9/10/18
Mottoes, nicknames and flags, oh my!

In Kentucky, where I grew up, the state motto was “United we stand, Divided we fall”. The state seal had a frontier man (leather fringed jacket, moccasins and all) shaking hands with a city slicker/politician type in a frock coat. As a child, I thought the motto had to do with the two guys, but maybe not.  One source says the frock coat guy represents England while the leather stocking guy represents the new world frontier. Whatever.

The state seal has always had the two guys, but apparently the first version had them in a fierce hug.  Look left to see the original seal.  Imagine how popular that would be in a conservative place like Kentucky today!  Maybe we could do one in rainbow colors?



That was modified to an image of two guys standing awkwardly holding hands.  One wag said it was because they were so drunk on bourbon that they had to hang on to each other just to stand up.  At any rate, since the current version (in the flag above) was always around when I was growing up, I didn’t pay too much attention to the details.

The state nickname is The Bluegrass State. Why blue?

This common nickname for the Kentucky is given because of the vast expanses of Bluegrass across parts of the Commonwealth. Bluegrass is not really blue. It's green. In the spring, however, when seen from a distance, the blue-purple buds of Bluegrass lend a bluish tint to the landscape.

Sounds nice, doesn't it?  I spent 10 years of my life in bluegrass country, and I have to tell you, it’s not blue. Not even close. Sure is pretty country, though.

And no, I have no idea why it's a commonwealth instead of a state. Don't ask.

As I’ve moved from place to place, I was never very interested in the state seals and mottoes and nicknames.  I just this minute looked up West Virginia, where I lived for awhile. It’s got the cousin of the Kentucky frontier guy leaning on a rock next to what is probably a coal miner. Actually, the frontier guy might be a farmer. He’s got an ax and is growing corn and wheat.  Who knows.  The motto is great though: Montani Semper Liberi:  The mountains are always free. That’s pure West Virginia right there.  

California’s seal has Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, overlooking what is apparently the Sacramento River. The state motto is Eureka! in honor of the discovery of gold in the 1840s.  I may have uttered the same word when we moved there from Kentucky…

However, what brought about this entire essay is the motto that appears on the state flag of my new home in Nevada:  Battle Born.  That piqued my curiosity.  Was it a battle that finally allowed the territory to become a state?  Was it a battle to get the state accepted into the Union? Nope. Wikipedia will tell you it’s simply because Nevada was admitted to the Union during the Civil War, but it was really political chicanery at work.

The year was 1864.  The Civil War raged in the east and south with devastating battles at Spottsylvania, Wilderness and Cold Harbor. Abraham Lincoln was running for his second term, and the Republicans were desperate to ensure his re-election.  Nevada was happy to help donate its electoral votes to the cause, but they weren’t a state yet.  So in a rush to be admitted to the union before the first Tuesday in November, the legislature created a constitution and telegraphed it in its entirety, in Morse code, to Washington for approval by congress in time.  It remains the longest telegram ever sent. And expensive! It cost almost $3,500 then, which would be over $56,000 today. It turns out Lincoln didn’t need the votes, but we were there for him, just in case. Anyway, we were and are Battle Born. Sadly, the OFFICIAL state motto is the wimpy "All for our Country".

They should have stuck with Battle Born. Oo-rah!

3/16/18

Why we should lower the voting age to 16 and raise the age to buy a firearm to 21.

Like many of us, I have been stunned at the thoughtful and articulate maturity of the Parkland, Florida students as they expressed their frustration and anger at school shootings and gun control laws.  They certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of phone-addicted, narcissistic slackers. But are they exceptions or just good examples? And what does this have to do with gun control?

There was a fascinating op-ed piece on this topic in the New York Times earlier this month. The author, professor Laurence Steinberg, suggests that the voting age should be lowered to 16. 

He begins by distinguishing between “cold” cognition and “hot” cognition. Cold cognition is the type of thinking we do in calm situations, where we look at evidence and weigh pros and cons.  Voting is a great example of this.  And Steinberg says that the research on adolescent thinking shows that cold cognitive abilities have matured by the time teenagers have reached age 16.  Hot cognition, on the other hand, concerns making good decisions in times of stress or emotional arousal, which requires self-regulation. As most of us remember, teenagers are notoriously short on this and will remain so until their early 20s when the related parts of the brain finish developing. 

Can we change the voting age?  Certainly. It was changed from 21 to 18 some years ago. 

Should we change the voting age?  Steinberg says definitely because voter turnout in this age group is significantly higher than among other young adults.  And when it comes to voting, we tend to continue as we've started. People who don't vote the first time they can are less like to vote in the future.

Will we change the voting age?  Probably not. Since younger people tend to be more liberal, that’s not going to happen in this political climate. Moreover, as my husband suggested when I brought this up, 16 year olds don’t have a wealth of experience to bring to bear on topics of foreign trade, economics, or the balance of powers. However, the research does provide excellent support for the notion of raising the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21, when mechanisms in the brain for self-regulation have matured. That notion gets a big YES vote from me.

3/6/18

Demonizing the Opposition

One of the first things you learn in social psychology is how easily we group people into "US" and "THEM".  In-groups and out-groups. There's probably a survival mechanism at work here - we bond together for safety with those who are like us in some way because it increases our likelihood of survival.  But we do see each group differently.

