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The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior--and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage
by Martha Stout
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2007-09-04)
ISBN: 0374229996
EAN: 9780374229993
Dewy Decimal #: 616.897
Hardcover: 240 pages
Edition: 1
Release Date: 2007-09-04
SKU: 08100327
Condition: Very Good Very Good
Comments: Hardback in very good plus condition with no markings except owners name inside front jacket. Dust jacket in like new condition with minor shelf wear. Tight binding and clear crisp text. Very nice book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
On September 11, 2001, the "Fear Switch" in our brains got flicked. How do we turn it off and reclaim our lives? Five years after September 11, we’re still scared. And why not? Terrorists could strike at any moment. Our country is at war. The polar caps are melting. Hurricanes loom. We struggle to control our fear so that we can go about our daily lives. Our national consciousness has been torqued by trauma, in the process transforming our behavior, our expectations, our legal system. In The Myth of Sanity, Martha Stout, who until recently taught at the Harvard Medical School, analyzed how we cope with personal trauma. In her national bestseller The Sociopath Next Door, she showed how to avoid suffering psychological damage at the hands of others. Now, in The Paranoia Switch, she offers a groundbreaking clinical, neuropsychological, and practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds, and to the very biology of our brains. In this timely and essential book, Stout assures us that we can interrupt the cycle of trauma and look forward to a future free of fear only by understanding our own paranoia—and what flips the paranoia switch.
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Customer Reviews
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Switched on
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-10-25
I think the real pleasure in reading this writer comes from hearing what you already know articulated so clearly. In The Paranoia Switch she really crystallised the idea that if our fear of terrorism is about fear of death, there are many threats to life more likely to happen to us - cancer, car crashes, heart disease. In fact, she says, Americans are more likely to be hit by space debris than die in a terrorist attack!?
Here in the UK, the statistic is probably similar, so when we consider the relative cost/threat index - healthy free school meals to avert obesity and poor nutrition would probably save more lives than introducing ID cards to prevent terrorism. But where is the gain for the global military industrial complex in analysis like that?
The Paranoia Switch has a clear ally in Naomi Klein's recent offering The Shock Doctrine. Both books focus on the impact of trauma from national and global events on the individual and societal psyche. And both call on the population to be alert to it happening again.
Klein teaches her readers how to spot self-serving profiteers capitalising on a shell shocked populations at times of crisis, while Stout warns us against the fear-mongers similarly out for their own ends. It isn't hard to conclude that both women are talking about the same people and they share the view that our only defence is to spot them and resist.
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Terror Rewires Our Brains
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-10-16
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
From: www.BasilAndSpice.com
Author & Book Views On A Healthy Life!
Book Review: The Paranoia Swithch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) by Martha Stout, Ph.D.
Do you remember 9/11? Odds are you do. You probably recall exactly what you were doing and where you were when the news of the Twin Towers reached your ears. At the time, I was filling in for my child's elementary school teacher who was home sick. By background, I am a teacher; my concern of course was for the children. After having a quick conference in the hallway, and because details of the attacks were sketchy at 10 AM for those of us without access to current news, the fourth grade instructors decided not to explain what was happening to the pupils, and rather carry on as usual. The kids caught on though. They knew something was up as child after child was called down to the office for "early dismissal." By 1 PM the majority of the student body had been excused, and even I was told that I wasn't needed any longer. Where did we all go? Home--to our television sets.
Psychotherapist Martha Stout, Ph.D., author of The Paranoia Switch, writes that 9/11 officially traumatized nearly all of us. "9/11 grabbed us by the throat like nothing else. It changed us emotionally, behaviorally, spiritually. It caused people of conscience to fear for the future of the whole human world." After researching the issue, Dr. Stout found a Pew Research Center survey which stated that six out of ten men and eight out of ten women felt depressed. The New England Journal of Medicine summarized that within three to five days after the terror plot occurred, "44% of ordinary Americans reported at least one clinical symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms of PTSD include shattered self-confidence, exaggerated startle responses, panic attacks, impaired concentration, nightmares, and dissociative reactions. Many of us, including our children, were affected because we saw the glued-to graphic television coverage either during the actual event or shortly thereafter, over and over. The traumatic event replayed itself continuously in our minds as well.
FEMA asserts that terrorism is used to create fear, get immediate publicity of a cause, and convince citizens that their government is powerless in the prevention of terror. We were frightfully afraid on 9-11. Dr. Stout writes, "Fear is more widely destructive than anything we can be afraid of. Fear makes us do things we would not otherwise do. And fear is contagious."
