Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and moreShane Battier #31 of the Miami Heat drives against Blake Griffin #32 of the Los Angeles Clippers, 14 November 2012 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Noah Graham/NBA/GettyJessica Flack

is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and director of the Collective Computation Group at SFI.Cade Massey

is a practice professor in the Wharton School’s Operations, Information and Decisions Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives outside of Austin, Texas.

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27 November 2020 (aeon.co)

‘We know,’ Runciter said to GG, ‘that as individuals they perform well. It’s all down here on paper.’ He rattled the documents on his desk. ‘But how about together? How great a polyencephalic counter-field will they generate together? Ask yourself that, GG. That is the question to ask.’
– From Ubik (1969) by Philip K Dick

In Philip K Dick’s classic science fiction novel Ubik, one of the main characters, Runciter, is in charge of assembling a team of individuals called ‘inertials’. The hope is that they will counteract the power of ‘precogs’ and ‘telepaths’, recruited by corporations to carry out espionage and other nefarious activities. Each inertial is a superstar with a unique talent – but Runciter’s concern is their collective power.

Interest in collective behaviour is not new. It’s been the research subject of organisation scholars, anthropologists, economists, ethologists studying group-living animals and evolutionary biologists interested in the evolution of cooperation. And, of course, it’s the chief occupation of coaches and managers building teams across a wide range of sports. Although many of us believe a team is more than just the sum of its outstanding individual performers, this kind of simple-minded thinking still dominates recruitment and team assembly in sports, finance, academia and other settings.

Part of the reason why recruiters and others resort to going after the best players rather than building the best team is that it remains unclear what other factors contribute to team greatness, and how to quantify them. Moreover, simply recruiting the best players is fairly straightforward, and some analyses suggest this approach might even be the most reliable: as the sociologist Duncan Watts and colleagues argued, overall talent level is often the single best predictor of team performance. Yet we shouldn’t be lured into thinking overall talent is the best predictor because it is the most important factor. It might be the best predictor because we’re not yet good at capturing the nuance of collective dynamics. Hints that this could be the case come from studies such as that of the management scholar Satyam Mukherjee and colleagues, in which they found that prior shared success can predict performance above and beyond what would be expected from the group’s composition and talent.

These seemingly at-odds results raise the question: how does a collective work exactly? When is it more than the sum of its parts? The increasing availability of data on individual decision-making across the social sciences, coupled with how complexity science is improving our understanding of the mechanics of group performance, are changing what’s possible. Some of the questions that can now be answered include how a team synchronises, when contributions are synergistic as opposed to additive, and whether it’s the players’ skill or the strategies they use that’s more important. Before we get to promising future directions, though, it’s worth considering the existing space of ideas about what makes a good team, as well as some scenarios suggesting greater nuance is required.

In his book The Captain Class (2017), Sam Walker – deputy editor for enterprise at The Wall Street Journal – argues that a key to team performance is leadership, defined not by charisma but by the ability to resolve conflict and improve morale behind the scenes. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict proposed culture as a factor in human performance, writing in Patterns of Culture (1934):

No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilisation has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

Michael Lombardi, a former executive at the US National Football League, echoes Benedict’s point in his book Gridiron Genius (2018). Lombardi proposes that the New England Patriots’ dynasty, and the success of their quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick, are due in large part to meticulous micromanagement of every detail of recruitment, scheduling, training and play. In the case of the Patriots and other football dynasties such as Nick Saban’s Alabama teams, this focus on institutions and process is so pronounced as to give the impression that players could be swapped in or out, with little change to outcomes.

Emphasis on leadership, culture, process over outcome, and attention to detail at all scales might seem obvious. Yet these strategies for optimising team performance depart strongly from the common assumption that the key to making a great team is assembling the best players. What is it about team performance that makes it so hard to reconcile these positions?

Consider the most significant large-scale science project in history, the Manhattan Project, resulting in the world’s first nuclear weapon. It involved many significant figures but three can be singled out: the physicist Leo Szilard for vision, Major General Leslie Groves for organisational skills, and the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer for his inspirational leadership. It was Szilard who first understood that subatomic particles called neutrons could cause atoms to break apart, triggering a chain reaction that would produce vast quantities of energy. Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project from 1942 to 1946, overcame huge bureaucratic barriers to acquiring the resources the project needed. Oppenheimer had the idea to corral the projects’ scientists in an isolated summer-camp-style setting in New Mexico, now Los Alamos National Laboratory. If we subtracted any one of these men from the Manhattan Project, would the outcome have changed, and can we quantify by how much?

Some settings promote creativity and exploration, and so facilitate chance-related positive discoveries

We must acknowledge it’s difficult to know. Complicating matters, performance isn’t guaranteed even with the most gifted individuals, a constructive cultural environment and a resource-rich, ‘all details covered’ organisation. Luck plays a role in performance, although its significance varies across domains. This is one of the main themes in the book The Success Equation (2012) by the investment strategist Michael Mauboussin. Sports such as hockey – with its fast-moving puck, fewer opportunities to score due in part to having no shot clock and less ice time for skilled players – are governed by greater randomness than sports such as basketball, meaning that outcomes in hockey are harder to understand, predict and control.

Given that chance’s role in performance varies, we might ask whether it’s possible to create circumstances that favour ‘good luck’. The sociologist Robert Merton in the 1950s coined the term ‘serendipitous sociocognitive microenvironments’ to capture the idea that some settings seem to promote creativity and exploration, and so facilitate chance-related positive discoveries. Merton believed in this principle so strongly that it was part of his motivation in establishing the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) – an institution, he said, with an aim of fostering ‘sustained sociocognitive interaction between talents in different social science disciplines and subdisciplines that would prove to be symbiotic’. By attending to the ‘cognitive microenvironment’, Merton was acknowledging the factors that shape teams beyond raw talent alone. He tried to build an environment as congenial to those forces as possible, even if he couldn’t name them precisely. As the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson wrote:

Luck is not chance–
It’s Toil–
Fortune’s expensive smile
Is earned–
The Father of the Mine
Is that old-fashioned Coin
We spurned–

Merton’s goal for the CASBS and other creative institutions brings into focus a central issue missing from much of the discussion on team performance. The terms proposed for group performance in the ‘success equations’ hide complexity that, if it can be exploited, offers a meaningful edge. This hidden complexity – whether you favour explanations that stress individual players, team dynamics, training or cultural forces – captures precisely how these factors influence individual performance and how this in turn translates into team success. Oppenheimer might have inspired his titans to work together by appealing to an urgent shared purpose (defeating the Axis Alliance) but how did the collaboration actually transpire? We might be able to describe the traits and behaviour of Walker’s quiet leaders, but what are the causal mechanisms connecting their leadership to how players perform, individually and as a team?

