The Spirit of Ma’at interviews Dr. Masaru Emoto by Reiko Myamoto Dewey
REIKO: We have read your book The Message from Water, and we introduced it on our website in our August issue (see "Conscious Water Crystals: The Power of Prayer Made Visible"). It has been our most popular article, with its readership increasing every week, and has raised many questions.You mentioned in your book how you would type out words on a piece of paper and paste these written words onto a bottle, and see how the water reacted to the words — what kind of crystals were formed from the words. From your research, are you able to discern whether the reaction of the water came from the vibration of the actual words that were pasted onto the bottles, or whether the intention of the person who was pasting the words onto the bottle influenced the experiment in any way?
DR. EMOTO: This is one of the more difficult areas to clarify. However, from continuing these experiments we have come to the conclusion that the water is reacting to the actual words. For example, for our trip to Europe we tried using the words "thank you" and "you fool" in German. The people on our team who took the actual photographs of the water crystals did not understand the German for "you fool", and yet we were able to obtain exactly the same kind of results in the different crystal formations based on the words used.
REIKO: Have you found that distance made any difference when people were praying over water? For example, if people in Japan were to pray over water in Russia, would this be different from people praying over water that is right in front of them?
DR. EMOTO: We have only experimented once with that in the book. But from that experiment, distance did not seem to matter. The intention and prayers of the person still influenced the water. We have not yet tried further experiments from a long distance. However, my feeling is that distance would not make much of a difference. What would make a difference is the purity of intent of the person doing the praying. The higher the purity of intent, the less of a difference the distance itself would make.
REIKO: Have you seen any difference between one person praying over water versus a whole group of people praying over water?
DR. EMOTO: Since the water reflects the composite energy of what is being sent to it, the crystalline structure reflects the composite vibrations of the group. So one person praying reflects the energy or intention of that one person. In terms of how powerful the effect can be, if you have one person praying with a deep sense of clarity and purity, the crystalline structure will be clear and pure. And even though you may have a large group of people, if their intention as a group is not cohesive, you end up with an incohesive structure in the water. However, if everyone is united together, you will find a clear, beautiful crystal, like one created by the prayer of a single person of deep purity. In one of our experiments, we had some water on a table, and 17 participants all stood in a circle around a table holding hands. Then each of the participants spoke a beautiful word of their choice to the water. Words like unity, love, and friendship. We took before-and-after shots and were able to obtain some beautiful crystalline structures as a result of this. I have some slides that I will be showing of these crystals in my upcoming European tour.
REIKO: Is the water influenced immediately, or is there a time lag?
DR. EMOTO: In these cases we would freeze the water right away, so we could say that the water is changed instantaneously.
REIKO: Have you ever tested other human body fluids, such as saliva, blood, urine etc?
DR. EMOTO: Yes, we certainly have. However, fluids with other elements in them, like seawater, blood and urine, do not form crystals. However, we can dilute them with distilled water to something like 10 to the power of -12 or -20 or so. This dilutes the component of other elements in the fluid to the point where we can freeze the sample and obtain crystals.
REIKO: Could you then see the effect that energetic healing or prayer has on a person by looking at the crystals formed by their blood or urine?
DR. EMOTO: As far as experiments related to the human body are concerned, there are a lot of subtle influences that also need to be taken into consideration. So although we are looking at this, we have not publicized any information yet. However, you can look forward to hearing about our findings on this in the future.
REIKO: If we could imbue water with the energy of various words, for example, with the word, "health", could we then use the water that has that vibration in it and use it to do things like grow food, water plants, etc?
DR. EMOTO: We have not tried this, but some people who have read the book are experimenting with bottling tap water and taping words like "love" and "appreciation" on the bottle and using that water to water their plants, or to put cut flowers in. They are finding that their cut flowers are lasting much longer, and that the plants in the garden are much more radiant.
REIKO: Once a certain vibration is introduced to the water, how long does the water "remember" that crystalline structure?
