If you’re interested in chance events, fate and serendipity, try this blog: http://chancehappens.com

Bookmark this because it has the solution to the banking crisis. I’ve just found out that fish can count and monkeys can subtract.

People are worried about the exodus of Wall Street talent, but we can hurry up and hire the best fish and monkeys to fill those fat cat positions. Fish are honest and those who can count eat mosquito larvae– no eight-figure bonuses required. Monkeys are a little excitable but they get around just by swinging from tree to tree instead of using limos and corporate jets – a smaller carbon footprint! Both species seem to be more honest and socially aware than our current crop of bankers.

I make that bold, pro-fish, pro-simian statement because I watched Jon Stewart last night. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, told us what’s happened to at least half of the TARP funds bestowed on bankers by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

The deal was that for every dollar we taxpayers gave the banks, the banks would give us a dollar’s worth of stock and warrants. Fair enough. But the bankers, according to Warren, only gave us 66 cents on the dollar, and the value of those stocks and warrants has dropped even more since the trade.

Well, this would never happen if fish were in key banking positions because fish know how to count. Mosquitofish, a North and Central American freshwater species, successfully counted geometric shapes in a study conducted by psychologists at the University of Padova in Italy.

The fish were taught to associate a door in their tank with a certain number of shapes. They recognized the right number even though researchers varied the size, brightness and distance of the shapes counted. Since Mosquitofish are social animals, scientists believe that being able to count might help them seek safety in numbers.

On Jon Stewart’s show, Elizabeth Warren also mentioned that she doesn’t quite know how much of the TARP funds have actually been distributed.

If monkeys were in charge of that distribution there wouldn’t be a problem, because monkeys know how to subtract. In a test of their subtraction skills at Duke University, Rhesus macaques were able to solve a simple subtraction problem on a touch screen. They didn’t need to count, they just relied on their sense of missing shapes.

The qualities present in fish and monkeys, being social and caring about their fellows, have gone missing in some bankers. While fish seek companionship and protect each other in schools, bankers enjoy purchasing multiple homes while their customers lose the only homes they’ve got. Monkeys and even ravens have been shown to care for their communities.

Maybe it’s not just the bankers who are bonkers, maybe it’s clawing to the top of the food chain that has messed with the human mind. Masters of the Universe, we eat anything that moves, screw over weaker species, profit whenever possible. I lust after profit as much as anyone else (if you want to send me money, please do) but I certainly don’t want to be bettered by a bunch of animals who can count, subtract and are more socially aware than some of the bankers who watch over my money.

Something to consider as we monkey around, fishing for answers.

I have been staring at a $20 bill on my desk for an hour now but it has yet to turn into $40. If I think about this blog really hard, will it write itself? There are those who believe beliefs can manifest into things, that action and thought are entangled.

There’s a kind of chocolate on the market called Intentional Chocolate. Dr. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, co-authored a study on it, a randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind study, to see whether chocolate exposed to the positive intentions of people meditating would make a difference in the mood of people who ate the chocolate. Turns out, according to the paper, that people who ate the “positive thought” chocolate reported feeling better than those who ate regular chocolate. Huh. Would that work with pizza?

Dr. Radin admits to being surprised at the outcome of the test, but he says he’s interested in asking questions about how the world works, regardless of prejudices.

Well, scientists do tend to freak out when you suggest that the consciousness of somebody can change the outcome of an experiment. Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times about the chocolate experiment: “There’s nothing in the way that we understand the universe that would explain how a group of people could influence the well-being of others by blessing their chocolate,” he was quoted in the article. “Besides, if chocolate could be blessed, it could also be cursed.”

Cursed chocolate bunnies aside, Dr. Sloan is an important crusader against quack science and I admire his stand. But there are other beliefs about belief.

One of the premises of quantum physics is that the observer, by the act of watching, affects observed reality. Trying to get my mind around this makes me want to lie down in a darkened room and eat chocolate. But according to a study published in Nature, scientists have demonstrated how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed.

Dr. William Tiller, a Professor Emeritus of materials science at Stanford University, believes that human consciousness can change what we call physical reality. His view is that physics has been examining the interaction of mass and energy and he now wants to bring consciousness to the party. He thinks mass can be converted into energy which in turn can be converted into consciousness. This makes my head hurt, supporting the formula t/C*10=a2. That is, thinking (t) about consciousness ( C ) for ten minutes equals taking two Advil (a2) and lying down in a darkened room.

