Tag: pandemic

The Triumph of the Human Spirit

Posted on by japineda

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5.

The last two years are without question the most unusual years of the 21st century. With surprise, alarm, disorder, and panic as a backdrop, the ordinariness of life stands out. I want, therefore, to celebrate the normal rather than the above-normal. To that end, I want to recognize someone who didn’t just go above and beyond this last year, she also went below and beneath. By this I mean she kept and maintained normalcy in the day-to-day life during a very chaotic time. She is someone who in her normalcy provided a glimpse for why the human spirit will triumph in the end.

Like a large portion of working professionals, her employers required my wife Jane to switch to working from home. It was psychologically and practically a disruptive event. Yet, her only real complaint was that she was less productive at home because the wi-fi speed of our internet was slow. Gradually, however, she adjusted to the slower rhythm even though it produced longer times spent at “work.” After a few weeks, she appreciated the rewards of being home. These included things she could let go, such as the need to commute, to dress-up, to be punctual. It also included things she didn’t know she missed, such as the comfort of being home, taking a break, snacking, catching up on the news at any moment. The result was a gradual switch and change. She was still not as productive, but she was enjoying her routine much more.

My wife suffered health problems following a trip to Australia in 2018. She was, therefore, in a high-risk group for catching the coronavirus. Because of this we decided, from the start of the pandemic in March 2020, to have her avoid contact with people as much as possible. She stayed home and away from crowds, and did most of her social contact through phone and zoom. It fell to me to do the grocery shopping and other activities requiring leaving the house. She went along with little complaining, and once again transformed the normal and naturalness of her social life into a constricted and cartoonish version of it. As the months rolled by, it became clear this new life would be less temporary than we imagined. She adjusted and did not grow depressed or anxious. She turned to her faith to provide the strength to bear the negativity and transmute it into a hopeful future. Her adaptiveness was a show of strength that bolstered my spirit.

I want to recognize my wife, Jane, whom I love and admire, as someone who did the nearly impossible – maintain a normal life and a confident purpose these last two years of the pandemic. By doing so, she showcased the strength and resiliency in all of us. In a similar way, many of you persevered and now look forward to a more normal future. Likewise, the triumph of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris this year was a victory of the American spirit over the darkness that had descended over our country. While the dark clouds have not totally dissipated, it is easier to see the sunlight.

We have been through a lot during this pandemic, but there is clearly a human spirit that is indomitable. We must, above all, keep the optimistic flames going by celebrating every act of normalcy we can, along with acts of kindness and acts of love!

The Relevancy of Being

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I wish to be relevant.
I do not want my ashes
In the dustbin of history.
It is a terrifying thought.


To be invisible,
To be irrelevant,
Unable to add
To the human enterprise.


In the midst of a pandemic,
This consuming hunger
And accompanying fear
Is exposed.


As I shelter at home
And avoid the world,
I feel less able to add
To the human existence.


The existential crisis grows.
My insignificance is clear.
I have no ground to stand on
And I disappear.


Then, out of the ashes
Something new is reborn.
With a new relevancy
The relevancy of being.


Nothing to do,
Nothing to be,
No more,
No less.

Faulty Thinking and the Trump Administration

Posted on by japineda

We are in an extraordinary historical juncture. There is a current world-wide pandemic causing 150,000 deaths in in the U.S. alone in the last six months. How to act during this scary and turbulent period is self-evident for some but not so obvious to others. How, I ask, can anyone not promote wearing masks and social distancing when these are the strongest defenses we have against the deadly virus? Why does a rational individual, conscious of what a poor decision is, make it anyhow? How can we interpret this degree of ignorance? Or to say it another way: How can we understand faulty thinking?

Consider the efforts of President Trump and the Governor of South Dakota recently. The President refuses to wear a mask in public, and does not promote wearing one, because it makes him appear weak, unmanly, and not in control. He seems to care more about his self-perception rather than the health of the society at large. The evidence is incontrovertible that his selfishness and paucity of empathy explains his faulty judgment. But what explains the actions of the Governor?  A Republican, Gov. Kristi Noem is following the lead of the President. While inviting thousands of people to attend the Mt Rushmore celebrations for the 4th of July, she won’t make masks mandatory, nor will she promote social distancing.

