Bruce M. Hood

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You may think you’re not superstitious. Think again. Would you want to wear Jeffrey Dahmer’s raincoat? Put on the sweater of a cannibal mass murderer? Why not?

Why do we knock on wood? Walk around black cats? Believe in premonitions? Believe that rituals at home plate may bring us a home run?

Cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Bruce Hood says it’s baked in our human nature. A pull to the supernatural. That it’s not all we are, but it’s an important, powerful piece of who we are as humans. He calls it supersense.

This hour, On Point: Why we believe the unbelievable.

You can join the conversation. Are you beyond superstition? Are you sure? Do you embrace the supernatural? Why?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us in our studio is Bruce Hood, chair of developmental psychology and director of the Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol in southwest England. His new book, out this week, is “SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable.”

Adderall (Photo by hipsxxhearts, Flickr.com)

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Attention-deficit drugs like Adderall and Ritalin have helped millions of ADHD kids get along. For a new generation, they’ve also fed a black market in college dorms and high-pressure labs, where off-label use by the non-ADHD gets term papers written and lab reports done.

Now, pharmaceutical companies — and some scientists — are saying maybe we should consider “cognitive enhancers,” drugs like these, for the general population.

Some call it “cosmetic neurology,” and say it’s time. Others say it’s a bad, bad idea.

This hour, On Point: The debate over drugs for the mind.

You can join the conversation. Is it time to loosen up? To think of Adderall and Ritalin the way you might think of an hour of exercise? Or a cup of coffee? A fine way to sharpen up? Or is general use of pills for the mind a bad idea?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Ellen Gibson at BusinessWeek magazine. She recently wrote the article “Mental Pick Me Ups: The Coming Boom.”

From Philadelphia, we’re joined by Martha Farah, professor of psychology and director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is co-author of a commentary in the December issue of the journal Nature, “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.”

From Garrison, N.Y., is Thomas Murray, president of The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. He was formerly the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

And from Washington, we’re joined by Nora Volkow, director of the National Insitute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.

Ever read a passage in a book, or hear a bit of music, and think, “how did they do that? How did the author or composer get inside my head?”

Well, science writer Jonah Lehrer says that artists have a pretty good track record understanding the subtleties of our minds — often well ahead of scientists.

Whitman, Proust, Stravinsky, Cezanne — each of them, Lehrer writes, anticipated major breakthroughs in what today we call neuroscience.

Proust didn’t invent Prozac, but he connected the body to the mind in a way Lehrer said no one had before.

This hour On Point: artists and intimations of neuroscience.

-Jacki Lyden

Guest:

Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large for Seed Magazine, a magazine about science in our culture. His new book is “Proust was a Neuroscientist.”

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that began on the humble squid shows that the very act of reading itself actually shapes the human brain. And reading has shaped our history, our culture, our civilization.

Now, in the digital age, we are reading less. She sees devolution.

This hour On Point: reading, Proust and the squid.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

Constance Steinkuehler, professor of educational communication and technology, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.