Jon Stewart interviewed Marc A. Thiessen last night. Thiessen is the former Bush speech writer whose recently-published book is Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.

Typically, the Daily Show segments are about 7:30-8:30 for the first segment, 4:30-6:00 for the second, and the interview segment is 6:00-7:00, depending on the guest. For example, last week Lynne Olsen, author of Citizens of London, got 6:16; astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson 6:43. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff Admiral Mullen got two segments totalling over 9 minutes. Newt Gingrich recently got 7:35.

So last night, when the first segment was just over 5 minutes and the second just over 4, I figured the interview with Thiessen would be pretty combative. Sure enough, it was, over an uninterrupted 10:56.

Since Thiessen objected at the end that he wasn’t given a chance to state his positions, I thought I’d edit the interview and include just Thiessen’s remarks. You can judge for yourself below whether Thiessen was given adequate time … while considering the context of the relative importance of a former Bush speech writer talking about Liz Cheney’s claims, to say, Newt Gingrich or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

You can see the full episode here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-march-9-2010-marc-thiessen

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This short (2:50) was inspired by the PBS series, “Faces of America,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It addresses the urgent question: how many 37th great-grandparents do you have?

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The fifth of twelve episodes in the series on the brain aired on February 23. Charlie and co-host Dr. Eric Kandel welcomed a panel of experts to discuss “The Developing Brain”:

• Elizabeth Spelke, cognitive psychologist at Harvard and director of the laboratory for developmental studies;
• Patricia Kuhl, professor at the University of Washington, director of the Center for Brain and Learning Sciences, author of  The Scientist in the Crib;
• Huda Zoghbi, director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Research Institute at Baylor Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes medical investigator;
• Stephen Warren, professor at Emory University in Atlanta, focusing on the causes of mental retardation.

The episode can be seen online at: http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702

Following clips represent what I found most pertinent. (14:16) Most of the episode dealt with brain development of infants and children, their capacity for learning language, abstract concepts such as counting and numbers, and commending the early work in this field by Jean Piaget.

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The Charlie Rose Brain Series website has posted the broadcast schedule for the six remaining special programs on the brain, co-hosted by Charlie Rose and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel:

• February 23: The Developing Brain
• March 23: The Aging Brain
• April 20: The Emotional and Vulnerable Brain
• May 25: The Anxious Brain
• June 22: The Mentally Ill Brain
• July 20: The Disordered Brain
• September 28: The Deciding Brain
• October: The Artistic Brain
• November: The New Science of the Mind

Previously-aired in the series (links within this blog):

• Episode 1, The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain
• Episode 2, The Perceiving Brain
• Episode 3, The Acting Brain
• Episode 4, The Social Brain

Other programs that emphasize the brain (links to external sites):

• The Human Spark with Alan Alda (especially episodes 2 and 3); watch segments online
• This Emotional Life with Daniel Gilbert (also especially episodes 2 and 3); watch segments online
• Dan Rather Reports on Mind Science (Episode 313, available on iTunes and HDNet store ), including his interview with the Dalai Lama and neuroscience researchers such as Richard Davidson
• Google Tech Talk lecture by Richard Davidson (YouTube, Davidson is featured in the Dan Rather report and This Emotional Life)

In his televised statement yesterday, Tiger Woods mentioned the importance of his Buddhist faith that he learned from his mother. During the ESPN commentary following the statement, writer Rick Reilly smacked down Brit Hume’s proselytizing suggestion that Tiger convert to Christianity. (2:13)

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Other than the fact that he was raised Buddhist, what does Buddhism offer than Christianity doesn’t? Perhaps some comparative clues can be gleaned from these excerpts from Dan Rather’s 2008 interview with the Dalai Lama. (5:58)

[This was part of a special report on the emerging brain science of neuroplasticity. With the latest brain imaging capabilities (primarily functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI), scientists from the U.S. have been studying the effects of meditation on the brains of Buddhist monks. Look for more at http://www.hd.net/danrather.html, the full program is available on iTunes; search for Dan Rather Mind Science.]

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In recognition of Presidents’ Day and Black History Month, we should never forget that historical attitudes never really go away. Prejudice is belief left unchallenged, and we never lack unchallenged beliefs. The video below attempts such a commentary.

