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Fairness

In the last post, we saw SCARF model proposed by David Rock, identifying five strong human motivations (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness & Fairness).  The last post also discussed Status.  In this post, we will discuss the Fairness, or morality.

The most important paradigm shift on morality is this:

Fairness and other morals are hard coded in our genes!

The conventional belief is that the moralities have been given to us by religions.  But the more we understand how humans and other animals work, the more it becomes clear that

Religions have simply documented the moral values that we have inherited through our genes.

Unfortunately, religions have done a poor job of documenting morality.  Given that most of the religious teachings are hundreds or thousands of years old, they suffer from two disadvantages:

  1. The clarity of thought applied (while documenting the moral values) in the distant is substantially poor when compared with today’s rigorous standards
  2. The power of today’s science and mathematics to segregate the nuts and bolts of morality was not available in the past.  For the ancient thinkers, morality was too large to grasp, too dynamic to pin down and contained too many black boxes to make sense of.

Here is a wonderful TED video that shows morals are hard coded in the genes: Do Animals have Morals? (17 min).  The capuchin monkeys shown at 13 minute mark in the video have a brain that weighs about just 3.5% of a human brain!  Still, they clearly understand what is fair.  Understanding of fairness has been observed even in small fishes with pinhead sized brain, or in insects with no central nervous system.  If we know how to look, morality is seen in every animal.

Here is why the genetic origin of morality shouldn’t be surprising:

Proteins come together to form genes.  Genes, to chromosomes.  Chromosomes to organs to an organism.  Individual organisms come together to form a society/colony.

Each of these collectives has their own set of rules that must be preserved across time and generations.  Else, the process of formation of collectives stop from happening.

Chemical and physical rules govern the coagulation of organs into an organism (or upstream).  Morality is the rules that govern as to how individual organisms come together to form a colony/society.

Without morality, we will have no societies.  Because, morality is the fabric that holds us all together into a society.  The fabric of the society.

This idea has a few very interesting implications:

  • Since we don’t find many humans wanting to live in isolation for extended period of time, we can speculate that our ancestors who didn’t crave for fairness perished.  For today’s humans, fairness is a basic necessity.  Perceived lack of fairness and morality in other people can make us do funny things.
  • Since fairness is built into our genes, we should expect the world to become a more just place to live with time.
  • Morality is a component of the society.  Moral values usually give more importance to the society, than the benefit of an individual.
  • All agents of morality (including the religions) will mostly put the benefit of the society above the benefit of an individual.
  • We don’t need the religious teachings to tell us what is right and what is not.
  • Because of the poor standards of thinking of understanding involved in the religious teachings, we will be much better off if we replace the religious teachings with scientific understanding of moral values.

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Seek Status

If you are a corporate type, I am sure they have already bored you to death with Abraham Maslow’s human need pyramid.  Maslow proposed that human beings start addressing their needs from the bottom most layer.  Typically, after the bottom layer is addressed, they move to the layer above.  How-much-ever popular Maslow’s pyramid is, I can never figure out what self-actualization is!

Maslow's Pyramid

Fortunately, there is a delightfully alternative human-drive model that works for me.  Proposed by David Rock, the SCARF Model identifies five human needs that have huge impact on our decisions.  And it is not as if one of them is more important than the other.

SCARF Model

Maslow and all other teachers before him (including the religious teachers) completely missed the human hunger for status.  Almost every religion, without an exception, preach that status seeking is evil or trivial thing.  People readily die in order to retain their status.  In fact, almost every one is spending their whole life pursuing status.

With the help of modern science, animal studies and hard data, we now clearly know that having high status adds a few years to one’s life.  Not only that, we now know that the people/animals with lower status suffer much higher levels of stress and anxiety, making even their shorter life much less pleasant.

