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2008-08-23 The Mind of the Market - National Science Week forum
All in the Mind
Are markets moral? Is our hunter-gatherer brain geared for modern capitalism, and do economies work like evolutionary organisms? The rise of neuroeconomics, the extinction of Homo Economicus and more - with outspoken founder of the U.S Skeptics Society, Dr Michael Shermer, and shareholder activist and Crikey founder, Stephen Mayne. TRANSCRIPT: The downloadable or streaming audio will be available directly after Saturday's broadcast. Transcript by mid week after broadcast. read less
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2008-08-23 The Mind of the Market - National Science Week forum
Fri August 22 2008
Are markets moral? Is our hunter-gatherer brain geared for modern capitalism, and do economies work like evolutionary organisms? The rise of neuroeconomics, the extinction of Homo Economicus and more - with outspoken founder of the U.S Skeptics Society, Dr Michael Shermer, and shareholder activist and Crikey founder, Stephen Mayne. TRANSCRIPT: The downloadable or streaming audio will be available directly after Saturday's broadcast. Transcript by mid week after broadcast. read less
2008-08-16 The Stuff of Thought with Steven Pinker
Fri August 15 2008
Why do we often avoid speaking our mind? Does swearing have an evolutionary function? What do linguistic taboos do to your brain? How are new words born? Acclaimed author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is a self-confessed verbivore. To him language offers a window into the human mind and how it works. He joins Natasha Mitchell in a feature interview to argue there´s nothing mere about semantics. Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. Happy Science Week. Back by popular demand today - an encore broadcast of one of the globe´s great thinkers and hugely popular science writers. Harvard psychologist Professor Steven Pinker is my guest. His books, amongst others, include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. His latest tome The Stuff of Thought revisits his great passion—language—which he sees as an innate, biological instinct, and a window on to the mechanics of the mind. Classic wit of the words, George Carlin, who just died in June, would´ve loved his work... George Carlin Sometime during my life...sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. I wasn´t notified of this, no one asked me if I agreed with it. Medicine became medication. The dump became the landfill. Partly cloudy became partly sunny, and constipation became occasional irregularity. Poor people used to live in slums, now the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. And they´re broke, they don´t have a negative cash flow position, because a lot of them were fired. You know, fired; management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area, so many people are no longer viable members... Steven Pinker: All of the classic poetic devices like alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, rhythm go into the crafting of obscene curses. Our language is filled with idioms that put taboo words to use without any discernible link to meaning, like `bloody´ and `freakin´ and `pissing contest´ would be an example. Can you say that on the radio? Natasha Mitchell: Yes, of course you can. Steven Pinker: Okay, not in this country. Natasha Mitchell: From why we swear, what taboo words do to your brain, to how we so often fail to speak our mind, and the unexpected birth of new words, even the linguistic phenomenon of the Sniglet. More later... The delights of language with Steven Pinker, much more than mere semantics, today on All in the Mind. Steven Pinker: People are fascinated by language. An enormous amount has been discovered about language in linguistics, in computer science, in psychology, in philosophy. Also it bears on human evolution, on political rhetoric, on the enjoyment of poetry and fiction, on the organisation of the brain. Language plays such a role in our lives, even sexuality, as we see in the language of swearing. Natasha Mitchell: You start The Stuff of Thought with a $3.5 billion battle over, in fact, the toppling of the World Trade Centre, which is one of countless linguistic problems with surprisingly enormous consequences. What´s the story there? Steven Pinker: There was a debate between opposing lawyers in a set of insurance cases after 9/11 over whether the events in Manhattan that morning comprised one event or two events. It´s an open semantic dispute because you could define an event in terms of a plan being carried out, namely al-Qaeda´s plan to destroy the World Trade Centre, in which case there´d be one event; or you could define it in physical terms, in terms of salient changes to hunks of matter, in which case there was one building that was hit and then another building that was hit. The reason for the debate is that the lease-holder for the World Trade Centre held insurance policies that entitled him to $3.5 billion per destructive event, so if 9/11 was two events he stood to gain $7 billion, and if it was one event only $3.5 billion. So the value of a semantic distinction in this case can actually be given a precise number; $3.5 billion. One of the reasons there´s still a hole in the ground in lower Manhattan instead of the so-called Freedom Tower is that it took the opposing lawyers years and years to iron this out. Natasha Mitchell: Did they turn to linguists? Steven Pinker: They ought to have. I think they reached a stalemate and they came up with a figure of $4.25 billion. I don´t know if that means that they decided that it was one-and-a-third events or whether they just had staked out positions that defined the end points of the range and finally just haggled over an agreement that both could live with. Natasha Mitchell: But this really says that linguistic problems can have enormous consequences. Steven Pinker: Indeed, because we negotiate our social arrangements through language. It´s also in issue in murder cases; who is responsible for someone´s death is a very similar question to when do we use a causal verb. There´s a difference between killing someone and causing them to die. That´s a linguistic difference but I think it reflects a cognitive and moral difference over who we believe to be morally responsible. Just causing someone to die is not a crime but killing someone is. Bill Crosby: [from Bill Crosby Collection CD] You take an Englishman who´s supposed to be very intelligent. English people speak the way they do because the suits they wear don´t bend too good and they have to stand up straight. You see, their bottom lip is not as developed as ours. You see, their bottom lip...[makes exaggerated English accent sounds]. English people are conceited. You ever hear `em? They love to listen to themselves, they say everything twice. Hear, hear! Natasha Mitchell: You make a key distinction between language itself and the language of thought. Some people think in fact language drives thought. So what´s the distinction you´re making there? Steven Pinker: Language drives thought in the sense that you acquire a lot of your thoughts from other people through language, but thought is not the same thing as language. Stretches of sound that we call sentences have meanings and those meanings themselves are part of a huge database of our understanding of the world and reality and ourselves. Language is just a tip of the iceberg of what´s going on in the mind. This is a necessary assumption to explain how children learn language in the first place. They´re born, clearly, without language, they´ve got to learn it, they can´t be learning to think at the same time as they´re learning to speak because how would they learn to speak if they had no ability whatsoever to think? Experiments show that babies surely think about the world, as do non-human animals. Likewise, as adults, once we have a language we can translate from one language to another, we can identify two sentences that have the same meaning, we can identify a single sentence that has two meanings; such as `visiting professors can be boring´ which can either mean that the professors are boring or the visits are boring. In order for a given sentence to have two meanings there have to be meanings that are separate from the sentences themselves, and we often know that words can be inadequate to the thoughts that we have. We struggle to put our thoughts into words. And in experiments you find, say, the human memory very quickly sloughs off the exact wording of a passage of prose and the only thing that stays is something much more abstract; the gist or content of what you´re read. Natasha Mitchell: A great way where our language doesn´t actually reflect what we´re thinking is a subject of great fascination to you...you´re struck by just how indirect our language can be in so many social interactions. `Do you want to come up and see my etchings?´ is just one example of that, that´s just the tip of the iceberg, isn´t it. Steven Pinker: Indeed, very often we don´t just blurt out our intentions in so many words but we veil them in innuendo and count on our listeners to read between the lines to figure out what we really mean. There are others, like a veiled bribe, `Gee officer, is there some way to take care of the traffic ticket here without going to court or doing any paperwork?´ Even polite requests, `If you could pass the salt that would be brilliant.´ When you think about it, that doesn´t make a whole lot of sense but we instantly recognise it as a polite request. I think it´s because language has to do two things at once; it has to convey content, a promise, a proposition, a command; and at the same time it´s got to ratify or change a relationship type because people aren´t just modems downloading information into each other´s brains. We always have a social relationship with the person we´re talking to and the content of our conversation can affect that relationship. Natasha Mitchell: So is this a linguistic case of politeness, of saving face, in effect, that we don´t literally speak our mind? Steven Pinker: Very much, and what politeness largely consists of is maintaining a relationship type, in order to reassure the listener that you want the damn salt but you don´t think of them as some kind of underling, you veil it as a hypothetical, like `if you could pass the salt that would be awesome´, or a question `do you think you could pass the salt?´ and other ways of achieving both goals at once. Natasha Mitchell: There´s an incredible inefficiency in indirect speech, though, isn´t there. Steven Pinker: Yes, there´s not only the extra words and the beating around the bush, and there´s also some chance that your message will be lost on your listener. Excerpt from Seinfeld: JERRY: You´re still thinking about this? GEORGE: She invites me up at twelve o´clock at night for coffee, and I don´t go up. `No thank you. I don´t want coffee. It keeps me up.