10 of the Best Memoirs About Mothers
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A very Happy Mother’s Day to all!
Friday Findings
What You See Affects What You Can Do
Classic psychology experiments have demonstrated that our goals can influence what we see. For example, people viewing a slope they will have to climb judge the slope to be steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack than when they are not. In this article Art Markman reports on a study published in the April, 2012, issue of Psychological Science that points in the opposite direction: “that influencing the way people perceive the world can influence how they act on it.” In the study golfers were asked to putt toward a hole that was manipulated with lighting to appear either smaller or larger than it actually was. “When the golf hole appeared large, participants in the study made more putts than when it appeared small.”
Although further study is necessary, these results help to demonstrate that what we have to do can effect how we preceive our environment.
Friends Influence Your Perception of Depression
Researchers from the psychology department at the University of Warwick in the U. K. report that people tend to rate their own level of depression by how depressed their friends and acquaintances feel:
For the study, researchers conducted two experiments and discovered that a person’s judgment of his own depression or anxiety was not mainly predicted by severity of symptoms, but rather by how the person self-ranked himself in comparison with others’ symptoms.
Lead researcher Karen Melrose from the University of Warwick warns that people’s tendency to quantify their degree of depression or anxiety may result in false or missed diagnoses.
Study finds psychopaths have distinct brain structure
Kate Kelland reports in the Baltimore Sun on a study by scientists in the U. K. who scanned the brains of men convicted of murder, rape, and violent assaults. The study provides “the strongest evidence yet that psychopaths have structural abnormalities in their brains”:
The study showed that psychopaths, who are characterized by a lack of empathy, had less grey matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples’ emotions.
The study results raise questions that have implications for both the medical field and the justice system. What kinds of treatments might help people with damaged brains? And does the evidence of a damaged or impaired brain justify an insanity defense?
Our Roaring 20s: ‘The Defining Decade’
Apparently Erik Erikson was right after all: Our 20s are a crucial decade in defining who we become:
In her new book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — And How to Make the Most of Them Now, University of Virginia clinical psychologist Meg Jay argues that those first years of adulthood are the most important time in a young person’s life.
“We know that 80 percent of life’s most defining moments happen by age 35,” says Jay in this interview with NPR. And perhaps the best news is that our 20s can really allow us to outgrow our childhood:
If there’s ever a 10-year period when you’re going to transcend your childhood, it’s going to be the 20-something years … I’ve worked with clients with the saddest family histories, who grew up chanting, “You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends.” And then in their 20s, they transform their lives by picking and creating good families for themselves. On the flip side, I’ve seen 20-somethings who’ve had every advantage, but who blow it and fall very far from where they grew up.
The article provides a link to an excerpt from The Defining Decade.
Psychiatry’s “Bible” Gets an Overhaul: Scientific American
Psychiatry’s “Bible” Gets an Overhaul: Scientific American
The American Psychiatric association (APA) is preparing to issue a new edition of its diagnostic guide for psychiatrists, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in May 2013. The new version will be a radical transformation of the current version:
The APA is now working on the fifth version of the hefty tome, slated for publication in May 2013. Because the DSM-IV was largely similar to its predecessor, the DSM-5 embodies the first substantial change to psychiatric diagnosis in more than 30 years. It introduces guidelines for rating the severity of symptoms that are expected to make diagnoses more precise and to provide a new way to track improvement. The DSM framers are also scrapping certain disorders entirely, such as Asperger’s syndrome, and adding brand-new ones, including binge eating and addiction to gambling.
Scientific American Mind offers an extensive history of the DSM and the controversies raging over the new edition.
Pres. Obama’s Change of Perspective
Obama, explaining to ABC how his position has evolved, noted that his daughters Malia and Sasha have “friends whose parents are same-sex couples. It wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. And frankly that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change of perspective — not wanting to somehow explain to your child why somebody should be treated differently when it comes to the eyes of the law.”
via Obama: Biden comments pushed up same-sex marriage announcement – CNN.com.
Quotation of the Day
“Women’s history has taught us the high cost of complacency, and of failing to make our perspective known. We have labored under the false assumption that if we would just express enough unconditional love, if we would pray and stand fast by morality and principles of right living, then life would flow justly, and peace and high-level wellness would automatically enfold us according to some divine plan. The assumption has proven false; the dangers of the passive stance for the health of society are clear (p. 190).”
—Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer
Quotation of the Day
“writing and reading can allow people to live other lives and to try things out symbolically so that we can make better decisions about what we value and do. There is no guarantee, of course, that reading and writing make people act more wisely. But, writing and reading, by expanding our experience and repertoire of strategies, can provide additional possibilities from which we may choose in order to live and act effectively in specific contexts.”
—Tilly Warnock
Friday Findings
Life Writing: An ethical source of self identity, or painful invasion of privacy?
We are all the main character in our own life story, but many other characters appear in those stories, too. At what point does a particular episode in our life stop being just about us and become the other characters’ story as well? And when that happens, is the episode ours to tell? How will our revelation of the episode affect the other people involved?
At some point all writers of memoir intended for publication—or even for distribution within a limited group such as a family—have to ask themselves such questions. John Eakin, a professor at Indiana University and one of the foremost authorities on autobiography and memoir, recently addressed this issue in the final installment of a speaker series at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University in Indiana on the ethics of life writing:
“Complicating my thinking about this question was my belief that our identities are relational, that is my sense of my self as an individual is a function in no small part in my understanding of my relationships to other people, particularly the near and dear siblings and friends,” Eakin said. “So if that’s the case, if our identities are relational and hence our privacies are shared, where does one life end and another begin?”
Despite such complexities, Eakin pointed out the value of life writing as a tool for self-discovery and identity formation:
“I can suggest three reasons why we engage in life writing. We are trained to do it, it answers a metaphysical need to know our place in the larger scheme of things, and self-narration promotes the well-being of the organisms that we are,” Eakin said.
He called life writing “a step towards preparing for the future, as people must ‘accept rather than disavow the lives that they’ve lived.’”
How To Be Creative
The Wall Street Journal recently published this adapted excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in March.
The image of the ‘creative type’ is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague’s desk might be the key to your next big idea.
Lehrer cites research from the relatively new science of the study of creativity:
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
Read about how inventions like the Post-It Note often come about in the unlikeliest of places and when people aren’t concentrating on a problem that needs solving. Particularly intersting in the list “10 Quick Creativity Hacks” at the end of the article. Also interesting are the many comments from readers.
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The time machine in our mind. The imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time
This isn’t an article. It’s a collection of quotations about and references (some with links) to resources about how and why our brain allows us to use memory to relive our experiences. If that topic interests you, this is a good place to start your research.
The brain… it makes you think. Doesn’t it?
Are we governed by unconscious processes? Neuroscience believes so – but isn’t the human condition more complicated than that? Two experts offer different views.
What makes us the person we are? Does our sense of “my self” refer to our minds, our bodies, or some combination of the two? How does the mass of gray matter within our skulls determine or discover who we are and why we think, feel, and act they way we do?
David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, and Raymond Tallis, former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University [U. K.], here debate questions such as these.
Says Eagleman:
It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3 lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change. Our personality, decision-making, risk-aversion, the capacity to see colours or name animals – all these can change, in very specific ways, when the brain is altered by tumours, strokes, drugs, disease or trauma. As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical.
This clarifies some aspects of our existence while deepening the mystery and the awe of others.
For example, take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. We have discovered that the large majority of the brain’s activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the “me” that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed.
Counters Tallis:
Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”.
This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn.
Of course brain activity is automated and, as you say, runs “under the hood of conscious awareness”, but this doesn’t mean that we are automatons or that we are largely unconscious of the reasons we do things.
Read on to discover some of the newest hypotheses and discoveries from the burgeoning field of neuroscience. And take a look at all the comments this debate generated.
In Memory of Dr. Jeanne Achterberg
Dr. Jeanne Achterberg
About 10 years ago I read the book Woman as Healer because that is a topic I’ve long been interested in. A couple of years later I decided to go back to school to study for a doctorate in humanistic psychology. I had already enrolled at Saybrook before I realized that the author of Woman as Healer,
Jeanne Achterberg, was on the faculty. I worked with her throughout my six years of study, and she chaired my dissertation committee. Jeanne Achterberg died on March 7, 2012. She was a popular and well-known scholar, researcher, and speaker, and she was immediately eulogized by her colleagues (see links below). But I knew her as a teacher—one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in my long academic career.
Jeanne Achterberg made her name in the field of alternative medicine, or mind-body medicine, with the development of the use of guided imagery in the treatment of cancer. In 2001 Time magazine named her one of 100 innovators for this pioneering work. Here are a couple of tributes by her colleagues:
- Marilyn Schlitz of IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences)
- Don Moss, Chair, College of Mind-Body Medicine, Saybrook
Also, her family has set up a tribute page on Facebook.
Jeannie was passionate about her work in promoting the spiritual nature of healing, but she was equally devoted to mentoring students, particularly in their research. Many professors think of their graduate students as extensions of themselves whose main purpose is to further their mentors’ research. But Jeannie did not think that way. She saw her role of mentor as that of guiding students in pursuing the research topics they were interested in. Trained as an experimental psychologist, her first allegiance was always to science. Her approach was to work with students to find a sound methodology appropriate for their research questions. When, at the beginning of my doctoral research, I asked her for some specific direction, she gently refused—not because she wanted to work me as hard as possible, but because she wanted me to discover my own passion within the topic rather than pursuing hers.
The other characteristic that made Jeannie such a good teacher was her own willingness, even eagerness, to learn. She frequently talked about how much she learned from her students. When I wanted to use the developing methodology of narrative inquiry for my dissertation, she initially hesitated. But she gave me the opportunity to demonstrate its soundness, then declared herself convinced and wholeheartedly supported my work. I was truly blessed to be one of the many students who earned their degrees under her direction.
There is a complete list of her publications on her web site. Here are two of my favorites, in addition to Woman as Healer:
- Lightning at the Gate, her memoir of her own experience of illness
- Intentional Healing, an audio program that sums up her life’s work and her belief in the spiritual nature of healing
And in this 15-minute video she discusses transpersonal psychology in advance of her scheduled appearance as a keynote speaker at the Spirituality and Psychology Conference in February, 2012 (you will need to turn the volume all the way up on both the video and your machine):
Heaven must certainly be a much nattier place now that Jeannie has arrived to offer fashion advice.
Quotation: The Writing Life
“I’m conscious of writing as a living, breathing practice, not as something in a textbook or something you do for a grade in a 10-week course. It’s living a life. And particularly for women, it’s living a struggle to claim artistic practice as a viable and socially relevant activity. So as a writer I teach how to live it, how writing and literature change your life.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch
Mt. Hood Community College, Gresham, OR, USA
Read more here.
Friday Findings
Storytelling Animals: 10 Surprising Ways That Story Dominates Our Lives
The Storytelling Animal
Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, offers a list of “10 hidden ways that story saturates our lives”:
- neverland
- dreams
- fantasies
- religion
- song
- video games
- TV commercials
- conspiracy theories
- nonfiction
- life stories
Dream On
Writing for The American Scholar, Priscilla Long discusses dreams:
We dream in part to learn. . . . We dream to incorporate the experiences of the day into long-term memory. . . . We dream to process feelings, most commonly anxiety.
Do our dreams have meaning? she asks:
Dreams help us make art and do science. No wonder, since imagination (like dreaming) works in part by associating unrelated images, memories, ideas.
As to whether dreams mean, well, maybe they don’t. But they do if we think they do. We are, after all, a meaning-making species. Anything we experience is subject to our propensity to make meaning. And that includes our dreams.
Stories from Main Street
Created by the Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program within the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), “Stories from Main Street” is the Smithsonian’s home for stories from rural America. This website is designed to be a place where anyone with an interest in life in America’s small towns and communities can add their own experiences to the archive. . . . Local museums, historical societies, libraries and the public are encouraged to tell the Smithsonian about their unique experiences in America’s small and rural communities and share photographs, recordings and videos to help us all learn what’s special about your town. We want to hear from you!
iBorg: I have become them
In the ocean of ebooks-vs-printed books controversy, this unpretentious little piece by Erica Sadun for The Unofficial Apple Weblog stands out. Read how a recent evening made her realize “I have been assimilated. I am become Borg. I have betrayed the trust of my fellow ex-librarians. . . . I’ve lost the dead-tree itch. I am e-woman.”
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