Quid est veritas?
(Plato's Allegory of the Cave)
"Est enim verum index sui et falsi," Baruch de Spinoza wrote. It means: "Since the truth is the touchstone of itself and of the untruth." Furthermore: "Sane sicut lux se ipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic veritas norma sui et falsi est", that is: "Indeed as light reveals itself and darkness, so the truth is the norm of itself and of untruth." (source)
Truth stands on its own, while lies can stand if they find accomplices.
Lying means betraying both others and ourselves. Telling the truth frees us, helps us to live together and learn from our mistakes. No one is infallible, and everyone has the right to make mistakes: the important thing is to admit them, accept our responsibilities, without alibis or excuses that first seem to make us feel better, but in the long run wear us down. Lies may seem like easy and straight paths, but that inevitably leads to a dead end.
The truth stands on its own, the lie needs the constant support of lie upon lie, but it's only a matter of time before it ends up collapsing under its weight. Behind a lie, there is always something unresolved that drags on for a long time, losing pieces along the way and making us lose the right direction.
Political communication is a continuous lie. The lie needs violence and blackmail (even psychological) to impose a false truth. Is our communication better than political communication?
Whoever tells the truth does not need to repeat themselves, justify themselves, or impose their vision of things. The truth is enough for itself and does not need to proselytize since it is evident to anyone who wants to see it.
Lies, on the contrary, need continuous repetitions, justifications, suggestions, influencing, and impositions: this is the policy of the state, of religion, of scientism, of social networks, of school, and also that of many of us. Socrates would never have thought of setting up fake news commissions.
The truth I've talked about so far corresponds to what the ancient Greeks called "ἀλήθεια" (the state of not being hidden, the state of being evident). This word is reminiscent of Plato's allegory of the cave. In this sense, truth exists and is apparent only to those who want to see it.
However, the truth is never absolute. What is true is so because our awareness makes it so here and now, into the fleeting moment. Wanting to grasp the truth is like wishing to catch the water of a river with our own hands.
(December 24, 2021)
Karma or randomness or both?
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(Ego Illusions, December 23, 2021, go to the art gallery)
The concept of karma is not very dissimilar to divine justice. Thanks to karma or God, a good or bad reward follows our actions.
Karma contrasts with randomness, which is the idea that things happen for no particular reason. But are we sure there is any opposition?
Pure determinism (karma) believes that existing causes entirely determine all events. Pure randomness is the opposite idea. Both these are two equally not provable ways to make sense of the mystery of life.
What is wrong with the concept of karma? It can justify our claims that the facts of life are as we like them because we have been good; or that our life is as we do not want it because we have been evil. For example, we can perform seemingly good actions not because we are good but because we expect a reward. Same with divine justice.
What's wrong with the concept of randomness? Essentially, it tends to deny that the entire universe is intelligent and has a purpose; thus, it tends to take away meaning from our existence. On the other hand, pure randomness does not exist in our daily experiences. We instead notice causes and effects. Randomness is philosophically closely related to materialism, and both can justify every human aberration.
A third way can be to get out of this opposition. Each of us is not a single person opposed to an external reality. The universe is a fractal, and we are within this fractal. Geometrically, each part of a fractal is equal to the whole fractal. So each of us is the entire universe, and we create a reality that corresponds to our awareness.
Then it's no longer a matter of karma or randomness; it's just a matter of recognizing one's ego as an illusion.
(December 23, 2021)
Dream and sleep hacking, aka targeted dream incubation: an open letter signed by scientists
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(Dreams' Sacredness: let's not touch them, December 21, 2021, go to the art gallery)
Dream Engineering
Advertising in Dreams is Coming: Now What?
