The Washington Monthly College Guide

Here's is their intro:

Welcome to The Washington Monthly College Rankings. Unlike other college guides, such as U.S. News and World Report, this guide asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country. It's a guide for all Americans who are concerned about our institutions of higher learning. Are our colleges making good use of our tax dollars? Are they producing graduates who can keep our nation competitive in a changing world? Are they, in short, doing well by doing good? This is the guide that tells you.

click here to visit their website. It is worth it.

A Baseball Intrusion

Jon Lester, left handed pitcher for the Red Sox, who, in his rookie year was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma, and last year won the clincher in the World Series, threw a no-hitter this evening against the Royals. You need luck for that sort of thing, certainly, and a cool head. But you need to be ON, and that requires MOJO. By reading this, I pass on to you his mojo, which I received by watching the game. You can thank me by continuing to read this blog.

HMS Conference

Dan Siegel, a child psychiatrist who specializes in parent-child attachment and its neurobiological orgins spoke at the Boston conference I attended this past weekend. I will try to post some comments on the conference (and blocks of quotes) but for now, a teaser from the article Mindsight: Dan Siegel offers therapists a new vision of the brain:

[Siegel] focused, for example, on the clinical implications of the fact that the right and left hemispheres work in dramatically different ways. By then it was commonly understood that the left brain is associated with logic, cause-effect reasoning, verbal processing, and linear thinking, while the right is associated with nonlinear, holistic (big-picture) thinking, intense emotion, body sense, social awareness, and nonverbal communication.

What Siegel became interested in was that a coherent narrative about the past requires both hemispheres to be fully online: the right holds the images, themes, and sense of personal self existing across time, while the left holds the drive to make logical meaning and put words to these wordless feeling states and perceptions. Right away, this seemed to explain the difficulties many people had in creating coherent narrative: if the two sides of the brain weren't working together, the story would either be chaotic and confused-overwhelming feeling, overwhelmed thought-or superficially logical but lacking the emotional oomph of a good, coherent autobiographical story.

He decided to try out the theory that integrating brain function could be beneficial therapeutically with clients who had an impoverished sense of their own past and couldn't really feel or express emotion: "I'd worked out a hypothesis that this type of patient might respond to therapy that explicitly stimulated the development of the right hemisphere." And it worked. A lot of the patients, who usually intellectualized their way through talk therapy, responded very well to guided imagery, sensate-body focusing, and practice in using and picking up on nonverbal cues.

Simply telling patients what might be going on in their brains, he discovered, could also be both deeply comforting and therapeutic. He explained to patients with PTSD the difference between implicit and explicit memory and the function of the hippocampus, and they felt less crazy. "You're telling me I'm not nuts," said one greatly relieved patient, who thought she was going insane because of the flashbacks and intrusive images that hounded her. As she put it, "It's just that the bad things that happened to me got fragmented in my mind and were never put together into my regular memory by my hippowhatsis."

Soon, he was spiking his therapy with brief, neurobiological vignettes that helped clients understand why they were so prone to sudden rages, or had such rotten love lives, or felt so anxious all the time. Siegel became adept at explaining the role of the unbridled amygdala, the self-calming talents of the neocortex, the heroically integrative properties of the orbitofrontal cortex, the amazing system of mirror neurons that allows us to pick up and feel the feelings and intentions of others-the remarkable capacity for "mindsight."

He even started keeping a chalkboard in his office to draw rough sketches of the brain and its parts, which helped ground discussions of subjective mental experience in the world of physical reality. "Unlike most psychological concepts, the brain is a three-dimensional object that you can hold in your hand," he says. "It's also a visual entity, and we're very visual creatures-a lot of our cortical real estate is devoted to vision. So when I sketch the brain on the board, people can really 'see' it."

His patients loved it. Far from making them feel that their lives were completely determined by physiological processes beyond their control, they felt empowered. They discovered that their negative feelings weren't them, but originated from one part of their brains, which could be controlled by another part, actually altered by what they think.

"Connections in the brain shape the way you think, but the flip side is true, too," says Siegel. "The way you think can change your brain. Neural firing changes neural connections-if you pay attention." We often have the idea that we have no power to control our own attention. Not so. "You can harness the power of your mind," says Siegel. "You can sit in your prefrontal cortex, where self-regulation is mediated, and simply notice, just notice, the mental processes emanating from different neural circuits of the brain-without locking onto them."

Cross-Post: Kevin Drum

from washingtonmontly.com:

RELIGION AND HAPPINESS....In Europe, the advance of secularization has corresponded with an increase in reported happiness. In America, it's just the opposite: religious participation is positively correlated with higher levels of self-reported happiness. Will Wilkinson suggests that this is mostly a matter of fitting in: since most Americans are religious, you're more likely to be happier if you fit in with our religious culture. Ross Douthat suggests the answer lies elsewhere:

My suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well — that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you're a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe's path to modernity, you'd probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it's the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism. Either way, I suspect that this symbiosis between high levels of religiosity and economic individualism is at the heart of American exceptionalism — which is another way of saying that libertarians root for secularization at their peril.

This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You'd have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today's secular Europe than in yesterday's religious Europe.

Religion in America is just a whole different story. Sure, it's caused its share of problems, but nothing even remotely on the scale of what happened in Europe. We still have a pretty innocent view of religious belief here, and this probably accounts for part of the reason that religion is associated with happiness here but not in Europe. Whether that makes us exceptional or just naive I'll leave for others to debate.

(btw: kevin's blog is one of my daily reads...)