“Eschew surplusage.”

― Mark Twain

• Saturday, January 30, 202111:00 AM 
  Saturday, May 22, 20212:00 PM

This program is full. Click HERE to join the waitlist

“I went to Kim Rosen’s “Death’s Door” last year, and it was undoubtedly the most powerful and profound retreat I’ve ever experienced. Invaluable for anyone dedicated to spiritual development.”

All the wisdom teachings of the world tell us, through one story or another, that the key to life lies in the manner in which we meet death within and around us. This 6 part online series is an opportunity to welcome all that emerges as we turn towards our own death, the deaths of our loved ones, and the losses, changes and “everyday dying” that abound in a life fully lived.

Poetry, ritual, movement, writing and guided inner inquiry will hold, heal, challenge, and reveal us. Within an exquisitely supportive sacred space, we will welcome the fears, losses, blessings and awakenings that come from opening to death and loss as a portal to fullest aliveness.

Kim has innovated unique techniques of working with the Zoom video platform that allows for deep intimacy, authenticity and a lush immersion in music, poetry, movement and connection. Optional homework explorations, readings and videos continue the conversation between gatherings, and the “Temple Wall”, a private social media site, provides a place to share and connect.

A note about what this is not: This is not 2.5 hours entrained to your device. It is an inner journey that will intentionally disrupt your ‘screen time’, because the primary focus is deep listening within.

Dates: Jan 30; Feb 20 ; March 13; April 3; April 24; May 22. Each session is 2-4:30pm EDT, EXCEPT the last session which is 2-5pm EDT. REMEMBER TO CONVERT IF YOU ARE NOT ON EASTERN TIME.

(Reddit.com)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wilhelm Reich
Reich in his mid-20s
Born	24 March 1897 Dobzau, Austria-Hungary (present-day Dobzau, Ukraine)
Died	3 November 1957 (aged 60) United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, United States
Cause of death	Heart failure
Resting place	Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine, United States 44.991027°N 70.713902°W
Nationality	Austrian
Medical career
Education	M.D. (1922), University of Vienna
Speciality	Psychoanalysis
Institutions	Vienna City Hospital Vienna Ambulatorium University of Oslo The New School, New York
Known for	Character analysismuscular armourorgastic potencyvegetotherapyFreudo-Marxismorgone
Notable work	Character Analysis (1933)The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)The Sexual Revolution (1936)
Family
Partner(s)	Annie Reich, née Pink (m. 1922–1933)Elsa Lindenberg (1932–1939)Ilse Ollendorf (m. 1946–1951)Aurora Karrer (1955–1957)
Children	Eva Reich [de] (1924–2008)Lore Reich Rubin (b. 1928)Peter Reich (b. 1944)
Parent(s)	Leon Reich, Cecilia Roniger
Relatives	Robert Reich (brother)

Wilhelm Reich (/raɪx/; German: [ʁaɪç]; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud.^[1] The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936), Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.^{[2][n 1]}

Reich’s work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud‘s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy.^[6] His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase “the sexual revolution” and according to one historian acted as its midwife.^[7] During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.^[8]

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud‘s outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium.^[9] Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called “orgastic potency“. He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria.^[10] He said he wanted to “attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment”.^[11]

From the 1930s he became an increasingly controversial figure, and from 1932 until his death in 1957 all his work was self-published.^[12] His message of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his political associates, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their “muscular armour”, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis.^[13] He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving coined the term “orgone“—from “orgasm” and “organism”—for a biological energy he said he had discovered, which he said others called God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.^[14]

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper’s in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a “fraud of the first magnitude”.^[15] Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court.^{[n 2]} He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.^[18]

Early life

Childhood

Reich in 1900

Reich was born the first of two sons to Leon Reich, a farmer, and his wife Cäcilie (née Roniger) in Dobzau, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now in Ukraine. Wilhelm Reich’s parents were married by Rabbi Schmelkes on June 4, 1895.^[19] There was a sister too, born one year after Reich, but she died in infancy. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Jujinetz, a village in Bukovina, where his father ran a cattle farm leased by his mother’s uncle, Josef Blum.^[20]

His father was described as a jealous man.^[21] Both parents were Jewish, but decided against raising the boys as Jews. Reich and his brother, Robert, were brought up to speak only German, were punished for using Yiddish expressions and forbidden from playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children.^[22]

As an adult Reich wrote extensively, in his diary, about his sexual precocity. He maintained that his first sexual experience was at the age of four when he tried to have sex with the family maid (with whom he shared a bed), that he would regularly watch the farm animals have sex, that he used a whip handle sexually on the horses while masturbating, and that he had almost daily sexual intercourse from the age of 11 with another of the servants. He wrote of regular visits to brothels, the first when he was 15, and said he was visiting them daily from the age of around 17. He also developed sexual fantasies about his mother, writing when he was 22 that he masturbated while thinking about her.^[23]

It is impossible to judge the truth of these diary entries, but Reich’s second daughter, the psychiatrist Lore Reich Rubin, told Christopher Turner that she believed Reich had been a victim of child sexual abuse, and that this explained his lifelong interest in sex and childhood sexuality.^[24]

Death of parents

Reich was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother was discovered having an affair with his live-in tutor. Reich wrote about the affair in 1920 in his first published paper, “Über einen Fall von Durchbruch der Inzestschranke” (“About a Case of Breaching the Incest Taboo”), presented in the third person as though about a patient.^[25] He wrote that he would follow his mother when she went to the tutor’s bedroom at night, feeling ashamed and jealous, and wondering if they would kill him if they found out that he knew. He briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him, on pain of threatening to tell his father. In the end, he did tell his father, and after a protracted period of beatings, his mother committed suicide in 1910, for which Reich blamed himself.^[25]

With the tutor ordered out of the house, Reich was sent to an all-male gymnasium in Czernowitz. It was during this period that a skin condition appeared, diagnosed as psoriasis, that plagued him for the rest of his life, leading several commentators to remark on his ruddy complexion. He visited brothels every day and wrote in his diary of his disgust for the women.^[26] His father died of tuberculosis in 1914, and because of rampant inflation the father’s insurance was worthless, so no money was forthcoming for the brothers.^[27] Reich managed the farm and continued with his studies, graduating in 1915 with Stimmeneinhelligkeit (unanimous approval). The Russians invaded Bukovina that summer and the Reich brothers fled, losing everything. Reich wrote in his diary: “I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left.”^[28]

1919–1930: Vienna

Undergraduate studies

Reich joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, serving from 1915 to 1918, for the last two years as a lieutenant at the Italian front with 40 men under his command. When the war ended he headed for Vienna, enrolling in law at the University of Vienna, but found it dull and switched to medicine after the first semester. He arrived with nothing in a city with little to offer; the overthrow of the Austria-Hungarian empire a few weeks earlier had left the newly formed Republic of German-Austria in the grip of famine. Reich lived on soup, oats and dried fruit from the university canteen, and shared an unheated room with his brother and another undergraduate, wearing his coat and gloves indoors to stave off the cold. He fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom he was dissecting a corpse, but it was largely unrequited.^[29]

Myron Sharaf, his biographer, wrote that Reich loved medicine but was caught between a reductionist/mechanistic and vitalist view of the world.^[30] Reich wrote later of this period:

The question, “What is Life?” lay behind everything I learned. … It became clear that the mechanistic concept of life, which dominated our study of medicine at the time, was unsatisfactory … There was no denying the principle of creative power governing life; only it was not satisfactory as long as it was not tangible, as long as it could not be described or practically handled. For, rightly, this was considered the supreme goal of natural science.^[30]

Introduction to Freud

Sigmund Freud

Reich first met Sigmund Freud in 1919, when he asked Freud for a reading list for a seminar concerning sexology. It seems they left a strong impression on each other. Freud allowed him to start meeting with analytic patients in September that year, although Reich was just 22 years old and still an undergraduate, which gave him a small income. He was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, becoming a regular member in October 1920, and began his own analysis with Isidor Sadger. He lived and worked out of an apartment on Berggasse 7, the street on which Freud lived at no. 19, in the Alsergrund area of Vienna.^[31]

One of Reich’s first patients was Lore Kahn, a 19-year-old woman with whom he had an affair. Freud had warned analysts not to involve themselves with their patients, but in the early days of psychoanalysis the warnings went unheeded. According to Reich’s diaries, Kahn became ill in November 1920 and died of sepsis after sleeping in a bitterly cold room she had rented as a place for her and Reich to meet (both his landlady and her parents had forbidden their meetings). Kahn’s mother suspected that her daughter had died after a botched illegal abortion, possibly performed by Reich himself. According to Christopher Turner, she found some of her daughter’s bloodied underwear in a cupboard.^[32]

It was a serious allegation to make against a physician. Reich wrote in his diary that the mother had been attracted to him and had made the allegation to damage him. She later committed suicide and Reich blamed himself.^[32] If Kahn did have an abortion, Turner wrote, she was the first of four of Reich’s partners to do so: Annie, his first wife, had several, and his long-term partners Elsa Lindenberg and Ilse Ollendorf (his second wife) each had one (supposedly) at Reich’s insistence.^[33]

First marriage, graduation

Two months after Kahn’s death, Reich accepted her friend, Annie Pink (1902–1971), as an analysand. Pink was Reich’s fourth female patient, a medical student three months shy of her 19th birthday. He had an affair with her too, and married her in March 1922 at her father’s insistence, with psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel and Edith Buxbaum as witnesses.^[34] Annie Reich became a well-known psychoanalyst herself. The marriage produced two daughters, Eva (1924–2008) and Lore (b. 1928), both of whom became physicians; Lore Reich Rubin also became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.^[35]

Because he was a war veteran, Reich was allowed to complete a combined bachelor’s and M.D. in four years, instead of six, and graduated in July 1922.^[36] After graduating, he worked in internal medicine at the city’s University Hospital, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922 to 1924 at the hospital’s neurological and psychiatric clinic under Professor Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927.^[37]

Vienna Ambulatorium

Staff of the Vienna Ambulatorium, 1922. Eduard Hitschmann is seated fourth from the left, Reich fifth, and Annie Reich first on the right.