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
Molson Coors recently announced a new kind of advertising campaign. Timed for the days before Super Bowl Sunday, it was designed to infiltrate our dreams [1]. They planned to use "targeted dream incubation" (TDI) [2] to alter the dreams of the nearly 100 million Super Bowl viewers the night before the game—specifically, to have them dream about Coors beer in a clean, refreshing, mountain environment—and presumably then drink their beer while watching the Super Bowl. Participants in what Coors called ‘the world’s largest dream study’ would get half off on a 12 pack of Coors; if they sent the link to a friend who also incubated their dreams, the 12 pack was free. With this campaign, Coors is proudly pioneering a new form of intrusive marketing. “Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) is a never-before-seen form of advertising,” says Marcelo Pascoa, Vice President of Marketing at Molson Coors [3].
With brain imaging techniques beginning to capture the core contents of people’s dreams [4] and sleep studies establishing real-time communication between researchers and sleeping dreamers [5], the kind of dream incubation until recently assumed to be the pure science fiction of movies like Inception is now becoming reality. Coors is not the only company expressing interest in using these novel dream incubation technologies: Xbox's Made From Dreams uses TDI to give professional gamers dreams of their favorite video games, while Playstation advertises a new Tetris game based on a sleep study demonstrating that gameplay incubates Tetris dreams [5]. In 2018, Burger King created a "nightmare" burger for Halloween, claiming that a sleep laboratory study had ‘clinically proven’ it would induce nightmares [6]. And multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and motivate purchasing behavior through dream and sleep hacking [7, 8]. The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation is rapidly becoming a reality.
Traditions of dream incubation—techniques employed during wakefulness to help a person dream about a specific topic—go back thousands of years and span indigenous practices across the globe. Over the last few years, brain scientists have begun to develop scientific tools that facilitate this incubation of specific dream content [2], making dream incubation more targeted and measurable, and allowing scientific experimentation on the nature and function of dreaming. They use sensors to determine when an individual’s sleeping brain is receptive to external stimuli and, at these times, introduce smells, sounds, flashing lights or even speech to influence the content of our dreams [9].
Dreams have ties to people’s well-being [10, 11], and dream content can predict how well someone will adapt to waking challenges and concerns, including those related to trauma and depression [12, 13]. Altering dream content can augment our creativity, boost our mood, and help us learn [14, 15]. We believe that targeted intervention in sleep and dreams could help alleviate several psychiatric conditions including depression and PTSD [12]. We know that targeted delivery of odors during sleep can help combat addiction; participants exposed during their sleep to the smells of cigarettes along with those of rotten eggs smoked 30% fewer cigarettes over the following week [16]. Researchers have not yet tested whether TDI can instead worsen addiction, but the Coors study, which paired images of beer cans not with odious smells but with images of clean mountain streams, may shine a disturbing light on this question. Regardless, such interventions clearly influence the choices our sleeping and dreaming brain make in how to interpret the events from our day, and how to use memories of these events in planning our future, biasing the brain's decisions toward whatever information was presented during sleep [17, 18].
These questions and developments should be considered in the broader context of sleep and memory research. The last twenty years have been a watershed for sleep research during which we have come to understand the importance of sleep for our memories and emotional health. It is while we sleep that our brain decides which memories to keep and which to forget, and how to organize those it keeps [19, 20]. It also can choose to keep the gist or the emotional core of a memory while letting other details be forgotten [20, 21]. Through this nocturnal process, the brain shapes the memories that together create our autobiographical past, our sense of who we are now, and our understanding of how best to live our lives in the future.
More recent studies have shown that dreaming represents another aspect of this nightly memory evolution. Our dreams are not attempts to suppress undesirable wishes, nor are they simply the result of random brain activity during sleep. Dreaming represents an evolved mechanism for exploring the relevance and importance of older memories to newer ones, seeking to position the events of our day among the innumerable memories and concepts we have accumulated across a lifetime [18], helping to make us just a bit wiser in the process.
For now, TDI-based advertising requires our active participation, for example choosing to play an 8-hour Coors soundtrack while we sleep. But it is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—40 million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms [22]— become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission. These tailored soundtracks would become background scenery for our sleep, as the unending billboards that litter American highways have become for our waking life.
