Moving Your MOSS Databases to a new SQL Server

If you manage a single-server SharePoint 2007 farm, which is a very common configuration, there's a good chance that at some point you will want to move to a separate SQL Server. Maybe for performance, maybe to improve your infrstructure, maybe to help meet corporate database guidelines. There are lots of reasons you might want to do this. So what is involved? Is it a big deal?

The short answer is that it takes a SharePoint admin to do this (instead of or in addition to a SQL admin) and I generally allow about a day to do it if it is a machine I know well. If it is client machine rather than one of mine, and there are unknowns, I allow an additional day to troubleshoot the things that will inevitably break after the move.

So you shouldn't fear this move, but don't take it for granted either. It isn't usually trivial and sometimes can be a little painful. The obvious question in your mind will be: "what in SharePoint is directly dependent on the database server, isn't there a single setting somewhere that tells SharePoint which database server to use?" Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. You can't just go into Central Administration or someplace in the registry and tell SharePoint to use a different database server. You will effectively need to back up your farm, disband it, recreate the farm and restore the original content to the new farm. Then you will need to go through and check for various little things that might have directly specified database connections and so will need to be modified. Of course if you know about or can find that sort of thing ahead of time, that would be preferable.

1. The first step is preparation.

---> a. Make sure things are currently working. You don't want to find something broken after the move and be unsure of whether it was working before the move. That makes troubleshooting a lot tougher. If practical, fix broken things before the move, or at least make a note of them. Take snapshots of the most critical pages, so you can look back fondly on them as a pleasant memory if they never come back. Well, also to help troubleshoot them if they don't look quite right at the end. Yes, I've actually had to use this.

---> b. Gather the required information: the file location of the SQL database files on the old and new servers, the name and password for the SQL admin accounts, the account names and passwords of the SharePoint service and administration accounts, the old and new database names. I use a template I call a "configuration sheet" which captures all the server, web application, site collection, database, and IIS information I would need to recreate the farm topology. I recommend using something like that to be sure you have all of the informatiom you need before diving in, to avoid any panicky last second calls.

---> c. Go through Central Admin in SharePoint and make a note of the critical settings that you care about (because you will probably lose these in the move): SMTP server address for incoming and outgoing mail, alternate access mappings, accounts and permissions, yes just about everything! The fact that you have to do this tedious step is the biggest reason why the move is not as simple as you might have assumed. There are some tools that can help with this, but they cost. You wouldn't need my instructions here if had that kind of scratch. You should also get an SPSREPORT (this is a free tool used by Microsoft to capture configuration information and logs).

2. The second step is to get a good multi-technology backup (you should already be doing this routinely):

---> a. Backup your IIS metabase - not strictly neccessary but definitely recommended just in case. Sometimes you need to recreate web sites, and this will save your butt if there were IIS settings you didn't know about.

---> b. Get SQL backups of your content dbs -- hopefully you won't need them, but a good thing to have. Don't bother backing up the configuration db or admin db, you can't do much with them anyway.

---> c. Backup your web server extensions and inetpub (IIS) folders on the web server. This is not an optional step, this is essential. Most of SharePoint's content is in the database, but some things you need to properly render and use pages are in the front end web server files.

---> d. Perform site collection backups from STSADM for the site collections that are most critical to you. This will give you a way to quickly and easily recover them elsewhere to keep your business going in case of a complete FUBAR.

---> e. Perform "catastropic" backup from STSADM if you are familiar with this. If not, don't worry about it. It's just another way to recover in case of an unexpected problem.

---> f. Lastly, and most importantly, perform a full backup of the farm from the Central Administration GUI interface. This (plus the web server file backup) is going to be your primary tool for SharePoint recovery in most cases). This is a kind of backup that can't be scheduled, it must be performed interactively by an administrator, and it isn't very robust for restoration, but it has some unique advantages for convenient recovery. You should use the Central Admin backup just before any configuration change to your farm.

3. Take a deep breath. You're about to dive in. Run the technologies wizard on the SharePoint server and use it to disconnect the web server from the farm.

4. Use the technologies wizard to create a new farm on the NEW SQL server (this is the key step that recreates the configuration database, which cannot be moved due to dynamic links with other things, thus the root cause of the complications). This is where all that preparation starts to pay off, you should know the right accounts to use for everything. Using the right accounts in the right places in MOSS is critical. If you don't know the rules for this, you should not be recreating the farm, go back and do the homework. No kidding. I promise that you (or someone that curses your name) will be sorry later if you take the account assignments for granted or just use the same admin account for everything.

5. Configure the Office SharePoint Search Service from Central Administration. This may allow you to restore search indexes later if neccessary. It is optional, since you could always recreate the indexes if neccessary.

6. Using SharePoint Central Admin, perform farm restore of the backup you took in step 2f. Did it work? Phew, you're mostly done. I feel your relief. [No? Well, that's why we grabbed all that other stuff before! You have everything you need for a complete disaster recovery. Good luck. Or just reconnect your original databases and try again when you figure out what went wrong.]

7. Tedious but easy: go through Central Admin and replace all of those settings you captured before. Oh, you didn't believe me that you would need them? Too busy to do all that work? Just hope there wasn't anything important in there that you can't figure out later.

8. Take the original databases offline and go through the portal and fix anything that is broken because it needs to be reconfigured or has connection back to the old databases. This is the part that may sometimes take the additional day on a farm with unknowns. Don't forget to go through and change any database backup and maintenance procedures to use the new server if neccessary.

If you can't use the SharePoint Farm Backup and Restore from Central Administration for some reason, the process gets more complicated but it can still be done.

For example, you can sometimes use the "catastrophic" restore to restore the GUI backup using STSADM. You have to get the ID of the appropriate backup and figure out all of the parameters for accounts and locations and so on, but it may work even when the Central Admin restore does not (mainly because it doesn't rely on the timer service).

If you end up having to restore from a site collection backup for some reason, notice that your sites may not work properly. That's because there are some components in the file system for IIS and SharePoint that may have been modified. That's why you took those backups of INETPUB and WEB SERVER EXTENSIONS before. First try replacing the WEBCONFIG and GLOBAL files in your web site virtual folder with the original ones. That often does the trick. If not, you may need to do some more work to track down what is different. That's another reason I plan for a second day for these database migrations.

Best of Luck to you!

Hypnosis Research Text: Hypnotic and Subtle Influence (PDF)

My text about the psychological and neuroscience perspectives on hypnosis Hypnotic and Subtle Influence is posted on Jake Shannon's "Scientific Mind Control" site.

The text is dated but I think by and large still accurate and useful. The basic concepts and research models have not changed significantly, other than to fill in more of the details.

The chapters organization is based around concepts commonly associated with hypnosis:

Imagination, Talents, Healing, History, Suggestion, Unconscious Mind, Trance, Rapport, Role-Taking, and "Frequently Asked Questions"

The detailed table of contents:

Chapter 1 3
The Magic of Imagination 3

The Power to Alter Our Own Awareness 3
Adaptive Self-Regulation 4
Altering Our Own Experience 8
What State Are You In ? 9
Emotional States 10
Activation States 12
States of Consciousness 13
Studying Human Experience in Science 13
Taking Consciousness Seriously 15
The Value in Studying Human Experience 16
Beyond Hypnosis: Principles of Hypnotic Influence 17
Four Themes 19
Actions that happen by themselves 22
Explaining Hypnotic Involuntariness 25
Review of Chapter 1 29
Summary of Chapter 1 33
The Story So Far … 35

Chapter 2 36
Talents Used In Hypnosis 36

Fantasy, Dissociation, and Cooperative Mindset 36
Hypnotizability 36
Highs and Lows 38
Fantasy Proneness and Absorption 43
Amnesia Proneness and Dissociation 46
The Cooperative Mindset: A Gray Area 51
The Three Types of Highly Responsive People 53
Review of Chapter 2 54
Summary of Chapter 2 55
The Story So Far … 56