We all know the saying “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It’s at the heart of “show me” scientific thinking. Dr. Radin argues we have this backwards. It should be, he says, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

Consider that over the weekend, and if you catch a chocolate bunny smirking at you, do not eat it.

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

Healing is hard to quantify. Does it mean, “My back has stopped hurting by a factor of 45 percent?” Does it mean, “I don’t wake up at night because of those nightmares of being chased by thousands of cats. I only wake up now because I dream of 50 cats?” Does it simply mean, “I feel better?”

Not all healing involves ripping off the band aid and seeing the healing with your own eyes. It can be invisible.

Some have experienced the invisible kind of healing using a technique called Reiki. Reiki involves moving the hands over the patient or lightly touching them. Afterward people have reported feeling balanced energetically or feeling more centered. But how does it work?

“Medicine doesn’t understand how Reiki works.” said Pamela Miles, founding director of the Institute for the Advancement of Complementary Therapies, when I recently interviewed her about Reiki. I’m working on a project about integrative and complementary therapies. As a science-oriented guy I’ve been curious about these therapies because often science can’t explain how they work but they seem to help people a lot. I’ve seen yoga reduce my stress levels. My mother stopped smoking after acupuncture treatments. There’s a mystery here and I want to know more about it.

“When I place hands on someone it’s like feeling an orchestra in my palms – I feel many different notes and qualities of vibration and it keeps changing,” says Miles.

What is science supposed to do with that? What is she transmitting through her hands? Life force energy? Mind energy? It might involve electromagnetic forces. Using a magnetometer to measure electromagnetism, some researchers claim to have seen the energy of Reiki moving from practitioner to patient. (Others say they have no idea what they’re measuring.) But even more interesting is the belief system involved for Reiki to work: you don’t need one. It works anyway, regardless of your belief system or even lack of one.

Scientists, being the take-measure types they are, have taken a shot at trying to understand the success of Reiki. One study suggested that Reiki can speed the healing of skin wounds. Another at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City looked at how Reiki and meditation might reduce anxiety, fatigue and pain in cancer patients. During the study, the intensity of those symptoms dropped by half. Results like that have encouraged mainstream health care providers to offer Reiki treatments as part of a hospital program. New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, Boston’s Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Institute and Yale-New Haven Hospital are all in.

Nobody knows why, but Reiki seems to help the body engage in self healing. “With Reiki,” Miles says, “patients get a chance to participate actively in their health care and regain a sense of control.” They become partners in their own care, and that, most doctors would say, is a key reason why this form of invisible healing seems to be so effective. I wonder how science will develop the tools to measure something like that. For me, it’s a mystery worth investigating.

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

Spiritual seekers may spend decades working to detach from their ego. Buddha meditated under a Bodhi tree for 49 days when he did it. But I think I’ve managed it in just .2 seconds. All I had to do was Google myself. There are 8,900,000 different results for Lee Schneider. I can already feel my sense of self slipping away into 8.9 million little pieces. In yoga we’re often reminded that it’s a good thing to surrender the ego. Buddhism teaches that the self is only an illusion. But what does that really mean?

As I examine myself under Google’s microscope, I can verify that I was once a writer of “ThunderCats” cartoons. How did I juggle that with my job as project manager at the Computer Sciences Corporation in Dallas/Fort Worth? It seems like a good living, I just don’t remember going into the office this morning.

Then again, I do move around. This week I’m living in Alexandria, KY, Morrison, CO and Batavia, OH all at the same time. Perhaps, upon dissolution, my ego is now able to be in several places at once. In his book “Autobiography of a Yogi,” Paramhansa Yogananda described one Swami Pranabananda who was able to do this. That seems like pretty advanced yoga and I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m not even doing handstand anymore.

When I started this blog I said I would never join Facebook. But it looks like I have anyway and I really like horses. I also like to Twitter, have 124 followers and live in Boston. Whole chunks of my life are kind of different from the life I thought I was living. For instance, I married Elyssa Korez on December 20th, 2008. Sorry, I don’t remember that wedding at all. Thing is, I’m getting married again in Los Angeles on June 20. Could I be practicing polygamy? I don’t remember being Mormon but then I don’t remember signing up for the Navy Reserves in Auburn, Washington either. I don’t know how I fit the Reserves in with my job as a photographer of tall ships. I published a calendar of them in 2002. It’s for sale at Amazon, anyway, and it has my name on it.