Status seeking is a selfish act, done to benefit the self and near-self.  Selfishness in itself is not a bad thing till such time it affects others in an unfair manner.  Unfortunately, status seeking is a win-lose game; for one person to win, other(s) must lose.  An individual’s status seeking threatens the status of (few) others in the group.  Sometimes, the entire group is threatened by an individual’s status seeking.  Groups almost always hate status seekers.

Religions are a product of group selection.  They almost always put the benefit of the group above that of the individual.  Religions always belittle an individual’s self-centered reward seeking behavior.  Ironically, religions smuggle an individual’s reward-seeking mechanism to serve the group.  If we look at it from this point of view, a religion is a parasite on its member, though a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with the host might exist.

Interestingly, status seeking is driven by sexual selection.  Status seeking is usually an expression of the mate selection drive.  An individual’s status seeking drives roughly correlates with the level of androgens and other gonadal hormones in their body.  People are most status seeking in their sexual prime.  Kids and elderly, with their low gonadal hormone levels, more readily cooperate.  Men, with their higher androgen levels, are much more competitive than women.

Summary:

  1. Seek, and win, Status; it is good for your health and well being
  2. Your status-run will threaten your peers
  3. Institutions put their selfish motive above your individual welfare when they teach you not to seek status
  4. As you grow old, your status-seeking drive might diminish.  And, you might think that the status seekers are all foolish.

We’ll look at “Fairness” in the next post.

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Happiness

We’ve heard people claiming that we use only 20% of our brain (or is it 10%).  It’s wrong!  We know beyond doubt that the brain is a finite resource and the demand placed on it often surpasses the resources available.

When the brain is assigned more than one task, they compete inside the brain for resources and the energy hungry tasks usually are sacrificed.  Of course, unless it is more critical or more rewarding (in which case, other tasks are sacrificed).

The neocortex (and particularly, the Pre-Frontal Cortex) is central in high cognition (though, higher cognition occurs outside the cortex too).  It is also the most energy inefficient part of the brain.  Evolutionarily, it is the most recent part of the brain, whereas the rest of the brain has been around for millions of years more.  The rest of the brain has had time to evolve better efficiency.

Neocortex is the part of the brain where you hold a thought and process it.  It is also where we hold a negative thought and ruminate over it.  If such a thought is about something that happened in the past, we call it sadness or regret.  If the negative thought is about the future, we call it worry.

Ruminating the past doesn’t change a thing.  We all know it but we often find ourselves unable (the thought it too powerful) or unwilling (we feel guilty to let go) to extricate ourselves from this thought pattern.  The sad thing here is that none of this will ever change the past.  But the rumination will deprive our ability to be available to the people and the challenges that are right in front of us today.

But there is a very interesting perspective to worrying that is not immediately obvious.  When we are facing a future challenge, we ‘usually’ do not need more than a few seconds (if not minutes) of thinking to find the solution.  If we are unable to find a solution after a short reflection, we probably lack data/skill and we need to go out and get some.  In the former case, worrying is a meaningless sacrifice of our mental health.  In the later case, worrying stunts our ability to acquire additional resources that will help us actually solve the problem.  Either way, worrying extracts huge cost from us.  Almost always, it is a wasteful exercise.

Here is a simple technique to stop from dwelving in a past or future negative event:

Do something that shifts the flow of blood (i.e. energy) from the neo-cortex!  It is that simple!!

Get up and walk.  Exercise.  Dance.  All these things shift the energy flow inside your brain to the regions that have the motor control.  If you are good at it, sing a song, play a music or simply listen to a type of music that doesn’t accentuates your negative mood.  Play with kids, play with pets, go to a movie, go to some chat room, spend time with friends.  Start a movement, contribute time to a cause, join a mission, join a competition.  Meditate. Cook.  Shop.  Party.  Watch a movie.  Fall in love.  Travel.  Bunjee jump.  Wear Spandex and fight crime.

The choices are limitless.  The point is to get on to something that shifts the blood flow from the structures that ruminate or worry, to anything other structure in the brain.  All the grand strategies that are taught to stop worrying/ruminating all boil down to this simple thing.