‘Statistics and mythology may seem the most unlikely bedfellows,’ mused the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the essay ‘The Streak of Streaks’ (1988) for The New York Review. ‘How can we quantify Caruso or measure Middlemarch?’ In the domain of team sports, there’s been an explosion of attempts to answer Gould in recent years. In his book Moneyball (2003), the financial journalist Michael Lewis chronicles how sports analytics now impact decisions about recruitment, training, playing time and even strategy on the court – a good example is the rise of the three-point shot in basketball. Yet many players feel frustrated by the ‘tyranny of metrics’, to riff on Jerry Muller’s 2018 book about replacing human judgment and intuition with (typically) simple statistics. The former professional basketball player and current sports commentator Jalen Rose suggests in a New Yorker interview that the emphasis on simple metrics insults player intelligence. It fails to capture hard-to-describe skills that matter – such as understanding ‘the flow of the game’ – and places too much emphasis on easy-to-quantify measures such as ‘triple doubles’ (getting double-digit baskets, rebounds and assists in a single game).

Bill Russell, one of basketball’s titans who played for the Boston Celtics in the 1960s, felt strongly enough about this to mention it in his retirement letter in 1969:

Let’s talk about statistics. The important statistics in basketball are supposed to be points scored, rebounds and assists. But nobody keeps statistics on other important things – the good fake you make that helps your teammate score; the bad pass you force the other team to make; the good long pass you make that sets up another pass that sets up another pass that leads to a score; the way you recognise when one of your teammates has a hot hand that night and you give up your own shot so he can take it. All of those things. Those were some of the things we excelled in that you won’t find in the statistics.

The problem is so common it has its own name: the McNamara fallacy, after Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary known for a slavish devotion to numerical analysis during the escalation of the Vietnam War. ‘The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured,’ wrote Daniel Yankelovich in Corporate Priorities: A Continuing Study of the New Demands of Business (1972). ‘The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured … The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important … The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.’

‘I call him Lego. When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together’

In his insightful article ‘The No-Stats All-Star’ in The New York Times Magazine in 2009, Lewis captured the essence of the problem. Writing about the US National Basketball Association (NBA) player Shane Battier, he notes:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

For those who study collective behaviour, these lines are enticing. Just how might Battier have changed the mechanics of team play? Lewis doesn’t answer the question, though he teases with many examples:

When [Battier] is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse – often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding … He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same … On defence, although he routinely guards the NBA’s most prolific scorers [he was one of the most effective to guard Kobe Bryant], he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates – probably, Morey [general manager of Battier’s team at the time] surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. ‘I call him Lego,’ Morey says. ‘When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together …’

These issues – the importance of synergistic interactions, how strategies and individual attributes combine to produce team performance, how individuals coordinate in space and time to become mesmerising as a whole, and what role the leadership and larger organisational and cultural environment play in bringing out our best – are not just questions for basketball analysts and sociologists studying the Manhattan Project. They are in fact key questions for all biological systems, as all biological systems – whether groups of neurons or animal societies – are composed of interacting parts that collectively discover solutions to environmental or internal challenges. And complexity science, replete with nuanced concepts and rigorous methods, offers a quantitative lens through which to study them.

Let’s start with the notions of ‘synergy’ and ‘complementarity’, which pertain to situations where the collective output is greater than expected from adding up individual ability. ‘Whenever they speak Michael Jordan, they should speak Scottie Pippen.’ This statement, by Jordan in the documentary The Last Dance (2020), was so salient to the audience that it evolved into a refrain. Similarly, the idea of Battier as a Lego block that brings the team together resonates in the Lewis article as a powerful metaphor for what’s missing in our understanding of team dynamics.

The sentiment captured in the Jordan-Pippen refrain brings to mind the synergy Runciter was looking for in his inertials, whereas the Battier Lego metaphor suggests complementarity via a contribution that, as of yet, is hard to pinpoint. Hidden in these observations are many subtleties. Consider Tex Winter’s ‘triangle offence’, a strategy used in basketball in which the five players on the court dynamically space themselves according to geometric principles and using ‘reads and rhythm’ to open the floor for passing. It’s credited with elevating the Chicago Bulls beyond Jordan’s, Pippen’s and Dennis Rodman’s considerable individual abilities, and is thought to have served as the basis for the success years later of the Golden State Warriors, coached by the former Chicago Bulls player Steve Kerr.

The triangle offence is complex – involving multiple players, their relationships with each other, an understanding of space, and intuition – and a natural question is: which of these aspects really matters? Is it the Jordan-Pippen synergy with some additional, additive bonus from Rodman, or is their three-way interaction more than the sum of its parts? Is it not their interaction at all but the triangle offence strategy itself – perhaps, as is often suggested, the way in which its geometry opens the floor to passing – that contributed to the Bulls’ success? Likewise, with Battier – is he adding a little bit of opportunity to each of his teammates on the court? Or is his presence and hard-to-pin-down skill set changing how his teammates interact with each other in a synergistic way?

The roles of synergistic interactions and complementarity are relevant beyond team performance to a wide range of issues – from our understanding of how drugs combine to treat disease, to how proteins function, to how monkeys manage conflict in their societies. Consequently, various statistical and information theoretic measures have been devised by complexity scientists to assess the different ways individual contributions can combine to produce collective outcomes. These contributions can be decomposed into ‘synergy’, ‘antagonism’ (synergy’s inverse, an individual diminishing collective performance beyond what would be expected based on his or her (in)ability alone), ‘redundant’ (a ‘backup’) and ‘unique’ (as is possibly the case for Battier). Each of these contribution types has been formalised mathematically and, in principle, can be quantified in team performance data. The calculations are challenging (and not wholly agreed upon yet) and can give counterintuitive results, conferring a real edge to anyone doing the work to compute them.