In Buddhism it’s said that attachment to ego leads to suffering. Right now, I’m getting the opposite effect. As my ego splits apart I’m hyperventilating.

If people are looking for me online, they might connect with one of my other selves instead of the one typing this right now. What is my name good for if so many others are using it? I need to run an online background check on myself to get back in touch with who I really am, but that costs $39.95.

Maybe finding myself isn’t as easy as clicking on a link. Maybe I’m not ready to completely surrender my ego, but if I nudge it out of the way a little I might have better access to the interior life that goes on whether my Google ranking looks good or not.

I know where ideas come from. They come from coffee. While living in Italy, I drank five espresso coffees a day and had lots of ideas. One of those ideas was this: Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. Unless I wanted to become a professional insomniac I needed an alternative. Switching to green tea has worked but the lower caffeine content results in just 62.5 words per cup. Large vats of it must be brewed by the kitchen staff even to write this blog.

Getting enough caffeine in me to feel the neurons charging is only part of the story. The ideas have to come from somewhere – but where? The first theory involves sweat.

Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Hard work isn’t always the answer, but changing perspectives might be, like stepping into the car or into a shower. After stepping into his bath, Archimedes figured out how water displacement could be used to calculate density. Could be the water, but closing your eyes also works. Researchers call this “gating” of visual input, and it might cause solution-related brain activity to burst into consciousness. The ah-ha moment! Dreams are a great resource, too. I’ve had some very big ideas in dreams, and after I wake up I write them down. They usually go like this: “Mungle bubble car mouse tree bliff.” If anyone can make sense of that, drop me a line.

It gets interesting when big ideas visit several people at once. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions simultaneously. Does that mean that scientific discoveries are just “in the air” — waiting to be grabbed up by a receptive mind? Can ideas be the product of a collective super-consciousness? That would mean that ideas don’t only come from inside. Instead of a theory of sweat, this is a theory of spirit.

According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray Love,” the Greeks believed that the “genius” was a magical, divine entity living in the walls of the artist’s studio. When the artist was working, the genius would come out to help. As Gilbert put it, this was a psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. Your ideas were not yours – they were on loan from higher sources. If your work bombed, it was not entirely your fault. You just had a faulty genius. (Can you give your genius a cup of coffee?) This changed in the Renaissance, when human creativity was put at the center of the universe. Brilliance was being a genius, not having a genius.

Whether I have a genius living in the wall of my office or not, I believe that ideas come from having a prepared mind, and yet there is that undefined something that makes me wonder if a larger consciousness comes into play.

Television, for example, was invented by several people at once, including a Mormon farmer who was mowing hay in rows and realized that an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines. Then he went in to take a shower. Where do your ideas come from?

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

Taking risks. Going on a hunch. These are not words I’d associate with university or corporate science. In those often male dominated labs everybody seems to be on tenure track or fretting about funding.

Change is coming … and it’s female. According the New York Times, women constitute about half of today’s medical students, 60 percent of the biology majors and 70 percent of the psychology Ph.Ds. Though women remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering that doesn’t mean there are not female superstars in those fields.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s employee number 20, was the company’s first female engineer and its current VP of Search Products & User Experience. She seems to be doing ok, with a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons in San Francisco. But she has taken some flak for being female, liking clothes, cupcakes and parties.

There’s lots of bias out there. It’s documented in blogs like Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Women, Science and Writing. A scientist known as Dr. Isis writes another influential science blog and I emailed her to ask about all this. She directed me to some data about women in science: While more than 50% of chemistry bachelors degrees are awarded to women, less than 32% of Ph.D’s and 22% of assistant professorships are. Those careers hit the wall, some believe, because women are expected, pressured, conditioned or driven by biology to become mothers or pursue other non-career-advancing activities.

