Commentary on the LA Times story on epidemiological effects of global warming
I stopped by where my husband was watching the Oscars on Sunday night, to see Al Gore start to say --or was it just my wishful thinking?-- that he was going to run for president. I don't know because he didn't say it, it just seemed like he might. I thought I saw him overcome with emotion, or was Gore just joking, as he walked away with someone, whose arm was around Gore. I don't know, it was a brief moment, but I felt so absurd as my eyes filled with tears and I began crying. My husband looked at me strangely, I must have been making this scenario up, but I kept crying. The take-home message to me is that I am perhaps most concerned, involved, passionate about our need to save the planet and save it fast.
Watching Destruction
I have been watching the destruction of our air in the Bay Area since 1966. I wrote some songs about it, I said that we were living with "a big brown smog belt caused by male supremacy" by which I meant our constant need for expansion, to go yet another mile "forward." I am myself an expansionist, I always want to do something new, something different, I fail at strength in the area of simple ordinary "life maintenance." I watched with horror as the air over the S.F.Bay grew darker. In 1967, I could go to the top of Mount Diablo on a clear winter day, and see across the state all the way to the Sierras, and I could even see the far away snowly peaks of Mount Lasses and Mount Shasta. In 1967, when the smog belt over the city was already present, when flying across the country, I could look down from an airplane, and for the most part, our country was not entirely covered with that "big brown smog belt,” it still seemed somewhat local.
Population 1971: The Behavioral Sink
In 1971 I published an article in the SF State Gator, "Population 1971: The Behavioral Sink" discussing the stories of overpopulation in non-human animal species, causing destruction of their local environment, social disruption, failure at reproduction, and species extinction. I was sophomoric in my writing, and highly idealistic in my vision of the difference that women in high political positions might make. But I predicted that as the earth became more heavily populated by our own species, we would be faced with an onslaught of viral epidemics for which we had no developed defenses. When Europe became overpopulated given the technology of the middle ages, they were over run with Plague, a natural way to cut back on population. Disease is a natural mechanism to enforce control of the size of a population. Ten years later we witnessed the emergence of the AIDs epidemic, and I pulled out that old article, shrugged because it was so prophetic and yet I had had no way to do anything about it.
Canaries in the CoalMines
I have lived with a deep belief that our need for growth and expansion was leading directly to conditions that would, in the end, mean species extinction. "Overly dramatic thinking" I would tell myself. "Stop being so pessimistic, stop exaggerating everything.” But I never altered in my "exaggerated" vision of what lay before us. The planet is an ecosystem, a non-linear complex adaptive system that has sensitivity as great as any sensitive human psyche. The near hysterical feelings that inflicted many of us 40 years ago just indicated that we were canaries in the coalmines. The people who have already died in the wake of climate changes and the incredible number of species that have already become extinct are perhaps even more the canaries in the coalmines. The psychological impact of living with the specter of species extinction is unknown, and I'm not ready to go public with the difficulties I had myself, adapting to a vision that was so defeatist. I eventually emerged somewhat stronger and ready to be an environmental warrior, if only I knew where to put my efforts. But I could not throw in with the green agencies springing up everywhere; they seemed to imply there were private solutions. "If only" we would stop driving to the jobs we had to drive to, if we were going to keep the jobs that fed our families. "If only we would stop using paper, that was a necessary piece of our knowledge worker, working tools. "If only" we would personally stop doing anything that added to pollution in our small local environment. "If only" we would stop using foods that grew in the agro-industrial system of food production, and switch to organic foodstuffs.
