totalitarianism today

A few brief notes on secrets, sociopaths, selfies, and integrity.

[Image source: Thinking Through My Lens]

Keeping a secret is hard work for the brain. And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep.

Unless you are a sociopath.

For sociopaths, nothing is sacred.

Sociopaths tend to stare into people's eyes intensely. This act of unabashed staring, often despite social cues which encourage the contrary, is known as the "predator's stare". 

A sociopath suffers from antisocial personality disorder, or APD.  Technically, APD is “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” Typical characteristics include overconfidence, lack of remorse, high levels of manipulation and an inability to confirm to social norms.

Lacking an established sense of self, sociopaths are social chameleons- they adapt to different social settings depending on what the situation demands. They constantly change and transform to get the best out of the world around them.  

Integrity involves loyalty to one's core beliefs and principles. It requires a strongly-held concept of self. 

To have integrity is to be loyal to the "self" we try to be. 

There is no such thing as a sociopath with integrity.

Sociopaths are drawn to employment that involves wielding positions of power over people– the more helpless and less likely to be listened to the better. They flock to working with children, animals, the elderly, and the mentally, emotionally, or physically challenged. They also enjoy power-heavy jobs as police officers or prison guards.

They are aware of projecting a personality, though they have no remorse over failing to identify with this projected self.

[Image source: Design Instruct]

Some sociopaths teach Sunday school in the Church of Latter Day Saints. E.M. Thomas is one such sociopath. She likes to look into people's eyes:

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of my confidence is the way I sustain eye contact. Some people have called it the "predator stare." Sociopaths are unfazed by uninterrupted eye contact. Our failure to look away politely is also perceived as being aggressive or seductive. It can throw people off balance, but often in an exciting way that imitates the unsettling feeling of infatuation. Do you ever find yourself using charmand confidence to get people to do things for you that they otherwise wouldn't? Some might call it manipulation, but I like to think I'm using what God gave me.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, the basic physics of flirting involves making eye contact with someone, giving a small smile, then looking down and averting your gaze. 

I find myself wondering if sociopaths' sustained staring making it impossible for them to be coy. 

Sometimes people envy sociopaths for their lack of moral inhibition. They don't do what most of us call "regret". 

[Image source: Alapan]

Nor do they bother with what philosophers and psychologists call "human self-reflection", or the capacity of humans to exercise introspection and the willingness to learn more about their nature, purpose, and actions. A reflection is defined as "a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation". Sociopaths are very conscious and adept at observing their own reflections. A reflection also means "an image that is seen in a mirror or on a shiny surface".

Rachel Simmons says selfies are "good for girls". Erin Gloria Ryan says selfies are "a cry for help". We are drawn to ugly selfies. Scientists have linked selfies to narcissism, addiction, and mental illness. 

Many women take a large number of exciting, half-nude selfies after healing from breast implant surgery. Post-surgery selfies even include credits- the name of the surgeon or implant size is mentioned.

A sociopath is just as likely to take a selfie photo as any other American. They may even take selfies at funerals. But what they see in the selfie is rarely a self with whom they identify- only a personality they pretend. 

Selfies are the sociopaths propaganda machine, allowing them to flit rapidly from one personality to the next. Now you see them, now you don't.

[Image source: the new is tired of you]

I'm a big fan of shadow selfies.

Unlike selfies that reveal false facial expressions or newly-bleached teeth, shadow selfies reveal only the darkness that comes from the way our bodies block or absorb light. They depict only what they can afford to inhabit- a shadow of a self.

Shadow selfies, unlike sociopaths, have integrity.

Carl Sagan's "Reflections of a mote of dust".

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

This is an excerpt from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996 by Carl Sagan. His book Pale Blue Dot expands on these ideas. 