We know that men come from that planet over there and women come from the other one. The differences start early, with a shot of testosterone for male fetuses that helps them be competitive and assertive, and a shot of oxytocin for females that can help them read people’s emotions. Studies have shown that men are better at spatial relations – like assembling Ikea furniture. Women are better at communicating. They are more likely to trust their intuition.

Shall I argue that these differences carry into adult life and change the way males and females do science? Touchy subject.

Lawrence Summers, past president of Harvard and current head of the White House’s National Economic Council, got himself in hot water a while back for saying that innate differences between men and women may explain why lower proportions of women succeed in math and science careers. He set off a firestorm and later apologized – sort of.

Intuition is at the core of the risk-taking nature of science. Guys like to call intuition “a hunch.” Thomas Edison was famous for hunches. But those making a career of intuition – placing it center stage – are more likely to be women.

Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz has a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Boston School of Medicine and is the author of “Awakening Intuition.” Dr. Candace Pert, formerly a section chief at the National Institutes of Health, is looking at the unconscious and its influence on illness, happiness and wellness.

DocuCinema is developing a series about integrative medicine. We’re finding that a majority of the scientists involved are female. Why? They seem more willing than male scientists to invite intuition into the lab. They are the risk takers, making them more likely to be discovery makers. I am going out on a limb with that – just a hunch.

Do blogs have too many links? Links are someone interrupting when you’re trying to talk or worse, your own thoughts interrupting you when you think. Something like this happens when you sit cross-legged in yoga and the aching knees start talking to the mind. Your consciousness loops back upon itself and you work to quiet what is known as the “monkey mind.”

But I digress.

In 1960 Ted Nelson, a graduate student at Harvard, created Project Xanadu. The project was going to be a word processor capable of creating nonlinear documents. Every quotation would be linked to its original source and every thought annotated. Funny thing, Ted Nelson never finished the project. That tells you something right there about nonlinear thinking. Ted Nelson would have liked Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Links dare me to click to see where they’ll go. If I don’t have time to write about the British post office employee who developed the technology of the link you’re using now, I just link to him. Links are an intellectual weapon. If I write about differential calculus and you have to click, you prove you don’t know what kind of calculus that is. By linking to special relativity I can seem really smart. But I’m not so smart if I link to Wikipedia. Here’s why.

I was interviewing a pharmacology expert about the stuff voodoo priests use to turn people into zombies. Armed with my Wikipedia fact sheet, I began talking about witch doctors gathering neurotoxins from puffer fish and toads and feeding those chemicals to their victims. But as the professor kindly explained and the camera rolled on my discomfort, no puffer fish are required. He told me, correctly, that you turn somebody into a zombie by feeding them jimson weed, a plant that grows wild in California and has a lot of scopolamine. Huh. If you click on Wikipedia and How Stuff Works the wrong answers are still up there.

Elements of the original Xanadu Project thrive today and its acolytes propose that your documents come alive with an electronic storm of Post-Its.

http://transliterature.org

Some contend that such multi-tasking is great for parallel processing computers, but not so efficient for people. I’m not sure: I haven’t actually read those books. I’m just linking to one of them so it seems like I’ve done the research.

Good writing has its own hypertext. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about “the tintinnabulation that so musically wells … from the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.” With tintinnabulation in the poem, derived from a Latin word for bell-ringer, you get to hear the bells without clicking on anything. James Joyce wrote about “the light music of whiskey falling into a glass,” which makes me want to get a cocktail.

Before I go into the kitchen, let’s stay on track. I believe I am passively using technology but in fact technology is using me. Using a computer to help me think changes the way I think. Clicking on links as I read changes the way I read. I started this with Yogi, yoga and the monkey mind and hyperlinked near and far. I’ve realized that if I want to read a sentence to the end, I might need to do it with a book.

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

The amazing things that have happened to me recently include kismet, random romance, encountering the famous and meeting my future wife in an unheated room of sweaty people. Is everything predetermined? Or is the universe running on Random?

Growing up in Larchmont, New York I was given a charge account at a book store. One summer I charged $1000 worth of literature, shocking my parents with the bill. I loved a book called Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine author.

Nearly four decades later I was in Buenos Aires with a modest notion. I wanted to see the café where Borges took a coffee now and again. Chance had different plans, because when we went by Borges’ house his widow was inside. She wanted to meet me. Incredibly, she not only gave me a tour of his house, but I saw the studio where he wrote the book I had come to love. On that day, I reconnected with the spark of writing.

