Deirdre Barrett

The concept of supernormal stimuli is perhaps a little difficult to explain, but not, I think, particularly hard to understand. Basically, animals have instincts that cause them to respond to certain things -- like food, rivals, young, or potential mates -- in ways that aid survival and reproductive success. But if you take those things and replace them with unnaturally exaggerated versions, or versions that unnaturally exaggerate a particular detail that the animal cues in on, you can get an unnaturally exaggerated response, one that might even be detrimental to survival. For example, consider a bird that lays speckled eggs, which it has a strong instinct to take care of. If you stick a ball in its nest, one that's bigger and brighter than the bird's real eggs and has big bold polka-dots instead of little speckles, the bird doesn't think, "Wait a second, something's wrong here. This is not my egg." Instead -- and I'm very much paraphrasing here -- its reaction is more along the lines of, "OMG, that is one amazing egg! Boy, do I want to sit on that!" It might even neglect its actual eggs in favor of the fake one.

If you think about it, it's a concept that probably explains a lot about human beings and all the weird and often unhealthy things we're into. Well, Deirdre Barrett has thought about it a lot, and she does think it explains a lot... But unfortunately the book she's written about it wasn't really the one I wanted to read on the subject. There is some science here, some relevant statistics, and some useful perspectives. But, honestly, the whole thing often feels less like an exploration of an important scientific phenomenon and its relevance to human culture and psychology and more like an exercise in complaining about What's Wrong With the World Today and trying to shame people out of doing anything fun. Science mixes with opinion, nuances get lost, and entire swathes of human artistic endeavor get dismissed as a waste of time. Even the chapter on why we find exaggeratedly baby-featured things cute -- an absolutely classic example of supernormal stimuli at work -- ends with what feels very much like the author desperately trying to come up with a reason to disapprove of that, too. And the chapter on why war is bad -- not, I hasten to add, an assertion I disagree with -- feels only tenuously connected to the concept of supernormal stimuli at all.

All of which maybe makes it sound a lot worse than it is. I mean, there are certainly some good points in here, and it does at least serve to introduce an important topic that I suspect we should be paying a lot more attention to as we try to understand this artificial world we've created and how we interact with it. But it's still definitely not the book I wanted it to be.… (altro)

When you wait a week to review some random article you picked up for idle curiosity like this you mostly forget what it was all about, which I suppose is valuable learning occasioned by this reading in and of itself, but the basic thing is that people who have happy/safe/fun memories of childhood are more open and winning than those who remember feeling scared/sad. Of course. And why are we talking correlation, not causation, here? Individual Psychology: Journal of Adlerian Theory, Research & Practice.… (altro)