"Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it..."

"Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain."

"It's an argument with which older, calmer people needle the emotional young."

I wrote in the previous post. Meade asks: "Did you mean 'the emotionally young'?"

No, I'm not insulting anyone for emotional immaturity. I'm characterizing young people as more emotionally raw. They're not emotionally young, they're emotional, as is typical of the young. Note that I referred to "older, calmer people."

It's like that Cat Stevens song, "Father and Son." We hear the calm voice of the man who's "old... but happy," saying "it's not time to make a change," and one ought to "relax" and put much more time into thinking and learning. Then — at 1:24 — Stevens suddenly switches to the young man's voice, and he's so wound up and emotional. He can't deal with his father at all, he's sick of the same old thing, and he's got to run away. The old man returns at 2:44 ("sit down, take it slowly"), and the young man again at 3:15 ("All the times I have cried...").

***

Please keep the comments on topic. I want none of the usual diatribes about Cat Stevens's religious notions relating to fatwa and so forth. Let me just say in advance, I will delete anything in that category along with discussion of this decision to delete, though you're welcome to discuss any of that in the next or the last open thread. Or click on the Cat Stevens tag and revisit all the times we've already done that.

"Top 10 Emotional Intelligence Moments of 2012."

Some are high EQ and some are low. #6 is a fascinating low: a restaurant owner at a Romney campaign stop who suddenly wipes Romney's face — vigorously, with a napkin — just trying to help). #4 is a wonderful low, an inert man in a nursing home, revived by music. I love the part where the interviewer needs to be told to ask a yes-or-no question, and the man is able to respond, going far beyond yes/no. And then he's asked "What does music do to you?" and he says springs to life, saying:

It gives me the feeling of love — romance! I figure right now the world needs to come into music, singing — you've got beautiful music here.

Romance... that made me want to rethink the previous post about Egypt banning "romantic" songs on state TV and radio.

Torture in "Zero Dark Thirty": "It’s enough to make you wretch. It’s arguably the best and most important part of the movie."

Spencer Ackerman — whose wretched spelling may make you retch — struggles with the question that's plaguing movie fans today: Does the much-praised, Oscar-worthy Kathryn Bigelow film approve of torture?

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he’s shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo...

I'm no longer willing to view movies like this. (And I saw "3 Kings," which had a man getting liquid — crude oil — poured down his throat.) But this is what perhaps counts as serious film art these days. Crappy film entertainment is also full of torture (horror films).

Ackerman defends Bigelow: the film "presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was" and "does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet."

Bigelow's critics, linked in Ackerman's article, are worried that the film may convince people that torture is effective and worthwhile. This all sounds too rational. What does sitting quietly in a dark room with a crowd of comfortable strangers, watching huge, bright, clear moving pictures of actors pretending to be tortured do to our souls? I know the stock answer is: It's worse to live comfortably and complacently with a head free of any such picture. But the stock answer assumes that our souls are already dead.

"There are some good things" about being "robotic."

"Discipline comes to mind. But it sounds like there is just no emotion. People that know me, I don’t think they would say that. I certainly am not a fist-pounder. That isn’t my style. But that and emotion are two different things. One is just a way of expressing it, basically. So, anyway."

Says Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple (picked by Steve Jobs).

"A color-coded map of the world’s most and least emotional countries."

Most emotional: The Philippines. Least emotional: Singapore.

Self-reporting, so I question whether they've really measured emotion. One question was: "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?" Depends on the meaning of "a lot," the vividness of memories of "yesterday," whether you smile and laugh when you're feeling joyful, and so forth. But... whatever. It was  nice to see a color-coded map.

It made me smile.

The end of Asperger's and "gender identity disorder."

The people haven't changed, but the manual's been rewritten. If you've got what were the symptoms that once scored you the now-obsolete label, how will you feel?

Asperger's is now merged with autism as "autism spectrum disorder." As for "gender identity disorder":

It has been used for children or adults who strongly believe that they were born the wrong gender. But many activists believe the condition isn’t a disorder and say calling it one is stigmatizing. The term would be replaced with “gender dysphoria,” which means emotional distress over one’s gender.

Meanwhile, people with "severe recurrent temper tantrums" have gained a label: disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.

Critics say it will medicalize kids’ who have normal tantrums. Supporters say it will address concerns about too many kids being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful psychiatric drugs.

The illusion that emotion is expressed through the face.

"When you and I talk to each other and we look at each other, we're really looking at each other's faces. That's where our attention is. And so the assumption has been that that's where all the information is, too.... But these studies show very clearly that that's not the case."

"It is hard to love people whom we do not respect..."

"... but it is harder still to love those whom we respect more highly than we respect ourselves."

A maxim of Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

"The former Mr. Universe traces his detachment to his bodybuilding days, where he says emotions make athletes lose."