Had the moment been engineered by unseen forces, or by the simple action of a woman moving to the window to see if it was raining? Forty years ago I plucked a paperback from a shelf and half a world away a woman decided to accept Borges’ offer to become his secretary and later, wife. Try figuring the odds of she and I meeting someday and your head might explode. But let’s try something else instead.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman believes that we all know 300 people by first name. One morning you’re walking among New York’s 8.2 million people. What are the chances of running into someone you know?

I posed this question to a professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Before he could answer, he had more questions. “How many people does one run into walking in NY in a day? 100? 500? 1000? How many of the 300 people you know visit NY on a given day?”

Roping in random wasn’t going to be easy. Assume that all 300 of my friends were in New York at the same time and assume 26,402.9 persons per square mile, as per US Census data. But since I am walking, you have to calculate how many people I’d meet not per square foot, but while moving in a straight line as I walked. That would be a whopping 733.4139 people per linear mile. Since I know 300 of them, divided by the 8.2 million of New York’s population, it would follow that I’d encounter .0268 friends per mile. The chance of seeing at least one of them was about 12.7%.

Wow.

First, it’s amazing that we can put a number to something that you might think of as random, like running into a friend. Second, the number delivered by our spectacular calculation was meaningless. No way everyone in New York is going to be outside at the same time and distributed randomly so I could run into them in a controlled way. Fuggaboutit! As the statistics professor put it, “These assumptions are ridiculous, of course!”

Of course. But the tortured nature of the calculation shows how the effortless ballet of running into a friend can be awesomely complex.

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

Comments on last week’s 500 Words ran the spectrum from “you freaked out Dad,” to “I’m concerned about your mental state.” It got me thinking about which side I was on in the science-spirit game.

Say you’re on West 4th Street in NY. You’re choosing sides for a pickup ball game between the New York Logics and the California Intuitives. The guy leaning on the fence has a great jump shot and is obsessed with hard data. He goes to the Logics. The guy in three point land always makes the right move without thinking about it. He’ll play for the Intuitives. Easy choices? Before I push the basketball metaphor and tear a ligament, consider a crossroads I found myself in a few years ago.

I was making a documentary for the History Channel about the Shroud of Turin, interviewing investigators who wanted proof that the Shroud was the true burial cloth of Jesus. One reputable researcher told me, “if you do the experiment that way, you don’t get the result you want.” The result you want? I realized the guy was no longer a scientist even though he called himself one. He wasn’t playing for the Logics. He’d been traded to the Believers. Thing is, however, other Believers have been pretty good scientists. Francis Bacon, originator of the scientific method, was a Believer. Isaac Newton worked on biblical numerology when he wasn’t working with calculus. This is where the dividing line gets fuzzy.

Charles Darwin was cozy with the Church. According to a piece in Seed Magazine Darwin was close friends with his local pastor, John Brodie Innes. They served on various committees and church-funded groups, including the Sunday School. “We often differed,” Darwin wrote to Innes, “but you are one of those rare mortals, from whom one can differ & yet feel no shade of animosity.”

Innes wrote of Darwin: “He is a most accurate observer, and never states anything as a fact which he has not most thoroughly investigated … He follows his own course as a Naturalist and leaves Moses to take care of himself.” Walking in this crossroads of science and spirit you might encounter Deepak Chopra, who seems a little pissed off at science lately. Dr. Chopra recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, an article reprinted on intent.com, about what he calls science’s “diabolical creativity.” The atom bomb, Thalidomide, DDT and hormone-injected meat are all on Dr. Chopra’s “Bad Science” list. He says scientists shouldn’t act like they are above morality.

That’s a tough one. You place limits on research and the free flow of ideas isn’t so free any more. This sort of action produces not Bad Science but Bad Religion: Believers vs. Infidels, Crusades, Holy Wars, regimes that suppress the rights of women. Moral absolutes might feel good to some but do they help investigators get at the truth?

Maybe, in truth, the truth is blurry. Creationists hate Darwin, but in truth he was involved in Church affairs because he knew it was good for the community. Truth is Chopra thinks from the heart, but he has years of medical training and has a scientific mind.

What team do you play for? Or do we need to choose up sides at all?

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.