Why do we do what we do? Why are we the way we are? What makes us different from each other? These kinds of questions naturally intrigue us. Historically, they have been approached through one of two perspectives. First, the nature perspective suggests that human behavior is driven mostly by biology (evolution, genetics, brain chemistry, and hormones). In contrast, the nurture perspective suggests that behavior is driven mostly by the psychosocial environment (for example, how we were raised, our peers, the situations we are in at present).

Interestingly, almost everyone in our culture seems to believe that nurture is more powerful than nature. More than likely, this is because it is easier to observe the effects of nurture in our lives and because it feels more empowering to believe that nurture has more of an effect, perhaps because it seems more controllable.

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Consciousness is a mystery. Nobody really understands the mechanisms that explain how non-conscious beings somehow became conscious. Nobody really understands what influences our consciousness. Why is it, for example, that when some people read something, they are entirely focused on what they are reading and enjoy the process so much that time seems to “fly by,” while others can read the exact same material and find that their attention drifts and they feel that time “drags?” Although most equate the desire for an “altered state of consciousness” with the desire for illegal chemical substances, I can’t help but notice that almost everyone seeks altered states of consciousness regularly in their everyday lives – for example, being “addicted” to activities such as running, gambling, worship, reading, Facebook, sex, and television. Why is it that most people seek altered states of consciousness in some form so frequently? How is it that the addictions we pursue determine the quality of our lives?

To help answer some of these questions, I long have been intrigued by a psychological state called “flow.” The idea of flow was first advanced by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Chick-SENT-Me-High”). Csikszentmihalyi has studied many different kinds of people (for example, artists, athletes, martial artists, musicians, rock climbers, various kinds of spiritual practitioners) and found that the best experiences of life often come with certain characteristics, including a loss of self-consciousness, the quick passage of time, high enjoyment, and sometimes exceptional performance. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow tends to occur when there is an intersection of high perceived challenge and high perceived competence. This combination of high perceived challenge and high perceived competence seems most likely to occur when an individual is pursuing something that they find particularly meaningful or interesting. In contrast, boredom results when perceived competence is greater than perceived challenge and anxiety results when perceived challenge is greater than perceived competence. For more information on “flow,” check out Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

For example, then, the student who is able to read a reflection such as this with great concentration and enjoyment likely is able to do so because it challenges them to do something that they find meaningful or interesting that they also believe they are capable of doing. However, the student who has a difficult time reading a reflection such as this because they are bored may find that it does not challenge them enough, make enough use of their perceived skill, or connect with what they find meaningful or interesting. Finally, the student who finds material such as this anxiety-provoking may find that it challenges them beyond a level of their perceived competence for whatever reason.

To me, flow theory suggests that all of us have a certain need for “optimal experience.” Of course, this kind of desired state can be pursued in ways that are personally fulfilling and socially productive or in ways that are not. The person who is able to follow a passion at work, for instance, is likely to excel in many ways; for instance, they are likely to enjoy themselves as they work and achieve much as they continually challenge themselves and develop greater abilities. In contrast, people who have a more difficult time finding flow in healthy ways may find themselves drawn to unhealthy, and ultimately unsatisfactory, ways to alter their consciousness.

As Csikszentmihalyi writes in one of Psychology’s most prestigious journals, American Psychologist, in an article entitled “If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy?:”

“When a person finds few meaningful opportunities for action in the environment, he or she will often resort to finding flow in activities that are destructive, addictive, or at the very least wasteful. . . Juvenile crime is rarely a direct consequence of deprivation but rather is caused by boredom or the frustration teenagers experience when other opportunities for flow are blocked. Vandalism, gang fights, promiscuous sex, and experimenting with psychotropic drugs might provide flow at first, but such experiences are rarely enjoyable for long.”

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a colleague who worked with people struggling with powerful problems with addiction. I asked him what he found to be most helpful in this kind of work and he remarked that, ultimately, people who overcome addiction problems typically exchange one addiction for another. One might say that this does not reflect true change, but he added that we all have addictions; the question is what kind of addiction we have and the results these addictions have on our lives.