In 1922 Reich began working in Freud’s psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, known as the Vienna Ambulatorium, which was opened on 22 May that year at Pelikangasse 18 by Eduard Hitschmann. Reich became the assistant director under Hitschmann in 1924 and worked there until his move to Berlin in 1930.^[38]

Between 1922 and 1932 the clinic offered free or reduced-cost psychoanalysis to 1,445 men and 800 women, many suffering from shell shock after World War I. It was the second such clinic to open under Freud’s direction; the first was the Poliklinik in Berlin, set up in 1920 by Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel.^[39]

Sharaf writes that working with labourers, farmers and students allowed Reich to move away from treating neurotic symptoms to observing chaotic lifestyles and anti-social personalities.^[37] Reich argued that neurotic symptoms such as obsessive–compulsive disorder were an unconscious attempt to gain control of a hostile environment, including poverty or childhood abuse. They were examples of what he called “character armour” (Charakterpanzer), repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech and body posture that served as defence mechanisms. According to Danto, Reich sought out patients at the Ambulatorium who had been diagnosed as psychopaths, believing that psychoanalysis could free them of their rage.^[40]

Reich joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924 and became its director of training.^[41] According to Danto, he was well-regarded for the weekly technical seminars he chaired at the Ambulatorium, where he gave papers on his theory of character structure, arguing that psychoanalysis should be based on the examination of unconscious character traits, later known as ego defences.^[42] The seminars were attended, from 1927, by Fritz Perls, who went on to develop Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls.^[43] Several commentators remarked on how captivating the seminars were and how eloquently Reich spoke. According to a Danish newspaper in 1934:

The moment he starts to speak, not at the lectern, but walking around it on cat’s paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Middle Ages, this man would have been sent into exile. He is not only eloquent, he also keeps his listeners spellbound by his sparking personality, reflected in his small, dark eyes.^[44]

Der triebhafte Charakter

Reich’s first book, Der triebhafte Charakter: eine psychoanalytische Studie zur Pathologie des Ich (“The Impulsive Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Pathology of the Self”), was published in 1925.^[45] It was a study of the anti-social personalities he had encountered in the Ambulatorium, and argued the need for a systematic theory of character.^[46] The book won him professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927 arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.^[47] The appointment was made over the objection of Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s second analyst in 1922 and who, according to Sharaf, regarded Reich as a psychopath.^{[n 3]} Reich found the society dull and wrote that he behaved “like a shark in a pond of carps”.^[50]

Orgastic potency

Further information: Orgastic potencyReich lived for a time on Berggasse in Vienna (seen here in 2010), where Freud lived at number 19

Beginning in 1924 Reich published a series of papers on the idea of “orgastic potency”, the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call Reich’s “Steckenpferd” (hobby horse).^[51] Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love depended on orgastic potency, the full discharge of the libido: “Sexual release in the sex act must correspond to the excitement which leads up to it.”^[52] He wrote: “It is not just to fuck … not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”^[53] He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of character analysis.^[54]

Whereas Reich’s work on character was well received by the psychoanalytic community, Sharaf writes, his work on orgastic potency was unpopular from the start and later ridiculed. He came to be known as the “prophet of the better orgasm” and the “founder of a genital utopia”.^[55]

Rest cure in Switzerland

Reich’s brother died of tuberculosis (TB) in 1926, the same disease that had killed their father. Turner writes that a quarter of deaths in Vienna were caused by TB in the 1920s. Reich himself contracted it in 1927 and spent several weeks in the winter of that year in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, where TB patients went for rest cures and fresh air before antibiotics became widely available around 1945. Turner writes that Reich underwent a political and existential crisis in Davos; he returned home in the spring angry and paranoid, according to Annie Reich. Some months later he and Annie were on the streets during the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were shot and killed by police and another 600 were injured. It seems that the experience changed Reich; he wrote that it was his first encounter with human irrationality.^[56] He began to doubt everything, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party of Austria:

As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.^[57]

Sex-pol movement

Partly in response to the shooting he had witnessed in Vienna, Reich, then 30, opened six free sex-counseling clinics in the city in 1927 for working-class patients. Each clinic was overseen by a physician, with three obstetricians and a lawyer on call, and offered what Reich called Sex-Pol counseling. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Reich offered a mixture of “psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives”, Danto writes, and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.^[58]

He also took to the streets in a mobile clinic, driving to parks and out to the suburbs with other psychoanalysts and physicians. Reich would talk to the teenagers and men, while a gynaecologist fitted the women with contraceptive devices, and Lia Laszky, the woman Reich fell in love with at medical school, spoke to the children. They also distributed sex-education pamphlets door to door.^[59]

Die Funktion des Orgasmus

Further information: Die Funktion des Orgasmus

Reich published Die Funktion des Orgasmus (“The Function of the Orgasm”) in 1927, dedicating it to Freud. He had presented a copy of the manuscript to Freud on the latter’s 70th birthday on 6 May 1926.^[60] Freud had not appeared impressed. He replied, “That thick?” when Reich handed it to him, and took two months to write a brief but positive letter in response, which Reich interpreted as a rejection.^{[61][n 4]} Freud’s view was that the matter was more complicated than Reich suggested, and that there was no single cause of neurosis.^[62] He wrote in 1928 to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Lou Andreas-Salomé:

We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the complicated nature of the psyche.^[63]

Visit to Soviet Union

In 1929 Reich and his wife visited the Soviet Union on a lecture tour, leaving the two children in the care of the psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein. Sharaf writes that he returned even more convinced of the link between sexual and economic oppression, and of the need to integrate Marx and Freud.^[64] In 1929 his article “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis” was published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, the German Communist Party journal. The article explored whether psychoanalysis was compatible with historical materialism, class struggle and proletarian revolution. Reich concluded that they were compatible if dialectical materialism was applied to psychology.^[65] This was one of the central theoretical statements of his Marxist period, which included The Imposition of Sexual Morality (1932), The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1932), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), “What is Class Consciousness?” (1934) and The Sexual Revolution (1936).

1930–1934: Germany, Denmark, Sweden

Verlag für Sexualpolitik

Plaque on Schlangenbader Straße 87, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, the house in which Reich lived, 1931–1933.

Reich and his wife moved to Berlin in November 1930, where he set up clinics in working-class areas, taught sex education and published pamphlets. He joined the Communist Party of Germany, but grew impatient over their delay in publishing one of his pamphlets, Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (1932), published in English as The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1972). He set up his own publishing house, Verlag für Sexualpolitik, and published the pamphlet himself.^[66]

His subsequent involvement in a conference promoting adolescent sexuality caused the party to announce that it would no longer publish his material. On March 24, 1933 Freud told him that his contract with the International Psychoanalytic Publishers to publish Character Analysis had been cancelled. Sharaf writes that this was almost certainly because of Reich’s stance on teenage sex.^[66]

Character Analysis

Further information: Character Analysis

Reich published what Robert Corrington called his masterpiece, Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker, in 1933. It was revised and published in English in 1946 and 1949 as Character Analysis. The book sought to move psychoanalysis toward a reconfiguration of character structure.^[67]

For Reich, character structure was the result of social processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family.^[67] Les Greenberg and Jeremy Safran write that Reich proposed a functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and tension in the body, or what he called character (or muscular/body) armour (Charakterpanzer).^[68]

Reich proposed that muscular armour was a defence that contained the history of the patient’s traumas.^[69] For example, he blamed Freud’s jaw cancer on his muscular armour, rather than his smoking: Freud’s Judaism meant he was “biting down” impulses, rather than expressing them.^[70] Dissolving the armour would bring back the memory of the childhood repression that had caused the blockage in the first place.^[68]

End of first marriage

Reich had several affairs during his marriage to Annie Reich, which ended in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and pupil of Elsa Gindler.^[71] He was living with Lindenberg in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend.^[72] Reich and Lindenberg left for Vienna the next day. They moved from there to Denmark, where Reich was excluded from the Danish Communist Party in November 1933 (without ever having joined it) because of his promotion of teenage sex and the publication that year of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which they regarded as “counterrevolutionary”. There were multiple complaints about his promotion of abortion, sex education, and the attempted suicide of a teenage patient. According to Turner, when Reich’s visa expired, it was not renewed.^[73]

He tried to find support among psychoanalysts in the UK so that he could settle there, and was interviewed in London by Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and James Strachey. They decided that he had been “insufficiently analysed” and had an unresolved hostility toward Freud.^[74] Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter—whom Jones had contacted about Reich’s desire to relocate to England—wrote in 1938: “There is a wall somewhere where he stops to understand the other person’s point of view and flies off into a world of his own … He is an unhappy person … and I am afraid this will end in sickness.”^[75]

Reich and Lindenberg moved instead to Malmö in Sweden, which Reich described as “better than a concentration camp”, but he was placed under surveillance when police suspected that the hourly visits of patients to his hotel room meant he was running a brothel, with Lindenberg as the prostitute.^[76] The government declined to extend his visa, and the couple had to move briefly back to Denmark, Reich under an assumed name.^[77]

Vegetotherapy

Further information: Vegetotherapy

From 1930 onwards, Reich began to treat patients outside the limits of psychoanalysis’s restrictions. He would sit opposite them, rather than behind them as they lay on a couch (the traditional psychoanalyst’s position), and begin talking to them and answering their questions, instead of offering the stock, “Why do you ask?” analyst’s response. He had noticed that after a successful course of psychoanalysis his patients would hold their bodies differently, so he began to try to communicate with the body using touch. He asked his male patients to undress down to their shorts, and sometimes entirely, and his female patients down to their underclothes, and began to massage them to loosen their body armour. He would also ask them to simulate physically the effects of certain emotions in the hope of triggering them.^[78]