Another key idea from complexity science that can provide the foundations for great teams is synchrony – the coordination in time of parts of a system, such as cells, individuals or nanobots. Stephen Curry, a basketball star renowned for his ability to make three-point shots, was asked in a Sports Illustrated interview in 2013 what it’s like to have a ‘hot hand’. Curry is notorious for going a quarter or even a half game with few points, and then returning to the court to score more points in a single quarter than the other basketball players score the entire game. Curry said:

It’s one of the best feelings ever. The rim looks like you’re literally shooting into an ocean. When you can get a clean look off, it’s going in. Just your whole body feels in sync and in rhythm. On top of having the hot hand, you find the opportunity to get those shots off. There’s no point in having the hot hand if you’re not getting the ball in your hands to shoot it.

Hot hands like Curry’s represent one of those special skills or states to which athletes often subscribe but that statisticians and sports analysts have traditionally dismissed. It’s technically challenging to find evidence for the existence of ‘hot hands’ and, based on studies from the 1980s, it’s been largely cast as a superstition or perceptual bias. Recently, the economists Adam Sanjurjo and Joshua Miller corrected this misconception by showing that detecting a hot hand depends critically on having the right null model, or baseline – something previous studies had failed to get right.

Through synchronising their behaviour, the whole team could become ‘in flow’, or ‘hot’

Statistical evidence for the hot hand, however, is just a starting point. What are the neurophysiological dynamics underlying the hot hand that create this sense of flow or synchronicity across the motor control system? Though we don’t yet know, this is very likely a dynamical systems question about how populations or groups of neurons come to oscillate together – akin to how fireflies on a summer night coordinate their flashes. Understanding the underlying process would not only provide a mechanistic basis for the hot hand – it might also enable us to predict its onset and duration, making it easier to find in behavioural data, and perhaps even induce it in a player who’s lagging. Many fascinating questions would become fair scientific game, such as Russell’s suggestion that players can see when a teammate has the hot hand. What cues might teammates use to make this assessment? Is the cue in the ‘statistics’ describing a behavioural pattern – that is, the number of baskets in a row – or is it something visible in the physical demeanour of the player?

The possibility that players perceive hot hands remains controversial; their existence doesn’t mean that ‘hot hands’ are as large or as pervasive as players believe. But the ability of players to discern when hot hands come and go in teammates suggests the possibility of a collective hot hand. That is, through synchronising their behaviour, the whole team could become ‘in flow’, or ‘hot’. This might seem farfetched, but it regularly happens in nature – the fireflies mentioned above are one example. Others include the coordinated chorusing of frogs and circadian rhythms. So why shouldn’t it happen in sports? Moreover, nature has taught us that the collective can synchronise in different ways. Some firefly species, for example, are bursty synchronisers, whereas others are snappy, with different timescales describing the coordinated flashing and different strategic implications. The same might be true on the court.

How individuals synchronise in time can have implications for how they coordinate in space or ‘swarm’. Swarming broadly refers to the coordinated movement of individuals – think of wildebeest stampeding across the Serengeti or fish forming a tightly aligned school to escape a predator. Likewise, players moving across the soccer field or basketball court can be conceived of as a swarm. How do teammates coordinate their movement to increase the likelihood that a behind-the-back pass is caught by a teammate rather than stolen? More generally, does coordination in space interact with synchronicity to produce a more effective team on which the players anticipate one another’s actions because they’re ‘in sync’? In The Last Dance documentary, Kerr remarks that Pippen provided essential rhythm on the court, suggesting that some players function as swarm harmonisers, perhaps making dynamic spatial strategies such as the triangle offence more effective.

These possibilities suggest hypotheses that can be tested and, coupled to well-developed quantitative frameworks for synchronicity and swarming from the collective-phenomena literature, offer tractable research questions. Indeed, in a recent study, the sports scientist Rui Marcelino and colleagues used collective behaviour research methods to evaluate soccer matches. They found that how well a player coordinates his movement with teammates, and his opponents, varies reliably across players, and relates to both team success and player valuation. With motion-tracking data increasingly available, and tools from complexity science plentiful, such studies will become more common.

In his science fiction novel Solaris (1961), Stanisław Lem wrote:

We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.

We might indeed ‘lack the ears to hear’ but with the help of rigorous tools and concepts from complexity science building on statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, information theory and computer science, it is possible to boost perception and find the origins of hidden patterns in collective phenomena.

The causes of the hot hand; what makes the triangle offence work; whether Pippen, Jordan and Rodman were better together than one would expect from their individual talent added up; the idea that harmony and complementarity might be as important as the number of triple doubles (or even the very possibility that we could quantify the value of these distinct contributions) – these are just a few of the many examples where our grasp of human performance would benefit from a more mechanistic understanding of collective behaviour. Armed with that better understanding, we could avoid the McNamara fallacy and develop the nuanced measures Runciter craved, capturing Michael Lewis’s magic and Jalen Rose’s flow. In doing so, we would finally, fully, honour the players’ intrinsic knowledge and incredible collective skill.

Published in association with the Santa Fe Institute, an Aeon Strategic Partner.

Human evolution Sports and games Complexity

Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify themTherapy for a patient recovering from drug addiction at the Shiliping rehabilitation centre in Zhejiang Province, China in June 2014. Photo by William Hong/Reuters

Yevgeny Botanov is a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University York.Alexander Williams

is programme director of psychology and director of the Psychological Clinic, both at the University of Kansas, Edwards Campus.John Sakaluk

is an assistant professor in psychology at Western University, Ontario, Canada.