As a thoughtful cognitive scientist, I am dismayed and yet fascinated by such wrong-headed and dangerous rationale. Mass gatherings with no social distancing and optional masks inevitably will increase the number of infections and undoubtedly the deaths of some of the attendees. The logic of these leaders may result from a paucity in considering all alternatives, erroneous judgment, or absence of compassion in the face of objective evidence to the contrary.

Psychologists describe a specific cognitive tendency that occurs in individuals called confirmation bias that may explain features of their attitude. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, cherry-pick and recall material that confirms or supports one’s personal opinions or values. Confirmation bias distorts evidence-based decision-making.

Anti-maskers and anti-social distancing folks argue that their essential rights are being abridged during the pandemic: the freedom to associate and to do as they want. In their minds, such basic rights “trump” medical considerations. For me, it’s tantamount to declaring that having a gratifying time is more important than protecting life against a destructive virus. It is hard logic to understand. Since confirmation bias tunes people toward confirming their preexisting convictions, it may explain why it is mainly Republicans that react skeptically to health directives.

Psychologists note that explanations for confirmation bias include wishful thinking and the lessened readiness to process information. Another explanation is that people may consider the cost of being incorrect, rather than responding in an evenhanded, objective manner. These are attributes of President Trump’s and Gov. Noem’s responses.

Confirmation bias leads to “attitude polarization” (when a conflict becomes more severe, even when the parties receive the same evidence), and other such erroneous reasoning. It suggests that faulty thinking promotes more faulty thinking.

In the essay Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds published in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert points out the limitations of reason. She shows why sensible folks are often foolish. Kolbert bases her conclusions on the work of cognitive scientists, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Their argument is an unexpected and fascinating explanation for stupidity. They state that reason is an evolved character, like bipedalism or three-color vision; We developed this trait because of our skill at cooperating; And to work out the dilemmas posed by living in collaborative groups. That is, being stupid is sometimes advantageous. The problem is that often we apply this behavior in the wrong situation.

Mercier and Sperber suggest that a mouse with confirmation bias “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would quickly become supper. The human equivalent of this confirmation bias, leading individuals to dismiss evidence of recent or underappreciated threats, is a quality that should have disappeared through evolution. But because it has survived, they explain, it must have some adaptive function. They relate this to our “hyper sociability.” We developed reason, they say, to prevent us from getting screwed by the diverse members of our group.

Sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or malfunctions. We depend on others more than we realize. For most things we need not understand the world to live in it because someone else has understood it and we entrust them to have done it right. Think of how we use devices like our computers, smartphones, etc. without substantial awareness of how they work. We trust those who built these gadgets. Thus, partial, flawed, or “stupid” thinking is irrelevant in such circumstances.  It may actually be empowering. But we carry that attitude into other areas of life where it is not a smart thing to do. Politics being one.

As Kolbert says, “If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.”

Injecting Rationality Into Our Discourse

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The covid-19 pandemic has brought to light many deficiencies in our democracy, institutions, leaders, and ourselves. The exposure of such fissures in what make up the fundamental pillars of our lives has been crushing and humbling. It has left our minds aimless and searching for answers.  One of the foundational cornerstones exposed as more virtual than actual is our dependence on science and medicine. With no means to combat the coronavirus, no vaccine to inoculate us from its destructive actions, no medicines to withstand the multiple assaults on our body, we have lost confidence. Compounding that is a U.S. leader who rejects or confuses faith in science with faith in magical thinking. To lessen the risk, he advocates using drugs with no efficacy and considered highly dangerous.  His lodestar is not science but misplaced hope in superstition and instinct. But gut feelings untested by rational thinking are worse than ineffective, they can be deadly.

What this lack of trust in education and in the scientific method teaches our children undermines the very basis of contemporary living. How are we to fight these changes to our body politic, the environment, and psychological well-being? There are many answers, but for now I concentrate on what academia can do. As part of that community, I would like to know where the wisdom experts are when we need them the most? Where are the clinicians, investigators, educators, schoolteachers who can make the case for why we need to look to science? Where are the cognitive scientists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers to steer us through these bleak and uncertain times? The world needs them now more than ever.