Historical clips come from the PBS American Experience presentation of “Eyes on the Prize: The American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1985).” Music playlist: “Keep your eyes on the prize” (from the documentary and also performed by John Mellencamp); “Mississippi” (by Bob Dylan, performed by the Dixie Chicks); “For what it’s worth” (by Stephen Stills, performed by Buffalo Springfield); “Crazy” (by Gnarls Barkley); “Inner city blues (makes me wanna holler)” (by Marvin Gaye and James Nyx). 9:27

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Brain Series #4:  “The Social Brain” (aired January 19, 2010)

Watch the episode online, with full transcript: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10820

Featuring Charlie Rose with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. Panelists include:

• Cornelia Bargmann. She studies the genetic control of social behavior in simple animals such as worms and flies. She is also a professor at Rockefeller University.
• Kevin Pelphrey.  His work uses brain imaging techniques to understand social perception and cognition. He is an associate professor of child psychiatry at Yale University.
• Giacomo Rizzolatti. In 1996 he discovered a special group of cells known as mirror neurons. They are thought to play many crucial roles in social interaction. He’s a professor at the University of Parma, Italy.
• Gerald Fischbach. His research is devoted to understanding autism, a disease that robs victims of their social skills. He is a professor at Columbia University and the director of autism research at the Simons Foundation.

Excerpts (with corrections) from the transcript follow this 17-minute clip of highlights:

