Psychology Today Blogs - Stanton Peele

Heard any good Temperance sermons lately?

Stanton Peele — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:50:00 -0700

Most Americans don't realize the hold that Temperance still has on us. There remain many dry counties in the U.S. (particularly in the South) and blue laws honeycomb state statutes. By the criterion of drinking less than once monthly, a majority of Americans are teetotalers.

In nineteenth century America, Temperance lectures, groups, literature, art, music, etc. pervaded the country. It was impossible not to be constantly aware of the Temperance message - alcohol was evil. In fact, Temperance proponents claimed that all drinkers were unknowingly headed down the garden path to excess, addiction, and ultimate ruination and death - much as we currently view drug users.

Prohibition took the wind out of the organized Temperance movement. On the eve of national Prohibition in 1919, evangelist Billy Sunday spoke before a live audience of ten thousand people and a radio audience of millions:

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children will laugh. Hell will forever be rent.

Of course, the Rev. Sunday's high hopes were not realized - crime and alcohol poisonings actually increased during this period, and hell was not rent.

Alcoholics Anonymous appeared in 1935, shortly after Prohibition was repealed. AA developed a crucial marketing advantage over Temperance - it claimed that the progression to damnation due to drinking characterized only a small group of alcoholics, and not all drinkers. Nonetheless, the AA meeting is a replica of Temperance meetings organized for former drunkards who bewailed their former sins, turned themselves over to a Higher Power, and sought to make amends to God and man.

Temperance is also apparent in the standard American drug education program, where a former drinker or drug user or some other "expert" describes the inevitable slide into perdition due to drug use or drinking. Obviously, if the speakers were moderate drinkers or occasional drug users (or former drug users who simply "matured out" without any negative life consequences), the whole point of the lecture - that substances are inherently evil - would be lost.

Temperance preachers - er, I mean motivational speakers - either detail their own sordid pasts or else describe some young person whose life was ruined by alcohol and drugs. Their favorite examples are top students, class presidents, and exceptional athletes. If they reflected that nearly all serious drug abusers have many simultaneous risk factors and problems - school and emotional issues, run-ins with the law, disrupted home lives - listeners might miss how devilish drugs and alcohol are.

I just returned from a gambling conference where I listened to a prominent gambling researcher describe a young man - an athlete and class president - who ended up in prison. I realized I was at a Temperance sermon! Following the talk, I asked two questions: "Don't most young problem gamblers, like young substance abusers, have a host of problems?" The speaker admitted the same held for problem gamblers. He also admitted he didn't personally know the young man in question, but had only heard about him from a third party!

I then asked, "What percentage of all youthful gamblers experience such problems?" The speaker answered: "I don't know." In fact, his data showed that three-quarters of seventh graders had had gambling experiences. Yet, despite their broad exposure to gambling, another speaker noted that only one percent of young people reckoned that gambling was a risk for them (the number one risk issue the teens reported was a negative body image).

The researcher then proudly displayed a video he had produced. A parental couple sits contentedly reading their newspapers in the kitchen. Cut to their late adolescent son in another room in front of a computer screen playing cards. The young man suddenly jumps up and smashes the computer with a baseball bat, trying to exorcise his gambling demons. Only then do his oblivious parents awaken to the evils of youth gambling. The scary message to parents: Gambling, straight from hell!

Anybody know where I can catch a good Temperance sermon this weekend - now that Billy Sunday is no longer with us?

Straightening the Irish Out About Addiction (before they become as crazy as us)

Stanton Peele — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:27:11 -0700

I write from Killarney, where yesterday I delivered the keynote address at a conference on "Addiction-Proofing Our Communities." The conference opened with a speech by Ireland's drug czar, Desmond Corrigan, an academic pharmacologist who, unlike his American counterpart, provided hard data and humility. Nonetheless, he still communicated an unbalanced and inaccurate image of drugs, one destined to exacerbate the problem. (Oddly, the czar indicated this was true in the past, when he had predicted drops in drug use, following which drug use in fact increased. As a result, he said, "I no longer make predictions.")