Has fear, brought on by the terror of 9/11 changed us, permanently? Some studies show that it has. The Endocrine Society released a report stating that women who were pregnant and present during the World Trade Center collapse passed on markers of PTSD to their babies. More recently, Archives of General Psychiatry published a 3-year national study following up the 9/11 attacks, showing that, "Acute stress responses to the 9/11 attacks were associated with a 53% increased incidence of cardiovascular ailments over the 3 subsequent years." Psychologically, we are still being challenged. The terror of 9/11 has rewired our brains.
Dr. Stout believes that, "...for whatever reason, we are hardwired to be most fearful of harm when it threatens to occur maliciously, at the hands of our fellow human beings, and this special variety of fear is the most contagious of all." Together we, as a nation, were scared. Together, we developed a paranoia of the unknown. Do you take a closer look at fellow passengers in the terminal or on the plane? Is international news and its relationship to the United States more of a priority now? Does a sounding alarm evoke a physical response from you? What flips your paranoia switch?
5 Stars
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Paranoia Switch
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-10-08
I am becoming a devotee of Martha Stout's thoroughly readable popular psychology books and it is despite myself that I ploughed through The Paranoia Switch in not much more than 24-hours. I wish I'd had better control because now I've finished it and the joy is passed and it will take so much longer for Stout to write a new one that it did for me to read the last.
I think the real pleasure in reading this writer comes from hearing what you already know articulated so clearly. She really crystallised the idea that if our fear of terrorism is about fear of death, there are many threats to life more likely to happen to us - cancer, car crashes, heart disease. In fact, she says, Americans are more likely to be hit by space debris than die in a terrorist attack!?
Here in the UK, the statistic is probably similar, so when we consider the relative cost/threat index - healthy free school meals to avert obesity and poor nutrition would probably save more lives than introducing ID cards to prevent terrorism. But where is the gain and glamour for the global military industrial complex in analysis like that?
The Paranoia Switch has a clear ally in Naomi Klein's recent offering The Shock Doctrine. Both books focus on the impact of trauma from national and global events on the individual and societal psyche. And both call on the population to be alert to it happening again.
Klein teaches her readers how to spot self-serving profiteers capitalising on a shell shocked populations at times of crisis, while Stout warns us against the fear-mongers similarly out for their own ends. It isn't hard to conclude that both women are talking about the same people and they share the view that our only defence is to spot them and resist.
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Paranoia Switch
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-08-13
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
A book everyone should read. I plan to use excerpts for my high school students as I feel it will teach them how to analyze behavior and feel more confident.
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Enlightening and Informative, Practical Tools for Self-Improvement
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-06-21
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This latest tome from one of my favorite writers gives some incredible insight on the topic of fear. Namely, how it is generated, transmitted, and how it can impact your behavior without you knowing. Dr Stout has over thirty years of practice working with survivors of trauma, and treating them, helping them along the road to recovery. She's pretty much seen it all; children, adults, memory loss, missing time, child abuse, incest, multiple-personalities, and her experience shows in her writing.
The Paranoia Switch deals exclusively with the politics of fear, and how fear-brokers use our own limbic systems against us. The limbic system is a part of the brain that deals with reading and transmitting human emotions. It allows us to comprehend, in a matter of microseconds, the feelings of another human being through body language, expressions, tone of voice and other subtle yet present markers. Stout writes:
Our limbic systems receive and transmit emotional information in wordless neurological "conversations," and within these exchanges, work hard to bring different brains together into similar emotional states.
The neurological process that enables us to sense the emotions of other people is called limbic resonance
It gives us our fundamental ability to empathize, sympathize, and thus share in one another's emotional experience. This is not without it's downside however, without careful self-observation we can easily succumb to powerful emotions of others, such as fear, anger, and hate and allow those emotions to dominate our psyche even though they are coming from an outside source.
This is a powerful phenomenon in mother-child relationships, and very important for parents to be aware of since they can unknowingly transmit negative emotions, such as anxiety, to their children. Stout gives a very good example of this exact phenomenon.
She continues, demonstrating how this phenomenon can effect entire societies, and has effected ours in the recent past. Using Pearl Harbor and the Cold War, as well as 9-11 as examples, she gives point by point analysis of how each event traumatized us as a nation, and thus triggered an internal 'paranoia switch' which temporarily disables rational, critical thought and instead engages our more primitive survival instincts.
For example - how many of you knew Cat Stevens was deported from the United States on Sept 22nd, 2004? I missed it at the time. But was shocked when I discovered his chosen name, Yusuf Islam was listed on a government watch list. They diverted the plane, removed Yusuf, and put him on another back to London on the grounds of 'national security'. Yeah, you read that right: Cat Stevens was deported because he was a threat to national security.
She goes into a brilliant discussion of how our memories are formed, how they are given emotional context, and how we can understand future/present events given our stored history. She also explains how, during trauma, this system short-circuits due to an overload of emotional input and the event doesn't get properly stored. This allows future events that merely resemble the original trauma to suddenly bring back the intense emotional experience that overloaded the brain in the past. A common example she employs is the Vietnam Vet ducking for cover if he hears a firecracker or car backfiring.
