According to an article in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American, micromovements of the human eye give us the capacity for vision – and a window into the mind.

“As you read this, your eyes are rapidly flicking from left to right in small hops, bringing each word sequentially into focus. When you stare at a person’s face, your eyes will similarly dart here and there, resting momentarily on one eye, the other eye, nose, mouth and other features. With a little introspection, you can detect this frequent flexing of your eye muscles as you scan a page, face or scene.

But these large voluntary eye movements, called saccades, turn out to be just a small part of the daily workout your eye muscles get. Your eyes never stop moving, even when they are apparently settled, say, on a person’s nose or a sailboat bobbing on the horizon. When the eyes fixate on something, as they do for 80 percent of your waking hours, they still jump and jiggle imperceptibly in ways that turn out to be essential for seeing. If you could somehow halt these miniature motions while fixing your gaze, a static scene would simply fade from view.”

(Windows on the Mind; August 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik)

In addition, “Microsaccades may have significance beyond vision. These little eye movements may also help expose a person’s subliminal thoughts.” (pg 62)

What was that again?!

Your eyes can betray your thoughts?!

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A percentage of veterans (and by extension, some civilians) who have experienced traumatic events have a built-in coping mechanism that appears to repress traumatic memories in order to make life more satisfying and livable. And the strategy works well for them!

“Going back to the days of Sigmund Freud, psychiatrists and mental health experts have suggested that repression of traumatic memories could lead to health problems. Yet we have found little evidence that repression had an adverse health impact on combat veterans exposed to psychological trauma many years later.”

Joseph Boscarino, Ph.D. and Tulane University investigator Charles Figley, Ph.D., have been studying the effects of repressed memories in Vietnam war and other war veterans to help understand the relationship between repressed memories and physical ailment and longevity.

For years I had worked under the belief that horrific traumatic experiences should “come out” to be resolved or relieved of their emotional charge – and that suppressing those memories was tantamount to denial – leading to terrible life consequences. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients, many of whom were veterans. For those who chose to disclose their traumatic emotional baggage, swift release of the psychic energy often produced a noticeable increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction – that lasted.

However, according to Boscarino and Figley, a percentage of veterans (and by extension, some civilians) who have experienced traumatic events have a built-in coping mechanism that appears to repress traumatic memories in order to make life more satisfying and livable. And the strategy works well for them!

In these cases, “Repression is a self-regulator and a method of memory management,” Dr. Figley said. “In other words, ‘keeping your stressful memories inside or it will kill you’ is a myth.”

To both practitioner and veteran, I would say – “If what you are doing is working well for you, no need to ‘rock the boat’ for the sake of therapy.” Like my old pappy used to say, “If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it!”

To that I would add – just because you experienced traumatic events does not necessarily mean you need therapy to “resolve your issue” or that you must have repressed memories that will affect you physically if not properly dealt with – usually by expressing them. Maybe all you need to do is continue to do what you’re doing now. Sometimes the hunt for repressed memories itself is more traumatic than the memories sought after – and can cause more psychological damage than repressing the memories.

However (and this is important) – if someone close to you suggests therapy, take them up on the idea. And if you suddenly find yourself acting out for no reason whatsoever – like losing your temper when your wife tells you she’s going to brew another cup of coffee or sit in a different chair – or maybe you start losing sleep at night due to recurring nightmares – consider therapy to relieve you of some suppressed emotional charge. The investment may just make the difference between “just getting by” emotionally and loving and living your life to the fullest.

Self-deception proves itself to be more powerful than deception

By Michael Shermer

Published in Scientific American

	Michael Shermer, PhD

The war in Iraq is now four years old. It has cost more than 3,000 American lives and has run up a tab of $200 million a day, or $73 billion a year, since it began. That’s a substantial investment. No wonder most members of Congress from both parties, along with President George W. Bush, believe that we have to “stay the course” and not just “cut and run.” As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: “I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.”

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational–not in love or war or business–and this particular irrationality is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy.”

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Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix. The “AHA” of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.

“While you’re trying to understand a difficult theorem, it’s not fun,” said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“But once you get it, you just feel fabulous.”

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Our human capacity for rational thought and compassion must win out in the end – or else…

Recently a basic tenet of economics was challenged – that people always behave selfishly. Sam Bowles argues in the June 20 edition of Science that economics sometimes gets it wrong. New experimental evidence demonstrates that people often act against their own personal self-interest in favor of the common good – in predictable, understandable ways. Poorly-designed economic programs fail to take advantage of this intrinsic moral behavior and often undermine it.

For example: In one study, six day care centers imposed a fine on parents who picked up their children late. The effect? The rate of tardiness doubled, and stayed high even when the fine was removed. Parents, it seems, stopped seeing lateness as an imposition on teachers, and instead saw it as something that could be purchased with no moral failing. The institution had missed entirely the altruistic nature of humans. Read the rest of this entry »