That night, I asked Dr. Corrigan to examine his own data showing that, of all those in Ireland who had ever tried illicit drugs (cocaine, heroin, marijuana, mushrooms, meth), ten percent or fewer currently used them (the data are similar here). Of course, this image is totally at odds with what the czar was trying to communicate: that drugs are an irresistible scourge that human beings cannot control and must avoid at all costs. When I asked him to explain the results, he said, "people quit when they get jobs, have families, and mature. Actually, they tell us ‘I simply didn't wish to continue using'."

I then directed his attention to the remarkably skewed usage patterns his data showed. While illicit drug use was largely self-limiting, pharmaceutical drugs use, drinking, and smoking were not. (Although the Irish use fewer illicit drugs than us - about a quarter have used one in their lives, compared with half of Americans -- a higher percentage currently drink - about three quarters, compared with half of Americans.) The czar answered by indicating that, although his province was only drugs, they intended to become as heavy-handed with alcohol as they already are with drugs. "Based on the work of Robin Room, we are arguing to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21, and to tax alcohol heavily."

By the time my speech rolled around the next day, of course, the czar was long gone. I noted that it would have been stressful for him to listen to my talk, and I appointed one of the conference organizers to stand in his stead. In my own imitable style, interacting with the czar stand-in, I then made the following points:

Given that his mission was to reduce drug use, it was remarkable that he did not note that the vast majority of people do so on their own, and (until I asked him) why and how they did so.

I told the "czar" that he was disingenuous when he said he no longer made predictions - "You are here predicting the steps you are taking will improve the situation."

I then turned to the audience (by now on the edge of their seats) to ask what it meant that the czar's predictions were previously disproved, and they correctly shouted out - "He has failed." And so, I pointed out, "he is now proposing more of the same." (Of course, the Irish drug czar is worlds apart from his American counterpart, for example in endorsing methadone, needle exchange, and other harm reduction techniques that can only be employed sub rosa in the U.S.)

I then pointed out that the Irish - like Americans - were tremendously culturally ambivalent about alcohol. I cited data showing that Irish men are the least likely to drink daily (2%) and most likely to binge once weekly (roughly half) in Europe.

These data are almost exactly reversed for Italian men, who have high daily drinking rates, but rarely binge. I then reviewed data showing that three percent of Italian youth binge drink three or more times a month, compared with a quarter of Irish youth - the highest figure in Europe.

To his stand-in, I then said, "So what do you think you will accomplish by imposing more restrictive alcohol regulations? By the way, do you drink? And how did you introduce your children to alcohol?" His stand-in admitted that both he and the czar drank wine with meals, and had taught this custom to their children. Of course, this is the approach Italians take (the drinking age in Italy is 16, and parents can give children of any age alcohol at a restaurant).

"So, I said, you feel the best approach for you and those you love is mild social drinking, and teaching this to youngsters, but for the Irish at large, you intend to raise the drinking age and make it harder for them to afford alcohol. In other words, they can't be expected to learn the healthy patterns you yourself practice."

I continued, "And by how much do you realistically expect to lower the prevalence of Irish drinkers (90% 0f who have imbibed)? Of course, what you will really accomplish is to exacerbate the ambivalence and uncertainty with which the Irish already drink, so that you can come back in future years to admit how you failed in this area also."

At this point, I stepped back and said to the "czar," "I understand -- as the Chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on Drugs -- you are primarily concerned with drugs. Really, what this means (as it does for the director of the American National Institute on Drug Abuse - with whom I would never be permitted to share a venue) is that you must constantly terrorize people about illicit drug use. On the other hand, examining your data - showing fewer than five percent of the Irish use marijuana, .5% use cocaine, and "0.0%" (actual figure) use heroin, while much higher percentages use a pharmaceutical (10% use sedatives and a similar number anti-depressants) while three-quarters drink, the Irish people are not getting good value from paying your salary. (Recently, in the U.S., the head of the NIDA - Nora Volkow - following as she always does my insights but years later - has labelled pharmaceutical abuse as the number one drug problem in America.)

"I, on the other hand, am the sole member of the Intergalactic Commission on Addiction. I am only interested in harmful substance use, not with banning or discouraging use of disapproved substances. So let us speak here today about how we can best aid our children in avoiding harmful substance use, and addictions of all kind (the audience immediately agreed that addiction was not limited to drugs and alcohol)."