She shows us our this 'paranoia switch' can be blamed for the internment of around 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII. McCarthyism is also a phenomenon directly related to our fear of 'commies in our midst', and even though McCarthy himself was exposed as an alcoholic with obvious issues with his sexuality, much damage was wrought from 1950-54 by people who actually believed the nonsense he spouted. People lost their jobs, their reputations, and their dignity because society at large was afraid of commies under the bed and willing to listen to a strong authority in order to protect themselves. Amazing how triggering survival instincts can cause a group of otherwise rational people to listen to a power-craving nut-job.
A Limbic War occurs when a group is traumatized and then individuals seek to use that trauma to push their own agendas. Stout lists the Six Stages of a Limbic War as guidelines for us to keep in mind. They're very enlightening so I'll include them here in brief.
1.)Group Trauma - A limbic war occurs after some form of national catastrophe. Most typically, this event is a war, or a single attack that is abrupt and brutal enough to generate nationwide fear. The disaster can conceivably be a natural one, but natural disasters are less apt to be starting points, since paranoia is less often induced by "acts of God" than by traumatic events brought on by our fellow human beings. Because traumatic memories remain in the brain as incoherent bits of image and sensation that together constitute a neurological trigger - a paranoia switch - the nation that has been traumatized is dangerously reactive to reminders or suggestions of ongoing threat, whether these cues by real, imagined, or contrived.
2.)Fear Brokers - One person or a handful of people use the public's fear to pursue a private agenda. These fear brokers are variously motivated. ...by far the most common motivators are ambition and a desire for power. Usually, regardless of their political affiliation or initial place in society, such individuals can be described as authoritarian, in the straightforward dictionary meaning of that word: "favoring blind submission to authority," or "favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people." Authoritarian fear brokers remind us, frequently and dramatically, of how much danger we are in, whether or not the remaining threat is significant or real.
3.) Scapegoatism - The fear-promoting leader can further heighten the population's anxiety and paranoia by contending that another group or race or people is to be blamed for the crisis.
4.) Cultural Regression - When there is a definite idea of whom to blame, the primitive lust for revenge can crystallize around it. And the idea of a self-righteous vendetta, once it is even whispered of, is a difficult thought for human beings to put away. With all the energy that great fear can generate, the designated out-group is persecuted, or interned, or attacked, and for a time, there is the gratifying sentiment that vengeance is being served.
Typically, encouraging an us-versus-them atmosphere impels a tidal wave of patriotism across the traumatized nation. The new fear-inspired emphasis on national fealty enables the authoritarian leader to divide the population psychologically into two groups: the patriots, who support his authority and his agenda, and the nonpatriots - the traitors, the conspiracy members, the subversives, the cowards - who do not.
Civil Rights are threatened. Humanitarian endeavors atrophy. The arts and literature lose their funding - and their daring. Protected now, intolerance comes out of its hiding places. The limbic war, the emotional manipulation of the people by their own leaders, is in full throttle.
5.) Recognition and Backlash - Of the McCarthy era, the playwright and accused subversive Arthur Miller has reflected, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Fortunately, the evidence is not denied forever. Limbic wars come to an end, and their instigators are eventually deposed. In this stage, protests begin, small and uneasy at the beginning, growing larger and bolder as time goes on.
6.) Regret and Forgetting - As the original trauma-engendered fear begins to ease, often years later one, we have difficulty recalling why we allowed ourselves to be so easily co-opted into an authoritarian agenda. Many of us are left in a state of dissonance and guilt, and this uncomfortable condition promotes forgetting, a return to the internal denial noted by Arthur Miller. Thus, an experience that might have inoculated us against future problems is effectively lost to us, instead.
Her summary above is excellent and can be seen in virtually every trauma we as a society as suffered. Most appropriately, it can be used to describe the current national scene with the Neo-cons at the helm after the tragedy that was 9-11.
Stout continues, and demonstrates how a nation traumatized is similar to a battered-wife. She feels she needs protection (from the original trauma, perhaps child abuse) and so she seeks our a powerful defender (her husband/boyfriend) who will shield her from the evil world. The irony is that she only seeks out a new tormentor and he uses her paranoia switch, installed in childhood, to control her. Eventually, with help, these women can learn to protect themselves, and leave their abusers - however that is not always the case. Stout cites many incidents where women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and encourages us to take the message seriously and apply it to the national level.
The book continues with several anecdotes which are highly useful, but I cannot reproduce them here for lack of space. Given that the reader has already indulged me by reading this far, I'd like to wrap up this review with the Ten Traits of Fear Brokers left to us by Stout, briefly:
1.) Fear brokers speak to us of fear, dangerous people, and frightening situations. When addressing the public, he will raise subjects other than fear. These are often flattering topics, intended to showcase the people's superior bravery and nobility (that is to say, superior to those other groups of people). He may even use humor. But somewhere within virtually every address, there will be several references to danger, and to just how frightened people must not forget to be.