In this context, it is interesting to note how often society does not encourage individuals to follow their interests, challenge themselves, or develop their abilities. Often times, individuals are encouraged, rather, to seek external markers of success such as wealth, status, or other markers of achievement (such as college degrees), but to do so while putting forth as little effort as possible. Rather than finding optimal experience in the ordinary tasks of everyday life (such as work), individuals are encouraged to find it in leisure-time pursuits that typically are too passive to really result in such a state or that lead to self-destruction.

All of this suggests that rather than seeking happiness through some external marker, or hoping to find happiness at some later date, true happiness that fulfills and that produces good fruit must be experienced in the present. As Csikszentmihalyi notes, “the [only] prerequisite for happiness is the ability to get fully involved in life.”

As the world has become smaller, people increasingly have recognized the wide variety of ways in which individuals differ. Most focus on the content of differences in how people think, feel, and act. However, it equally is true that people differ in how they think. That is, even if two people agree about some issue, vast differences in how they think about that issue often are evident.

From a philosophical perspective, “epistemology” concerns how people think about what is true. From a psychological perspective, what may be of most interest is that people differ in how they approach this task, however. For example, as discussed by Laird Edman, professor of Psychology at Northwestern College in Iowa, many psychologists who study personal epistemology believe that individuals develop thinking skills in a roughly stage-like fashion. At the lowest level, individuals view knowledge as certain and absolute; these people believe that single correct answers exist for all questions. As a result, such individuals often defer to authorities who they presume know the truth. At a middle level, people recognize that uncertainty is part of the knowing process. However, conclusions often are not reached because it seems that “all truth is relative.” At the highest level, people recognize that uncertainty is part of knowledge, but based on the best evidence and reason they can muster, they reach tentative conclusions. They are capable of understanding and respecting others’ views while still holding firmly to what they believe.

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If I were to guess what topic most interested people about human behavior, I would say it would have something to do with “evil.” I long have been struck by the observation that people are fascinated with what constitutes evil and what explains evil. This can be seen in people’s curiosities about mass murderers such as Jeffrey Dahmer.

For better or worse, I share many of these interests. In fact, in recent years, I have become, at times, almost obsessed with what is perhaps the best example of mass evil ever committed – the Holocaust of World War II – during which over 10,000,000 people (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and mentally ill) were murdered. I have read many books detailing first-person accounts of what the Holocaust really was like, both from the perspective of victims, of which there are many more accounts (my “favorite” is “Night,” by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel), and from the perspective of perpetrators. At some point, I decided that I wanted to teach a course related to the topic. To learn more, I applied, and was accepted, to be a part of a small, intense, week-long seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. in January, 2011. I also have interviewed several concentration camp survivors in the past year, and have brought several to Normandale to speak on campus. Along with my friend and colleague, Dr. Jay Anderson, I will be teaching a course in the Psychology of the Holocaust during Spring semester, 2012, which will include a Spring Break tour of Holocaust sites in and around Berlin, Prague, Krakow (including Auschwitz), and Budapest.

In all of this, I have struggled with the meaning of “evil.” Phil Zimbardo, lead scientist of the “Stanford Prison Study” provides a comprehensive definition in his book “The Lucifer Effect:”

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Human beings long have been on a quest for happiness. This often is expressed in
religious, philosophical, and psychological thought. Perhaps this is why so many people
are interested in these disciplines, as they may further individuals‟ personal quests for
happiness.

As the world has become more interconnected, the quest for happiness increasingly is
approached through study of different cultures. This is one of the reasons why I like to
travel and read about different customs across the world. I have read two books
specifically geared toward trying to understand what enables some places in the world to
produce people with more happiness. Although life circumstances such as location
generally appear only to play a minimal role in causing happiness, these still are
instructive.

