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Albert Einstein: What would a light wave look like to someone keeping pace with it?Bill Bowerman (inventor of Nike shoes): What happens if I pour rubber into my waffle iron?Fred Smith (founder of Federal Express): Why can't there be reliable overnight mail service?Jack Kornfield (Author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom) : There is no need to be confused by the outer forms of different spiritual traditions, by comparing Zen robes or Indian ceremonies to Hindu mantras or Sufi dancing. It is simple. Measured inwardly, any practice that leads to liberation will cultivate the qualities of mindfulness, effort, investigation, rapture, concentration, tranquility, and equanimity.Thomas Paine (one political entrepreneur who creates societies as he says in his pamphlet Common Sense): Independence is the only BOND that can tye and keep us together. (read more below) |
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"The true joy of life lies in . . . being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances." — George Bernard Shaw
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations......(EMILY DICKINSON)
At the end of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey realizes his life isn’t so bad after all because he has many friends in Bedford Falls who are ready and willing to help him. And, as George Bailey was reminded, “No man is a failure who has friends.”
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. Thomas Paine
In the arts I think two of our countrymen have presented the most important inventions. Mr. Paine, the author of Common Sense, has invented an iron bridge, which promises to be cheaper by great deal than stone, and to admit of a much greater arch. He has obtained a patent for it in England..(SCIENCE AND LIBERTY, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Joseph Willard)
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Fortune seems to have drawn a line of separation between us. Though often in the same neighborhood some unlucky star has still shuffled us asunder. When I count backwards the years since I had last the happiness of seeing you in this place, and recur to my own lively memory of our friendship , I am almost induced to discredit my arithmetic. (Jefferson wrote to Lucy Chiswell Nelson)
Having performed the last sad office of handling you into your carriage at the pavillion de St. Denis, and seen the wheels get actually into motion, I turned on my heel & walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door, where my own was awaiting me. ("DIALOGUE BWTEEN MY HAND & MY HEART", Thomas Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway)
In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the fore-ground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away and it is no picture for me. (Jefferson told a friend of Martha Skelton); Jefferson's metaphor captures his visual sensibilities. Imagining his future happiness, he foresaw it as a beautiful painting.
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and pursuit of happiness..(Thomas Jefferson, rough draft, Declaration of Independence)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness. (As adopted by Congress)
Travelling. This make men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel, they gather knolege which they may apply usefully for their country, ....Young men who travel are exposed to all inconveniences in higher degree, and do not acquire that wisdom for which a previous foundation is requisite by repeated & just observation at home. ("THE HOMAGE OF REASON", Thomas Jefferson letter to Peter Carr)
Of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, of theology that is true. I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope of happiness beyond this life. I believe in equality of man, and I believe their religious duties consists of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy. My own mind is my own church. Thomas Paine
Engineers usually create systems based on existing sciences and theories. The science examined in this book belong to the best minds in our universities. It belongs to Professor Ellen J. Langer, Professor Gardner, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor Deci, Professor Goleman, Dr. Paul Kaufman, Dr. Nyanaponika Thera, Roshi Philip Kapleau, Joseph Goldstein, Dr. Michael Ray, Dr. John M. Gottman, Dr. Bob Murray, Professor Grinde, Dr. Bhante H. Gunaratana, Professor Hippel, and Professor Reiss. I am only hoping to create a system to engineer motivation for creativity and entrepreneurship based on their existing sciences.
To bring an analogy in regards to my work, imagine a computer as a complete system. Many many engineers have designed your computer as a complex system. This system is actually creation of many sciences developed by many ingenious minds. Way, way, back a genius mind invented the math behind the existing computers (Charles Babbage), another genius mind invented the vacuum tube (Clifford Berry), someone improved on vacuum tube and invented the transistor (William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain), another genius mind invented the semiconductor (Robert Noyce), mouse (Douglas Engelbart), and so on. And, finally Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak put it all together. In this book I like to do something similar to what Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak accomplished.
Our motivation engineered system consists of eastern mindfulness and spirituality (Goldstein, Kapleau, Thera, Gunaratana) and western mindfulness (Dr. Langer) to cut through and step out of negativity and mental obstacles, finding new intrinsic motivations through autonomy, relatedness and observation skills (Dr. Deci), involving in passionate activities to experience a concept called Flow (Dr. Csikszentmihalyi), finding creativity in the subject of passion (Gardner), becoming an innovative USER of the passion (Dr. Hippel) and finally trying entrepreneurial experimentations with the subject of passion (Dr. Robert A. Baron). All these steps are analyzed and explained in detail. In the first chapter we discuss the relevancy of these sciences and in the second chapter we examine a practice based on these sciences that will take the reader on the path below:
The path above is extremely joyful. As the reader gets into creativity, he/she will feel strong form of rapture and a concept called Flow (introduced by Professor Csikszentmihalyi). The experience of Flow or Rapture intensifies with innovation and entrepreneurship. I strongly believe without creativity (originality), the experience of Rapture and Flow is not possible. It is the feeling of having been able to create something new and original that brings the Rapture and Flow.
We call the path above a physical path. What does actually take place inside the mind? The path below is the mind map.
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Society is product of our wants, and Government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is patron, the last is a punisher. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
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On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan (another political entrepreneur) stood before the Republican National Convention and the American people to accept his party's nomination for president of the United States. Most of what he said that evening was to be expected from a Republican. He spoke of the nation's past and its "shared values." He attacked the incumbent Carter administration and promised to lower taxes, limit government, and expand national defense. And invoking God, he invited Americans to join him in a "crusade to make America great again." But Reagan had much more than restoration in mind. He intended to transform American political life and discourse. He had constructed a new Republican alliance-a New Right-of corporate elites, Christian evangelicals, conservative and neoconservative intellectuals, and a host of right-wing interest groups in hopes of undoing the liberal politics and programs of the past forty years, reversing the cultural changes and developments of the 1960s, and establishing a new national governing consensus. His ambitions were well known, but that night Reagan startled many by calling forth the revolutionary Thomas Paine and quoting Paine's words of 1776, from the pamphlet Common Sense: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."!
American politicians have always drawn upon the words and deeds of the Founders to bolster their own positions. Nevertheless, in quoting Paine, Reagan broke emphatically with long-standing conservative practice. Paine was not like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams.
Conservatives certainly were not supposed to openly speak favorably of Paine, and for two hundred years they had not. Conservatives had despised Paine and scorned his memory. And one can understand why. Endowing American experience with democratic impulses and aspirations, Paine had turned Americans into radicals-and we have remained radicals at heart ever since.
Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen. But struck by America's startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause, and through his pamphlet Common Sense and the American Crisis papers, he emboldened Americans to turn their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Five feet ten inches tall, with a full head of dark hair and striking blue eyes, Paine was inquisitive, gregarious, and compssionate, yet strong-willed, combative, and ever ready to argue about and fight for the good and the right.
At war's end Paine was a popular hero, known by all as "Common Sense." Joel Barlow, American diplomat and poet, who had served as a chaplain to the Continental Army, wrote: "without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain." And yet Paine was not finished. To him, America possessed extraordinary political, economic, and cultural potential. But he did not see that potential as belonging to Americans alone.
Reared an Englishman, adopted by America, and honored as a Frenchman, Paine often called himself a "citizen of the world." But the United States always remained paramount in his thoughts and evident in his labors, and his later writings continued to shape the young nation's events and developments. And yet as great as his contributions were, they were not always appreciated, and his affections were not always reciprocated. Paine's democratic arguments, style, and appeal-as well as his social background, confidence, and single-mindedness-antagonized many among the powerful, propertied, prestigious, and pious and made him enemies even within the ranks of his fellow patriots. (Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of the America)
HOT-AIR BALLOONS
To Dr. Philip Turpin
Annapolis, Apr. 28, 1784
DEAR SIR-Supposing you may not have received intelligence to be relied on as to the reality & extent of the late discovery of traversing the air in balloons, & having lately perused a book in which everything is brought together on that subject as low down as Decemb. last, I will give you a detail of it. I will state the several experiments, with the most interesting circumstances attending them, by way of table, which will give you a clearer view & in less compass.
They suppose the minimum of these balloons to be of 6 inches diameter: these are constructed of gold-beaters' skin & filled with inflammable air. this air produced from iron-filings, the vitriolic acid & distilled water is, in weight, to Atmospheric air as 7. to 43. on an average of the trials: & when produced from the filings of Zinc, the Marine acid & distilled water, is to the Atmospheric air as 5. to 53. or 1. to IOV2. but Montgolfier's air is half the weight of Atmospheric. This is produced by burning straw & wool. The straw must be dry & open, & the wool shred very fine, so that they may make a clear flame, with as little smoke as possible. 50 lb. of straw & 5 lb. of wool filled the balloons of Oct. 19. & Nov. 21. in five minutes. These balloons contained 60,000 cubic feet. no analysis of this air is given us. Mons'r de Saintford the author of the book, gives us a very great & useless display of Mathematical learning, which certainly has as yet had very little to do with this discovery: & when he comes to the chemical investigations, which are interesting, he says little. the balloons sometimes were torn by the pressure of the internal air being insufficiently counteracted in the higher regions of the Atmosphere. these rents were of 6. or 7. f. length, yet the machine descended with a gentle equable motion & not with an accelerated one. by the trials at Versailles & Champ- de Mars it appears at they will go witl1 a moderate wind ISO. leagues in 24 hours. there are yet two principal desiderata. 1. the cheapest & easiest process of making the lightest inflammable air. 2. an envelopment which will be light, strong, impervious to the air & proof against rain. supplies of gas are desirable too, without being obliged to carry fire with the machin in those in which men ascended there was a store of str; wool laid in the gallery which surrounded the bottom c ballon & in which the men stood, & a chaffing dish of 3 cube in which they burnt the materials to supply air. conjectured that these machines may be guided by oars & raised & depressed by having vessels wherein, by the a pumps, they can produce a vacuum or condensation atmospheric air at will. ............
Congress has determined to adjourn on the 3d of June meet in November at Trenton. a vessel arrived here yester which left London the 25th of March. she brings papen the 20th of that month. mr. Pitt was still in place, supported by the city of London, the nation in general, & the Hous of Lords. still however the majority in the H. of commons against him, to reduced to 12. it was thought the parliam would be dissolved.
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http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1971/5/1971_5_22.shtml
It was a romance in which the statesman found his Head at war with his Heart
Why is it that American history books contain so few romantic episodes? Aside from occasional references to John Rolfe and Pocahontas, or to Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, general histories have little to say about the love affairs experienced by our famous forefathers, or about the effect of such affairs on the course of the nation’s history.
As a case in point, consider Thomas Jefferson. It isn’t easy to think of the lofty, idealistic author of the Declaration of Independence as a lover, especially when most accounts of his life ignore his relationship with a pretty, blue-eyed blonde named Maria Cosway. Yet the Virginian did fall in love with a young married lady, write stirring love letters to her, even suffer a foolish accident while trying to act the gallant in her presence. This love affair could easily have changed Jefferson’s life so drastically that the American public would never have accepted him as a candidate for President of the United States.
On New Year’s Day in 1772, Thomas Jefferson married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. He loved Martha deeply, but their marriage ended tragically when she died in September of 1782. The loss of his beloved wife sent Jefferson into a self-imposed period of isolation. Offers of positions in the new American government reached Monticello, but the Virginian declined them. “… for ills so immense,” he said, “time and silence are the only medicines.”
Jefferson’s friends did not agree. They thought a change of scene was what the despondent man needed most and urged him to re-enter public life. Jefferson finally gave in to their pleas and in May, 1784, accepted an appointment as minister plenipotentiary to France. He reached Paris in early August, accompanied by his eldest daughter, Patsy.
Once in France, Jefferson committed himself fully to la vie parisienne. Patsy entered one of the finest convent schools available. Her father first took a modest house on the rue Têtebout and then moved to a more elegant and expensive establishment on the Champs Elysées. He hired servants, began his ministerial duties, was presented at court, haunted the bookstalls along the Seine, collected furniture and paintings, and made an increasing number of friends. Soon the Virginian was much in demand because of his personal charm and knowledge of America.
The new American minister believed in the Virginia reputation for southern hospitality, and his home was always open to guests. One of these was John Trumbull, an American artist studying in France. Trumbull and Jefferson became close friends. The painter circulated in Parisian art circles and was acquainted with many European artists. Among them was Richard Cosway, an Englishman who specialized in miniature portraits, and Cosway’s wife, Maria. One Sunday in August, 1786, Trumbull and the Cosways visited a small village outside Paris. At Trumbull’s invitation, his friend Jefferson joined them. It was on that occasion that Thomas Jefferson first met Maria Cosway.
Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Hadfield was born in Florence, Italy, in 1759. Her parents were English and Protestant, but Maria spoke better Italian than English and was a devout Catholic. When her father, Charles Hadfield, died in 1778, Maria’s mother was barely able to dissuade her from becoming a nun. Instead, Mrs. Hadfield took Maria home to England.