He first presented the principles of what he called character-analytic vegetotherapy in August 1934, in a paper entitled “Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung” (“Psychological Contact and Vegetative Current”) at the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland.^[79] His second wife, Ilse Ollendorf, said vegetotherapy replaced the psychoanalytic method of never touching a patient with “a physical attack by the therapist”.^[80]

The method eliminated the psychoanalytic doctrine of neutrality. Reich argued that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient, and that he wanted his patients to see him as human.^[79] He would press his thumb or the palm of his hand hard (and painfully) on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity.^[81] He wrote that the purpose of the massage was to retrieve the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression. If the session worked, he would see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, which he called the “orgasm reflex”. According to Sharaf, the twin goals of Reichian therapy were the attainment of this orgasm reflex during sessions and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich briefly considered calling it “orgasmotherapy”, but thought better of it.^[82]

Just before the crucial August 1934 Lucerne conference (13th International Congress of Psycho-analysis), Reich was (perhaps naively) ignorant of the ground-swell of opinion against him. At the meeting, he was asked to resign from the International Psychoanalytical Association, where Anna Freud was the “acknowledged leader” at the time, for prioritizing his revolutionary political-social (Communist) agenda over Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas. Besides the theoretical differences, there was also, by that time, a significant level of “appeasement” to the increasing power of National Socialism. Reich had protested to Anna Freud (Secretary of the International Association) about the omission of his name from the list of German members of the Association, apparently on the spurious grounds that he was going to join the Scandinavian branch. Ernest Jones was the President of the International Association and he had also turned against Reich, combined with Paul Federn and Max Eitingon, who had all levelled personal attacks against Reich.^[83]

According to Lore Reich Rubin, Reich’s daughter, Anna Freud was responsible for destroying her father’s career: “She got rid of him”.^[84][85] However, there is also some evidence that she later regretted this. He arrived at the conference, relatively unconscious about his future treatment. He presented a significant paper and was then informed that he was to be excluded. Turner writes that he cemented his reputation as a madman, camping in a tent outside the conference hall and reportedly carrying a large knife in his belt.^[86] According to the psychiatrist Grete L. Bibring, Paul Federn declared, “Either Reich goes or I go.”^[87]

1934–1939: Norway

Bioelectricity

Willy Brandt

In October 1934 Reich and Lindenberg moved to Oslo, Norway, where Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, had invited Reich to lecture on character analysis and vegetotherapy. They ended up staying for five years.^[88] During his time in Norway, Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, exploring whether Freud’s metaphor of the libido was in fact electricity or a chemical substance, an argument Freud had proposed in the 1890s but had abandoned.^[89] Reich argued that conceiving of the orgasm as nothing but mechanical tension and relaxation could not explain why some experience pleasure and others do not. He wanted to know what additional element had to be present for pleasure to be felt.^[90]

Reich was influenced by the work of the Austrian internist Friedrich Kraus, who argued in his paper Allgemeine und Spezielle Pathologie der Person (1926) that the biosystem was a relay-like switch mechanism of electrical charge and discharge. Reich wrote in an essay, “Der Orgasmus als Elektro-physiologische Entladung” (“The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge”, 1934), that the orgasm is just such a bioelectrical discharge and proposed his “orgasm formula”: mechanical tension (filling of the organs with fluid; tumescence) → bioelectrical charge → bioelectrical discharge → mechanical relaxation (detumescence).^[91]

In 1935 Reich bought an oscillograph and attached it to friends and students, who volunteered to touch and kiss each other while Reich read the tracings. One of the volunteers was a young Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of Germany. At the time, he was married to Reich’s secretary, Gertrude Gaasland, and was living in Norway to organize protests against the Nazis. Reich also took measurements from the patients of a psychiatric hospital near Oslo, including catatonic patients, with the permission of the hospital’s director.^[92] Reich described the oscillograph experiments in 1937 in Experimentelle Ergebnisse über die elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst (The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety).^[93]

Bion experiments

Further information: Spontaneous generation and AbiogenesisCancer specialist Leiv Kreyberg (third from right; picture circa 1937) dismissed Reich’s work.^[94]

From 1934 to 1939 Reich conducted what he called the bion experiments, which he published as Die Bione: zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens in Oslo in February 1938 (published in English in 1979 and later called The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life).^[95] He examined protozoa and grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron and animal tissue, boiling them and adding potassium and gelatin. Having heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he wrote that he had seen bright, glowing, blue vesicles. His photographs and films of his experiments were taken by Kari Berggrav. He called them “bions” and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between life and non-life. He wrote that when he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born, dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air or on other materials.^[96]

In what Sharaf writes was the origins of the orgone theory, Reich said he could see two kinds of bions, the blue vesicles and smaller red ones shaped like lancets. He called the former PA-bions and the latter T-bacilli, the T standing for Tod, German for death.^[97] He wrote in his book The Cancer Biopathy (1948) that he had found T-bacilli in rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a local hospital, and when injected into mice they caused inflammation and cancer. He concluded that, when orgone energy diminishes in cells through aging or injury, the cells undergo “bionous degeneration”. At some point the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.^[98]

Opposition to his ideas

Bronisław Malinowski wrote to newspapers in Norway in support of Reich.^[99]

Scientists in Oslo reacted strongly to Reich’s work on bions, deriding it as nonsense. Tidens Tegn, a leading liberal newspaper, launched a campaign against him in 1937, supported by scientists and other newspapers.^[100] Between March and December 1938, more than 165 articles or letters appeared in 13 Norwegian newspapers denouncing him.^[101][102]

In 1937 the Norwegian pathologist Leiv Kreyberg was allowed to examine one of Reich’s bion preparations under a microscope. Kreyberg wrote that the broth Reich had used as his culture medium was indeed sterile, but that the bacteria were ordinary staphylococci. He concluded that Reich’s control measures to prevent infection from airborne bacteria were not as foolproof as Reich believed. Kreyberg accused Reich of being ignorant of basic bacteriological and anatomical facts, while Reich accused Kreyberg of having failed to recognize living cancer cells under magnification.^[103]

Reich sent a sample of the bacteria to a Norwegian biologist, Theodor Thjøtta of the Oslo Bacteriological Institute, who also blamed airborne infection. Kreyberg and Thjøtta’s views were published in the country’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, on 19 and 21 April 1938. Kreyberg alleged that “Mr. Reich” knew less about bacteria and anatomy than a first-year medical student. When Reich requested a detailed control study, Kreyberg responded that his work did not merit it.^[103]

By February 1938 Reich’s visa had expired. Several Norwegian scientists argued against an extension, Kreyberg saying, “If it is a question of handing Dr. Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if one could get rid of him in a decent manner, that would be the best.”^[104] The writer Sigurd Hoel asked: “When did it become a reason for deportation that one looked in a microscope when one was not a trained biologist?” Reich received support from overseas, first from the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who in March wrote to the press in Norway that Reich’s sociological works were “a distinct and valuable contribution toward science”, and from A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill, a progressive school in England, who argued that “the campaign against Reich seems largely ignorant and uncivilized, more like fascism than democracy”.^[99]

Norway was proud of its intellectual tolerance, so the “Reich affair”, especially following the country’s 1936 expulsion of Leon Trotsky, put Nygaardsvold’s government on the spot. A compromise was found. Reich was given his visa, but a royal decree was issued stipulating that anyone wanting to practice psychoanalysis needed a licence, and it was understood that Reich would not be given one. Throughout the affair Reich issued just one public statement, when he asked for a commission to replicate his bion experiments. Sharaf writes that the opposition to his work affected his personality and relationships. He was left humiliated, no longer comfortable in public, and seething with bitterness against the researchers who had denounced him.^[105]

Personal life

Reich’s home in Frogner, Oslo. A blue plaque, in Norwegian, reads: “The physician and psychoanalyst WILHELM REICH (1897–1957) lived and worked here 1935–39. Developed character analysis and the body-oriented therapy.”

According to Sharaf, 1934–1937 was the happiest period of Reich’s personal life, despite the professional problems. His relationship with Elsa Lindenberg was good and he considered marrying her. When she became pregnant in 1935, they were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture for the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who saw the future as too unsettled. To Lindenberg’s great distress, Sharaf writes, Reich insisted on an abortion, at that time illegal. They went to Berlin, where the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson helped to arrange it.^[106]

In 1937 Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who had been married to a colleague of his. According to Sigurd Hoel, the analysis would stop because of the relationship, then the relationship would end and the analysis would start up again. The patient eventually threatened to go to the press, but was persuaded that it would harm her as much as it would Reich. Around the same time, Reich also had an affair with Gerd Bergersen, a 25-year-old Norwegian textile designer.^[107]

Despite the affairs, Sharaf writes that, as the newspaper campaign against Reich gained pace, he developed an intense jealousy toward Lindenberg, demanding that she not have a separate life of any kind. He even physically assaulted a composer with whom she was working. Lindenberg considered calling the police but decided Reich could not afford another scandal. His behaviour took its toll on their relationship, and when Reich asked her to accompany him to the United States, she said no.^[107]

1939–1957: United States

Teaching, second marriage

When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Reich’s ex-wife and daughters had already left for the United States. Later that year, Theodore P. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Wolfe offered to help Reich settle in the States, and managed to arrange an invitation from The New School in New York for Reich to teach a course on “Biological Aspects of Character Formation”. Wolfe and Walter Briehl, a former student of Reich’s, put up $5,000 to guarantee his visa.^[108] Wolfe also pulled strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the State Department.^[109] Reich wrote in his diary in May 1939:

I am sitting in a completely empty apartment waiting for my American visa. I have misgivings as to how it will go. … I am utterly and horribly alone!

