George Carlin

Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.

He spoke about the pride he took in his work. As a ninth-grade dropout, he said, it was gratifying to see his words quoted in textbooks, classrooms, and courtrooms. And he was proud to have inspired other comedy greats, who routinely called him to say, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” As he looked back on his astonishingly prolific 50-year career—which includes 130 Tonight Show appearances, 23 albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, and one Supreme Court case—the interview became a sort of retrospective of his life.

Finally, after two hours, he gently mentioned that his arm was getting tired from holding the phone. “I really appreciate all the thought you’ve put into all these questions. Really, it’s the most complete interview I’ve ever done,” he said. “Is it tomorrow yet? I think it is.”

“It feels like it is,” I said, struggling to keep up with his wit.

“All this is for a quote unquote back page?” he said.

“This is for the back page, but, I don’t know, I just love you and your work so much!” I gushed. “I just had so much I wanted to ask.”

At the time, I was embarrassed by what I’d said. But when I heard the sad news this morning, my feelings changed instantly. I’m honored that I got to speak to him, and I’m grateful that I got to tell him how much I admired him before he died.

It would be impossible to overstate George Carlin’s contribution to standup comedy. Along with Richard Pryor and a few others, he essentially created the genre as we know it today. But he was more than just a comedy pioneer. He was a freethinker who never backed down, and he truly changed the course of American culture. He will be missed.

Read highlights from the interview here: George Carlin’s Last Interview

Posted: June 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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My article on low sexual desire, originally written for Psychology Today’s Web site, is now up on MSN. I didn’t quite get a byline—it just says “By PsychologyToday.com”—but if you scroll down and read the fine print at the bottom in six-point font, I think you’ll find my name down there somewhere.

Read it on the PT site: 4 Myths about Low Sexual Desire

Speaking of sexual desire, I just found out I won the cartoon caption contest that Twelve had for their new book, Sex and Sensibility.

My caption: “Do you think we have time for one more?” I was originally going to make it “Do you think we have time for one more before we plummet to our deaths?” but I decided that was too much of a downer. I also liked one my colleague Matt Hutson came up with, though too late to enter the contest: “Where did you come from?” Mine was a weak one to win, but now I get a giant signed print of a naked skydiving couple to put up in my front hall.

Posted: April 16th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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There are two kinds of vacations: the kind where you’re trying to actually do something—explore a foreign country, see the sights, climb the mountain, learn to scuba dive/ski/blow glass, and the kind where you do nothing at all—you lie out on a beach, read the paper by the pool, or simply slowly decompose in front of the TV. In the movie Office Space, when asked what he would do if he had a million dollars, the antihero replies, “Nothing. I would relax, I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.”

When I was a freelancer, and I spent my days alone at home typing on my computer, and the only deadlines I had were the ones I volunteered for, the idea of a passive vegetative vacation seemed utterly pointless. I longed to do things, active things, to have adventures and rack up new experiences. I had on my side psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who finds that although most people spend their leisure time doing “unstructured activities,” they are more likely to achieve that state of blissful engagement he terms “flow” when they’re working on a task with a clear goal.

I still tend in that direction—in 2006 I went to Mexico twice, to California three times, to Hong Kong, and to Thailand, and in 2007, I went to India, where I visited my family and went on a tiger safari, and learned to scuba dive in the Turks and Caicos Islands. But now that I spend my days working in an office, with a snarling three-train commute bookending my days, I’m much more sympathetic to people who think the point of a vacation is to pass out on a beach. After a stressful close, the thought of just vegging out in front of the TV holds a delirious appeal.

On tiger safari in Kanha National Park, the setting for Kipling's The Jungle Book

And indeed, when my vacations take me home to my family in Canada rather than to some exotic foreign locale, I find myself doing just that. Nothing gives me a greater sense of being free and unburdened than staying up into the wee hours of the morning watching old movies on TV. That’s it—that’s my fantasy. And that’s exactly what I do when I’m home. My mom kisses me goodnight and eventually my brother turns in too, and then it’s just me happily biodegrading on the couch. My mind is turning to slime and it never felt so good.

I do this too whenever I go to another city and stay in a hotel. I’m mesmerized by the TV. I go to my friends’ weddings in other cities and offer to give toasts, but I always show up bleary-eyed because I’ve stayed up late the previous night watching HBO.

Maybe it’s because it symbolizes an easier existence. I’m a striver, and if I have a free moment alone in my ordinary life in New York, I try to spend it productively, doing work, reading a book that will improve me, or catching up on my correspondence. Maybe it’s because it brings me back to those weekends during high school, having sleepovers with my friends, ordering pizza, staying up watching reruns of the old Star Trek.