Most of the typical anti-worry or anti-rumination methodologies work ‘on’ the negative thought.  While working on a thought, you must hold it in your mind.  The more you hold a thought in your mind, the more deeply entrenched it becomes and the more difficult it is to extinguish it.  There lies the simple elegance of the shift-blood-flow technique.  It takes just a second to implement and it doesn’t ever involve working ‘on’ the negative thought!

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Lights

We often focus like a laser beam: Precise and with high intensity.  When we focus like a laser, anything that is not under the beam vanishes from our attention, including our  perception of time.  We are usually under flow state and we are reasonably confident about cracking the problem that we are focusing on.

When we focus like a laser, a portion of our brain called Dorsolateral Pre-Frontal Cortex becomes highly active.  DLPFC is involved in our executive functions, working memory, self control, etc.

Other than laser focus, there is a diametrically opposite powerful mental state: Illuminate like a table lamp!  The light has no specific agenda.  But it has its fingers in every pie there is.  This is the state of mind we typically acquire when we become spontaneously creative.  Examples include composing a new tune, writing a poem, flirting with someone special, etc.

Interestingly, when our mind lights up like a table lamp, the DLPFC become under-active!

DLPFC often underlies the difference between the well-organized disciplinarian and the artsy-creative types.  The former has overactive DLPFC and the later has under-active DLPFC.

Each mental state has its own advantage.  There are times where we need to focus like a laser and there are time where we need to bounce around like the photons from a table lamp.  Usually, every individual is good in one type of thinking.

But there is a ridiculously simple way to acquire each mental state:

Mimic a laser beam or a table lamp with your attention!

Don’t think.  Just visualize your light source and mimic it with your attention.  You can shift your mental state in a jiffy.  With that, your whole persona changes!

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Escape Velocity of Life Extension

One of the best kept secrets of medical industry is that life extension techniques are here and now!  We have known for decades that stuff like micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.), hormone balancing, etc. can easily give additional 10 to 20 ‘fit’ years to an ageing individuals. However, for incredibly silly reasons, these techniques are not widely known or practiced.

For example, benefits of most of the micro-nutrients have been known for several decades.  No one can take a patent on them and there is not enough money for pharmaceutical companies to promote them.  All over the world, unfortunately, most of the (not all) physicians limit their post-college education to sales presentations given to them by medical representatives.  With no medical representative to show a nutrition therapy in front of a physician, nutrition therapy has become an orphan that no one cares about.

Hormone balancing, on the other hand, has a different story.  During the later part of twentieth century, many pharmaceutical companies have sold poor mimics of human hormones, resulting in several adverse side effects.  Consequently, hormones replacement strikes terror in the minds of the lay public and under-educated physicians.  Given that hormones are used by the body as the elixir of youth and vitality, ignoring their potential benefit because we are ill-informed is really sad.

But things are changing fast.  More and more physicians are waking up to simple, yet effective, ways to dramatically increase the fitness levels of the ageing.  People in the anti-ageing industry and patients undergoing age-management therapy, routinely claim that their biological age has been reversed by 10 to 20 years.  If not more.

10 to 20 bonus fit years is no small thing.  But that’s all we can hope to gain from today’s science.  However, there is an interesting aspect: With the breakneck speed at which science is progressing, it is generally believed that before the bonus time (of 10 to 20 years) runs out, newer understanding will come along, giving us additional 10 to 20 fit years.  And…so…on.

This speed of medical breakthroughs, which will ultimately give us immortality, is loosely called the ‘escape velocity of age extension’.  Most of the people in the know believe that the escape velocity is already here.  I tend to agree with them!

Of course, they could be completely wrong.  But what if they are right?  If you were born in the 1960′s or earlier, it is time to sit up and take notice.