´ People this stupid shouldn´t be allowed to live. I can´t imagine what she must think of me. ELAINE: It´s all in your head. All she knows is she had a good time. I think you should call her. GEORGE: She´s gonna think I´m too needy. Women don´t wanna see need. They want a take-charge guy, a colonel, a Kaiser, a tsar. ELAINE: All she´ll think is that you like her. Steven Pinker: And in fact at times that ambiguity is the reason that we resort to indirect speech such as in tendering a bribe to a policeman or a sexual come-on to a partner who may or may not be interested, especially in cases where the listener´s intentions are uncertain, as in you don´t know whether you´re going to have an honest cop who´s going to arrest you for bribery or a dishonest cop who will accept the bribe; or whether you have a willing partner who will come up for sex or an unwilling one, in which case you couldn´t pretend to be friends anymore. So there is a kind of calculated vagueness in some of these. Natasha Mitchell: I was really struck by one of your comments and that is, `language is not just a window on to human nature but a fistula, an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world´. That, in a sense, says language is at once both deeply social and also a deeply private affair. Steven Pinker: That´s right, and I think it comes from a very profound and paradoxical feature of information and rationality, namely it´s not always good to have more information. Sometimes you´re better off if you don´t know something. The Godfather made famous the phrase, `I´ll make him an offer he can´t refuse.´ The humour of that is if you don´t understand the language in which the threat was issued you´re actually better off because then you can´t be compelled, by your own self-interest, to do what the threatener wants. There are many other cases where you´re better off not hearing something. If, for example, a prestigious job opens up, if someone asks, `Are you interested?´ if you say `yes´ you´re setting yourself up for humiliation if you don´t get the job, if you say `no´ you might take yourself out of the running, and if you say `no comment´ then that´s a confession that the answer is `yes´ because otherwise why would you have to say `no comment´. Likewise, politicians when they say `no comment´ realise that often either answer will get them into trouble and they would have been better off not having been asked the question in the first place. Natasha Mitchell: One of the most delicious pleasures in all great literature is of course metaphor, but we spend a lot of time also talking in metaphor, and this particularly fascinates you. Why? Steven Pinker: Metaphor saturates our language, as in what I just said, `metaphor saturates our language´, as if language is a sponge or a container and the constructions are a kind of fluid that fills them. It´s almost hard to find a passage of everyday speech that doesn´t contain metaphor. `My spirits are up but the economy is down´, `I had to force myself to get out of bed this morning to drag myself to work,´ all of these things involve quite bizarre images if you were to take them literally. It raises the question; for all of the brilliant abstraction that the human mind is capable of—philosophy and law and science and government and so on—is it all a coopting of mental structures that are much more concrete and physical; and is metaphor...not in the sense of a literary ornament but metaphor in the sense of these unconscious analogies, metaphors that fill our speech, is that a fundamental mechanism that allows us to apply Stone Age ways of thinking to abstract subject matters? Natasha Mitchell: Some people think that metaphors have really no special place in the mind, that they just would have been dubbed semantic fossils or ornamental flourishes of languages. You think they´re killjoys. Steven Pinker: Yes, well, I set up two extreme positions. One of them, when you just alluded to the killjoy position, was that metaphor was alive in the mind of the coiner back in the mists of history but that we´ve been dumbly memorising them ever since without ever thinking about what they refer to. That clearly has to be true some of the time because we use mixed metaphors, like `when you open a can of worms they always come home to roost´, where the person who uttered that couldn´t possibly have thought through to what those metaphors allude to. There are dead metaphors, like `the situation is coming to a head´. I don´t think anyone would use that if they really knew where the metaphor arose, namely the build up of pus in a pimple. And there are inadvertently tasteless metaphors, like I heard a radio psychotherapist once say, `For many patients, cancer can be a growth experience.´ Bad choice of words. So clearly not all metaphors are processed as metaphors. At the other extreme there´s the position that George Lakoff... Natasha Mitchell: You are thick in the linguistic wars with George Lakoff, aren´t you. Steven Pinker: Yes. Lakoff I think stakes out the other position, namely that all abstract thought is metaphorical, the way we think about the world depends on the metaphors that get stamped into our brain by sheer repetition... Natasha Mitchell: He thinks that we think entirely through metaphor. Steven Pinker: Well, other than actual physical experiences which we´re born with, sights and sounds and emotions and bodily sensations, pretty much everything other than those he believes is metaphorical; that we actually at some level think of language as a container and its constructions as a kind of fluid. Or we think of love as a journey when we say things like `look how far we´ve come´, `it´s been a rocky road´, `don´t bale out now´, with implications that whoever controls the metaphors controls people´s political understanding, which is why he has been a consultant to the Democratic Party in the United States, trying to advise them on how to recapture metaphors in political discourse. So those are the two extremes, and clearly the truth has to be somewhere in between. So I think Lakoff has uncovered a very profound fact about our psychology, namely that we can often effortlessly go from a concrete image to a more abstract way of thinking, but I think he takes it too far. Natasha Mitchell: You think metaphors provide a way, as you put it, `to eff the ineffable´. Steven Pinker: Yes, there are many things that we can´t express very easily through words because there are emotions, there are creative thought processes that are very difficult to express in ordinary language. But skilled writers can use metaphor to do their best to push the outside of the envelope of what language can express, to try to convey what it´s like to have a mathematical insight come looming into your mind if you´re a mathematician, or compose a melody if you´re a composer, or to be in the throes of an unspeakable sexual urge. Great writers like Nabokov, Ian McEwan and so on are able to press language into service by the use of metaphor. George Carlin: We have more ways to describe dirty words than we actually have dirty words; dirty, filthy, foul, vile, vulgar, coarse, in poor taste, unseemly, street-talk, gutter-talk, locker room language, barracks-talk, bawdy, naughty, saucy, raunchy, rude, crude, lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off-colour, risqué, suggestive, cursing, cussing, swearing, and all I could think of was... Natasha Mitchell: Let´s come to one of my favourite topics and it´s perhaps the most entertaining chapter in The Stuff of Thought, the semantics of swearing and taboo language. What´s the delight for you in taking on rude words? Steven Pinker: Part of it is a strictly linguistic puzzle, that a lot of our obscene expressions make no sense literally and have a bizarre syntax. Natasha Mitchell: That´s your excuse! Steven Pinker: I insist that I´m not actually swearing, I´m writing about swearing. That´s why we have quotation marks. Also it´s a strange psychological and even biological phenomenon that, for example, when some misfortune befalls us, if we slice our thumb together with the bagel or knock a glass of wine into our laps, the topic of our conversation abruptly switches to theology or excretion or sexuality. And of course there´s the phenomenon of people who can´t seem to get a sentence out without three or four uses of the F word or the word `bloody´ which used to be highly inflammatory but... Natasha Mitchell: Yes, I did note you pointed out that Australians were particularly adept at that. Steven Pinker: Yes, it´s sometimes called the great Australian adjective. Now of course it´s much more acceptable, but in, say, 1913 when Pygmalion the Shaw play was first performed and Eliza Doolittle said, `Not bloody likely,´ it was meant to cause a sensation among her fictitious tea party companions, but it also caused a sensation among theatre audiences who´d never heard that word uttered in public before. Of course times have changed. Natasha Mitchell: But you point to what you suggest is the illogic and hypocrisy of linguistic taboos. Why hypocrisy? Steven Pinker: Everyone knows what the words are, you can put a fig leaf over the word with a few asterisks, even though by historical standards we have unprecedented freedom of speech...you can call the leader of your country a liar and a moron and you won´t be thrown in a dungeon or burned at the stake, but if you use certain words for excretion and sexuality then the full might of the government will come crashing down on you. At least in America, radio and TV stations can almost be put out of business by the ruinous fines that have recently been written into law. Natasha Mitchell: But in fact legislators in the States have really struggled, haven´t they, to linguistically define or encapsulate the full extent of swear words. Steven Pinker: Yes. In fact I reproduce verbatim a bill that was introduced in congress called the Clean Airwaves Act which tried to close a loophole in the existing radio and television regulations. At one point when Bono from the U2 group said, `This is really freakin´ brilliant,´ on the air (although he didn´t use the word `freakin´!) legally it was okay because it wasn´t technically referring to sexuality. A congressman introduced a bill to close this loophole that is so filthy that you couldn´t read the bill over the air. In fact the bill would make it illegal to read itself over the air. He did his best in his grammatically illiterate way to stipulate all of the bad words and all the contexts in which you couldn´t use them. I just downloaded it directly from the US government website and reproduced it in the book. I point out that the irony is that he tried to list every part of speech, the participle, the gerund and compound to rule out every possible case, and he left out the actual one that was the bone of contention in the Bono case, namely in `freakin brilliant´...