It will be quite an undertaking to carry on all the work in America. Essentially, I am a great man, a rarity, as it were. I can’t quite believe it myself, however, and that is why I struggle against playing the role of a great man.^[110]

He received the visa in August 1939 and sailed out of Norway on 19 August on the SS Stavangerfjord, the last ship to leave for the United States before the war began on 3 September.^[109] He began teaching at The New School, where he remained until May 1941, living first at 7502 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Queens, where he conducted experiments on mice with cancer, injecting them with bions. He built a small Faraday cage to examine the vapors and lights he said the bions were producing.^[111] In October 1939 his secretary Gertrud Gaasland introduced him to Ilse Ollendorf, 29 years old at the time. Reich was still in love with Lindenberg, but Ollendorf started organizing his life for him, becoming his bookkeeper and laboratory assistant.^[112] They began living together in the Kessel Street house on Christmas Day 1939. She was eight weeks pregnant, but according to Turner he insisted that she have an abortion.^[111] Five years later, in 1944, they had a son, Peter, and were married in 1946.^[112]

Sharaf writes that Reich’s personality changed after his experience in Oslo.^[102] He became socially isolated and kept his distance even from old friends and his ex-wife. His students in the United States came to know him as a man that no colleague, no matter how close, called by his first name. In January 1940 he wrote to Lindenberg to end their relationship once and for all, telling her that he was in despair and that he believed he would end up dying like a dog.^[113]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

Gazing at a painting feels like an almost magical encounter with another mind but what real effects does art have on us?

The Boating Party (1893-94), by Mary Cassatt. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Ellen Winner is professor of psychology at Boston College and senior research associate at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her most recent book is How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration(2018). 

22 April 2021 (aeon.co)

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Scenario 1: suppose you’ve been gazing intensely at Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1659), which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and later you’re told that this was actually a painting made by a deep-learning machine that had internalised Rembrandt’s style through exposure to his paintings. You immediately feel that something’s lost. The museum would certainly take the work off its walls. What’s the thing that’s lost?

Scenario 2: recently, thousands of paintings covering almost eight miles were found on remote cliffs in the Amazonian rainforest; estimated age: 12,500 years. The Amazonian cliff art depicts humans dancing and holding hands, and now extinct mastodons, Ice Age horses with wild faces (some so detailed that the horse’s hair was shown) and giant sloths – like the weird creatures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. This made headlines. Standing face-to-face with these actual images on the rocks would be exciting. If the paintings turned out to be a hoax, we’d no longer feel the thrill of imagining the prehistoric humans perhaps so like us painting these images.

For me, as a psychologist with a special interest and expertise in the arts, our fascination with art raises two long-standing and fundamental questions, ones that have engaged philosophers, psychologists and art lovers. First, why are we so drawn to works of art? For their beauty, of course, but that can’t be all, as the thought-experiments above show us. Second, what kinds of demonstrable beneficial effects, if any, can engagement in the arts have on us?

As for the first question – why do we care so much? – I argue that we’re drawn to works of art because they connect us quite directly to the imagined mind of the artist. We believe that artists mean something by what they produce, even if it’s sometimes difficult to discern just what meanings were intended. And thus, whenever we take something to be art, rather than accident or functional artefact, we automatically read into it intentionality and meaning.

When we look at a Rembrandt, we feel like we’re reading a message sent to us today by this long-ago genius. The brushstrokes are clues to how his arm was moving as he painted, and how his arm moved can be read as an expression of his state of mind as he created this image. His self-portraits suggest a certain kind of self-scrutiny. We feel that we can see Rembrandt’s awareness of how he’s coming across, and understand his penetrative self-analysis in the series of self-portraits made over time as he aged. We have analogous reactions when we look at the Amazonian rock paintings. We try to imagine what these prehistoric artists with minds like ours were thinking, feeling and intending by their actions in painting these images.

It’s well-established that people dislike forgeries. Two recent documentaries, Driven to Abstraction (2019) and Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020), explore the biggest and most successful forgery-art scandal in memory. For more than 10 years beginning in 1994, a woman who said she represented a rich collector who wished to remain anonymous brought at least 40 paintings to the prestigious Knoedler gallery in New York. The paintings were by the most famous 20th-century artists – Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, among others. The gallery owner reported that she’d been overwhelmed by the beauty of these works. She bought them all for very low prices, having been told that the anonymous collector who was selling them didn’t care about money, and then Knoedler turned them around at auction for many millions.

The gallery had either overlooked or covered up the fact that these paintings didn’t come with any evidence of how they came to be owned by the anonymous collector. Though some art experts said the works looked authentic, others disagreed. Nonetheless, the paintings were sold at auction for a total of about $70 million. Much of the high-end art world had been duped. Little by little, the truth came out, ending with the confession in court of the woman who’d brought the paintings to the gallery. She admitted that the paintings were fakes made by Pei-Shen Qian, a painter from China who was living in Queens, New York. In China, making fakes is traditionally not frowned upon – it is a specialty of some artists – and one of the documentaries takes us to one of the studios in China where fakes are churned out.

The collectors who’d been fooled were outraged. But if they’d found the paintings so thrillingly beautiful in the first place, why should they care? One reason is obviously the paintings’ loss of value: what would have been worth millions as an original is worth next to nothing when outed as a forgery. There’s also the possibility that a beautiful painting ceases to look so beautiful when we look at it knowing it’s a forgery – as if the negative tinge of fraudulence and immorality spills over into the painting’s aesthetic appeal. Then there’s the question of snobbery, as Arthur Koestler argued in 1964, noting how, when a friend of his learned that she had a genuine drawing rather than a mass-produced print, she hung it conspicuously on her wall, even though it hadn’t changed physically. But we don’t only dislike forgeries that we’ve bought – we also dislike discovering them on the walls of a museum, and certainly snobbery can’t be involved when there’s no ownership.

On what basis could an assistant’s perfect copy be worse than the artist’s perfect copy?

There’s another, deeper, reason for our dislike of forgeries. If artworks are in fact intimately connected with what we imagine to be the mind that actually made them, then reproductions and forgeries of paintings, no matter how high-quality, don’t have that same power over us. Copies made by someone other than Rembrandt don’t allow us to feel that we’re communing directly with the mind of a Rembrandt.

My research group conducted an experiment to rule out explanations based on monetary value and immorality. First, we had to figure out how to strip a forgery of its loss of monetary value and its immorality. We decided that a perfect copy by an artist’s assistant, signed by the actual artist, and worth the same on the art market as the original, would be illuminating. To avoid the immorality stigma, we told participants that having assistants produce work for famous artists is commonplace in the artworld, and also had them rate the morality of the copiers so we could make sure participants believed us. Thus, like a forgery, this would be a copy but it wouldn’t be immoral, and it would be worth as much as the original. Participants were also shown the exact-same image and told that it was a copy of the original by the artist. The key question was whether the copy by the assistant was devalued relative to the copy by the artist.

Participants rated the duplicate by the artist as more creative, original and influential than the duplicate by the assistant. This preference had to have been independent of monetary value (since the two copies were worth the same amount of money), and also proved independent of moral evaluation after we controlled statistically for any lower ratings of the morality of the assistant’s action. Neither was an original: both were copies. On what basis, then, could an assistant’s perfect copy be worse than the artist’s perfect copy?

The explanation that we’re left with is that people believe, if irrationally, that artists imbue their works with their essence at the moment of creation – even if these works are copies by the artist of the original. The psychologist Paul Bloom has written about this kind of irrational belief in relation to what he calls essentialism. Essentialism explains our preference for objects with particular histories because of a kind of magical thinking based on a causal story of contact. The belief that certain objects have inner essences explains our preference for objects with sentimental value: if I lose my wedding ring, I’m not fully satisfied by an exact replacement; if a child loses her worn teddy bear, she’s not mollified by a gift of a new one. In the case of an artwork, the belief in the artist’s essence is what allows us to feel we’re connecting to the mind of the artist. Our reverence for originals takes an absurdly extreme form in the recent craze for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), where collectors and traders spend huge sums of money on unique ‘ownership’ of a digital artwork that anyone can download for free. Since there’s no such thing as the original of a digital file, the artist can now certify the file as the one and only ‘original copy’, and make a fortune. Time will tell whether this is a transient fad or a new way of establishing the feeling of a relationship to the mind of the digital artist.

But our reverence for originals isn’t universal. Treating the original as special and sacred is a Western attitude. In China and Japan, for example, it’s acceptable to create exact replicas, and these are valued as much as the original – especially because an ancient original might degrade over time, but a new replica will show us how the work looked originally. And, as mentioned, there are studios in China where artists are employed to create fakes. Perhaps our culture teaches us to respond to artworks by inferring the mind behind the art.

Turning to the second question – what are the potential beneficial effects of art? – it feels intuitively plausible to say that art has a positive effect on our mental health and wellbeing, and that it makes us more compassionate and empathetic human beings. It turns out that there’s some evidence for the wellbeing claim, but that evidence for the empathy claim is still wanting.

Many people would agree that, while art is not a biological necessity like eating and sleeping, making and responding to art are activities important for human flourishing. But how might art have such an effect on us, and do we have any evidence that this is so? I offer evidence here for two seemingly opposite ways in which art can improve our wellbeing – by allowing us to escape, and by allowing us to confront and understand negative emotions.

First, consider the idea of art as an escape. Aristotle believed that dramatic tragedies work on us via catharsis – they provoke pity and fear, which then wash away at the end of the play, leaving us relieved. Art therapists use artmaking to help people work through trauma. But there’s a diametrically opposite way in which art can work on us, and that’s via escape. We might think of escape as a cop-out, but it plays an important role in wellbeing. When art allows us to escape, it takes us out of our day-to-day world to another reality. This is why so many of us can’t go to sleep without entering a fictional world – whether in a novel or a television series.

The beneficial emotional effects of escape through visual artmaking have been shown in the work of the psychologist Jennifer Drake, formerly my doctoral student and now an associate professor at Brooklyn College. When adults as well as children are asked to think about a very sad and upsetting personal experience, and then to make a drawing either about the sad memory, or about something completely different, they report a positive mood change (their mood is measured by self-report both before and after the drawing experience). What’s most interesting, however, is that mood is elevated significantly more not when people use art to focus on their sadness but instead when artmaking helps them to escape from thinking about their sadness – when they can think of something different from their sad memory. This finding, which has been replicated, shows that artmaking causes us to feel better when we’re distressed by spiriting us away from those unsettling feelings, rather than by allowing us to focus on and process these feelings.

