have been incomplete. I was still years away from my current interest in exploring and resonating the experience and science of intuition. But what is a mere twenty seven years when completeness is at stake? Here is the original dedication, and below what I would now add:

This dissertation is dedicated to Bruce Isenman. He wanted to be a scientist, and I believe nothing would have stopped him had he lived.

This study is also dedicated to Julia Child. By teaching me to weigh and measure with the best of them, she gave me the confidence I needed to become a scientist. I now know that she also helped chart my course beyond to resonate more subtle yet no less real realms of knowledge and experience with scientific understanding.

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OTHER RESTAURANT SIGNS I THINK INTERESTING
(A Work In Progress)

I have not eaten at all these restaurants whose signs I think bespeak good food or find interesting for one reason or another. It is no doubt a better test of the rule when the food is unknown. (I apologize for the quality of some of the pictures. I am using Picasa for the first time, and the quality of the uploads seem inconsistent. Any insight appreciated.)

I am not sure about what these signs reveal, but I am certainly intrigued by them. The restaurant has been there since my college years and back then had excellent subs. It recently closed.

This one has changed hands at least once and probably more---so it might be a legacy issue as well.

The signs in the foodcourt of the Porter Exchange in the old Sears Building in Cambridge seem to be all by the same artist. They are very attractive but to my mind verging on slick. I think signs by an artist hired by a corporation for a foodcourt are less telling. Most of the food is quite good at the Porter Exchange, if I remember correctly, and hardly slick!

INTUITION AND BRUSSELS SPROUTS---WHAT!!?

My first intensive schooling in intuition came when I learned to cross streets, my second when I learned to drive a car, and my third when I learned to cook (see "Running in Herds, Traffic, and Intuition").The cooking part began a year or two after I graduated from college with a going away dinner for some friends who were leaving Cambridge---and a three day stew. I bought Julia Child’s first cookbook, what became the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and chose the most labor intensive dish I could find.

Julia became my cooking teacher. Her clear and wonderful, if labor intensive, recipes produced food I was delighted to serve and eat. Because she provided such a strong base, she created what I will call a feeling for the palate--- or alternatively, for the recipe.

Her last direction was frequently to correct seasoning. Often it seemed that if I held the salt (or spice) shaker over the dish and went into a mentally blank but extremely attentive place, I would know exactly how much to put in. It certainly doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, I have this clear crisp feeling of being on beam—almost as if I am communing with the dish.

Over the years I have consulted Julia less and less. A recent special project made me go back to her once again. I ate a wonderful pasta dish in a restaurant several years ago, which, among other things, contained a few brussels sprouts. Cut in two, they had been browned in such a way that they became all crispy on their cut end. The contrast of textures and tastes was divine.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to try to make them for myself. I have cooked brussels sprouts only very occasionally---boiling them the ten minutes that the recipe I used suggested---in a pan just large enough to accommodate them. The results were OK, but less than wonderful; the sprouts tended to end up a dull green.

The key, Julia said, was a huge pot of boiling water, a short cooking time---about 6 minutes---and taking them out at their greenest. When I tried it, they turned bright green in no time at all---maybe two minutes. I hesitated a moment and then took them out.

I went on to the second step—cutting them in half and trying to brown them in butter. They hardly browned at all. However my curiosity was piqued. I thought intuition might tell me how brown the butter had to be---instead of my conditioned reactions of all kinds, combined with my thinking mind. Over a period of months I cooked many batches of brussels sprouts—each time trying a different way to brown them. Indeed intuition did have the role in this project, and somewhat like I anticipated, but I got in which part wrong.

I began to notice something interesting about the initially cooking step---the sprouts stayed bright green for a while---maybe as long as a minute and a half. Nonetheless something in me knew when they were at their brightest green and would be at their most delicious. This means a tiny bit crunchy inside, with a wonderful mustard or perhaps horseradish-like flavor.

I would watch them attentively and all of a sudden I would just know it was time to take them out. It certainly had nothing to do with thinking. In fact when I let myself think, I was less alert to this other kind of knowing and less likely to respond appropriately.