Edited by Christian Jarrett

19 May 2022 (aeon.co)

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In 2000, Jeane Newmaker took her adopted 10-year-old daughter Candace to an ‘attachment therapy’ retreat designed to increase their emotional bond. While there, Candace underwent an intervention that’s supposed to replicate the birthing process. Therapists wrapped her in a flannel sheet and covered her with pillows to simulate a womb or birth canal. Then they instructed her to fight her way out while four adults (weighing nearly 700 lbs in total) tried to stop her. Candace complained and screamed for help and air, unable to escape from the sheet. After 70 minutes of struggling, pleading that she was dying, and vomiting and excreting inside the sheet, Candace died of suffocation. This tragic case highlights an important but often overlooked aspect of psychological interventions designed to help people – sometimes they can be harmful, or even fatal.

Candace Newmaker’s death is a shocking and obviously recognisable example of an alleged treatment causing immense harm. However, there are innumerable psychological treatments on offer, many of which are not so obviously harmful but that can also carry risks. Consider that, before her rebirthing treatment, Candace underwent other forms of attachment therapy, such as ‘holding therapy’ wherein her mother Jeane held her for an extended, uncomfortable period and restricted her movements. Candace was also pinned under her mother during a session of so-called ‘compression therapy’. Throughout these different psychological treatments, her mother licked her to induce rage. These strange interventions are perhaps harmful too, but less strikingly so than the rebirthing procedure. Yet they all continue to be practised in some US states and elsewhere around the world.

Assessing whether a psychological treatment causes harm can be surprisingly difficult, and intuition is an unreliable guide. Take the popular school programme Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) founded in Los Angeles in 1983. The idea of DARE, consistent with the wider ‘war on drugs’ in the United States, is straightforward: uniformed police officers visit classrooms to warn children and teens about the dangers of drug and alcohol use, thereby reducing underage use of alcohol and illicit substances, or so it is hoped. On the surface, DARE appears to be potentially beneficial and unlikely to harm. However, in 2001, the US surgeon general deemed DARE ineffective. Decades after it was developed, and despite millions of dollars spent annually on its implementation, the data indicated that DARE was no better than doing nothing.

Or was it worse than that? Was DARE potentially leading to an increase in alcohol and drug use among children and teens? The history of interventions such as rebirthing and DARE highlights important questions that should concern anyone involved in therapy, clients and therapists alike: how do we know if a certain treatment or intervention helps people as proclaimed, or if it is ineffective, even potentially harmful? And whom do we trust to make these judgments?

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In the US, one might assume a government agency is responsible for the oversight of psychological interventions such as mental health treatments or larger intervention programmes. After all, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates numerous products including food, tobacco, some supplements, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, medical devices and cosmetics. Yet the FDA has no oversight over psychological interventions, and neither does any other agency. And while every state and territory in the US has licensing boards to oversee mental health practice and safeguard the wellbeing of the public, these boards rarely prohibit types of treatment or interventions; instead, they focus on unethical therapist behaviour, such as sexual relationships with clients and the false claiming of qualifications.

Nor are clients protected from given forms of therapy or large-scale interventions by state or federal law. A notable exception is that about half of US states have banned ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘reparative therapy’ for minors, which attempts to change their sexual orientation. But we know of no other psychological interventions that are so widely banned by law. Importantly, Candace Newmaker is not the only victim of attachment therapies such as rebirthing and, since her death, only two states have outlawed the practice. Without a governing body or lawful regulations, the people providing psychological interventions and the people receiving those interventions are left to figure out on their own whether there is any potential for harm.

Negative experiences from mainstream mental health care are seen among many ethnoracial minority clients

Unfortunately, history is replete with popular mental health interventions that turned out to be harmful, or even deadly. In hindsight, it may seem all too easy to disregard trepanning (ie, curing ‘madness’ by drilling holes in the skull to release evil spirits), leeches and electric eels as ridiculous ‘treatments’, but harmful treatments – however abhorrent or ridiculous they seem now – have a way of sticking around. For instance, lobotomies were used in the late 20th century for decades after their barbaric nature was recognised; similarly bloodlettings, which likely contributed to the death of George Washington, continue to be used in some parts of the world today. But harmful therapies are not limited to these centuries-old treatments.

Although viscerally harmful treatments such as rebirthing are mercifully rare nowadays, less dramatic but still significant harms arising from psychological practices are more widespread. You might imagine that more conventional forms of modern therapy as delivered by a psychologist, counsellor or clinical social worker cannot be harmful because the treatments involve ‘just talking’. Regrettably, this is not the case. For instance, a survey published in 2018 of more than 14,000 clients who’d undergone therapy with a qualified professional in the NHS in England and Wales found that 5 per cent reported experiencing unspecified lasting harmful effects from the experience; similar effects were reported by 14 per cent of clients in a survey published in 2021 (other studies suggest these ill effects are likely to include worsening symptoms and relationship problems). An extensive literature also documents negative experiences from mainstream mental health care among many ethnoracial minority clients (eg, overdiagnosis of severe mental illness among Black Americans) that likely reflects both prejudices and cultural insensitivities.

It is important to state that, globally, most psychotherapies are helpful and not harmful. Meta-analyses (which, in short, combine data across numerous clinical trials to calculate the ‘average’ treatment effect) have consistently shown that receiving any bona fide psychotherapy (that is, a therapy with a clear rationale that is grounded in psychological science) more often leads to beneficial effects compared with not receiving any therapy. For instance, a meta-analysis published in 2021 showed that receiving any bona fide therapy compared with no treatment more than halves the chances of psychological deterioration in children. However, these are averaged effects, and the devil is in the details – for many psychological interventions, the cost-benefit ratio is less clear.

To better understand how upwards of one in 20 clients could be harmed from psychotherapy, or whether programmes like DARE are harmful, it’s important first to determine what we mean by harm, and to distinguish among the different forms that harm can take in these contexts.

One not so obvious form of harm is an ‘opportunity cost’ – even if somebody undergoes a treatment that does not make their symptoms worse, but is merely ineffective, then in a sense they have been harmed because they’ve missed out on a treatment that could have helped. Some opportunity costs will be difficult if not impossible to avoid because it’s so hard to predict who will benefit from different forms of therapy. However, some therapies have opportunity costs that are eminently knowable. DARE, as assessed by the US surgeon general, would fall into this category: it absorbed exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money and student time that could have been used for an effective substance-use intervention instead.