Our dreams cannot become just another playground for corporate advertisers. Regardless of Coors’ intent, their actions set the stage for a corporate assault of our very sense of who we are. And it is not difficult to imagine Coors' ad campaign negatively impacting abstinent alcoholics. Indeed, research has shown that abstinent drug users who report dreaming about their drug-use show higher levels of craving [23]. In the cigarette cessation study mentioned above, not only was the intervention effective in sleep (yet ineffective when the smells were presented during wake), but participants reported no memory of being exposed to these smells in the morning. The potential for misuse of these technologies is as ominous as it is obvious.
TDI-advertising is not some fun gimmick, but a slippery slope with real consequences. Planting dreams in people’s minds for the purpose of selling products, not to mention addictive substances, raises important ethical questions. The moral line dividing companies selling relaxing rain soundtracks to help people sleep from those embedding targeted dreams to influence consumer behavior is admittedly unclear at the moment. While the Federal Trade Commission has indicated that subliminal ads during wake violate its statute requiring truth in advertising, there is no similar indication regarding exposure to advertisements during sleep.
As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing. Brain science helped design several addictive technologies, from cell phones to social media, that now shape much of our waking lives; we do not want to see the same happen to our sleep. We believe that proactive action and new protective policies are urgently needed to keep advertisers from manipulating one of the last refuges of our already beleaguered conscious and unconscious minds: Our dreams.
Robert Stickgold – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, coauthor of When Brains Dream
Antonio Zadra – Université de Montréal, Canada, coauthor of When Brains Dream
Adam Haar – M.I.T., Cambridge MA, co-developer of TDI tools
Signatories
Judith Amores – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA
Thomas Andrillon – Monash University, Australia
Kristoffer Appel – Institute of Sleep and Dream Technologies, Germany
Ryan Bottary – Boston College, Boston MA
Kelly Bulkeley – The Sleep and Dream Database, Portland OR
Tony Cunningham – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA
Per Davidson – Lund University, Sweden
Teresa DeCicco – Trent Univ, Canada
Eden Evins – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA
Rockelle Guthrie - David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
David Kahn – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA
Alexandra Kitson – Simon Fraser University, Canada
Karen Konkoly – Northwestern University, Evanston IL
Célia Lacaux – Paris Brain Institute (ICM) - Paris, France
Anthony Levasseur - Université de Montréal, Canada
Pattie Maes – M.I.T., Cambridge MA
Louis-Philippe Marquis – Université de Montréal, Canada
Patrick McNamara – Boston University, Boston MA
Sara Mednick – University of California, Irvine
Natália Bezerra Mota - Federal University of Pernambuco and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Delphine Oudiette – Paris Brain Institute (ICM) - Paris, France
Edward Pace-Schott – Harvard Medical School, Boston MA
Ken Paller – Northwestern University, Evanston IL
Jessica Payne - University of Notre Dame, South Bend IN
Claudia Picard-Deland - Université de Montréal, Canada
Leila Salvesen - IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca / Donders Institute
Sophie Schwartz – University of Geneva, Switzerland
Paul Seli – Duke Univ., Durham NC
Carlyle Smith – Trent University, Canada
Matthew Spellberg -- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Katja Valli – University of Turku, Finland
Tomás Vega – M.I.T, Cambridge MA
Erin Wamsley – Furman University, SC
Marco Zanasi – Torvergata Univ, Italy
Morteza Zangeneh Soroush - Tehran University of Medical Sciences
(affiliations listed for identification only)
Citations
1. Coors. (2021). The Big Game Commercial of you Dreams. Retrieved from coorsbiggamedream.com.
2. Horowitz, A. H., Cunningham, T. J., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2020). Dormio: A targeted dream incubation device. Consciousness & Cognition, 83, 102938. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2020.102938
4. Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., & Kamitani, Y. (2013). Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science, 340(6132), 639-642. doi:10.1126/science.1234330
5. Konkoly, K., Appel, K., Chabani, E., Mironov, A. Y., Mangiaruga, A., Gott, J., . . . Witkowski, S. (2021). Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep. Current Biology, in press. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3606772
6. foodnetwork.com. (2018). Burger King Says New Burger Is ‘Clinically Proven to Induce Nightmares’. Retrieved from https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2018/10/burger-king-says-new-burger-is-clinically-proven-to-induce-night.