Second, consider the idea of art as allowing understanding of negative emotions. Philosophers have wondered why we seek out art that confronts us with images and stories of suffering, at the same time as we try to avoid such witnessing or feelings of suffering in our actual lives. Why do we love Rembrandt’s 1659 self-portrait as a pensive, sad and worried-looking old man? Do we enjoy the sadness that this work makes us feel? Thalia Goldstein, another former student of mine and now assistant professor at George Mason University in Virginia, tried to ferret out the differences between the experience of personal sadness and the experience of sadness from art. She asked people to rate their feelings of sadness and anxiety as they thought about a very sad personal memory and as they viewed tragic film clips. Respondents felt equally sad from both the films and the autobiographical memories. What differentiated the autobiographical memory response was that it also triggered anxiety. The sadness from the films, as people projected themselves into the worlds of others, resulted in pure sadness, untinged with the aversive feeling of anxiety.

Does looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits as an old man make us more compassionate towards the aged?

The psychologist Winfried Menninghaus has offered us the ‘distancing-embracing’ model to explain why we’re drawn to art that so often induces negative emotions. Negative emotions have been shown to compel our attention, increase our emotional involvement, and make the art more memorable and more moving (and feeling moved is pleasurable). Because we know we’re experiencing art, which is a form of make-believe, we distance ourselves from these emotions and remain in control of them. Art invites us in to embrace negative emotions because these occur in a safe space – with no practical consequences for our own lives. We know that they’re make-believe. The psychologist Paul Rozin referred to this as ‘benign masochism’ in a safe context. And by embracing negative emotions, we savour them and come to better understand them.

While art might be good for our wellbeing, can it also make us behave more empathically? If art connects us with the mind of the creator, isn’t that a form of empathy? The problem with the art-creates-empathy-claim is that it means more than connecting with the mind of the artist. It also means behaving more compassionately (or endorsing more compassionate policies) as a result of connecting to others’ mental states.

The art/empathy claim is plausible only when we confront art about suffering and injustice. The British artist Luke Jerram created a sculpture of a person sleeping under a plastic sheet (made out of glass) on top of a piece of cardboard, and left this on a street in Bristol. Presumably, he meant to raise awareness about homelessness – and perhaps move people to act. Pablo Picasso’s oil painting Guernica (1937) depicts the devastation wrought on a town in Spain by German bombs; Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 (1814) depicts Spanish soldiers being executed by Napoleon’s occupying army. Do these works turn us into pacifists? Does looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits as an old man make us more compassionate towards the aged?

Though the art/empathy claim is made broadly about the arts, it’s most often made about the narrative arts – fiction, film, theatre. As heard in this interview, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes strongly that, because literature trains our ability to stand in others’ shoes, it makes us more empathetic. And, inscribed on a plaque at San Francisco Playhouse, we read:

Our theater is an empathy gym where we come to practice our powers of compassion … And as we walk through these doors we take with us greater powers of understanding to make our community a better place.

In a radio interview, the neuroscientist Jamil Zaki, an empathy researcher at Stanford University in California, says that he thinks ‘of lots of different forms of art as empathy boot camp’, and that ‘if you see a painting of someone being whipped, or they’re weeping profusely, then you take on that state.’

The general claim is that reading literature and watching films and theatre productions cause us to practise empathy: we put ourselves into the shoes of another – often of others very different from ourselves – and this transport humanises the other. The philosopher Richard Rorty concurs. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), he points to books about injustice – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) – and suggests that, by learning about the destructive effects of cruelty, readers will become less cruel in their own behaviour. It is said that when Beecher Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he said to her: ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.’ Whether or not this story is actually true, and it’s disputed, it nicely captures the belief that literature can change minds and change behaviours.

The belief that reading fiction makes us better, more empathetic human beings sounds right. We all know from personal experience that we often empathise very strongly with fictional characters. The question is whether art can change our attitudes and behaviours once we’ve closed the pages on the novel or left the theatre, making us behave more empathetically and compassionately towards others. When we leave the fictional world, do we feel we’ve paid our empathy dues?

Working with Ruoyan Zeng, an undergraduate honours student at Boston College, I recently completed a study (unpublished) that provides some support for the claim that narratives about suffering can increase rather than deplete empathy. We had 114 college students sign up with us for ‘a study on the effect of reading’. In one condition, participants read Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018) by Jose Antonio Vargas. This memoir recounts how the author was a child in the Philippines when he was sent to live with relatives in the United States in hopes of finding a better life, and the identity crisis he experienced after finding out that he was an undocumented immigrant. In the other condition, participants read only factual information about the plight of undocumented immigrants in the US.

Before reading, everyone completed an eight-item survey probing their attitudes about undocumented immigrants, asking, for example, how strongly they agreed (on a sliding five-point scale) with statements such as:

• Young adults brought over as children without papers should go back to their home country and wait in line to come here legally, no matter the conditions at home, and no matter how long this takes.
• Families who bring their children to the US without recognised status often have no choice because they’re fleeing from extreme violence, terror and hunger.

Answers to these questions generated an attitude score for each individual. Participants completed this same survey immediately after reading, and again one month later.

Many of the most heinous Nazis loved art, literature and music

Before reading, there was no difference in attitudes between the two groups. However, immediately after reading, the memoir group showed a statistically significant gain in endorsing empathetic and compassionate policies towards undocumented immigrants, while the fact group’s attitudes remained unchanged. One month later, we documented some backsliding: the attitudes of the memoir group started to shift back to where they were at the beginning, making the difference between the two groups no longer significant.

Such a decline after one month, with an intervention involving only one reading, isn’t terribly surprising. It’s exceedingly difficult to change people’s attitudes, and it would be naive to think that one reading could effect a permanent change. Clearly, many readings (and perhaps also discussions of the readings) would be more likely to lead to lasting change. And there’s another issue: almost all of our participants started out with positive attitudes about undocumented immigrants. Those in the memoir group grew more positive. But could we have changed the attitudes of people who, prior to reading, had very negative attitudes? This remains to be seen – and we’re now initiating that study – but surely this will be much harder to demonstrate.

Empathy might well work to make us behave more compassionately. But it could also do the opposite. Bloom cautions that knowing what someone else is feeling also makes some people better at knowing how to make them suffer. And, of course, we’re often reminded of the fact that many of the most heinous Nazis loved art, literature and music. And so, while engaging with art might increase our empathy and compassionate behaviour, there’s no guarantee that it will do so. We ought to resist wishful thinking about the arts unless we have the evidence needed to support rosy claims.

We’re drawn to art for many reasons, but one particularly powerful reason is to experience the feeling that we’re engaging with the mind of a great artist. Take away this possibility by telling us that the work was created by an assistant, a forger or a deep-learning machine, and we’re disappointed, even angered. As far as the effects of engaging with art, artmaking has positive effects on our mood, and viewing art allows us to engage with negative emotions in a way that’s protective and leads to the pleasurable experience of feeling moved. But whether or not the empathy we feel for the artist – say, for Rembrandt as an old man, or that which we feel for the characters in a narrative – actually changes our behaviour once we leave the world of the museum or the novel or film or play, those are as-yet unanswered questions.

To read more on art and wellbeing, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

MakingArtWellbeing

APRIL 22, 2021 (counterpunch.org)

BY JONATHAN COOK

Photograph Source: Joël Kuiper – CC BY 2.0

Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.

Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.

In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.

This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pin-pricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.

Paradox and mystery

Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.

But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.

The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.

At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.

And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.

Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.

Conceit and humility

Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.

There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.

The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.

When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.

Mind and matter

Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.

Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.

Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.

Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.

We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.

Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.

Science and power

Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.

The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.

Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.

But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.

In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.

Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”

He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”

Doctors and clerics

But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.

In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.

But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.

Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.

Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.

But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?

Fear and quick-fixes

For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.

So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?

Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies.

Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.

Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

by Astro Butterfly (astrobutterfly.com)

On April 26th, 20219 we have a Full Moon at 7° Scorpio. The Full Moon is opposite Uranus in Taurus, square Saturn in Aquarius and trine Mars in Cancer. 

Full Moons in Scorpio are intense by definition (we are dealing with Scorpio energy after all) and this one is no exception.

Mars in a water sign will fuel our emotions even more, while Uranus will seek an outlet for them, despite Saturn’s effort to keep us in check. 

This combo is dynamite. But when there is tension, when there is friction, things happen. And change is always a good thing, even if it may not always feel that way.  

Taurus Vs Scorpio – Freedom Bears Consequences

The Full Moon is a Sun-Moon opposition, so it is a reflection of the qualities of the opposite sign.

The Full Moon in Scorpio is a reflection of what is going on in Taurus. 

At the Full Moon in Scorpio, the Sun is conjunct Uranus in Taurus (and opposite the Moon).

Sun conjunct Uranus = a desire to be free, independent, autonomous, to depend on nothing and no one.

Scorpio, on the other side of the axis, is pretty much the opposite.

Scorpio is covenants. Scorpio is debt. Freedom bears consequences, and everything we do has a ripple effect. We all pay our dues sooner or later. What goes around always comes around.   

In our desire to be free and not having to worry about the future, we want to own stuff. But the more we own, the more we pile up, and the more we become a slave of our possessions. Stuff needs to be put into use. Money needs to circulate.

What’s no longer in use needs to be repurposed, recycled, or disposed of.

Stuff cannot just exist in a vacuum, and nothing lasts forever, as much as we want to freeze the status quo and defy the laws of nature.

The only constant is change. 

Full Moon In Scorpio – We’re In This Together

Taurus is “mine” and Scorpio is “ours”. Of course, owning stuff is an absolutely necessary process in our development. If you don’t have food in the fridge, you starve. If you don’t have warm clothes, you get sick. 

Taurus teaches us to become self-autonomous and to take care of ourselves. However, once we achieve this goal, from a certain point onwards, we realize that we can only go so far on our own.

There comes a point – always – when we’re better off joining forces, or merging with another entity – a project, a person, a community.