DR. EMOTO: This will be different depending on the original structure of the water itself. Tap water will lose its memory quickly. We refer to the crystalline structure of water as "clusters." The smaller the clusters, the longer the water will retain its memory. If there is too much space between the clusters, other information could easily infiltrate this space, making it hard for the clusters to hold the integrity of the information. Other micro-organisms could also enter this space. A tight bonding structure is best for maintaining the integrity of information.
REIKO: What kind of words would create smaller clusters and what kind of words would create larger clusters?
DR. EMOTO: Slang words like "you fool" destroy clusters. You would not see any crystals in these cases. Negative phrases and words create large clusters or will not form clusters, and positive, beautiful words and phrases create small, tight clusters.
REIKO: You say that some negatives do not form clusters, but we see from your photos that they do still form characteristic patterns. How would you classify these patterns?
DR. EMOTO: Think of it in terms of vibration. It’s easy to understand that language — the spoken word — has a vibration. Well, written words also have a vibration. Anything in existence has a vibration. If I were to draw a circle, the vibration of a circle would be created. Drawing a cross would create the vibration of a cross. So if I write the letters L O V E, then these letters put out the vibration of love. Water can be imprinted with these vibrations. Beautiful words have beautiful, clear vibrations. But negative words put out ugly, incoherent vibrations which do not form clusters. Language is not something artificial, but rather is something that exists naturally. I believe that language is created by nature.
REIKO: Does that mean that every word has its own signature vibration or cluster that is unique to itself?
DR. EMOTO: Yes. During our evolution, we learned what sounds were dangerous, what sounds were soothing and safe, and what sounds were pleasurable, and so on. We slowly learned about various vibrations of the laws of nature. We learned this through instinct and through experience. We accumulated this information over time. We started out with some simple sounds like "a" or "u" or "e," which evolved into more complex sounds like "love." And these positive words create "natural" crystalline structures — which are all based on the hexagon.In fact, the structure of all evolution in nature, from an informational perspective, is based on the hexagon. The reason hexagons are formed has to do with the chemical reaction of the benzene ring. I believe that anything that lacks this basic hexagonal structure is out of accord with the laws of nature and holds a destructive vibration. So when we look at things that do not exist naturally — things that have been created artificially — many of them lack this hexagonal structure and so they have, I believe, a destructive vibration. This principle is what I think makes swearing and slang words destructive. These words are not in accordance with the laws of nature. So, for example, I think you would probably find higher rates of violent crime in areas where a lot of negative language is being used. Just as the Bible says, first there was the Word, and God created all of Creation from the Word. So words actually convert the vibrations of nature into sound. And each language is different. Japanese has its own set of vibrations that differs from American. Nature in America is different from nature in Japan. An American cedar is different from a Japanese cedar, so the vibrations coming from these words are different. In this way, nothing else holds the same vibrations as the word arigato. In Japanese, arigato means "thank you." But even when there is this mutual underlying meaning, arigato and thank you create different crystalline structures. Every word in every language is unique and exists only in that language.
REIKO: Have you come across a particular word or phrase in your research that you have found to be most helpful in cleaning up the natural waters of the world?
DR. EMOTO: Yes. There is a special combination that seems to be perfect for this, which is love plus the combination of thanks and appreciation reflected in the English word gratitude. Just one of these is not enough. Love needs to be based in gratitude, and gratitude needs to be based in love. These two words together create the most important vibration. And it is even more important that we understand the value of these words. For example, we know that water is described as H2O. If we were to look at love and gratitude as a pair, gratitude is the H and love is the O. Water is the basis that not only supports but also allows the existence of life. In my understanding of the concept of yin and yang, in the same way that there is one O and two Hs, we also need one part yang/love to two parts yin/gratitude, in order to come to a place of balance in the equation. Love is an active word and gratitude is passive. When you think of gratitude — a combination of appreciation and thankfulness — there is an apologetic quality. The Japanese word for gratitude is kan-sha, consisting of two Chinese characters: kan, which means feeling, and sha, apology. It’s coming from a reverential space, taking a step or two back. I believe that love coming from this space is optimal love, and may even lead to an end to the wars and conflicts in the world. Kan-sha is inherent in the substance H2O — an essential element for life.