7. Ai, S., Yin, Y., Chen, Y., Wang, C., Sun, Y., Tang, X., . . . Shi, J. (2018). Promoting subjective preferences in simple economic choices during nap. Elife, 7. doi:10.7554/eLife.40583
8. Mahdavi, M., Fatehi Rad, N., & Barbosa, B. T. r. o. d. o. a. i. p. i. D., 29(3), . https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000110. (2019). The role of dreams of ads in purchase intention. Dreaming, 29(3), 241–252. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000110
9. Solomonova, E., & Carr, C. (2019). Incorporation of external stimuli into dream content. In K. Valli & R. Hoss (Eds.), Dreams: Biology, Psychology and Culture (pp. 213-218). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
10. Pesant, N., & Zadra, A. (2006). Dream content and psychological well-being: a longitudinal study of the continuity hypothesis. J Clin Psychol, 62(1), 111-121. doi:10.1002/jclp.20212
11. Sandman, N., Valli, K., Kronholm, E., Vartiainen, E., Laatikainen, T., & Paunio, T. (2017). Nightmares as predictors of suicide: an extension study including war veterans. Sci Rep, 7, 44756. doi:10.1038/srep44756
12. Cartwright, R. (1991). Dreams that work: The relation of dream incorporation to adaptation to stressful events. Dreaming, 1, 3-9.
13. Mellman, T. A., David, D., Bustamante, V., Torres, J., & Fins, A. I. (2001). Dreams in the Acute Aftermath of Trauma and Their Relationship to PTSD. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 14, 241-247. doi: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007812321136
14. Barrett, D. (2001). The committee of sleep : How artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving--and how you can, too. New York: Crown Publishers.
15. Erlacher, D., & Schredl, M. (2010). Practicing a motor task in a lucid dream enhances subsequent performance: A pilot study. The Sport Psychologist, 24(2), 157-167.
16. Arzi, A., Holtzman, Y., Samnon, P., Eshel, N., Harel, E., & Sobel, N. (2014). Olfactory aversive conditioning during sleep reduces cigarette-smoking behavior. J Neurosci, 34(46), 15382-15393. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2291-14.2014
17. Hu, X., Antony, J. W., Creery, J. D., Vargas, I. M., Bodenhausen, G. V., & Paller, K. A. (2015). Cognitive neuroscience. Unlearning implicit social biases during sleep. Science, 348(6238), 1013-1015. doi:10.1126/science.aaa3841
18. Zadra, A., & Stickgold, R. (2021). When Brains Dream. New York: W.W. Norton.
19. Dumay, N., & Gaskell, M. G. (2007). Sleep-associated changes in the mental representation of spoken words. Psychological Science, 18(1), 35-39. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=17362375
20. Payne, J. D., Stickgold, R., Swanberg, K., & Kensinger, E. A. (2008). Sleep preferentially enhances memory for emotional components of scenes. Psychological Science, 19(8), 781-788. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02157.x
21. Payne, J. D., Schacter, D. L., Propper, R. E., Huang, L. W., Wamsley, E. J., Tucker, M. A., . . . Stickgold, R. (2009). The role of sleep in false memory formation. Neurobiol Learn Mem, 92(3), 327-334. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=19348959
22. voicebot.ai. (2020). Yes. The Bedroom is Now the Most Popular Location for Smart Speakers. Here’s Why and What it Means. Retrieved from https://voicebot.ai/2020/04/30/yes-the-bedroom-is-now-the-most-popular-location-for-smart-speakers-heres-why-and-what-it-means/.