Teaching people to punch when angered leads to more anger and punching

A more obvious form of harm is when a treatment causes short-term deterioration in clients, with no prospect of any long-term benefit, and sometimes the chance of longer-term harm. A clear example is ‘cathartic interventions’ that promise relief by directing people to express difficult emotions in a purge-like manner, such as punching pillows when angry and yelling as loudly as possible when distressed. Such practices date to the times of Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and ‘primal scream therapy’ in the 1970s, and lend themselves to the rising popularity of ‘smash rooms’ in which people pay to ‘therapeutically’ destroy items such as televisions and toasters with a hammer. Despite their popular appeal, copious research indicates that, as a means of dealing with difficult emotions, these approaches have the opposite of the intended therapeutic effect, actually increasing anger and distress. Simply put, teaching people to punch when angered leads to more anger and punching. Furthermore, most often the therapists providing these treatments are unaware of their harmful effects. This is also likely the case for therapists who recommend mindfulness interventions to their clients without reservation, failing to consider that, in a minority of users, mindfulness can cause adverse events such as anxiety, depression and unpleasant dissociation.

Similarly, some therapists, including celebrated pioneers, have been seemingly ignorant of the harms caused by conversion therapy, such as depression, low self-esteem and impaired sexual function. For example, Albert Ellis reported using rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) – a forerunner to modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – to change a man’s sexual orientation:

In this case of a 35-year-old male who entered therapy because he was severely troubled by a fixed pattern of homosexuality, a swift frontal attack was made by the therapist on the basic assumptions or philosophies illogically underlying the client’s symptoms. In the course of this attack, the client was shown, by the therapist’s rigorously unmasking and then inducing the client himself to contradict and act against his irrational beliefs, that his homosexual pattern of behaviour and his other neurotic symptoms were not hopelessly ingrained, and that he himself could control his own destiny by changing his assumptions … As he began to change the fundamental irrational beliefs that motivated his homosexual and neurotic behaviour, the client’s symptoms almost automatically began to disappear and he was able to change from a fixed, exclusive homosexual to a virtually 100 per cent heterosexually oriented individual.

‘Virtually’ indeed. Similarly, in A New Guide to Rational Living (1975), the revised edition of his bestseller, Ellis wrote:

Jack M, a compulsive or obligatory homosexual, came to therapy at the age of 25 … After 10 years of highly promiscuous homosexual behaviour, including one arrest and a recent attempt to blackmail him at the school for boys at which he taught, Jack decided he’d better attempt to ‘go straight’. And he came to see me (AE) with the knowledge that I, unlike a good many therapists, strongly felt that compulsive homosexuals definitely could change … His sexual interest in males considerably diminished and he felt sure that whatever interest he had, he could control, or occasionally act out uncompulsively.

Ellis’s REBT has helped untold numbers of clients, but his promulgation of conversion therapy was wrong then and wrong today. Perhaps Ellis realised this: the far-fetched story of Jack M was removed from later editions of his influential book.

So, psychological harm can take many different forms, and it’s not always obvious, even to the most talented therapists. Thankfully, clinical researchers have highlighted the problems with purging emotions in a cathartic manner, and they continue to study other forms of potentially harmful interventions. An influential figure in this field until his untimely death in 2020, the US psychologist Scott Lilienfeld reviewed this research and outlined numerous potentially harmful psychological and behavioural interventions, which included attachment therapies such as rebirthing. Unfortunately, since the publication of Lilienfeld’s landmark paper in 2007, seemingly little has changed in clinical practice; most of the interventions he outlined are still employed today.

Harmful treatments persist, ironically, in part because the same research processes that can identify safe and effective interventions can also mask the harmful ones. DARE, for example, has been tested repeatedly in forms of randomised controlled trials, the gold standard for health intervention research. These trials have often provided a range of outcomes that could be taken to indicate either that the intervention helps, is ineffective, or is harmful. When the scientific literature on an intervention grows sufficiently large, it becomes all too easy for biased individuals to focus on studies that confirm what they want to see, and all too difficult for more objective investigators to separate high-quality trials from the more cringeworthy studies.

Our own research team (the present authors, along with the PhD students Robyn Kilshaw at the University of Utah and Ryan Wong at University of Victoria in Canada) has tried to address this problem for some potentially harmful treatments. Using methods we wrote about for Aeon previously, we studied the credibility of all the available research evidence for the psychological interventions Lilienfeld reviewed in his 2007 paper, leading us to analyse 70-plus randomised controlled trials. As we recently reported in the journal Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, the results for each treatment were often ambiguous – unfortunately, we found more cringe than quality. For example, the statistical analyses for many trials were often reported so sparsely that we could not independently verify their accuracy. Across the board, the clinical trials for all the treatments we examined also exhibited signs of having insufficient numbers of participants, making it impossible to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness. Worryingly, we also found that the claimed statistical support for treatments in the clinical trials was consistently and implausibly positive, given the trials’ modest sample sizes.

It’s unethical to continue practising CISD without some new compelling evidence that it helps first responders

These methodological patterns are beyond concerning; many of these treatments (eg, boot camps for conduct disorders; expressive-experiential psychotherapies) have existed for decades, yet uniformly lack evidence from which one can solidly conclude whether they work. However, despite the limitations of this literature, we were able to extract some signal from the noise for four treatments. The news was not all bad: there was robust evidence that grief therapy – a treatment for individuals following loss of a loved one – can help those who receive it, and we found no evidence that it harmed them. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about the other three interventions for which sufficiently robust evidence allowed for firmer conclusions:

Critical incident stress debriefing (CISD)/psychological debriefing

CISD and similar interventions are a popular option for first responders such as police officers and firefighters. The treatment is meant to forestall potential mental health problems, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), by intervening in the immediate aftermath of a severely stressful event. Our statistical analysis found that, in a best-case scenario, CISD provides no benefit, while in the worst-case it increases PTSD symptoms. Because most people do not develop PTSD following a traumatic event, it might be that harm arises from compelling people to discuss and re-experience the traumatic moments in a setting in which they are uncomfortable, which interferes with the natural healing process. We consider it unethical to continue practising CISD without some new compelling evidence that it helps first responders. (For example, we would be interested in the results of a large, preregistered randomised control trial of a modified form of CISD that is more congruent with existing psychological research on healing from trauma.)