And this merging always comes at the expense of our personal freedom. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and evolution-wise, it is absolutely necessary.

Happy couples may miss their bachelor years, but overall, they find more value in the intimacy of the relationship.

Being part of a community may mean you have to turn your volume down when you listen to music – but it also means there is a neighbor there to rely on.  

Full Moon In Scorpio – What Goes Around Comes Around

Scorpio is associated with transformation, letting go, and purging. When you say “Scorpio” you automatically think of “what do I need to let go of?”.

But here we miss the incredible transformational potential Scorpio can offer.

Scorpio is not just about letting go. In autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees, the tree does just not let go of useless, dry leaves.

These dry leaves go back to the earth and transform into nutrients. They don’t just go away. They don’t just die. 

If it wasn’t for the leaves falling down and feeding the three through winter, the tree would dry out. Without trees, we wouldn’t have oxygen. Life on earth would cease to exist.

The process of transformation from one state of being to another is so very feared, by all of us – but it is a normal, and absolute necessity of life.

Just because things are no longer the way they used to be, just because they change their status, their properties, doesn’t mean they cease to exist. They simply become something else. 

The Full Moon in Scorpio is a great opportunity to ask yourself:

• What do I cling to? What freedom can I find by letting go of what is mine? 
• Where am I stuck? What can I repurpose so I can move forward? 
• Who am I no longer willing to be? Who am I becoming? 

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Photo by Maskot/Getty

Tal Dotan Ben-Soussanis the director of the Research Institute for Neuroscience, Education and Didactics (RINED) – Paoletti Foundation. As a neuroscientist and bio-psychologist, she has published numerous articles on neuroplasticity, mindfulness, movement and meditation, and she coordinates international conferences integrating theoretical, methodological and practical approaches on various topics, such as silence, logic and neuro-education. She lives in Assisi, Italy.

Edited by Christian Jarrett

April 21, 2021 (psyche.co)

William James, the father of Western psychology, in 1902 defined spiritual experiences as states of higher consciousness, which are induced by efforts to understand the general principles or structure of the world through one’s inner experience. At the core of his view of spirituality is what we might call ‘connectedness’, which refers to the fact that individual goals can be truly realised only in the context of the whole – one’s relationship to the world and to others.

Traditionally, this spiritual state has been described as divine, achievable through contemplative and embodied practices, such as prayer, meditation and rhythmic rituals. Indeed, this higher state of consciousness and connection has been reported in many spiritual traditions, ranging from Buddhism to Sufism and Judaism to Christianity. However, recent neuroscientific research shows that the same state can be achieved by secular practices too. Scientific and creative epiphanies with their accompanying ecstatic states characterised by a sense of unity and bliss are similar to religious experiences, with both involving a higher state of presence and observation. Many geniuses, such as Albert Einstein and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, reported spiritual-like states during their revelations or breakthroughs. But these don’t have to be the rare experiences of a chosen few. They can be reached in daily life. As the Nobel laureate and poet Czesław Miłosz put it: ‘Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous.’

I’m a neuroscientist and, among other things, I study the way that spiritual states are reflected in the brain and other parts of the body. Spiritual practices have been shown to be closely linked to self-awareness, empathy and a sense of connectedness, all of which can be correlated with the frequency of brainwaves as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG). Studies using EEG have demonstrated how ‘fragmented’ or out of step our whole brain activity can be much of the time, suggestive of conflicts between our behaviour, thinking, feeling and communication. On the other hand, expert meditators demonstrate more ‘harmonious’ brain waves, which could be indicative of greater synchrony or connectivity within and across different neural areas. In short, spirituality, similar to love, has physiological effects in the brain and body, and EEG provides a window on these changes.

What’s more, research suggests that we can do more than just measure this kind of activity. We can also train our brains to behave in a more ‘aware’ way by engaging in activities that facilitate greater connection or neural synchronisation. Higher synchronisation – imagine a large group of brain cells singing together – has been found following the practice of different contemplative paradigms, such as meditation and prayer (creating, as it were, slower ocean waves, now growing calmer and calmer). One way of interpreting this is that neuronal synchronisation enhances our brain ‘harmony’ or ‘integrity’ – achieving a state in which the brain works in a more congruent way, adopting a more global perspective. Other findings point to the psychological consequences of this state – greater neuronal synchronisation tends to enable a greater ability to make moral judgments and problem-solve creatively.

Neuronal synchronisation also correlates with feeling more self-connected, which can, in turn, further increase empathy, creativity and social effectiveness. In two words, it’s associated with greater self-awareness, which has many practical benefits. For instance, the psychologist and author of Insight (2017) Tasha Eurich wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018 that people with greater self-awareness are more confident, make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships and communicate more effectively. The self-aware also receive more promotions, have more satisfied employees, and achieve more profitable companies.

We can transcend the here and now to create a more ‘spherical’ life that changes our focus from basic needs and fears to values

You might be concerned that taking a neuroscientific approach to profound, ineffable spiritual experiences is reductionist. But another perspective is that the scientific exploration of such experiences could reveal the mechanisms enabling us all to achieve these states even in the most mundane moments, such as waiting in traffic. Scientific discovery could turn seemingly subjective experiences into unified (and unifying) understanding. Simply put, I’ve seen how spirituality can be experienced in the lab! Let me share some examples with you.

Most of my research over the past two decades is linked to a movement meditation called Quadrato Motor Training (QMT) that demands both coordination and mindfulness. Practitioners alternate between dynamic movements and static postures, while dividing their attention between their body in the present moment and its location in space. QMT requires a connection between the ‘external’ world and the inner realm by requiring the participant to be intentionally aware of both inner and outer ‘worlds’ simultaneously.

In our research, we found that QMT improved cognitive flexibility. For example, in thinking about a simple glass, most people will associate it with the act of drinking. But following QMT training, additional ‘worlds of content’ can open up – the glass can be viewed as ‘the holy grail’ or a hat. In fact, our study showed that a seven-minute QMT session increased cognitive flexibility by 25 per cent, compared with other simpler kinds of movement or verbal training. What’s more, EEG measures showed that the enhanced cognitive flexibility associated with QMT training was also accompanied by increased brain synchronisation of the kind previously related to relaxation, attention and a flow state. Some might say QMT also fosters spirituality.

What else helps to produce neural synchronisation? Well, perhaps surprisingly, being in a space similar to a sensory-deprivation chamber, with little external stimulation, also impacts on neuronal synchronisation. Such was the idea behind the OVO chamber (uovo is Italian for ‘egg’, describing the space’s shape), created by Patrizio Paoletti, one of the leading teachers of meditation, based on his ‘Sphere Model of Consciousness’ (stated briefly, the model describes a spherical matrix that maps on to our subjective experiences, ranging from ordinary automatic habits to higher states of consciousness achieved in contemplative practices; see figures 1 and 2 below).

My colleagues and I have found that OVO-immersion leads to increased neuronal synchronisation in the insula, a brain area related to empathy as well as bodily self-awareness. In turn, this was found to be accompanied by an increased sense of ‘absorption’ (akin to that feeling you get when overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset, as you fully and voluntarily engage your attention in the experience). Absorption is also closely related to spirituality, meditation and empathy, likely because all involve openness to self-altering experiences and voluntarily increasing awareness.

When we lose it, for instance, what exactly are we losing? Nothing less than our selves

Although most of us don’t have access to an external ‘egg’ chamber, we can place ourselves at the centre of our own ‘sphere’ in daily life. By rooting ourselves, listening to our highest aspirations, and paying closer attention to our breathing, to the people we love and to the present moment, we can transcend the here and now to create a more ‘spherical’ life that changes our focus from basic needs and fears to values. This is further accompanied by an intentional shift toward a clear ‘goal’ state, represented by the centre of our inner sphere in Paoletti’s model. In this sense, spirituality can be seen as actions that are not separate from daily life, but rather congruently connected to its different aspects – the body, family, career, friendship, relationships, finance and society.

As well as finding Paoletti’s Sphere Model of Consciousness useful in my neuroscience research, I also use it as a practical instrument with which to observe myself. As spirituality is closely related to one’s state of consciousness, self-awareness and neuronal synchronisation, the more one’s consciousness is elevated, the more one feels the connectedness of things. Imagine you’re out driving and notice the sun setting. Is your next thought about the traffic, or are you awed by the glorious sunset and the daily planetary dance we all share? Now imagine the same drive. Someone recklessly cuts you off and zooms away. Is your first reaction to get upset and start chasing them – risking yourself and others? Or do you remain calm, with your heart rate the same as before the car overtook you?

In both examples, the latter option involves engaging a more mature, present part of ourselves in the current once-in-a-lifetime moment – being fully connected to the experience of the sights, the sounds and the scents. This is the kind of experience some call spirituality, namely the interconnectedness of being. In contrast, each time we react involuntarily, we aren’t anchored in our centre, but controlled by a more automatic state not chosen by us, and therefore we’re less connected both within ourselves and to the greater good.

For me, a big part of spirituality is overcoming daily challenging situations with calm and care. When we lose it, for instance, what exactly are we losing? Nothing less than our selves. We all lose it sometimes, but we can lose it less often by continually reconnecting to our best selves and to each other.

Recently, while preparing for an online conference, I shared some of my data showing increasingly greater levels of relaxation among novice, intermediate and expert meditators. My curious 17-year-old daughter said: ‘Mom, I know how to meditate. I’m an intermediate practitioner, right?’ I replied: ‘Well, as you see by these graphs, there is a big difference between knowing how to meditate and actually practising it regularly. Imagine some stairways you can climb to reach the sky. You have the means to get there, but now you need to keep climbing.’

As a neuroscientist, knowing that brain change is possible (even among grown-ups) keeps me optimistic and motivated in my research. Through simple non-invasive techniques, we can all train and monitor our spirituality and, in turn, live more vibrantly.

This Idea was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon+Psyche from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon+Psyche are not involved in editorial decision-making.