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One of the classic distinctions made by motivation researchers concerns the difference between extrinsic motivation (where behavior is pursued because of the desire for secondary gain) and intrinsic motivation (where behavior is pursued for its own sake). In general, decades of psychological research shows that extrinsic motivation is associated with negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness. Although sometimes contributing to short-term performance benefits (such as when a student completes a homework assignment to earn points), in the long-run, extrinsic motivation is associated with performance difficulties (such as why many people stop reading for pleasure after extrinsic benefits for doing so cease). In contrast, intrinsic motivation is associated with a better emotional experience and long-term performance benefits, particularly when individuals encounter a setback and need to persist to overcome difficulties.

There are a variety of factors that influence whether an individual will express extrinsic or intrinsic motivation (or, given that motivation occurs on a continuum, the extent to which they show these motivational styles).

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For centuries, various religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions have taught that compassion and pride play an important role in moral and social behavior. One way in which these moral emotions may influence people is by influencing perceptions of similarity with others. That is, whereas compassion may encourage people to perceive others as being more similar to themselves, pride may encourage people to perceive others as being more different. Put another way, compassion may cause people to think of others as being more universally alike, while pride may encourage people to think more hierarchically, viewing others as being “higher” or “lower” on the totem pole.

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What causes emotional difficulties such as depression, chronic anxiety, and excessive anger, as well as the behavioral problems that often mask them (such as alcoholism)? What can be done to prevent and treat these difficulties? These are extremely important questions, given the amount of suffering that these difficulties cause. Furthermore, research shows that many of these problems increasingly are being diagnosed and treated. For example, research shows that approximately 5% of all American men and approximately 10% of all American women now are taking some kind of antidepressant medication.

Most experts now agree that emotional difficulties are due to a complex interaction among biological, psychological, and social causes. Although psychotherapy is an effective treatment – often times more effective than psychotropic medications – biological treatments are becoming more and more popular.

Increasingly, though, I wonder if we are overlooking certain factors and remedies because of the bio-psycho-social paradigm that dominates medicine. Aristotle once suggested that virtue (and its opposite, vice) underlies human happiness. As the field of “Positive Psychology” continues to establish itself as the scientific study of virtue, there seems to be increasing support for this notion. For instance, virtues such as compassion, forgiveness, self-control, gratitude, hope, and faith increasingly are being studied by scientists, with impressive results for emotional health. On the flip side, vices such as pride and greed have been shown to be counterproductive to emotional health.

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Often times, faith and science are presented as being at odds, impossible to reconcile because of competing truths. Personally, I have never thought this was the case, especially when I consider the relationship between Christianity and Psychology. In fact, increasingly I wonder how these two pillars of wisdom might be integrated to form a more complete picture of human nature and to obtain a fuller understanding of how to live well.

One area in which I think Christianity and Psychology may be particularly likely to benefit each other concerns the topic of virtue. Here, Christianity (and other religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions) offer insights into what constitutes virtue (and vice). However, rarely are details elaborated or specific advice made possible.

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Understanding biological influences on behavior often makes me pause. It is so counterintuitive and interesting to think that the brain underlies our thoughts, feelings, and actions. If someone suffers from some serious brain damage, they often will experience a profound change in thoughts, feelings, or actions, for example. When researchers have manipulated the brain, they find that individuals will experience new and sometimes unexpected thoughts, feelings, and activities. This has led many biological scientists to conclude that the brain determines thoughts, feelings, and actions. I can totally understand why someone might draw this conclusion.

However, I often have wondered how to reconcile the biologically deterministic view with the idea that we are free to choose our thoughts and actions. One way that I have framed this in my mind is to question whether there is a mind separate from the brain. That is, is there a non-physical part of us (mind, soul, or spirit) that is capable of choosing our thoughts and actions, separate to some extent from the brain? Clearly, this part of us does not exist entirely separate from the brain, as suggested by brain science, and as mentioned above, but might there be a mind that is connected, but not completely reducible to, a brain?