There are No Private Solutions
It made no sense to me, given the image of the global eco-system, where everything thing is deeply connected. Yes, I could eat "organic" vegetables, but what about the water table, and the farms right next to the organic farms, where pesticides were used copiously, sinking down to the water table, and making the easy trip to the neighboring farms ostensibly free of pesticides. I knew the chemicals used so massively would end up everywhere, from the water table to the rainfall, to the air, and into every one of us, from our local environment to the poles of our planet. And sure enough, the bears in Alaska carry within them the pesticides and toxins that we sought to avoid in that personal local manner. "NO," I knew there were no private solutions. Our largest industries to our smallest organizational units were connected, and until we were able to effect the activities of those larger industrial complexes, until everyone was compelled to do the same things, because they were endorsed by our governing agencies, including our private, commercial and "for profit," organizational entities, we were in grave danger as a species. I followed our demise; we all have followed the signs of global warming as it raced forward through the years, always quietly thinking "there are no private solutions."
Killing Mentation and Global Warming
I thought about trying to vote for women in public office, thinking they might do better. I thought of the work of David Buss from U.Texas. He studied "killing mentation" and found that men think about killing many times, every day. I think women are socialized differently, they don't think about killing all the time, it is not socially sanctioned. We think what we are socialized to think, we are not born thinking about killing, it is not hardwired into our species-specific, psychological mechanisms. The capacity to think of killing, to day-dream of killing, is present and hard wired, however, the fact of killing mentation has to be the byproduct of learning and special environmental conditions. Buss uncovered something urgently important. Men who were socialized to think about killing constantly, were running all those agencies I mention, the governments of the world to most of the Fortune 500, and even many of our non-profit agencies including those devoted to the conservation of the planet. At the lead are people who constantly think of killing.
Modern Warfare and Global Warming
Modern warfare rests entirely on the oil economy. You all know how much oil based energy it take to fly those planes we use to bomb, --over and over, night after night-- the people in the Middle East. The victims of the bombing are not just other men, the warriors of nations. The victims are also the women and children, hiding in their homes in absolute terror. If there is such a thing as unusual trauma, it defines the life of the people who live with nightly bombings over which they are entirely powerless. PTSD takes new meaning in those circumstances and one is reminded of living with the Nazi's in WWII, never knowing when the Gestapo would bang on your door and carry you and your loved ones away to an almost certain death under inhuman conditions. All this contemporary fear-ridden "war against terror" where the opponents of terror may in fact be terrorists, this is all dependent on the oil economy and ever growing global warming and the march to species extinction.
Our Soldiers are also Victims
Our soldiers are also victims, we send our least advantaged young men and women to fight our wars, to live in countries where they are not wanted, to commit acts that are not normal and therefore only feasible when one believes that one is acting for the benefit of one's social group, one's family and one’s nation. Fighting in a war is an act of altruism; it is self-sacrifice for the benefit of your group. Even suicidal acts of "terrorism" are self-sacrificial altruistic actions, with personal death and "the good of the nation" as the only reward. And the net result for everyone is yet another step forward in our march towards species extinction.
The War on Global Warming is the War on Species Extinction
The war on terrorism has to transform to the war on species extinction, and this is the war on global warming. In this, Al Gore is our leader. We voted for him once before, and the trickery built into our constitution made room for our vote to make no difference. I have never before seen a politician who I believed was inherently honest and not out for his own aggrandizement. But I think Al Gore is honest, and ready to lead our war on global warming. We will all sacrifice when the changes that have to occur in our daily lives take place. However, it will not feel like sacrifice when making those changes are mirrored everywhere, and we are all doing it together, not as a private solution, but as a unified nation joined to fight the same “external” enemy, global warming. (See the comments passed on in Seah’s blog, reporting on how we tend to form and solidify friendships based on common enemies or people and things we “don’t like.” http://davidseah.com/?s=my+friend+is+the+enemy+of+the+enemy&submit=search+site
We Need our Leaders
We need the buy-in of our leaders, and we need our leaders to see this battle as the only battle that matters. Fighting global warming will bring ethical changes to our lives, and therefore whatever the difficulties, we will all feel better. Everything is affected by the smallest change in a non-linear complex adaptive system. The biggest change and one that might have a chance of reversing the march to species extinction is to put at the head of our nation, the greatest and bravest warrior that has yet to step forward, in the fight against global warming. I think I cried when I felt that moment that Al Gore might announce to all of us that he is going to run for president, because I thought there might be hope in the future, for me and for my family, my small personal community as well as for my global community. It was perhaps a perfect example of crying at the happy ending. Lets all work for Al Gore as he might lead us away from the pending disaster we are facing.
