Scientists have identified the part of the brain that appears to control introspection – the ability to think about what you are thinking.
The discovery could lead to an understanding of one of the key ingredients of human consciousness and could help to treat certain brain injuries where people lose their ability to reflect upon their own thoughts and actions.
Researchers found that people who were more introspective tended to have larger volumes of nerve tissue in an area of the prefrontal cortex, directly behind the eyes.
American paranoia is secretly behind everything
Whatever their boogeymen (and in the case of anti-Communist fanatics during the Cold War -- paranoia's golden age -- the fear was grounded in fact), these groups shared the same baroque and fantastical imagination. This is what Hofstadter meant when he referred to a persistent "style." Its elements are: "the central image" of "a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life"; an "apocalyptic" mentality, that "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human value"; and an insistence on seeing all political differences as "a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil."
With the passing of the Soviet Union, the paranoid style lost a bad guy made in heaven, and the years since have seen a restless casting about for a suitable replacement. Hofstadter essentially argued that, while political paranoids claim to be driven to their crusades by the nefarious misdeeds of their designated fiends, really it's the other way around; the craziness comes first and then seeks an appropriate object. It looks even crazier when it can't quite settle on a sufficiently dastardly evildoer. For example, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" reads like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid's "quality of pedantry" and "heroic strivings for 'evidence,'" embodied in Beck's chalkboard and piles of books. But Beck lacks an archenemy commensurate with his stratospheric ambitions, which makes him appear even more absurd to outsiders.
Decoupling from reality
As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.
Yet, despite the danger, the nation can’t seem to move in a positive direction, as if the suctioning effect of endless spin, half-truths and lies holds the populace in place, a force that grows ever more powerful like quicksand sucking the country deeper into the muck – to waist deep, then neck deep.
Trapped in the mud, millions of Americans are complaining about their loss of economic status, their sense of powerlessness, their nation’s decline. But instead of examining how the country stumbled into this morass, many still choose not to face reality.
Instead of seeking paths to the firmer ground of a reality-based world, people from different parts of the political spectrum have decided to embrace unreality even more, either cynically as a way to delegitimize a political opponent or because they’ve simply become addicted to the crazy.
Hitler was Catholic? The nuns never mentioned it…
Uh, wait a minute. Hitler and the Nazis most assuredly were not atheists. Indeed, Hitler was baptized a Catholic and never renounced the faith, though he didn’t practice it. Neither did the Vatican excommunicate him or pronounce anathema on his regime.
Hitler did crack down on the church’s role in politics, banished the crucifix from public schools and shut down monasteries whenever reports of pedophilia surfaced.
He also launched the German Christian protestant movement, where folks were called on to worship an Aryan Christ. Atheists were banned from the SS, which required its members to be Gottglaubig, literally “God-believing.”