From The New Yorker:

People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You’d think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students. In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literature—notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—many sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,” he wrote. “There is no third.”

…Translators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring a solo show about the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games. As of last week, their company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, “Inferno” (Doubleday). In many ways, the new book is like Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code.” Here, as there, we have Brown’s beloved “symbologist,” Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker of Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking woman—this one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q. of 208—while people shoot at them. All this transpires in exotic climes—Florence, Venice, and Istanbul—upon which, even as the two are fleeing a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: “The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolò Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti.” Or: “No trip to the piazza was complete without sipping an espresso at Caffè Rivoire.” As we saw in “The Da Vinci Code,” there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that Brown doesn’t like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He’s also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman’s black arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike “The Da Vinci Code” and Brown’s “Angels and Demons” (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western world’s most famous eschatological thriller, Dante’s Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by the sequence of events in Dante’s poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever he feels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying things like “I am life” and “I am death.” Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly. The book’s villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dante’s death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, “The path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that.”

More here.

Wow, outing himself: Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras interview Snowden in The Guardian:

Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. “I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.”

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.”

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

Here’s one of the things I want to know about the government’s electronic-spying programs, which evidently give it the power to find out intimate details about virtually anybody. Who designed the spooky red-and-black logo for the National Security Agency’s Prism program? My colleague Amy Davidson correctly points out that it owes something to Storm Thorgerson’s album cover for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” a ponderous recording that back in the nineteen-seventies drove me and many others to punk rock. But it’s also reminiscent of the logos featured in the cinematic version of “1984,” featuring John Hurt and Richard Burton, which came out in 1984. In the film, for example, the logo for IngSoc, the all-powerful ruling party of Oceania, the dystopian land of the future, is a red-and-black capital “V.”

Was the Prism designer, whose identity is doubtless classified, a “prog rock” fan, or did he or she share Orwell’s wry sense of humor? When you are dealing with this intelligence stuff, you certainly need an example of the latter, or you will go a bit batty. Take me. Only a few weeks ago, I praised President Obama for publicly questioningthe basis of the ongoing “war on terror.” At the time, a couple of commenters suggested I’d been duped, that it was all just fine-sounding rhetoric, but I was willing to take the President at his word. Big mistake. As the editorial board of the Timespoints out, Obama and his Administration have lost all credibility on the issue of domestic surveillance, which is an integral part of the war on terror.

It’s come to something when Rand Paul—he of the Tea Party membership, goblin-like father, and nutty conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve—is the hero of the hour, but we have reached that point.

Over at the Rationally Speaking podcast:

Astrophysicist and author Sean Carroll joins this episode of Rationally Speaking, to talk about “naturalism” — the philosophical viewpoint that there are no supernatural phenomena, and the universe runs on scientific laws. Sean, Julia [Galef], and Massimo [Pigliucci] discuss what distinguishes naturalism from similar philosophies like physicalism and materialism, and what a naturalistic worldview implies about free will, consciousness, and other philosophical dilemmas. And they return to that long-standing debate: should scientists have more respect for philosophy?

Sean's pick: “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human”

Ernie Lepore in the NYT's The Stone:

Along with the words to be offered here is an interesting artifact— a photograph of an assembly of some of the most important and influential philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century on one fine day in April in 1984 in front of the Hyatt Hotel in downtown New Brunswick, N.J.

And of course there is a story behind it.

It begins with Donald Davidson, who died in 2003 at the age of 86, one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Though his contributions are rich and widespread, he is probably best known for his work in three areas; The theory of meaning, especially his influential theory of interpretation; the philosophy of action, in particular, his view that our reasons for our actions both cause and justify them; and the philosophy of mind, especially his defense of the thesis that though every mental event is a physical event not every type of mental event may be identified with a type of physical event.

Davidson’s philosophy is unusually unified for someone making contributions to so many areas. But this unity is difficult to appreciate because it is represented exclusively in a series of compressed, even cryptic, articles he wrote over the course of more than 40 years. These essays overlap and often presuppose knowledge of one another; and together they form a mosaic out of which emerges one of the most integrated and elegant bodies of philosophical work of our era.

