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Tag Archives: David Eagleman

About Half of You Have Violent Genes

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

biology, crime, David Eagleman, genes, genetics, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, psychology, the brain, the mind

David Eagleman“Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong…

Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not:

Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed
Annually in the United States

Offense                     Carrying the genes            Not carrying the genes

Aggravated assault           3,419,000                           435,000

Homicide                           14,196                               1,468

Armed robbery                 2,051,000                            157,000

Sexual assault                   442,000                              10,000

In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.

About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.

We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.”

__________

From David Eagleman’s eye-opening and highly digestible Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. If you’re looking for a layman’s guide to the mind, fan through Incognito.

The photograph is of Eagleman at his laboratory and office in my hometown of Houston, Texas.

Check out a philosophical and a fictional work of Eagleman’s below:

David EaglemanWhat Is Happening When We See Someone Die?

Clouds and MetalIn the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

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What Is Happening When We See Somebody Die?

20 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, David Eagleman, Life, Will Self

David Eagleman

“It may be that people have different flavors, or levels, of anxiety about death. I’m actually quite optimistic about death. I feel like everything about our existence is so mysterious. For example, you don’t remember getting here, you’ve just sort of always been here as far as you recall. You’re told you’re going to die; nobody knows what that means.

We don’t understand the fabric of reality yet. We know that space is somewhere between nine and thirteen dimensional — not just the three dimensions that we see. So I sort of feel optimistic about it. And I feel like, I’m curious about what happens next.

So let me make up a couple of things that could be happening – I’m not saying I believe these, but they’re perfectly possible. So let’s say what happens when you die is that you slip out of these three dimensions and into some other dimensions. Okay, well there’s no evidence to support that, it’s a lovely idea, and when a loved one dies, you can certainly think about that happening.

When it comes to questions of consciousness… most neuroscientists will say something like, ‘Oh well, when you die, you just shut off. That’s the end of it, because the brain stops functioning.’ What’s clear from a century of good neuroscience is that you are totally dependent on the integrity of your biology, and when this starts going downhill, you change. You lose the ability to see colors or name fuzzy animals or understand music. You are your brain. So it seems the logical conclusion to that must be that when your brain stops, you stop.

But there actually are other ways of viewing it that are equally as plausible. And again, please don’t cite me on this, because I’m not saying it is true, but let me give an example of something that could be true.

Imagine you’re a bushman in the Kalahari desert and you find a radio. You don’t understand what it is or how it works, but it’s making voices.

You discover through experimentation that if you pull out the different wires, the voices stop or change. So you would conclude, correctly, that the voices are dependent on the integrity of the physical system. But you’d be missing something very large there, which is that it’s not really about just the integrity of the physical system: there’s electromagnetic radiation, which you don’t have the capacity to detect yet.

So the reason I mention these sort of wacky, far out ideas is that they’re equally as plausible as anything else we have in neuroscience. They’re consistent with all the data. And those different options – there are lots of them – make me feel, when I see somebody die, as though there are many things that could be happening.

Including that they’re slipping off into some different place and the broadcast may still be going on.”

__________

A transcribed portion from neuroscientist David Eagleman in conversation with novelist Will Self. This is a fantastically illuminating interview (the second best for my money, behind the greatest interview ever given, Martin Amis with Charlie Rose).

Eagleman, who I’m proud to say lives and operates a lab in my home city of Houston, Texas, is one of the great living communicators of science. I try to listen to or read everything of his.

Watch a portion of the conversation here:

Listen to the entire Eagleman-Self conversation here.

Read a story from his acclaimed collection of fiction, Sum: “In the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences”

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In the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives

“In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes of pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

__________

The opening short story in David Eagleman’s enthralling collection Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

Sum is a series of imaginative and often revealing explorations of what an afterlife could be. In this, Eagleman’s book represents a brilliant window not onto the next world, but onto this one — the cluster of oft-ignored paradoxes and properties that make up the setting in which we experience our lives. This book is as playful as it is poignant; a very rare achievement and a highly recommended read.

Check out three more stories from the collection, reprinted by the New York Times here.

The photograph is of the ramp of a ferry as it was being drawn up to cross the channel at County Kerry, Ireland.

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