`freakin´ is an adverb, and adverb was the one part of speech he forgot to include in his list. Natasha Mitchell: So it was a grammatically incorrect piece of legislation anyway. Beautiful, beautiful. Steve, you´ve looked to the brain for an explanation. What do we know about how swearing engages the brain? Steven Pinker: Swearing taps into different parts of the brain than ordinary articulate speech. This has been known for quite some time because often neurological patients who suffer a stroke to the parts of the brain that underlie language and become aphasic, unable to speak fluently, have no trouble with swearing. They can swear like a sailor even though they can´t put an articulate sentence together. Neuro imaging studies have shown that taboo words light up primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala which responds to threatening stimuli, like an angry face or a dangerous animal. Also the right hemisphere which we know plays less of a role in articulate language...typically, strokes to the right hemisphere don´t make a person aphasic, but the right hemisphere seems to be more involved in swearing than the left hemisphere. It suggests that basically taboo words activate brain areas that are associated with negative emotion, disgust, with hatred, with revulsion at sexual depravity, with awe and fear of deities, and all of the topics that get turned into swear words in different languages all have something to do with strongly felt emotion. Natasha Mitchell: That said, though, why would any word associated with sex that´s been turned into a swear word...I love the fact that we can have a conversation about swearing without actually swearing, but anyway...why would a word associated with sex that´s been turned into a swear word present a sort of negative challenge to the brain? Steven Pinker: There are sexual taboos and hang-ups in all human cultures, and it´s not surprising to a biologist because sexuality is the very stuff of evolution, although since the 60s we´ve had a romantic view of sex as a wholesome pleasure between two mutually consenting adults. But that characterises a fraction of the sexual encounters of the human species because there´s also exploitation and cuckoldry and rape and harassment and child abuse, and many instances of sexuality are not so benign. There are parents who might have an arranged marriage in mind, there´s the community that has to figure out what to do with the babies that might come from a consensual sexual act, there´s a community that worries about the sexual competition and posturing that accompany sexual freedom. So it´s a highly charged emotional activity, and it´s not surprising that words for the activity should also carry an emotional charge. Natasha Mitchell: So your sense is that swearing and our response to it emerges from a deep and ancient part of the brain. Steven Pinker: Yes, from the neurobiological work that suggests that swearing taps into structures like the amygdala, the basal ganglia and even the right hemisphere which is more involved in negative emotion than the left hemisphere, suggests that there is some primitive grounding in it, especially in the one kind of swearing, the one that I call cathartic swearing, that is when you suddenly injure yourself or make an error and you blurt out a word for sex or a deity or excretion. We have a lot of euphemisms like `shucks´, `golly´, `geez´ and `fiddlesticks´. But I think that they are rooted in what biologists call the rage circuit, which is found throughout mammals, namely when an animal is suddenly injured or confined it will erupt in a furious struggle accompanied by an ear-splitting screech or howl. So if you´ve ever sat down on your pet cat you´ll be familiar with this reflex. In the case of humans we don´t just let out a yelp but we articulate it with a word filled with negative emotion that we ordinarily inhibit ourselves from making. So I think it´s a peculiar hybrid of a human language and a primitive mammalian reflex. Natasha Mitchell: And yet we´ve become incredibly creative in swearing, haven´t we. So what about arrangements like `abso-bloody-lutely´? And it can actually express great joy, a good bout of swearing. Steven Pinker: Indeed, there´s a lot of poetry that goes into another kind of swearing; abuse swearing, where we tap the emotional power of swear words to intimidate or humiliate someone. Natasha Mitchell: The story of how new words come into being is particularly interesting in your book The Stuff of Thought, and there´s a conversation about Sniglets, for example. Steven Pinker: A Sniglet is a term introduced by an American comedian, Rich Hall, for a word that should exist but doesn´t or a concept that needs a word. So a Sniglet, by the way, is an example of itself, although I think he got the concept from John Lloyd and Douglas Adams, who had a delightful book called The Meaning of Liff, and he coined hundreds of them, like `perpetate´ which is to take an item in a supermarket and put it in your shopping cart and then decide you don´t want it and put it on some random other shelf; like a `hextable´ for the one record in someone´s collection that convinces you that you could never go out with them. For years I was worried that my copy of... Natasha Mitchell: That´s so true. They found your Phil Collins... Steven Pinker: Yes, exactly, my copy of Gordon Lightfoot Greatest Hits would scare away any potential romantic partner. Or a `lamlash´ which is the folder on hotel dressing tables full of astoundingly dull information. But it shows that you can have far more... Natasha Mitchell: None of these words seem to stick though, do they, and that´s your point. Steven Pinker: They don´t stick, that´s right, exactly, that most new coinages don´t stick, and that the ones that do are often completely unpredictable. I don´t think anyone could have predicted that the term for bulk email would be `spam´ based on the Monty Python skit. Excerpt from Monty Python skit Spam: MAN: Morning! WAITRESS: Morning! MAN: What´ve you got then? WAITRESS: Well, there´s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam and spam...or lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam. WIFE: Have you got anything without spam in it? WAITRESS: Well, there´s spam egg sausage and spam, that´s not got much spam in it. WIFE: I don´t want any spam... Steven Pinker: This silly mindless repetition reminded some hacker in the 1980s of identical postings to a news group, and the usage escaped from the community of computer programmers to the population at large. And I think that typifies the history of words, namely not only are there concepts that need a word that somehow remain nameless, they come out of nowhere, they catch on, it´s a kind of popular fad or craze that people can´t see coming and that follow some kind of chaotic dynamics. Natasha Mitchell: Is there any way we can predict whether a new word will take hold? Steven Pinker: I think not, because there are people who try to do it. Dialectologists every year will nominate their ten words of the year, and you go back after a decade and generally none of them catch on. If you go back to the early 90s there were words like `Infobahn´ for the internet and `information superhighway´, Al Gore made that popular, but you´d feel rather silly saying, `I need to log on to the information superhighway´ these days. Natasha Mitchell: I want to come to this final question and that is one of the criticisms of your arguments in the past has been...particularly your argument that we´re born into the world with a mind that´s already shaped to some extent by our genetic heritage, is that it´s a constraining sort of view of human nature and the possibilities for us as we enter the world and become adults. So I´m intrigued by your argument in this book that language in fact offers us the clearest window on how we might transcend our cognitive limitations. What are you getting at there? Steven Pinker: Clearly we have done unprecedented things with respect to the history of our species. We figured out how a lot of the world works through science, we have remarkably productive economies through economic institutions, we have governance structures that more or less work in large parts of the world, liberal democracy. How do we get these from a backdrop of minds that can only count up to three, that are habitually prone to feuding and warfare, that are filled with ignorance and superstition? I think we do it partly by this mechanism of metaphor, that is we take mental structures that were designed to reason about throwing rocks and dragging branches along the ground and apply them to abstract domains, which is why so much of the language of science is metaphorical; evolution as a kind of selection, genetic material as a code. We take everyday concepts and give them new meanings because we can carry over some of their structure. The ability to assemble complex thoughts out of simple thoughts by words, exactly analogous to how we assemble sentences out of words using rules in language allows us to build bigger and bigger cognitive structures or more and more complex ideas out of simple ideas. And then I think we also have a social apparatus that specifically inhibits some of our social instincts, like in nepotism or in cronyism and dominance. We stipulate exactly where we can and can´t apply those and get social institutions that transcend the historic limitations of people hiring their friends or their brother-in-law—exerting sheer brute force strength over others. Our institutions like science, democracy, journalism, government hinge on rewiring our social instincts, not making them go away, as we see that we´re apt to backslide into superstition and nepotism and cronyism whenever we don´t make a concerted effort to overcome them. We also see that the ancestry of our concrete ideas in education where we have to teach abstract new concepts by analogy and metaphor, and to debug misunderstandings by saying to pupils, `Make sure you don´t take this analogy too literally.´ So our heritage is still visible in the struggle that we always have to avoid backsliding. Natasha Mitchell: So is language our way out of that? Does it save us from ourselves, in effect, in our instinctual ways? Steven Pinker: Yes, and not just language but what language reveals. That is, the metaphor that we see in language I think is like analogical thinking that we put into scientific understanding. The combinatorial rules that we see in language are like the combinatorial rules that build up complicated thoughts. So it´s not just that we negotiate these new social arrangements and new knowledge via language, which of course we do, but in addition language gives us a hint as to what´s going on beneath language, which has to be at least as complicated as language. Natasha Mitchell: It´s a bit of a magical mystery tour really of our most uniquely human faculty, I think. You must have had a lot of fun writing it. It´s been a delight to have you on ABC Radio National and on All in the Mind. Thank you for joining me. Steven Pinker: Thanks for having me. Excerpt from Monty Python skit Spam: WAITRESS: Urgghh! WIFE: What do you mean `Urgghh´? I don't like spam! VIKINGS: [singing] Spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam! Natasha Mitchell: Those mischief-makers, Monty Python. And If you´re passing through Melbourne this Monday 18th August at 6.30 pm - come along to an All in the Mind event for National Science Week. Are markets moral? Is our brain evolutionarily geared for modern capitalism? Does money make us happy? And the rise of neuroeconomics and more... With two absolute corker guests - Dr Michael Shermer, this year's touring guest for Science Week. Founder of The Skeptics Society in the USA and popular columnist with Scientific American. And Stephen Mayne, shareholder activist, journalist and founder of crikey.com.au These two won't be shy. More info about the event on All in the Mind´s website...alongwith the audio and transcript of the show ...And...an extended podcast version of today´s conversation too. I´m Natasha Mitchell - catch you next week. read less
2008-08-09 Being your own therapist - Buddhist style
Fri August 08 2008