One of the biggest differences is that we see our guys as individuals, with varying skills and opinions and actions, while those other guys over there are all the same.   The formal term is the "outgroup homogeneity effect". Drop that into the conversation if you want to impress someone at your next cocktail party.  

Recently, though, this has taken on even more of a political flavor. The result is a demonization of the opposition, to the detriment of useful conversations and helpful problem solving. 

"Those stupid, bleeding-heart liberals." 

"Those evil, money-hungry Republicans."

I came across a recent article in the January edition of Political Psychology that bears this out and ties it to something called Implicit Follower Theory.  What the researchers found is that we see followers of our own political viewpoint as enthusiastic, industrious and good citizens.  The other guys are conformists, incompetent and insubordinate.  In turn, this leads to two qualitatively different strategies in trying to change opinions.  If we’re dealing with our own guys, our favorite strategies involve persuasion.  Lay out the facts and try to change their minds. Sadly, the option of choice for the other guys is coercion instead.  One of my favorite people sometimes says, "I'd like to smack those guys till they can see what's real and what's not." Think how useful that'll be!

Those notions on how to change the mind of the opposition are about as successful as the guy below. And for the same reason: they’re driven by faulty perceptions, not reality. We can do better.

2/10/18

Creativity and the Brain

 

We have lots of ideas of what creativity is – like the ability to paint a pretty picture or write a poem or design an experiment.  But folks who want to study creativity in the lab need what’s called an operational definition, something unambiguous that they can then measure under controlled conditions. That’s a lot harder to do, and I’ve seen some unhelpful ones, like the sorting paint chip method that then asks the scientist to figure out which piles of colors are creative and which piles aren’t. Oy.

Of late, one popular definition of creativity has been the ability to come up with new and useful ideas, like how to make dinner based only on what’s in the fridge.  The important terms here are “new” and “useful”.  Keep that in mind.

An essay in a recent edition of The Conversation describes research at Harvard that uses this definition of creativity to study what’s happening in the brain when someone’s being creative. The scientists put volunteers in a brain scanning machine and then asked them to come up with novel and useful ways to use things like gum wrappers or socks.

Think about it for a minute. What’s a creative way to use socks?  What new and cool thing can you do with gum wrappers. Go ahead. Give it a try. I can wait.

Do you have some ideas?  So did the volunteers.  Using socks to warm your feet isn’t “novel”.  But using them to filter water is.  (And may I say, ewwwww. Hope they’re clean.) Or you could use socks to dust furniture. Or as potholders. My husband suggests using wadded up gum wrappers to pack small fragile items, like tiny glass sculptures. Or arrange different colored ones to make a pretty mosaic. And so on.

 

At the same time the volunteers were thinking up these ideas, the researchers were scanning their brains and looking for what areas were active. And what they found was really interesting.

Three brain areas seemed to be utilized when people are trying to be creative: the default network (usually active when we’re daydreaming or when our minds are just wandering), the executive function system (which focuses us on completing a task), and the salience network (that seems to be involved in switching back and forth between the other two). It’s like we come up with an idea (default) and then decide whether it’s a good one or a new one (executive function).

Normally, these areas don’t work at the same time. But when highly creative people are thinking up new ways to use socks or gum wrappers, all three activate.

But what does that have to do with REAL creativity, the traditional kind, like creating art?  A lot, actually. Further studies showed the same networks are at work in creative acts as varied as writing poetry, composing music, and creating visual arts. The brains of these people are also activating these three areas.  Perhaps the brains of creative people are wired differently than the rest of us. Or maybe creativity is created.  That's a question yet to be answered.

There’s also a dark side to creativity. Sometimes, people who believe they are creative feel that they are then entitled to break the rules.  Benign case in point: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. 

In 1968 Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was working on developing a strong and durable adhesive for building aircraft. At one point, he created a very weak adhesive. While it lacked the necessary strength, it had the remarkable qualities of leaving no residue and being reusable. Nonetheless, 3M deemed the product useless, put it aside, and forgot about it. 

Years later, Art Fry, a chemical engineer at 3M and church choir member, was frustrated about losing his place in his hymnal. Fry, who’d been aware of Silver’s invention, had an idea: he coated some paper with Silver’s failed adhesive, marked the hymnal pages with the pieces of paper, and then removed the paper after the church service without damaging the pages. 

Seeing potential value in the product, Fry reintroduced it to his superiors. They panned the idea, and ordered that he cease working on the project. Nonetheless, Fry defied those orders and continued with the project. He built a machine to produce the Post-it notes, distributing the prototypes to 3M’s secretaries, who loved them. Fry ignored his managers’ requests, used company property without permission, and bypassed the established protocols of the company – all to pursue his idea. 

3M eventually saw the product’s value and manufactured it. Post-it notes became wildly successful and profitable: Fry had taken what was considered a useless product and applied it in a unique and useful way. But the story of the Post-it note demonstrates both the positive and the dark sides of creativity. On the one hand, a creative idea resulted in value and profit; on the other, an individual was willing to be intentionally dishonest in order to execute his idea.   

 Something to keep in mind...

Art Fry