The image is borrowed from Maria Popova's delightful review of You Are Stardust, a children's book that begins with the idea that every little atom in our bodies comes from a star that exploded billions of years before we were born. The author, Elin Kelsey, observes that today's sports-obsessed, iPad-wielding children have lost a vital connection to nature. Her weaving of verse and science reveals how we are intimately connected to the natural world by analogizing the growth and development of human bodies to forests. Kelsey aims to re-spark the natural relationship of children to the world they inhabit, however flippantly. I admire the impulse.

Disconnected thoughts and discursions on Waldrop's "Complexity".

It's the way that M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity accesses the mysterious realm of Rilke's "sublime" that really blew open my mind. I could hear the old schemas and models grinding and cracking as I read the following passage:

The equation that governed the flow of wind and moisture looked simple enough.... until researchers realized that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Texas could change the course of a hurricane in Haiti a week later. Or that a flap of that butterfly's wings a millimeter to the left might have deflected the hurricane in a totally different direction. 

In contrast to the linear cause-effect sequences that dominated post-Newtonian science and economics, the study of nonlinear dynamics opened up a world in which "everything is connected, and often with an incredible sensitivity". Waldrop elaborates:

Tiny perturbations won't always remain tiny. Under the right circumstances, the slightest uncertainty can grow until the system's future becomes utterly unpredictable- or, in a word, chaotic.

Source for these "fractalicious butterfly wings"

Complexity and/or Chaos Theory studies the non-linear dynamics of complex adaptive systems in an attempt to explain the dynamic behavior of complex systems by discovering the laws governing such behavior, which can range from the chaotic to the rigidly ordered, with a critical "edge-of-chaos" region in the middle where order and disorder co-exist.

At the edge-of-chaos region, complex dynamical systems become adaptive, solve problems and evolve by mutation and selection. Such systems are called Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS.

Ultimately, it was Phil Anderson's 1972 article published in Science magazine that turned the world into a web. Michael Atkisson offers insight on how Phil rattled the reigning reductionist models. Anderson's "emergent properties" rippled through the world of hard and soft sciences, reaching even into the humanities to move our thinking from lines into networks.

Netvolution writes:

The examples of cellular automata and the computational universe illustrate the possibility of emergence as the results of complexity. The study of these systems has become defined as the field of Complexity Science. Through the interaction of many simple independent agents governed by simple rules operating in a non linear manner this space of enquiry has been able to model a vast array of environments, opening up new methods of looking at fields as varied as Urban Design, Economics, Neuroscience and Physics. The pioneers of Complexity Science - based at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico - saw that this space of generative emergence exists at the edge of chaos: “the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy.” It is at this domain, in the phase transition between order and disorder that complexity operates. 

Don't settle for halfway measures or irrationalizations in your ethics, economics (pace  Chicago School), science, or history. Lose your mind on the Santa Fe Institute website and emerge with a better one.

TWO MORE TANGLES

Waldrop's complexity reviewed chapter by chapter for Computational Modeling course

Complexity theory for software developers (Methods and Tools)

Why long-distance romance brings out the best in us.

In a brief essay for Pacific Standard, Nicole Allan probes her long-distance relationship in the context of recent scientific research. Citing a recent research paper "showing that long-distance couples feel greater intimacy than those who live in the same place", Nicole wonders if the idealization engendered by long-distance intimacy ultimately amounts to a net cost or benefit.

The study in question showed that members of long-distance "couples reveal more about themselves, and perceive their partners to be more revealing as well". Nicole wisely observes the writing on the wall:

This is a form of “idealization,” or the tendency to view your partner and your relationship in an unrealistically positive light. It is a hallmark of long-distance relationships, a reason why many geographically remote partners feel more connected to each other than those who wake up in the same bed do. This effect is likely familiar to the three million married Americans and up to one-half of American college students who are currently geographically separated from their partners. Given these numbers, it’s also worth noting the flip side of idealization, which is that it contributes to making long-distance couples more likely, whenever they do manage to align their geographic trajectories, to break up.