Chapter 3 57
Hypnosis and Healing 57

Healing the Mind and Healing with the Mind 57
Illness and Healing 57
Coping with Different Kinds of Illness 57
Hope and Healing 60
Core Components of Psychological Healing 63
General Aspect of Mental Healing 63
Specific Aspects of Mental Healing 66
Review of Chapter 3 67
Summary of Chapter 3 68
The Story So Far … 69


Chapter 4 70
Western Perspectives 70

Hypnosis in Western Culture 70
Hypnosis Wakes Up 70
The Forms that Hypnosis Takes Today 75
The Very Different Views of Hypnosis 75
The Fundamental Problem 76
Suggestion: Explicit and Implicit 77
Hypnosis for Entertainment 78
Hypnosis for Healing 78
The Distinct Cultures of Hypnotists 79
The Evolution of the Concept 80
Roots in Faith Healing and Exorcism 81
First Attempts to Study Hypnotic Influence in Science 82
The “Sleep” Method of Hypnotic Influence Emerges 84
Bernheim and Therapeutic Suggestion 88
The Origins of the Concept of Hypnotic “Depth” 90
“Depth” and Involvement in Fantasy 91
Hypnotherapy is more than Laboratory Hypnosis 93
Psychotherapy Independent of Laboratory Hypnosis 94
Summary of Chapter 4 98
The Story So Far … 99

Chapter 5 100
Suggestion 100

Identifying “Hypnotic” Responses 100
What is Suggestion ? 100
A Special Kind of Communication 101
Learning Through Rhythm 103
Ideodynamic Processes and Induction 107
Review of Chapter 5 116
Summary of Chapter 5 118
The Story So Far … 119

Chapter 6 120
The Unconscious Mind 120

What Lies Beneath: Great Storehouse or Self-Deception ? 120
Into the Realm of the Unconscious 122
The Dynamic Unconscious 123
The Cognitive Unconscious 133
Attention and Preconscious Processing 134
Types of Knowledge and Memory 136
Unconscious Procedures 137
Remembered Experiences vs. Known Facts 137
The Social-Emotional Unconscious 139
Dissociated Mental Processes 148
Review of Chapter 6 150
Summary of Chapter 6 153
The Story So Far … 154
3

Chapter 7 155
Trance 155

The Experiential Mindset and The Elusive Mental State of Hypnosis 155
How does trance feel ? 161
What does a Hypnotic Trance look like ? 162
The Paradox of Alert Trance 163
Different Kinds of Trances ? 165
Attentional Focus and the Flow State 168
What are we measuring ? 173
Hypnosis and Relaxation 174
Most hypnosis is mostly relaxation 174
Trance as distinct from sleep or stupor 177
Measurements of Localized Brain Activity 178
Looking for the Phantasms of Hypnotic Trance in the EEG 178
Evoked Potentials 182
EEG correlates of effective cognitive pain control 183
Neuroanatomy and Hypnosis : Where is the “Unconscious” ? 184
Functional Systems and Outcome-Orientation 188
A speculative neurological substrate of goal-directed behavior 190
Hemispheric Asymmetry and Hypnosis 192
“Putting half the brain to sleep,” Is the right hemisphere the Freudian Unconscious ? 197
Hypnosis and Callosal Connectivity 200
The Brain in Trance 202
Information Transduction and the HPA 203
Triggering Fast Waves and the Orienting Response 204
The Hemisphere Shift 207
The Amygdala and the Hippocampus in Attention 208
Perceptual Decisions and the Prefrontal Cortex 212
Switching Between Cognitive Modes 215
Review of Chapter 7 216
Summary of Chapter 7 218
The Story So Far … 219

Chapter 8 221
Rapport 221

The Cooperation Mindset and the Hypnotic Dance of Intimacy 221
Hypnotic Cooperation and Intimacy 221
Imagination Plus Intimacy 223
Cooperation of a Special Kind 227
Review of Chapter 8 230
Summary of Chapter 8 231
The Story So Far … 231

Chapter 9 232
Role Taking 232

Involvement and Our Sense of Identity 232
Who I Am Depends On Who I'm With 232
Coordinated Involvement 235
4
Review of Chapter 9 238
Summary of Chapter 9 240
The Story So Far … 240

Epilogue to Section One: Common Questions 242

Is Hypnosis Real ? 242
Does Hypnosis Work ? 242
Will People Do Anything the Hypnotist Says ? 243
Can Someone Be "Brainwashed" Through Hypnosis ? 244
Can I Be Hurt By Hypnosis ? 244
Can Anyone Be Hypnotized ? 245
Can Hypnosis Help Me Change My Habits ? 245
Can I Control My Body Processes With Hypnosis ? 245
Can I Control Pain With Hypnosis ? 246

Subliminal or Marginal Perception - its current scientific status

Subliminal perception is a deeply ambiguous concept, which is perhaps appropriate if you think about it!

This is partly because the concept caught on originally as the result of a hoax. The now infamous "eat popcorn, drink coke study" was a planted story by marketing consultant James Vicary which became a wildly successful urban legend about selling products subliminally in movie theatres. Vicary's model wasn't entirely impossible in theory, but as he later admitted, he made up (or exaggerated?) his results to sell his consulting services and seemed honestly surprised that people got so excited about his planted news stories. He thought of it as a rather subtle effect and the concept caught fire beyond his wildest expectations.

It is also partly because of how much the concept has been abused to make the self-help industry more lucrative. It seems like less work and more exotic to listen to music rather than repeat affirmations or use suggestions, and people like less work and are attracted to the exotic.

Of course part of the ambiguity is because we are naturally fascinated and afraid of something that can potentially influence us without being aware of it. All sorts of paranoia (and also some justified fear!) results from this, especially since it is at least theoretically a real possibility. We don't trust many people who might have a technology like this, and for good reason.

Finally, it is partly because there are legitimately difficult technical issues to resolve within the perceptual research.

Some thoughts on the technical issues in subliminal perception.

First of all, it is important to understand that subliminal perception is real. Sometimes the term "marginal perception" is preferred because the concept of a single sensory boundary is not really accurate. In either case, these terms refer to the theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought.

Second, most of the research on this has been on visual perception, especially using rapidly flashed images and masking stimuli. Auditory subliminal perception is not as popular in experiments for two reasons. First, it is technically much more difficult to control what is going on in order to produce repeatable results, and second, because of those problems and the lack of interest in doing real auditory subliminal research, there have been no convincing repeatable demonstrations yet that there is an auditory subliminal perception effect of the same sort as in the visual experiments. That's why the claims for auditory self-help subliminal programs are not based on any legitimate research, because there really isn't much, and because practical tests have all turned up no evidence of effects beyond placebo. Enough on that. You can check the archives of any good Skeptic magazine to find the research by Phil Merikle and others that tested many of these products.

Third, getting to the legitimate phenomenon and the technical issues, the biggest ambiguity is in how we think of perception. Is it an all-or-none phenomenon or a gradual shift between different levels? This is an important question because it tells us whether effective stimuli can really be hidden from awareness or "unconscious," or whether they just fall into the shadows of our mind but we are dimly aware of them.

This isn't as easy a thing to test as it might seem. Different experimental situations produce clear but different results, and sorting out the overall picture is an interesting but challenging job for theorists. This article from Consciousness and Cognition suggests a perspective I tend to agree with, that if some experiments show gradual levels of awareness and others show all-or-none, then the underlying phenomenon probably consists of levels. It's easier to come up with a model of how levels can become all-or-none under some conditions that a model that creates gradual levels out of an all-or-none effect.

There is a recent experimental tool called the perceptual awareness scale that has been useful so far distinguishing whether something is actually perceived or not, and to what degree. Its implications for understanding subliminal perception are described in this article from Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

This is just a quick intro to a very deep and very tricky topic that has fascinated me for decades. The choice of the two articles which share an author was not a coincidence, I was inspired to write this after checking in on Thomas Ramsoy's work after I noticed that his wonderful Science and Consciousness Review site had been down for a while. I hope it comes back up in some form, it was once one of the best resources for research news on mind and brain topics.