My call is for them to leave their ivory towers, commune with common folk, and share their insights. It is time to banish the fiction that science cannot mingle with politics. Science, intellectual thinking, and analytic reasoning must undergird policy. Policy should be receptive to alternative ways of discerning, including faith-based approaches. But science has won the right to take a principal role and help us assimilate what we learn. We must encourage citizen-scientists to present the argument to the public, not just to colleagues and not just in specialized periodicals. Further, we cannot support leaders who disdainfully minimize the hard-won fight over illiteracy and magical thinking without a response to reconfirm what we know. We are better off because we pay attention to, assess, and then conclude rather than acting only from instinct.

This response to the anxiety and ambiguity of the moment can only take place one way. When academics shed their cloak of protection from reality and immerse in the free exchange of information using all channels of communication. There is a striking ignorance of what science is and the benefits it provides. We encounter such ignorance in schools, and more so in the dark corners of the internet. It is time to flash the light of awareness and intelligence into this darkness. Everyone trained in science must step up before it’s too late. It is an invitation to arms. The world needs saving and a massive influx of rationality into our discourse would go a long way towards doing that.

A Study in Humility?

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We use myths, legends, fables, folktales, fairy tales, and parables as ways to understand momentous and frightening events. Parables speak of ordinary mortals performing sometimes extraordinary actions. In trying to find meaning in the covid-19 pandemic, I searched for an appropriate parable. The closest that springs to mind is the biblical story of David and Goliath. But in this case, the evil character is the small one. So if the moral roles are reversed with covid-19, perhaps the teaching this time is more about humility.

A virus is about 120 nanometers in size, where a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. If you do the math, it means over 200,000 viruses could crowd into one inch of space.  What this suggests is that this pathogen is a very tiny entity. And yet, covid-19, a coronavirus, has brought humankind to its knees. Democracies, dictatorships, and everything in between yielded to the power of this microorganism.

Viruses attach to droplets of saliva when a human coughs or sneezes. Scientists estimate that about 3,000 such beads form a single cough and ten times as many in a sneeze. And the speed at which they race out of the mouth approaches between 50-200 miles per hour. When someone is sick, the droplets in a single cough may contain two hundred million individual virus particles. This number will vary dramatically as the immune system clears out the pathogen. 

Covid-19 is infectious and causes respiratory tract problems ranging from mild to lethal. For those already suffering from a respiratory illness, such as asthma, or a compromised immune system, it puts them in a vulnerable category. To date, over 3 million humans throughout the earth experienced coronavirus and close to a quarter million people succumbed to it.

Regardless of how much our ego distorts the accurate image of our character, covid-19 shows us how vulnerable we are to the tiniest of organisms. Despite every society implementing the only tool at their disposal for fighting this invisible enemy, social distancing, it has been an upsetting experience. Social or physical distancing is something contrary to our social nature, yet we followed the recommendations and are seeing the end of the storm. At least for now. But the virus has made crystal clear that although humbling, the one thing we can count on as a species is our inimitable spirit!

Walking Is a Miracle

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It was a warm sunny spring day. The type that justifies living in California. I was meandering and enjoying a hiking trail around our housing complex when I lost my footing and fell. The injury was sufficient so I cannot partake in this exercise, at least for a while. The sudden pause gave me a chance to reconsider an activity I enjoy while sheltering in place during the covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, it made me appreciate walking more than ever.

Our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus, began ambulating upright over two million years ago. But it is only in the last few decades that researchers have gained insights into how we do it. The action is a complex mechanical engineering accomplishment. Complicated and mysterious enough that some have characterized it as a daily miracle we should not take for granted.

The term walking originates in the Old English word wealcan meaning “to roll.” A 2013 article in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Lipfert and colleagues outlines the unique interaction between ankle, knee, muscles and tendons that summarizes how we go about this roll. Wikipedia describes walking from a physics perspective as the kinetic energy of forward motion being traded dynamically for a rise in potential energy. At another level of definition, the movement results from the body “vaulting” (or rolling) over the leg on the ground. One leg moves forward in a way that maximizes motion while using minimal amounts of energy. This raises the center of mass to its highest point as the leg passes the vertical and dropping it to the lowest as the limbs spread apart.

The 2D inverted pendulum model of walking provides an even more explicit description. During forward motion, the leg that leaves the ground swings forward from the hip. This sweep is the first pendulum. Then the leg strikes the ground with the heel and rolls through to the toe in a motion described as an inverted pendulum. The motion of the two legs synchronize so that one foot is always in contact with the ground.