Of course, everywhere - even the countries, like Ireland and the UK, closest to the U.S. in their screwy attitudes toward alcohol and drugs -- there is greater diversity of opinion permitted on the subject of drugs. I was invited by a group in Kerry County who teach "Life Education" in the schools (none of whom would at all agree with my remarks to the czar!) -- their mission is "to help children make healthy choices." You can see already why they would have me, creator of the Life Process Program, come to speak. We both agree that the key to avoiding unhealthy substance use, along with all addiction, is to encourage positive life attiudes and to arm young people with the knowledge and skill to live such a life.

In the U.S., where education programs are called "Drug Prevention," meaning their mission is to say the scariest things possible at all times about both drugs and alcohol, here is no room for my voice at all. Thus, I will be speaking in London and Paris shortly - in France addressing the national association of substance abuse counsellors. But you will never hear my voice in Washington D.C.

The Disease of Having Too Much Sex -- Addiction is real, it's just not a disease

Stanton Peele — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:08:42 -0700

Dr. Joseph Beck, psychiatrist and addiction specialist, wrote an article for the Sun-Times News Group titled, "Addiction doesn't always involve drugs, alcohol." I confess to thinking, as the author (in 1975) of Love and Addiction, "I'm glad someone got psychiatry the news."

But what does this mean to Dr. Beck? (Please note this is not Dr. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavior therapy for depression.)

While it's true that chemical dependency on drugs or alcohol remains the leading cause of addiction in the United States, a growing number of individuals are battling addictions to compulsive shopping and spending, food, sex, gambling, video-gaming, the Internet and more.

Addiction is a chronic disease that requires dedicated medical management, and is one of the most underserved chronic illnesses in the United States.

So, let's see - the first paragraph says compulsive shopping and sex are addictions just like compulsive substance use is. That was my point in Love and Addiction. (By the way, I would point out the mathematical error when Dr. Beck claims drug and alcohol dependency is "the leading cause of addiction in the U.S." - more than "compulsive shopping and spending, food, sex, gambling, video-gaming, the Internet and more." Really?)

The second paragraph says that, according to Beck, they are all chronic diseases requiring "dedicated medical management." I can just picture a rock star hooked up to an IV machine as he recovers from his latest affair with the likes of Paris Hilton, Heather Locklear, Pamela Anderson - whoever. And I can see millions of husbands looking at their shoes as they imagine what they would do if confronted with a willing, nude version of some Hollywood hottie.

And that's where the average American parts company with Dr. Beck: "That's no disease," they shout in unison. Just like eating oodles of hot fudge is no disease. It's an excess -- yes it can be extremely self-defeating - even to the point of endangering one's health. Yes, it can be fueled by the negative consequences from previous such indulgences. That's addiction.

But is that a medical disease? Hasn't this kind of addictive, self-destructive cycle been around since the bible? Haven't we all experienced doing more of something we know is bad for us because it temporarily pleases us? There, in a nutshell, is my argument that addiction is not a disease, but rather an experience people seek in order to allay negative feelings (like anxiety or depression) and to give them a false sense of control in their lives, and which can become insanely self-fueling.

And what if we say it is a medical disease? For Dr. Beck, that means it is uncontrollable, inbred and genetic, can never be reversed, is not subject to interpersonal and setting factors like stress and exposure, and cannot be cured by improving coping and situational control such as through teaching problem solving skills, contrasting behavior with personal values, changing social networks to comprise moderate users. Too bad, Dr. Beck -- because those are the most empirically effective treatments for addiction.

In 2003 William R. Miller and his colleagues rated forty-eight kinds of treatment by combining the results of 381 controlled trials that had compared the effectiveness of a treatment with either no treatment or with other alcoholism therapies. The treatment with by far the best score was 'brief intervention' - followed by motivational enhancement, community reinforcement, and social-skills training. The least effective treatments were found to be general alcoholism counseling and education, ordinary psychotherapy, and confrontational therapies, followed by twelve-step interventions and AA (ranked 37th and 38th) - the very treatments most utilized in the U.S.!

So Dr. Beck's disease theory of addiction - that followed by the American Society of Addiction Medicine - endorses the least effective ways of treating the problem. And I thought medicine was about empirical effectiveness!

