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This reader email in response to Andrew Sullivan's debate with Sam Harris is the best -- and most moving -- thing I've read in the entire Dawkins/Harris atheism debate:

I would describe my own embrace of science and secular humanism as being motivated by a form of faith that is deeper than Christian faith. I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he "rejected" Judaism and inspired Christianity. Christianity was once the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality, the brotherhood of man, and the human condition. I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of "God" (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.

Worth reading in its entirety.

From the Times: Average Scores on SAT Show Significant Decline:

Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, pointed out that the decline in test scores represented less than one half of a test question in reading and one-fifth of one test question in math. Still officials had concerns about the overall performance of American students. “The data does suggest that as a nation, critical reading and writing are lagging behind the progress we are making in math,” Mr. Camara said. The SAT score declines contrasted with the increase in scores on the ACT exam, the other primary college admissions test, reported earlier this month. ACT scores registered their biggest increase in 20 years and reached their highest level since 1991. ACT also has a writing section of the test but it is optional.

Is the Flynn Effect waning? There's some mixed evidence. But as usual, Flynn himself has some interesting thoughts:

Although Flynn cautions against generalizing the recent Danish and Norwegian experiences, he anticipates similar results will crop up elsewhere in the world. But he's not glum about it. Flynn is convinced that the cause of his eponymous effect has to do with changes in the environment that allow children more opportunity to exercise the kinds of skills probed in today's intelligence tests—changes like a shift to smaller family sizes, which allow parents more time to interact with each child, for example, or devotion of an ever-greater portion of kids' leisure time to abstract, mentally demanding games. He points out that in industrialized, middle-class countries (like those of Scandinavia), such influences must be reaching a point of saturation: "You can't really get the family much smaller than one or two kids." And the current craze for Sudoku puzzles not withstanding, as Flynn says, "eventually, people do want to relax."

The scientists also cited research suggesting young dolphins deliberately make their games as hard as possible, possibly to enhance the learning experience. The captive dolphins “produced 317 distinct forms of play behavior during thefive years that they were observed,” they wrote. One calf became adept at “blowing bubbles while swimming upside-down near the bottom of the pool and then chasing and biting each bubble before it reached the surface,” the researchers continued. “She then began to release bubbles while swimming closer and closer to the surface, eventually being so close that she could not catch a single bubble.”

I love this story for obvious reasons. It's a great endorsement of the idea that play may be crucial to advanced forms of learning, not just among the primates. But I suppose there's also the crankier interpretation: that any sufficiently intelligent species will inevitably use that intelligence to waste their time in increasingly baroque ways.

Dolphin games: no mere child’s play?

The Kids Are Better Than Alright

One of the most striking things I've experienced over the past few months talking to people about Everything Bad is how deeply ingrained the assumption is that today's kids are academic underachievers compared to previous generations. In the book I tried to combat that stereotype by looking at the increase in IQ scores, largely because IQ scores were the most accurate measure of the kind of intelligence that I was discussing in the book -- i.e., abstract problem-solving, pattern recognition, and so on. But I've also been exploring some of the data on traditional educational measures -- reading and math skills, for instance -- and it's amazing how solidly the data flies in the face of the "dumbed-down" hypothesis.

Today's release of the "Nation's Report Card" should silence all the doomsayers for once and for all. The report card has been tracking student achievement in reading and math since 1971, focusing on three age groups (9, 13, and 17) and three major demographic groups (white, black and hispanic.) How do the kids of today compare to the late boomers of 1971? Allow me to turn caps lock on to make this point clearly: with one exception, EVERY SINGLE LINE GOES UP. All the age groups are better at math, and both the 9-year-olds and the 13-year-olds are better readers than the kids of 1971.

Now, the one exception is the 17-year-olds, but even that is misleading, because both black and hispanic kids saw dramatic increases in reading skills since 1971, while the white kids stayed exactly the same. This is what we call Simpson's paradox: all the groups either improve or stay the same, but the average doesn't go up. That seems illogical, until you realize that the ratio between the different groups has changed from 1971: there are far more Hispanics being the assessed, and that group has on average lower reading scores. (Not surprisingly, since a full 20% of them are not native English speakers.) So the change in the overall breakdown of the group brings the statistical mean down, even though most of the people being assessed are actually improving their skills.