That’s my fantasy—to give up ambition. I imagine with envy the people who work from 9 to 5, who, when they’re done working, they’re done—no staying up late writing a journal. There are only sixpacks and Monday Night Football, or bottles of port and French movies. Forget moving to a country house, if I ever bow out of the rat race, all I’ll need is a couch, a TV, and a Netflix account.

Posted: April 2nd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Last week I wrote about how the placebo effect can have a potent effect on medical symptoms. The reason: the power of expectations. We expect to get better and so we do.

Here’s a related thought experiment. Suppose I’m a sommelier and someone orders a $20 bottle of wine and I serve it to them. Then another customer orders a $100 bottle of wine. Is it unethical for me to serve them the $20 bottle and tell them it’s the $100 bottle? What if they can’t tell the difference?

And here’s the real question: What if the person who thinks it’s a $100 bottle actually enjoys it more?

That’s just what a team at Caltech and Stanford recently did, and brain scans confirmed that people don’t just think the more expensive (but identical) wine tasted better—it actually really did taste better, as reflected by brain scans that showed their pleasure centers lighting up like Christmas trees. The phenomenon is called the price-placebo effect, and it, too, is fueled by the the power of expectations. Cognitive dissonance may also play a role: If you pay that much, you reason, it must be worth it, and the large psychological investment actually increases your satisfaction.

As Jonah Lehrer puts it in his Boston Globe article:

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

The same thing may have been going on with Eliot Spitzer, suggests Shankar Vedantam in Sunday’s Washington Post. It is, after all, hard to fathom how a $5000 sexual encounter could be that much better than a $500 one. But the mere expectation that it will be better may be sufficient to actually make it better. And it may be that had we scanned Spitzer’s brain in medias res, we would have seen not only that he thought it was better, but that he was actually deriving more pleasure than a governor in another room who was paying only $500 or $50.

Sure, Spitzer is a hypocrite and a cheater, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting a good value from his hookers.

This post originally appeared on Brainstorm, at Psychology Today Blogs.

Posted: March 24th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Self-Deprecator In Chief

When someone finds out I work for Psychology Today, they always react the same way. “Oh really?” they say. “Are you a psychologist?” This response is so reliable that my colleague Carlin Flora warned me about it my first day on the job.

“Ha ha, no!” I usually reply. “I’m not nearly that well educated. I’m just a journalist.” We at the magazine are not academics; many of us have undergraduate degrees in psychology, but for the most part we’re trained as writers and editors. “It’s like how you don’t have to be a chef to be a food writer,” I’ll sometimes add. “We interview experts when we’re reporting articles, but we’re not academic researchers ourselves.”

The other thing that happens is that people label you a psychology expert and probably give you more credit than you deserve. It’s like what Conan O’Brien says about how people pigeonhole him after they find out he went to Harvard:

You’re in for a lifetime of “And you went to Harvard?” Accidentally give the wrong amount of change in a transaction and it’s “And you went to Harvard?” Ask the guy at the hardware store how these jumper cables work and hear, “And you went to Harvard?” Forget just once that your underwear goes inside your pants and it’s, “And you went to Harvard.” Get your head stuck in your niece’s dollhouse because you wanted to see what it was like to be a giant and it’s “Uncle Conan, you went to Harvard?” (text/video)

There’s something about the word “psychology” that changes the way people perceive you. My colleague Matt Hutson has written about how people are more likely to believe an explanation that mentions neurology. Maybe something similar happens when I drop the P-bomb.

When people find out I work for Psychology Today, they become hyper-attuned to the faintest trace of psychological insight in anything I say. This happens, for instance, whenever I give someone dating advice they find remotely helpful, even if the advice I provide is the most bargain-basement form of common sense. “Aha, you see!” they’ll say. “That’s why you work for Psychology Today!”

It doesn’t quite make sense. My dating advice is no better or worse than it ever was—and is probably far worse than average. But for some reason people feel an exaggerated need to connect my observational perspective to my job title. It’s funny how people attribute personality elements to you based on your job, even if those things were there all along.

Here’s another example. I recently caught up with Kien Dang, a friend from high school whom I hadn’t seen since graduation. He’d Facebooked me out of the blue, asking me how I was doing and saying he’d heard I’d left Canada and was living in New York. He’s now a psychiatrist, working at a hospital in Toronto with organ transplant donors and recipients. So when I was home in Ottawa over the winter holidays, Kien and I had dinner, along with our friend Sujatha Jahagirdar, another friend from high school who’s now an environmental organizer in California. As we talked about our lives, we marveled at how different we were from the people we used to be.