Also posted at: http://www.scientificmindcontrol.com/forum/topics/subliminal-or-marginal

"Evolving Your Brain" some interesting and inspiring science with an unneccessary spin

My review of "Evolving Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind", (author Joe Dispenza).

Interesting neuroscience, inspiring message, and some old philosophy in new clothes

Overall I enjoyed reading this book, although I did find it somewhat misleading regarding the scientific "paradigm" it offers and the minority philosophical points underlying it, and I was disappointed that there was not more practical applications of the author's interesting model.

My take on this book was almost the opposite of many of the other reviewers here who were either so impressed by the fact that someone would try to sue use science to support "free will" or so dismayed by the amount neuroscience in this book. Neither of those things seems that impressive to me. There *is* a lot of neuroscience here, and much of it is better than average (for a popular non-technical book anyway), but there is also some crude and I think poorly thought out philosophy as well. And the ironic thing for me was that the principles the author espouses for change are pretty mundane and don't really require either the neuroscience or the "consciousness precedes matter" philosophy.

The reasonable principles include such straightforward suggestions as envisioning your end point to organize action, using deliberate shifts of attention to change direction, using rehearsal to change habits, identifying destructive habits of thought, take responsibility for change, and make well-being a priority. Great ideas, but they don't really need the intro to neurosci or quantum physics in my opinion.

Brain science would have been more appropriate if the author had gone into more details about how we make decisions, showing how to influence the thinking process (e.g. see The Owner's Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain Research 3rd Edition, (Howard)), but he avoids *that* sort of research, probably because it would dilute the philosophical message of "free will" that the author seems very concerned with promoting. If there are causal influences on thought, then it doesn't seem so free afterall, the opposite of the rhetorical message of this book.

The author does a pretty good job most of the time selecting and deriving pertinent lessons from neuroscience data and he gives some optimistic and realistic applications for how we can and do change ourselves sometimes. Where there is practical advice given, most of it seems very good to me, which is why I like this book overall and gave it a fairly good rating as inspirational self-help that tries hard to be scientific. As such it may for many people turn out to be a nice corrective to the scientific pessimism they find from many old school medical and psychological experts who are overly deterministic in their prognoses. I guess that's why so many reviewers seem so taken with this book, it does have an element of hope in it dressed in science, and we are more used to getting skepticism or pessimism in scientific treatments.

The author and I both seem to agree that we *can* change ourselves and influence our healing processes deliberately to some degree by rewiring our own nervous system in places, and we both also respect and commit ourselves to scientific causal models. We also both seem to be "compatibilists," people who beleive that our sense of free will and scientific determinism can be adequately reconciled. That far, I liked this book. We may disagree on the limits of self-change in practice in some specific spots, but I think the basic concept of self-healing and self-change is sound and welcome.

However the author also seems to have struggled with the philosophical problem of "top-down causation" at some point and I don't agree with or like the resolution he came up with. The whole concept from the start begins with the idea that thoughts trigger all sorts of physical things that have lasting effects. The author spends a lot of time in the book giving detailed examples of this. I have no problem with that, although it should be mentioned that this is not something new, it has been pretty well documented for decades by other authors, e.g. The Healer Within: The New Medicine of Mind and Body (Locke) and Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis (Rossi).

The problem with this particular book that I didn't have with those others is: where did the thought itself come from and what is its manifestation in the brain? That's where the author mostly just hand waves the brain mechanisms and defers to the ancient archaic version of "free will" as something that floats free of physical reality through some obscure unspecified quantum mechanical rationale. Why does he need this stretch to point out that we can change ourselves? I don't think he does.

The way thoughts themselves arise is one of the most important and interesting aspects of brain science, and still largely a mystery. The author's good but selective review of neuroscience mentions "free will" a lot but never all the wonderful data that has been accumulated regarding how we make decisions or where our perceptions and misperceptions of "free will" come from. Free will, in the sense that it actually exists and is worth seeking, is not something that escapes the brain and then reprograms it as the author claims, it is a result of that same remarkable brain, even if not entirely understood. At least that is a more interesting and promising line scientifically than hand waving about quantum weirdness and how "thoughts" as disembodied entities cause things to happen in the body. From my perspective, the illusion that makes us feel as if thought has to be non-physical is addressed well in: The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner) and Freedom Evolves (Dennett).

This "new paradigm" of the author is actually more philosophy and pop science speculation than hard science I think. It isn't terrible by any means, or impossible, and he isn't alone in considering it, but it is not really a new scientific model at all in any interesting experimental sense. It has been around for a while and has had a small, marginal, but dedicated following outside of mainstream science (and more broadly in popular media).

The author applies the problematic "consciousness is prior to matter" philosophical stance and then at the end of the book he throws in the traditional idiosyncratic interpretation of quantum physics to make the point more "scientific." To be fair, this view is reasonable philosophically and more to the point, I suppose may help non-scientists better appreciate human potential for change, which seems to be the author's primary overriding goal. But personally I think it is a technically completely unneccessary and misleading way to resolve the issue raised by top-down causation. For details on the philsophical issues, Jaegwon Kim's books are particularly helpful, such as: Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (Kim).

"Top-down causation," is the problem of how the mind, as a product of the brain, can then turn around and influence the body. I would say that this is a problem of how some aspects of brain function can influence others. The author instead joins those modern day Cartesians who evade the scientific problem with philosophy by making "thought" something outside of the physical world that causes things to happen in the physical world. Yes, I agree with the author that whatever a thought is in the brain does cause other things to happen in the body, but I disagree with him that it requires a weird non-physicalist take on consciousness and quantum mechanics to achieve this in principle. I particularly don't like that he claims this is some sort of new scientific paradigm. It is an old philosophical idea. There's a nice account of the difference between this intuitive view and the scientific worldview in: The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Flanagan).

This idea is certainly considered seriously by some philosophers, especially those who feel it is impossible to solve "hard problems" like qualia with physical explanations. But there is very little science here that applies to these ideas unless you really stretch and squint an awful lot at a few marginal experiments that could just as well be interpreted in other ways.

More importantly, the book doesn't really have as much in the way of practical ideas as I would have liked. The "science of changing your mind" should actually have a lot in it about changing your mind, rather than just explaining why it should be possible to change your mind.

So I don't think this was pioneering science because of its unneccessary odd digressions of philosophy and quantum physics, and I don't think it is a good how-to book, but I think the author makes a good case from neuroscience for the possibility of changing ourselves. I did find some value in the author's general model of how we change, but that would have made a better article than a book.

If the author had taken his model of change and neuroscience references and applied them to many practical examples rather than using them to promote an idiosyncratic underlying theory, this would have been a superb book in my opinion.

As it is, it is a better than average "alternative science" book. A worthwhile spiritual and also practical message combined with a mixture of real scientific and also very idiosyncratic models.

Volumetrics: Practical application of the obesity research

The top of the diet book list: More Taste, More Filling, Less Calories

My review of "The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan" by Barbara Rolls, PH.D. and Robert A. Barnett, HarperCollins, 2000.

There are thousands of diet books out there promoting approaches with varying combinations of common sense, science, experience, and novelty in their approach to weight control. They each have their advocates. I think Volumetrics is at the very top of the list of approaches for a number of reasons.

First is credibility. Barbara Rolls is not a personal trainer or a celebrity or "nutritionist" in the generic sense or someone who read a handful of studies and observed a handful of clients to derive her conclusions, she is a leading nutrition and health researcher. She knows the trends and patterns in the research, she knows which approaches have been reliable and which have not in the long run and with the widest base of people. Her foundation in the science of weight control is as solid as anyone writing about nutrition, and much better than 99.9% of the authors.