Scared Straight

Scared Straight is a psychoeducational programme that was first popularised by a 1978 documentary of the same name, and then reintroduced to modern audiences via the TV series Beyond Scared Straight (2011-15), which ran on the A&E cable network in the US. Scared Straight and similar interventions expose adolescents who have been found guilty of committing a crime to a real prison and real-life prisoners. The intention is that the prisoners will scare the adolescents onto the ‘straight and narrow’, including using threats of physical and sexual assault. Our statistical analysis suggested that, in a best-case scenario, Scared Straight has a tiny harmful effect. You read that right – the most optimistic interpretation of the data is that Scared Straight interventions hurt teenagers. Conversely, in a worst-case scenario, Scared Straight meaningfully increases the odds that adolescents who complete the programme will reoffend (perhaps via increased socialising with the other teenagers on the programme; reinforcement of antisocial behaviour via ‘tough love’, or a myriad other possibilities). Again, as with CISD, our analysis indicates that Scared Straight-type programmes should cease.

DARE

What about DARE? We found that, in a best-case scenario, DARE has a negligible beneficial effect; in a worst-case scenario, it has a similarly tiny or negligible harmful effect. In other words, our statistical results indicate that DARE is a poster child for opportunity costs: children who participate in DARE are unlikely to be helped or harmed by it (maybe because ‘information-only’ interventions do little to inspire motivation and behaviour change), and so the time and money spent on DARE could be better spent on anything that is actually of benefit.

Our analyses were limited by the substantial problems in the clinical trials that we’ve noted. Additionally, they were constrained by the lack of availability of clinical trials for any given treatment. For instance, we could not assess some of the interventions Lilienfeld chronicled, including the attachment treatments that killed Candace Newmaker, because no one has yet had the gall (thankfully) to test such interventions in rigorous clinical trials. However, for those treatments, the documented cases of lethal harm should be convincing enough to consider their use as unequivocally unethical. But many other interventions are still poorly researched, and it is an open question whether and for whom they are helpful versus harmful.

It is concerning that all the potentially harmful treatments we’ve discussed, and many more, still maintain a foothold in mental health treatment and are easily available throughout the US and in many other countries. If you are an adult US citizen, in almost any state you can find a licensed provider who will try to change your sexual orientation (laws ban the practice only for minors). If you are still interested in undergoing a questionable attachment therapy, then finding a practitioner is also just a Google search away. Moreover, many of these treatments are touted on podcasts, television shows and films. Unfortunately, the average person seeking a psychological intervention, often desperate for help, cannot be expected to possess knowledge of health statistics and methodologies to understand the potential for benefit or harm. Additionally, many people likely assume that interventions often seen in the popular media – such as Scared Straight, which has spawned five TV movies and a multi-season TV series spanning four decades – are accepted and effective.

It often falls upon mental health providers to safeguard against harm, but psychologists, social workers and other kinds of mental health therapists are also subject to human biases, such as confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out evidence to justify one’s existing beliefs. Like all of us, therapists are also often much more swayed by their personal, anecdotal experiences than the scientific literature. The individuals who killed Candace Newmaker and most clinicians who continue to practise ineffective or potentially harmful interventions are not devious individuals looking to harm the public. Rather, these individuals simply, but regretfully, rely on their own perceptions above what has been shown, at scale, scientifically.

The reality is that many healthcare providers lack the scientific training necessary to understand the statistical and methodological nuances of clinical trials. For the typical therapist, many layers of human bias obfuscate the outcomes of the treatments they provide. Most will see their treatments as helpful, even when they are not. Simply put, oftentimes the evidence therapists use to judge the efficacy of their interventions (eg, the client says they are doing better, the client ‘looks better’) are the least reliable indicators for that purpose. Indeed, many apparent gains might not be real, or could be attributable to other factors having nothing to do with the therapy, such as a placebo effect, or a reversion to a more typical state of mental health.

Replacing Scared Straight and CISD with literally no intervention whatsoever would be more beneficial

We urge therapists to remember that good intentions are not sufficient for fulfilling their ethical duty to do good (beneficence) and to do no harm (nonmaleficence). We also remind them – as we, the authors of this essay who are clinicians, remind ourselves in our own practices – how commonly confirmation bias can cause one to make overly optimistic armchair assessments of client improvement. If and when evidence emerges that a treatment they use has the potential to harm, clinicians should reconsider their use of that treatment despite any allegiance they might have to it. We, the authors of this essay who are clinicians, have also taken this lesson to heart, discontinuing our use of potentially harmful therapeutic techniques we were trained in and felt attachment to. Additionally, if evidence of a treatment’s benefit is lacking, yet credible evidence of possible harm exists, these interventions should be subjected to what we call ‘psychological reversal’: for safety, they should be retired. Where possible, these treatments could be replaced with interventions that have actual evidence of benefit, though we want to stress that the evidence from our review suggest that replacing interventions such as Scared Straight and CISD with literally no intervention whatsoever would be more beneficial.

While it is clinicians’ responsibility to not provide harmful interventions, individuals seeking treatment can take steps to protect themselves too. The study we mentioned – that showed 5 per cent of clients reported lasting harmful effects from therapy – also found that it was those clients who were unsure about what type of therapy they’d received who were more likely to say they’d experienced harm. Conversely, those who’d sought more information about a treatment were at less risk. This suggests that putting full faith in a therapist could be problematic. To any readers of this essay undergoing therapy, we want to reassure you again that most clients are still helped by therapy, but we do recommend that you request that your therapist is up to date on treatment research, and also that they are able to present you with evidence that the treatments or interventions they are providing have been rigorously tested. We especially encourage you to challenge your therapist in this way if something about the treatment is atypical, such as if it involves physical contact. Your therapist should have evidence their treatments work and share with you any concerns about potential harms. If your therapist never requires you to complete some sort of assessment of your progress – even a symptom checklist – then we suggest you see this as a red flag.