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• ERIC KANDEL: As you pointed out very nicely in your introduction, we are immensely social beings. We use our social behavior to find a partner, to build a family, to build a community, to build a culture. And also, as you indicate, aspects of that can go into disarray and lead to aggression. Social behavior is so important that it is conserved in evolution, and you find it not only in people, but you find it in simple animals, such of which, like ants build complex societies.
• Although much of social behavior is learned, important aspects of it are determined by genes. For example, you can show in flies and in worms and in simple mouse-like animals that single genes control bonding, whether animals will hang together, whether they go their own way. So genes can have important influences in behavior.
• Moreover, as you indicated with the social brain, social functions are localized in the brain just as sensory functions and motor functions are. In fact, we see in the social brain that there are sensory areas and the motor areas. In sensory areas, the visual system is very important. Faces, as you pointed out, are extremely important, reading other people’s emotions. So there are face areas in the brain that respond not only to faces but to emotional expression of faces.
• Moreover, as you pointed out, parts of the motor systems are committed to social behavior. Rizzolatti made this wonderful discovery that there are areas of the motor system that respond when the monkey picks up a glass of water. That’s not surprising. The motor system is designed to pick up a glass of water. But the amazing thing is the same cells in a monkey respond when you, Charlie Rose, pick up a glass of water. So they are mirroring your behavior, so empathic identification with another person is mediated through the motor system. So we have learned all of this by looking at the emotional brain.
• CORNELIA BARGMANN, ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY: Most animals, most living things spend at least part of their life in association with others of their own kind. And we know that even in the way we talk about schools of fish or flocks of geese or hives of bees that groups of animals are often units that are traveling through time and are behaving together. So they have to recognize each other, they have to communicate with each other, and they have to generate coherent behavior. So what E.O. Wilson noticed, a naturalist about the middle of the last century, is that many of the social behaviors that animals have are recognizably similar to each other, related to each other even in animals that are very different and very widely separated by evolution. And when you make an observation like that in biology, very often what it means is that there’s an underlying genetics that are very ancient that is contributing to the same output in lots of different animals. And that idea of taking different genes, that sort of flowing them through the different animals and using them for social behavior in a variety of animals, is the idea that builds on the idea that there’s a genetics of social behavior.
• BARGMANN: So if we could have a movie, I’m going to show you the organism that my lab works on, which is a very simple worm. And this worm is tiny and it lives in the soil, and it eats bacteria. But it has a number of interesting behaviors, and among those, as shown in this movie, are that it’s a friendly worm. And so if we look at a group of worms together, here we see that the two little white worms are associating with about ten other little black worms, and they’re gathered together in two little clusters of animals. And most of the worms want to spend most of the time with other worms, although sometimes they will wander off and come back and join the group. And this is not about food, there’s food everywhere, and it’s not about mating, this is a family show. It’s about the animals preferring to associate with each other.
• GIACOMO RIZZOLATTI, UNIVERSITY OF PARMA: Well, I think one mechanism which we discovered a few years ago is very important in showing how monkeys interact one to another. And especially this discovery of mirror neurons show there’s a specific way in which the animals, and humans as well, we’ll talk later about humans, have knowledge of the other. So in other words, there are these neurons which fire both, one you observe something or one you do the same thing. So what is strange in this neuron because the type of knowledge you get from them, it’s completely different from that that you can get about obstructing. So what you are doing inside my brain and become my behavior. So it’s a specific type of link which cannot be substituted by any type of cognitive or inferential thing. So you do something, enter inside my brain as a motor system, and that’s my experience. So somehow, we share the experience. That’s the novelty of the mirror neurons. So it’s not only a way to understand, because there are many other ways in which we can understand behavior patterns. But this one has this unique stuff that somehow we share experiences.
• KANDEL: Giacomo’s discovery of mirror neurons is one of the major discoveries of the last 20 years in neuron science because it taught us several different lessons. One is, as he indicated, the appreciation that one has in one’s brain, the capability of understanding another person’s action, that when somebody does something, your own nervous systems goes off as if you’re carrying out the action yourself although your hand doesn’t move. That’s number one. Number two, we used to think that the sensory systems and the motor systems are completely separate. This processing of sensory information, your movement is occurring in his motor system. So a fraction of the cells that are involved in picking up this pencil will respond when you pick up your pencil. It’s in the motor system that he discovered this remarkable thing. So he made us realize that the motor systems have sensory cognitive capabilities. It’s an extraordinary advance.
• CR: As we listen every episode to this, I’m hearing certain common themes. One is localization, the cutting engine of where brain research is going is understanding where localizations are. The other two is, sort of as we’re discussing here, both genetic and environmental and where those things come.
• And the third thing that I find is how complex all of this is, so that if you really want to go really understand it, you have to go to begin with genes where you can isolate and these are commonalities — every conversation we have…
• EK: This is why it’s so important to have different experimental models. The worm that Cory works on is fantastic in terms of understanding how genes control the logic of neuro-circuitry. Monkeys are terrific because they’re the closest things to humans. They are non-human primates. So you can study complex things like mirror neurons, which he discovered there. So this is the advantage of having these different experimental animals. Each one can give you a different insight into important biological problems. But there’s one other point that I think is important to emphasize. These are very difficult problems, and we’re at the beginning of understanding any one of them. So it’s really in the last decade or two that the social brain is really emerged in terms of discrete subcomponents.
• GERALD FISCHBACH: Yes. And so Charlie, I think this also a theme throughout every session of the program, that basic science has taught us a lot about human disorders or predicaments. But conversely, it’s the human predicament that has taught us enormously about the basic science of the brain. We talked about this in the very, very first show, and nowhere is that illustrated more profoundly than in autism and related developmental disorders. Autism runs the spectrum between normal behavior and the other end of the spectrum, really compromised, severely compromised individuals.