“Look at you, Kien,” said Sujatha. “I mean, you’re a psychiatrist working in a hospital! Think about how far you’ve come. You got your medical degree, you specialized, you’ve developed all these people skills!”

“No, no,” said Kien. “My people skills are probably not nearly as good as you’d think.”

“Well that’s a case in point,” I said. “Self-deprecation is itself a people skill.” And it’s true. The smartest people I know are also the most humble, making others comfortable by downplaying their abilities.

They both turned to me. “Good pickup,” said Kien. “You got me!”

“See!” said Sujatha. “That’s why you work for Psychology Today!”

This post originally appeared on Brainstorm, at Psychology Today Blogs.

Posted: March 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I spent the weekend reading my friend Jenny Lee’s new book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. It’s a wonderful account of Jenny’s journey across 42 states and 23 countries around the world as she uncovers secrets about Chinese food.

The main point of the book is that the foods we think of as Chinese—chop suey, General Tso’s chicken, fortune cookies—aren’t. Like Jenny herself, those foods look Chinese, but they’re actually American. Chop suey was invented here. General Tso’s was invented here. The white takeout boxes were invented here. Even fortune cookies, the most iconic of all Chinese foods, originally came from Japan before being popularized here in the United States. As Jenny puts it: “Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie. But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?”

Posted: March 5th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I’m not sure how I first became interested in accents. The obvious suspect upon whom to pin the blame would be my father, an immigrant from India who speaks with what you might call a subtle foreign accent. Growing up, when my brother and I needed to do an impression of him, it wound up coming out like Apu from the Simpsons. But in reality his accent is an elegant mix of the Bhopal of his youth, the Delhi of his teen years, the Chicago of his doctoral days, the Canada of my childhood, and the France where he spent years working at CERN—and the combination is, I promise you, utterly inimitable.

More likely my interest started when, as a high school geek, I began incessantly reciting my favorite lines from Monty Python. “Course sah! It’s a cheese shop, sah!” “She turned me into a newt! … I got better.” “Help, help, I’m being repressed!” Of course, reciting these without the proper accent would be even more pointless than it already is. I’m convinced my precocious interest in other forms of British humor (Blackadder, Yes Prime Minister, Fawlty Towers) derived at least from the bottomless font of memorizable dialogue they provided me. One might even attribute my love of Shakespeare to the same factor. Peter Sellers was a revelation, not just his Inspector Clouseau (”Do you have a rhyum?”) but also the proto-Apu Indian actor he plays in The Party (”Birdie nam nam!”).

Indeed, such was my enthusiasm for accents that I went so far as to order an audiobook called Accent Monologues for Actors, which I practiced out loud, and I acquired the habit of repeating the lines spoken by characters on TV to try to simulate their accents. In my prime, I could do different kinds of German (the barking Nazi stormtrooper vs. the refined watchmaker), English (Oxbridge vs. Cockney vs. Liverpool), and many Indian relatives (with varying levels of Western education in their voices). Thus began a lifetime of constant and annoying recitation of accented lines.

Peter Sellers does various British accents.

This vocal mimicry continued through the Captain Picard years (”Engage!”), through the Schwarzenegger years (”Honey, let’s do it!” “Do what?” “Move to Mars!”), the Apu years (”If I don’t make it, promise you won’t sleep with my wife.” “I promise nothing!”), the Gandhi years (”Then they will have my dead body… not my obedience!”) the Clinton years, “Ah did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky“) and through to the present day, with (poor) impressions of Ali G and Borat.

Some people are better mimics than others. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s attempt at an English accent was reportedly so atrocious—even after months of accent training from a dialect coach—that he had to overdub the entire movie minus the accent.

But why are people who mangle the language so funny? It may be that the ear expects to hear language spoken a certain way—and the subversion of those expectations creates the surprise necessary for humor. This works not just on the ear but also on the eye. There’s a time-honored tradition of funny accents in literature, the most salient recent example of which is Alexander, the Borat-esque narrator in Everything Is Illuminated.

I’m also fascinated by accent modification, when a person deliberately sheds (or rather more rarely, acquires) an accent different from the dominant one in the place they live. A friend of mine has two uncles who immigrated from Russia at the same time, but one speaks in an eerily flawless American drawl, and the other retains a heavy St. Petersberg brogue. In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie, Hercules Goes Bananas, his garbled English was so incomprehensible that it had to be dubbed over by another actor. (He’s credited as Arnold Strong.) Of course, his accent has now attained iconic status, and is part of the charm of his absurd one-liners.

