Timing is Everything
Moving right along from last month's Easter Morality Play Reality Check, let's see how many unsubscribes this one generates.  For this month, make no mistake, we will be touching some more raw nerves. 

In Gurdjieff's language, we will be treading on some big toes.

Yes, this month we move from the epic geological features carved by the River Jordan to the uncharted no man's land of Happy Valley.

Happy Valley looks nothing like the lush green vales of the Levant, and still less like the rolling hills of the Algarve.  Nor does it resemble the rugged quaintness of the Quantocks or the daylight-robbing depths of the West Virginia Holler.

No, because Happy Valley is in your head, and we all have one.

Hamlet - For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. 

Happy Valley is a little bit like Pooh Bear's Thinking Place. Except, of course, that it's not a particular physical place where we go to think, like Pooh's special thinking place, it's rather more of a comfortable space in our head where we go.  Only we go there to not think.

You are probably bored with this all-too-familiar sequence of events:
    Information arrives, or is otherwise abandoned on our cerebral doorstep.
    We trust the source.  We believe the information.
    We find out later that it's a crock.

One good example of this mechanism is the staggering stupidity that underpins those many urban legend e-mails.  You've seen them: pitiful, rambling, laughable stories that have been on snopes.com for over five years, yet well-intentioned friends still forward them. Hello?

The Story
At the root of this, of course, is the fact that we all love a good story. And the best stories come from good storytellers. When we say that someone tells us a story, what we mean is that it isn't true.

A good story, be it a book, a movie or an anecdote, is based on one essential ingredient: The Lie. It's not true, it's a story.  Storytelling: it isn't just for campfires any more.

The lie, as it is used in drama and literature, takes many forms. The lie may be a circumstance or an object that purports to be one thing that later turns out to be quite something other.  Often it is a person pretending to be someone else, harbouring a secret, or even discovering a hitherto unknown personality flaw.  We call this process of discovering the lie "character development", and the unravelling of people forms the backbone of most classic dramas. In its most basic form, the lie and its undoing is intended to take us on a journey, often an intellectual or emotional rollercoaster.

The lie is big business, we fall for it, time and time again. And we lap it up in droves – witness books, TV and movies.

Unravelling the lie is not just for drama, but is also the staple of gutter tabloids: A celebrity has an affair, gets in a fight, gains weight, gets drunk or otherwise does something that is (apparently) considered incongruent with their public persona. Hardly an intellectual tsunami, unless you've been asleep for the last 100 years.

Perhaps the least satisfying thing about urban legends is that they invariably fail to unravel. The plot does not unfold, there is no character development.  All we are told is the lie, and it is normally painfully obvious.  Urban legends are like the first act of a good play, the scene is set, the lie is told, but where is the rest?  Don't you hate those stories without a satisfying ending?

The Narrative
We like stories because that's the way our brain works. The two halves of our brain communicate in a kind of constantly updated dream sequence, of which only a tiny part is available to the conscious mind. The brain can be compared to two huge corporations doing business with the outside world and each other.  Our conscious mind is like a hacker that can occasionally break into e-mails, but can only read those sent by the left brain.  All of which is just as well, as the conscious mind is tiny compared to the rest.

Contrary to the popular checkout-magazine science level understanding of the brain, wherein the right brain lives in creative La-La land and the left brain deals with the harsh realities, recent discoveries have pointed to an entirely different scenario. While the right brain is interested in imagination and creativity, it is primarily concerned with grasping reality. The left brain, on the other hand, far from being the logical and rational powerhouse we've been told, is mainly concerned with patterns and explanations.

And, get this, the left brain is not overly concerned with the rationality of these explanations. In fact, in the absence of any understanding, it is prone to making up explanations, which may or may not be rational. One reason why people who cannot read a dictionary are given to making up spurious etymologies: Fornicate Under Consent of the King, etc.

Not only is the whole left brain-right brain thing not quite what we've been led to believe, in many respects it is the complete opposite. It is the right hemisphere that is mainly responsible for keeping a grip on reality. The left hemisphere merely requires an explanation, and pretty much any explanation will do.

The Brain and The Passenger
Somewhere, hidden in a dusty corner or two at the front, is the tiny hitchhiker we call our conscious mind. Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argues that we didn't originally have consciousness and that it was a fairly recent development. This is difficult to understand until you receive yet another puerile urban legend email written entirely in uppercase.

The conscious mind is so small compared to the rest of the brain that it has developed various coping mechanisms to make sense of huge amounts of random data. If there is no apparent pattern, it tells the left brain to simplify the data until it finds one. As soon as a match is made, that's the accepted explanantion.

The entire mechanism of boiler-plate narrative, pattern-matching, explanation and belief happens without our conscious intervention. All we know is that our pile of complicated stuff suddenly makes sense. Of course, it doesn't really make sense, we just found a reason.  And if we didn't, our brain made up a reason.