Second is flexibility. Volumetrics is not a concept based on sensory-specific boredom or food restriction, common and very popular approaches which generally are self-defeating. Volumetrics is instead based on understanding our own feelings of satisfaction with food so that we can feel satisfied while meeting our health goals rather than depriving ourselves. There are a number of effective tactics in Volumetrics for eating in a way that is satisfying and does not restrict food yet does restrict calories and therefore control weight. These tactics are not all or nothing, you can apply the ones you need to the degree that you need without following rigid rules and dietary restrictions. The tactics are organized in modular fashion. You can apply these principles when you go out to eat or order take-out or prepare your own favorites or you can make your own Volumetric meals from scratch, or any combination of these. Most of the time you are not avoiding foods at all, you are actually adding new ones in to help satisfy hunger so you don't need as much of the ones you crave in order to feel satisfied.

Third is variety. Unlike most programs, Volumetrics takes advantage of our natural inclination to eat a variety of foods in order to get the wide variety of nutrients that we need for optimal health. Most programs recognize that variety triggers us to eat more, so they discourage it and encourage boredom but we eventually get bored of nutritional boredom. Volumetrics instead encourages variety but provides a variety of choices that help rather than hurt weight control goals.

The central concepts are probably not going to be new to anyone who reads diet books. The presentation of their scientific basis and the reason why they work in terms of modern obesity research models is the strength of this book, and having this rationale is what allows the principles to be applied more flexibly. If you understand the *why* of the food choices, you can improvise flexibly in your own application of the program, and that's what Volumetrics gives you.

The key principle is satiety. Research indicates that in the long run we tend to eat until we are satisfied and we know we are satisfied in two ways. First, a complex collection of physiological signals from various parts of the body combine to produce the experience of satiety itself. Then we also learn what behaviors and foods lead to the experience of satiety for us. The Volumetrics approach centers around learning how to effectively produce the experience of satiety with what we eat and how to retrain our expectations for what we need to eat to be satisfied. That's it, the rest is details.

The main detail is the concept of energy density. Another important consistent research result is that people tend to eat the same amount by weight because of how we've learned to satisfy our hunger. The key result that makes the Volumetrics approach workable is that we can trigger the same signals that a particular weight of food produces with an equal volume of more satisfying, less energy-dense food. By deliberately creating the right sensory experience and fullness with foods that have less caloric energy, we learn to satisfy our hunger with less calories and so lose weight while eating more healthy and less calories.

The important point is that this is not about just eating salads and soups all the time, it is about strategically getting good nutrition by knowing the relative energy density of foods and eating more of the low energy density foods we really enjoy, and then more strictly portion control the higher energy density ones we have been craving and have been obstacles to our health goals. The emphasis on satiety in low-density foods controls the cravings for the high-density ones, making this possible.

This probably sounds a lot like common sense, and I think much of it is. However the details and their scientific rationale are what really make the program in this book stand out and make it workable and flexible. Volumetrics explains the specific problems with various other approaches like high protein/low carb and presents a broadly workable and scientifically based alternative that give you good lifelong nutritional habits rather than a tricky way to lose weight for a few weeks. I've been gradually incorporating these principles into my own life for several years and have been very happy with both their sustainability and their effectiveness. I think this program is going to be they key to weight control for a lot of people.

Given that the treatment of weight control in this book is so good, let's look at the few limitations.

First, since it is written from the perspective of health, there is really no treatment of performance or athletic nutrition, so athletes interested in weight control may be able to use these principles but they will not be able to rely on this book for their complete nutritional program.

Second, a related limitation is that the treatment regarding exercise is rather weak compared to the treatment of nutrition. Guidelines for walking and moderate activity are emphasized particularly for weight maintenance where they are most effective, rather than weight loss. The Volumetric approach is consistent with the trainer's dictum "you can't out-train a bad diet." Only a competitive endurance athlete and few extremes of that sort can hope to move so much that they burn off an energy-dense diet. So the principles of weight loss emphasize calorie restriction and satiety rather than exercise. As Volumetrics explains, exercise becomes important in three ways for weight *maintenance* (rather than loss) however: (1) strength training builds lean mass which raises resting metabolism, so we don't need to restrict calories as much, and (2) activity itself is more successful at maintaining weight than losing it, once we have eating patterns that maintain a nearly stable weight, and (3) a good exercise program is extremely effective at increasing our sense of self-efficacy, which leads to compliance and success in other habits as well. The limitation is that the book offers no help in what makes a good exercise program effective in these ways. It is not a book about exercise. High intensity exercise is mentioned as possibly even more useful for people who can tolerate it. I think this aspect is very important and should have been discussed a bit more. However it is a large book with a lot of details on its core principles, and exercise is really just a secondary concern to the authors.

Third, there is really very little discussion of popular principles that just aren't effective or those that possibly might be useful. The authors explain that most diets succeed in the short term because of various kinds of boredom and appetite suppression rather than because they are sound eating patterns. And they explain why adequate protein is important but more than that is not particularly helpful in the long run for weight control. But all of the rest of the tactics are left pretty much untouched. It would have been useful for some of the more intriguing ones to have been addressed, such as intermittent fasting.

Fourth, the thoroughness of the book will also be its downfall for some less patient readers used to reading web pages rather than books. This is a real book, not a pamphlet. It doesn't give you a condensed program in abstract form in the first few pages, you have to read the book and digest its lessons in order to get its full education and apply them effectively and flexibly. That's the whole point of the program, at least from my perspective, that deeper knowledge of the principles will help you with lifelong better eating.

All in all, I'd say this is the best single book on general principles of lifelong nutrition for weight control, it is detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative, and the program is practical, flexible, and sustainable. I'd venture so far as to say that other programs probably succeed or fail largely on how well they apply the sound principles behind Volumetrics.

Hypnosis and Synesthesia

Hypnosis and Synesthesia

New Scientist ran a recent review article by David Robson that might be of interest to those exploring the nature of hypnosis. It is on the experimental investigation of synesthesia effects using hypnosis. Feb 14-20 2009 issue. Research is reviewed narrowing down the genetic origin of synesthesia, but then research is also reviewed showing that similar sensory cross-over effects can be reproduced with suggestion. The percentage of people who showed a particular cross-over effect under the hypnosis condition was roughly the same as that of people diagnosed with synesthesia, and significantly different from non-hypnosis controls.

This is interesting but not neccessarily something all that new. It doesn't say as much about the nature of hypnosis as a different state of consciousness as Robson's article seems to assume because it is also suspected that synesthesia effects are actually fairly common, and that the diagnostic criteria reveal a matter of degree more than kind. So as in T.X. Barber's famous line of "non-trance" experiments, suggestion rather than hypnosis per se could well be what brings out the cross-over effects. Missing from the hypnosis synesthesia experiment seems to be a non-trance task-motivated or expectancy control, their controls were simply "asked to imagine." The difference between being "asked to imagine" and being motivated or expectant to see results is very different, and this was one of Barber's central contributions to hypnosis research.

On the incidence of synesthesia effects, also see Alison Motluk's article from New Scientist last year: "Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-syn...

Synesthesia and suggestion both turn out to be fascinating windows into the mind!

The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life

The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life

A review of Sean Carroll's book "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species" 2009, Houghton Mifflin.

This is one of those “stories behind the science” books that gives you a sense of the sort of explorations that lay behind the famous discoveries that shaped modern biology. The primary focus is on the paleontologists who made various critical fossil finds and whose scientific obsessions led the efforts to uncover the history of life. Other books have covered the stories behind the genetics and the development of evolutionary theory itself better, but this one is particularly strong on the stories of key fossil hunters and their unique fascination with deep history and what it tells us.

The thing that makes this book worthwhile is that it is not just a travelogue of fossil discoveries, it makes a good and often successful effort to tie the work of each of the paleontologists into its implications for the history of life as well as making each find an interesting discovery for the reader.

It’s a very different experience learning the principles of biology in a classroom and reading the story of biology from the eyes of the naturalists discovering it firsthand.