In London, Angelica Kauffmann Church, well-known painter of miniatures, sponsored Maria’s introduction to society. The young lady had beauty and artistic talent. She conquered London without half trying. Her acquaintances included many famous people: Charles Townley, Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Parsons, Lord Erskine, James Boswell, and the miniaturist Richard Cosway. Many of these distinguished gentlemen were eager to establish a close and permanent relationship with Maria. Under the influence of her mother and Angelica she accepted a proposal from Richard Cosway. They were married in 1781.
It is easy to understand why Maria’s mother and patroness favored a union with Richard Cosway, who had amassed fortune and reputation as an artist. Why Maria acceded to their wishes is not easy to understand. Richard was seventeen years his young wife’s senior, a vain and foppish little man with few redeeming qualities. He fawned on his socially superior clients, particularly the Prince of Wales, whose mistresses Richard had painted.
Richard Cosway was short on inches, but long on pretensions. For a honeymoon cottage he leased a majestic palace built by the Duke of Schomberg. There the newly married couple began a series of lavish entertainments. “Bushels of little Italian notes of invitation,” Horace Walpole noted, went out to bring in the cream of the artistic world. Maria, a talented hostess, performed on the harp or the pianoforte; she was also a fine singer. Richard, her coxcomb of a husband, bounced around the ballroom, ogling pretty ladies and flattering rich gentlemen who might give him a commission.
When she was not entertaining, Maria worked on her painting. Richard had no intention of permitting any competition within the family and insisted she devote her efforts to portraits of close friends and landscapes. But Maria painted a fine portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, establishing a reputation despite her husband’s efforts to hide her ability, and was soon exhibiting work in the Royal Academy.
Although Maria enjoyed London life, she could not accustom herself to the English climate, and her health deteriorated. In the summer of 1786 the Cosways travelled to France, where Richard could work on a commission for the Duc d’Orléans and Maria could recover. They visited galleries and exhibitions and made acquaintances among members of the art world in Paris, including John Trumbull. Then in August the Cosways arranged the jaunt with Trumbull and Trumbull’s friend, the American minister to France. For Maria Cosway and Thomas Jefferson it was a fateful journey.
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What was Maria’s initial impression of Jefferson? She was not so taken with him as he was with her, but still was profoundly impressed. The Virginian was an important and famous public figure, ruggedly mature at forty-three, and a widower. Being thoroughly feminine, Maria could not help responding to the tall man whose eyes so plainly reflected his admiration of her. When Jefferson found himself unable to leave her company that August afternoon, Maria readily agreed that they should prolong their first meeting.
All four had other engagements, but they broke them and drove off to St.—Cloud for dinner. Returning to the city that evening, they stopped to watch a display of fireworks and then called on Johann Baptist Krumpholtz, composer and teacher of the harp. For Jefferson at least, where the party stopped was of little importance, as long as stops were made. “If the day had been as long as a Lapland summer day,” Jefferson and Maria Cosway would still have found excuses to fill it.
In the weeks following their first encounter Maria Cosway and Thomas Jefferson were constant companions. At first they were accompanied by Richard or by John Trumbull; but those gentlemen had their own interests, and soon Maria and the American were alone together. Maria fell into the habit of rushing into Jefferson’s house unannounced. When Jefferson called on Maria, Richard often excused himself and left his wife alone with her visitor.
The days passed swiftly. By mid-September Richard had nearly finished his work for the Duc d’Orléans. When that was completed, the Cosways would return to London. A few days remained for Maria and Jefferson to share each other’s company—but on September 18, 1786, Jefferson broke his right wrist. There are at least two versions of how the accident occurred. All Jefferson would ever say about it was that “it was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may.”
According to one account, the pair were walking together along the Seine. They came to a fence that the Virginian decided to jump, no doubt with the intention of helping his lady across from the far side. However, forty-three-year-old gentlemen often do not jump fences with the same agility they demonstrated twenty years earlier. In this case the attempt proved disastrous for Jefferson.
In another version, perhaps less romantic but probably more factual, Jefferson left his front door for a meeting with Maria. Exuberant at the prospect of seeing her again, he attempted to jump a small decorative pool on the way to his carriage, tripped, and fractured his wrist as he tried to break his fall.
However it happened, the wrist was obviously injured and doctors were summoned. They diagnosed the wrist as “dislocated” and did such a poor job of setting it that Jefferson was left in excruciating pain for many days to come. As it turned out, the wrist was to bother him for the rest of his life. During the weeks it was immobilized, he laboriously taught himself to write with his left hand. Even years later, writing normally was often awkward.
Painful wrist and all, Jefferson spent many happy hours with Maria, sightseeing and attending the theater. Now, however, the day of parting was fast upon them. On October 4, 1786, they spent one last day in each other’s company, riding about Paris. The carriage rocking over the rough cobbles of the Paris streets did Jefferson’s wrist no good. Next morning, after a night spent sleepless with pain, the Virginian found it difficult to accept the fact that Maria was to be separated from him.
Maria answered immediately: “We shall go I believe this Morning, Nothing seems redy, but Mr. Cosway seems More dispos’d then I have seen him all this time.” The thought of not seeing Maria one more time proved unbearable. Jefferson ordered his carriage for a fast trip to the Cosways’. He arrived to find the artists’ home in chaos and their packing far from completed, but even this opportunity to spend additional time with Maria proved too short. He determined to accompany them to the outskirts of Paris on the first part of their journey. Later, at St.-Denis, the time of parting could be postponed no longer. In lonely silence Jefferson returned to Paris.
That evening Jefferson sat musing in his bedchamber. He knew full well what had happened to him. After all, he was not the first man to fall in love with a young woman married to someone else. Maria, he thought, reciprocated his feelings. What could the future hold for them? Jefferson’s reason told him that they faced nothing but trouble and grief in view of Maria’s circumstances, but his emotions called loudly for his ladylove. He was in the prime of life, a widower who had remained constant to the memory of his wife for four long years. Surely he now deserved to hold close something more substantial than a fading memory.
Slowly, clumsy still when writing left-handed, Jefferson began to describe for Maria the conflict that was taking place between his reason and his emotions in the form of a dialogue between his “Head” and his “Heart.” The result must rank as one of the most unusual love letters ever written:
And so it went, point and counterpoint between reason and emotion. Head admitted that Maria and her husband were of “the greatest merit, possessing good sense, good humour, honest hearts, honest manners, and eminence in a lovely art.” Yet the voice of reason also knew “that all these considerations would increase the pang of separation … and that the separation would in this instance be the more severe as you would probably never see them again.”
“But they told me they would come back again the next year,” answered Heart. Head admitted that such a promise was made, “but in the mean time see what you suffer. …” Maria’s return was something which could not be counted on, “therefore you should abandon the idea of ever seeing them again.” “May heaven abandon me ifl do!” cried Heart.