REIKO: So if we were to develop a car that could run on water instead of gasoline, and return the water to the atmosphere and subsequently back into space in this way, would that be one way of fulfilling our task?
DR. EMOTO: I think that would be a wonderful thing, and for the sake of preserving Mother Nature it is the direction that we need to go. However, since water is the mirror reflecting our level of consciousness, a large percentage of the people on the planet, at least 10 percent of the people, need to have the love and the kan-sha awareness. When they do, then the time will come when water can be used to replace gasoline. And the reason I say 10 percent is that this ratio is mirrored in nature. When we look at the world of bacteria, for example, there are 10 percent good bacteria, 10 percent bad, and a majority of 80 percent opportunistic bacteria that could go either way. In looking at the various environmental issues we are faced with, and the tasks that we need to fulfill for the planet, if we could get more than 10 percent of the people consciously aware, than I believe we could pull the 80 percent in that direction, too. And so I believe that the people who are following a spiritual path are promoting peace for the planet and for other people. If we could only unite on this level of consciousness, then we will be there. I feel that my book The Message From Water has given birth to a convincing message through a common language for the whole world. Not because I wrote it, but because I know it was birthed through kan-sha toward mankind. I think this is why so many people from other countries want to interview me about the book. I am being invited to give talks at six different European locations. Things have been coming in non-stop from abroad.
REIKO: Do you believe that water itself is conscious and is reacting to the words?
DR. EMOTO: I understand that many of your readers are people interested in spiritual matters, and I would like to answer this question from that perspective. I believe that prior to Adam and Eve water itself held the consciousness of God — that God’s intention was put into the medium of water, and that this was used in the creation of Earth and Nature. In other words, all of the information needed for God’s Creation was reflected in the water. And then we — Adam and Eve — were placed on Earth to be the caretakers for this Creation of God. I believe that water held the consciousness of God until then, but that after the caretakers were placed on Earth, water became an empty vessel to mirror and reflect what was in the heart. It became a container to carry energy and information. Therefore, since this time, I think water has taken on the quality of simply reflecting the energies and thoughts that it is exposed to; that it no longer has its own consciousness. Water reflects the consciousness of the human race.
REIKO: Would you tell us your philosophical thoughts about what you believe these water crystals really are?
DR. EMOTO: After the book was published, I was wondering about this, and I came to the realization that these crystals are spirits. There are many parallels. When ice melts, the crystalline structure becomes an illusion. It’s there — and yet it’s not there, because you can no longer see it. Similarly, when a person dies their body loses several grams of weight — what some people think of this as the weight of the soul. But then we can often visually see them. I think that the soul has mass, and that it returns to water molecules. And because it has mass, it is affected by the gravitational pull of the earth. And so sometimes the soul cannot transition over to the other side. In Buddhism, we talk about attaining sattori, or reaching enlightenment. People who attain sattori do not become ghosts. They are able to achieve a certain stage of development at the soul level and return to God for a while before they move on to their next assignment. We traveled here to Earth on the water crystals of spheres of ice [Editor's Note: You will hear more about this amazing phenomenon in an upcoming issue of the Spirit of Ma'at on the subject of water.] Earth is not our native home. There was nothing here. So these souls can return to their native homes for awhile. That is sattori, or enlightenment. However, most people on the planet are not able to attain enlightenment. To reach enlightenment means to be able to completely let go of the ego and our worldly attachments. In the past 100 years the world’s population has increased from 1 billion to 6 billion. During these 100 years, war and capitalism has dominated the planet. Rather than being able to detach from our desires, the opposite has been true. Our desires have grown and grown. Very few people have been able to attain enlightenment in this environment. Few souls have been able to go "home" and I believe they have remained on Earth in the form of water. This connects into the concept of reincarnation, where these spirits keep falling back to Earth and need to redo their lives here.