The following article from the LA Times describes in vivid detail the changes in diseases, the sudden development of new bacterial growth in Alaskan oysters, the appearance of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, malaria and encephalitis on the slopes and valleys rising up to Mount Kenya. If you didn't believe in global warming before, reading this article might change you. If you already knew what we are facing across the planet, you might find this article calming, as it demonstrates the work being done by scientists who are devoting their lives to research that could help Gore and the rest of us, in this war on global warming, destruction of the environment across our planet, and the pending species extinction. To calm myself all those years ago, when recognizing the emerging patterns, I would tell myself “well cockroaches will survive, they might have the right DNA to make it through the climate changes, so life itself will continue on, despite whatever happens to us homo sapiens.” But frankly, that isn’t enough for me, I have higher hopes for our capacities for self-correction.
To see the article from the LA Times, by Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer, follow the link below. However for those of you who don’t want to follow the link, I think its important enough to include the entire article, reprinted beneath the link below.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-disease25feb25,1,3847467,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true
LA Times
Global warming: enough to make you sick
Rising temperatures are redistributing bacteria, insects and plants, exposing people to diseases they'd never encountered before.
By Jia-Rui ChongLA Times
Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2007
CORDOVA, ALASKA - Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.
The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.
But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting - the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.
"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.
As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.
"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak.
The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome subplots in the story of global warming. Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before.
A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change.
The temperature change has been small, about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 150 years, but it has been enough to alter disease patterns across the globe.
In Sweden, fewer winter days below 10 degrees and more summer days above 50 degrees have encouraged the northward movement of ticks, which has coincided with an increase in cases of tick-borne encephalitis since the 1980s.
Researchers have found that poison ivy has grown more potent and lush because of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In Africa, mosquitoes have been slowly inching up the slopes around Mt. Kenya, bringing malaria to high villages that had never been exposed before.
"It's going to get very warm," said Andrew Githeko, a vector biologist who heads the Climate and Human Health Research Unit at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu. "That's going to mean a huge difference to malaria."
Githeko, 49, grew up in the central highlands in a tiny village near the town of Karatina, about 5,700 feet above sea level.
His home was different from most of Africa. The air was damp and chilly. On clear days, he could see the glaciers on Mt. Kenya, the second-highest peak in Africa at 17,058 feet.
When he was a child, lowland diseases like malaria were unknown in Karatina. But perhaps 10 years ago, a smattering of cases began to appear.
He had long ago left his home to study the great plagues of Africa - Rift Valley fever, malaria, cholera and others. The appearance of malaria in the highlands, however, was a mystery worth returning home for.
Githeko dispatched a colleague to collect mosquito larvae in puddles and streams around Mt. Kenya, some as high as 6,300 feet. Tests later identified some of the mosquitoes as Anopheles arabiensis, one of the species that carry malaria.
Githeko's findings, published in 2006, marked the highest A. arabiensis breeding site ever recorded in Kenya and was the first published report of malaria infections in the central highlands, he said.
He knew by watching Mt. Kenya's gradually disappearing glaciers that his world was warming, and that lowland diseases would eventually work their way higher. "But we did not expect this to happen so soon," he said.
Githeko's work has been echoed in a small number of studies around the world.
In 1996, health authorities reported a human case of tick-borne encephalitis in the Czech village of Borova Lada, elevation 3,000 feet. Until then, the Ixodes rinicus tick, which carries the disease, had never been seen above 2,600 feet.
The case caught the attention of Milan Daniel, a parasitologist the Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education in Prague who has been studying the movement of ticks in the Czech Republic for half a century.
He scoured the Sumava and Krkonose mountains and found that the ticks had migrated as high as 4,100 feet largely because of milder autumns over the last two decades, according to a series of studies published over the last four years.
>From 1961 to 2005, the mean temperature in the Krkonose Mountains had increased about 2 1/2 degrees.
"This shift of the ticks," Daniel said, "is clearly connected with climate changes."
According to a landmark United Nations report released this month, global warming has reached a point where even if greenhouse gas emissions could be held stable, the trend would continue for centuries.
The report painted a grim picture of the future - rising sea levels, more intense storms, widespread drought.
Predicting the future of disease, however, has proven difficult because of myriad factors - many of which have little to do with global warming. Diseases move with people, they follow trade routes, they thrive in places with poor sanitation, they develop resistance to medicines, they can blossom during war or economic breakdowns.
"No one's saying global warming is the whole picture here," said Dr. Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. "But it is playing a role. As climate changes, it's projected to play an even greater role."
In a Beltsville, Md., laboratory filled with bathroom-sized aluminum chambers, U.S. Department of Agriculture weed physiologist Lewis Ziska is peering into the future of one of the key components of global warming - rising carbon dioxide levels.
CO2 levels have been on the rise since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago. Today, they are at their highest point in more than 650,000 years.
In the tightly sealed chambers, Ziska re-created pre-industrial conditions by turning down the concentration of carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million. In another box, he simulated the present with 370 parts per million. In a third box, he pumped up the carbon dioxide to 600 parts per million, the estimate for 2050.
Much of Ziska's work has centered on ragweed, a noxious plant that sets off allergy sufferers, such as Ziska himself. The weeds inside the tanks suck up carbon dioxide. "It's like feeding a hungry teenager," he said.
Collecting yellow pollen in plastic bags fitted around the plants, Ziska found that current conditions produced 131% more pollen than pre-industrial conditions. Future conditions produced 320% more.
"For us weed biologists, this is the worst of times and the best of times," he said.
The impact of global warming has not been all bad. Researchers recently found that rising temperatures have helped reduce some diseases related to cold weather. One British study found that the number of children infected with a cold-like virus known as respiratory syncytial virus has been declining with warming temperatures.
Combining meteorological data and emergency room admission rates from 1981 to 2004, physiologist Gavin Donaldson at University College London found each increase of 1.8 degrees clipped three weeks off the end the virus' winter season.
"A small amount of warming can go a long way, as far as changing disease transmission dynamics," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of Global Environmental Health at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Given the gradual pace of warming, there are also some chances to adapt.
After Prince William Sound's Vibrio outbreak in 2004, the state required more oyster testing in some areas. In the last two years, there have been only four cases of Vibrio food poisoning.
Life in Aguiar's remote inlet has largely returned to the way it was before. This winter has been cold. Aguiar, a bear of a man with a riotous beard, huddled inside the houseboat for warmth recently as the temperature outside hovered around 20 degrees. The pale Northern Lights pulsed over the snow-laced Chugach Mountains, and skins of ice grew on the still water.
Come summer, Aguiar will start sending oyster samples to the state. When the temperature hits about 55 degrees, he'll drop his oyster baskets 60 or 100 feet in the water for about 10 days to clear out the bacteria.
It's a solution he can live with in a warming world.
"It's not all evil," he said. "I just don't like to see rapid change."
jia-rui.chong@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-sci-disease25feb25,1,3847467,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Rules of Blogging & The First Blog I Read
The Rules of Blogging and Pseudo Geekdom
I'm just learning the rules of blogging, so if anything I do in terms of quotations, or reprinting stories or parts of articles that I like and I don't do it right, please bare with me. And let me know if anything logistical (or anything for that matter) bothers you. If I'm breaking some blogging rule, it is not by intention but by sheer ignorance. How much I am a pseudo geek became increasingly evident as the past year rolled by. A wannabe geek sort of like the blog title of a blogger whose name I don't remember at the moment (another apology due) who calls her/his blog, a "wannabe GTDer" which I definitely identify with. I not only wish I were a geek instead of a pseudo geek, I wish I were more successful at GTD (again for those of you not yet into productivity as a passionate subject in life, this is in reference to David Allen's methodology presented in his book "Getting Things Done."
I'm so much a pseudo geek and an impulsive scientist that even though I was using my first Mac in 1895, I have never read a software manual, and I haven't found out what the rules are in blogging, and how to be sure I follow them. I've been writing every day since --never mind that-- lets just say way before I had my first Mac, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I was writing to people I knew, boyfriends, colleagues, my analyst, bosses, friends, my children, anyone who I thought might read at least some of what I write. I was not writing for the public, except in my scientific articles and the people who read the journals they appear in are hardly the public at large. Readers of scientific articles are almost always other scientists or students being forced to read that boring style by their teachers. So whatever I wrote, it always seemed rather private and I didn't worry too much about it. Oh I wrote political things that got around, but even there it was in relatively small circles and even if I should have worried about it, I didn't. Now I want to continue addressing my students (hear hear everyone) because if I'm not writing to someone in particular, it has to be a group of some-ones. I think going public might be somewhat daring because I might lose track of whom I'm talking to. In fact I might have no idea who I'm talking to. I wonder if I should do the ad thing, through Google or if that is considered crass. I am sure of one thing, at this age I don't intend to start worrying too much about what people think of me. But I can't stand the idea of hurting someone's feelings, or getting sent to blog hell because I didn’t follow rules I didn't know.
The First Blog I Read: Introducing Steve Pavlina and How to Succeed in 30 Days
I read a great article tonight, or to be more accurate, I reread an article by Steve Pavlina who I is a kind of productivity blogger. Pavlina is what psychologists should be, but unfortunately we don't usually make it. I'm trying to change; I think I'll hand out the Pavlina blog I discuss here, to my Professional Development Seminar this week.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to
The first time I read Pavlina's "30 Days to Success," I really didn't know it was a blog because I didn't know what a blog was, I hadn't heard of it (see, pseudo geekdom, if I knew anything about anything, I should have known what a blog was by 2005). I thought it was an article and I loved it. Rereading it tonight I loved it even more. Pavlina discusses a great tactic for getting yourself to attempt to do some piece of life improvement (personal betterment?) by posing it as a short-term challenge, and not a life-long commitment to something onerous. For example, if you want to become a day person, someone who gets up early with the rest of the world, or if you want to become an avid exerciser, Pavlina recommends you give yourself a thirty day challenge, and nothing more, nothing less. He says that its really hard to overcome inertia and that that first step to quitting smoking, or learning to run, or learning to write a blog, can be overcome by promising yourself that you will do this new "habit" you want to form or "habit" you want to make a thing of the past for only thirty days. Pavlina suggests that new behaviors take about 30 days to become habitual. I am not sure if there is scientific validity to that proposal, it takes most people a lot longer to get over excessive alcohol consumption, or to lose any sizable amount of weight, or to stay on a diet beyond a month or two. But he has a point, namely that if you do something for 30 days as a sort of personal experiment and you find it has a good effect (if it becomes inherently rewarding because it makes you feel good, or feel better), at the end of thirty days you are likely to decide to keep the experiment running for another thirty days, and then, past that, up to 90 days and then it really is a habit.
Pavlina as Superman
Pavlina described how he once promised himself he was going to exercise every day for a year, even when he was sick, and he did it. And then he went on for a few more weeks, and its sounds like he still exercises every day. He definitely eats vegan and got to that through a series of 30-day experiments. Obviously Pavlina's exercising every day for a year speak to a great deal more than his original suggestion to do something for 30 days, and it made me think he was made of steel or something and completely unlike the rest of us mortals.
It reminded me of another blog Pavlina wrote about how to get things done by working efficiently, and he spelled out how he went through college in half the time it normally takes using a large number of mind-numbing but effective tactics. When I read that one I knew he was beyond most people in terms of work and capacity for disciple, and the whole time I was rereading this piece I find encouraging, his unusual prowess was in the back of my mind. "Well maybe that is true for YOU Steve Pavlina, but the rest of us couldn't begin to do that." But maybe its true, we can do things we think we can't do if we make it time-limited. I'm trying to become an early riser (also written about by Pavlina) and I'm taking the thirty-day approach. However, my husband and I just joined Weight Watchers but not by telling ourselves we'd follow "the plan" for thirty days. If we thought we had to discipline ourselves that long, we would never have initiated this new behavior. We're hoping that after a week we might decide to do another week, but that is as far as it goes.
Despite all my reservations and usual "where is the evidence for that, where in the scientific literature have they demonstrated that it takes only 30 days to form a habit?" I think he might be right and I think he was on to positive psychology just as it was hitting the mass media. Everyone knows about breaking difficult tasks into smaller and smaller pieces until you get the job down into such small pieces that you can really begin it, its easy. Maybe Pavlina rather brilliantly applied that to overcoming bad habits and picking up good ones. I'm sure ready to give it a try, and I'll keep everyone posted.
I'm just learning the rules of blogging, so if anything I do in terms of quotations, or reprinting stories or parts of articles that I like and I don't do it right, please bare with me. And let me know if anything logistical (or anything for that matter) bothers you. If I'm breaking some blogging rule, it is not by intention but by sheer ignorance. How much I am a pseudo geek became increasingly evident as the past year rolled by. A wannabe geek sort of like the blog title of a blogger whose name I don't remember at the moment (another apology due) who calls her/his blog, a "wannabe GTDer" which I definitely identify with. I not only wish I were a geek instead of a pseudo geek, I wish I were more successful at GTD (again for those of you not yet into productivity as a passionate subject in life, this is in reference to David Allen's methodology presented in his book "Getting Things Done."
I'm so much a pseudo geek and an impulsive scientist that even though I was using my first Mac in 1895, I have never read a software manual, and I haven't found out what the rules are in blogging, and how to be sure I follow them. I've been writing every day since --never mind that-- lets just say way before I had my first Mac, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I was writing to people I knew, boyfriends, colleagues, my analyst, bosses, friends, my children, anyone who I thought might read at least some of what I write. I was not writing for the public, except in my scientific articles and the people who read the journals they appear in are hardly the public at large. Readers of scientific articles are almost always other scientists or students being forced to read that boring style by their teachers. So whatever I wrote, it always seemed rather private and I didn't worry too much about it. Oh I wrote political things that got around, but even there it was in relatively small circles and even if I should have worried about it, I didn't. Now I want to continue addressing my students (hear hear everyone) because if I'm not writing to someone in particular, it has to be a group of some-ones. I think going public might be somewhat daring because I might lose track of whom I'm talking to. In fact I might have no idea who I'm talking to. I wonder if I should do the ad thing, through Google or if that is considered crass. I am sure of one thing, at this age I don't intend to start worrying too much about what people think of me. But I can't stand the idea of hurting someone's feelings, or getting sent to blog hell because I didn’t follow rules I didn't know.
The First Blog I Read: Introducing Steve Pavlina and How to Succeed in 30 Days
I read a great article tonight, or to be more accurate, I reread an article by Steve Pavlina who I is a kind of productivity blogger. Pavlina is what psychologists should be, but unfortunately we don't usually make it. I'm trying to change; I think I'll hand out the Pavlina blog I discuss here, to my Professional Development Seminar this week.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to
The first time I read Pavlina's "30 Days to Success," I really didn't know it was a blog because I didn't know what a blog was, I hadn't heard of it (see, pseudo geekdom, if I knew anything about anything, I should have known what a blog was by 2005). I thought it was an article and I loved it. Rereading it tonight I loved it even more. Pavlina discusses a great tactic for getting yourself to attempt to do some piece of life improvement (personal betterment?) by posing it as a short-term challenge, and not a life-long commitment to something onerous. For example, if you want to become a day person, someone who gets up early with the rest of the world, or if you want to become an avid exerciser, Pavlina recommends you give yourself a thirty day challenge, and nothing more, nothing less. He says that its really hard to overcome inertia and that that first step to quitting smoking, or learning to run, or learning to write a blog, can be overcome by promising yourself that you will do this new "habit" you want to form or "habit" you want to make a thing of the past for only thirty days. Pavlina suggests that new behaviors take about 30 days to become habitual. I am not sure if there is scientific validity to that proposal, it takes most people a lot longer to get over excessive alcohol consumption, or to lose any sizable amount of weight, or to stay on a diet beyond a month or two. But he has a point, namely that if you do something for 30 days as a sort of personal experiment and you find it has a good effect (if it becomes inherently rewarding because it makes you feel good, or feel better), at the end of thirty days you are likely to decide to keep the experiment running for another thirty days, and then, past that, up to 90 days and then it really is a habit.
Pavlina as Superman
Pavlina described how he once promised himself he was going to exercise every day for a year, even when he was sick, and he did it. And then he went on for a few more weeks, and its sounds like he still exercises every day. He definitely eats vegan and got to that through a series of 30-day experiments. Obviously Pavlina's exercising every day for a year speak to a great deal more than his original suggestion to do something for 30 days, and it made me think he was made of steel or something and completely unlike the rest of us mortals.
It reminded me of another blog Pavlina wrote about how to get things done by working efficiently, and he spelled out how he went through college in half the time it normally takes using a large number of mind-numbing but effective tactics. When I read that one I knew he was beyond most people in terms of work and capacity for disciple, and the whole time I was rereading this piece I find encouraging, his unusual prowess was in the back of my mind. "Well maybe that is true for YOU Steve Pavlina, but the rest of us couldn't begin to do that." But maybe its true, we can do things we think we can't do if we make it time-limited. I'm trying to become an early riser (also written about by Pavlina) and I'm taking the thirty-day approach. However, my husband and I just joined Weight Watchers but not by telling ourselves we'd follow "the plan" for thirty days. If we thought we had to discipline ourselves that long, we would never have initiated this new behavior. We're hoping that after a week we might decide to do another week, but that is as far as it goes.
Despite all my reservations and usual "where is the evidence for that, where in the scientific literature have they demonstrated that it takes only 30 days to form a habit?" I think he might be right and I think he was on to positive psychology just as it was hitting the mass media. Everyone knows about breaking difficult tasks into smaller and smaller pieces until you get the job down into such small pieces that you can really begin it, its easy. Maybe Pavlina rather brilliantly applied that to overcoming bad habits and picking up good ones. I'm sure ready to give it a try, and I'll keep everyone posted.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Introduction and then: Practice Your Personal Kaizen: from Jason Thomas & Lifehacker
My Introduction, Excuses, & Apologies
As I confessed a few days ago, although obliquely, in the past several years I've become a follower of David Allen and the "Getting Things Done" methodology of how to work and how to live one's life, and perhaps even get a few things done along the way. As a rather sloppy kind of person by nature, along with my scientific bent, I always believed that one was either born organized or disorganized, much the way the twins studies tell us that the tendency to neatness (or to messiness as well) is a heritable quality. Twins separated at birth who find one another years later, discover to their surprise, that their twin shares the same proclivities in the neat/messy department of life. And it seems, the neatness or messiness of the enviornment in which they developed was irrelevant to how they turned out on this variant. So I assumed that my proneness to ignore all the things that needed to be put away or otherwise tended to was an expression of my genetically inherited --ok I admit- messiness "by nature." I excused my lack of calm methologies by claiming that my love of fast excitment and discovery just didn't go along with a great sense of organization, this was a gift I failed to have and would have to live without. But then I fell into what some have called "a cult," the world of David Allen and "Getting things Done," inhabited by CEOs of Fortune 500s, and the genius geeks who I so admire and who brought me to GTD. And low and behold, I discoverd that good organization, unlike neatness, is something that is LEARNED, and that anyone can learn. I'm still a novice, and I sure am still messy, but as the Kaizen method goes, we only make small improvement a bit at a time, one thing at a time. Maybe one of these days I'll remember to put my laundry away and I should because my husband does our laundry. We're both packrats, we're both messy, but he is far less lazy than myself. All that aside, this is just to introduce a great article that appeared in Lifehacker.