Georges Simenon in Paris, October 1956. Photo by Philippe Le Tellier/Paris Match/Getty

The best detectives seem to have almost supernatural insight, but their cognitive toolkit is one that anybody can use

by Ivar Fahsing

April 21, 2021 (psyche.co)

Ivar Fahsingis a detective chief superintendent and associate professor at the Norwegian Police University College in Oslo, and has 15 years’ experience as a senior detective in the Oslo Police department and at the National Criminal Investigation Service of Norway. His co-authored books include Organized Crime (2010) and The Routledge International Handbook of Legal and Investigative Psychology (2019), and he is currently co-authoring the UNPOL manual on investigative interviewing in cooperation with the Norwegian Centre of Human Rights. 

Edited by Christian Jarrett

Need to know

A criminal investigation is a complex, multifaceted problem-solving challenge. Detectives must make critical decisions rapidly – sometimes involving life and death, based on limited information in a dynamic environment of active and still-evolving events. Detectives are responsible and empowered under the law to make judgment calls that will dramatically affect the lives of those involved. The stakes are high, the settings are ugly, and there’s no room for error.

Detectives are often portrayed as misanthropic masterminds. They seem to possess almost mythical personal gifts that the average person can only dream of. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this isn’t entirely true. Not all detectives are masterminds, and you actually don’t need to be a detective to think like one. A few tools and methods can improve your inner detective, help you find facts, and learn to better understand the relationship between them.

Most of us, whether we’re highly educated or not, have never actually learnt how to think and make safe judgments under pressure. Yet good thinking is important for every aspect of life. Learning how to think like an expert detective can boost your incisiveness and creativity. It can make you less judgmental and a better listener. Honing your detective-thinking skills could help you solve everyday issues, such as planning the perfect vacation or choosing the best job candidate.

I am a university academic, but I’m also a real-life detective myself – more specifically, I’m a detective chief superintendent at the Norwegian Police University College. I’ve worked on some of the worst crimes in Norway for 30 years. These days, I spend much of my time teaching police detectives and other investigators how to make safer decisions in serious and complex matters – and I’m going to share some of the basics with you in this Guide.

When I first started as a police officer, none of my fellow detectives, police academy teachers or criminal investigation department bosses were seemingly able, nor interested, in telling me in practical terms how to think like a detective. Instead, they talked about attitude, talent and experience. Most of all, they liked talking about old cases they’d solved. They never spoke about the cases they failed to solve or the next challenge. The most crucial tool of any successful investigator – namely, sharp reasoning skills – was also never mentioned. We were all very keen on formulating mental profiles of offenders. Yet, strangely, the idea of profiling the effective detective was almost taboo. It’s as if the ability to think like an expert detective was taken for granted.

In fact, what might at first seem akin to a supernatural gift is mostly a metacognitive skill, which means the ability to think about thinking. Anyone can learn to improve their metacognitive skill, but it doesn’t come easily. For most of us, it goes against our instincts. Consider the common cognitive bias known as WYSIATI or ‘what you see is all there is’, described by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). WYSIATI refers to the fact that we typically make our judgments according to the information we have readily available – no matter how incomplete it is. We find it difficult to appreciate that there are still many things we don’t know. Another bias known as ‘confirmation bias’ compounds WYSIATI, and describes our tendency to seek out more evidence to support our existing beliefs or judgments.

Imagine what happens when you meet someone new. It typically takes less than a second to establish an impression of a complete stranger. Immediately, we decide whether they’re empathic and courteous or dominant and hostile, and whether we like them or not. What’s more, we do all this based on gut feeling and incomplete information such as facial features, how the person’s dressed, or how they talk. When we make everyday decisions, our mind often considers only the first information at hand. Regardless of its quality and quantity, the only thing it tries to do with the information is to build a coherent story. ‘He is nice!’, ‘She is not!’ That’s it. The story doesn’t have to be accurate, complete or reliable; it only has to be coherent for us to feel confident in our judgment.

Making decisions this way is easy, comfortable and intuitive, but unfortunately it also fuels feelings of overconfidence and exaggerated competence. Regardless of our social class or our so-called intelligence, we are all by nature ‘cognitive misers’ – that is, we have a tendency to solve problems in superficial and effortless ways rather than via more sophisticated and effortful ways. If not addressed deliberately, this overconfidence, and the gap between one’s initial ideas and reality (see figure above), can lead even the most trusted experts astray.

As a homicide detective, I began to notice how my more skilled colleagues were different from the others. It wasn’t apparent at first. They never spoke loudly nor did they frown at how obvious things were. They didn’t voice their opinion any more than others; they didn’t jump to conclusions. Rather, they observed, asked questions, and calmly kept on digging. This detached involvement and the ability to keep digging are the main attributes that set expert detectives apart from the rest of the crowd. Hence, not making a decision is the best decision a good investigator can make. For some of us, it will be hard, and it might take some practice. It seems counterintuitive to walk away from a problem you want to solve. Forcing your mind to take a step back is not easy.

However, when you get the hang of this way of thinking, you’ll find it helpful in many everyday situations and problems, big or small. For instance, it might help you become less judgmental in social settings, have the patience to acquire more information, and end up a better reader of people. Thinking like a detective will encourage you to continuously analyse any problem until the time is right to start fixing it. When done correctly, over time, your patient approach will also build your trustworthiness and integrity.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that when making any important life decisions where it would be hazardous to jump to conclusions – eg, when buying a new home, hiring a new employee or planning a career move – it’s wise to adopt the same detachment and patient approach as used by expert detectives. Keep in mind that your brain will invariably try to convince you that your first impression is right. So, to activate your inner detective, you will have to make a conscious effort to dig deeper into all the available information, and try to do a more systematic and thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various conclusions before making your decision. In the next section, I’ll show you the practical steps involved in applying a detective’s mindset to any investigation in your life.NEED TO KNOWWHAT TO DOKEY POINTSLEARN MORELINKS & BOOKS

What to do

Step 1: Assume nothing and find out what you really know

To think like an expert detective, you have to embrace a so-called ‘investigative mindset’. The terms ‘possibly’ and ‘could’ should be your watchwords as they are in every real investigation and at every crime scene. In detective handbooks, this is called the ABC principle:

• Assume nothing
• Believe nothing
• Challenge and check everything

Nothing should be taken for granted or accepted at face value. Expert detectives will always take a sceptical approach to any information or evidence. All stories are possible, until they are not. Always ask yourself ‘What do I know?’ and ‘What do I not know?’ Doing this is sometimes very hard, but even just attempting to slow down your otherwise conclusion-jumping brain will prove helpful. Keep reminding yourself: correlation does not imply causation. Hence, the safest way to test any hypothesis is to try to disprove it. Suppose you think your house keys are lost or stolen. In this situation, it might be a good idea to double-check and eliminate all other options before you decide to change your locks. The only true investigative mantra was formulated in 1890 by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It goes like this: ‘[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

It might sound pretty straightforward, but believe me, it’s not. There’s a reason why Sherlock Holmes is considered a genius. The hardest thing is to resist our automatic assumptions and deep-seated need for closure.

Step 2: Identify all the possible explanations

In the Sherlock Holmes novels, our titular hero continuously assails Dr Watson, a man of science, about the merits of deductive logic. In fact, strictly speaking, Holmes’s favoured logical approach is not deduction, which is reasoning on the basis of known facts, but rather what is known as abductive logic, which is the cognitive process of identifying the best possible explanation for a given set of observations. Abductive reasoning is widely recognised as a powerful mechanism for hypothetical reasoning in the absence of complete knowledge. It’s generally understood as reasoning from effects to causes. Only rarely does Holmes engage in the deduction of which he speaks so highly.

A familiar and typical application of abductive reasoning is when a doctor makes a medical diagnosis: given a set of symptoms, what is the diagnosis that would best explain most of them? As a general rule – and due to our conclusion-loving brain – there will always be more alternative explanations than you first realised. A wise doctor won’t leap to make the first diagnosis that springs to mind, but will consider many alternatives to see which best matches the presentation before them.

Similarly, criminal investigations are abductive and not deductive. In most cases, the police don’t find a crystal-clear and indisputable CCTV picture of the suspect while he commits a crime. We’ll typically have a greyish, blurred image of a person leaving or entering a dark alley just before, or just after, a crime was committed. Our initial interpretation of the picture might tell us that this potential offender is a relatively tall man in his 40s wearing a short dark jacket and black or blue jeans. The description can, in essence, fit half the city’s population. Hence, to identify a suspect, you have to come up with all the possible interpretations, then cross-check your blurred picture with a number of other sources of information such as witness statements, motives, fingerprints or mobile-phone activity, to find a suspect and rule out other potential candidates.

Similarly, you should always create a short outline of all the possible alternative explanations you can think of for the situation you’re trying to solve. Based on your alternatives, your next important step is to make a plan for the information you need to test your different explanations, including how you’ll get hold of the required information. This will be your investigation plan.

Step 3: Test the alternative explanations and narrow your investigation

Now’s the time to start the real investigation. This is when the Sherlock Holmes mantra about eliminating the impossible kicks in. Try to eliminate as many explanations or lines of inquiry as you can. Just like in science, theories can be truly tested only through falsification. To be able to keep track of all your alternative explanations and information needs, you’ll need to take a methodical approach. Without it, there’s a huge risk you’ll become a slave to your first and best idea. My colleagues and I designed a model to help. It’s in no way perfect, but probably far better than no model at all. We’ve called this the 6-Cs approach:

First of all – what do you know? Collect the available information and check the facts. Are they relevant, accurate and reliable? Connect the dots. Do different sources say the same? Find out what you don’t know. Next, construct all possible solutions and hypotheses. What does the available information allow for? What do we need to check, and what can be cross-checked? What can be ruled out? What remains possible? Now, consider what information you need the most in order to test your remaining hypotheses? Before you implement your plan, always consult somebody you trust, to help narrow the scope of your investigation by repeating this process from step one.