REIKO: So when a person dies, if they are unable to attain sattori at that time, their soul remains on this planet as water?
DR. EMOTO: That is what I believe, yes. The Japanese character for spirit is a combination of the words "rain" and "soul." People who have seen ghosts report seeing them in water or in places where there is a lot of humidity. It’s as if the imprint of the soul, which is in the form of water, suddenly takes form when surrounded by water or moisture — much like a mirage. And so, looking at the pictures of the water crystals and the impact they are having, I came to the realization that these themselves are ghosts. Up until now, I had thought of ghosts as something to be frightened of, something that we could do nothing about. But watching these crystals, I realized that by simply projecting beautiful music and words onto them, the crystals or ghosts become beautiful. If that’s the case, there’s nothing to be frightened of. We need to let everybody know about this, and all use beautiful words and offer beautiful music, and create beauty in the environment. By receiving beautiful thoughts and feelings and words and music, our ancestral spirits get lighter and are now able to make the transition "home." When we consider this, we can see the importance of traditions like Obon [a Japanese summer tradition where ancestral spirits are invited back to spend time with the family, and the ancestors are taken care of and respected]. When we are alive, the human body is at approximately 36 degrees Celsius. This is the temperature of the fluids in the body. When we die, this goes to zero degrees Celsius. When we die and go to the other side, crossing the river, we are no longer able to move our bodies. But the crystalline structure of our soul emerges. It’s like water. When water turns to ice, the crystalline structure becomes visible, but it also becomes immobile. So "crystal" equals "spirit."
MUST the road to enlightenment be paved in sincerity? Can only the super-earnest attain spiritual salvation?
Some yoga teachers have been pondering these mysteries with the gravity of an economic summit. And they are chanting in unison, “Nooohhhhm.”
“I do think there’s a trend toward lightening up in the yoga community,” said Kelly McGonigal, 31, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy (found at iayt.org). “Mostly around the rigidity and humorlessness of doing things ‘the one right way’ — always having to get better, feeling like every yoga practice has to be one big self-improvement project.”
One stereotype of yoga is of a reed-thin, baggy-panted guru gravely pontificating on the meaning of life while a sitar strains in the background. But now some teachers are poking holes in this austere image, infusing levity into classes in an effort to appeal to more students. They are cracking jokes, chanting to pop lyrics, posting humorous videos online and putting a uniquely Western stamp on asanas, or poses.
The yoga community appears ready for it. A spoof of a student who comes to class to pick up women, “The Inappropriate Yoga Guy” — which, at the same time, mocks the holier-than-thou attitude of some yoga followers — has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, according to the Web site’s counter. Amanda Wegner, 28, a yoga teacher in Madison, Wis., often demonstrates a variation of standing-knee-to-chest that she calls “Captain Morgan pose,” like the rum. “Not exactly yogic, but it keeps it interesting, and most often, the students know exactly what I mean,” she said.
Sadie Nardini, the director of yoga at East West Yoga in Manhattan, calls herself “reverently irreverent,” and said she runs a kind of “punk rock” practice (never mind the inherent sanctimony in the word “practice”). “People are moving away from what I call the Madame Tussauds yogi, frozen in a super-serious face, and instead want to rediscover the joy of living, even on the mat,” said Ms. Nardini, 37, who has been teaching for 10 years and practicing for 15.
Her cheekiness is on display on her YouTube video, “The Bon Jovi Chant” which features a close-up of Ms. Nardini, fingers clasped, leading a hearty rendition of the noted sage Jon Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer.” (It’s hard to feel self-important when the mantra is “Whooooa! We’re halfway there! Whooooa! Livin’ on a prayer!”)
“People laugh at first and then get teary chanting Bon Jovi,” she said. There are yogic benefits, too: “When you laugh, you open your heart to reality,” she said. “Truth is there, deep in that laughing place.”