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Transhuman

Evolution, the blind watchmaker, has been toying around with various models of biological entities for the last three and a half billion years.  And if you subscribe to panspermia (that the first life form originated somewhere else in the Universe and floated to the earth as star dust), God know how many years of evolution was under play before the three and a half billion years of evolutionary drama started on earth!

Evolution builds on top of evolution.  Because of this, as the time progresses, evolutionary changes happen in exponential speed.  Unfortunately, or brains are not geared up to perceive geometric progression.  That speed of evolution picked up with appearance of intelligent humans on earth.

‘Natural vs artificial’ is a false dichotomy.  Brick and mortar, soot and sewer are products of evolution, just as a honeycomb is a product of evolution.  Extending that thinking…

all the human achievement, including science, technology, philosophy, arts, modern medicine are all products of evolution

Ray Kurzweil of MIT has figured out a neat way to predict the progress of information technology.  Kurzweil has proposed (this video) that

  • By 2020, we will have computer inexpensive hardware that are as powerful as a human brain (but we won’t have the software yet)
  • By 2029, we will have reverse engineered all the regions of human brain, giving us a good understanding of how the software of the human brain works.
  • By 2045, we will have machines that are just as powerful as humans.  While the intelligence of human brain is limited by its biology, capabilities of the machines will continue to grow in exponential pace.

Unbelievable as they might sound, Kurzweil has been accurately predicting major technological events from the mid 1980′s onward.  While Kurzweil maintains that it is hard to see how things will turn out beyond this point, it is obvious that the pace of improvement of technology will change who we are and what are our values.  As a result,

the very definition of human is changing!

These changes that are going to hit us with warp speed.  Understanding them will help us to prepare ourselves for both good and the bad that are in store for us.

Welcome to the future…

Where, you might be among the first to defy death!

Or, be among the last to celebrate life!!

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Elanthirumaran

I don’t invest much of time thinking about politics and governance.  I think they would take several years to master them.  I also think that because they are poorly documented, at least in India where I live, only a person in the middle of all this on a day to day basis can master them.

But today, I had an interesting insight into improving the quality of democracy in a meeting organized by a FaceBook group called Occum’s Saloon.

Indian democracy, though robust, is infested with rampant corruption and inefficient governance.  The options available in an election are so disgusting, most of the educated franchisee in the country doesn’t ‘stoop’ to participate in the election.  I am one of them.  I have never voted in a general election.  The choices available are outright disgusting and the process of voting is pointless.

Save Democracy

One Mr. Elanthirumaran (translates to The Victorious Young One) made a presentation about the vicious circle perpetuated by non-participating educated voters.  He had one powerful answer to ‘What is the Point (of voting)?’

His response was, “while your candidate will not win in this election, or you might not even find a worth a while candidate in this election, your coming into the the electoral democracy will make the existing political parties to sit up and think.  Slowly, but surely, they will want to cater to your needs and your issues”.

That is an argument I can’t refuse!

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Questions No One Asks

Here are a bunch of questions about human sexuality that no one wants to ask.  Probably because the answers frighten everyone!

01: If men are genetically programmed to spread their seeds as  wide as possible, why shouldn’t we expect women to be genetically programmed to collect as varied seeds as possible so that the best one wins?

02: If women have muted sexuality, or naturally monogamous, why did men have to build societies that so severely restricts women’s independence.

03: If families are economical units lead by man-the-provider, what is going to happen to the unit in a world where women have larger average income than men?

04: Many people who are alive today are likely to live beyond 100, and spend much of that life in their sexual prime.  What will happen to marriage, monogamy and other conventional values?

05: Why do women reach their sexual prime in their late thirties, just when men start their downhill slide?  Or why do men reach their sexual prime in late teens and early twenties, exactly when most women their age are unable to even get a decent orgasm?

06: While we believe that the clitoris is the only human organ built purely for pleasure, why doesn’t it occur to us that women may be selecting men for their pleasure giving ability?

07: If size doesn’t matter, why almost every man is perennially insecure about his size?