Fortunately, there is much room for growth in improving safeguards against harmful therapies. Policymakers, funders and government agencies need to be aware that some of the interventions they are fiscally supporting may be ineffective or potentially harmful. They should review the concerns in the scientific literature about an intervention, and consult with clinical scientists and practitioners (including those who are not users of the treatment) before providing it with additional support and resources. At some point, monetary backers have to deploy the stage hook: if evidence consistently shows that a well-intentioned intervention they financially supported either has no effect on clients or actively harms them, they need to exit their funding, stage right. And if the intervention persists? The public may need to give regulatory agencies more powers to ban harmful psychological interventions, to be able to tell those individuals or organisations using such approaches: ‘Don’t you DARE.’

Psychiatry and psychotherapy History of science Mental health

In everyday life, experience usually obscures being;
in meditation being outshines experience.

–Rupert Spira

 May 27, 2022 (menalive.com)

By  Jed Diamond

Part 2

            We continue to see acts of violence perpetrated by males. We know that depression turned inward can lead to suicide and turned outward can turn to violence. Most depressed people are neither suicidal or violent, but understanding depression can help save lives. In Part 1, I described my life-long interest in understanding depression which began when my father became increasingly depressed when he couldn’t make a living supporting his family, took an overdose of sleeping pills, and was committed to a mental hospital. I described our Moonshot Mission for Mankind and the importance of finding ways to treat, cure, and prevent depression.

            I noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) says,

“Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease. Approximately 280 million people in the world have depression and over 700,000 people die due to suicide every year.”

            Following my father’s commitment to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, my uncle began visiting my father and my mother wanted me to go with him. She reasoned that seeing me might help my father recover more quickly. But very little helpful treatment was going on in 1949 when I began my visits. Ironically, years later I found an entry in one of my father’s journals that he had gone to see the movie, “The Snake Pit” starring Olivia de Haviland who had been committed to a mental hospital. The movie had been released in 1948 and partially filmed at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which was located just north of our home in Los Angeles.

            At the time, “treatment” involved heavy doses of psychiatric medications, electro-shock treatments, and even lobotomies for patients who didn’t respond to the “help” they were being given. After a year of visits my father was clearly getting worse, but my mother and uncle were told by the doctors he needed to stay longer and might need “treatments” for the rest of his life.

            Even as a six-year-old child, it was clear that my father was not getting better and my visits weren’t helping. The doctors were convinced they knew what was wrong with my father and he needed to be locked up and treated for his own good. I knew I couldn’t help him and the trauma of going weekly to “the snake pit” was making me sick. After a year of visits, I refused to go. My father was forced to stay, until one day, he told my uncle, who continued with his weekly visits, that he needed to get stamps at the post office. Instead of getting stamps, he walked away and never returned. My uncle had to report to the staff that he had disappeared.

            I tell the full story of my father’s healing journey and my own in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. Here, and in future articles, I’ll share what I’ve learned over the years and the program I’ve developed to help depressed men and their families.

The Evolution of a New Approach for Effectively Addressing the Realities of Depression

            When my father was hospitalized in 1949, the psychiatric establishment believed that a person who took an overdose of sleeping pills must be crazy and should be locked up for his own good until he regained his sanity. What passed as treatment was primitive. Over the years things have improved, but the mainstream focus in the mental health field remains on what is wrong with a person. The assumption was that depression, and other common mental disorders, is simply a kind of brain disease that could be treated once the right diagnosis was agreed upon.

            Even as I child, I was more interested in what happened to my father that caused his despair than what diagnosis he was given. After growing up, attending college, and going on to earn a master’s degree in Social Work and a Ph.D in International Health, I had a different understanding of mental illness and what was needed for mental health. My approach focuses less on what was wrong with the person and more on what happened to them, what life experience and trauma contributed to the symptoms we call “mental illness.”

            This approach recognizes that there are genetic and biological aspects of depression and other illnesses, but they can’t be fully understood, treated, cured, or prevented without looking at these problems more broadly to include interpersonal, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects.

            Charles Whitfield, M.D. is one of the world’s leading experts on mental health and illness. In his book, The Truth About Depression: Choices for Healing, Dr. Whitfield, says,

“The truth about depression is that it is not as advertised. It is not what some special-interest groups tell us. It is not the single, simple disorder that drug companies and some mental health groups may claim. It is  not simply a genetically transmitted disorder of brain chemistry. It is not a brain serotonin problem. And it does not reliably respond to antidepressant drugs. And these drugs are not the only available recovery aid.”

            I agree with Dr. Whitfield’s assessment. It is consistent with my own experience in working with men and women over the last fifty years.

Where in the World is Depression Not a Major Problem?

            Although depression is widespread throughout our modern world, there are places where it is virtually unknown. Dr. Stephen Ilardi, author of The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression Without Drugs, notes that

“modern-day hunter-gatherer bands—such as the Kaluli people of the New Guinea highlands—have been assessed by Western researchers for the presence of mental illness. Remarkably, clinical depression is almost completely nonexistent among such groups, whose way of life is similar to that of our remote ancestors.”

            Dr. Ilardi goes on to describe the findings of anthropologist Edward Schieffelin who lived among the Kaluli for nearly a decade and carefully interviewed over two thousand men, women, and children regarding their experiences of grief and depression.

“He found only one person who came close to meeting our full diagnostic criteria for depressive illness,”

Dr. Ilardi reported.

Why Our Present Approach to Understanding and Treating Depression is Misguided

            There is an old problem in the way we treat people with depression and other illnesses. When a treatment approach isn’t working, there is a tendency to blame the individual seeking help rather than looking at the larger system. When one anti-depressant isn’t working, doctors will try another. When that doesn’t work, they look at the patient and question their desire to get well.

            Let me be clear, I think there are times medications can help people. I took medications for my depression and they were helpful. But when medications aren’t working or when a problem continues to get worse despite, billions of dollars spent on various treatment approaches, we need to look at the larger system and ask what is wrong with the system, not what is wrong with the individual.

