During the 1960s, George Carlin had something of an epiphany. Confronted by the counterculture, the young comedian realized that he wasn’t staying true to himself — that he was trying to be Danny Kaye, a very mainstream star, when he was really an outlaw and a rebel at heart. (Watch him on The Tonight Show in 1966). Eventually, Carlin learned “not to give a shit,” to break with milquetoast conventions that restrained other comedians, and that’s when his comic genius bloomed. Note that some of Carlin’s comments here are … not surprisingly … not safe for work.

Steve Jobs, another child of the counterculture, didn’t learn Carlin’s lesson over time. As Walter Isaacson makes clear in his new biography, Jobs understood from the beginning that excellence is rarely achieved by walking down the path of conformity. In a 1995 interview, Jobs boiled down his basic approach to life. The mastermind behind the legendary Think Different television campaign (watch the version narrated by Jobs himself) said:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

You can find more pearls of wisdom from Jobs over at BrainPickings, and we’ll leave you below with more cultural figures meditating on life:

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18

Paulo Coelho: Success Never Happens Without Taking Risks

One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cautious…

Bono Tells Graduates “Pick a Fight, Get in It” (2004)

Conan O’Brien: Through Disappointment You Can Gain Clarity

J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Graduates What They Need to Know

Conformity Isn’t a Recipe for Excellence: George Carlin & Steve Jobs (NSFW) is a post from: Open Culture

If you attended the recent Society for Neuroscience conference, you had the chance to see some unprecedented 3D imaging of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which women’s brain regions (80 in total) are activated in the sequence leading to an orgasm. For Barry Komisaruk (professor of psychology at Rutgers University), this imaging isn’t gratuitous. The whole point is to demystify how the brain experiences pleasure, something that could eventually inform our understanding of addiction and depression. Komisaruk said:

It’s a beautiful system in which to study the brain’s connectivity. We expect that this movie [above], a dynamic representation of the gradual buildup of brain activity to a climax, followed by resolution, will facilitate our understanding of pathological conditions such as anorgasmia by emphasizing where in the brain the sequential process breaks down.

Meanwhile, back at the neuroscience ranch, researchers are also using imaging technology to observe the human brain in another state, the state where people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or other spiritual epiphanies. Scientific American took a fairly deep look at this cutting-edge field several years ago (read the full piece here), and now NPR has produced a multimedia glimpse into the evolving science of spirituality. The presentation (click here or the image above) combines audio, video, articles, book excerpts, etc. and delves into the fundamental question: Is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?

If you want to learn more about the brain and neuroscience, don’t miss the courses listed in the Psychology/Neuroscience section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.

Time and The Guardian have more on the first story above here and here.

This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion: Experiments in Neuroscience is a post from: Open Culture

The mind, they say, is a house divided: The right hemisphere of the brain is predominantly intuitive; the left, predominantly rational.

In his recent book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the British psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist looks at the evolution of Western Civilization through a neuropsychological prism. In McGilchrist’s view our left hemisphere has, over the past four centuries, progressively pushed aside our right hemisphere. “My belief,” McGilchrist told The Morning News last year, “is that it has now taken over our self-understanding, for a variety of reasons, and is leading us all down the road to ruin.”

McGilchrist is quick to point out that the old left-brain, right-brain clichés of the 1960s and 1970s were greatly oversimplified. Recent research has shown that both sides of the brain are deeply involved in functions such as reason and emotion. But the dichotomy is still useful, McGilchrist says, and should not be abandoned.

“The right hemisphere gives sustained, broad, open, vigilant alertness, whereas the left hemisphere gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail,” McGilchrist says in a new RSA Animate feature (see above). “People who lose their right hemispheres have a pathological narrowing of the window of attention.”  McGilchrist sees this narrowing process occurring at the societal level. The left brain, he argues, conceives of the world as a set of decontextualized, static, material, abstract things, whereas the right brain holistically embraces a world of evolving, spiritual, empathic, concrete beings.

Both hemispheres are necessary, McGilchrist says in the Morning News interview, “but one is more fundamentally important than the other, and sees more than the other, even though there are some things that it must not get involved with, if it is to maintain its broader, more complete–in essence more truthful–vision. This is the right hemisphere, which, as I demonstrate from the neuropsychological literature, literally sees more, and grounds the understanding of the left hemisphere–an understanding which must ultimately be re-integreted with the right hemisphere, if it is not to lead to error. The left hemisphere is extraordinarily valuable as an intermediate, but not as a final authority.”

McGilchrist is not without his critics. The British philosopher A.C. Grayling writes in the Literary Review, “Unfortunately, if one accepts the logic of his argument that our Western civilisation has declined from a right-hemisphere to a left-hemisphere dispensation, we do not have to imagine what the former would be like, because history itself tells us: in it most of us would be superstitious and ignorant peasants working a strip farm that we would never leave from cradle to grave, under the thumb of slightly more left-hemispheric bullies in the form of the local baron and priest.”

After The Master and His Emissary was published, McGilchrist discovered a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein that he felt neatly supported his thesis. He uses this quote at the end of his RSA talk: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” But did Einstein actually say that? The Internet is awash with dubious Einstein quotations, and we were unable to locate the original source of this one. If any reader can verify its authenticity (by citing the original text, speech or conversation) please leave a note in our comments section. Meanwhile, you can watch McGilchrist’s entire half-hour RSA lecture here.

via Brain Pickings

The Decline of Civilization’s Right Brain: Animated is a post from: Open Culture

Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World in 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-born writer was living in Italy at the time, a continental intellectual par excellence.