Venerable Robina Courtin, acclaimed Australian Tibetan Buddhist nun, has excavated the suffering mind at its greatest depths of despair. Founder of the Liberation Prison Project, she´s helped thousands of inmates release themselves from the prison within—their mind—using Buddhist techniques. Venerable Tenzin Palmo was one of the first Westerners to be ordained as a Buddhist nun, spending years undergoing intense meditative practice in an isolated cave in the Himalayan mountains. We can all be our own therapist is their powerful claim. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, great to have your ears—and your head. A different pace today with two acclaimed Buddhist nuns whose lives started out in the west but have been transformed by the values of the east, particularly by Tibetan Buddhism. Each of them has excavated the darkest depths of our suffering minds. Robina Courtin: I mean I can see, for myself, when I first thought about Buddhism I was a bit of an old political leftie and before that trying to bash the world into shape—you know a hippy first and then bit kind of radical communist type thing and then black politics, then feminism. And by the time I was 30 I had no one else to blame you know. So I had to look at Robina, it was kind of painful but I knew there was no one left—okay Robina, you´ve tried everything. So that´s when I bumped into these Tibetan lamas you know, so here I am somehow. So the thing is that I can see now—I forget what I was going to say, your clapping disturbed by ego, I got all excited. Tenzin Palmo: We think that satisfying `me´ will if we keep ahead of it create a sense of satisfaction and happiness. And sometimes it does for a short time but then again we need to create more, we reach out to find pleasure to please this sense of `me´ and to avoid anything which we think will cause unpleasantness or pain to `me´. And we do it constantly and unconsciously. Natasha Mitchell: London born Venerable Tanzin Palmo. In 1964 she became one of the first westerners to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Her extraordinary experience of 12 years in seclusion and meditation, braving the elements in a Himalayan cave, was told in the book Cave in the Snow which you may have read. She came out of retreat to set up a nunnery in India for young women. Australian Venerable Robina Courtin is the founder and director of the Liberation Prison Project working with thousands of prisoners, many on death row, across the US and now in Australia too. Now not all their ideas will wash with the more scientistic All in the Mind listeners, the idea of Karma for example, or the mind as something different from the brain. But sit back, let their rather meditative presentations wash into the crevices of your cranium. This is `how to be your own therapist´ Buddhist style. First to Tenzin Palmo. Tenzin Palmo: Sometimes people think that Buddhism is very pessimistic because the first think that the Buddha after his enlightenment spoke about was the fact of Dukkha, or the unsatisfactory nature of our ordinary mundane existence. And if like the existentialists he had ended up just with Dukkha, this unsatisfactoriness, then he would have indeed been very pessimistic but he also wouldn´t have been a Buddha. What made him so special was that he then explained very clearly what was the cause of our suffering, the fact that there is a state beyond suffering and how we could attain that. So the good news is that inherently in the very depths of our being we are completely perfect, there is simply no problem, and that all we have to do is to uncover and rediscover who we really are and who we have always been from the very beginning. Sometimes that is described as that the mind, the nature of our mind is like the sky. And I think this is very useful because if we go out right now there´s this huge, vast, blue sky. The thing with the sky, the thing with space, is that it has no centre and it has no ending, it has no circumference. It´s just sky. And space is everywhere, it´s not just outside, it´s inside us, everything is space. And you cannot say of space this is my space, we are all breathing the same air, friend or enemy we are all sharing the same air and we cannot say this is my air. And likewise with the nature of the mind when we are in a state of pure awareness there´s no sense of `me´ versus everything else which is not `me´. It´s just this deep sense of interconnection with everything, not just other human beings but also all beings. And that is our true nature—this is the good news. It´s not something which we have to acquire from outside; it´s something which we have to recognise from inside. So what´s gone wrong? I don´t know what´s gone wrong. It´s very hard to know at which point our basic essential pure awareness which is unborn and undying created this bifurcation and then the sense of this ego, this sense of I am—why is it that we have this very strong sense of an eternal, solid, unchanging `me´ in the centre of everything around which the rest of the universe gravitates? And that was what the Buddha was trying to help us to overcome, because it causes suffering. Natasha Mitchell: Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo. Like Vernerable Palmo, Venerable Robina Courtin believes we all have the potential to be our own therapist, to relieve ourselves of this mental suffering and she also uses the Buddhist tradition to explain why. Robina Courtin: So why would we want to be our own therapist? I think often in the west it's a bit like damage control. There´s an assumption that you just get born, you´re stuck with what you are and when things go wrong then you have to go off finding a therapist. But the Buddhist approach is kind of pro-active, Buddha assumes from day one—and you can look at this in this little package of the teachings called The Four Noble Truths—that Buddha is saying in the third one (frankly I think he should have put it first) the third one is where he is saying basically that we can be free of suffering. This is our fundamental potential. And a positive way to put that is you flip it over and it says you can be full of happiness. This potential we all possess is just something absolutely innate, and where this potential exists is very clear for the Buddha. You ask any Tibetan who has been living in a cave for 40 years or studying the Buddhist philosophy in a monastery what a gene is, what DNA is, what a brain is—he wouldn´t have a clue, right? But they know about the mind, they know about the internal process. So take as a hypothesis for this discussion that your mind is not your brain. Buddha has no problem if he heard about brains that it would exist nicely inter-dependently with the brain. A decent working brain is very helpful. And indeed we can see signs, as we are all now in the materialistic world finding all these experiments they are talking about, proving physically the points that Buddha is making. That basically Buddha is saying your mind is your consciousness not just the cognitive process, mind or consciousness in Buddhism are used synonymously to refer to the entire spectrum of your inner experiences: thoughts, concepts, cognition, emotion, feeling, unconscious, subconscious, intuition, instinct, the entire spectrum—this is mind. And the Buddha is saying it´s the internal process and so being your own therapist is absolutely fundamental to being a Buddhist. And this is where this word meditation comes in, this thing that we so mystify, so gloss over. You know for the Buddhist, and frankly you know many of the techniques he took them from the Hindus, you know pre-Buddha, I mean they don´t mind they are happy to share. But they´re basically psychological techniques...and so one of the kinds of meditation, there are thousands of techniques, but you can summarise them as two. The first one, which is this very practical technique that you need to develop concentration—because let´s face it, if you´re going to be your own therapist you´re going to have to know the contents of your mind. So you need some concentration. So this concentration meditation, it´s nothing religious about it, I mean a communist could do it you know, it´s something—but you need to have discipline, it´s very boring sitting down just watching your own boring breath, you know there´s nothing very appealing about doing it. They would say that we have much subtler and refine levels of cognition, levels of awareness, and this is the function of your mind that we need in the long term in Buddha´s view to tap and access like the microscope of your mind where you really can do the most astonishing work of being your own therapist. So why do you want to be your own therapist? Why do you want to tap the subtler levels of your mind isn´t some kind of airy-fairy reason, it´s because the Buddha is basically saying—if we look at the second Noble Truth when he outlines or summarises the causes of suffering—the main causes are inside, the main causes of happiness are inside, they come down to mind. For the Buddha mind is the creator, mind is the source of all things, you know. It can sound quite abstract if we take our usual views of mind but given the Buddha´s view of mind, that it´s yours, no one created it, he would assert consciousness is not as I said physical but it continues before, before, before and carries on after, after, after—it´s its own entity, it´s its own river of mental moments. We come fully programmed Buddha would say into this life. So as a hypothesis it´s a very interesting point but it has marvellous experiential implications when we look into the big picture of the Buddha and this assertion here that I have the potential to be free of suffering. So then the main causes, as I said, come down to the mind. I mean somewhere they talk about we´ve got 84,000 delusions but it can summarise it down to just a few you know. So Buddha is saying the contents of this mind of ours, the contents we can divide into three: we´ve got positive, negative and neutral states. So what Buddha is really saying is that there´s this natural organic relationship between the presence in my mind right now—forget about the future—of happiness, contentment, fulfilment, wellbeing and therefore indeed, love and compassion and empathy. But there´s a natural relationship between positive states and happiness and, by implication, and this is the real hard work in the beginning, the removal of the neuroses, the removal of these negative states. So therefore the Buddhist method then of getting rid of suffering and developing happiness is the method of learning—one, to know my mind well, and then learning through familiarity on the basis of having Buddha´s model of the mind as my basis, learning to identify ever more deeply the neuroses and then learning every day—and it´s the hardest job we´ll ever do—to go against them, to deconstruct them, to let go of them. So another way to say this too is—first of all there´s this nice analogy that Buddha has that a bird needs two wings, wisdom and compassion. So you could say in a way the bottom line is finally the compassion one, that´s the political wing, that´s the action wing, that´s where you put your money where your mouth is and you get on and you´re useful to the world. But as His Holiness says, compassion is not enough. You need the first wing which is wisdom and that´s where you put yourself together, that´s where you have your personal happiness as it were. Miserable people aren´t kind to other people. If you´re miserable, depressed, lonely, sad, jealous, angry, anxious—and not being mean about it, no need to feel guilty—then we can´t even see passed our own nose, we can´t even help a dog, you know, it´s so clear. So you could say the long term and this is often, we can misunderstand this and get all kind of holier than thou and think I´ve got to run around and be like Mother Teresa and we get depressed at the thought, it all seems