Finding truth was one of the original goals of yoga, which dates to the Upanishads (Hindu scriptures) between 5000 to 1000 B.C., scholars estimate, with the first yoga-specific Upanishads closer to 500 B.C.
Back then, yoga was a spiritual practice intended to lead practitioners to a form of insight. Today, many Western devotees cite the tranquillity they have found after twisting their bodies into pretzel-like contortions (not to mention excuses to visit India, yoga’s birthplace). But others say it is simply a form of exercise, a gateway to physical relaxation.
With that in mind, many teachers introduce their own spiritual teaching, some less solemn than others.
Erin Motzenbecker, 21, has been teaching a combination of yoga, Pilates and tai chi for about three years. Her policy is to “not say anything in my classes that doesn’t sound like me in real life,” she said, recalling an instructor who talked about “allowing your heart to open like a lotus flower and find your quiet place of enlightenment.”
Instead of tiptoeing into the studio and silently waiting for her students to set up their mats, Ms. Motzenbecker prefers to share incidents from her own life: how her sister thought Tina Fey was actually John McCain’s running mate; how she dressed her dog as Shrek for Halloween.
“I teach a class of suburban housewives who want to do something good for themselves without being knocked over the head with a bunch of spiritual hokey-pokey,” she said. “This is not to say that I am against the spiritual side of it, because personally I enjoy those types of classes, too. But you have to cater to the people you’re teaching.”
Luann Udell, 56, an artist in Keene, N.H., refuses to take classes that are too “authoritarian” or “martial.”
“Some teachers treat yoga like a church service — solemn, unworldly, mystical,” she said. “I know it can be those things, but yoga also can teach us to simply enjoy being in this moment, in this body. It can open our hearts to the gifts right in front of us that we take for granted. And being in this moment, in this body, means being in a body that burps, creaks, aches and laughs.”
Havi Brooks, 31, a yoga teacher in Portland, Ore., tries to lighten the mood by using a rubber duck named Selma that she refers to as her co-teacher.
If students seem to be a too uptight during, say, breathing exercises, Ms. Brooks might have them balance Selma on their heads. “I wanted to make yoga accessible for people who think chakras are a bunch of bull and that yoga people are hippie-dippie gullible fools,” Ms. Brooks said.
“As soon as you bring out a duck and say this is my co-teacher, people know this is a different kind of yoga.”
Sarah Court’s way of poking fun at overly earnest practitioners was to create satirical videos called Yoga Thugs, which she posted on YouTube. The videos address everything from Yoga-induced body odor to students texting during downward-facing dog (inspired by her own experiences).
“I don’t want people to think I don’t take yoga seriously, because I absolutely do, but I just think there’s room for humor as well,” said Ms. Court, 34, a yoga instructor in New York. “Does it make me better at yoga if I take myself really seriously? No.”
Some attempts at taking yoga lightly might still come across as being heavy.
Karen B. Cohen, 46, of Lexington, Va., said she is a “master” yoga instructor, and holds the “highest designation” in the national Yoga Teachers’ Registry, maintained by the Yoga Alliance, an industry organization. Her credentials notwithstanding, she said she rejects the “serious” yoga approach.
“The ability to cultivate joy and lightness in our lives is one of the principal aims of true yoga: the bringing of opposing qualities into a productive harmony,” she said. “Our desire to do our best, our concentrated effort — abhyasa — needs to be balanced with the letting go of perfectionism, being happy with what ‘is’: vairagya.” Most classes today, she said, seem to be too heavy on the abhyasa and not focused enough on the vairagya, which leads to self-acceptance, more fun, and peace.
“Laughing is healthy,” she said. “Joy is healthy. A bit of goofy is good. Seeing and experiencing the humor in tough situations — that is yoga. Yoga teaches us to enjoy and embrace paradox.”
Others explain their thinking in less, well, lofty terms.
“What gets the biggest laughs in my classes are when I say out loud some of the stuff that’s going on in people’s heads, but nobody really talks about,” said Ms. McGonigal, who teaches at Avalon Art and Yoga Center in Palo Alto, Calif. “Like in the middle of the usual instruction for a pose, slip in, ‘Please inspect your toenail polish and wonder if class is almost over.’