Accent is a central part of impression management—the way we present ourselves to others—and it has real and measurable effects. There’s a reason newscasters all talk the same way: They’re trained to shed their regionalisms. Accents influence our perceptions of another person’s class, intelligence, friendliness—even their credibility on the witness stand. We’re all familiar with the stereotypes about various accents: British accents are perceived as intelligent and charming, and Southern accents are perceived as dumb. Or is it that British accents are perceived as snobby and Southern accents are perceived as folksy and friendly? It depends on your bias. But I know a British guy who attracted no women when he lived in his native London, but dates more than he can comfortably handle now that he wields the vocal cachet of an Englishman in New York.

The other arena in which accents are highly visible, of course, is politics. At Ivy League colleges, you can tell who’s planning on running for public office because they’re the ones who keep their regional accents while everyone else converges on a generic “educated” accent. Politicians such as Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee are perceived as folksy—not hoity-toity, able to relate to the people—partly due to their Southern accents. Pundits have wondered whether foreign accents have hampered the political viability of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Arianna Huffington. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both been accused of changing their accent to pander to Southern audiences.

Far be it for me to judge, though. Born and raised in Ottawa, I’ve spoken most of my life with a Canadian accent, peppering my speech liberally with “eh” and “right on!” But in college, I got tired of people making fun of my “oots” and “aboots,” of their grabbing my arm mid-sentence and saying, “Wait a minute, are you from Canada?” So I stopped using the phrases that stopped people in their tracks, and gradually, my speech lost all traces of my Canadian roots. As hard as it is to admit, I guess I was just tired of being perceived as different. My metamorphosis is immortalized in an article in the Yale Daily News about students who allowed their accents to fade. “I’m trying to see if I can pass as American,” I’m quoted as saying. “If Peter Jennings can do it, I can do it.”

But that doesn’t stop me from invoking a classic accent when the mood strikes.

Russell Peters on accents.

This post originally appeared on Brainstorm, at Psychology Today Blogs.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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The other night my roommate and I were having a conversation and the subject of goals came up. I had been reading about the state of effortless concentration and enjoyment that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has famously termed “flow.” Flow occurs when you’re so absorbed in a task that you lose track of everything else. You fall into the rhythm of your activity so completely that all distractions melt away, and may even lose track of time. I mentioned that having a clearly defined goal is an important component in achieving flow.

Read the complete post at Psychology Today’s Brainstorm.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. I would rather be with you than anyone else.
(strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 strongly agree)

2. I yearn to know all about you.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

3. For me, you are the perfect romantic partner.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

4. You always seem to be on my mind.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

5. I sense my body responding when you touch me.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

These are questions from the Passionate Love Scale, a questionnaire psychologists use to measure the intensity of romantic love.

Read the complete post at Psychology Today’s Brainstorm.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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The case of the med school murderer in Sweden has sparked a fascinating debate about the purpose of criminal sentencing itself.

The relevant question is what’s best for society and whether the criminal is likely to harm others in the future. The purpose of the criminal justice system should be not to inflict suffering on prisoners, but to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism.

But the fact is that right now, prisons have precisely the opposite effect. As author Daniel Goleman puts it in Social Intelligence:

Prison is a hellish realm, where convicts struggle in a tooth-and-nail battle; everyone fights to get respect, and toughness wins prestige. The prison yard becomes a jungle where the powerful prevail and fear rules. It’s a psychopath’s paradise, where coolheaded cruelty wins the day… Survival there demands an amygdala that is set for paranoid hypervigilance, plus a protective emotional distance or outright distrust, and a readiness to fight… Prisons are colleges for criminal activity, strengthening an inmate’s predilection and skill sets for criminality. Younger prisoners make the very worst kind of connections in prison, typically becoming mentored by more seasoned inmates, so that on their release they are hardened, angry, and endowed with greater skills as criminals.

When prisons are crime schools that foster hostility, impulsivity, and violence, and the majority of released convicts wind up back in prison, the term “corrections” is a sick joke. Young prisoners suffer most of all. They’re plunged into this environment when their social brains are at their most plastic. No wonder cumulative lifetime recidivism is highest for prisoners 25 and under.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As Goleman points out, many people who wind up in prison are no doubt there as a result of neural deficits such as impaired empathy and impulse control. Why not create prisons that teach self-awareness, self-control, empathy, emotional regulation, and thinking before acting?

Studies show this can work. Juvenile prisoners who learn how “to stop and think before reacting, to consider solutions and the consequences of different responses, and to stay coolheaded” wind up in fewer fights. In schools, programs that teach conflict and anger management, empathy, and self-management drastically reduce schoolyard fights and bullying.

I’m all for prisoners learning the skills they need to earn an honest living once they’re released. But we should make sure they’re also learning the emotional skills they need to stay out of jail.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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