You'll Never Believe What Happened...
It gets worse. Much worse. The left hemisphere's criteria for accepting an explanation is proportional to the amount of dopamine present.  This pretty much means that, if you're comfortable with something, the left hemisphere allows a lot of wriggle room. It turns out that our level of scepticism is inversely proportional to left brain dopamine levels. In other words, if it feels good we are likely to believe any old crap.

And of course we do, that's why the story is so effective. Each new narrative snapshot is pasted onto our dynamic brain sequence storyboard. A staircase of good guy/bad guy elevates our acceptance through cycles of dopamine and adrenaline.  Some people call it escapism, which is a naive way of saying that this easily manipulated mechanism has never been targeted by those with commercial or political agendas. (You can trust the Government. Ask an Indian.)

The right brain is not susceptible to varying levels of dopamine, and is a constant and very sceptical watchdog. One curious outcome of all this is that many of those who consider themselves sensitive, intuitive and spiritual (in other words, right-brained) are very often left-brained people with a high level of dopamine. It only takes a touch of dopamine to turn a hard-nosed sceptic into a gullible sponge. Failing that, repetition is a great alternative.

That's correct. In the absense of dopamine, repetition of any idea will produce the same affect. An idea like hearing or saying Hare Krishna all day. Or repetition of movement (like marching). Or repetition of sound (like pop music). Or repetition of sound and movement together (like drumming). Or any other method that kicks your brain into alpha and, whoops, here comes that dopamine again...

Those of you that think that you live predominantly through your right brain should see this:

The Sucker
Are people easily manipulated? You only have to look around a parking lot to see that a large percentage of the population is indeed very gullible. People buy SUVs because they are safer, right? Forgetting for the moment that they have miserable gas mileage and circumvent Ralph Nader's safety laws because they are classifed as a truck, SUVs are solely responsible for a huge increase in one particular accident statistic.

Twenty years ago rollover deaths were very rare - less than 1%. Since then, all the many different ways of dying on the road have gone down considerably.  Except for one. Today, a staggering one quarter (25%) of all road deaths (10,000+ people a year) are killed in rollover deaths, nearly all involving an SUV.

Despite this, one of the main reasons people give for buying one is that an SUV is safer. They need to go read The Black Swan. For my next trick I will start believing in WMD or terrorists in Iraq, which will be no problem at all for the gullible left hemisphere and a few repetitions from CNN.

The Secret
Here is another lie, somewhat along the same lines as an urban legend, only this one costs money. Right now would be a good opportunity to fess up and point out (if you haven't yet heard it from me in person) that I consider both The Secret and The Law of Attraction to be complete and utter mind-numbing bollocks.

This lie is a simple one, yet there is no character development, no unravelling, they never actually point out that it's a crock. Of course, they don't really need to, the premise is so preposterous that people will see through this desperate April Fool's Joke long before the closing credits. That is, they would if their dominant left hemisphere wasn't tripping on dopamine.

The Secret even pretends it is validated by quantum physics, discussed here.

Aimed at the richest 5% the world has ever known, this Secret Stuff proceeds to tell us how to acquire yet more wealth merely by asking for it. Asking is all it takes, as that is sufficient to persuade some unspecified deity that our whims are more important than, for instance, delivering food to the tens of thousands who will starve to death today.

Apparently, the starving must not be asking. Or at least, not asking in the right way.  So, apologies to all those goatherders in the Sudan dying from the drought; those millions who disappeared, suffering, at the hands of the Nazis, Pol Pot, Stalin or the Chinese Cultural Revolution; the people being tortured to death as you read this; the parents who will never see their children again; condemned men on death row, the wives of soldiers who will not return and abused children, wherever you are, apologies. You see, you are just not asking properly. Either that, or you inadvertantly asked for the wrong thing.

The sociopaths that thought up The Secret would have us believe that these millions must have deliberately invoked human tragedy, on themselves no less, just by thinking about it. Most devotees of this new sicko religion even have anecdotal confirmation that it works. The "Secret" is to ask often enough that you coincidentally ask immediately before some good fortune arrives.

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to The Rain Dance. A causal link is established, and this of course proves the "Law". Well, that and the remote friend of a remote relative who heard it from the maid of Mrs. Null Hypothesis (retired).

Unfortunately, the devotees are not capable of communicating this "Law" to the poor bastards in Chad who will starve to death this week. Be very suspicious of miracle religions, especially ones that only work in dollars. That alone should be a clue that it's offering more left-brain hypno-manipulation.

Of course, it's not just the New-Age fruitcakes that market left-brain lies as spiritual, they merely stole the idea from old-time religion. A lie told often enough becomes truth.

Well, at least this story unravelled to a satisfying ending.

Yours in peace and service,

Ken