There are two stages necessary for starting this wealcan, the powerful “push-off” phase. The first stage is an “alleviation” in which the action relieves the trailing leg of the burden of supporting the body mass. Then in a “launching” stage, the knee buckles, allowing the rapid release of stored elastic energy in the ankle tendons, like the triggering of a catapult. The catapult energy from the ankle is used to swing the leg, not add sizeable amounts of energy to the forward motion. This makes it energy-efficient and agile, making the human action different from how robots walk. As the hip rotates 40 degrees in the sagittal plane during a normal stride it becomes a smooth, beautiful movement.

Is walking a simple act?  No. It is a complicated mechanical engineering organization of movements and forces that only recently has shed its mysteries. It is a daily miracle. We perform it so easily and overlook it from among the other physiological miracles, like seeing and hearing. The covid-19 pandemic has been a brutal war on humanity but also an opportunity to pause and recognize the many things we take for granted.

Humanity’s Secret Weapon

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Covid-19 is an infectious coronavirus attacking humanity in a world-wide pandemic. Charles Eisenstein, author, essayist, and public speaker, asked a rather interesting question related to this pandemic in his March 2020 article, The Coronation. It is one deserving of consideration: “Why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity?”  His argument is that other threats paralyze us, but somehow, we got jolted into action by covid-19. And the reason, according to Eisenstein, is we don’t know how to deal with other overwhelming threats. In contrast, we seem to know how to “control” the covid-19 situation. Control involves physical actions, such as social distancing, which are easier to do compared to mental actions necessary in other cases. The argument is interesting but incomplete.

For one, other threats affect specific groups (children, depressed individuals, addicts). Covid-19 is indiscriminate and affects every single person on the planet. Early on, we convinced ourselves that the virus affected mainly the elderly and a few vulnerable populations. While these populations have borne a disproportionate amount of the pain, the stats say everyone is susceptible to infection and can suffer similar consequences. The only comparable threat to covid-19 is climate change, although such a threat isn’t imminent and still too far away to matter. Covid-19 is immediate and in our face. As others have argued, it is the dress rehearsal for the bigger show to come when climate change will affect us all.

The missing ingredient in Eisenstein’s perspective is the recognition that covid-19 affects the core of what makes us human. Homo sapiens evolved as a communal group, favoring close social contact. It is why we have been so successful and literally reigning supreme. However, our strength is also our weakness. Being social makes us susceptible to diseases transmitted from individual to individual. Covid-19 is taking advantage of our evolutionary strength, the social bonding and cohesion of our species. The ruthless assault by this invisible enemy has taken many fellow citizens in agonizing deaths due to respiratory failure. While the attack is ongoing, it has also unmasked what could be humanity’s ultimate secret weapon and the basis for surviving this war: the adaptability of our social cohesion.

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his book Principles of Biology in 1864. Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. He conceptualized the evolutionary process as comprising of two movements – integration and differentiation. For Spencer, the principle of integration provided the unifying dynamic keeping a differentiated population together. When integration weakens, it leads to dissolution or disappearance of the differentiated traits and of the species. Integration describes processes which become the driving force to unite, combine, and integrate parts into a whole. When there is high interactivity among the parts, it produces connected and interdependent organisms with features of social cohesion.  Social cohesion refers to the glue that makes a group a group. The glue of social cohesion emphasizes the connectedness or bonds arising to make individuals in the group meaningfully related to one another. It also enhances the identification with the group, incentives and willingness to cooperate, social and economic balance, and what modulates the interactions among members. In bee, ant, and primate societies, social cohesion is the ultimate expression of the integration drive. And this is what covid-19 is leveraging to attack us—the essence of what makes us social creatures. It is also why our response is so unique.

In humans, social cohesion reaches its zenith when integration of the whole benefits the individual parts. By this I mean when the infrastructure of the society, the institutions of government and politics, provide the guidance and incentive to practice social distancing, for example. In this way, they encourage individuals to go against the grain of evolution to survive. This is the part of the story covid-19 has exposed. It has shown that this most treasured feature of humanity, its social cohesiveness, is adaptable and can be relaxed to bend to the attack we are under. Bend but not break. And in that flexibility to allow for the infectious agent to exhaust itself. What the pandemic has shown is that humanity can respond and adapt as the communal organism it is. It has been fascinating to watch and it portends a new and exciting evolutionary step in the story of humans.