Paul Newman's Beer Drinking

Stanton Peele — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:31:58 -0700

One reason we don't know people drink regularly or take drugs while leading normal - even distinguished - lives is because they are not allowed to tell us. After his first autobiography, Giant Steps (1983) was criticized for describing his collegiate drug use, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a second autobiography, Kareem (1990), which didn't mention drugs.

When a biography of Louis Armstrong revealed he smoked marijuana every day of his adult life, the information was omitted from all descriptions of the book and the life of the legendary jazz musician. Whenever I mention this to drug professionals, they deny it.

Paul Newman often referred to his beer drinking, and was identified by it. His obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle listed: "Mr. Newman reveled in certain aspects of stereotypical male behavior. He loved drinking beer and playing elaborate pranks on friends." In the New York Times, best friend A. E. Hotchner recounted long days "on Long Island Sound, drinking beer and scaring the fish." But Newman's predilection for beer is not well known -- perhaps because it is incongruous with his image.

I thought of this when I had lunch with several friends, and one said, "Paul Newman had a six-pack of beer every day." Everybody else in the room denied this factoid out of hand. I believe they thought that a happily married man, successful professional, and philanthropist like Newman - one who moreover never entered the Betty Ford Center - could not have been a regular drinker. It just didn't add up. (They might have added that Newman was an anti-drug activist, due to the drug overdose death of his son from his first marriage.)

Although I'm not aware that Newman ever addressed this "controversy," I imagine he might have said, "I lead an active, healthy, engaged life, in which I regularly drink beer. I hold myself responsible for being a productive, positive person - and I don't see anything wrong with regularly consuming a potent psychoactive substance, so long as I am true to my own values" (and presumably his wife's).

Since alcohol is legal and widely available, and drug use is quite prevalent (100 million Americans have consumed illicit drugs), Americans - human beings - all have to somehow come to grips with what we might call the Newman paradox - making peace with psychoactive substance use (including alcohol). And, despite all of our anti-drug efforts, as National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora Volkow has recently announced, this task is becoming exponentially more difficult with the proliferation of powerful pharmaceuticals among current generations of children.

But schools are not allowed to talk about this. Certainly school authorities are not going to bring in successful actors or athletes who confess they have used drugs, or to talk about their enjoyment of drinking. The prevailing prevention approach is to tell everyone not to do these things, claim no one successful has ever done them, and carry on with what everyone knows to be a complete fiction. (Think of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.)

When I speak with a group of parents - or parents and students - I begin by asking, "How many people in this room drink alcohol?" Looking around at the majority of parents (in an upper socio-economic and ethnic state like New Jersey) who do, I ask people, "What does this say about your school's DARE program?" A parent will then reply, "I was always afraid to voice my concern that the zero-tolerance message they teach our kids - it just doesn't make sense. Look around you!"

Here's Kareem Jabbar's resolution of these issues in Giant Steps: "Drugs are an open secret on all strata of America society: . . . [So] each man and woman, from the most known to the least, should have the confidence and the strength to create and live by his or her own beliefs and not be led blindly by others who may not be qualified for the job."

"I don't really care who's doing drugs in the NBA as long as the scene isn't adversely affecting my team and teammates. I've known enough drug users--going as far back as grade school and the streets of New York--not to view them as pariahs or lost souls. I've certainly smoked more than my quota of weed."

Whoooa! But Jabbar is not endorsing drug use willy-nilly here: "For a while there at UCLA I didn't want to hang out with anyone who didn't smoke reefer, but that was as parochial a view of the world as any uptight antidoper's, and I got over it quickly." And he notes as a professional athlete, "serious drug use, whether it's pot, cocaine, amphetamines or heroin, will wrestle with your conditioning."

Jabbar, like Newman, was coming to grips with the complex demands of a constructive life lived in a modern world of ever-available psychopharmaceutical stimulation. As yet, we have not come up with a way to teach this.

Palin Accuses Dems of Witchcraft!

Stanton Peele — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:48:16 -0700

A shocking secret transcript has been uncovered, in which Alaska Governor and GOP Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin, accuses Democrats of witchcraft:

Palin: We need to call in Bishop Thomas Muthee to clear my campaign plane of witchcraft. I just feel its presence everywhere.