This is the point where it seems fair to confess that Nicole is my favorite kind of girl- a woman asks herself big, impossible questions and sets about to find answers. A girl after my own curious heart. For example, Nicole pays close attention to the indiscreet details of how we revise others in light of romantic love. She worries about the way her "nightly conversations" with Joel make it easy to become curators in the museum of self. She pauses before the way in which selective self-presentation offers a lop-sided picture of life- one weighed heavily towards the sublime, one that finds little space for the mundane. And she doesn't shy away from a study by communications theorists Laura Stafford and Andy J. Merolla which found that the long-distance couples who idealized each other the most were the least stable upon reunion. Pragmatic thinking suggests Nicole should idealize "not too little, not too much".

Idealization, in a sense, implies an ongoing infidelity. The ideal person to whom one is faithful is a perfect creature whom we can count on remembering fondly in the near future, especially with many miles between us. At some point- usually when the geographic distance is overcome- we must decide whether our fidelity applies as surely to the real lover as it did to the ideal one. And there are no two ways about it- no way to split the difference between idealization and reality. The supernatural essence of idealization makes it hard for me to imagine how one might go about applying an Aristotlean course of moderation to a perspective that insists on pies in the sky. 

Any self-respecting Protestant will tell you that demystifying the sublime leaves you with pizza and indoor basketball courts.

As an avid former practioner of the long-distance romance, I discovered my own reasons for cultivating cross-country relationships. There was nothing quite so exciting as those weekends where the most fascinating thing we could find to do was each other. Unlike the pickled romances of my colleagues, my long-range lovers and I rarely bickered or argued over trivial matters. Granted, we weren't that involved in the trivial aspects of one anothers' lives.

But the pros generally outweighed the cons. I appreciated the way every communication proved amenable to my editing and rewriting skills. Frankly, a person is never quite as pliant in the flesh as they tend to be on paper. My long-distance lovers benefitted from my tendency to interpret their comments and actions in light of the stories I longed to tell. Likewise, I found myself impressed by the tenderness with which they approached their own editing tasks. This woman they loved- the character they wrote me into- I couldn't get enough of her charms. 

It's a fact that long-distance makes great fodder for fiction. Loving from far away gives us more control over the creation of our own narrative self- the person whom we wish to be when we line up our emotions, values, feelings, and hopes. Not to mention the time saved by only having to shave one's legs once or twice a month before conjugal visits. 

In his book, The Happiness of Pursuit, Shimon Edelmen describes the narrative self as the "growing, often rehearsed, incessantly revised personal anthology", the series of scripts, social behaviors, and stories we use to construct and maintain our personal identity. Edelman observes that human emotions are essentially "computational shortcuts that funnel" the results of our self-monitoring and observations. Our emotions matter in the grand scheme of things because our emotions ultimately structure our responses and reactions to the world around us over time. We need the past, Edelman insists, to deal with the future. This imperative to construct and maintain a narrative self is key to our survival and thriving. 

Putting a positive spin on things keeps us from wallowing in melancholy and adding too many Leonard Cohen songs to the party playlist. Our narrative selves learn from mistakes and adapt accordingly. The love we lost wasn't such a bad thing since it made way for the love we currently inhabit. But idealization, as a cognitive approach, makes level-headed analysis almost impossible. 

Long-distance love is an ideal vehicle for nourishing and sustaining romantic love. But only over the long distance. Usually, the lovers tend to feel betrayed by the sides not represented in the ideal. Sharing an apartment means you don't have to vacuum it in a mad dash before your lover's weekend visit. Instead, you have the opportunity to argue over whose career or schedule most sensibly accomodates vacuuming duties. These are the sorts of conversations that make or break the kingdom of couple-dom. Sadly, my long-distance lovers and I wasted many years before arriving at a point when the importance of vacuuming duties could be dully addressed and divvied. 

Infographic sourced from LDR magazine.

If my descriptions of shared domestic life sound as if they emanate from another planet, that is because they do. The distance between long-distance love and day-to-day-coupling can be measured in light years. Waiting to cross that bridge when you come to it only ensures the costs of divestment accrue over time.  