Arnold Schwarzenegger explains how and why he "became an expert in living in denial."

"Ban all performative weddings, ban all crazy expenditures... Ban the marriage pages in The New York Times."

"Ban those things that turn otherwise sensible people to start buying into that fantasy," says Virginia Rutter — great name — a professor of — take a guess — sociology, quoted in a NYT "Fashion and Style" piece, written by Matt Richtel, who's mostly airing his own "whimsical" notion that marriage could be a 20-year renewable contract.

Richtel quotes another a professor of — take a guess — sociology, Pepper Schwartz — great name — saying, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions, writ large, have changed... We haven’t scrutinized it. We’ve been picking at it like a scab, and it’s not going to heal that way.”

But wouldn't being innovative be picking at it? What's Pepper planning to do to this scab? Sociology professors... can we just pick at them?

As to Professor Rutter and her objection to "performative weddings"... well, I'm more concerned about her attraction to the word "ban"... she decries emotionality while sounding utterly emotional. And who are these "otherwise sensible people"? Human beings get involved in all sorts of ideas and practices entailing love and beauty and religion and hope and sex and money. There's no stripping away of all that. It is humanity itself, not a fantasy (or a scab!).

Pacifier use retards emotional development in boys.

According to a UW-Madison study by psychprof Paula Niedenthal, who tested the boys and theorizes that the problem is that when you've got a pacifier in your mouth, you can't mimic the facial expressions you see, and it's this mimicry that causes the brain to become capable of feeling the emotion the other person is expressing.

That sounds plausible, but why is it a boy problem?

Niedenthal said studies on girls did not show the same phenomenon. She said that may be because of societal norms that prompt parents to work harder at encouraging the expression of emotion in girls.

Or maybe girls are innately more emotional. Maybe you want to plug in the pacifier so they don't get overemotional. If Niedenthal is right, and it's those parents trying so hard to get a smile out of their girls, why not use the pacifier on the boys but encourage them more? Eh. I don't know. I only had boys. We used pacifiers, and we were always trying to get them to laugh and smile. I seem to remember lots of smiling and laughing around the pacifier, which often fell out as a result.

Niedenthal... compared her work with babies and pacifiers to studies that have shown people who use Botox, which paralyzes facial muscles, have a more limited range of emotions and also have difficulty recognizing the emotions behind others' facial expressions.

Would that mean that if you're a woman who's all excitable and dependent on what other people think of you, you could go in for a good Botoxing so you could calm down and get things done in a more manly way?

[Niedenthal's] current research had a much less scientific origin. Her own three boys did not use pacifiers, Niedenthal said. She recalled a dinner at which her 3-year-old son was throwing a fit. She noticed that another child at the table, who was using a pacifier, did not respond to her son's flailing tantrum.

"The parents took the pacifier out, and the child still did not respond," Niedenthal said. "That's when I got the idea for this research."

Funny that the research showed that her boys were better off. Science! It has so many applications!

I don't know what emotional intelligence test Niedenthal used, but some of the tests were done on adult men who'd used pacifiers when they were babies. One test I noticed recently was the "mind in the eyes test." Try it.

"SCIENCE: Men and women apologize differently."

Writes Instapundit, but the link goes to a story about one woman's apology. If you keep reading there's a small grab bag of "science":

Without defaulting to the conventional wisdom that men have to protect fragile egos, there’s an aspect to apologizing that implies defeat, which the more competitive male gender is less inclined to concede. Tiger Woods, Anthony Wiener, and Bill Clinton all had personas shaped by winning and success, and their late-coming, highly crafted apologies lacked authenticity. They seemed more driven by those self-preserving, secondary motives of escaping punishment and guilt. It felt like none of them would have apologized had he never been caught, implying the regret originated in being exposed rather than in feeling bad.

And all of that drivel is true of the apology from the woman (Kristen Stewart) that's supposed to feel so sincere! Well, there's the answer: The perceiver of the apology has subjective feelings and is judging the woman differently (and patronizingly!).

One of few scientific studies on the psychology of female versus male apologies determined that men are less inclined to apologize because they have a different threshold for perceiving offensive behavior; that is, that they don’t always get what they’ve done wrong until someone slaps them upside the head for it. 

Now, you're not talking about whether men and women apologize differently. You're talking about whether they apologize at all. And, come on, Kristen Stewart got "slapped upside the head," as you say. And, by the way, her apology — going by the quote at the link — doesn't even say she was wrong. It says she's sorry she hurt people, and what she did was a "momentary indiscretion" that interfered with what she wants in life.

Now... here it comes... brain science!

Disparities between female and male brains may also impact how apologies are shaped and delivered. Men tend to have proportionally more white matter in their heads, indicating a thick web of connections that strengthen organizational skills, spatial relations, and problem solving. But women are understood to have greater connectivity between the left side of the brain, where logic and facts are mostly processed, and the right side in charge of non-linear thought like creativity and perception. The flow of signals between left and right may explain why women are generally better at connecting emotions with language.