Aide: What makes you say that, Sarah?

Palin: I know I put my briefing papers down on my seat - the ones that explain the difference between a senator and congressperson - and the next thing, they were back in my briefcase. I think that's pretty solid evidence, don't you?

Aide: Do you think the Democrats are using Voodoo?

Palin: You can bet on it, just as surely as people used to keep dinosaurs for pets! Have you noticed, Caribbean voters are four-square behind them? I caught someone trying to remove a strand of my hair. . .

Aide: . . .to make a Voodoo doll!

Palin: Exactly. I even blame Demonic possession for my daughter's becoming pregnant - how can you explain it otherwise, when I told her never to have sex until marriage or she would go to hell! And, have you noticed, DEMOn/DEMOcrat!

Aide: I see what you mean.

Palin: Of course, we're so close to Russia, they could be sending witchcraft signals across the Bering Sea. I wonder if we could convene a witchcraft trial at the Geneva World Court? Those Salem people had a lot of folk wisdom!

Aide: Do you think the Defense Department has an anti-witchcraft shield they can coat our plane with?

Palin: What a great idea! I'll put it in my notebook - oh where have they transubstantiated it to now!?!

The tape is suddenly filled with cracking electronic distortion, as though the devil was throwing lightening bolts - you can't escape the forces of evil, even in Alaska, where the saved will gather in order to be transported to Heaven on Judgment Day, according to Palin's church.

[NOTICE: NO SUCH TRANSCRIPT EXISTS. Rather, I observed the above meeting during an out-of-body experience I had, where I narrowly missed Vladimir Putin's plane coming into American air space from the opposite direction.]

We can never be happy again

Stanton Peele — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:37:47 -0700

Somewhere along the way, America transformed from an achieving society to a consuming one. While people date American consumerism from the 1950s, the permanent shift in values actually occurred later, sometime in the 1970s.

But we were uneasy about the shift, not the least because we feared there were limits to our ability to continue consuming. We elected a nudge who told us that - but then we rejected him. Instead, in response to our fear rode Ronald Reagan, like the cowboy heroes to whom he often played supporting roles in films. He convinced us there were no limits to our ability to consume, now and forever.

With this last restraint removed, Americans set all their efforts to feeding themselves - eating more and better foods, driving bigger and better cars, getting their kids into superior schools, making more money, owning larger homes, being healthier, having better sex, being happier, protecting ourselves from discordant elements around the world.

But each of these consumptive goals has proven double-edged. The eating has interfered with the health, the larger homes and cars have bumped into the limits on natural resources, our ability to protect our international interests has been undercut by the massive discrepancy between our productiveness and our consumption, our happiness and mental health could not be purchased as we were promised they would be, and so on.

"Chickens coming home to roost" has become a favorite metaphor for critiquing American society and our economic system. The largest, latest example of an obstacle we cannot overcome is the collapse of real estate consumption and the related implosion of our financial institutions.

And our response? Like the fantasy futuristic figures in the cartoon hit film WALL-E - who are so fat and complacent they are permanently attached to personal conveyances they ride from one shopping venue to another - we scream for a return of our toys and treats. We want overextended mortgages to be forgiven, we want American automakers who made massive hunks of steel for us to be saved, we want the planet to be okay despite our assaults on it to obtain the resources we need for our pleasures.

But we are incapable of sacrificing anything to achieve these goals - we have lost that ability. We define what we want to be lower taxes and more goodies, not a return to financial soundness and living within our means. So to succeed at our goals is to feed our failures. The presidential candidate who wins will be the one who best convinces us he can square this circle - but the impossibility of his doing so is written in the wind.

So enjoy yourself in this bonfire of the vanities - it only gets worse from here.

Love is for the Living

Stanton Peele — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 05:28:55 -0700

"Ghost Town," while well written and well acted, plays with among the oldest human notions - that we can interact with dead people. Like modern TV shows starring psychics, the movie mixes in our current preoccupation with perfecting relationships.

Human beings seem to differ from other animals by wondering what happens after death. This has produced religion, séances, quite a few films, and James Van Praagh and Sylvia Browne (you know - the woman with the cigarette voice on the Montel Williams Show).