Then, six years later, Huxley turned all of this upside down. He headed West, to Hollywood, the newest of the New World, where he took a stab at writing screenplays (with not much luck) and started experimenting with mysticism and psychedelics — first mescaline in 1953, then LSD in 1955. This put Huxley at the forefront of the counterculture’s experimentation with psychedelic drugs, something he documented in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception.

Huxley’s experimentation continued right through his death in November 1963. When cancer brought him to his death bed, he asked his wife to inject him with ”LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.” He died later that day, just hours after Kennedy’s assassination. Three years later, LSD was officially banned in California.

By way of footnote, it’s worth mentioning that the American medical establishment is now giving hallucinogens a second look, conducting controlled studies of how psilocybin and other psychedelics can help treat patients dealing with cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug/alcohol addiction and end-of-life anxiety. The New York Times has more on this story.

For a look at the history of LSD, we recommend the 2002 film Hofmann’s Potion (2002) by Canadian filmmaker Connie Littlefield. You can watch it here, or find it listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.

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Aldous Huxley’s LSD Death Trip is a post from: Open Culture

This vintage stunt from a 1962 episode of Candid Camera makes for a good laugh. But it also captures something important about human psychology — something that social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment, describes on a website related to his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He writes:

One of the most popular scenarios in the long history of Alan Funt’s ingenious Candid Camera programs is “Face The Rear.” An elevator is rigged so that after an unsuspecting person enters, four Candid Camera staff enter, and one by one they all face the rear. The doors close and then reopen; now revealing that the passenger had conformed and is now also facing the rear. Doors close and reopen, and everyone is facing sideways, and then face the other way. We laugh that these people are manipulated like puppets on invisible strings, but this scenario makes us aware of the number of situations in which we mindlessly follow the dictates of group norms and situational forces.

Often times, the mindless submission to group norms has entirely innocuous results. But, in other cases, it can lead to “good people engaging in evil actions.” Witness what happened within the controlled environment of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Or, worse, the devastating abuses at Abu Ghraib, which brought otherwise average people to commit atrocious acts. For more read The Lucifer Effect.

H/T Science Dump

The Power of Conformity is a post from: Open Culture

In July, the Edge.org held its annual “Master Class” in Napa, California and brought together some influential thinkers to talk about “The Science of Human Nature.” The highlights included:

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.

The Edge.org has now started making videos from the class available online, including, this week, Steven Pinker’s talk on the history of violence. You can watch Pinker’s full 86 minute talk here (sorry, we couldn’t embed it on our site.) Or, if you want the quick gist of Pinker’s thinking, then watch the short clip above. In five minutes, Pinker tells you why violence is steadily trending down, and why some things are actually going right in our momentarily/monetarily troubled world.

Steven Pinker on the History of Violence: A Happy Tale is a post from: Open Culture

Back in 1970, three psychology professors pulled off a hoax that doubled as medical research. They brought Dr. Myron L. Fox, “an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior,” to a conference near Lake Tahoe and let him talk about “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” Little did the audience know that Fox wasn’t actually a researcher or scholar. He was actually an actor who had played parts in Hogan’s Heroes and Batman. And he was given a gibberish-filled script to learn only the day before. Nonetheless, the educators in the crowd ate up his meaningless talk, and it allowed the researchers to draw the conclusion that “style was more influential than content in providing learner satisfaction.” A nice way of saying that jargon and cant can sometimes take you a long way in the academy — in the humanities and sciences alike. More backstory here. H/T Metafilter

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The Great Dr. Fox Lecture: A Vintage Academic Hoax (1970) is a post from: Open Culture

Just when you thought that Freudian theory was dead, it makes a comeback, thanks to Slavoj Žižek, our favorite Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist. Above, Žižek offers a reading that finds Freud’s model of the psyche at work in the Marx Brothers. Hyper Groucho is the super-ego; rational Chico, the ego; and mute Harpo, the id. The footage you’re watching comes from the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup (1933). H/T Biblioklept

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Slavoj Žižek: How the Marx Brothers Embody Freud’s Id, Ego & Super-Ego is a post from: Open Culture

Ray Bradbury, one of America’s beloved sci-fi writers, turns 91 today. So how about a little party favor: This retro clip takes you back to the 1970s (we believe) and it features Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451, literature has more than an aesthetic purpose. It has an important sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Stories are a safety valve. They keep society collectively, and us individually, from coming apart at the seams. They’re the linchpin of civilization. And they provide a more immediate source of pleasure and wonder too. His most recent book, We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories, came out in 2009.

This clip now appears in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons. Here you can watch great thinkers and artists speaking in their own words…

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Ray Bradbury: Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization is a post from: Open Culture

According this fascinating piece in The Smithsonian, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 weepfest The Champ is the most consistently effective tearjerker in the history of film. It’s also the tearjerker most often used in scientific studies of grief and sadness:

The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people (they aren’t). It has helped determine whether people are more likely to spend money when they are sad (they are) and whether older people are more sensitive to grief than younger people (older people did report more sadness when they watched the scene). Dutch scientists used the scene when they studied the effect of sadness on people with binge eating disorders (sadness didn’t increase eating).

We would have gone with either the last scene of West Side Story or that devastating 1989 Negro College Fund commercial with the pennies. Feel free to post your own candidates in the comments.

via Neatorama

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

Movie Tearjerkers: What’s the Saddest Scene in Cinema? is a post from: Open Culture