On the other hand, the author doesn’t always tie specific finds back to their specific implications for biology. There is story and there is explanation, and the two are hard to balance. Story sometimes gets the better of explanation in this book. Although he is often careful to give simple explanations of concepts when introducing them, in a book of this type the author can’t help implicitly assuming a fair amount of knowledge that some lay readers might not have. I’m not sure I’d recommend this book as a primer on evolutionary biology, but then it wasn’t intended to be anything of the sort and that’s part of its charm.

What better way to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial this year than to learn about how his ideas helped inspire generations of scientist-detectives to learn about the fascinating history of living things on our planet. The story is intriguing throughout, but by the time Carroll gets to the story of discoveries close to our own species, it has become a story you just can’t put down and which is really just beginning to be told.

The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"

The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"

Why have human beings always enjoyed making and experiencing art throughout history and in all areas of the world? This book is a bold claim about the nature of human beings. The claim is that the things we enjoy doing and the things we appreciate about each other were shaped largely by our history as a species rather than by what we learn from each other during our own life time.

This may not seem too bold to those unfamiliar with the academic climate of modern social sciences and humanities. In academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities, it is virtually heretical to claim any significant role at all for "nature" in human behavior. Although biologists in general agree that human nature is the result of an interaction of the expression of genes and their environment, the philosophy underlying the arts and social sciences heavily emphasizes the role of learning and enculturation in shaping us.

Still, even among biologists, Dutton's version of the claim is somewhat controversial. Dutton doesn't just say that human beings are the result of an evolutionary history. He doesn't just say that our brain and other organs are shaped by that history. Those claims are uncontroversial in biology. Dutton's particular boldness is that he claims that our nervous system specifically was shaped during the Pleistocene period of our history to favor certain qualities in potential mates, and that this shaping is the reason we have art.

The reason this claim is controversial even within biology has to do with two kinds of problem. The claim is rooted in a relatively recent subfield of biology known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary biologists are split about the potential of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior. Some, proponents of evolutionary psychology, believe that the only way we can fully trace the workings of the human mind is to find what specific sorts of problems it evolved to solve.

Others are skeptical on principle. Some just think the whole endeavor is wrongheaded. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the human mind was more like a collection of byproducts of adaptations than adaptations. The philosopher Jerry Fodor argues that while modularity of the sort assumed by Dutton's chosen form of evolutionary psychology is clearly the rule in lower level neural processes like perception, it is unlikely in principle to play a role in higher mental processes.

Still others agree with the principles behind evolutionary psychology but don't think we can do it practically because the evidence we would need is too elusive and too easily obscured . They often cite the unfortunate tendency to explain everything glibly in terms of hypothetical Pleistocene adaptations. This tendency has been noted about evolutionary biology in general, but in other areas of evolutionary biology the methodological issues are more readily addressed. When we try to explain the roots of human behaviors, the issues become more complex.

Teasing out the evolutionary history of adaptations can be surprisingly tricky even for things with seemingly straightforward functions like feathers and eyes. When we look at mind and complex behaviors, the issues get extremely thorny.

Perhaps the best review of the empirical issues around evolutionary psychology are found in David Buller's book "Adapting Minds." [[ASIN:0262524600 Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)]] Buller summarizes the core arguments: (1) EP requires a specific stable environment that we adapted to over time, and the evidence for this is based entirely on time span, rather than having found such an environment, (2) a primary tool of adaptation analysis, the comparison of species which share a common ancestor, is rendered problematic by our lack of knowledge other hominid species any closer than chimps, (3) rapid evolutionary change since the Pleistocene is potentially relevant, and points out the difficulties distinguishing adaptations of the Pleistocene from those far more ancient, and (4) most of the EP experimental programs are open to interpretation regarding how their data relates back to evidence for adaptations.

Dutton's argument is well made but not compelling because it is by nature very speculative. However he does do a good job addressing the major objections in a way that lets you see the potential for his theory. The argument is particularly difficult, and Dutton's efforts particularly admirable, because he not only has to address the scientific issues regarding evolutionary psychology, but also the climate of opinion in the arts and social sciences that opposes the whole notion of explaining human preferences and experience in biological rather than cultural terms. Against this background of broad skepticism, Denis Dutton is particularly well suited to make the case for the bold use of evolutionary psychology because he is more familiar than most people with humanities as well as having a good understanding of biology.

Dutton has to jump through several rather big hoops. Since he is arguing specifically about our universal appreciation of art as something to be explained, he has to first establish that art is indeed a distinct universal domain that can be studied. This is a challenge already because the modernist philosophy underlying art does not view it as a single domain that is universal to human beings. Dutton addresses this in two parts: first arguing that art can be defined usefully in terms of a dozen or so related cluster criteria, and then arguing that these are more likely the result of natural selection than they are byproducts. Next he has to establish that art is not only universal to humankind but also that something universal to our species actually requires an evolutionary explanation.

In the most generally interesting parts of the book, Dutton raises common controversies about art in order to show how he would address them. In the most technically interesting parts of the book, Dutton compares and contrasts the competing theories: (1) it is purely cultural with no relation to natural selection, (2) it helps bind people into groups for collective action, (3) it is the result of byproducts of evolutionary adaptation, (4) it is the result of sexual selection.

Ultimately Dutton settles on a sexual selection explanation, similar to Geoffrey Miller's treatment in "The Mating Mind," [[ASIN:038549517X The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature]] but more focused on art in particular. In this theory, we came to appreciate certain abilities in each other as a way to find better mates, and these various abilities cluster around certain common themes like skill, novelty, specific focus, expressive individuality, intellectual challenge, emotional saturation, and imaginative experience.

If you appreciate Dutton's intriguing cluster criteria for art and you accept at least in principle the concept that we may have evolved preferences shaped through sexual selection, it is easy to find Dutton's argument exciting in spite of its speculative status. This is very good popular science writing: a bold theory, a well made argument, and a lot of interesting examples.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a bold theory, but at least one good reason to consider it: it is wonderfully elegant.

The "Peek-A-Boo" Tactic in Modern Martial Arts

The Peek-A-Boo Tactic in Modern Martial Arts

Update Dec 2, 2011: Lee Morrison at Urban Combatives recently expanded on the idea of the Peek-A-Boo as a distinct tactic by combining it with some other more or less instinctive positions commonly used by well known instructors such as Tony Blauer's "SPEAR" and calling the positions collectively "default positions." Interesting idea and worth reading I think. I was leading up to something like this in the article here but never got around to following up, but I think Lee did a better job than the one I would have done.

The Peek-A-Boo as a Distinct Tactic

There's a very widely used and very effective tactic in modern martial arts that is used for the two critical purposes of: (1) defending from a wide range of attacks and (2) bridging from boxing range into close range striking and grappling.

It is notable in that the best known Asian traditions mostly use tactics where you stand upright, hands down or outstretched, grabbing or trapping limbs and striking while moving into close range. In Western boxing, the hands are usually held in front of the chin and beside the jaw.

The "peek-a-boo" tactic differs in that the fighter places both hands on his head (or sometimes at brow level), blocking with his forearms and elbows, and then in some variations may use this defense as part of a guarded rush to force the opponent back and engage them at close range. The position may appear momentarily in some form in boxing and Asian martial arts while covering up, but it becomes a distinct "Peek-A-Boo Tactic" when it is heavily relied on for its own unique characteristics.


A number of styles seem to treat this tactic as if they originated it, but it is likely that it was developed in parallel because relies on some of our gross defensive instincts, such as hunching over and pulling our body away from attack and raising our shoulders and arms to cover our face. That's probably why it is so highly favored in "reality-based" martial arts training, it requires little formal training and little fine motor skill to use effectively under a wide range of conditions.