Fortunately, I am not the only sourpuss with opinions on the merits of long-distance love affairs. When the goodbye's get tough and you find yourself wondering why pining and loneliness share so many common traits, you can thank your lucky stars-and-stripes for the way in which the free-market responds to all our needs, including the needs we never knew existed until we bought the latest how-to-be-happier book on a longer-than-expected layover in Atlanta's awful airport. As a matter of social scientific fact, the emerging market for long-distance lover self-help might be able to give you what the perfect lover cannot. 

LDR magazine (yes, that's "Long Distance Relationship" magazine) can give you tips on everything from the best instant messaging services to how to plan your long-distance wedding. The visually-inclined will also find a cornucopia of infographics illustrating the various costs, benefits, dividends, retrenchments, and pay-offs of a love that refuses to be bound by city, county, or nation-state. While ordinary couples spoon themselves to sleep at night, you can master the much-needed skills involved in self-soothing rituals. You can also explore the ways in which a small, furry pet can satisfy your need for company and physical touch. 

You can tap into an online community of experts, personal coaches, and fellow LDR's eager to assist you in your struggle to love someone elsewhere. Self-described long-distance lover Besski Livius extols the benefits of loving from afar:

Even if for a while it may be linear during all those months that you stay far from each other, the intensity of your missing of each other and desiring each other and wanting to hold each other is just unbelievable, it’s not even comparable with the missing that you have in a classic relationship. 

If Nicole ever feels overwhelmed by the ways in which long-distance love doesn't quite measure up to its promised passion and intensity, Besski offers paid coaching services and products to help long-distance lovers meet their full relationship potential. My guess is that Nicole won't find Besski any more comforting than I did. 

Infographic sourced from LDR magazine.

Nicole concludes her essay with the hope that she and Joel will "find each other extraordinary enough to defy geography". At the risk of sounding cynical, I might add that this hope is remarkably similar to the hope of every couple in the throes of romantic love, including those couples who are not currently geographically-challenged.

Is it any less dramatic to admit I hoped my partner and I would find each other extraordinary enough to defy the tendency for our generation to engage in a series of seven-year marriages interspersed with a few years of single parenthood and the occasional career change? For couples today, there are greater distances and dangers than those maintained by physical miles. Nicole, geography might be smallest hurdle to the love you decide to live.

For the sake of full disclosure, my current partner and I did the long-distance dating activity for six months after he moved back to Atlanta. In a now-legendary trail of tears, text messages, and letters, we ended our relationship. He decided to accept a career opportunity in Asia.

Then, one weekend, we ran into each other, got engaged at a truck stop somewhere in Ohio or Kentucky, simultaneously quit our jobs, and spent the next two months doing nothing besides dreaming and planning our wedding. So our LDR had a happy ending. But I can't help thinking the happy ending came about because we elected to drop everything else in our lives and put meat onto our idealizations of one another. 

If I stand by any of my previous contentions, it's the one that posits a choice between pragmatism and idealization. My choice leaves me shooting the moon and admiring pies in the sky. The view remains anything but dull.

Steven Rose's skepticism about neuro-education models.

According to neuro-enthusiasts, Steven Rose is "neuroeducation skeptic". Being a skeptic just means that you have formulated a set of well-considered reasons for declining to drink the Kool-Aid just yet. One of Rose's most interesting arguments is not even an argument so much as it is a semantic quibble.