Combine this new study with the fact that 1) IQ scores are significantly higher than they were 30 years ago, 2) SAT math scores are at an all-time high, and 3) today's kids are undoubtedly more skilled today at things like multitasking or mastering new technologies that are both essential to success in the workforce and entirely ignored by all standardized tests. Add all that together and you get a clear portrait of a generation of kids that are significantly better off intellectually than the kids of 1971. Now, I'm not implying by any means that pop culture is responsible for most of this improvement. (In fact, most of the skills measure by the Nation's Report Card have nothing to do with pop culture.) But the idea that today's kids are an illiterate bunch of slackers compared to earlier generations is empirically false.

Mind Hacks

Amazon's email recommendations have historically worked very nicely for me -- about a third of the time, they're notifying me of something that I'm genuinely interested in. (Almost every other automated sales pitch I receive is useless.) But every now and then, they get a little too cute. Today, for instance, I received this in the mail:

Dear Amazon.com Customer:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson also purchased books by Tom Stafford. For this reason, you might like to know that Tom Stafford's Mind Hacks (O'Reilly's Hacks Series) is now available in paperback.

Now, first of all, this is funny because not only have I purchased Emergence, I also, well, wrote Emergence. I'm not sure if there's the same correlation between Emergence writers and Tom Stafford readers, but of course, the sample size is quite small.

Actually, I suppose there is a correlation there, though Amazon seems not to be aware of it, because I also wrote the introduction to Mind Hacks. If only "Tom Stafford" was a pen name I used for side projects, this might well have been the most self-referential automated recommendation in history.

P.S. The one piece of genuinely useful information in this email is that Mind Hacks is out! Go buy it! It's really a wonderful book, filled with experiments that you can do on your brain in the safety of your own home.

The Political Brain

Today's Sunday Times Magazine is running an essay of mine on the neuroscience of political affiliation -- as embryonic a line of research as you're likely to find, but an intriguing one. I first started mulling over the ideas this spring, when the Times covered an early study commissioned by two Democrat consultants that performed fMRI scans on people as they viewed campaign ads. The typical response to these studies at the time was that there's something creepy about political hacks using brain scans to make more effective ads. But to me -- having just written Mind Wide Open -- it seemed much more interesting, and much less creepy, if you looked at these results more as a political science experiment than an exercise in neuromarketing. Instead of scanning brains to devise more persuasive means of securing votes for Candidate X, scan brains to find an answer to that most mysterious of questions: how do political values form in the first place?

You can see how I ended up answering the question in the piece itself, but one thing is probably worth reiterating here: whatever conclusions we end up extracting for this line of research won't come exclusively from the neuroscientists. You'd need sociologists and political scientists and philosophers -- not to mention those political strategists -- to make sense of the results, to put them in context, and to propose new avenues of research. The neuroscientists would be mostly there to explain the results in terms of brain anatomy and function, leaving it to the social scientists to interpret the results on the level of human experience. In other words, the scans don't give you answers. They give you new kinds of questions.

Thinking Faster

I've been meaning to point to a recent feature story I did for Discover that's an exploration of some of Antonio Damasio's latest ideas about the brain. It was a delightful piece to get to write, since I got to spend some quality time with Damasio without having to package our interactions all together into the traditional format of a profile. But I'm most energized by the premise of the piece, and the avenues I think it opens up for analysis. In Mind Wide Open I talked a little about the idea of connecting brain research with disciplines that exist one or two levels up, disciplines that study the way brain interact with other brains and with the forces of history: economics, sociology, media studies, even literary theory. But the book mostly leaves that idea as a kind of teaser. This Discover piece is my first attempt to systematically look at how that kind of interpretation might work. It revolves around the question of speed, both in terms of our inner neurological channels of communication, and the acceleration of modern life. I think there are some truly fresh ideas that will come out this kind of collaborative inquiry, though right now most of this is speculative. Here's a long excerpt since the piece is still locked down over at the Discover site:

On the face of it, idea that the speed of modern life will lead to cognitive overload is a familiar complaint: cultural critics like David Shenk and the late Neil Postman have warned of the dangers of accelerated society. But Damasio has a twist: he's not saying that the brain can't keep up with the society -- he's saying that part of the brain can't keep up with the society, while another part, thus far, has been game to go along for the ride.

"We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other, but that are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with time scales of a second or more. Than you have the cognitive system, which is much faster, because of the way it's wired, and because a lot of the fiber systems are totally myelinated -- which means it works much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names, in just a few hundredths of a second. And in fact it has been suggested that we're optimizing those times -- that we're working faster and faster. Certainly people that are younger are now capable of working at faster and faster rates." You need only watch a concert pianist's fingers -- or those of a teenager running fifteen simultaneous Instant Messenger chats -- to see how certain brain functions can, with adequate training, reach astonishing velocities.