• CR: And talk about aggressive behavior.
• BARGMANN: At the level of animals, animals have fights. And animal aggression or animal conflict is something that is well-organized and has rules. It’s a way that animals use to allocate scarce resources. So I’m going to show two videos. We’ve all seen movies on the Nature Channel, elks fighting each other for a female. But these movies will show you that even very simple animals, fruit flies, can show aggressive behaviors. And so these are going to be two male fruit flies, and they’re going to be fighting over food supply. So in the first very short clip you’ll see one fruit fly decide that the other fruit fly has to go. (LAUGHTER)
• CR: And the next one?
• BARGMANN: And in the second video we’re going to see one male fruit fly decide that the other male fruit fly has really got to go. And I would like you to watch this movie to get a sense of the clear intention of this fly’s action. (LAUGHTER)
• CR: What did we learn from this? (LAUGHTER)
• BARGMANN: The important thing to learn is these are not fights to the death. So when animals have this kind of an argument, there’s a winner and there’s a loser, and the loser goes off to try and find another location to find some food. If these are two males, they might have been fighting about a female instead of fighting about food. But these are orderly ways of determining who gets to be dominant and who has to move on. And in fact, animals will remember this and they will change their behavior. Even pretty simple animals will remember who they lost a fight to. Fish can figure out if they lost a fight to this guy and an even bigger guy beat up the other guy, the even bigger guy, just don’t even bother. (LAUGHTER)
• This is a surprisingly logical, intelligent way of working. And there’s work in animals that has told us something that there is really a biology, that there are chemicals involved in the memory of being a winner and a loser. And that, for example, serotonin, a neurotransmitter, is particularly involved in correctly recognizing whether you’ve won or lost an argument. And so again this is a neuro-chemical that’s present in the human brain. There’s some evidence that severe disruptions in serotonin systems caused disruptions in your ability to correctly learn and evaluate a situation where there’s a potential aggressive interaction.
• BARGMANN: But humans are complicated. We start from children, we learn throughout our lives what the right way is to act within our environment. We’re educated for many years until we encounter each other. And we learn that the football field is an acceptable place to give aggression under well-defined circumstances with protective headgear. And we learn other situations are incorrect situations in which to display them.
• RIZZOLATTI: I don’t deny the aggression and everything you said about it in biology. But I think we are born to be good, as a matter of fact.
• KANDEL: Giacomo makes a very good point. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great protestant theologian, once said “The capability of people for good makes democracy desirable. The capability for evil makes democracy necessary.”
• CR: Right.
• RIZZOLATTI: That is a very good point.
• KANDEL: Social custom often determines how we behave. The capabilities for good may in fact be the predominant built-in mode, but we can be corrupted.
• CR: Corrupted by?
• KANDEL: By social pressure, by, you know, all kinds of constraints in society, or by lack of resources.
• BARGMANN: And as you say, if you see someone in pain, you feel pain. But if you see someone angry, you start to feel defensive. Good behavior around you can elicit positive behavior in yourself. Problematic behavior around you can elicit problematic behavior in yourself.
• KEVIN PELPHREY: One of the points I want to highlight is that a lot of the mechanisms that we’re talking about for social perception can be used for good or ill. So I can try to understand other people’s intentions because I want to help them, and we hope that most of the time that’s what’s going on. But these very same mechanisms are extremely powerful if I want to compete with them.
• PELPHREY: … and that’s really a developmental perspective on all this. So the reason why autism is such a profoundly difficult thing to understand is development. We’re talking about a neuro-developmental disorder, and things are changing constantly, and you take all of that into account. And the question I want to address in that medium to short term is I think we’re in a position where we have an understanding from genetics, both clinical genetics and work in other organisms and non-human primates, and we can take that information into human neuro-imaging, and we can begin to understand the very early development in the social brain and why different social brains development differently.
• CR: But the theory of mind means what?
• KANDEL: The theory of mind refers to a fact when you and I have a conversation I have a general idea of where you’re going, what you hope to get at, that you have your only way of thinking about a problem. Autistic kids can’t get into your brain. They don’t understand that you have your own agenda, which is different than their agenda.
• FISCHBACH: This is very profound. It’s a matter of belief. When the children develop an idea about false beliefs, that other people may believe things that are different than what they believe. It’s different than a shared emotion. A young child will smile when you smile or they’ll frown when you frown. But to appreciate that the person you’re looking at may be thinking about something that’s different than what you’re thinking about is a very late developing and very profound skill.
• PELPHREY: And a key concept that we can relate back to aggression is understanding that another person’s belief may be different from yours and different from what you know to be reality is your belief of what reality is. When those two things disagree, that’s an opportunity for conflict.
• BARGMANN: The point to take away is that our brains are not calculators where you punch in a bunch of numbers and you get a number out in the end. Our brains are ourselves, and they incorporate what’s important and how we feel, and they give you different kinds of responses. And one of the most important things for us is each other. From the moment of our birth, the most important aspect of our life is our ability to predict and affect the behavior of others. And so this is a big part of what it is to be human. And I would say that the question I would like to understand is how a biological system can do something so remarkable.
• KANDEL: I think there are two themes that struck me that have come out of this discussion. One is how important it is for biology for our understanding of using a number of different experimental approaches, including different organisms varying in complexity from worms to non-human primates to people. I think this is essential, this comparative approach that is critical to understanding behavior, number one. And number two, given the fact that we are born to do good, as Giacomo would have us believe, but we’re capable of evil — to understand better how one flips from one to the other, and to see a way where we can prevent this tribalism from becoming a dominant force. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had some biological insight into how to contain that?