Audiences rely on TV psychics to divine their love lives, health, what happened to missing relatives, and - more than anything else - to make sure dead relatives aren't mad at them. This usually amounts to asking whether so-and-so knew that the questioner loved them. Sylvia or James reassures the depressed audience member, often discerning that the dead people in question are hovering nearby and can hear the professions of love themselves.

We are left to wonder what was up between the questioner and the deceased. And, of course, to imagine that if the two were together in the same room, alive, a fight would quickly break out - like at family dinners before one of them died.

Ghost Town is about a husband who cheated on his loving wife, his loving wife, and a go-between who acquires the gift of communicating with the dead. The husband (played by Greg Kinnear) harangues Ricky Gervais to tell his wife (Tea Leoni) that her new fiancée's a bum - but, really, he wants to say he's sorry for being a bum and that he loved her.

Kinnear is joined in his harassment of Gervais, playing misanthrope dentist Bertram Pincus (himself nursing a broken heart), by scores of dead people who can't leave New York City until someone communicates something critical to their survivors that will show how much they really loved them, or some such. As if you could live a whole life with someone and then, by some unfortunate accident, misplace at the last moment the one thing that would show them you really cared.

Pathetic, isn't it? But we're all suckers for this idea. As though we could redo not only our life histories, but our current behavior patterns, in one fell, magical, swoop.

Interviewed about the movie, Brit Gervais points out the parallels to Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," in that Pincus becomes a feeling human being after his experiences in the underworld. It is true - both tales are about redemption. But there is a difference. Scrooge never actually communicates with the dead or missing while observing them before he returns to life to rectify his current behavior and relationships.

It seems that Dickens (like Houdini) couldn't bring himself to actually present the dead as sentient human beings to whom we can pour our hearts out. It's good to keep in mind that love is only possible with the living - you've got plenty to do without the regrets.

Genetics Can't Save Us

Stanton Peele — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:09:10 -0700

The search to identify and explore the human genome dominated biology and newspaper science pages for more than a decade. The hope was that, soon we could identify the sources of most major illnesses, including schizophrenia, addiction, and bipolar disorder. We now know this search has been an utter failure.

Actually, I am being disingenuous. I knew all along this hunt would come up empty, as I wrote (with Rich DeGrandpre) in Psychology Today at the outset of the genome enterprise. And, just as the vast deployment of brain scans has shown the ineradicable gap between brain chemistry and human choice and action, the genome project has paradoxically disproved genetic determinism.

The reasons for this are five-fold:

1. The prayerful hope of genetic determinism in the case of behavior and psychopathology was based on hyped up behavior genetic studies (e.g., of identical twins reared apart, comparing identical and fraternal twins), which were statistical tour de forces designed intentionally to inflate heritability factors.

2. The human chromosome was quickly discovered not to consist of a series of genes linkable to traits - only a small minority of the genome contains material that looks and acts like genes with significant manifestations.

3. The genome is more mobile and malleable than had been deemed possible, with many genes interacting, most DNA serving to impact rates and direction of ontological development, and pre- and post-birth environmental influences changing, sometimes radically, genetic expression.

4. Addiction, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder - among other socially critical maladies - simply do not act like classical diseases with a straightforward biological source and an irreversible epidemiology that manifests itself independent of setting.

5. The entire genome-determines-all concept turns out to have been an American fantasy fueled by our never-ending hope that medical science can cure everything wrong with us. Whether it can make coming generations physically healthier than past ones is open to debate. Whether it can make us happier, better able to accept and relate to others and our world, and more resistant to the lure of addiction has, on the other and, been decisively refuted.

Even Brain Scanners Don't Believe Brain Scans -- But One Day Soon We Will

Stanton Peele — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:59:47 -0700

Here's a scary thought - that we will soon accept that brain scans tell us something truthful about people!

That actually does not occur in the United States today. You can't go into court and say: "He knew what he was doing - the consciousness part of his brain was lit up when he shot his wife," or "He's a psychopath because the moral judgment sector of his brain is underdeveloped."

The government agency that most traffics in MRIs of the brain is the National Institute on Drug Abuse, where they claim cocaine causes addiction because the drug floods the pleasure centers of the brain. But not one scientist claims they can tell if an individual is addicted by the effects of cocaine on the person's brain.

