substitute: (smartypants)
My high school biology teacher was an original. Passionate about his subject, honest and plain-spoken, and invariably good-natured, he was a hero to me at the time. I was terrible at biology but I loved the ideas and I loved him.

He was a park ranger in the summers, and he took us out on field trips in, well, the fields to find out what our local ecosystem had to offer.

His experience stretched beyond life science. He had been a seminary student and on a serious track to the priesthood at one point, and he was also an expert in several Native American spiritual traditions. He wouldn't eat meat without apologizing to the animal, for example.

One day in class the subject of the occult somehow came up. I'm not sure, but I think it was related to a classmate of mine who scared the pants off herself with a ouija board. Some bit of aleatory coincidence made her think a dead relative was speaking and she flipped. Our teacher looked thoughtful at this and said "I have a story."
"When I was in the seminary, I had a lot of trouble with the idea of the Devil. I couldn't reconcile myself to the idea that an individual, some fallen angel, was permitted to exist and to hate us. And I couldn't wrap my mind around the dogma of evil, especially personified evil. My supervisor told me to fast and meditate about it and I did.

"So I didnt eat much at all, and prayed and meditated for three days. This is difficult and I do not suggest you do it yourself without a good reason and a supervisor. Near the end of the third day, I got up to go into the other room and there was someone sitting in there. He introduced himself as the Devil, and said he'd heard I wanted to know about him. He didn't look evil or have horns or anything. But it was clear somehow that he was the genuine article, you know. Not some prank.

"So I talked with the Devil for a few hours, and he explained his role to me, and why there was evil in the world. He himself didn't know why God permitted him, but he was quite serious about evil and his hatred for everyone. Very calm conversation, but obviously very chilling.

"And then he didn't leave. I hung around wondering what to do, and he just sat there. I realized then that the problem with inviting the Devil in is that he doesn't have to leave unless he wants to. I gave up on getting rid of him and went for a long walk, because that's solved so many problems for me. When I came back there was no Devil, and I had breakfast and went to sleep.

"And yes there is a moral to this story, right? Because there always is with me. Yeah, the moral is that you shouldn't play with things you can't understand or control. As much as it may look like a good idea, you're risking everything. And really it doesn't matter whether the Devil exists or I was hallucinating after all that fasting. In either case I couldn't get him to leave and it was terrifying.

"So, yeah. If the ouija board does that to you, leave it alone."
He had a picture on his wall of the Voyager message plaque, you know the one with the planet map and the humans and the symbols. The right-wing super-fundamentalist creationist smbiology teacher down the hall (yes, I know) got in the room one night and painted it over because it had nakeds on it. He also removed and destroyed the part of the anatomical charts that had genitalia on it. They had a little war, or rather the religioso waged war on my teacher. I think you can guess who won.
substitute: (1967)
Just as I was running out of money (temporarily) because the government thingy was being slow and bureaucratic and dumb, something happens that never, ever happens. I was part of the class in a class action suit against SmithKline Beecham about Paxil. They lied about withdrawal symptoms, essentially.

Based on the (large) amount of money I spent on Paxil over the years, I just got a check for $477.08.

Suck it, Smith and Kline and Beecham. That withdrawal was worth more than $477.08 in pain to me, but I'm glad to have it right now.
substitute: (1967)
Some of my favorite art (books, music, food, all of it) I have hated the first time. Some of it is understandable: the shock of the new. Bitter foods, dissonant music, singers with weird voices, idiosyncratic writers. Other things I still don't know why I hated at first. A partial list is below. Heavy on the pop music because, well, I am heavy on the pop music. But for some reason my taste there is fluid and weird. I love everything below but couldn't stand it at first:

Gang of Four
Cilantro
Joy Division
James Joyce
The Mountain Goats
Bill Hicks
Van Morrison
Prefab Sprout
John Coltrane
Faulkner
Neil Young
Thomas Mann
Sashimi

Part of it is just maturing, I think, and not needing everything to be accessible. But I liked bitter, weird, dissonant, and generally obscure crap starting very young. I can't explain those taste changes. Glad I enjoy all those things now.

The list of things I liked and now despise is shorter, more boring, and pointlessly negative so I won't share. Most of them are pop culture that I liked because of some personal context and then realized was shit, or things I enjoyed because I was immaturer and later found the real version thereof.
substitute: (phrenology head)
[livejournal.com profile] springheel_jack has produced a handy guide for the perplexed. Useful only if the person you're talking to is actually perplexed and not a sociopath, but hey, we can't have everything.

on being clinically depressed: a primer
substitute: (binky)
Two recent topics (list of high school cliques and defining the internet/watercooler news story) resulted in another phenomenon. Certain topics present the nearly irresistable urge to respond personally with an opinion or experience, even if that's not the original intent of the discussion.