To a girl who believes semantic quibbles lie at the heart of everything from peace in the Middle East to craft beer preferences, Rose's description of the mereological fallacy is rather exciting and fraught with possibility. After dismantling the left/right brain "neuromyth", Rose writes:

Children from poorer families (or as the literature more demurely puts it, of low socioeconomic status) may generally have a more restricted vocabulary than their wealthier peers – although this has been vigorously contested – but subjecting them to imaging or measuring their electrical event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that this difference may be reflected in brain processes might seem to add insult to injury. And when cognitive neuroscientists claim that poverty impedes cognitive function (the title of a recent paper in Science) or that one way to lift people out of poverty is to use cognitive behavioural therapy to improve their “mental capital” (“conceived metaphorically”, according to psychologist Cary Cooper, “as the bank account of the mind, which is debited or credited throughout the life course, from childhood to old age”), it shows a certain disconnect with the economic forces currently driving people into poverty.

There’s another problem here, a manifestation of the common tendency among neuroscientists to commit what philosophers call the mereological fallacy, which broadly means ascribing the properties of the whole – in neuroscience terms, the living, conscious human being – to a part of that whole, ie, the brain. Thus, an accessible and widely read introduction to the brain and its study by two leading researchers, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith, is called The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education (2005), and its chapter heads include “the mathematical brain” and “the literate brain”. Common usage, but as I am sure both authors would agree, it isn’t brains that learn, are mathematical or literate; it is their owners who use their brains to learn, do maths or whatever. (I know I am putting my own head on the block here – many years ago, in the early 1970s, I wrote a book called, in my youthful certainty, The Conscious Brain. But I have reformed.) This is, I think, more than a semantic quibble, because such titles reflect the way that we neuroscientists tend to think and encourage others to think likewise.

Professor Rose is clearly out of fashion. Acknowledging the extent to which the reigning pet scientific theory drives the selection of questions and research results is not common practice among scientists hoping to score research grant funding.

Ultimately, I agree with Rose's skepticism. But it's more than intellectual accord. You see, I admire the way Rose wears the chartreuse mottled tie tucked into his dress-shirt pocket in a room filled with elegant men and women modeling various shades of gray. I like the way he stands out and keeps it shameless.

A different perspective on schizophrenia.

Average human beings will struggle to determine if this mask is convex or concave. The hollow-mask illusion makes distinguishing the front from the back of a mask harder you would expect. But an article in New Scientist highlights new research which reveals that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are immune to the hollow mask illusion. 

In the study, volunteers were monitored in an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner as they looked at photos. Some of these were normal pictures of faces, but others had been inverted as in the hollow-mask illusion. All the participants with schizophrenia could distinguish between the two types of photos, whereas control volunteers without the condition were fooled 99 per cent of the time.

People with schizophrenia, which affects about 1 per cent of the population, are already known to be immune to certain visual illusions. Immunity to the hollow-mask illusion, says Danai Dima, of Hannover School of Medicine in Germany, suggests that the "bottom-up" process of collecting incoming visual information from the eyes, and the "top-down" process of interpreting this information is different in people with schizophrenia.

"The term 'schizophrenia' was coined almost a century ago to mean the splitting of different mental domains, but the idea has now shifted more towards connectivity between brain areas," says Dima.

The prevailing theory is that perception comprises three main components: sensory input (bottom-up); the internal production of concepts (top-down); and a control component, which covers interaction between the two first components. "Our study provides further evidence of 'dysconnectivity' between these components in the brains of people with schizophrenia."

While this "disconnectivity" might make it difficult to function on our linear, legalistic social environment, it seems unfortunate that New Scientist hails this research mainly for discovering that the hollow-mask illusion  "could provide a diagnostic test for the condition". It certainly proves that those individuals whom we label as "schizophrenics" perceive the world differently, but that knowledge is neither new nor exciting. Why we have damned such modes of perception is a much more interesting question.

Thomas Szasz maintains that describing a behavioral disorder such as schizophrenia as a "disease" is merely a "medical metaphor". In his words:

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."