23. Tanguay, H., Zadra, A., Good, D., & Leri, F. (2015). Relationship between drug dreams, affect, and craving during treatment for substance dependence. J Addict Med, 9(2), 123-129. doi:10.1097/ADM.0000000000000105
Coors ad: (https://youtu.be/tU_0jU0mMLw)
Tips for Good Writing
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(Third Millennium Narcissus, December 21, 2021, go to the art gallery)
Words create reality, so good writing creates good reality.
The writing I'm referring to here is "exploratory": the human being is a wanderer, an explorer, a being who moves forward by trial and error. There are no "experts" in anything because every path of knowledge requires doubt and error. Intuition does not follow logical paths, as it arrives directly at its destination. Emotions and feelings push us in different directions; they make us fall, they make us stand up, they make us act. The human mind is the place of chaos, like a small universe that reflects the big universe: mind and universe are in the same way, or maybe they are the same thing.
We are a mystery and, above all, a plurality: there is no "single human being," there is no "person." There is no individuality detached from everything else.
Starting from these assumptions, I try to imagine some tips for good writing. I mean a writing habit that can help us answer two questions: "who we are?" and "how to live together?".
An old saying goes: «Three things we should ask ourselves before speaking. The first: "Are these words true?". The second: "Are they necessary?". The third: "Are they kind?". If they are true, necessary, and kind, they deserve to be spoken.». This saying is probably a short form of the Socrates' Triple Filter Test.
1. Reality or inclusiveness?
"Yesterday I saw a terrible scene: a big wolf-dog - but maybe it was a wolf - trying to bite a little girl. This one didn't dare to run away because she knew that the animal was much faster than her. To defend herself, she first gave it a sort of blanket, already in tatters, to bite on. Then, seeing that the wolf did not give up, she tried to distract it by throwing away the ball it was playing with: this happened two or three times. Finally, the little girl, terrified, while the other one was attacking the ball, hid behind a tree, but in vain... I don't know how it ended because I ran away to get help".
Or:
"Yesterday, I saw a delightful scene: a little girl playing with a wolf-dog that was bigger than her. They were trying to tear a tattered old blanket from each other, but I could see that the dog was pulling slowly so the little girl wouldn't fall. Then she started throwing a ball at it, and it would run to catch it: this happened two or three times until the little girl hid behind a tree, and the dog pretended for a while not to see her... At a certain distance, there was another child who wanted to play too, but someone must have called him back because at a certain point he ran away".
It's the same story, from two perspectives that are both legitimate.
Does "reality" exist, or are there as many realities as possible observers and points of view?
Wanting to affirm a particular reality while firmly denying all others is divisive. Division gives birth to fears, anxieties, weakness, arrogance, violence, disease. The division makes us stupid, and the union makes us smarter. The more we divide, the worse we live. It's like a group of friends making music together. Not even one concert would succeed if each musician played without considering all the others (and possible mutual mistakes).
Everything works well when we seek harmony, not a war to distinguish us from each other.
2. Necessity or creativity?
We human beings are creative and social. We need to dialogue to explore new paths and understand ourselves, and, above all, because we strongly need other human beings. Dialogue is not just an exchange of information: it is a mutual growth path. Writing is, first of all, a dialogue with oneself and, only afterward, with those who will read. In this way, we can also dialogue with people far away in time and space.
From this point of view, all motivations for starting a dialogue can be good, except two: "trying to convince someone of something" and "imposing one's will." In other words: persuasive communication is the only kind of communication that, instead of advancing us in awareness, blocks the human evolution of both the speaker and the listener. The disasters and falsehoods of advertising and political communication are examples of this.
Persuasive, self-centered communication is that one of wars and death.
Exploratory and open to one's mistakes communication is that one of life.
Just a reminder: Narcissus killed himself because he could only look at himself.
3. Kindness or empathy?
Can a termination letter be kind?
Can words of contempt for the choices and emotions of others be kind?
Is politically correct (but ethically corrupt) language kind?
Perhaps, more than choosing our words well, we should also put ourselves in others' shoes, not just our own. Performing a miracle is not about transforming the world but changing perspective.
(December 21, 2021)
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