“Everyone laughs, it gets the point of mindfulness across, but there’s no judgment, and we aren’t taking ourselves too seriously. Ego is the enemy of both humor and yoga.”
Love your way… you are Brilliant!
Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report
"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your
Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a
The man, a doctor left blind by two successive strokes, refused to take part in the experiment. He could not see anything, he said, and had no interest in navigating an obstacle course — a cluttered hallway — for the benefit of science. Why bother?
When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.
“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. A video is online at www.beatricedegelder.com/books.html.
The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.
Scientists have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes — one in each hemisphere, under the skull at the back of the head — were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice.
“It’s a very rigorously done report and the first demonstration of this in someone with apparent total absence of a striate cortex, the visual processing region,” said Dr. Richard Held, an emeritus professor of cognitive and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who with Ernst Pöppel and Douglas Frost wrote the first published account of blindsight in a person, in 1973.
The man in the new study, an African living in Switzerland at the time, suffered the two strokes in his 50s, weeks apart, and was profoundly blind by any of the usual measures. Unlike people suffering from eye injuries, or congenital blindness in which the visual system develops abnormally, his brain was otherwise healthy, as were his eyes, so he had the necessary tools to process subconscious vision. What he lacked were the circuits that cobble together a clear, conscious picture.
The research team took brain scans and magnetic resonance images to see the damage, finding no evidence of visual activity in the cortex. They also found no evidence that the patient was navigating by echolocation, the way that bats do. Both the patient, T. N., and the researcher shadowing him walked the course in silence.
The man himself was as dumbfounded as anyone that he was able to navigate the obstacle course.
“The more educated people are,” Dr. de Gelder said, “in my experience, the less likely they are to believe they have these resources that they are not aware of to avoid obstacles. And this was a very educated person.”
Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina project not only to the visual cortex — the destroyed regions in this man — but also to subcortical areas, which in T. N. were intact. These include the superior colliculus, which is crucial in eye movements and may have other sensory functions; and, probably, circuits running through the amygdala, which registers emotion.
In an earlier experiment, one of the authors of the new paper, Dr. Alan Pegna of Geneva University Hospitals, found that the same African doctor had emotional blindsight. When presented with images of fearful faces, he cringed subconsciously in the same way that almost everyone does, even though he could not consciously see the faces. The subcortical, primitive visual system apparently registers not only solid objects but also strong social signals.
Dr. Held, the M.I.T. neuroscientist, said that in lower mammals these midbrain systems appeared to play a much larger role in perception. In a study of rats published in the journal Science last Friday, researchers demonstrated that cells deep in the brain were in fact specialized to register certain qualities of the environment.
They include place cells, which fire when an animal passes a certain landmark, and head-direction cells, which track which way the face is pointing. But the new study also found strong evidence of what the scientists, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, called “border cells,” which fire when an animal is close to a wall or boundary of some kind.
All of these types of neurons, which exist in some form in humans, may too have assisted T. N. in his navigation of the obstacle course.
In time, and with practice, people with brain injuries may learn to lean more heavily on such subconscious or semiconscious systems, and perhaps even begin to construct some conscious vision from them.
“It’s not clear how sharp it would be,” Dr. Held said. “Probably a vague, low-resolution spatial sense. But it might allow them to move around more independently.”
Love your way… you are Brilliant!
Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report "Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a Sensational Life" available at www.throughyourbody.com
Alan is also the author of Body Brilliance: Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences (IQs)
When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.
Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.
Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.
In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.
Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.
In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.
In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.
“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”
The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.
Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.
Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.
“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”
Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.
Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.
Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”
One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.
We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?
Love your way… you are Brilliant!
Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report
"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your
Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a
A Note from Alan: Here’s a powerful piece by Frank Rich. It’s extremely well-written and was even read on "Meet the Press" yesterday when David Axelrod, Obama’s Chief Strategist was on the show.
IN his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.
Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.
I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.
As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.
In this case, the capital spent is small change. Most Americans who have an opinion about Warren like him and his best-selling self-help tome, “The Purpose Driven Life.” His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change. He is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama. Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago.
There’s no reason why Obama shouldn’t return the favor by inviting him to Washington. But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” Less strange but equally hard to take is Warren’s defensive insistence that some of his best friends are the gays: His boasts of having “eaten dinner in gay homes” and loving Melissa Etheridge records will not protect any gay families’ civil rights.
Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has foughthis silence and utter inaction when the epidemic was killing Texans by the thousands, many of them gay men, during his term as governor. for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card. That Bush finally joined Bono in doing the right thing about AIDS in Africa does not mitigate the gay-baiting of his 2004 campaign, let alone
Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time did, that the president-elect is “a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot.” Much more to the point is the astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, “I think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences.” That’s a polite way of describing the Obama cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president’s personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States of America he and we all want it to be.
Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly glitch-free transition can’t entirely mask the tensions underneath. Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.
The success of Proposition 8 in California was a serious shock to gay Americans and to all the rest of us who believe that all marriages should be equal under the law. The roles played by African-Americans and white Mormans only added to the morning-after recriminations. And that was in blue California. In Arkansas, voters went so far as to approve a measure forbidding gay couples to adopt.
There is comparable anger and fear on the right. David Brody, a political correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, was flooded with e-mails from religious conservatives chastising Warren for accepting the invitation to the inaugural. They vilified Obama as “pro-death” and worse because of his support for abortion rights.
Stoking this rage, no doubt, is the dawning realization that the old religious right is crumbling — in part because Warren’s new generation of leaders departs from the Falwell-Robertson brand of zealots who have had a stranglehold on the G.O.P. It’s a sign of the old establishment’s panic that the Rev. Richard Cizik, known for his leadership in addressing global warming, was pushed out of his executive post at the National Association of Evangelicals this month. Cizik’s sin was to tell Terry Gross of NPR that he was starting to shift in favor of civil unions for gay couples.
Cizik’s ouster won’t halt the new wave he represents. As he also told Gross, young evangelicals care less and less about the old wedge issues and aren’t as likely to base their votes on them. On gay rights in particular, polls show that young evangelicals are moving in Cizik’s (and the country’s) direction and away from what John McCain once rightly called “the agents of intolerance.” It’s not a coincidence that Dobson’s Focus on the Family, which spent more than $500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent of its work force in Colorado Springs.
But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.
It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.
By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.
Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.
After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”
McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”
Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.
I don’t need to look at a calendar or feel Jack Frost nipping at my fingertips to know that the first of the year is fast approaching. My mailbox gives it away, loaded as it is with review copies of new and reissued diet books.
Publishers consider January the ideal time for these works, figuring that many already overweight Americans will have added more inches and pounds since Thanksgiving and will resolve once more to shed them when they usher in the new year.
But I’m happy to say that there has been a tremendous improvement in recent years in the crop of weight loss guides. Most have been written by research scientists who avoid gimmicks and boring, overly restrictive or quick weight-loss schemes that are bound to fail. Instead, their recommendations are based on sound studies and clinical trials that have yielded a better understanding of what prompts us to eat more calories than we need and, in particular, more calories from the wrong kinds of foods.
These authors are not miracle workers who can get you bikini-ready for a midwinter vacation, but their approaches can work wonders for those determined to lose weight permanently, even with limits on time or budget, or with a social or occupational need to dine out often.
Treating Body and Mind
Science-based improvements in the diet-book genre began about five years ago with the publication of “The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan: Feel Full on Fewer Calories,” by Barbara J. Rolls and Robert A. Barnett (HarperCollins). Dr. Rolls, chairwoman of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University, shunned specific diet plans and instead developed an approach to eating based on her findings from numerous clinical studies that people need a certain volume or weight of food to feel satisfied.