On Wednesday 29 May 2013, a small group of students and ecologists tore down the barriers to occupy the Gezi Park adjoining Taksim, the most symbolic of Istanbul’s central squares. Their declared aim was to stop developers from building a shopping-centre that was to be housed in a replica of a military barracks building demolished sixty years ago – resulting in the destruction of much of the park. The group attracted support from intellectuals and politicians, notably the pro-Kurdish socialist MP Sirri Süreyya Önder. The event was completely peaceful, but the police response to activists was, by any measure, disproportionate. Their repression initially forced the protesters out of the park, but caused wide public outrage. Soon, mobilized by social media, they were back – and in hugely greater numbers. By Friday 31 May, tens of thousands were clashing with police units in different Istanbul neighbourhoods, while clouds of teargas darkened the skies. Police units threw gas-bombs and teargas into metro-stations, hotel-lobbies and residential buildings. By midnight, protesters had retaken the park, even as street-fights continued and spread to many, mostly middle-class, suburbs. Hundreds of protestors were wounded and hundreds more taken into police custody. Clashes intensified on Saturday and spread increasingly around the country.

more from Kerem Oktem at Eurozine here.

According to Demeter, the key aspect of twentieth-century philosophical thought in Hungary is its connection to the social: questions that the most prominent figures of the century addressed are deeply rooted in the problems of society and sociality, and it is against such a characteristically Central-European socio-historical background that their works can be fruitfully interpreted as parts of a tradition. The main question therefore is the following: in the vein of German idealism and British empiricism, is it plausible to speak of something like “Hungarian sociologism” in the twentieth century? Demeter’s answer is an unequivocal “yes”, and the perspective he offers his readers gives him firm grounds to rebut the claim that Hungarian philosophy is “much less creative than it is receptive” His book attempts to paint the picture of a century’s worth of Hungarian thought from Menyhért Palágyi’s critique of psychologism at the turn of the century to Kristóf Nyíri’s contributions to communication theory in the 1990s. Demeter’s investigations are quite wide in scope, addressing not only the work of prominent Hungarian philosophers (like Menyhért Palágyi, György Lukács, Imre Lakatos, György Márkus, Ágnes Heller) but of social historians (István Hajnal), classical scholars (József Balogh), and philosophically inclined sociologists of knowledge and art (Karl Mannheim and Arnold Hauser, respectively), too.

more from Ákos Sivadó at Berlin Review of Books here.

It is Smolin’s view that the best hope for a solution to the difficulties that face contemporary physics – for example, the difficulties in bringing gravity into line with the rest of the currently accepted picture of reality – lies in overturning this orthodoxy and reaffirming the view that most of us non-physicists have anyway, namely that “nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time”. In putting his case for it, Smolin says many things that are comprehensible and that, to me at least, seem both true and important. Among those things is the idea (that Smolin advances brilliantly and persuasively) that the reason physicists have come to reject the reality of time is that they have been bewitched by the beauty and success of the mathematical models they use into mistaking those models for reality. For timelessness, though not really a feature of our world, is a feature of mathematics. Two plus two equals four, but if we ask when or for how long the perplexing (though true) answer seems to be: “Well, always. It is an eternal truth. Time is irrelevant to it.” And thus we seem to be driven to accepting the thought that some truths, at least, are eternal. And, if we can have timeless truths in mathematics, why not in physics?

more from Ray Monk at The Guardian here.

“Bough Down,” the first book by artist Karen Green, arrives trailing a train of sorrow. Green was married to writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in September 2008. He was 46. Green has surfaced intermittently since then, giving few interviews. In 2009, at an exhibit in South Pasadena, she showed a piece called “The Forgiveness Machine,” a 7-foot-long device into which one placed a piece of paper inscribed with what you wanted forgiven; the paper emerged, shredded, from the other end of the machine. The exhibition, one of her first public appearances since her husband’s death, was draining for Green, and she told an interviewer that she struggled to make it through. She never used the machine herself. “Bough Down” is a book of prose poems interspersed with collages the size of a few postage stamps. It’s not about forgiveness so much as the excruciating difficulty of living with someone terminally depressed and, after his death, the long, lonely aftermath.

more from Jacob Silverman at the LA Times here.

From Edge:

Thanks to Steven Pinker for initiating and facilitating this Edge Special Event with Napoleon Chagnon, the last of the great ethnographers.