In these cases: The mention of teenager social cliques caused almost everyone to deliver their personal clique membership experience: claiming one, resisting them, etc. This accidentally proved my point about the power of that experience well into adulthood. The discussion of bloggable watercooler news stories got a lot of responses opining about the particular story that sparked my interest. In short, a watercooler was formed.

In both cases the general wasn't nearly as attractive as the opportunity to share the personal and specific.

I think I hit the "talk about the weather" organ again. I wonder where that thing is? I'm sure as hell not "above" it; mention the weather and I'll discuss it at length, and I'll bet I'd do the same on the other topics if I hadn't been the one with the less magnetic general questions.

So the next question is; what is the list of those topics? My first guess is that a lot of things about food, sex, and sleep would cause a similar response.
substitute: (lopan)
Fortunately most of it is theoretical and occurs as military exercises rather than actual attacks. But my snark is at a near all-time high.

Example. My brother is in town, and we were talking about scammers and beggars. I related the story of one local addict, the kind of guy who goes from looking pretty much okay because his family has cleaned him up, through increasingly scruffy, to Gone For A While. He has a hunted look and that near-permanent sunburn of the person who has been outside not by choice. Sometimes he just bums cigs, but he usually does the "out of gas" scam, which is a script I have not seen vary in multiple cities and decades:

"Hey, I feel really dumb, can I ask you a question here? I was at a [bachelor party,picnic,church] and didn't pay attention and I ran out of gas! I have to get back to [suburb about 20 miles away where no poor people live] tonight and I don't have my wallet on my. So dumb. Do you have a couple bucks?"

The last time our local guy did this my answer was "This is the third variation on that lie you have told just to me. Did you know that?" He looked surprised and said "Sorry! No, I didn't." and left. So that was kind of snarky and unnecessarily mean, since the poor fucker is a drug addict and kind of doomed. I got my button pushed by the lie and was nasty.

My brother told me in response that he'd been taken in by a young woman who worked this scam at the college where he works. There had been some kind of kampus kop alert about scammers so he reported his misadventure to the cops in case it was someone they were looking for, etc etc. The young policewoman who took the report mocked him to no end, basically calling in the other cops to say hey look at the dumb professor who fell for the scam haw haw haw, on and on. He was pretty upset. My response was that he should have replied:

"That's funny all right. Here's an even better joke. Did you hear the one about the girl who was so dumb she barely made it out of high school and ended up a third-rate rentacop working for the smart people? It's FUCKING HILARIOUS!"

I think I shocked my brother. I certainly shocked myself! Maybe I need to take up punching clowns or something.
substitute: (Default)
More than 40 years ago, my father wrote a short story called "Dr. Pettigott's Face." The eponymous doctor of the story has a theory that pushing the face into happy expressions will make people happy, and has constructed a machine to do this. I remember that for years he had a correspondence with some neuro researcher who was interested in facial expressions because the guy liked the story so much. The title has been a shorthand in our family for people trying to reverse engineer things in weird ways.

The polyvagal theory and some of its implications suggest that there may be a grain of truth in this. The connections between emotion and facial expression are very tight and it's possible that it "goes both ways". This story from the LA Times on Sunday is fascinating:

botox for a better brain? )
substitute: (phrenology head)
Today in a psychotherapy session I was discussing my problems with relationships, and more specifically my lack of intimate relationships. The working theory is that my own emotional life is too intense to communicate to others and that I shut them out in ways I'm not consciously able to control, mostly nonverbal.

This is particularly true if I have an attraction to someone, because my feeling of attraction is tightly coupled with unacceptably strong fear, shame, and self-hatred so that I become exceptionally false and not "present".

Okay, interesting theory. But what's the mechanism here? One theory is that the problem lies in the 10th cranial nerve. This is the vagus nerve, which goes to both the gut and the lungs from the brain. The "polyvagal theory" holds that separate branches of the vagus nerve, when stimulated, produce strong and opposed feelings: either you feel very safe, or not at all safe.

This has implications for a number of problems, including some autistic spectrum disorders, PTSD, panic attacks, and social adjustment problems. If the two systems become, as my therapist puts it, "overcoupled", then it can be impossible to make a serious connection with someone without being overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions. The result is a kind of neural shutdown, which makes people like me seem distant or standoffish when we're feeling exactly the opposite.

Stephen Polger, the originator of the polyvagal theory, has had some promising results at the University of Illinois treating autism with sound. There are also some suggestions and tips for dealing with these problems in this interview with Polger, which is intended for a lay audience. The other information I've found about this so far has been much more technical.