Trying to induce a line of logic, Head stated :
My friend, you must mend your manners. This is not a world to live at random in as you do. To avoid these eternal distresses, to which you are for ever exposing us, you must learn to look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world is a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand.
But Heart was unwilling to accept cold logic where Maria was concerned and recalled to mind the loneliness suffered since Martha’s death:
Let the gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain.
Besides, continued Heart, there are times when emotion must prevail over cool logic: “If our country when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by it’s heads instead of it’s hearts, where should we have been now?”
In this dialogue, which after all was prepared for Maria to read, Heart had the final word:
You confess that in the present case I could not have made a worthier choice. You only object that I was so soon to lose them. … True, this condition is pressing cruelly on me at this moment … I comfort myself with expectations of their promised return … in the spring, said the lady: and I should love her forever, were it only for that !
Shortly after the dialogue had been prepared for dispatch, news of the Cosways arrived in a letter from John Trumbull. He reported that Richard and Maria had reached Antwerp on October 9, after a miserable, rainy trip. Jefferson skipped over other comments made by the artist to a short note following Trumbull’s. Maria wrote in Italian, a language of romance, but the words were far from what Jefferson had hoped to see. “I am adding a couple of lines to ask you how you are. I hope the trip to St. Dennys did not cause you to remember us painfully, [and that] I shall soon receive news of your complete recovery, which will give infinite pleasure to your always obliged and affectionate Friend, Maria Cosway.”
Irked at Maria’s brevity and apparent coldness, Jefferson wrote her that he had examined TrumbulPs letter repeatedly, only to find that her name was signed to four lines rather than four pages. “I thank you for the four lines however because they prove you think of me. Little indeed, but better a little than none.” Then he relented and ended the letter by stating that his right hand was much indignant because his left had all the pleasure of writing to her. However, the first letter written by the healed right hand would be to her.
The dialogue was received warmly byMaria in London. “Why do you say so Many kind things? Why present so many opportunities for my feeling undeserving of them, why not leave me a free consolation in admiring a friend, without the temptation … to my Vanity? … Oh, Sir, if my correspondence equalled yours how perfect it would be!” Then she described her trip to London and the sadness she felt there in comparison with France. She told Jefferson that his letters could never be long enough and that she could hardly wait to receive a letter from his right hand. Of her brevity in Trumbull’s letter and Jefferson’s complaint about it, there was no word of explanation or apology.
At home once more, the Cosways reentered the social life they had abandoned for France some months before. Richard painted, flirted, and entered into some notorious love affairs. Wagging tongues also spoke of Maria, who was linked to the Prince of Wales. Gossip swirling around her, Maria threw herself into her painting and composing. One of her songs may have reflected the romantic attachment to Jefferson:
Days became weeks, and the post brought nothing from Paris. Maria was discovering that she was more committed to the affair with Jefferson than she had thought and became impatient and somewhat petulant, wondering if the Virginian had already forgotten her.
She wrote to him, asking what his silence meant: “I am really worried … I think of a thousand things at once except that my friends should so soon have forgotten me. …” What was she to do? she asked. Complain? Reprove? Implore patience? Or should she express mortification and anxiety at his silence?
Separated from him, Maria found that she missed Jefferson’s company very much. She was “wont to think with satisfaction about the excellent qualities of the persons for whom one has esteem, of our happiness in being able to savour of their value. …”
By mid-November Jefferson was beginning to use his right hand once more, and he wrote to Maria: “… you are by promise, as well as by inclination entitled to it’s first homage.” (Jefferson stretched truth here; he had written with his right hand to others.) However, the wrist still pained him, he told her, and the letter would be short. This was just as well, in Jefferson’s opinion, because “were the hand able to follow the effusions of the heart, that would cease to write only when this shall cease to beat.” Then he spoke of a friend, Madame de Corny, who was soon to leave for London. “I wish she could put me into her pocket, when she goes, or you, when she comes back.”
On Christmas Eve of 1786, Jefferson again wrote to his Maria, and it is apparent that Heart predominated on that occasion. Jefferson referred to the legend of Fortunatus, who possessed a magic cap permitting him to wish himself wherever he might want to be. If he had such a cap, Jefferson said, “I question if I should use it but once. I should wish myself with you, and not wish myself away again … I am always thinking of you. If I cannot be with you in reality, I will in imagination.”
The broken wrist continued to be troublesome, and Jefferson decided to accept his surgeons’ advice and take the waters at Aix. He stayed at Aix only a little while, long enough to be certain that the mineral waters were not going to help his wrist. Then he toured large areas of France and spent three weeks in Italy. Following his return to Paris, he found a large accumulation of official business.
Not until July 1, 1787, did Jefferson finally get around to telling Maria of his trip. He described Italy and what he had seen there, calling it “a peep only into Elysium,” and added, “I am born to lose every thing I love. Why were you not with me?” Jefferson acknowledged that he had received a letter from Maria, dated February 15, on the eve of his departing on his trip, and longed to receive another, “lengthy, warm and flowing from the heart.”
Now Maria was provoked, knowing that the American had received her letter but had not answered it throughout the entire trip:
Do you deserve a long letter, My dear friend? No, certainly not, and to avoid temptation, I take a small sheet of paper … I was glad to know you was well, sure of your being much engaged and diverted … oh! if I had been a shadow of this Elysium of yours! how you would have been tormented!”
Jefferson’s only immediate reaction to this was to advise John Trumbull wryly, “My love to Mrs. Cosway. Tell her I will send her a supply of larger paper.”
Regarding a trip to France, Maria was still not sure. Richard had agreed to it early in the year and then began to have doubts when the time for departure neared. “You cannot believe how much this uncertainty displeases me, when I have everything to fear against my desire,” she told Jefferson. But at some time during the days that followed, doubt disappeared. On August 28, 1787, Maria turned up in Paris.
There were differences between this and the visit the previous year, however. Her husband and John Trumbull were not in the city, for one thing, both having remained in London. This should have offered bright prospects for the two lovers, especially since Maria’s stay was to last four whole months. But she perceived that there was another notable change. For some reason the relationship between her and Jefferson was not the same as it had been the summer before.
What made the difference? That question could only be answered by Maria Cosway and Thomas Jefferson. For the Virginian, perhaps Head was restraining the natural inclinations of Heart. On Maria’s part, the absence of a husband may have proved a restraining factor. Or perhaps for both of them, the realities of being together again could not match the anticipation they had carried in their hearts throughout the long months of separation.