2.) Fear brokers are not limited by the facts; they use alarming "unfacts". Where terrorism is concerned, out-and-out lying may not be required. It is easy enough to fan public fears by giving alarming renditions of terrorist events that might happen in the future, and by speaking in imaginative detail about terrorist events that would have happened had they not been thwarted. When such "unfacts" are delivered dramatically, there is seldom any prosocial motive involved, only the intent to capture an audience and amplify fear.
3.) Fear brokers tend to accuse those who disagree with them of being unpatriotic and/or naive.
4.) Fear brokers look good. ...a scaremonger cannot afford to have shifty eyes or scary teeth, or any other seriously repellent feature... a broker of fear must be attractive. This is because, other factors being equal, and attractive person is perceived as smarter, more honest, and more trustworthy than an unattractive person.
Because we love the familiar, a fear broker who is not a natural head-turner can make himself attractive by looking as much like the people in his constituency as possible.
5.) Fear brokers behave like archetypal parents. They can make us feel the attitudinal equivalent of being patted on the back by a kind authority who tells us that he knows what we have been through, and that he is proud of us for being brave. The scaremonger can act comfortably omnipotent ... and that we must always rely on him. He demands we trust him. If he is a sociopath or, if he is delusional, he may even imply that he is in direct communication with God, who approves of his ambitions and plans.
6.) Fear brokers shame us over sex. A fear politician wishes to be viewed as the moral and literal rule maker where sexuality in concerned. Unlike a good parent, he shames us, and then tries to use that shame to exert control.
Of course, issues pertaining in some way to sexuality - sexual preference, same-sex marriage, birth control, abortion, certain types of medical research - are often discussed politically. The fear politician uses them manipulatively, as a distraction tactic. Matters of sexual morality are inherently divisive and highly emotional, and tend to divert us completely from whatever we had been thinking or discussing before.
7.)In a seeming contradiction, fear brokers praise us for being moral and heroic. In various ways, she or he tells us over and again that we, and only we, can take on anything, succeed at anything, and endure anything, in the service of what we know to be right.
Flattery always involves an intent to manipulate. Straight-forward, moral leaders almost never use extreme flattery. Listen for what are essentially come-on lines, and know that a person with no hidden agenda would not be speaking them.
8.) Fear brokers project personal infallibility. When you are evaluating a fear politician, look for moments when that individual is asked the direct question Do you feel you made a mistake? Invariably, the fear politician's answer will be reducible to one word: No.
9.) Fear brokers are secretive, and certain that other people, too, are keeping dangerous secrets. In general, paranoia is all about secrecy, one's own secrecy and that suspected of other people. The leader who advances cultural paranoia - who, as history demonstrates, may be moderately to seriously paranoid himself - is typically driven to collect information about other people, while at the same time withholding information about himself and his activities.
10.) Fear brokers use language that pulls for primitive affect. For centuries, the word evil, in all the various languages of the world, has been on the lips of fear brokers and also war makers. It is an overwhelmingly powerful tool. In addition to conjuring fear, the concept of good vs evil has the advantages of
reassuring the people that they are on the side of good;
creating a division between "us" and "them" that has no gray areas;
and casting as evil all doubters and dissenters.
Another concept with ancient links to fear is that of revenge. Whether or not the word itself is used, a typical fear broker will communicate the primitively appealing notion that the people should have revenge, and also that they will have revenge, provided they are loyal to him. He may induce still more primitive emotionality by introducing the notion of cowardice. Via a series of nonrational twists, the enemies are cowards, and therefore being cowardly is not just shameful - being cowardly means a person is one of the enemies.
To conclude, Stout gives us several useful facts. Most importantly, is that the odds of us being harmed by terrorists are virtually nill. Much less then our odds of getting cancer, heart disease, or dieing in a car accident. Comparatively it seems almost silly to worry about terrorism, and in point of fact, doing so lets the terrorists accomplish their goal.
She also gives us a few short, poignant clues as to how we can recover our lost sense of safety. One of these includes writing out our 'worst case scenario' in as much detail as we can. Then, we symbolically tear it up and toss it in the garbage, or burn it, allowing us to discard those notions and reclaim our courage.
Overall her book is stunning. It allowed one, such as myself, to understand in scientific terms, why and how our nation has become the caricature it is today. How a noble, and idealistic race of people became paralyzed and twisted by their own biology, and thus it helped alleviate much of my frustration and anti-American angst. It's also a tome of healing, and can help pretty much anyone, who's on the question for knowledge, gain insight and understanding about our world, and why it is the way it is.
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