As usual, "science" says women are better! Considering that the article was written by a man, we do have a data point. Despite the great connectivity between the hemispheres of my brain, I see a bunch of  data points going nowhere. An actress, caught in a lie, dribbled out some blather. Maybe emotion is clouding my language. Sorry. (Could you tell how sincere that apology was?)

"Self-reliance — the new edgy lifestyle for the trendsetters among America’s youth?"

Glenn Reynolds asks in a NY Post column.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

He's looking at a new reality show — "Princess" — that makes entertainment out of forcing young women how to live within their means. And he's comparing it to pornography, which isn't exciting anymore. Supposedly. Despite the big "Shades of Grey" trend (which he mentions).

Could self-reliance become trendy? Maybe if it's imposed on some annoyingly bratty girl on television, but self-reliance is a low-profile matter in real life. It's about not getting noticed, not asking for help. Pornography is truly exciting when it interacts with shame. That's why the word transgression comes into play. There used to be shame in taking advantage of handouts and welfare, and people would apply themselves quite seriously to the tasks of remaining independent — staying off "the dole," as people used to say.

These days, half of Americans are getting government benefits. We've gotten comfortable leaning on each other, and where's the shame? People feel entitled, and we don't want to lose what we have, even if we perceive that what we're depending on might be/must be collapsing. But even if we did feel shame about our dependence, becoming independent would not be the escape from shame that one feels from pornography. When a person escapes shame through pornography, he is going ahead and indulging in the things that were the cause of shame. In the analogy, it's dependence on others that would be the source of the shame, and avoiding that dependence would be refraining from doing that which you're ashamed of. So quite aside from the present-day absence of shame, the analogy doesn't work.

You can't get to excitement and edginess unless you transgress — you move toward the behavior you were ashamed of. It might nevertheless — and for different reasons — feel beautifully rewarding to behave so well that you don't suffer from shame. But let's be clear about the analogy: self-reliance corresponds to chastity.

"A Kentucky man's family was able to satisfy his dying wish this week and give a local waitress an emotional surprise when they gave her a $500 tip on a pizza."

I loved this story — which includes a viral video of the delighted waitress — until I got to the part about the website using this video to collect donations which will purportedly be used to give more giant tips to unsuspecting waiters and waitresses. Yes, it's charming at first, including the dead guy's will:

“He left us a will full of his personality,” his brother Seth wrote in a July 9 post on a tribute website. “He asked that any debt he owed his parents be repaid should he have money in the bank at his death, but also had the following request: Third, leave an awesome tip (and I don’t mean 25%. I mean $500 on a f***ing pizza) for a waiter or waitress.”

I have no idea how sincere or trustworthy these people are, but they're getting massive publicity of the kind that can unleash torrents of donations. Remember all the pity in the form of money that flowed in to the bus monitor lady who had no idea how to monitor her bus? (Did you know she rejected the apologies the kids offered?)

Money sloshes around all over the internet. People get a kick out of tossing a few dollars into something that made their heart swell. The kick is real and probably better than the kick people get from buying a lottery ticket. Why raise suspicions when it's all about feelings? You might give money to a guy on the street who tells you a sob story or just asks for money in a way that amuses you. What's the difference? It's a free market.

Do you want more rationality in charity? Or is it all about feelings? 

"I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called."

Wrote Fania Pascal, back in the 1930:

I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

That's quoted in Harry G. Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit." Frankfurt aptly wonders if that really happened like that:

It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings — so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was only trying to cheer her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing. In that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all. 

Pascal needs to be more appreciative of having a friend like Wittgenstein. I'd say. But Frankfurt credits her with having this friendship and therefore with an aptitude for discerning whether Wittgenstein is cranky or nice. He decides to take her report as "sufficiently true to her idea of Wittgenstein to have made sense to her" and to "accept Pascal’s report at face value, supposing that when it came to the use of allusive or figurative language, Wittgenstein was indeed as preposterous as she makes him out to be." That is, Pascal — who might lack a sense of humor — now gets credit for having portrayed Wittgenstein as ridiculous, as if she'd made a joke rather than not getting the joke.

But Frankfurt's agenda is talking about bullshit, not analyzing the quality of a joke. She was bullshitting about how she felt by carelessly likening it to something overly specific — how a run-over dog feels. So Wittgenstein was essentially saying: That's bullshit. The key point — for "On Bullshit" purposes — is that Pascal doesn't care about the truth with respect to how the dog feels. So then Wittgenstein could be disgusted because of the way she didn't care about how the dog felt.