Oliver Burkeman discusses David Bourland and E-Prime in his “This column will change your life” column in today’s Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/16/e-prime-change-your-life.

I responded to him with the following email:

Oliver, thanks for your article about David Bourland and E-Prime in today’s Guardian, which I am reading online in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For your information:

1) I knew David for six years before his death in 2000. He visited me in my home once, and I visited him in his several times. In May 1997, I videotaped an interview with him in his kitchen. I have it posted online at: http://www.thisisnotthat.com/video/MP-ddb-csr.html. My 45-minute discussion with him is shown in three 15-minute segments.

2) On the same page are two are two clips of a different interview with Charlotte Schuchardt Read. (Or as David might say in E-Prime, “Two clips of an interview with Charlotte Read locate on the same page.”) I knew Charlotte fairly well through my involvement with the Institute of General Semantics, which I served as a Trustee beginning in 1996 and served as Executive Director from 2004-2007. Charlotte served as literary secretary for Korzybski from 1939 until his death in 1950, then continued as his literary executor until her death in 2002. In 1951 she married Allen Walker Read, who died at age 96 four months after she died.

3) I also have posted clips of a lecture David gave at a small private school (now defunct) in East Texas: http://www.thisisnotthat.com/video/MP-ddb-ep.html

4) I left the Institute after an internal dispute with certain trustees. However, I continue work in the field. In November I published an eBook which I now offer as a free download. Here’s Something About General Semantics: A Primer for Making Sense of Your World (ISBN 978-0-9824645-0-2; 290 pages.) www.thisisnotthat.com/hsgs.html .

5) One of the areas I now pursue is to study current neuroscience to critically assess how the latest state of knowledge supports or contradicts Korzybski and general semantics. Not surprisingly to me, his most significant findings and contentions from 1933 stand up well against neuroscience(2010). I’ve documented these throughout my website, notably at:

o http://www.thisisnotthat.com/video/MP-koch-demo.html : Cal Tech Neurobiologist (who collaborated with Francis Crick) gives 4 demonstrations illustrating the imperfections of our visual awareness, how we see things that aren’t there, don’t see things that are there, etc.

o http://www.thisisnotthat.com/video/MP-ak.html : After viewing Koch’s high-tech 2005 demonstrations, compare/contrast his message with Korzybski himself, in this clip that I edited that combines silent video of Korzybski with recorded audio.

o Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence, creator of the Palm Pilot and co-founder of Palm Computing, founder of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, reinforces the same general principle … that our brain/nervous system constructs what we perceive as “reality” … in a lecture I attended at Los Alamos last July. I transcribed his lecture for the Oppenheimer Memorial Committee that sponsored the lecture. You can view clips from the lecture at: http://www.thisisnotthat.com/video/MP-hawkins.html and read the transcription with slides at: http://www.thisisnotthat.com/hawkins-lecture.html .

Thanks again, and best regards from Santa Fe,
Steve Stockdale

The third of the Charlie Rose 12-part monthly series on the human brain aired December 22nd.  You can watch online at: www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702. An excerpt (16:48, including the opening introduction) is included below.

His guests for the third show, “The Active Brain,” included:

• Eric Kandel — co-host of the series, 2000 Nobel Laureate (Physiology/Biology), professor, Columbia University Physiology & Cellular Biophysics
• Daniel Wolpert — University of Cambridge
• John Krakauer — Columbia University
• Tom Jessell — Columbia University
• Robert Brown — Massachusetts General Hospital

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The snippets posted here reflect what I found especially meaningful to my interests. Among the highlights:

• The motor system in the human brain controls 650 different muscles. Every voluntary and involuntary movement or activity, reflexive or deliberate, is controlled by the motor system in the brain.
• Wolpert states that the sole reason brains have evolved as they have is for the purpose of adaptable and complex movement, the contraction of muscles.
• Dr. Charles Sherrington (1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) quote from his 1906 book, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System: “To move things is all that mankind can do, and for this task the sole executant is a muscle, whether it be whispering a syllable or felling a forest.”
• Regarding last month’s program that focused on perception (rim shot … pun intended), perception cannot be considered in isolation from the action it precipitates.
• The video excerpted here includes an amazing video demonstrating the difference in motor skills dexterity between humans and robots. (Taken together with last month’s Charlie Rose Brain Series discussion regarding facial recognition of humans vs. computers, and Jeff Hawkins’ work on human vs. computer pattern recognition … humans can rest easy for a few more eons.)
• Regarding anatomy, while the sensory organs provide multiple paths into the brain, the motor system provides the only neurological pathway out of the brain.
• Motor system functions are, like the sensing/perceiving functions, localized to specific regions of the brain.
• Motor system activity consists of three functions: 1) planning, 2) execution, 3) feedback or reporting back of results. This can be considered as the “logic” of the central nervous system.
• Reflex vs. conscious muscle activity is discussed.
• The importance of motor system (ie, muscle) predicting/simulating is emphasized, including an easy-to-replicate demonstration with a heavy book. (The video clip posted here doesn’t include it, but if you watch the episode online there’s also a hard-to-believe report about the ability of professional basketball players to predict whether or not a player will make a free throw BEFORE the ball leaves the shooter’s hand.)
• Neurological degenerative diseases, such as ALS Lou Gehrig’s Disease, have multiple causes that can be traced to some combination of genetics, behavior, environment, and chance.
• According to Wolpert, understanding the motor system is the key to understanding higher brain activity.
• John Krakauer: “Thought is movement planning without the movement.”

Wade Phillips, head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, held his weekly press conference on Monday and had an exchange with a local sportswriter that illustrates once again the futility of trying to pin labels like “winner” and “loser” on people. This clip is 1:34:

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Here’s a good example from the 2008 Summer Olympics featuring U.S. sprinter Sanya Richards:

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