            We are told that men are resistant to getting help for depression and men are often shamed because they won’t get help. It is certainly true to many men fear seeing doctors and many resist getting treatment. It is also true that there is stigma attached to seeking help for “mental” problems and men often are taught that it is unmanly to admit they are unhappy and depressed or to ask for help. But it is also true that some of male resistance to getting treatment may be that they realize that there is something wrong with the system, that accepting that we are “mentally ill” may cause us more harm than help.

            When we see that depression is getting worse and worse, impacting people at younger and younger ages, we have to look for solutions outside the individual. When we learn that depression is almost unheard of in indigenous cultures, we have to ask what they are doing right and what may be wrong with our “civilized” way of life.

            I address these issues in my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet. In examining our evolutionary history, I noted that our human lineage goes back 2 million years and for more than 99% of that time we lived as hunter-gatherers. Although it was a challenging way of life, it was a life without the stresses and strains that contribute to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and depression.

            In The Warrior’s Journey Home, I quoted my colleague, biologist Paul Shepard, author of The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game who offers a clear description of our lives through most of our human history and challenges the myth that our present way of life is always better than what we experienced in the past:

             “Although it has long been fashionable to describe it so, the world of the hunting and gathering peoples is not a vale of constant demonic threat and untold fears. It is a life of risk gladly taken, of very few wants, leisurely and communal, intellectual in ways that are simultaneously practical and esthetic. Most pertinent to our time, it is a life founded on the integrity of solitude and human sparseness, in which men do not become a disease on their environment but live in harmony with each other and with nature.”

            As Dr. Ilardi reminds us,

“We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life.”

Rather than viewing depression as a brain malfunction impacting a small percentage of individuals living in an otherwise healthy environment, I’ve come to see that depression is a natural response to anyone who is living in a dysfunctional society.

            Depression is not the problem and it won’t be solved within the system that created it. Depression is a wake-up call, reminding us that our current way of life is destructive to men, women, children, and the planet we all share. The problem is our disconnection from the natural world and our mistaken belief that humans were above nature. As we are told in our modern religion.

“And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”

            In Part 3, I will continue our exploration and share a program of healing that not only can help heal depression in men, but can help us heal our separation from nature, from ourselves, and from each other. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free newsletter, I invite you to join us and receive my weekly articles as well other news about how you can live long and well.

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Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

---

Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

Henry David Thoreau: A Life

by Laura Dassow Walls 

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.

Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?

Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.

“The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one,” says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.

(Goodreads.com)

Everybody wanna be God
Besides God, he wanna be like us 

–Song by Mac Miller

Malcolm James McCormick, known professionally as Mac Miller (January 19, 1992 – September 7, 2018), was an American rapper and record producer. Miller began his career in Pittsburgh’s hip hop scene in 2007, at the age of fifteen. Wikipedia

The Divine Feminine by Mac Miller

Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality

by Dean Radin (Goodreads Author) 

Is everything connected? Can we sense what’s happening to loved ones thousands of miles away? Why are we sometimes certain of a caller’s identity the instant the phone rings? Do intuitive hunches contain information about future events? Is it possible to perceive without the use of the ordinary senses?

Many people believe that such “psychic phenomena” are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don’t believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.

Albert Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance” — the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.

In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience.

(Goodreads.com)

“When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.”  Jack Kornfield (b. 1945) American Buddhist Teacher

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

On Consciousness

by Bernard J. Baars, Adam Alonzi (Editor)

This book retraces the influential “global workspace theory” (GWT) of conscious perception and thought. Part One is a look at the history of and the latest advances in consciousness studies, Part 2 is a republication of Baars’ 1988 Cambridge University Press book, “A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness,” and Part 3 presents the most recent advances in neurobiological theory (Baars et al, 2013).

Beliefs about the conscious mind are found in every culture. More than half of English content words refer to conscious perception, cognition, or voluntary control. Yet the careful scientific study of conscious thought has been very controversial until recently.

Readers can start with the tutorial, the cognitive theory, or jump to the most recent neurobiological version, called “Dynamic GWT.” Conscious brains are biological emergents, and can be understood in a coherent scientific framework.

Global Workspace (GW) Theory has become something of a buzzword in recent years, as philosophers and scientists have come to similar conclusions. The scientific study of consciousness in humans and other species has risen to the forefront, with many contributions from experimental psychology and neuroscience. The biological basis of the conscious brain is increasingly studied. New journals and societies have been founded to support research and communication among the many fields that are contributing to the science of conscious brains. In 2005 Science magazine listed “the biological basis of consciousness” as one of its top unsolved problems, a welcome sign of wider acceptance.

Yet I believe this Kindle Edition of the basic exposition of Global Workspace Theory is still needed today.

First, while the phrase “global workspace” has become popular, it is rarely used with clarity or empirical precision. This is not desirable in a young field of science. This book gives explicit definitions for all the theoretical terms used as of 1988 (see the Glossary and Index to Theoretical Claims). It also reviews the extensive evidence that may make those terms meaningful. In science we can debate facts and theory, but we should do so with clarity and rigor.

Second, it is widely (and wrongly) believed that GWT makes only one major claim about the role of consciousness in the brain. In fact, GWT claims there may be five necessary conditions for conscious brain events, not just one. There is evidence for all five conditions, and of course there may well be additional conditions that we do not understand at this time. As far as I can tell, the evidence for those conditions has only grown since 1988. Thus many discussions of GWT deal with only one-fifth of the theory.

In recent years the Cambridge University Press edition has become costly and sometimes hard to find. I hope therefore that this inexpensive electronic edition will remove any barriers for interested readers. Today, nearly the entire scientific literature on consciousness and its sister issues should be available to interested readers.

(Goodreads.com)

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 26, 2022 David Levitt, ScD, is the husband of Gail Hayssen, who has been a featured guest on New Thinking Allowed. He is cofounder and CEO of the Pantomime Corporation and is an expert in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality. His website is https://www.pantomime.co/ Here he shares information about his work as a doctoral student at MIT, studying under Marvin Minsky at the Media Lab. He also describes growing up in New York City in a biracial household. Living with his highly psychic wife, Gail Hayssen, has forced him to acknowledge that events can occur that are inexplicable by current materialistic science. The wide-ranging discussion touches on a number of cultural and political issues. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “Parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on May 7, 2022)