INTRODUCTION By Richard Dawkins

Napoleon Chagnon is a Living World Treasure. Arguably our greatest anthropologist, he is brave on two fronts. As a field worker in the Amazon forest he has lived, intimately and under conditions of great privation, with The Fierce People at considerable physical danger to himself. But the wooden clubs and poison-tipped arrows of the Yanomamö were matched by the verbal clubs and toxic barbs of his anthropologist colleagues in the journal pages and conference halls of the United States. And it is not hard to guess which armamentarium was the more disagreeable to him.

Chagnon committed the unforgivable sin, cardinal heresy in the eyes of a certain kind of social scientist: he took Darwin seriously. Along with a few friends and colleagues, Chagnon studied the up-to-date literature on natural selection theory, and with brilliant success he applied the ideas of Fisher, Hamilton, Trivers and other heirs of Darwin to a human tribe which probably ran as close to the cutting edge of natural selection as any in the world. It is sobering to reflect on how unconventional a step this was: science bursting into the quasi-literary world of the anthropology in which the young Chagnon was trained. Still today, in many American departments of social science, for a young researcher to announce a serious interest in Darwin's dangerous idea—even an inclination towards scientific thinking at all—can come close to career suicide.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Is there really a menace to the humanities in the breezy flourishes of a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Hawking? White believes that the remarks of such thinkers matter immensely in an environment that glorifies science, one in which lectures by theorists like Krauss attract more than one million YouTube viewers and a TED presentation of the “connectome” speculations of Sebastian Seung is a hot ticket while attendance at symphony halls dwindles. The connection between the two, as if the lovers of the classical repertory might not significantly overlap with the viewership of lectures on neuroscience, is the kind of implicit dichotomy assumed throughout “The Science Delusion.”

White says that high culture and science are battling over a shared ground, and that the gain of one means the retreat of the other. And he is adamant that the emergence of a new form of science story­telling, wedded to entertainment outlets like TED Talks, is creating a monster that substitutes flashy wonder for hard thinking and insulates the practice of science from a real-world political context of value decisions, large capital investment and dubious technological offshoots. He is unhappiest when it comes to popular science journalism, which he views mostly as a malodorous brew of gushing prose mixed with a dash of snake oil: “The thing that I find most inscrutable about all of the recent books and essays that have sought to give mechanistic explanations for consciousness, personality, emotions, creativity, the whole human sensorium, is how happy the authors seem about it. They’re nearly giddy with the excitement, and so, for some reason, are many of their readers.”

More here.

Samanth Subramanian in Caravan:

DURING THE 1990S, the ethnic wars in the crumbling Balkans were often ascribed to what the media called “ancient hatreds”, a self-feeding cycle of fighting and vengeance with its roots deep in history: the Serbs were said to have detested the Croats since World War II and the Albanians since 1389. Deriding the theory, the journalist Stephen Schwartz joked that one might as well trace the animosity back 2,000 years, to a raid described by the Roman poet Ovid, in which the Sarmatians, notionally distant ancestors of today’s Slavs, brutally crushed the distant ancestors of today’s Albanians. So tenuous were the extrapolations that the Balkan wars could even be seen as a natural sequel to the millennia-old battle of which Ovid wrote:

Swift, on horseback, the barbarians ride to the attack;
an enemy with horses as numerous as their flying arrows;
and they leave the whole land depopulated.

The theory provided convenient historical ballast for the nightly news, Schwartz argued; even more dangerously, it suggested that the violence was inevitable. Soon after he won the presidency, Bill Clinton read Balkan Ghosts, a Robert Kaplan book that subscribed to the “ancient hatreds” model. From Balkan Ghosts, the Sarajevo journalist Kemal Kurspahic wrote in his 1997 book As Long As Sarajevo Exists, Clinton drew “the comforting thought that nothing much could be done in Bosnia ‘until those folks got tired of killing each other.’” Santayana’s maxim was turned on its head: the Slavs remembered their past too vividly and were thus condemned to repeat it.

Like a show pony, the “ancient hatreds” argument is trotted out of its stable and walked around the paddock during every ethnic conflict. The warring parties themselves are happy to shoehorn their stances into this model, buffing their credentials by claiming to be part of some grander historical purpose. So it was during the civil war in Sri Lanka. Sinhalese nationalists and Buddhist extremists—and these two groups overlapped more often than not—pointed accusing fingers to the past, when armies from Tamil kingdoms in India invaded this peaceful island, their haven of Buddhism. On the other side of the divide, Tamil nationalists contended that many of their ancestors had arrived as merchants and fishermen—perhaps even before Buddhism reached Sri Lanka—and that Sinhalese kings had repeatedly slaughtered Tamil communities and grabbed their land. Living in Sri Lanka, I frequently got the impression that the Sinhalese and the Tamils had fought two wars: the terrestrial one, which began nominally in 1983 and ended in 2009; and an abstract one, which began centuries ago and is not quite finished yet.