Whatever the reason, they spent little time together. Maria knew that the days were slipping by and she was seeing the American all too seldom. She felt that he was responsible. “If my inclination had been your law I should have had the pleasure of seeing you More then I have. I have felt the loss with displeasure. …”
As the time for Maria to leave drew closer, Jefferson began to regret the lost days and opportunities that might never be recovered. Finally, Maria could delay no longer and set December 8, 1787, as the day of departure. She invited Jefferson to a farewell breakfast that morning, but he reached her home to find the lady gone. Only a note was left behind, written the night before: “I cannot breakfast with you to morrow; to bid you adieu once is sufficiently painful, for I leave you with very melancholy ideas.”
Now, when it was far too late, Jefferson realized how strong was his disappointment that she was lost to him again. His disappointment intensified when he learned that Trumbull would soon arrive with Angelica Church. Angelica’s influence with Maria was such that Maria would undoubtedly have remained in Paris a much longer period had she not left before her patroness arrived.
Maria wrote to Jefferson as soon as she reached London:
How I regreted not having seen More of you, and I cannot have even the Satisfaction to unburden My displeasure of [it] by loading you with reproches. Your reasons Must be Sufficient, and My forcing you woud have (been) unkind and unfriendly as it would be cruel to pretend on what is totally disagreable to you.
Then, affecting lightness, Maria appeared to change subjects. Had he met Angelica? she asked Jefferson. What did he think of her? “If I did not love her so Much I should fear her rivalship, but no I give you free permission to love her with all your heart, and I shall feel happy if I think you keep me in a little corner of it, when you admit her even to re[ign]ing Queen.”
Jefferson did not answer until the end of January, 1788. Yes, he told Maria, he had kept the appointment for breakfast but had found her gone: “This spared me indeed the pain of parting, but it deprives me of the comfort of recollecting that pain.” He also admitted to having met Angelica, but Maria had no cause for concern. She alone held a serious share of his affections.
Angelica and John Trumbull returned to England in March. Jefferson committed the unpardonable sin, as far as Maria was concerned, of not giving them a letter to carry to her. Maria was furious. She wrote to the Virginian threatening to “send a blank paper; as a Lady in a Passion is not fit for Any thing.” Still, she asked Jefferson to permit Trumbull to copy a portrait of him that the artist had used for painting The Declaration of Independence: “It is a person who hates you that requests this favor.”
Trumbull wrote: “Mrs. Cosway’s love to you. … She is angry, yet she teases me every day for a copy of your little portrait, that she may scold it no doubt.” Eventually both Maria and Angelica received copies of the “little portrait.”
When Jefferson did write, he complimented Maria on one of her engravings, then enjoying wide circulation in Paris, and asked her to work up something distinctive for him to use on his calling cards. What was it to be? “Cupid leading the lion by a thread? or Minerva clipping his wings?” Jefferson thought that it did not really matter, as long as it was in Maria’s hand.
Maria was now satisfied that Jefferson had not forgotten her. She was pleased with his compliments about the engraving, happy that Trumbull had provided the picture, and delighted over the idea of making an etching for Jefferson’s calling cards. However, a dark cloud had appeared on her horizon.
“I have been Made very uneasy with the news that you intend to return soon to America, is it true? and is it possible! Oh then I give up the hopes of ever seeing you again. …” She wondered whether he could not visit her on the way home and asked him to promise to do so. Then she spoke of a trip to Italy contemplated by both Cosways for the following year and asked Jefferson if he could resist joining them.
Jefferson had no choice: “I am going to America, and you to Italy. The one or the other of us goes the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong which leads us farther apart.”
His journey was one of duty, Jefferson told Maria. He urged her to “join our good friend Mrs. Church,” who was about to go to America. But Maria, too, had obligations. In February she finally told the Virginian that his vision of her making a trip to America was but wishful thinking: “You are going to America, and you think I am going with you, I thank you for the flattering compliment, I deserve it for I shall certainly be with you in spirit. …”
Jefferson had to accept the inevitable. He disembarked from the Clermont at Norfolk, Virginia, on November 23, 1789. He never returned to France and he never again saw Maria Cosway.
The love affair between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway leaves some questions that may remain unanswered forever. Just what kind of relationship did exist between the two lovers so long ago? The ambiance of Paris was, after all, morally liberal by American standards, even in the late eighteenth century. But the affair by all evidence appears to have been unconsummated. Maria was devout and virtuous, Jefferson was a gentleman. At only one point is there any hint that things may have tended to escape proper bounds. In the dialogue, Heart at one point admitted: “The day we went to St. Germains was a little too warm, I think, was it not?”
Maria Cosway and Thomas Jefferson continued to exchange letters. She never travelled farther from England than to her native Italy. Some years later, still devoutly religious, she retired to a convent in Lodi, where she established a girls’ college attached to the Church of Santa Maria délia Grazie. For her efforts the emperor of Austria created Maria the Baroness Cosway of Lodi.
As the years stretched out for Jefferson and Maria, so did the months between their letters. In April of 1819 she wrote to the then-retired President: “To the Length of Silence I draw a Curtain,” and told him of her life at Lodi and of the serious illness of her husband. She spoke of many deceased friends and the illness and age of those few who remained. Then, strangely after so long a time, she made reference to the Head and Heart dialogue. With her work in the school and nursing her husband, she was “Happy in self gratification of doing my duty, with no other consolation. In your Dialogue your head would tell me, ‘that is enough,’ your heart perhaps will understand, I might wish for more. God’s will be done.”
Jefferson, close to eighty and frequently ill, did not reply until late the following year. “Such is the present state of our former coterie—dead, diseased, and dispersed.” His turn was next, he told her, “and I shall meet it with good will. …” Maria had many good years yet before her, he continued, and he hoped that they would all be filled with health and happiness. The two of them would meet again, in another world. “… the religion you so sincerely profess tells us that we shall. …”
Charles B. van Pelt is a major m the Air Force; he formerly taught history at the University of Alaska.
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Several years ago, while teaching one of those history surveys that gallops across great events as if they were pebbles at Belmont, I asked my students to name a revolutionary. I had in mind Tom Paine—whose Common Sense we had just read—or perhaps Marx. I should not have been surprised by the answer I got: Bill Gates.
We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.A revolutionary? Yes, my students told me. After all, Gates had changed everything. And he did not do this by accident. He even wrote a book, The Road Ahead (New York, 1996), whose first chapter bears the very Trotskyite title "A Revolution Begins." In that chapter, Gates reflected upon his achievements, the revolutionary looking back on the revolution. What did they know, he and Paul Allen, a couple of school kids tinkering with some funky machine at little old Lakeside School? Well, "We caused a kind of revolution—peaceful, mainly—and now the computer has taken up residence in our offices and in our homes."