08: Why internet search terms describing male endowment is one of the most popular search terms by heterosexual men?

09: Why internet search terms, to everyone’s surprise, show that men stay very close to few selected porn preferences whereas a woman’s taste is all over the chart and varies largely from time to time.

10: While most women don’t enjoy visual porn as much as men, why are stories like 50 shades and slash stories are very popular with women folk?

11: In the social networking age where copying others has been taken to unheard of heights, and mate search has become lot easier, what is going to happen to people’s social and sexual life?

12: While it is becoming clear that power inequality between  partners is a strongest aphrodisiac, what is going to happen to the equality movement?

13: Why is it that youngsters ridicule spiritual values that is so dear to people who are beyond their sexual prime? And the older people ridicule sex drive that determines almost every action of the youth?

14: While our values and priorities change with our age, why do we have our key social structures designed for the youthful mental state?

15: While attraction, attachment and sexual drives are three mutually independent faculties, why do we have a social structure that pins all three on a single individual.

Because we were prudes for several centuries now and never dared to ask some of the important questions, there is so much of clutter and misinformation out there.  If these questions are answered honestly, the answers will move the ground from under our feet.  I intend addressing all of them, supported by hard scientific data, neatly tucked into some innocuous-looking and academic-sounding posts!

However, this blog is not just about human sexuality.  I happen to believe that our sexuality is a huge part of who we are and without understanding it, we will never know who we truly are.  Also, without understanding our true self, we will never have a chance to be truly happy.

Since my blog is about all of human nature and not just about human sexuality, you will find the answers to these questions peppered in between several other topics that I believe are important in understanding human nature.  If you are interested in keeping track of the future posts so that you will know when your favorite topic comes up, you can do one of these things:

  • Subscribe to the blog by entering your name and email address in the form on the top-right.  Of course, your email address will not be shared with anyone.
  • Subscribe to the RSS feed (this is for the gear heads)
  • LIKE the FaceBook page you will find here.  I update this page only when I post something in this blog and you will easily miss the updates.  Hence, after LIKEing the page, you will have to click on LIKED button and select GET NOTIFICATIONS.  Otherwise, the updates from the FaceBook page tends to get lost.

By the way, if you can think of more unasked questions, please feel free to add them in the comment section below.

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ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is easily the most fascinating, misunderstood, contested and over-diagnosed psychiatric condition.  Through ADHD, we will see how our brain affects our behavior.

There is a brain chemical (neurotransmitter) called Dopamine.  When you get something right, the dopamine levels in the brain go up.  Of course, getting something right is often closely linked to improving one’s chances of survival or reproduction.  Dopamine is the reward chemical.  It supplies the feel good when we solve a mathematical problem, find delicious food or a delectable mate.  Cocaine high is also supplied by drug induced dopamine.  Dopamine is also responsible for movement, motivation, impulse control, alertness and focus.

There is a neurotransmitter called Norepinephrine (NE).  NE increases secreted in your brain when your stress levels go up.  NE also increases the alertness and focus.  NE is a product of Dopamine.

A small set of the population seem to have a mutation that leaves them with sub-optimal levels of dopamine and/or NE.  Because of the sub-optimal levels of alertness/focus chemicals, unless something excites them (and increases the dopamine levels) or frightens them (and increases the NE levels), these people tend to remain distracted and under-motivated.  These people are thought of attention deficit.

There is also a difference in the way an ADHD brain in wired.  When a baby is born, the neurons inside the brain are cross wired in an almost random fashion.  As the baby grows up, surplus connections are pruned out.  This pruning is needed to build specialized modules inside the brain and make the brain more efficient.  Often, parts of an ADHD brain remains under differentiated.  As you will see later, this not always a bad thing.