Accordingly, the “volumetrics” plan, spelled out in a follow-up book, “The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories,” emphasizes getting more for less — meals that include filling foods like soups, salads, vegetables and fruits that on a volume basis are naturally low in calorie density because they have a high water content.
But as most dieters know, eating habits that lead to weight gain, a failure to lose weight or an inability to maintain weight loss are as much a matter of mind as of body. If physical hunger were the only thing driving overeating, it is unlikely that 60 percent of Americans would be overweight. Rather, many of us have lost touch with natural hunger and satiety signals, and we overeat in response to emotional and external cues.
Judith Beck, a psychologist and the director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research in Philadelphia, had spent many years helping patients achieve their weight-loss goals, not through particular diets but by learning how to think and behave differently with regard to food and eating. Her two recent books, “The Beck Diet Solution” and “The Beck Diet Weight Loss Workbook” (Oxmoor House), aim to retrain the brain. Dr. Beck teaches someone who is overweight how to think like a thin person, with practical strategies to reduce eating prompted by emotions and stress.
Readers seeking a more lighthearted though still science-based approach might consider the 2006 book, “You On a Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management,” by Dr. Michael F. Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz of Columbia University (Free Press).
Though the authors are not “diet doctors,” they have devised principles of waist control based on the latest findings about appetite, metabolism, temptation and the biology of fat. In emphasizing the medical benefits of losing inches and not just pounds, these doctors focus more than most authors on the importance of exercise to produce a body that is healthy, strong and attractive.
Of course, the modern epidemic of overweight and obese adults didn’t spring up overnight — for many people, weight problems have their origins in childhood. Last year, Dr. David S. Ludwig, pediatrician and endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, tackled the underpinnings of the nation’s weight problems in “Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Children to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Dr. Ludwig, whose research focuses on how food affects hormones, metabolism and body weight regulation, has published more than 75 articles in medical or scientific journals. He is the founding director of the Optimal Weight for Life program, or OWL, at Children’s Hospital. His approach emphasizes foods that are digested and absorbed more slowly than high glycemic foods like white bread, white rice, highly processed cereals and concentrated sugars that cause a rapid rise in blood sugar and lead to a sugar-hormone “roller coaster” that drives hunger.
But Dr. Ludwig recognizes that some foods that have a high glycemic index in the laboratory, like carrots, do not have a high glycemic effect in the body when consumed in normal amounts.
Unlike most fast foods and highly processed foods, the meals and snacks recommended by Dr. Ludwig are rich in nonstarchy vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, minimally processed grains (like brown rice and steel-cut oats), wholesome fats like olive oil and avocado, and protein, including vegetable protein.
Dieting by Instinct
Perhaps the most comprehensive approach to eating for effective weight control is offered in a book to be published next month by Workman, “The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep It Off,” by Susan B. Roberts and Betty Kelly Sargent.
Dr. Roberts is a professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University in Boston and the author of nearly 200 articles published in research journals. She explains how natural hard-wired instincts to eat in response to hunger, availability, caloric density, familiarity and variety, which served us well in paleolithic times (and until the mid-20th century), have been compromised by changes in the kinds, amounts and constancy of foods in the modern world. These changes, in turn, undermine the ability of many people to maintain a normal weight.
The book guides readers to alternative approaches to fulfilling the demands of these instincts in ways that can help them lose weight and, at the same time, adopt a more wholesome, nutritious and healthful eating plan that can be adapted to anyone’s lifestyle. Though the instinct diet is rather prescriptive for the first two weeks, it offers a reasonable number of options to accommodate different tastes and eating schedules. The next six weeks of the eight-week program enable dieters to adopt and adapt eating plans that can result in permanent weight loss and improve health.
The diet is high in healthful fiber, which demands a significant intake of water and other noncaloric or low-calorie beverages. As with all sensible approaches to weight control, Dr. Roberts insists on three meals a day and wholesome snacks between them to reduce the risk of binges and unwise hunger-driven food choices.
Love your way… you are Brilliant!
Alan Davidson is the author of the Free report
"Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your
Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a