such hard work. But the compassion wing really is the point and you know in your own life enormous wellbeing for you comes from connecting with others, being at work, doing something useful, helping the world become a better place when you have that optimism. But the method for getting that is working on yourself The method for getting compassion, there are techniques for enhancing it there´s no question, but that´s really the more advanced practices. There´s this nice way of packaging all of Buddha´s views in Tibet called The Lam Rim. It´s just like a course from A to Z. You start in junior school, then you go to more advanced, you go to high school and that´s where you´re being your own therapist, is in high school. And then the compassion wing is university. So your capacity to be of use to others, to feel a part of this world, to feel connected, to be kind and all the rest is gained from doing the first part which means being your own therapist. Learning to look into yourself and having the courage to do this. But you know the usual instinctive modes we tend to have in our world we live in denial of a problem, we blame others, we feel guilty. But the other thing I think is because introspection is not part of our education. So more and more on the basis of this can you imagine as a little girl, by the time you´re 20 you´d be incredible, you´d be an amazing human being, you´d be utterly aware of what is going on in here, you´re able to take responsibility because you see it so well before it vomits out the mouth, when it´s too late. Or before you just can´t get out of bed one day because you´re so depressed which is how we are now because this introspection is not part of our life, or if it is it´s sort of bit—again hit and miss—when something goes wrong you´ve got to go and break your heart to a therapist. But can you imagine, from the beginning, living your life based on the assumption that your mind is yours, based on the assumption that the goodness within you, although it´s hard to find it sometimes, is definitely what defines you. But the neuroses, the negative states the Buddha would say actually don´t define us, they are really there loud and clear but they don´t define us and thus can be removed. And then based on this view that indeed you´ve got the neuroses; look how easy it is to be angry, jealous, anxious the smallest thing goes wrong you know, the red light, our day´s destroyed—isn´t it, we can see that we´re so fragile, we want so much to be happy and to feel good and be confident and optimistic but the smallest thing can go wrong. So again if you imagine since the time where children brought up with this view, the confidence in your own potential, I mean life for me when I was young was just torture, overwhelmed by my own misery and how ugly I was and I was so fat and no one loved me and so dramatic, and so much anger and jealousy and pain. And believing that that´s who I am, knowing I´ve got goodness but somehow not believing it. I mean 27 people can tell you how nice you are and how good you are, yet you´re hungry like a vampire to hear it. But you´ll go, you don´t believe it, oh yeah, yeah, okay. One person says something bad about you. Which one do you run to like a magnet? Which one do you believe 100%? So it´s kind of ironic the irony of ego for the Buddha is that it´s these unhappy feelings the self hate which comes from attachment, and anger, and pride, and anxiety and all these dramas that we just take as a given everyday. The Buddha would say they are the voices of ego and they have two characteristics and this is really something when a person is working with Buddha's psychology in their daily life attempting to use it—we go really deeply in Buddhist psychology into we can say, oh yeah, negative/positive, it sounds like simple words. But the Buddha is what is in its nature a negative state of mind. How does it function, what are its characteristics, what is a negative state of mind? Crucially this one. Natasha Mitchell: Being your own therapist Buddhist style here on ABC Radio National´s All in the Mind going global on Radio Australia and as podcast, I´m Natasha Mitchell and you´re in the company of two Buddhist nuns. Australian born Venerable Robina Courtin and London born Venerable Tenzin Palmo who spent 12 years in meditative isolation in a Himalayan cave. Tenzin Palmo: So often people think that they´d be loving kind people if only there wasn´t, you know, their boss or their wife or their children or something to annoy them. But I mean the point is of course that it´s so easy to be kind and loving to people who are lovable...anybody can do that. The challenge is to be kind and loving to people who are obnoxious, however difficult they may appear. If people are difficult it´s because inside very deeply they´re hurting. And during our daily life the problems which arise, the challenges which arise are our practice. How are we going to develop compassion, how are we going to develop patience, how are we going to grow up, if we are only encountering very easygoing, pleasurable, unchallenging situations and people. It´s like if we have very flabby arms right, like me, and we are lifting up a glass and lifting it down again and that´s really very nice but it´s not going to give me any muscles. They need the resistance, they need the challenge, if we had that then we will get muscles, if we are just picking up feathers we will never get it. I mean I don´t mean that we should allow ourselves in heavily abusive situations, clearly in those cases where one is in a really very heavily abusive situation with great compassion we should try to get out of it as soon as possible. But in our everyday life and in our everyday frustrations and irritations, this is our practice, it is our practice. I mean one time I was in India, I went to see an astrologer and I said to him okay I´ve got a choice here, either I can go back into retreat or I can start a nunnery—what should I do? And he said well if you go back into retreat, very peaceful, very harmonious, very pleasurable—and if you start a nunnery lots of problems, lots of challenges, lots of difficulties...but both are good so you decide. So I of course thought right, back into retreat. And then I met this Catholic priest and I mentioned it to him and he said but of course you start the nunnery. He said we are like rough pieces of wood and if we are always stroking ourselves with silk and velvet it´s very nice but we don´t become smooth. To become smooth you need sandpaper. So therefore all those difficulties, all those irritating people, all the problems we meet in life those are our sandpaper and we should be grateful because without sandpaper how will we become smooth? People who are truly happy in the world it seems to me are those who are no longer the slaves of their own minds. We take our mind with us everywhere, there´s nowhere we can go that the mind doesn´t come too. And what is more the mind is endlessly talking to us. Even in our sleep we dream, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter and most of it absolute garbage. I mean I´m sure anybody who´s ever sat and looked at their mind will realise just how abysmal the basic level of our thoughts really are...and repetitive. I mean the same old soap opera over and over, re-runs, talk about it. But it´s even worse than that, because everything we know we can only know because of our thinking. We believe what our minds tell us, we believe our thoughts. People die for their beliefs, people kill for their beliefs, we see it right now and yet the one thing we don´t do is to ask ourselves, what is a thought? What is a thought? Who is thinking? And if we say well I am thinking, you know, the great question of all time, who am I? And I think also that´s the problem is that people think well these great masters, they´ve spent 20 years meditating so of course...and they're Tibetans so naturally they can get this kind of achievement, but me, I´m just an ordinary person, what hope is there? But all we have to do really is to recognise the fact that behind the coming and going of all our thoughts and feelings is a quality of knowing. We all know that we´re conscious but we´re not conscious of being conscious. So it´s very hard for us to recognise the nature of our mind because it´s so close to us. You know it´s like the eyes cannot see themselves, we are always looking out at the Himalayan mountains out there trudging on our path. But the path is here, where we are now. So we start where we are now, learning how to be more mindful, more present with what we are doing, and opening our heart to realise that every single being wants only to be happy and doesn´t want to be hurt. We look for others to make us happy, we look for possessions to make us happy, but the genuine happiness is already in there, it´s an ocean, endless ocean of pure resources within ourselves. So be happy. Robina Courtin: Okay, so the very first stage is before you even begin to look at your mind, the first level of practice is zip your lip and keep your hands to yourself. Basically the very first level of practice Buddha is saying is back off and don´t harm others, at least you protect yourself from you know putting unhappy habits into your mind. I mean look at the world, if we just had decent behaviour like our grandmas told us, what a lovely world it would be. So this brings in one other aspect actually that´s fundamental to Buddha´s whole world view and this is this business of Karma, action in Sanskrit. So simply speaking here, psychologically, the Buddha´s deal is that every micro second of what we do, say and think is a Karma, an action in the dynamic sense of implying a reaction. And where it leaves a reaction—forget the outside world for the moment—is within your own mind. Now this is not rocket science, it´s just that we don´t talk like this in our culture. You know if I say to you, oh my goodness, why are you so good at piano? Well you´ll say oh excuse me Robina, I´ve been practising for ten years what do you think? So what you´ve been doing is you´ve been living according to the view of Karma that every single bit of piano playing you do leaves an imprint in your mind so that when you wake up tomorrow you haven´t forgotten it all. So you can put your hands on the piano and the hard work of all your years is expressed. Well Buddha says the same about goodness and badness, you know, so if you can see why are you so good at anger Robina—oh well, it´s his fault, nothing to do with me. Well that´s like saying, well why are you so good at piano? Oh it´s my teachers fault, he taught me. How about taking responsibility? Buddha is putting us firmly in the driving seat here. Yes indeed you´ve got a good teacher but if you didn´t have any potential for music and if you didn´t practise hard you could not play a note. Well it´s the same with anger, you know, if Fred punches me in the nose if I didn´t have the potential for anger I wouldn´t respond with anger, as shocking as that sounds to us, because for us it´s an absolute truth that I´m angry because Fred hit me. But equally I´m happy because Mary was kind to me aren´t I, I kind of blame Mary for my happiness and Fred for my suffering. But Buddha is putting us in the driving seat that if we really did get the strong sense that everything I say, do, and think leaves an impression in my mind that is truly every day producing me, we´d be very cautious about what we think and speak and do wouldn´t we? And even this again, forget