David Myers and Malcolm Jeeves, in their excellent book “Psychology through the Eyes of Faith,” write about this issue as well. They note:

“Monism, sometimes called physicalism, holds that humans are one and only one substance – that is, a physical body. Typically, however, the concept has been associated with reductive materialism and determinism. . . Recently, Warren Brown and his colleagues have suggested an alternate version of monism. . . They call it nonreductive physicalism. They agree with physicalizing about the biological nature of humans. Yet by qualifying this physicalism with nonreductive they want to assert that conscious decisions are real phenomena effective in exerting ‘top-down’ causal influence on the brain’s neurophysiology. This view agrees that thinking and deciding depend on lower-level neural processes, but claims that they are causal in their own right – that is, that they have top-down causal influence on the lower-level processes.”

With this, I agree. However, then Myers and Jeeves ultimately go in a different direction, which perhaps reflects the scientific consensus on this matter:

“When we bring together evidence from studies of brain-damaged people. . . the one thing that emerges repeatedly is the interdependence of what we think, remember, and see, and how we feel and express our feelings, with what is happening in our brains. Indeed, the interdependence is so all pervasive that we could label it as an ‘intrinsic’ interdependence, meaning it is the way the world is as regards the links between brains and cognitive behavior. . . Thus we see mental activity ’embodied’ in brain activity. The link is not a causal one in the most common way of using causal in science, with one physical force causing another. The relationship is between two interdependent levels. Description at both levels is necessary to give a full account of what is happening. . . So far as we can tell, mind is not an extra entity that occupies the brain. As Roger Sperry emphasized, ‘Everything in science to date seems to indicate that conscious awareness is a property of the living brain and inseparable from it.'”

Part of this makes sense to me. The brain definitely is dynamic, interacting with the environment in many counterintuitive ways. For instance, research shows that individuals going through psychotherapy often achieve the same changes in the brain that medication produces (but that the effects last longer). In this way, the brain seems to act like a muscle, growing stronger and weaker depending on how it is exercised.

However, I do not understand the basis for the conclusion that “conscious awareness is a property of the living brain and inseparable from it.” Consider, for example, what the Dalai Lama says about this issue in “The Art of Happiness:”

“. . . Underlying all Western modes of analysis is a very strong rationalistic tendency – an assumption that everything can be accounted for. And on top of that, there are constraints created by certain premises that are taken for granted. For example, recently I met with some doctors at a university medical school. They were talking about the brain and stated that thoughts and feelings were the result of different chemical reactions in the brain. So, I raised the question: Is it possible to conceive the reverse sequence, where the thought gives rise to the sequence of chemical events in the brain? [The scientist replied,] ‘We start from the premise that all thoughts are products or functions of chemical reactions in the brain. . . I think that in modern Western society, there seems to be a powerful cultural conditioning that is based on science. But in some instances, the basic premises and parameters set up by Western science can limit your ability to deal with certain realities. . . But when you encounter phenomena that you cannot account for, then there’s a kind of tension created; it’s almost a feeling of agony.'”

In other words, science is based on certain assumptions such as determinism, reductionism, and naturalism. These assumptions have taken us a long way. However, I think it’s important to recognize that these assumptions bring with them certain limitations. In this case, if we’re talking about an entity that is free from biology, then perhaps this is not a scientific issue. I always have thought that science is the best way of knowing for understanding measurable phenomena, but the question of a mind seems beyond this because, by definition, it involves something unmeasurable.

If the brain influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions, must it necessarily be the case that there cannot be a separate part of us that also can influence the brain? Might the relationship between biology and cognition not be one-directional, but reciprocal? This is the way most relationships concerning human behavior seem to work. If free will exists, it seems that there must be some entity that has a top-down influence on our biologies that, at least sometimes, has a primary causal role.

Of course, this leaves the question of why it should be assumed that freedom does exist. To a large extent, this is a philosophical or perhaps religious question that is beyond the scope of my expertise. Clearly, it is the assumption of most people and all religious systems that people have free will. My larger point here, though, is that science cannot disprove it as easily as most are lead to believe. This has many implications, including the recognition that individuals can choose different thoughts or environments to improve their lives. Thus, biological problems do not necessarily require biological remedies in every instance.