When I was a postdoc---way before I began to study intuition---I had my first experience of “knowing more than I know.” Often before I went home for the evening, I would have to add a liquid sample to a thick slurry of beads in a column and wait until it very slowly flowed in. Often it would get stuck.

One evening I knew that the sample was flowing even though I realized that the change in the fluid level in the column above the slurry of beads was imperceptible to my conscious mind. Astounded, I checked several more times and came to the same conclusion. This knowing had an extremely grounded, even physical feeling to it, though I could not identify its source.

I sensed it was not extraordinary knowing, but something every bit as interesting. Apparently our ability to detect visual change below awareness is greater than our ability to detect visual change at a conscious level. Since then I have become familiar with an ever growing body of work that confirms that indeed the unconscious can register and integrate stimuli that do not make it to awareness---see, for example, this 2000 review article by Philip Merikle . The study of unconscious perception of all kinds is a hot area of investigation in cognitive science.

I suspect there is also a similar explanation for my ability to sense when the brussels sprouts will be at their most flavorful as well. Probably my unconscious is aware of gradations in bright green that my conscious mind cannot distinguish. It may also follow the rate of change of the color to capture when it is at its brightest.

Perhaps there is a similar type of physiological explanation for my sometimes ability to stand over the pot in an apparently blank but attentive way and know just how much salt to put in---and also to get a clear signal that it is so. Could the vapors above the pot contain essential clues?

Of course I cannot rule out that an even more obscure aspect of the human ability to know has a role in this situation---or indeed any of these situations. But at least with the first two, a reasonable sounding explanation based on the greater acuity of our unconscious perceptual abilities makes it unnecessary to go any further, at this point anyway.

Currently I am still working on the second step---browning the brussels sprouts. After trying everything I could think of---different degrees of brownness of the butter, different pans, oil instead of butter, dipping the ends in different flour mixtures---I realized that it was time to bite the bullet. I had to attempt to dry the brussels sprouts after the initial cooking---an absurd-sounding notion I had been hoping to avoid. After a lot of thinking, I decided the best I could do was to put the newly cut cooked brussels sprouts on paper towels for a while.

This time they browned beautifully. After sitting a bit, they were scrumptious. The tangy, moist, fresh, mustardy sprouts contrasted in a profound way with the rich, deep, dark, taste of the burnt ends.

But alas they are still not really crispy. I guess I will have to go through everything I already tried before---this time with the paper towel drained sprouts. It is hardly a burden, but a labor of culinary and gustatory love.

Running in Herds, Traffic, and Intuition

It has always amazed me how birds can fly in formation and large animals can run in herds. You would think they would get in each other's way with disastrous consequences. Yet evolution makes sure that it works out.

Even more amazing to me is the way that we humans get from one place to another in this day and age. Much of the time this entails getting into a steel hulk with wheels on speed and sharing the roads with many other fast, steel driving machines. We are not all going the same place, even in an interim sense, unlike birds flying in formation or animals running in a herd. Nonetheless we manage to navigate even very complicated traffic with relative ease for the most part. Consider the complex information processing required to maneuver a busy traffic circle without an accident. (We have some real winners around Boston.) Evolution could not have bred us for cars or traffic circles, nonetheless even here we feel its hand.

I learned to cross streets as well as to drive a car in Harvard Square. Back then the traffic patterns in Harvard Square were all cockamamie. Crossing the street was a considerable challenge. I somehow learned that what I needed to do to get across safely was to get a glimpse of the face of the approaching driver. Immediately this would tell me whether he/she was a toughie who wanted to play chicken, or someone who would let me cross without a fight.

My intuitive education deepened when I learned to drive. I realized that you could get some sense of the other driver and his/her intentions, even when you couldn't see their face. This came through very subtle characteristics of the way they handled the car---at least at the first order approximation. It's as if you can sense something about the driver, their quality of attention, and what they are going to do next. Whatever its actual source, I suspect that receptivity to this very subtle level of information is part of what allowed us humans to have taken to the roads.