The Peek-A-Boo in Boxing

The first place I know of that this tactic was used with dramatic effectiveness was in boxing. The legendary Cus D'Amato trained two world champion boxers in it: Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. Both used it to great effect at times. Wikipedia has a useful description of the Peek-A-Boo tactic as used in boxing:


"Peek a boo boxing utilizes relaxed hands with the forearms in front of the face and the fist at nose-eye level, as opposed to the orthodox style where the hands are at chin level with the left hand slightly in front of the chin and the right hand next to the chin. Other unique features includes side to side head movements, bobbing, weaving and blind siding your opponent. The number system e.g. 3-2-3-Body-head-body or 3-3-2 Body-Body-head is drilled with the stationary dummy and on the bag until the fighter is able to punch by rapid combinations with what Cus calls "bad intentions". The style allows swift neck movements as well quick duckings and the bad returning damage, usually by rising uppercuts or even rising hooks."


The Peek-A-Boo in Martial Arts

The use of the tactic in martial arts follows this pattern as well, but expands on it. The hands are kept high (often actually being placed on the top of the head when defending), moving from side to side continually but also moving the hands continually to faciliate quick blocking reactions. Martial artists are concerned with attacks from a wider range of angles than boxers and allows a wider range of counter-attacks, so the Peek-A-Boo in martial arts has to make more use of active blocking to cut off the angles and counter-attack.

"Jailhouse Rock"


You find this tactic featured in some martial arts of African origin and it is featured prominently in "Jailhouse Rock," an art of recent origin which a number of sources have testified to finding in modern prisons. The link to Jailhouse Rock is probably not coincidental. One version of the story of Floyd Patterson says that it was Patterson's use of the tactic he learned in Coxsacki prison that led to Cus D'Amato developing it for boxing. This story can only be partially true at best, however, since D'Amato had already taught a similar kind of defense to fighters before working with Patterson. In any case, whether boxing learned the tactic from prison, or prison from boxing, the tactic appears in similar forms in boxing and in penal fighting. There are many ways that the two could influence each other back and forth because of the unfortunate fact that many professional boxers have done prison time.











In this scan from John S. Soet's book Martial Arts Around the World, the aggressive use of elbows from a loose Peek-A-Boo defense is shown as an illustration of Jailhouse Rock.






















Other Appearances

The tactic is found in a number of other modern systems as well. Defensive Tactics instructor Steve Tarani teaches a stationary version of the tactic for fast emergency defense and calls it the QuickShield (a name he trademarked). It is found in informal versions in self-defense arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where it is used very briefly as a temporary defense and as a way to get into close range more safely rather than as a formal defensive system. I don't know if they use it in the Israeli arts, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't appear there somewhere. The heavily Indonesian flavored Jeet Kune Do of Dan Inosanto makes good use of this tactic and similar ones. The tactic has recently been featured in the fighting scenes of several movies. There is an interesting variation sometimes seen where one hand takes on the Peek-A-Boo posture on the head and the other hand braces against that elbow.

Mel Gibson is shown below doing a variation of the Peek-A-Boo.

More formally, the tactic is featured very prominently in several fighting systems as well. It is particularly apparent in the "Crazy Monkey Defense," and the Keysi Fighting Method. In the Keysi system, a particularly versatile form of the Peek-A-Boo is called the Pensador or "Thinking Man" and is used in a very aggressive way very similar to the boxing application.

Crazy Monkey



The folks at Crazy Monkey Defense (Rodney King and friends) say that they invented the Peek-A-Boo tactic from watching monkeys while on safari. They use in primarily in a defensive boxing context, by keeping hands constantly in motion so as to use forearms for rapid blocking without giving up the defensive shield. Their use of Peek-A-Boo differs slightly from D'Amato's mainly in that they are initially teaching it purely as a defensive system and use blocking motions with the arms (as shown in the jab defense example below) rather than bobbing and weaving. This probably makes the defensive shield easier for beginners to utilize effectively, while at least temporarily giving up on the potentially aggressive use of the tactic.

Keysi Fighting Method


The Keysi Fighting Method was created by Justo Dieguez and Andy Norman in the 1950's and they say it originated in the "Spanish Gypsy streets." It heavily emphasizes a form of the Peek-A-Boo as a unique sort of aggressive defense in order to get into close range and set up close range strikes. In the Keysi system, the shield position is maintained continually and used to set up strikes and guarded rushes at close range. The Keysi method demonstrates the unique versatility of the Peek-A-Boo for both offense and defense when used in a more general martial arts application. The founders of the art also train in Jeet Kune Do with Dan Inosanto, which probably helps explain why it shares a lot of similarity in places with Kali, Silat, and other Indonesian martial arts. The Keysi method has received a lot of attention due to being featured in several popular Hollywood films such as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and MI-3.

The central concept in the Keysi method is the Pendador ("Thinking Man") which is the name they give the mobile, aggressive use of their particular version of the Peek-A-Boo position, with hands overlapping on the head. Many other concepts involve the use of that position to set up close range attacks.

Trinity Block: T.J. Kennedy's Hybrid Fighting Method




Raw Combat Sweden: Using arm attacks

The Rare Amazonian Dog-Bird (photo)

The rare Amazonian DogBird: I love this photo.

http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2009/01/todays_mystery_bird_for_you_to_155.php

"Blind" faith vs. faith

Attacking intellectual blindness rather than faith

This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.

I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.

I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.

Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.

The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.

We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.

The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.

That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.

If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.

Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness

Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness



I'm a risk averse type, who happens to enjoy some slighly risky activities, so I've always had an interest in injury prevention. In the past decade I've gotten more systematic about preventing injuries. A minor pull that would have taken a few days to heal in my teens will now at 50 sideline me for weeks or even months. And after a few weeks off, I'm pretty much starting over on some aspects of my training. Rather than challenge my motivation to keep starting over and over, I've learned to greatly reduce my injury rate with a judicious little bit of extra training. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip down to the last couple of sections. If you want to know the background of the robustness approach , which I think is pretty interesting, then read on.

The biological robustness approach to injury prevention

The concept behind injury prevention that I've adopted is called biological robustness. Biological robustness is based on a adaptive systems approach to human movement. The essential idea is that biological systems preserve their integrity and their core functions in spite of both internal and external perturbation, and we can make use of that fact to understand how things go wrong and make ourselves more resistant tp injury.

How the Body Responds to Stresses: Claude Bernard and the Inner Steady State

The central theme of biological robustness originated in the concept of homeostasis.

Homeostasis has a notable pedigree in physiology, going back to the man often considered the father of modern physiology in the mid 19th century, Claude Bernard. Bernard coined the term "mileu interior" for the internal environment of living things. He wrote that "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" which means:

The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.

Maintaining the Internal Steady State: Extended to a General Principle

This idea was later developed by physiologist Walter Cannon in the early 20th century into the concept of homeostasis. Canon published his ideas in 1932 in The Wisdom of the Body.

Most important for our purposes, Cannon reasoned that homeostasis does not occur by chance, but is the result of organized self-government. This is a very significant observation and modern biology has recently begun to build on it increasingly to see the body in terms of more tightly interconnected systems rather than a collections of loosely coordinated individual parts.

This probably seemed to a lot of mechanically minded physiologists at the time as a rather unlikely or even an unscientific notion. Fortunately our increasing understanding of how complex systems work in general has made Canon's ideas increasingly plausible and important over time rather than relegating them to the science museum with phlogiston and luminiferous ether.

Biological Stress Challenges Our Integrity

Canon's homeostasis, derived from Bernard's mileu interior, became the foundation for the familiar notion of stress, first discussed in this context by endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930's. Canon was the one who first coined the popular expression "fight or flight response" in 1915 and it later figured importantly in Selye's concept of stress, along with the idea of homeostasis.

Biological stress is when our capacity to maintain our internal steady state environment is exceeded, whether it is because of real external threats or even perceived ones (which is why there are psychological components to stress as well as physical components).

In the process of preparing for and responding to threat, organisms bring all sorts of emergency mechanisms into play. Selye theorized that when stresses were extended too long, these emergency responses would eventually become exhausted, leading to illness and injury. Other theorists since then have proposed the alternate theory that stress-related illness results not so much from the exhaustion of the emergency mechanisms as from their effect itself on our tissues and organs over time.