In my own case, since I am not autistic, PTSD, or suffering from panic attacks, the goal is to get the neural function more normal through a combination of neurofeedback, EMDR, somatic therapy, and medication. It's kind of a science project though, since some of these ideas are very new and raw and will undoubtedly be further refined later.
substitute: (phrenology head)
PSYCHOTHERAPY FLASH CARDS

frash

The t-shirts at psychotherapyclothing.com are also reasonably funny but nothing I couldn't make myself. A badly ironed on "emotionally unavailable" is more authentic anyway.
substitute: (burnside)
"Physicians get neither name nor fame by the pricking of wheals or the picking out thistles, or by laying of plaisters to the scratch of a pin; every old woman can do this. But if they would have a name and a fame, if they will have it quickly, they must do some great and desperate cures." —John Bunyan

Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness

Interview with Elliot Valenstein on the History of Lobotomy

Elliot Valenstein's page at umich

The War of the Soups and Sparks, The Discovery of Neurotransmitters and the Dispute Over How Nerves Communicate, by Elliot Valenstein.
substitute: (phrenology head)
Scientific American Mind: Train Your Brain
Mental exercises with neurofeedback may ease symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, epilepsy and depression--and even boost cognition in healthy brains.
substitute: (phrenology head)
Especially when half of the questions make me say "Well sometimes yes and sometimes the opposite!"

INTP - "Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.
Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)
substitute: (me by hils)
I just finished reading Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, which I had begun and read about a third of when it came out and then set aside.

Ted Kaczynski was that odd math-major guy. He had an upbringing in which he couldn't come up to his parents' standards, was teased badly at school and left out, and was miserable a lot. He went to college, where he was a loner and withdrawn. Then he went to grad school and did really well, but wasn't very happy. Then he became a professor of math, and then he moved to nowheresville, and then he started killing people with bombs. Wait, where'd that come in? There are enough tightly-wrapped smart kids, lonely outsiders in college, and crazy mathematicians around who don't turn into terrorists.

Chase's thesis is that Ted was driven into a state of permanent homicidal rage by psychological experiments done at Harvard by Charles Henry Murray. Ted was coaxed into joining a lengthy psychological study as a subject, and it apparently was no fun. For example, participants (who were chosen for their intelligence and sensitivity) were asked to write out a thorough explanation and defense of their philosophy of life, and then called in to a meeting in which a trained and prepared speaker demolished their ideas and attacked them as viciously as possible while they sat in a chair with EEG and blood pressure monitors on them and cameras pointed at them. Other participants in this program are bitter to this day about these experiences.

Murray was clearly a class A weirdo who had a lot of trouble separating his work from his personal life, and who enjoyed power over others way too much. He was also an ex OSS spook with a background in interrogations. Chase makes a lot of the CIA connection, and certainly Murray's friends were dosing hapless victims with LSD and doing other grimy things at this time, and he was part of an academic alliance with intelligence agencies.

Chase was also an undergrad at Harvard around this time, and he spends about 100 pages attacking the school. The elitism, coldness, and anomie of the environment are described in detail. He also dissects the academic dogma of the time, which was despairing in the extreme: existential, tragic, and rigidly structuralist. The Universe was described essentially as a huge machine for grinding up the Soul.

After Harvard, Ted did go around telling people he wanted to move to a remote place and kill a lot of people. He was also full of rage against "The System", but who wasn't? But he didn't participate in any of the Berkeley radicalism even when he was a young professor there in the late sixties. In fact, he left for Nowheresville in 1969.

Chase overstates his case all over the place, as monomaniacs do. Harvard and Murray are demonized to an unbelievable degree, as if poor Ted was a tabula rasa until he stepped inside the gates of Hell and met the Tempter himself. It's pretty clear that Murray's "research" was deeply fucked-up, though. It can't have been good for a hypersensitive and socially withdrawn guy with critical parent issues to be screamed at and belittled over and over again with a bright light shining in his face. And it's significant that this was done in the context of a psychological institute with government ties, part of a big university.

What Ted did later on was make war on industrial society. He wasn't insane by any good definition; he was a terrorist. His stated aim was to bring down the entire structure of computer technology, big government control, the military, and big businesses. He also wanted to kill a Communist but I guess he couldn't find one. He wasn't an environmentalist or a hippie. He was, if anything, a revolutionary anarchist. Chase points out that a lot of his behavior and language seems drawn from a few books, one of which is Joseph Conrad's meditation on anarchist violence The Secret Agent, which is also one of my favorites. Oddly Ted didn't get the message about the pointless, tragic nature of this kind of violence. It reminds me of Tim McVeigh getting inspired by watching Robert DeNiro's heroic A/C repairman blow up government buildings in Brazil, only a bit worse. Ted was highly intelligent and sophisticated about literature.