My students agreed. The PC had changed the world. For them, it was clear: things made history. It was a curious, if partly semantic, problem. Would this make Eli Whitney and James Watt more radical than Thomas Jefferson or John Brown?
I had not given the problem much thought until I recently started doing some research on Tom Paine. What drew me to Paine was his peripatetic life. I had finished a project about a traveler who was a contemporary of Paine’s and who led a similarly transatlantic existence. This phenomenon was something I wanted to explore further and Paine seemed the ultimate exemplar of the mobile eighteenth century.
As I started reading Paine, I found myself drawn in an unexpected direction, albeit one that in a weird way validated what those undergrads were telling me some years ago. Paine spent most of the final twenty years of his life pursuing answers to an extraordinary technological problem. The problem was simply this: how do you create a reliable, sturdy, weather-resistant bridge that can span rivers without impeding water traffic? What a mundane problem to occupy the author of The Rights of Man.
And yet the problem was anything but mundane. Paine’s world was a water world. Everything traveled more quickly and more cheaply by water. Where there were no rivers or seas there was little of anything else. What farmers and trappers and miners and other producers could bring to market depended on ready access to water transport. We do not generally think of the Connecticut River or the Schuylkill River or the James River as hugely important commercial arteries. But in the eighteenth century they were. If you stood on their banks in the right season, you would see logs bound together as huge rafts, fifty and sixty foot dugout canoes loaded with deerskins or dried fish, and small sailing craft carrying grain, livestock, or tobacco.
If you lived, say, in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut—hardly a remote place—you may as well have lived in Siberia. (Actually, you might have been better off in Siberia. The Russians had developed an enormous and well-traveled network of post roads—maintained by state-owned serfs—stretching from Lake Baikal in Siberia to St. Petersburg. Interestingly, these were more efficient arteries during the long winters when horse pulled sledges could glide across what would otherwise be wet, boggy terrain.). Getting anything to market—you would probably head to the river town of Hartford—would have involved a treacherous journey across barely maintained trails, usually unable to accommodate any kind of cart or carriage and all but impassible in the winter months. If, heaven forbid, you should stumble upon the swollen Housatonic or Farmington Rivers, you would hope to find a ferryman nearby and you would hope he knew and liked you and was happy to take a few pounds of grain or a few deer skins for his services. You would also hope the weather cooperated. Storms and spring ice made river crossings a deadly business.
Imagine a world without these problems. Imagine simply being able to carry your goods across a bridge. Sure, you might have to pay a toll, but you could travel when you wished, unimpeded by the comings and goings of ferrymen and foul weather. And you could expect, with a nice bridge across the Housatonic for instance, that others would be following you to market, perhaps now carrying large loads of corn and rye. And with those others now happily farming in northwest Connecticut, more people would be more dependent on roads and thus more inclined to band together to maintain them. Above all, if you could make rivers easy to cross you could open once remote tracts to European-style farming and if you could do that you could, in theory anyway, make more land available to more people. You could, to put it simply, help the cause of liberty.
This would all have been very agreeable to Tom Paine. He believed in property and he believed in the "projecting spirit," that spirit of invention that seemed to inhere in the breasts of all men (this was, as far as I know, understood to be a distinctly masculine quality). He thus advocated the creation of a national system of copyright so that authors could, in effect, claim proprietary interests in their work. Not only would this afford fair remuneration, it would also—so Paine believed—spur creativity. Why create if you cannot serve yourself in the process?
Bridge technology was obviously not a new thing in Tom Paine’s America. The Romans had created great stone ones and Europeans continued to build stone bridges using what was basically a modified Roman design. In the new United States, small wooden bridges were most common. They required little specialized knowledge and far less labor than stone bridges. But above all, wood was far more abundant in North America than in Europe.
Wooden bridges had a number of problems though. One was simply that they decayed. Moisture softens all but the rarest hardwoods, exposing load-bearing timbers to wood-boring organisms that can, in a matter of months, turn them into sawdust. The problem is especially acute on the flat road surface where pounding wagon wheels and horse hooves combine with accumulated rainwater, snow, or ice to speed decay. By the early nineteenth century, American bridge builders had devised a solution to this problem in the form of the covered bridge, but other problems with wood remained.
One was that building a wooden bridge long enough to span more than ten or fifteen feet was extremely difficult. With a growing scarcity of long, hard timbers, bridge builders had to rely on supporting piers. Aside from inhibiting river traffic, these were extremely difficult to build. They usually required temporary parapets, built midriver, within which stone foundations could be constructed. But even the most robust piers were vulnerable to forceful flood waters and spring ice.
Paine was among a small group of tinkerers who recognized that the solution to these problems lay in an old material put to a new use. That material was, of course, iron. In the short term, iron lost no strength when wet, and it could be easily fashioned into light, readily transported arches, western architecture’s strongest element. The strength of the arch allowed bridge builders to span waterways without costly piers that inhibited river traffic. But above all, Paine and his fellow inventors saw few limits to the potential span of iron bridges. As long as the basic design was sound, the scale was limited only by the ironworkers’ capacity to fashion the arches.
The material’s first real trial came in 1779 when an ironmaster named Abraham Darby III completed the world’s first iron bridge over the Severn River Gorge near the town of Coalbrookdale in England. It was a spectacular achievement. The one hundred-foot arch eased the movement of labor, manufactured goods, and raw materials fueling the region’s booming industrial economy.
Great though the Coalbrookdale Bridge was, Paine recognized several drawbacks. The first was that it was made from a vast, semicircular arch, whose height made the design feasible only for rivers running through deep gorges—or for bridges with costly embankment towers. And second, it remained largely the work of a single, creative mind. There were no plans or instructions on how similar structures might be erected elsewhere. If more such bridges were to be built, they would have to be built by Darby. This is one reason it took a decade and a half for Britain’s next full-scale iron bridge to appear.
Paine’s ambition was to solve both of these problems. He believed the same basic design principles could be applied to a much shallower arch, fashioned from a "small segment of a large circle." Such a shallow arch could span more than a hundred feet and required no more than five feet of vertical clearance. An arch was an arch. The same principles that applied to large segments of smaller circles applied to smaller segments of giant circles.
But perhaps even more innovative was Paine’s approach to the design and construction process. Instead of crafting a bridge in the way a joiner might a house or a wheelwright a wagon wheel—relying on experience and individual knowledge passed from one craftsperson to the next—he would begin with a design. And that design would be carefully tested, codified, and disseminated. Though he was a great advocate of individual patents, he would not seek one for his iron bridge. It was to become part of the public domain, accessible to all much like the uncannily crisp prose of his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense.
It was all very democratic and very much contrary to the closed and carefully guarded practices of the artisans and trade guilds in which Paine had once found his most loyal political constituency.