the music one but we understand the law of cause and effect, Karma, when we think of food. We know nutrition really well, we know if that particular food will give me a bellyache tomorrow, there´s no way, even if we like it, there´s no way we will put it in because we know very simply that there are consequences to me of what I do. That´s how we live our lives when it comes to physical things. But we kind of don´t get it when it comes to our mind, we don´t get it when it comes to our emotions. So what comes from this is this very empowering ability to own responsibility for what is inside you and therefore to want to know it. So you see if you think as long as you really do believe you´re made by someone else, you know you might not be a Christian or a Muslim but you definitely think your mummy and daddy created you. Like Frankenstein and his monster, your mummy and daddy made you. I didn´t ask to get born, we think, and that´s in the bones of our being, I think it informs, it informs our choices and the way we respond to emotional things every day. The logic of blame is fundamental to our being. So the reason, again, the reason to be your own therapist is very practical. The reason to know your mind deeply because my dear as Buddha would say that´s the source of your suffering, that´s the source of your happiness. And when you´ve really got a handle on that and what comes from that is enormous confidence in your own potential, which gives you the courage to never give up, then I will want to know my neuroses, I will want to be in touch with the anger, not to exaggerate it, not to make it worse than it is, not to sort of beat myself up instead of beating someone else up because I happily want to understand the nature of that thing so I can learn to go against it, so I can learn to change it. Not deny it, not blame someone else and not to just feel guilty, which is the modes we know, but to courageously take responsibility for it. Okay, what also comes from the wisdom wing is not just confidence but some enormous self-respect because again the irony of ego, of these unhappy voices, the anger, the depression, the jealousy, is that I am—as my mother would always point out—I am my own worst enemy. You are your own worst enemy Bobsy, I was Bobsy. And I mean it´s deeply true. Just look when we are depressed, we hate ourself. One of the terms for a negative state of mind for Buddhism is the word delusion. Now if you were called delusional you´d be very insulted, right? Well I´m sorry to tell you we´re all delusional Buddhists here, it´s just a question of degree, okay?. So you know when you´re caught up in this huge attachment or anger, you´re not in touch with reality for those few minutes, and the difference between you and someone else who´s locked up for their delusion is that you know you get over it and you become normal again. The extent to which I´m caught up in them is that I can´t see reality, I certainly can´t see other people, I see everything through the filter of my own insanity, you know. Check yourself, check the world. So Buddha´s view is there´s this natural relationship now between lack of wisdom and suffering; equally between wisdom and happiness. So the method for getting happy in Buddha´s terms is learning to know your own mind, seeing the neuroses, seeing how they cause you pain and how they blind you to reality, and lessening them. So as you lessen them you get wisdom and you get happy—simultaneous. And now you´re capable of benefiting others. I mean it is the hardest job we will ever do to confront yourself, to know your mind, but based on confidence not on self-hate, based on confidence so that you can change and become this marvellous person that Buddha says is innate within all of us. Natasha Mitchell: So there´s your challenge, how to be your own therapist, according to Venerable Robina Courtin, Founder/Director of the Liberation Prison Project. And before her Venerable Tenzin Palmo, Founder of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India. Both speaking at the Happiness and its Causes conferences in Australia. More info about them both on the All in the Mind website along with the transcript, references and audio of the show. And lots of rich discussion went on in the All in the Mind blog this week where you´ll find me posting regularly—join in. All at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. I´m Natasha Mitchell, thanks to studio engineer Melissa May, I´ll catch you next week. Bye for now. read less
2008-08-02 Is being gay in your biology?
Fri August 01 2008
What makes someone gay? The quest for the biological roots of sexual orientation remains rife with controversy. Is it in your genes, handedness, or the hormonal soup of the early foetus? Or, is the answer hidden deep inside the brain? Homo or hetero—the science of sexual attraction captures everyone´s attention. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on ABC RadIo National, welcome, Natasha Mitchell with you, great to have your company. Now remember those headlines a few years back about the search for a gay gene, and the biological roots of homosexuality? Well, on the show today we´re climbing into that controversial research effort—still fraught with questions of gender stereotyping, experimental bias and beyond, but still extremely interesting and powerful science. Your guide is my California based colleague, British science journalist Jon Stewart, who´s taken to the streets of LA for the occasion. Simon LeVay: There are aspects of choice to sexual orientation in terms of our behaviour, who we actually choose to have sex with, how we choose to call ourselves and so on. But our actual sexual feelings, where they come from, that´s something in my view that´s nothing to do with making decisions, conscious decisions. And I think the science really supports that point of view. Richard Lippa: People always ask what causes people to be gay and I think the broader question is what causes sexual orientation. And when you view it from that perspective this research is every bit as much about heterosexuality as it is about homosexuality. It´s kind of the Yin and the Yang of the same question. To understand what causes gay people to become gay is also to understand what causes straight people to be straight. And these are important questions. You know the survival of the species, human reproduction, depends on sexual attraction. So this is a really very broad question, and in that sense it should be of interest to every single person in the world, because we all have a sexual orientation and it seems like a fundamentally interesting question to me—what causes us to be attracted to the people we are attracted to? So I think it´s a bit limiting to think of this as research on the causes of homosexuality; it´s really about sexual orientation in its broadest sense. Jon Stewart: Gay Pride at Long Beach California. People have turned out en masse under the rainbow flags, expecting to see bands, comedy, food and drink stands, charity stalls but perhaps not expecting cutting edge science. I´ve come to meet Richard Lippa, a professor of psychology, conducting an experiment here. Richard Lippa: I´m doing a study on hair whorls, this sounds strange and weird but there actually is some research suggesting that gay men have a higher rate of counter-clockwise hair whorls than straight men do. Jon Stewart: By hair whorls you mean where the crown is on our head, which direction the hair turns. Richard Lippa: There´s a little whirlpool of hair that goes either in a clockwise or counter clockwise. I take a digital photograph of the back of men´s heads and they fill in a brief questionnaire—we´ve done this with a lot of college students of course to get a big gay male sample—that´s why I came to the Gay Pride Festival. Jon Stewart: Well we have a few volunteers here, can you introduce yourself? Chris: My name is Chris. Jon Stewart: And are you willing to take part in the hair whorl study? Chris: Yes I am, that will be fun. Jon Stewart: Can we put him through it? Richard Lippa: All we have to do is take a digital photograph of the back of your head and you fill in this questionnaire. Jon Stewart: It sounds bizarre but this study will add to the work will being done to try and answer the question, what makes someone gay? So what are some of the questions you have to go through. Chris: First question is asking my gender. I have a choice between male, female, transgender, male to female, trans gender, female to male and my age. How many boys did your mother give birth to before she had me? That was just one. How many girls? That´s zero, as I´m the youngest of two. So think about my sexual feelings to the extent to which you are attracted to and fantasise about persons of the opposite of the same sex? And I would say they are predominantly homosexual but occasionally... Jon Stewart: The questions are intriguing, some of them are obvious like are you straight or gay? But others sound frankly weird and seem to have little to do with someone´s sexual orientation. How much Chris would like to do different types of jobs, for example. Chris: Would strongly like to do, would strongly not like to do. So I would strongly not want to be in a convent. And art museum director—no. Auto mechanic—no. Jon Stewart: Are the stereotypes correct? Do more gay men become hairdressers and interior designers rather than engineers and construction workers? Is sexual orientation a learned behaviour or something more innate? Are homosexuals born or made? Chris: A book keeper—no. A building contractor—no. A business executive—yes. Jon Stewart: They are not easy questions to answer, as we´ll learn from some of the world´s leading psychologists, biologists and geneticists in this field. Chris: Children´s author—yeah, I´d like that it would be fun. Computer programmer—I´m kind of like one of those as well... Jon Stewart: As we´ve heard this is science that affects us all though much of the work is still seen as marginal many of the researchers are gay themselves, many of their studies don´t receive public funding, and when there is a big discovery the publicity and the controversy created has often taken them by surprise. Well, the first step in looking for answers is to visit Professor Lippa at his office at California State University, Fullerton, outside Los Angeles, to find out more about his study at Long Beach Pride starting with that questionnaire. Richard Lippa: Well there are various questions for example one of the questions in the questionnaire is asked about older brothers and older sisters. How many biological older brothers and older sisters do you have and how many younger brothers and younger sisters? There is a phenomenon that is very well documented in recent years called the fraternal birth order effect. And stated simply it says that the more older brothers that a man has, and it applies only to men, the more likely he is to be gay. And the best explanation we have for that is something biological is going on. One theory is that when a mother carries a male foetus there is actually a potential immunological reaction that she has against the male factors in the foetus and that could affect the development of subsequent male foetuses. There were also questions about handedness. We have quite good evidence at this point that gay men and lesbians have a higher rate of left-handedness or what´s called non-right handedness and that´s probably biological too, we don´t fully understand what causes that. But there is some learning that goes on with handedness but probably it´s a biological trait. Jon Stewart: Is that linked to the direction of the hair whorl that you were also looking at? Richard Lippa: It may be. One theory holds there´s a gene that may be responsible both for handedness and hair whorl patterns, and of course maybe it´s linked to sexual orientation too. Certainly the best hypothesis we have is there´s something biological that leads to all these associations. There were also questions in my questionnaire that asked about occupational preferences. How interested would you be in being an electrical engineer or an elementary school teacher, or a florist, or a truck driver? And I just gave examples that clearly are somewhat related to gender, on average men are more interested in being engineers; on average, women are probably more interested in being elementary school teachers and florists. And interestingly there are also gay/straight differences. Gay men seem to be somewhat shifted, they are more feminine in their occupational preferences, lesbians are shifted, they are more masculine in their occupational preferences compared to same-sex heterosexuals. So we are looking at different physical traits and also different psychological traits that may be related to sexual orientation. Jon Stewart: And those associations can be seen forming early in life. Richard Lippa: There are also measures of childhood gender conformity and non-conformity. I´ve used questionnaires in some of my studies—there might be questions like for a boy, you know when I was a boy people considered me a sissy, or I liked playing with girls more than boys, or I didn´t like rough and tumble sports and competitive team sports. You know there are some boys who are more typical rough and tumble boys and there´s some boys who are more atypical, more feminine you could say in certain ways. And that too seems to be strongly related to sexual orientation. Boys who become gay men are more likely to be gender non-conforming boys and boys who become straight men are more likely to be the typical rough and tumble, sort of typical kinds of boys. Jon Stewart: It sounds kind of logical when you put it like that, particularly when you use terms like gender non-conforming. You can sort of see that progression but do you get a lot of people saying this is stereotypical, and your´re pandering to stereotypes? Richard Lippa: I try to be very careful in my wording, I always use phrases like on average. On average gay men are more feminine in certain ways. That doesn´t mean all gay men are like that, there are some very masculine gay men, there´s some men who want to be engineers and soccer players and jet pilots. But on average gay men have more feminine interests and of course part of the goal of the scientific research is to find out how strong these differences actually are, and how they might be related to differences between men and women. You know in a way I think that´s where the biological argument might sneak in here, that there´s such an uncanny parallel sometimes between the gay/straight differences and the male/female differences that it seems they must be related somehow. Jon Stewart: Professor Richard Lippa. I´m Jon Stewart in Los Angeles for All in the Mind, you´re with ABC Radio National, podcast and broadcast internationally on Radio Australia and online. So, there are clear, well documented behavioural indicators of sexual orientation. The question now becomes are there similar biological indicators? Simon LeVay: My name is Simon LeVay, I used to be a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in San Diego and that´s where I did the study that I published in 1991 where I reported on differences in brain structure between gay and straight men. Jon Stewart: The first and one of the most famous studies into the biological differences, it was widely reported and highly controversial. As Dr LeVay, who trained as a neuroanatomist, explains. Simon LeVay: Around 1989 a group at UCLA reported on a difference between the brains of men and women without regard to their sexual orientation. In a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is a tiny region at the base of the brain, it´s only about a teaspoonfull of brain tissue but it´s a very crucial brain region, it somehow plays a key role in a lot of our motivated behaviours in terms of feeding, drinking, keeping our body temperature right—and certainly our sex life. And they found a structure which they called INAH 3 which is typically larger in men than in women, that´s what they reported. This was a region that is known from animal experiments to be involved in the regulation of sexual behaviour. So I thought it would be interesting to see whether there were differences, not only between men and women, but also between persons of the same sex who differed in their sexual orientation. It was an autopsy study so I had to get brain tissue from people whose sexual orientation was known, and then cut it up and look at it under the microscope and measure these very small structures in the hypothalamus. And this was all done blind—that is I didn´t know when I was doing the measurements which tissue came from a gay person or a straight person. When I finally opened the envelope, so as to speak, to see which was which I found that indeed this structure INAH 3 was smaller in the gay men than it was in the straight men in my sample. In fact it was about the same as it was in the women in my sample. Jon Stewart: And it made huge headlines at the time once you published. Simon LeVay: Yes, it did get a lot of attention. In fact when I came to work on the morning that the study was published I saw about eight satellite trucks parked outside the Salk Institute and I though oh my God. I was kind of surprised that this one little paper that occupied all of two pages in Science raised such a hullabaloo if you like. Jon Stewart: Why did you think it did, why did it grab people´s attention so much? Simon LeVay: Well in part for the wrong reasons, because people are very concerned about what causes homosexuality. I don´t think they should be, I´m a gay man myself and I think people should ideally would happily accept people regardless of their sexual orientation. But the reality is a little different, a lot of people are very concerned about homosexuality, they wonder what it is exactly and how gay people should be treated. So there´s a little more interest in research on that than there is in a lot of other aspects of our mental life. Jon Stewart: The study was quite controversial at the time as well because a number of your subjects had died from AIDS, and that I guess was what made it actually quite easy to get hold of the brains of so many gay people. But that raised a lot of questions as well didn´t it? Simon LeVay: There was always the concern that one could question whether perhaps I was looking at an effect of the disease on their brain rather than something to do with their sexual orientation. I was actually quite confident that that was not the reason, because half of my heterosexual subjects also died of AIDS, and in those subjects the size of this structure was exactly the same as it was in the heterosexual men who had died of other diseases. But still it remained an anxiety in my mind and a lot of people talked about this afterwards as being maybe a problem with the study. I am now very convinced that it wasn´t—partly because I did get hold of the brain of one gay man who died of a different disease later, whose INAH 3 was exactly the same as in the other gay men who died of AIDS. But also more recently there was a study on sheep actually done by a group in Oregon. You may be surprised to know that there are gay sheep and in fact the significant numbers of male sheep, or rams, will only have sex with other males. And the Oregon group looked at the hypothalamus of these animals and they found pretty much exactly the same thing that I found, that it was smaller in these animals, this little group of cells, compared with the animals that were heterosexual. So these animals obviously didn´t have AIDS or any other disease actually before they were sacrificed, so I´m pretty sure this was not a disease effect. Jon Stewart: Just this year another study has been published that used brain scans this time rather than actually looking at the brains of people who had died. Simon LeVay: Yes, just recently there was a study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden which looked actually at the size of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, so the entire left and right halves of the brain, comparing them in MRI scans of living people. And they found what had previously been recorded which is that there´s a difference between men and women in that respect. That men tend to have a slightly bigger right hemisphere than their left hemisphere—we don´t know why but that´s a fairly consistent thing—whereas women tend to have pretty much balanced hemispheres: same size left and right. And when the Swedish group put gay men and lesbians into the mix, they found that the gay men and lesbians were if you like sex atypical. The gay men actually tended to have symmetrical hemispheres rather like the heterosexual women and the lesbians tended to have a right-biased hemisphere, if you like, their right hemispheres were a little larger rather like the heterosexual men. So this fitted in to a general sort of picture that´s developing which is that some aspects of the biology of gay people are a little bit more like what you typically see in the other sex. As if there´s something going on during development of gay foetuses perhaps if you want to call them that which is sex atypical. And that´s a kind of model which is attracting more and more attention as being something rather fundamental that´s going on to produce this diversity in sexual orientation. Jon Stewart: And that question of exactly what is happening during foetal development that could differentiate someone as gay or straight is where research is now being focused. Simon LeVay: One of the theories, and one that I think is quite a good candidate, is this so called pre-natal hormonal hypothesis. And that really traces back to animal experiments. So you can take a laboratory animals like rats for example and mess around with their hormonal levels while they are foetuses. You can go in there and add testosterone for example to a female foetus that typically would have rather low levels of testosterone, or you can take away testosterone from a male foetus by castrating it. And then you allow the animal to grow up and then you can give it the hormones that it typically would have when it´s grown up, but you find that its sexual behaviour is now different from what it would have been if you hadn´t done that hormonal manipulation. And in fact its partner preference will be different A lot of people have thought about the idea that something like that could be going on in humans too, that you could have situations whereby in foetuses that ultimately become gay men, say, the levels of testosterone are lower at some point of foetal development than they are typically in other male foetuses, and perhaps in foetuses that may ultimately become lesbian women those levels might be a little higher at some point. Now there´s no real absolutely direct evidence of that, if you wanted to repeat the animal experiments and you had no ethical worries at all, you would go in there and repeat them in humans and then wait 20 years to see whether these people became gay or straight. Obviously you can´t do that and you wouldn´t want to do that. But there are a number of studies that have sort of sidestepped that by looking for markers in adulthood that may actually reflect the hormone levels that were existing when these people were foetuses. These are things, odd little quirks of anatomy like finger lengths, the whorls of hair on the top of your head turn to the left or to the right and some aspects of brain structure—all might give clues as to some hormonal differences existing early in foetal life. Jon Stewart: These are just clues though, still not answers. There´s nothing concrete, nothing black and white, no definitive test. Research about gender roles can be dismissed by sceptics as stereotyping, hormone levels can´t be tested in human babies. So as Dr Simon Levay says, something more is needed. Simon LeVay: The prenatal hormonal hypothesis is not really an ultimate explanation of sexual orientation because you can always go back and say okay, prenatal hormones were different, why were they different? What caused that? One possibility is that there are genetic differences between individuals that actually cause those hormone levels to be different. Or perhaps cause the brain to react to these hormones in different ways. So you could, for example, have the same hormone levels in a foetus that becomes gay and one that becomes straight but the genes in the brain are causing it to react to those hormones in a different way. So several groups have looked for evidence of genes influencing sexual orientation, and we now pretty much know from family studies, like sibling studies and particularly from twin studies, that genes do influence sexual orientation, particularly in men. But no one has actually identified a specific gene, and got it in a bottle and sequenced it and said this is what it is and this is how it works. And that of course would be a tremendous breakthrough if people were able to do that. Sven Bocklandt: We are in a cold room, which is a large refrigerator, it´s a walk-in refrigerator. Jon Stewart: One scientist hoping to achieve that breakthrough is Dr Sven Bocklandt, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sven Bocklandt: Here is our stack of samples for twin studies. So if you look at these older boxes that are labelled with some ID number. We know exactly, based on the number that this is the gay twin of a discordant pair, meaning that he has a straight brother. Jon Stewart: The genetic samples in this cold room are for a brand new study looking at identical twins in the hope that they´ll allow him to hone in on possible genes involved in homosexuality. Sven Bocklandt: Let´s get out of here because it´s cold. Jon Stewart: It certainly is. Sven Bocklandt: I personally work on the genetics of sexual orientation because I think that it's most interesting. It all sort of started in the early 90s when the first twin studies on sexual orientation showed that being gay and being straight is highly genetic. A large part of our sexual orientation is explained by the genes that we get. And they did that by looking at identical twins two individuals that are genetically the same and comparing those with fraternal twins that are also twins that are also growing up in the same room and in the same family but they are just like brothers genetically speaking—or sisters. By comparing these genetically identical twins with the fraternal twins, they were able to calculate the role of genes, and you can filter out all the environmental factors. And they found out that being gay is about 50% genetic. Now that still doesn´t tell us much, it just says that you know genes are involved. At least it was a good argument to start looking at genes. Jon Stewart: Now Dr Bocklandt has taken that one step further, again, working with identical twins where one is gay and one is straight. Sven Bocklandt: So the idea there is that even though they have the same genes they might use them differently and that´s what I´m looking for and that´s what I´m trying to see. And so using genes really means turning them on and turning them off, and that´s a process that we are just starting to understand. We know for example that even though your liver and your brain have the same genes they do very different things, they use different genes and so they turn them on and off differently. And that pattern of the genes being turned on and turned off, we can actually read with still fairly experimental techniques, we are able to look genome wide and see whether these genes are labelled as turned on or turned off, and it´s actually the chemical labelling of the DNA, it´s called DNA methylation. Jon Stewart: So you´ve had to go out and collect DNA samples from pairs of identical twins? Sven Bocklandt: That´s right, we collect saliva and sperm from twins, we get some through our collaborator who has been recruiting for another study at gay pride festivals. We advertised online, we have a website, uclatwins.com, where people can go and read about our study and sign up. And we´ve been able to get right now about 35 pairs of gay/straight identical twin pairs and we´re also collecting gay/gay and straight/straight pairs as controls, basically. Jon Stewart: This work really is at the cutting edge, looking not for different genes but for differences in how we use the genes that we have. Dr Sven Bocklandt used to work as a science journalist for Belgian Public TV and that was how he first met Dean Hamer. Dr Hamer was one of the most notorious names in this field, after publishing a paper in 1993 that suggested a genetic influence on male homosexuality. Sven was inspired by his work, had some ideas of his own and jumped on board. Sven Bocklandt: Dean Hamer started doing this research at the National Cancer Institute and his excuse for doing that research at a cancer institute was that gay men with AIDS seemed to have Carposi sarcoma, a skin cancer, more often that straight men with AIDS. And he said well maybe the genetic basis for homosexuality has something to do with the genetic basis for Carposi sarcoma and that way he got funding to do this study. Now we know that Carposi´s sarcoma is partially caused by a viral infection and so it has probably nothing to do with this genetic basis. But that´s how it all got started. And he had found that by looking at large families with several gay men that the gay men seemed to cluster on the mother´s side of the family and not on the father´s side of the family. So if you´re gay and you have a cousin who is gay as well, it´s more often related through your mother. So that made him think about looking at the X chromosome because the X chromosome is the one chromosome that you only get from your mother if you´re a man. You get the Y chromosome from your father. Now if you´re a woman and you get your X from your mum and another X from your dad and the technology wasn´t quite there to do a genome wide screen. So he looked at brother pairs where both brothers were gay, sometimes multiple brothers in one family, and looked at whether they shared markers on the X chromosome more often than two brothers on average do. On average you share half of your DNA with your brother. So sure enough he found a region on the X chromosome, really the bottom part of the X chromosome called Xq28, it´s basically the address on the X chromosome, X stands for the chromosome, Q stands for the long arm, B is the name of the short arm and then 28 is basically the address of the bottom part of the chromosome. Now this was 15 years ago and he never found the gene, he just found a region, but the press acted as if they had found the genetic basis for sexual orientation and it was a huge, huge media storm in the United States. Jon Stewart: And around the world, I remember the T shirts at the time 'Thanks mum for my Xq28' and that sort of thing. Sven Bocklandt: It was a big deal and for a biologist it seems kind of odd that it would be a big deal because after all it´s just a very important, very basic biological process. You know procreation, spreading your genes—and for you to be able to do that you need first of all to have sex and find someone sexually attractive and it seemed very obvious to most people that study biology that it would be a genetically regulated trait. But especially in the United States there is a strong political pressure to treat homosexuality as a sin, as something odd, and so that whole political aspect came into play with this biological finding as well. Jon Stewart: So right now we are at the stage where we have a controversial statistical linkage to a region on a chromosome. Even if genes implicated in sexual orientation are found, that may still not answer all the questions we started off with about what makes someone gay but it is getting us closer. Sven Bocklandt: It´s fair to say that something like sexual orientation is not extremely complicated, you know it takes a whole lot of genes to make a brain that is intelligent, that can understand language, that can navigate and have a memory and all these things are very complex. Now sexual attraction by itself is not all that complex because there is this very old reptilian brain, as people call it sometimes, the part of your brain that regulates these very basic processes like hunger, and thirst, and sleep and sex. So basically all you need to do if you were a gay gene or a straight gene is somehow make that person able to detect whether the other individual is male or female. Somehow know what their own sex is and then activate the sex part of their brain. So that little circuit shouldn´t be very complicated, it could be a pheromone receptor, something to do with how we visually detect males or females. We don´t quite know how any of that would work but we think it´s relatively simple compared to other behavioural traits that are a lot more complex. But all that is really speculation and I think the first thing we need to do is figure out what these genes are, what they do and where exactly in the brain and when they are turned on and turned off—and maybe how many gay men run around with a straight version of these genes, and how many straight men run around with a gay version of these genes. And I think until we know that, it´s very hard to speculate exactly about what happens in the brain or what the evolutionary biology point of all of this would be. But I think once we understand the genetics better, I think we´ll have a much better picture. I´m not saying that there will ever be a time when we can perfectly scan someone´s genome and predict exactly what you´re going to be—gay or straight. Probably because it´s biology, it´s messy, it´s not quite black or white and clean cut. But I do believe that at some point we will be able to understand it at least a whole lot better than we do right now. Natasha Mitchell: Sven Bocklandt, from UCLA´s Center for Gender Based Biology, speaking there with Jon Stewart, the producer of today´s show. And thanks to Jon—a topic sure to provoke on all sorts of levels—certainly got me riled at points, being a former girl engineer. So make your way to the All in the Mind blog and let it rip, there´s always our email as well. All via the All in the Mind website along with the transcript, references and downloadable audio of the show. That´s at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. My thanks to Anita Barraud, I´m Natasha Mitchell, catch you next week. read less