I'd recommend this book if you're interested in terrorism, psychology, or this case in particular. A chunk of salt is recommended, since Chase is pretty clearly rehashing his own problems with Harvard and the America of 1962; there's far too much generalization about generations and Big Ideas of the Time. I'd also not pay more than a few bucks for it, since it was expanded from a magazine article by dumping in a lot of filler, including an unnecessary forty page history of Western thought.
substitute: (happy helmet)
I decided to do some armchair research on this thing I'm trying. First stop was wikipedia, where a neurofeedback article had been flagged as both "neutrality disputed" and "needs to be cleaned up since May 2005". Uh oh. Sure enough, there are links to Scientology everywhere, and the tone of the article is not only dismissive but actively disparaging. Not very wikipedia. A link is provided to the talk page which is the usual ridiculous holy war involving pro- and anti-neurofeedback parties and of course Scientology.

It was depressing in that "Oh man, there goes that Internet Guy again" way. That guy in this case being [livejournal.com profile] njyoder, a talented and energetic troll who baits feminists and particularly rape awareness organizations.

The actual professional association seems to be pretty sane and know their limits.

New cures bring enthusiasm, messianic prose, The Solution To Everything, cranks, and naysayers. Looking around the web in a first-click way I see all of those in about ten minutes. From my point of view it's worth a try, since it doesn't seem likely to break my brain. At the worst I'll lose $200 a week for a while and then get disgusted. Since I'm already disgusted, here we go.
substitute: (burnside)
The "Mozart Effect", which has been a cultural phenomenon since the 1990s, is horseshit. It followed the same path as every urban legend, but the original study was never replicated, nor was the study about babies. The meta-study looks interesting, as does the researcher.

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Scientists have discredited claims that listening to classical music enhances intelligence, yet this so-called "Mozart Effect" has actually exploded in popularity over the years. So says Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior who has systematically tracked the evolution of this scientific legend. What's more, Heath and his colleague, Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter, found that the Mozart Effect received the most newspaper mentions in those U.S. states with the weakest educational systems—giving tentative support to the previously untested notion that rumors and legends grow in response to public anxiety.

the whole thing was a wash )

My Hitler

Jul. 7th, 2005 02:36 pm
substitute: (me by hils)
  1. My father once had a dream in which he was staying in a Swiss pension. There was a boarding house group from several countries, and as typical in these places meals were communal, all at one table. Shortly after his arrival he discovered that the elderly German gentleman with the mustache was, in fact, Adolf Hitler. Since dream logic was in effect, the problem was not how to kill Hitler, or call the police or the army, or even berate him for his crimes. The question was: how to address him at dinner?

    He couldn't just be "Mr. Hitler"; the guy was a former head of state. "Herr Führer", though, would imply approval of the Third Reich and his dictatorship, which can't be done even at dinner. Finally he figured it out: "Herr Reichskanzler Hitler" [sp?]. Since that was his official elected office, it was the best choice for being introduced or asking the guy to pass the salt.

  2. I once saw a lecture by a psychologist whose field of expertise was the psychology of contagion. This was just a few years into the AIDS epidemic, so it was a topic of current interest. He pointed out that how people think and behave about infection and contagion is related to scientific knowledge, but separate and different. And way stupider. For example, physically handicapped people are treated the way we treat people with an infectious transmittable disease: stay away, don't touch. The mentally handicapped, too. NIMBY arguments against group homes sometimes boil down to "I'm afraid to have this near me", as though one could catch mental retardation or multiple sclerosis from the water supply or at the mall.

    The most fascinating part of the lecture was the discussion of the contagion of clothing. People were asked a series of questions about clothing that had been worn by others. No one wanted to wear clothing that an AIDS patient had worn, even if it had been thoroughly cleaned. Many people didn't want to wear clothing that a handicapped person had worn. And finally, the contagion of evil enters the picture when we're talking about clothing. If some beloved figure like Mother Theresa has worn a sweater, most people responded they'd love to wear it. However, if Adolf Hitler had worn the sweater, no one wanted to wear it. And if the sweater had been worn by Adolf Hitler and then by the Dalai Lama, they still wouldn't wear it. Some kinds of contagion can't be purified.
So anyway that's how I learned that you can turn into Hitler if you sit on the wrong toilet seat, and that you don't want to stay in a hotel with the guy.

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