But other brain functions may have fixed ceilings. "There is no evidence whatsoever that the emotional system is going to speed up," Damasio tells me. "In fact, I think that it's pretty clear that the emotional system, because it is a body regulatory system, is going to stay at those same slow time constants. There's this constant limit, which is that the fibers are unmyelinated. So the conduction is very slow." In a sense, this is an engineering problem: The system that builds somatic markers -- the system that encodes the stream of consciousness with value -- works more slowly than the system that feeds it data to encode. The result is not a short-circuit of our cognitive machinery. (We can in fact process all that data, and perhaps more.) The danger comes from the emotional system shorting out.

In Today's Times

It's been nearly four months since the book started appearing on the shelves, but for some odd reason, today is Mind Wide Open day at the New York Times. First there's this lovely review of the book, written by Jonathan Weiner, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Beak Of The Finch. He has some very nice things to say about the book, but also has a truly artful way of describing what I was trying to do:

Johnson's preoccupations, the weather systems of his own inner life, keep cycling back chapter after chapter: his horror when that window blew in and almost killed his wife; his moments of tenderness gazing at their sleeping newborn son. As he explores his inner world and the mental modules that help to shape it, we begin to feel that we are right in there with him -- and we have a new sense of what it means to be human.

Meanwhile, in the Week In Review section, Amy Harmon has a fascinating story on "neurodiversity" that includes a few paragraphs about my adventures writing Mind Wide Open. Compared to Jonathan Weiner's prose, however, my attempts at describing the objectives of the book are somewhat less than artful. You gotta love it when the Times quotes you saying: "Enough about the human race - I want to hear about me."

The Correct Procedure For Trashing My Book

Ever since Mind Wide Open's release in the States three months ago, when I began bombarding you with posts about my sales breakthroughs and glamorous media appearances, I've been planning on posting links to critical reviews to keep the blog from seeming too full of itself. For a while it looked like we were going to dodge that particular bullet, but fortunately the UK edition came along and generated the kind of review that causes some writers to lock themselves up in a closet for a month. It ran in The New Statesman last week, and it literally ends with the command: "Do not read this book."

Plug that quote on the top of the paperback cover and we're ready to go! Abbie Hoffman would be proud.

It turns out to be one of those reviews that appears to be written about some other book, where the reviewer has either willfully ignored or failed to understand the book's underlying argument. He spends most of the review critiquing the ambitions of consciousness studies and evolutionary psychology, despite the fact that I began the book by saying that it would have nothing to say about the question of consciousness, and that its general argument was significantly different from the evolutionary psychology approach (though not necessarily incompatible with it.) The question of brain science as a lens for personal self-awareness -- understanding the details of your own life, and not just how the brain evolved, or how the magic of conciousness happens -- doesn't really appear in the review, though it is the essential subject, not to mention the subtitle, of Mind Wide Open.

At one point, he refers to me "padding" the book with "autobiographical ramblings." There was another reference to prominence of "personal anecdotes" in a semi-critical reader review on Amazon, so allow me a few sentences to make something clear. If you'd like to write a critical review of Mind Wide Open, by all means go ahead, but it's not sufficient to throw out the allegation that the book contains autobiographical material and have that stand as a criticism on its own. It's like critiquing a physics textbook for having equations, or a novel for only containing made-up people. The book was designed to be a personal journey into brain science, an attempt to see if neuroscience's insights would change the way I thought about myself. So personal anecdotes are central to the argument, not some kind of padding. The way to criticize the book is to actually discuss the many insights that I describe: mindreading, oxytocin and stress, the different attention tools, the amygdala and my fear memories, mood congruity, and so on. (The New Statesman review doesn't mention any of these, of course.) You can say that these insights are 1) not accurate because I've got the science wrong, 2) too subjective to be empirically useful, 3) not really insights because they are commonplace ideas that you don't need brain science to illuminate. Any of those would serve as a valid critique, though of course I'd probably be inclined to argue with your interpretation. But simply denouncing the idea of a personal anecdote just makes it sound like you don't understand what the book is trying to do.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening.

Updated 5/2, 8:42 PM: Paul Myers comes through with a brilliant dissection of the bizarre logic in the New Statesman review.