Reducing Uncertainty in a Chaotic World

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In a world where confusion is an unavoidable aspect of being human, the coronavirus pandemic has increased chaos. And changed levels of uncertainty from moderate to extreme. This is a dangerous state from which to live, since high uncertainty inhibits our rational mind. It also dampens other means in our psychological toolbox that we count on—our instinct and intuition. Scientists tell us that instinct and intuition are often the only practical method for assessing uncertainty.  We want to know the future and minimize not-knowing. But our brains have not developed the capabilities or natural means to understand and determine probabilities. This is true of complex events such how this pandemic will affect us; or how our loved one will respond to the needed medical intervention. We don’t waste a lot of time and effort figuring this out because it is beyond our capability. Rather, we decide based on tendencies and beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events.

Half a century ago, Kahneman and Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, showed that humans evolved strategies called heuristics. These strategies are economical and work well under most cases at predicting the immediate future. We use heuristics to form judgments, decide, and find solutions to complicated problems. They are the best guesses made under the circumstances. And distinct strategies are used to arrive at these judgments. One is focusing on the most important aspect of a problem. Another is basing responses on previous experiences. Heuristics are imperfect means to solve issues or make predictions, but good enough to reach a solution or decision quickly. These convenient and evolved strategies, however, lead to severe and systematic biases and errors. This is because they have a built-in trade-off between accuracy and effort.  Nature designed them to maximize speed of decision making with the least amount of effort. Unfortunately, they suffer in terms of accuracy.

Accuracy, however, is subjective, and what improves reliability is confidence and trust. We need to have confidence in life, God, Buddha nature, the government, anything that is greater than ourself. When uncertainty increases, trust decreases. And vice versa. The more we trust, the less the uncertainty, and the greater the accuracy. The key is to count on something or someone that is reliable. At this moment, trust in government, and maybe even medicine, teeters as the uncertainty grows. But it is important to trust in something. In the next few postings, I plan to share exercises to help cultivate trust in something and reduce uncertainty. Here is one to get started:

EXERCISE:  How to Cultivate an Intuitive Mind

Slow Down and Listen to Your Inner Voice
Learn to recognize “intuition.” Pay attention to your conscience, small inner voice, instincts, insights, and hunches. Before you can recognize your intuition, be able to hear/feel it amid the loudness and distractions of life. To do that, it’s important to first slow down and listen. Take time away from your normal routine. Spend time outdoors, or in an isolated place, with few distractions to practice this exercise.

Take a brief walk in a park, forest, or the beach.  Practice deep breathing and calm down the ongoing chatter of your mind. Imagine that your mind is like listening to noise caused by multiple radio stations playing all at once. You need to turn down the volume; to listen to the one station that is relevant and are searching for—your intuitive channel.

A Sociocultural Singularity?

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The coronavirus pandemic is the extraordinary moment we are experiencing in 2020. As I listen to the news of the coronavirus or COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 there is anxiety and uncertainty in the air. The slow crawl of the coronavirus, from East to the West, is bringing countries and societies to their knees. Economies are grinding to a halt. The frenzied activities of humanity are slowing to a remarkable crawl. The microorganism is powerful enough to devastate the earth’s population, so we shelter in place and isolate ourselves, hoping it will pass by. Paradoxically, the possibility of devastation is offering us a gift – it has forced us to pause and reflect.

Is it a coincidence that amid human-caused climate change, the ultimate challenge facing the earth, we experience the explosion of a pandemic directed at the ones responsible for climate change? From a religious context, some might view it as God’s response, in the form of a plague, to save the Earth. The punishment released on mankind for forsaking their God recalls the flood of Noah. In the realm of science, the explanation is simpler but equally devastating. From that angle, the interpretation relies more on the notion we have crossed a threshold in the fine biological balance established with other species on the planet. Encroachment by humans on territories inhabited by bats, which carry potential for diseases for which we lack immunity, has opened a Pandora’s box. It is an occasion to reflect.

I wish and pray that we see this pandemic as an opportunity to reconsider and reevaluate what our human activity is imposing on our mother planet.