In either case, the significance to us is the same: extended stressors without relief lead to breakdown. That becomes the model for how chronic injury occurs. It is also potentially an important factor even in acute injuries, which often occur when we are fatigued or distracted, both of which are sometimes related to the effect of stressors.

Homeostasis Expands To Biological Robustness

The modern slant on Selye's idea that makes it much more useful for injury prevention is that we have extended the mileu interior to a systems model of how the body operates in general, not just how the body regulates some of its interior processes. Biological robustness means the ability of the body to maintain its core functions in spite of unexpected events.

Note how much more general this is than Canon's homeostasis. The unexpected events might be inside our own body or things happening to us from the outside and they may be in many different kinds of systems. In a wide variety of cases our body strives to maintain function by adapting . Bernard's and Canon's careful observations about specific physiological processes turned out to be applicable to more systems than they first noticed.

This striving to adapt is important for a number of reasons. For example, it can mean that we will change our movement form (often without realizing it) to compensate for a stiffness or weakness in one muscle group by using other muscle groups differently. The fact that our body centrally coordinates movement as well as internal homeostasis means that problems in one place can end up being referred someplace else, a well known principle in modern physiotherapy.

It may seem obvious that when your left foot is hurt, you limp on it and change your gait to adapt, but the concept has some much more subtle implications. A tight iliopsoas muscle in the front of the hip can have an effect on how you use your gluteus muscles, which in turn helps cause an injury somewhere else. And this is a relatively simple and straightforward example.

What this all means to us for preventing injury is that we can't understand the mechanics of our activities just by studying human activity and trying to figure out where the direct physical stresses on us might be. We have to understand the patterns by which our body coordinates movement and strives to adapt to unexpected stresses.

How specifically does this translate to injury prevention? Expecting the Unexpected

Physical training for performance is mostly about identifying specific requirements and training in a way customized for those specific requirements. The better we know the demands of the activity, the better we can tailor the activities and schedules to meet them. Training is specific.

The way that biological robustness affects training is that we also have to take into consideration unexpected stressors as well as expected and well known ones. The principle of robustness training is "expect the unexpected." How the heck do you do that? It's not as crazy an idea as it first sounds. Although we obviously can't prepare for anything that might happen to us, there are a range of potential unexpected stresses that are found in any given kind of activity. For example, a runner can expect to sometimes hit broken ground and turn their foot over, a wrestler can expect to sometimes have body parts pulled forcefully to the limits of movement in various directions, and so on.

So knowing these potental unexpected stresses, how do you protect yourself?

Performance training and robustness have a critical tradeoff. The more you work to prepare yourself for specific expected demands, the more vulnerable you become to unexpected ones. It isn't obvious why this should be so. What seems to happen is that all this complex adaptation your body is doing to specific training demands leaves imbalances and vulnerabilities in other areas. As you become able to push more weight in one exercise, you may be developing a weakness somewhere else that is compensating for some minor internal or external factor that you don't even know about. Over time, even relatively minor unexpected stresses can hit one of these vulnerabilities, and all of a sudden we are injured and we don't know why. We assume we just worked to hard perhaps. But in some cases it was a long developing adaptation process.

How do we minimize the risk of this happening to us?

For each specific training goal, there is a related robustness goal.

When you train for strength, you are working to improve the work capacity of specific muscles and muscle groups. When you train for strength robustness, you look to increase modularity. This means looking at the chain of movements involved and enhancing the ability to withstand stress in each part of the chain. Rather than trying to increase the amount of weight you can push or pull, when you do strength robustness work you try to expose yourself to a wider variety of stresses on the various segments of the movement. You do simple assessment tests to find basic movement weaknesses and you address those. These often reveal problems that you never knew you had because your body found ways to compensate very effectively. But that compensation had an effect elsewhere over time and made you more fragile to injury from some unexpected small stressor.

When you train for general conditioning, you are trying to increase the capacity and efficiency of your cells and tissues to utilize oxygen and utilize various energy systems for movement. When you are trying to improve conditioning robustness you are instead trying to reduce fragility by preparing for a wider range of lesser unexpected challenges rather than a greater amount of an expected challenge. You subject yourself to a wider variety of moderate stresses, particularly varying resistance levels, range of movement around joints, and multidirectional patterns of movement. You want to constantly vary the stresses from session to session and from week to week to expose you to a wider variety of stresses than you would normally get in your activity, but which you still could potentially experience.

When you train for coordination in your activity, you learn movement skills for specific kinds of responses. When you are trying to improve coordination robustness you are looking to train your nervous system to adapt to unexpected variations in movement in your activity. This is done by focusing more deliberately on the skills involved in your training while you vary it. Rather than always turning your thoughts off and running on automatic in your conditioning sessions, you focus more on the skills you are using and vary the sessions, so you can teach yourself to perform the movements in different ways with skill. If you're a runner for example, you might deliberately extend or shorten your gait for a while, concentrating on otherwise maintaining good form. You don't want to do too much of this. You aren't trying to change your gait, you're trying to teach yourself to adapt to unexpected variations in movement. In general you might try varying the speed, direction, range, or rhythm of various movements in your activity.

Finally, consider the psychological dimension of stress. Deliberately focus on small easily neglected aspects of your training to look for problems and help recognize areas where you are frustrated or not in control. Use drills to help develop a greater sense of control over your performance. If you identify specific situations that cause you problems, expose yourself to them in a controlled way in practice to help desensitize yourself to it. Simulate problem situations and rehearse the coping skills you will need in realistic simulations.

Conclusion

Beginners often get too excited and simply overreach themselves. Aside from that, most injuries result not from doing too much or training with too high an intensity level, but from increasing difficulty too quickly without preparing properly or without realizing that there is a basic movement problem being compensated for. Using a conservative progression scheme and incorporating basic assessment tests goes a long way to preventing injuries.

If you want to do even more, then find subtle variations of your training methods that impose a wider variety of moderate stresses on your body, both slight variations in functional movements and in the individual segments of movement chains, and teach your body deliberately to adapt to
variations of stresses. Don't overdo this, it isn't meant to change your basic training program or interfere with it, it is meant to expand it at the boundaries to make you better prepared for the unexpected stressors that you will eventually meet.

Much thanks to Matt Lancaster for the ideas in his article Taking a robust approach to running from P2P Publishing (2008) from which a lot of the specific ideas in the last half of this post were taken. The Peak Performance web site offers a number of good articles and books that are well researched, authoritative, and practical.

Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!

Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!

I just read this excellent post on the Zen Habits blog which reflects a lot of my own philosophy of minimalist conditioning as well.

Part of self-directed training is doing a little research to figure out how to get started, then getting out of analysis mode and DOING IT. It helps in making that transition to DOING IT to have someone do some of the planning for you to get started. I list several programs that I've used personally and found very helpful and very motivating. There are many others that look good as well based on similar sound principles. Remember, I'm not suggesting these in particular for veterans or elite athletes, I'm emphasizing the ones that will help a relative newbie get started fast in a solid minimalist program which they can build on themselves later.

Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/
Does all of the planning for you with predetermined minimalist sessions and vaariety and progression built in. Support forums, contests, ongoing workouts available.

"Never Gymless" Workout
http://www.rosstraining.com/nevergymless.html
High-end intensity minimalist principles and program ideas, you have to do a little planning work to use this well and most of it is not really for absolute beginners but it provides superb conditioning principles.

RMAX
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/
This is a whole culture of programs around various aspects of fitness with a strong minimalist slant and often an interestingly unusual twist.

TorqueBlade
http://www.torqueblade.com/
A very cool approach based on swinging heavy blades around to emphasize functional movement. I mention this one mostly because it is fun, especially when you get bored with burpees and pushup varations.

As I said, I’m omitting a lot of good ones, but these I’ve actually used so far and found fun, effective, and minimalist.

Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?

Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?

In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.

My comments:


1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.

2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.

So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.

Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.

Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.

Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.