It is interesting to see how these subtle changes inside the brain express as personality traits:

  • There is a portion of the brain called striatum, which is partly responsible for physical movement.  People with sub-optimal levels of dopamine in striatum can’t sit in one place.  These are the physically hyperactive types.  The physical movement seem to increase the dopamine levels in the striatum.
  • Striatum is also responsible for motivation.  Less dopamine here results in poor motivation.
  • There is a part of the brain called pre-frontal cortex (PFC) that sits just behind our forehead.  It is believed to be responsible for several functions, including acting as the breaking system of the brain.  When someone has less dopamine in the PFC area, they exert poor impulse control.  It makes them short tempered (bad) and/or spontaneous (good at times).
  • PFC also smothers the creative insights to some extent.  This is one reason why creative people often have poor impulse control.
  • PFC is responsible for forethought, planning, executing, etc.  People with less dopamine in PFC show deficiencies with these skills.
  • PFC is also thought of as the seat of working memory.  Poor dopamine levels in PFC impairs a person’s working memory and makes them poor with details.  On the other hand, they become good at dealing with the big picture (which amounts to consolidating several smaller details into one bigger package).
  • Because of poor level of dopamine in PFC, this brain type is typically disorganized.  On the other hand, some of these people who learn to organize are super-organized.
  • Poor dopamine levels in PFC also results in poor time sense.  Even estimation of time required to complete a task is difficult for them.
  • People with low level of dopamine in cerebellum become physically sluggish.  But all the action happens inside an overactive mind, encased in a still body.
  • Novelty increases dopamine levels.  People with this brain type are usually novelty seekers.
  • Routine task doesn’t generate dopamine.  While these people can handle a novel task of higher difficulty, handling even a simple routine task is such a drag for them.
  • Risk taking pumps up dopamine and norepinephrine.  So, this brain type actively goes looking for risk.  Several of soldiers, police men, stock brokers and other high risk professions are filled with this brain type.
  • Of course, verbal quarrels also increase NE.  Some people with this brain type are pugnacious, particularly when they also have a short temper.  Almost everyone with this brain type is a drama queen.
  • Dopamine is also responsible for salience.  People with sub-optimal dopamine levels forgive others easily.  Except if they also have deficient levels of serotonin in anterior cingulate gyrus, in which case they won’t easily forget a slight.
  • The sub-optimal level of serotonin is ACG is often seen in people with ADHD brain type.  ACG is like the gear shift of the brain and serotonin acts like the gear fluid.  With deficient serotonin, their brain tends to get stuck in the same state.  Combined with poor working memory, these people tend to forget the rest of the world when they lay their hands on a task that fascinates them.
  • Throughout the brain, dopamine and serotonin are in a balance.  As less serotonin is known to cause depression, ADHD brain type with less dopamine (and hence, more serotonin) is not easily susceptible to depression.  However, we live in a world that is designed for non-ADHD brain and living in this world often puts them into very high level of stress.  This high stress often makes them prone to depression and anxiety.
  • Because the wiring inside the brain is criss-crossed, this brain type often results in traffic congestion.  This traffic (data) congestion expresses itself in several ways, including dyslexia.
  • Because of the hyper-wiring, people with this brain type usually have sharper senses.  Some of them can hear very feeble sound and/or sound from wide frequency range.  Many of them wear soft and casual clothes as formal clothes (and wrist watches) are too rough on their skin.  Many of them have a nose that can overwhelm them.  As a matter of fact, any of the senses can overwhelm easily them.  Of course, more severe cases of under-differentiation results in complications which have their own jargon and we are not getting into them here.

There are two people inside every person with ADHD brain type.  One is the dull, distraction prone, absent minded, careless and low-motivation person they live most of their life as.  The second character is highly charged, super-motivated, quick, sharp, intelligent and daring person they turn into when they are in a dopamine or norepinephrine pumping situation.

In other words, the baseline of performance for these people shift from situation to situation.  This dynamically shifting baseline is not understood by most of the people, including the ones who have this brain type.  That leads them to falsely under or over estimate their self worth.

In the next post, we will see how our compulsion to generalize ruins the lives of millions of people with this brain type.