Rather, testing goes the other way - when a person shows a particular brain image from cocaine use, researchers quickly examine their drug usage patterns, to "prove" that the drug's impact on the brain "causes" addiction. But if the person says, "I was uncomfortable when I felt that ‘lit up'," or "I was afraid to use the drug regularly because of the impact it had on me," we say they are not addicted, no matter what their MRI looks like.

Well, hold your horses. In India, they are using such MRIs in court; India became the first country to convict someone of a crime because the prosecution claimed a brain scan revealed a defendant had specific memories of the murder in question, and was therefore guilty of the crime. The woman received a life sentence.

"Psychologists and neuroscientists in the United States, which has been at the forefront of brain-based lie detection, variously called India's application of the technology to legal cases ‘fascinating,' ‘ridiculous,' ‘chilling' and ‘unconscionable.'" That is, although the dominant reaction was that hocus pocus was being used to prove something for which there was not sufficient actual evidence, some Americans couldn't help but be fascinated by the prospect that, some day soon, we could be making similar claims here.

In the 2002 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg movie (from a Philip K. Dick story), "Minority Report," people are convicted and imprisoned for crimes which have not occurred, but which are foretold from examination of their genetic material (or something). As ridiculous as its seems to apply this to contemporary American jurisprudence, what if one day soon we rely on a scan to show that a person has a level of hatred and rage towards someone that is significantly associated with people harming a person? What if we decide this is a reliable enough indicator that such a crime will occur that we imprison the person before they actually perpetrate any such violence?

Ah, a brave, new world indeed - and coming to an MRI near you.

Four Unpalatable Political-Psychological Truths -- Guaranteed to Offend Liberals and Conservatives Alike

Stanton Peele — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:50:57 -0700

1. Bill O'Reilly is smarter than Edward R. Murrow. As viewers of the 2005 film (produced and directed by George Clooney), "Good Night and Good Luck," are aware, Murrow's most famous confrontation - with "tail-gunner" Joe McCarthy - was an entirely scripted program, where Murrow read from a text prepared in advance by his staff.

Murrow never confronted McCarthy directly. O'Reilly, on the other hand, actually poses questions, gets answers, and reframes his thinking as he sits before millions of viewers, frequently coming up with brilliant rejoinders or, at least, new ways of phrasing questions to sidestep defensive moves by those he interviews.

As a result, the two best political interviews of this presidential campaign were O'Reilly's of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (separately), where real differences were aired and explored - since, of course, O'Reilly was as interested in expressing his views as hearing the candidates'.

2. Voters have no interest in hearing candidates debate issues. At any moment in the campaign, half to two-thirds of Americans are tuned out, because politics is too complicated and bores them. The better-informed they are, the more likely they are to have set opinions, and to back a candidate strongly already.

Campaigns and debates are about candidates processing phrases, looking presidential (but personable also), and hoping the other candidate will say something idiotic. The most potent vote-grabbing ideas - "low taxes," "getting tough" - are more likely to be harmful to the country than helpful. Occasionally, the smarter, better candidate is elected, but the democratic political process does not reliably produce this outcome. More likely, the mass of uninformed voters stampede when they smell that one candidate is different, weak, or - God forbid - thoughtful and complicated.

3. Tina Fey bears no resemblance to Sarah Palin. I pride myself on discerning resemblances that are not immediately obvious, but I cannot recognize Sarah Palin in Tina Fey, even (or especially) on the recent Saturday Night Live skit. Tina Fey conveys a self-awareness and consciousness that are entirely absent from the visage of Palin, who confidently sees the world as she - and her fellow Christian fundamentalists - imagine it.

4. John McCain is not brave. When I was in high school, I was shocked when a large, physically imposing football player I knew allowed a friend to bully a girl with epilepsy. Of course, he simply wanted to be accepted by the other kids, who felt better about themselves when mocking and harassing someone with a disability. John McCain learned the meaning of military honor as a midshipman - stand by your men, accept punishment from captors, endure physical pain. McCain is not strong enough emotionally, morally, or intellectually to map out an unpopular position and stand by it. And he'll gang tackle the weak among us with the gusto of a kamikaze pilot.