Richard Marshall interviews Jennifer Lackey in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re a leading figure in social or collective epistemology. There are various positions one can take under that term, so there’s what’s called a summative and a non-summative approach isn’t there? What’s the difference between these two positions?

JL: The distinction between summative and non-summative approaches in the collective epistemology literature applies to a broad range of phenomena, including group belief, group justification, group knowledge, and group testimony. According to summativism, a group’s state can be understood in the sense that all or some members of the group are, or would be, in that state. So, for instance, on a summative account of group belief, a group’s believing a proposition amounts to all or some members of the group believing that proposition. On such a view of group testimony, a group’s testifying to a proposition means that all or some members of the group would testify to that proposition were the relevant opportunity to arise. For summativists, then, collective states can be understood entirely in terms of the states of individuals.

In contrast, non-summativists claim that a group’s state cannot be understood in this way. Instead, the group itself is the bearer of the state, where this is something over and above, or otherwise distinct from, the states of the individual members. Such views in general are supported by divergence arguments, which purport to establish that phenomena at the group level can diverge from what is happening at the individual level among the group’s members. For instance, the divergence arguments with respect to group belief hold that a group can be properly said to believe a proposition even if not a single one of its members believes it. This might happen, for example, when a department agrees to put forward a candidate as the best applicant for admission to its Ph.D. program, despite the fact that not a single one of its members actually believes this is correct; instead, they all think that this is the candidate who is most likely to be approved by the administration. In such a case, non-summative accounts of group belief take this to be a good reason to accept that the department itself, rather than any particular individual(s), believes this proposition. For non-summativists, then, a new, collective epistemology is needed to understand the states of collective entities.

3:AM: So where are you on this?

JL: There are important differences between my view of group belief and, say, my view of group testimony, but, broadly speaking, much of my work in collective epistemology aims to develop reductionist views of collective phenomena. The central idea is that collective states can be understood entirely in terms of the states of individuals and the relations between them. This does not mean, however, that the states of groups with a particular content are merely the summation of individual states with the same content.

Rebecca Liao in Dissent:

One of the most vibrant intellectual discussions in China this year began with a tweet on Weibo, China’s premier micro-blogging service and anointed online town square. Economist Hua Sheng had just met with Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption czar, charged with fixing the country’s most important political problem. As Sinologist Joseph Fewsmith reported, Hua breathlessly tweeted after the meeting:

I went to the sea [海, an apparent abbreviation for 中南海, the seat of Communist power] to see my old leader. He recommended I read Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution. He believes that a big country like China that is playing such an important role in the world, whether viewed from the perspective of history or the external environment facing it today, will not modernize all that smoothly. The price the Chinese people have paid is still not enough.

Hua’s self-congratulatory reporting on social media would spur the cheapest propaganda campaign the Chinese government has instituted in years—one that is part of a tradition of intellectual suggestion by senior Chinese leaders, usually through sharing current reading lists. Wen Jiabao, China’s previous premier, popularized Marcus Aurelius’s The Meditationsby revealing that he had read it over a hundred times. And since Wang plugged The Old Regime late last year, Tocqueville’s tome has been front and center at the bookstore of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, where China’s future leaders are trained. The curious and ambitious in China are reading it, too, making it one of the country’s best-selling titles in the last few months.

From The New Yorker:

In the new film “Hannah Arendt,” the political theorist’s friendship with the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy gets its first cinematic treatment. The results are not good. McCarthy, played by Janet McTeer, is blowsily silly—and though she could be wicked and subversively funny, McCarthy was far from silly. Nearly every exchange between the two women is about men and love. It is symptomatic of a trend, I think. We are in a moment of unprecedented popular interest in the matter of female friendship, and this has been greeted as a triumph for feminism. But what we get, for all that, is rather flat portraiture: women giggling about crushes before finding real fulfillment in heterosexual romance and the grail of marriage. It’s a shame, because many women hunger for models of intellectual self-confidence, and female friendships can be rich soil for them. McCarthy and Arendt’s “love affair”—as their friends described it—was a union of ferocious minds, but it was hardly unusual. Women talk about ideas among themselves all the time. It would be nice if the culture could catch up.