But it's not as though there were any real dog that had been run over. Pascal wasn't being callous toward an actual suffering being. The suffering being was Pascal, and the callousness, if any, was Wittgenstein's. On this theory, which hurt Pascal's feelings, he was saying, essentially, let's not talk about your mundane little tonsil surgery and its predictable after-effects. Let's talk about something philosophical, and the first thing that springs to mind is that dog you just mentioned. And he introduces the new topic. Ironically, the distraction into the random issue of animal feelings was much more likely to alleviate Pascal's pain that going on about the details of the surgery.

In Frankfurt's view — the context of bullshit — Wittgenstein is disgusted by bullshit, the laxity about what is true. I sidetracked the discussion into the question of concern about suffering. But the original topic — and the theme of the day here on the blog — is joking.

Joking has a lax connection to truth and to suffering.

Why did Bob Dylan wear sunglasses to the White House?

Caitlin McDevitt (at Politico) simply notes that he did, but we watched the video (over there), and this was the dialogue at Meadhouse:

ME: Look how emotional he is. That's why he's wearing sunglasses...

MEADE: He doesn't want people scrutinizing him...

ME: He's crying. He doesn't want people to see him cry. Oh, jeez, look at Obama. That smug look on his face... compared to Dylan... who is shaking and crying... [Blogging the conversation:] Did you say he didn't want people peering into his soul?

MEADE: No, I said he doesn't want people scrutinizing him. He's very expressive. He doesn't want people to be able to see that.

ME: Oh, I'm mixing it up with Bush and Putin. [Bush said: "I looked the man in the eye... I was able to get a sense of his soul..."]

MEADE: "Please don’t put a price on my soul... I know you’ve suffered much/But in this you are not so unique.... And if you don’t underestimate me/I won’t underestimate you..."

ADDED: And if you don’t misunderestimate me, I won’t misunderestimate you...

ALSO: What Bob Dylan said about Barack Obama in June 2008.

"When in public, do you constantly feel overwhelmed with inexplicable emotions for which you can’t determine the reason?"

Question 1 on a list of 7 questions to test whether you are an "empath," which "is not simply another name for a Clairsentient, though many Clairsentients are indeed Empaths."

If you *are* an Empath, you will know this is you, you will not be saying “Hmm.. maybe… hmm…” If you feel (without hesitation!) these apply to you as I’ve just described, then also know there are ways of coping, and I’ll get into them in future articles. With a little self-awareness you can turn your curse into gift, especially when it comes to being able to ease the emotional and physical pain of others. For now, take consolation in the knowledge that you are not crazy!

For now... but then later, like tomorrow, go to the doctor.

Bonus political joke: These are the 7 questions President Obama uses to interview prospective Supreme Court justices." (Don't get my joke? Read this.)

"But none of this crying was from actually being sad; I just felt too connected to the lives of others..."

"... to the vulnerability I could hear in someone's voice or hanging plainly on his face," writes Catherine Lacey, who, to become an egg donor, had taken injections of Lupron (which "greatly reduces the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone") and Menopur ("made from the urine of post-menopausal women") and Gonal-F, ("a mega-follicle-stimulating-hormone that is bovine-derived").

If I made eye contact with anyone I immediately wanted to mourn and rejoice them. Subways were impossible. Strangers were emotional landmines. I was the menopausal, pregnant, and postpartum mother of the world.

I realize now that it sounds dramatic. It was dramatic, even to me: I'm not the weepiest woman who ever was. I'm known mostly for well-intentioned sarcasm, level-headedness, and an ability/susceptibility for detaching. So I found the over-emotional side-effect strangely enjoyable, like I was renting some more emotional woman's brain.

It's quite disturbing to think that these stereotypically female qualities are so chemical, that they could be injected, but then perhaps I wouldn't find it so disturbing if I were not myself female.

ADDED: A reader emails:

I used IVF to get pregnant. I took Lupron, Menopur, and Follistim (which is similar to Gonal-F). I didn't have any emotional symptoms at all. The only thing that happened was mild bloating and weight gain. Lacey's experience is totally foreign to me.

So was I right all along or did the Santorum campaign read my blog...

... and see how to spin the "other emotions" remark about women in combat?

After Rick Santorum said that women should not serve in combat, citing “emotions,” critics were furious, saying he had insulted women by suggesting that they were too emotional to be depended upon in life-and-death situations.

But Mr. Santorum said Friday that he was actually referring to the emotions of men, not women, saying that men might be distracted from their mission by their “natural instinct” to protect women.

Yesterday, you may remember, WaPo's Jennifer Rubin said he'd get in trouble, and I said:

I'm guessing that Rubin is worried that he's stuck on some stereotype about women — they're too "emotional" — but I think he's referring to an argument about the way men feel — that is, an urge to protect women that would skew decisionmaking and performance.

ADDED: As Irene points out in the comments, Santorum made it apparent that he was talking about men's emotions on Friday's "Today" show, which was before my post.