This story, like much else in Paine’s life, ends in failure. Paine’s design never made it beyond a prototype exhibited near London. Paine eventually tried to persuade the American Congress to invest in an ambitious version, but to no avail. Nobody in the new American polity—an increasingly Christian polity—wanted to pay the price of associating with such an unapologetic skeptic. It would not be for another thirty years, long after Paine’s passing, that an actual iron bridge would be built in the United States.
Paine blamed the initial collapse of the project on the French Revolution. It was that event that prompted his former friend, Edmund Burke, to publish a popular defense of hereditary rule. The greatest political pamphleteer of the time could not sit idly by. He abandoned the iron bridge project to compose The Rights of Man, a searing rejoinder to Burke. "The publication of this work of Mr. Burke," he later wrote, "drew me from my bridge operations, and my time became employed in defending a system [of representative government] then established and operating in America and which I wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe."
We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be. Paine saw in bridge design a handmaiden of social and political change. In encouraging freedom of movement, bridges could free individuals to better themselves. They could free farmers and merchants and craftspeople to move freely through the countryside, and in doing this, they could free them to prosper and become true citizens with a vested interest in the political nation.
Paine discussed his iron bridge activities in several letters but he said most about the project in his 1803 petition to Congress, reprinted in Eric Foner, ed., Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995). Paine’s remarks on copyright appear in a 1782 letter to the Abbé Raynal, reprinted in volume 2 of Philip S. Foner, ed. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945). The most recent and most complete treatment of Paine and his iron bridge appears in chapter 9 of John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York, 1995).
Creative Work Has Health Advantages
Newswise — Employees who have more control over their daily activities and can do challenging work that they enjoy are likely to be in better health, new research suggests.
“The most important finding is that creative activity helps people stay healthy,” said lead author John Mirowsky, a sociology professor with the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. “Creative activity is non-routine, enjoyable and provides opportunity for learning and for solving problems. People who do that kind of work, whether paid or not, feel healthier and have fewer physical problems.”
Moreover, although people who work give up some independence, the study found that having a job does lead to better health.
“One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education,” Mirowsky said.
The study, which appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, comprised 2,592 adults who responded to a 1995 national telephone survey; researchers followed up respondents in 1998. The survey addressed general health, physical functioning, how people spent their time on a daily basis and whether their work, even if unpaid, gave them a chance to learn new things or do things they enjoy.
“The health advantage of being somewhat above average in creative work [in the 60th percentile] versus being somewhat below average [in the 40th percentile] is equal to being 6.7 years younger,” Mirowsky said. It is also equal to having two more years of education or 15 times greater household income, he added.
Although the authors did not examine specific job positions that could confer this health advantage, professions considered not to involve a “creative” environment were those such as assembly lines.
Rather, jobs that are high-status, with managerial authority, or that require complex work with data generally provide more access to creative work, Mirowsky said. However, he added, “People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative.”
The Journal of Health and Social Behavior is the quarterly journal of the American Sociological Association. Contact Sujata Sinha, Media Relations Officer at (202) 247-9871 or ssinha@asanet.org
Mirowsky J, Ross CE. Creative work and health. J Health Soc Behav 48(4), 2007.
Creative and noncreative problem solvers exhibit different patterns of brain activity, study reveals
Why do some people solve problems more creatively than others? Are people who think creatively somehow different from those who tend to think in a more methodical fashion?
These questions are part of a long-standing debate, with some researchers arguing that what we call “creative thought” and “noncreative thought” are not basically different. If this is the case, then people who are thought of as creative do not really think in a fundamentally different way from those who are thought of as noncreative. On the other side of this debate, some researchers have argued that creative thought is fundamentally different from other forms of thought. If this is true, then those who tend to think creatively really are somehow different.
A new study led by John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University addresses these questions by comparing the brain activity of creative and noncreative problem solvers. The study published in the journal Neuropsychologia, reveals a distinct pattern of brain activity, even at rest, in people who tend to solve problems with a sudden creative insight -- an “Aha! Moment” – compared to people who tend to solve problems more methodically.
At the beginning of the study, participants relaxed quietly for seven minutes while their electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded to show their brain activity. The participants were not given any task to perform and told they could think about whatever they wanted. Later, they were asked to solve a series of anagrams – scrambled letters that can be rearranged to form words [MPXAELE = EXAMPLE]. These can be solved by deliberately and methodically trying out different letter combinations, or they can be solved with a sudden insight or “Aha!” in which the solution pops into awareness. After each successful solution, participants indicated in which way the solution had come to them.
The participants were then divided into two groups – those who reported solving the problems mostly by sudden insight, and those who reported solving the problems more methodically – and resting-state brain activity for these groups was compared. As predicted, the two groups displayed strikingly different patterns of brain activity during the resting period at the beginning of the experiment – before they knew they would have to solve problems or even knew what the study was about.
One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.
Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment. For example, a glimpse of an advertisement on a billboard or a word spoken in an overheard conversation could spark an association that leads to a solution. In contrast, the more focused attention of methodical solvers reduces their distractibility, allowing them to effectively solve problems for which the solution strategy is already known, as would be the case for balancing a checkbook or baking a cake using a known recipe.
Thus, the new study shows that basic differences in brain activity between creative and methodical problem solvers exist and are evident even when these individuals are not working on a problem. According to Kounios, “Problem solving, whether creative or methodical, doesn’t begin from scratch when a person starts to work on a problem. His or her pre-existing brain-state biases a person to use a creative or a methodical strategy.”
In addition to contributing to current knowledge about the neural basis of creativity, this study suggests the possible development of new brain imaging techniques for assessing potential for creative thought, and for assessing the effectiveness of methods for training individuals to think creatively.
Kounios, J., Fleck, J.I., Green, D.L., Payne, L., Stevenson, J.L., Bowden, M., & Jung- Beeman, M. (2008). The origins of insight in resting-state brain activity. Neuropsychologia, 46, 281-291.
See also:
Jung-Beeman, M., Bowden, E.M., Haberman, J., Frymiare, J.L., Arambel-Liu, S., Greenblatt, R., Reber, P.J., & Kounios, J. (2004). Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight. PLoS Biology, 2, 500-510.
Kounios, J., Frymiare, J.L., Bowden, E.M., Fleck, J.I., Subramaniam, K., Parrish, T.B., & Jung-Beeman, M.J. (2006). The prepared mind: Neural activity prior to problem presentation predicts subsequent solution by sudden insight. Psychological Science, 17, 882-890.
Researchers have mapped the brain regions that process social standing and money rewards, yielding new insights that they said will aid understanding of the basis of social behaviors.