To give just a sample of the subjects McCarthy and Arendt talked and wrote to each other about: George Eliot, Cartesianism, Eldridge Cleaver, Kant, G. Gordon Liddy, and Sartre. Both women were members of the Partisan Review crowd, who spent much of their time talking about Stalin and Trotsky. It was at a party at an editor’s house that the friendship hit a snag. McCarthy said she felt almost sorry for Hitler; that he seemed to want the citizens of occupied France to like him struck her as ridiculous. It took four years for Arendt, who’d only narrowly evaded Nazi clutches, to forgive the remark. To her, pity for Hitler was not just absurd but offensive. A truce was struck on the Astor Place subway platform, where Arendt approached McCarthy after a meeting and said, “Let’s end this nonsense. We think so much alike.”

More here.

The Eichmann about whom Arendt wrote was the Eichmann on display at the Jerusalem trial. There he seemed—as Simone de Beauvoir had said of the French collaborator Pierre Laval at his trial—commonplace and inconsequential, an unimaginative and feeble little fellow. (Hence the well-remembered phrase about “the banality of evil”—the killers, it seems, looked pretty much like you and me.) But even this Eichmann showed astonishing qualities, never breaking under pressure, never begging forgiveness for his crimes. Eichmann had once said, “I would jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction”; Hannah Arendt dismissed this remark as mere “boasting,” the big talk of a small man. But, asked Lionel Abel in a powerful reply to Arendt, “How many people have ever boasted of having killed five million people?” That kind of boast was hardly the talk of a featureless cog in a bureaucratic machine! As for the single-mindedness with which Eichmann had pursued the goal of mass extermination, surely some profound depravity of intention or monstrousness of thought had to be at its root. No merely banal creature could have conceived or executed so horrible a crime; some version of “radical evil,” far from commonplace, had to be invoked here, and once invoked, it shattered Arendt’s view of Eichmann. Far more persuasive was a remark by Saul Bellow that “banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.”

more from Irving Howe at Dissent here.

A nagging question in Frost criticism in the half-century since the author’s death has been where to place him in the larger narrative of American poetry. There has been no question about the magnitude of his achievement. Realizing “the utmost of ambition,” he lodged more than a few poems “where they will be hard to get rid of.” He ranks high on the short list of great American writers. Moreover, he remains one of the few modern poets in English still read, esteemed, and quoted by all types of people from elementary school kids and chaired professors to journalists and politicians. But after Modernism, popularity itself seems suspicious—an attribute associated with Longfellow and Whittier not Pound and Stevens. Frost’s defenders—from Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, and Louise Bogan in mid-century to such later champions as William Pritchard, Jay Parini, and Mark Richardson—have instinctively supported Frost’s major stature by finding ways to link his work to Modernism. In his controversial speech at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, Trilling praised the poet’s “ultimate radicalism” and “terrifying” view of cosmic emptiness. Viewed by some guests at the Waldorf Astoria banquet as an affront, these judgments were pure praise from the Partisan Review contributor, making the elderly poet sound like Franz Kafka or Albert Camus.

more from Dana Gioia at VQR here.

From Nature:

Researchers have both created and relieved symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in genetically modified mice using a technique that turns brain cells on and off with light, known as optogenetics. The work, by two separate teams, confirms the neural circuits that contribute to the condition and points to treatment targets. It also provides insight into how quickly compulsive behaviours can develop — and how quickly they might be soothed. The results of the studies are published in Science^{1, 2}.

Brain scanning in humans with OCD has pointed to two areas — the orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the eyes, and the striatum, a hub in the middle of the brain — as being involved in the condition's characteristic repetitive and compulsive behaviours. But “in people we have no way of testing cause and effect”, says Susanne Ahmari, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who led one of the studies. It is not clear, for example, whether abnormal brain activity causes the compulsions, or whether the behaviour simply results from the brain trying to hold symptoms at bay by compensating. “There’s been a big debate in the field,” says Satinder Kaur Singh of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies molecules involved in OCD-like disorders but was not involved in the new studies. “What the Ahmari paper shows is that it is causative.”

More here.