The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses and its application to rationalism

Two Kinds of Scientific Rationalists: The Influence of Motivated Cognition

The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses

There is a growing body of evidence that human abstract cognition is motivated, something that has been studied recently and somewhat infamously with regard to politics. The scientific concept has also been abused for political purposes, so for good context on the technical side check out this great article on the Mixing Memory cognitive science blog, which describes the basic concept and also its limitations:

In motivated reasoning, memory searches, interpretations of incoming
information, evaluations of arguments, and even perception, are biased in such a
way that we will be more likely to arrive at a desired conclusion ...

...biasing the information available for supporting or evaluating
conclusions and arguments, as well as interpreting incoming information...

...as long as we can, we'll only deal with that information that is
consistent with our conclusion

... continually confronted with information that conflicts with that conclusion, we will be forced to deal with it

Theories of motivated cognition have recently emphasized its apparent link with what is often called "hot cognition," which for example means that we particularly tend to use this mode of thinking in situations such as where:

• our attitudes are challenged
• an emotional judgment is called for
• there are relatively small consequences for being wrong
• the judgmental task is complex
• "Objective" information is not readily available or the evidence is ambiguous
• disconfirming evidence is not highlighted
• counter-arguments come easily to mind
• we are distracted or under time pressure

If you follow the concept this far, you notice that motivated reasoning indeed seems to be, rather disturbingly, something like a baseline mode of thinking for human beings. We tend to use it under the most common decision situations where we believe we are addressing something meaningful and important, where the decision is complex, where we have mostly ambiguous information available, and we don't feel we have the time and resources to just focus on and analyze the issue for long periods. This strongly resembles the situation where we generally give opinions on topics like politics, which seems to fit the original conclusion that we tend to use motivated cognition for political thinking.

Motivated cognition and science

The point I've been preparing for here is that philosophical discussions over human reason aren't all that different, from the standpoint of cognitive science, from political opinions. The fact that we are starting with the assumption that humans are rational doesn't mean we aren't typically affected by the conditions that lead to hot cognition.

The classic difference is of course that in the philosophical tradition of modern science, we are supposed to consider all ideas tentative, assume that our own ideas may be biased or wrong, and then are strongly encouraged seek out disconfirming evidence and to consider it when it is found. So in principle, at least, we should already be aware of something like the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, be aware that it affects ourselves as well as others, and actively work to compensate for it. The tradition emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge at a given time in history, and so encourages an important attitude of active open-mindedness in its conception of scientific inquiry. This is notoriously taken too far at times to encourage premature and unwarranted "paradigm shifts", but the basic underlying principle continues to be sound and consistent with current cognitive science.

When scientific rationalists write about how great science is and how religion is largely silly superstition, I think they often seem largely unaware that they are not representing a single body of opinion but are themselves split by the effects of motivated cognition.

Motivated cognition and rationalism

In the opening of his wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses two temptations he feels are worth avoiding, but which he he is compelled to flirt with for the purpose of narration: (a) our appetite to find patterns in history even when they aren't there and (b) the vanity of the present, seeing the past as if it were aimed at our own time.

Discussions over what is rational for human beings to believe based on science are in general forced to flirt with these temptations as well. The concept of what is rational has a history and we want to see patterns in it. At the same time, we also want to see the current worldview as being the end result that all of history has led up to.

I see people who consider themselves scientific rationalists (steadfast followers of the ideals of reason and the process of scientific inquiry) as falling mostly toward the extremes on a spectrum with the following poles which I think are the result of motivated cognition and reflect different approaches to addressing the two temptations:

1. those scientific rationalists who are motivated by a desire and need for a sense of certainty leading to a great faith in logic and current best knowledge and believe that we can know the outcomes of our actions with great confidence because science is self-correcting over time and has led up to the present day knowledge in a persistently cumulative way,

2. those scientific rationalists who are more motivated to embrace the unknown and to think of current best knowledge as more transient and have less confidence that we can know the outcomes of our actions because they see the history as contingent, they recognize that knowledge accumulates, but are also more motivated to think of any given theory as tentative at a given time

Similarly to the philosophers foxes and hedgehogs or the lumpers and splitters, these stereotyped views of scientific rationalism are just a tool for helping to understand how our motivations influence the worldviews we adopt and support.

The varieties of scientific rationalism

So I finally come to my point, the different sub-species of scientific rationalists. By the way, like those of us who are diametrically opposed on political ideology, the different scientific rationalists at the extremes don't really see those at the other extreme as scientific rationalists at all.

To make the point more concrete, at one extreme for example we have the people who are committted to preserving science and preventing irrationality and superstition from corrupting the body of accumulated well-tested knowledge. These are the "skeptics" and for historical reasons they are closely related to the almost ironically titled "freethinkers." I don't say this in a demeaning way, because these are really my intellectual mentors and inspire me. I say it is almost ironic because I truly think the motivation for this form of "skepticism" and "freethought" is at its root more about preserving something valuable than inquiring freely. It just happens to be the scientific tradition that they are preserving rather than the traditions of the Crown and Church altar.

At the other extreme we have the people who are committed to questioning and addressing the frontiers of knowedge more aggressively, who want to test the more wacky and more unpopular ideas, who are most motivated to feel that we don't really know how our actions will turn out but we have to act anyway. They are the people motivated to truly embrace the unknown rather than minimize it to help solidify our current knowledge.

The first extreme considers the second one to be irrationalists because they are so quick to dive into things that we have only clues about and not a stable research platform. Their motivation to aggressive "demarcation" of science and superstition leads them to consider ideas that have not yet been validated and well tested to be not only of low confidence but superstitious in principle as well. People who emphasize the contingent nature of history seem to this first extreme to be deliberately ignoring the important patterns and how much we have already accomplished.

The second extreme considers the first one to be irrationalists because they are so loathe to walk on the wild side and don't seem to them to embody much at all of the spirit of active open-mindedness that allows science to revise its mistakes over time. People who emphasize the cumulativeness of scientific knowledge seem to this second extreme to be deliberately ignoring the role of accidents and how much is still unknown, or what might be overturned.

I think the philosopher/logician Susan Haack captured this distinction very well in her book Defending Science Within Reason. She refers to the first category as deferentialists, and the second as cynics. I think that captures the spirit of the distinction very well overall. I strongly empathize with her efforts to steer between them.

The Mixing Memory blog has another fascinating post where a similar kindof distinction is applied to atheism, something commonly associated with scientific rationalism. The author (someone who identifies themself only as "Chris") cleverly divides atheists into skeptical atheists and suspicious atheists. Skeptical atheists are said to adhere strongly to rationalism, while suspicious atheists are more skeptics in the classical sense and question even the scientists' version of reason as well as religious faith.

This is similar to the tradition that considers Haack's cynics and my second category of rationalists to actually be irrationalists, which I tend to disagree with. True, they do put less emphasis on achieving closure through systematic logic, but in many notable cases they are just as opposed to superstition and irrationalism in spirit as the deferentialists.

The cynics are less confident that we really know what we think we know, they don't embrace superstition or revelation or acts of faith.

So I'd put a slightly different slant on that, and say that the cynics really are scientific rationalists of a kind, who have a different slant on reason, emphasizing its limitations while recognizing that it remains our best tool and that we still need to act on it.

To illustrate this important point, my best current example of someone I currently consider a scientfic rationalist cynic is Stuart Kauffman. His conception of how biological phenomena are epistemologically emergent in nature for example truly questions the classical physicalist picture, but it is consistently scientific and rationalist. His consideration of the issues is sophisticated enough that in their online article on emergent properties, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that (referring to kauffman's Home in the Universe):

Kauffman (1993b) is an important and influential assessment of current
scientific theories lending themselves to epistemological emergentist
ideas.

Since I consider philosophy to be for the most part a reason-motivated endeavor and the SEP to be relatively authoritative, I think their mention in this context lends support to my contention that Kauffman provides a data point for scientific rationalist cynics.