They published their findings in two papers in the April 24, 2008, issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press.
In one paper, Norihiro Sadato and colleagues found that making money and making a reputation engage much of the same reward circuitry in the brain—a finding that they say yields insight into what drives complex social behaviors.
In the other paper, Caroline Zink and colleagues mapped brain regions that are active when a person is processing information on social status. The researchers said their findings could yield insight into why social status can so profoundly affect behavior and health.
Also, the papers’ findings could offer an understanding of why drug treatments for such neurological disorders as Parkinson’s disease can trigger abnormal money-related behaviors such as compulsive gambling, commented Rebecca Saxe and Johannes Haushofer in a preview of the two papers in the same issue of Neuron.
In the first paper, Sadato and colleagues compared the activation of specific areas of volunteers’ brains as they took part in two experiments in which they received either money or social rewards. During the experiments, the researchers scanned the subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which harmless magnetic fields and radio waves are used to measure blood flow in brain regions, which reflects activity.
In the monetary reward experiments, the subjects were told they were playing a gambling game, in which they chose one of three cards to receive a payoff. However, the researchers manipulated the game so that they could determine the brain activity triggered by high rewards.
In the social reward experiment, the subjects were told that strangers would be evaluating them based on information from a personality questionnaire and a video they made introducing themselves. The subjects were shown a picture of themselves, along with the word or phrase indicating how the strangers had evaluated them. However, the strangers did not really exist, and the researchers showed the subjects predetermined evaluations that allowed the researchers to manipulate the level of social reward experienced by the subjects.
Sadato and colleagues found that both the monetary and social rewards activated a reward-related area of the brain called the striatum.
“By directly contrasting the brain activities of the same subjects in relation to the delivery of social and monetary rewards, our results clearly show that social approval shares the same neural basis as monetary rewards, thus providing strong support for the idea of a ‘common neural currency’ of reward,” concluded the researchers.
They wrote that their findings “indicate that the social reward of a good reputation should be incorporated into the neural model of human decision making in a similar manner to monetary rewards.” Thus, they wrote, experiments on decision making that use money-related games need to take into account that the subjects are exchanging more than money; they are also dealing in approval and reputation.
“Our findings indicate that the social reward of a good reputation in the eyes of others is processed in an anatomically and functionally similar manner to monetary rewards, and these results represent an essential step toward a complete neural understanding of human social behaviors,” concluded Sadato and colleagues.
In the second Neuron paper, Zink and colleagues explored the neural regions activated when people process information on their social status. Such insights, they said, are significant because social hierarchies are important factors in social behavior, and “in humans, social status strongly predicts well-being, morbidity, and even survival.”
In their experiments, the researchers set up artificial social hierarchies by asking volunteers to play simple interactive games for a money reward. Each of the volunteers was told that they were playing the games along with two other players, one of whom was a superior player and one an inferior player. However, in reality, the other players did not exist, and the game outcomes were manipulated so that the researchers could control the social status of the player. To give the illusion that the other players existed, the subjects saw the other players’ images on the screen during play. Importantly, the games were noncompetitive, so that the researchers could measure only social status and its change.
During the games, the subjects’ brains were scanned using fMRI, so the researchers could map the brain regions active during different conditions of social hierarchy.
In the first experiment, the researchers kept the social hierarchy stable. The subjects were asked to respond as quickly as possible when a blue circle on a computer screen changed to green. Throughout the game, the players’ status did not change relative to the other “players.”
In the second experiment, the researchers made the social hierarchy unstable, manipulating the outcome so that the player might do better or worse than the other “players.” In that game, the player was asked to respond as quickly as possible to indicate which of two boxes on the computer screen contained the most black dots. Periodically during the game, the player would be told whether his/her status was rising or falling compared to the other “players.”
In the third experiment, the researchers told the players they were playing against a computer, allowing the researchers to pinpoint the brain regions specifically activated by social behavior.
The researchers found they could distinguish brain regions that were more active when the subjects thought they were viewing a superior person compared with an inferior person, implicating these brain regions in the neural encoding of hierarchical rank.
Also, the researchers could distinguish brain areas that were particularly active when social hierarchy was changing. These areas included those involved in social emotional processing and social cognition.
“We conclude that activity in these regions represents an emotional arousal response to the superior player that only arises when the hierarchy is dynamic, i.e., when relative performance, although irrelevant for the game outcome, can have social hierarchical consequences,” wrote the researchers.
Zink and colleagues wrote that “our findings demonstrate that brain responses to superiority and inferiority are dissociable, even in the absence of explicit competition, both when encountering an individual of a particular status and when faced with an outcome that can affect one’s current position in the hierarchy. We hope that this research leads to identification of neural mechanisms mediating the enormous impact of social status on decision-making, health, and survival in humans.”
“One immediate implication of these results is for patients with dysfunction of these brain regions,” wrote Saxe and Haushofer in their preview. “The striatum is among the targets of some neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD). Overtreatment of PD with dopamine agonists is known to induce abnormal economic decision-making, including compulsive gambling. If the same brain structures are responsible for the reward-value of love and reputation, pharmacological manipulation of the striatum may also have social consequences.”
Article 1:
The researchers include Keise Izuma, National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), Aichi, Japan, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Kanagawa, Japan; Daisuke N. Saito, National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), Aichi, Japan, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX), Tokyo, Japan; and Norihiro Sadato, National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), Aichi, Japan, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Kanagawa, Japan, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX), Tokyo, Japan, Biomedical Imaging Research Center (BIRC), University of Fukui, Fukui, Japan.
Article 2:
The researchers include Caroline F. Zink, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD; Yunxia Tong, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD; Qiang Chen, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD; Danielle S. Bassett, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD; Jason L. Stein, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD; and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany.
A new neural evidence suggests that the brain's reward system works similarly for both praise and money
Why are we nice to others? One answer provided by social psychologists is because it pays off. A social psychological theory stated that we do something nice to others for a good reputation or social approval just like we work for salary.
Consistent with this idea, a research team led by Norihiro Sadato, a professor, at the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, NIPS (SEIRIKEN), and Keise Izuma, a graduate student of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, in Okazaki, Japan, now have neural evidence that perceiving one's good reputation formed by others activates the striatum, the brain's reward system, in a similar manner to monetary reward. The team reports their findings on April 24 in NEURON (Cell Press).
The research group conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments on 19 people with monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one's good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards. These results strongly suggest that social reward is processed in the striatum like monetary reward.
Considering a pivotal role played by a good reputation in social interactions, this study provides an important first step toward neural explanation for our everyday social behaviors.
"What a man knows about himself inside that makes him afraid" Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter Movie; Screen Play by Ernest Tidyman.