Let’s apply this to a fictional example based in the world of the animated movie Zootopia (aka Zootropolis) (2016): officer Judy is called to Zootopia Town Hall after mayor Lionheart was found lifeless on the floor in the canteen with a deep wound to his head. Beside him is a large candleholder covered in blood marked with fingerprints. Officer Judy takes photos and secures the candleholder, and soon after she finds that the blood is Lionheart’s and that the fingerprints belong to the assistant mayor Dawn Bellwether. Bellwether is called for an interview, but denies any knowledge of, or involvement in, the incident.

Now, imagine you’re assisting officer Judy on this case: what’s your first idea or suspicion? Write that down. Like me, you probably suspect Bellwether of a deliberate attack or even attempted murder of mayor Lionheart by hitting him over the head with a heavy candleholder. To think like a detective, what’s critical at this point is not to jump to conclusions but to start digging.

This is the first step – assume nothing. We need more information. To paraphrase Holmes: data, data, data: you can’t make bricks without clay. Ask yourself, what do we not know? What other sources of information are available? What alternative explanations might fit the evidence?

First, assuming that the fingerprints are related to the episode, Bellwether might accidentally have hit the mayor. Second, perhaps Lionheart was the one who attacked Bellwether, and she hit him in a lawful act of self-defence. These alternatives should definitely be investigated. Third, perhaps Bellwether found the mayor on the floor after somebody else had attacked him and she touched and moved the bloody candleholder. This hypothesis should also be added to your investigation plan. Fourth, although it might seem unlikely, maybe Bellwether and Lionheart were involved in an earlier incident where the mayor cut himself, such as during cooking or decorating, and Bellwether subsequently moved the candleholder with his blood on it. Furthermore, we can’t yet exclude that someone is trying to frame Bellwether by staging the event. Is that possible? Does she have enemies? If the answer is yes, you have yet another hypothesis that should be addressed. Now, since our investigation rests solely on the conclusion of a fingerprint expert, we should also double-check if another independent expert will come to the same conclusion. Sadly, in real life, there are plenty of examples of botched forensic evidence leading to wrongful convictions. Finally, we must check whether Bellwether hit mayor Lionheart but was somehow not in complete control of her faculties while she did so, hence her lack of memory for the incident.

Use a mind map

As you can see, there are more alternative options than you perhaps thought of in the beginning. To assist our fragile minds, we need practical methods and information-handling tools to keep track of our investigations. This will help your brain be more accurate, and reduces the risk of it jumping to premature conclusions. So you should keep track of your investigation using a matrix or a ‘mind map’ that lists the upcoming sources of further information against all the alternative explanations for the crime scene (see table below). This will also create transparency, allowing for a second opinion on your ideas and judgments, and you’ll gradually see if information from different sources narrows your investigation.

As each new nugget of information is obtained, you mark on the matrix what it means for each of the different possible explanations or hypotheses. The judgment symbols in the matrix have three different codes: the green plus-sign means that the explanation is supported; a red minus-sign means that an incoming fact opposes the hypothesis, whereas N/A means that the information doesn’t inform or have any bearing upon the hypothesis. The hypotheses that attract the most opposition or minus symbols can gradually be dismissed, while you move forward with the ones that receive more support. Your investigation should document all relevant hypotheses identified in the case, and the inquiry should seek to disprove each one. The last remaining hypothesis is probably the strongest theory but, as a true detective, you should ideally leave it up to others to make the final judgment.

All this nitty-gritty crosschecking is what ‘digging deep’ looks like. You can measure your investigation’s quality on both axes of the matrix: a glance at your number and range of hypotheses will tell you if you have gone wide enough to capture the true potential solution, and your investigative actions will tell you whether you’ve dug deep enough to find the facts to prove or disprove the different hypotheses. In other words, you need to consider both the breadth and the depth of your inquiry.

Recruit a ‘devil’s advocate’

As a rule, in any investigation there will always be something you’ve forgotten or don’t know everything about. That is why an open-minded and critical friend, like Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, is so indispensable. As Holmes said: ‘You have a grand gift of silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.’ He is the so-called ‘devil’s advocate’. Dr Watson’s role is not to solve the case, but to be sceptical and point to things that Holmes might have overlooked or misunderstood.

Remember that evidence, new perspectives or insights can be found where you least expect them. That’s why all expert detectives should demonstrate empathy, be humble, ask questions, and develop their listening skills. Investigative interviewing is done by gently holding back your own opinion, asking open-ended questions, and using silence and active listening techniques such as nodding and humming. This extends to listening to your devil’s advocate. Receptivity to alternative views is a crucial skill not only for detectives, but for any decision-maker in the modern era. In a world where complexity increases constantly, there’s no room for lone wolves.NEED TO KNOWWHAT TO DOKEY POINTSLEARN MORELINKS & BOOKS

Key points

• We aren’t born detectives or good decision-makers. Your ‘cave-man’ or ‘cave-woman’ brain will constantly try to fool you into quick-and-dirty decisions.
• There’s one cognitive bias in particular that makes it difficult to think like a detective: ‘What you see is all there is.’ The antidote is to resist jumping to conclusions and to seek out more information.
• Step back and establish what you currently know. Try to defer forming any conclusions. Instead, use what you already know as the starting point for a systematic investigation. What don’t you know, and how can you find it out?
• Identify all the possible explanations and write them down.
• Think again – there’s always something you will have forgotten.
• Use a mind map to keep track of incoming information, and whether it supports or contradicts the various possible explanations. Look for patterns without jumping to conclusions. Ensure your investigation has sufficient breadth (number of lines of inquiry) and depth (incoming evidence).
• Appoint a competent devil’s advocate to look at the case from a critical perspective and raise objections before or during implementation.
• Be curious, patient and a good listener.
• Practise: your brain needs training like any other muscle. Embrace doubt, start digging, stay humble, and continue educating yourself.

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Learn more

Rising complexity

Managing a major investigation or in fact any modern project today is fundamentally different than it was 30 years ago. According to the management scholars Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath, complexity has gone from something found mainly in large systems, such as cities, to something that affects almost everything we do: the life we live, the jobs we have, and the projects or organisations we run. As a consequence, the gap between our first idea and reality has almost exploded. Most of this increase stems from the information-technology revolution of the past few decades. Phenomena that used to be hidden, constant or separate are now tangible, interconnected and interdependent. Complex systems interact in unexpected ways. New patterns form, and the outlier is often more significant than the average. Making matters even worse, our analytical tools haven’t kept up with these developments. Collectively, we know a good deal about how to navigate complexity but this knowledge hasn’t been transformed into effective tools. Some predict that artificial intelligence might be our salvation, while others see it as our downfall.

What this rising complexity means in practice is that, whenever you’re confronted by a real-life dilemma that involves abductive reasoning – such as working out why a product launch failed, why your kid is struggling at school, or why your smartphone has stopped working – it’s more important than ever that you learn how to think more systematically. More like a detective.

Thinking like a detective is a skill that takes practice

Thinking the detective way won’t always guarantee a solution to your problem. There are still a number of circumstances involved that you can’t control as an investigator. There are always things you don’t know and perhaps won’t ever know. That said, using the approach I’ve outlined will help you handle the complexity inherent in almost all investigations or other difficult decisions. If you learn how to systematically shift focus and rewrite your understanding, you’ll increase the chance of discovering a quick and simple solution to your problem. In more complex and high-risk matters, following the expert-detective approach will help you reduce the risk of prematurely jumping to conclusions and therefore avoid serious blunders on your way. With practice, we can adjust the brain’s automatic wiring, unveil our inner detective, and improve our decision-making. This is like any other skill. The more you practise, the better you’ll get.NEED TO KNOWWHAT TO DOKEY POINTSLEARN MORELINKS & BOOKS

Links & books

To develop your thinking skills, you need regular training and feedback. Can you solve the three switches puzzle hosted by Guardian News on YouTube? Clue: it helps to start thinking like a detective.

When it comes to examining your existing beliefs, perspective is everything. Are you prone to defending your viewpoint at all costs, like a soldier, or are you spurred on by curiosity, like a scout? In her TED talk ‘Why You Think You’re Right – Even If You’re Wrong’ (2016), the rationalist Julia Galef examines the motivations behind these two different mindsets and how they shape our interpretations of information. When your steadfast opinions are tested, Galef asks: ‘What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs, or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?’

In this blog post for the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Gisle Kvanvig and I told the story of how, building on the work of British experts, we used the idea of a detective mindset to inform a new, more ethical approach to interviewing and investigation techniques in, for example, law enforcement. Following this approach, officers are trained to handle the interview room much like a crime scene where accurate, reliable and actionable information can be collected for the purpose of investigating the case.

The book Blackstone’s Senior Investigating Officers’ Handbook (5th ed, 2019) by Tony Cook is a unique one-stop guide to all the processes and actions involved in conducting major investigations, presented in a clear and understandable fashion.

For my PhD thesis The Making of an Expert Detective: Thinking and Deciding in Criminal Investigations (2016), I drew on theoretical frameworks developed in social and cognitive psychology to examine the degree to which individual and systemic factors can compensate for inherent biases in criminal detectives’ judgments and decision-making.

The book The Routledge International Handbook of Legal and Investigative Psychology (2019), edited by the psychologists Ray Bull and Iris Blandón-Gitlin, explores contemporary topics in psychological science, applying them to investigative and legal procedures. Featuring contributions from recognised scholars from around the globe (including myself), it brings together current research, emerging trends, and cutting-edge debates in a single comprehensive and authoritative volume.

The book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015) by the political scientist Philip E Tetlock and the author Dan Gardner offers a deeper insight into prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, US government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people – including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe-installer, and a former ballroom dancer – who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. These ‘superforecasters’ have beaten other benchmarks, competitors and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information.

‘Correlation does not imply causation’: for decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and climate change. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution has (seemingly) cut through a century of confusion, and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. The Book of Why (2018) by the computer scientist Judea Pearl and the science writer Dana Mackenzie explains causal thinking to general readers, showing how it allows us to explore both the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as these scientific discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we too can think better.