For Szasz, a different mode of perception might label one an artist, a melancholic, Aspberger's, or schizophrenic. Yet disturbing modes of behavior and thought do not fit the definition of a medical disease. To be a true disease, it should be capable of being found "on the autopsy table and meet pathological definition" rather than being voted into existence by groups like the American Psychiatric Association, who clearly have an interest in discovering as many mental "diseases" as there are stars in the sky. From the wiki entry:

Mental illnesses are "like a" disease, argues Szasz, putting mental illness in a semantic metaphorical language arts category. Psychiatry is a pseudo-science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented over the last 100 years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack belong to two completely different categories. Psychiatrists are but "soul doctors", the successors of priests, who deal with the spiritual "problems in living" that have troubled people forever. Psychiatry, through various Mental Health Acts has become the secular state religion according to Thomas Szasz. It is a social control system, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well, such as Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1961).

So New Scientist is thrilled to announce the discovery of a new, quasi-scientific test that legitimizes the forceful institutionalization and mistreatment of those labelled "schizophrenic" by our culture. Jumping for joy would be too twisted even for my East European dark humor.

For more on schizophrenia, Szasz, and the myth of mental illness:

Szasz's Manifesto
"Liberty and the Practice of Pyschotherapy", an interview with Szasz
"Mental Disorders Are Not Diseases" by Thomas Szasz
"The Case Against Psychiatric Coercion" by Thomas Szasz
Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility
"Thomas Szasz Takes On His Critics", an interview with Jacob Sullum

The sexiest science links.

Because science is made more beautiful when placed in the context of social cultures.....

• Jonathan Gottschall, co-editor of The Literary Animal, assists the rise of interpretive theory known as "Literary Darwinism" first given mass attention by the work of Joseph Carroll.  More on Gottschall from the gentlemen at Biocurious. More on "adaptationist" approaches by Carroll.
• Loose women are less uptight and kissing is good for your blood pressure. Next thing you know, some wacky scientist might venture that sex is fun too.
• Questions about the autheticity of the Vinland map, the world's oldest known map, continue.
• New Scientist has a special feature on robots.
• Johnathan Harris' Phylotaxis explores the "space where science meets culture".

Missing the details?

An autistic scientist believes she understands the way animals think, and her autism has something to do with it. Temple Grandin comments on what stands between animals and humans:

"The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren't. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead...Normal human beings are blind to anything they're not paying attention to."

This "perpetual fog" has a special name for Grandin-- it is called "abstractification", and it designates our ability to live within our thoughts, surrounded by "our ideas of things". As a result, we are likely to lose sight of what some might call first principles and other affectionately dub a "frame of reference".

For more on this subject, see Temple Grandin's latest book, Animals In Translation. A lengthy excerpt is available here. Other items of potential interest include:

• Proof that all cats are autistic?
• Grandin's 1997 essay, "Thinking The Way Animals Do"
• Grandin's 1998 paper, "Consciousness in Animals and People with Autism"

Understanding geese.... and football fans.

Simon Levin's research on animal flocks suggests interesting applications to human behavior. To understand how a "flock" is created, scientists previously focused on searching for complex communication clues or coordination mechanisms. But Levin's results point away from complexity. According to a bit in Discover magazine:

Using a computer model, Levin’s team found that no communication is necessary. All that is required is for any one of a few individuals to have a strong preference for a certain direction. When one of these individuals turns, everyone turns. If no one else turns, the individual gets back in the pack as a follower. “It doesn’t take much to direct the whole,” Levin says.

So how is information coordinated? Levin et al believe it arises naturally from two basic instincts-- "the need to stay in a group and the desire by some individuals to act on their own information about where to go".  The individual who is most decisive about going in a particular direction will usually be followed. Daniel Rubenstein, chair of ecology and evolutionary biology, says, "It demonstrates the power of the little guy. You don't need avowed leaders, you don't need complex signaling."

Another reason to appreciate Ralph Waldo Emerson.

According to A General Theory Of Love, a book by three love-curious MD's, Emerson might deserve credit as the first to propose that "emotionality is hard-wired" in the brain, which we now know to be true. Their evidence? A quote and the common tendency of Emerson fans to count him as a prophet on everything.

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue.... Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung."