Rational Philosophy

Changing the way we think.

Last week I wrote about the implications of what happens to an animal’s brain when you teach it to use a rake. I was fascinated and excited by the idea that the brain’s genetics may be changed by the way it is used. What might this tell us about our capacity to change the way we think and react?

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang write today about the brain’s limited capacity for governing self-discipline. Research going back several years has shown that if you exercise restraint or self-discipline in one activity or area of your life, you will deplete your “self-restraint” resources and find it more difficult to remain disciplined in another activity. Complete a cross-word puzzle and you won’t be able to resist dessert.

The studies implicate blood sugar as an important factor in restoring or maintaining self-restraint. Subjects performed better on disciplined tasks if they were allowed to replenish their blood sugar between those tasks. (If only Spitzer had had a glass of lemonade after a hard day in the legislature!)

But most fascinating for me the research has shown that one can increase one’s self-discipline over time by exercising it. This likely (the article says “must”) reflects “some biological change in the brain.” “Even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity.”

David Brooks uses insights from sports psychologist H. A. Dorfman’s book The Mental ABC’s of Pitching to argue that the prevailing American emphasis on self-awareness and self-discovery has begun to shift back toward self-discipline and the idea of transcending onesself in one’s work. Brooks, not unusually, doesn’t provide any kind of specific context for his assertion, but his unearthing of Dorfman’s ideas proves a fortuitous coincidence.

Brooks quotes from Dorfman’s book: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”

Combine this idea with the concept that we can, by exercising willpower and self-discipline, increase our capacity for it, and we have an even more powerful idea: we can choose to free ourselves from habits that inhibit our performance and self-satisfaction.

People, particularly young people, tend to rebel against the idea of excessive self-discipline. Too often the concept is fused with the idea of mindlessness or blind adherence to rules. Discipline can seem antithetical to freedom.

But we can distinguish between a reflexive adherence to habits, rules and regulations and the choice of adherence for the sake of improving self-discpline. One is passive and undirected, the other active and end-directed.

According to Dorfman, and supported by scientific research, it makes no difference whether we feel, in the moment, that we want to exercise self-discipline. If we act in a self-disciplined way we will increase our willpower. Just as we go to the gym to workout, whether we feel like it or not, we might be much more inclined to exercise self-discipline if we understand that it will make it easier for us to exercise more self-discipline in the future.

The same philosophy applies to other brain functions. If macaques and rodents in learning to use a rake exhibit changes in brain DNA, then we can postulate that people can experience changes in brain DNA by stretching the use of our minds.

(This theory comports with common sense (sophisticated mental tasks seem to make people more capable of performing sophisticated mental tasks) and studies that show brain exercise is linked with mental health in later life.)

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

�

On John McCain’s ironic disposition and rodents using rakes.

Times Op-Ed contributor Neal Gabler proposes that the media likes John McCain because he has an ironic outlook on the political process. McCain, with his candor and his self-deprecation and his broad wink at the distorted rigamarole of politics agrees with the default, liberal journalistic “notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic.” Gabler describes McCain, with his gleeful cynicism, as a postmodernist candidate.

This is fascinating both in and of itself and more generally. What would an ironically detached president do with his power? How would his sense of irony, of life’s faint imbecility, help or hinder him in running the country?

We get a glimpse perhaps in McCain’s reluctance to support a rigorous bailout of housing lenders and borrowers. McCain lays blame with the lenders for pushing risky loans and with the borrowers for wishful thinking. Bailing them out only rewards their behavior, he says.

His response is aloof, dismissive. He shows a reluctance to engage with the history of the current crisis, the emergence of the shadow banking system to sidestep the kinds of controls that the government put in place as a response to the market crash that precipitated the great depression. Doesn’t the government share a good part of the responsibility for allowing the shadow banking system to emerge without taking steps to regulate it?

Although, this same detachment might be an unusually helpful quality in some situations.

But, more generally, Gabler’s take on McCain points to a philosophical matter of engagement with reality. The ironist perceives the difference between our immediate perception of existence and life, and the larger context of those perceptions. The awareness that ultimately nothing really matters. The central character of Albert Camus’ The Fall (La Chute) comes to realize through a process of self-reflection that everything he’s held dear to him, the whole grand idea of his importance, is nothing but an illusion, an appearance that, ultimately, means nothing. Literature is strewn with such examples of the ironist. Detachment and perspective are essential skills for a novelist, so it is little surprise that this is the case. Hence Gabler’s reference to McCain as a post-modernist candidate.

Gabler surmises that perhaps McCain gained this perspective while a prisoner of war. I would have disagreed with him until I read about the rodents who learned to use a rake.

Dr. Atshushi Iriki, a neuroscientist at the Riken Institute in Tokyo, has trained degus (sociable, Chilean rodents) to use a rake as a tool. By putting the little fellows out of arms reach of their lunch, Iriki coaxed the rodents to take advantage of small rakes so that they could drag the sunflower seeds close enough to eat them. (You can watch a video of the degus at work here.)

Just in itself, this is fascinating. But even more fascinating is the proposal that this kind of learning may lead to molecular and genetic changes in the brain. When Doctor Iriki conducted a similar experiment with Japanese macaques “their brains showed signs of gene activity in a brain region that integrates vision and touch.”

The latent capability for a particular mental aptitude, when prompted and exercized, can lead to a new organization of brain function. This isn’t spelled out in the article, but one presumes that Iriki believes that the animals have not simply learned a new skill, but developed a new capability, one that allows them to process things differently.

And so perhaps Gabler might be right about McCain. It makes sense that being a prisoner of war might lead to the exercising of the functions of the brain that put our existence into perspective. Held captive, treated as insignificant, denied the power of our own self-determination, I can easily see how one would come away with a more ironic perspective on the world.

Related Posts from Around the Internet:

mouse on treadmill

  Exercise reduces brain age for middle-aged mice