I understand that the blog world differs from the world of my listservs in which we forward whole articles to one another, and it is well-thought of if you distributed someone else's writing about research findings, no matter who does the reporting. This is probably due to the fact that as scientists we want to ge the latest findings OUT, and if someone forwards a report of our findings that adds to our personal reputation. In fact it often isn't the scientist himself or herself writing the brief report that gets forwarded. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't, but the pride is not in the writing, its in the discovery. However, I've learned that in the world of blogs this is not considered a kind and honoring thing --in other words, the author of this wonderful article that follows, won't get credit because I felt I just had to pass this on to you and I didn't want to chop it up, I wanted those of you who wouldn't follow a lead, to read the whole thing, that is how good I think it is. I think this may be because in the blog world, if I have it right, the honor is in writing, not in being cited, or quoted, or passed on in whole form. Futhermore I've learned, I need to pass on the URL address move obviously, because that does lend status to the original writer. I am trying and trying to make this happen and my pseudo geekiness is now confessed. I can't seem to get the thing here to put the URL in a form that anyone can click on it and get to the original article. So bear with me, I think within 24 hours I'll have this right, but if you happen to read it before I do, I apologize, and this really SHOULD be acknowledgement of the great article below, written by Jason Thomas of Lifehacker. And the URL is right here, even if you can't just click on it and get to it, you can copy and paste it into your browser and not only find Thomas, but also find Lifehacker, both of which are a real treat. Everything that follows except for two small factual additions by me, is all from and by Jason Thomas and Lifehacker.
http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php
by Jason Thomas.
The following article appeared in "Lifehacker" a very cool blog, in November 2006.
QUOTE BEGINS "Practice your Personal Kaizen"
"A Japanese* management strategy called Kaizen roughly translates to "continuous slow improvement." In the corporate world, it's an efficiencyand defect-proofing system often used on factory floors. But Kaizen emphasizes the well-being of the employee, working smarter, not harder and developing best practices so that workers don't have to think. As such, Kaizen is an ideal approach to improve one's personal workflow."
(*Sidenote from LynnOC: Kaizen actually was developed first in the US, during WWII. After the war it was exported to Japan where it really took off, as Japan rebuilt its economy, post WWII, a small fact picked up from an interesting short book about Kaizen --Maurer, R. (2004) One Small Step Can Change Your Life,Workman Publishing Company Inc.
QUOTE CONTINUES "Getting Things Done with Kaizen"
"Getting Things Done** methods work well within the practice of Kaizen. Kaizen would be the overall strategy, and GTD a collection of tactics for process improvement. To apply GTD in a Kaizen way, you might choose a few related ideas from GTD that will help you immediately in areas where you need the mostwork. Then you'd implement one tactic every week for a month. You'd work on that one tactic-- 43 folders, say-- for a week, consciously using it and thinking about it. After a week, you'd have it down to the point where you don't have to think about it anymore. The next week, you'd move on to the next device while continuing to use the one you just mastered."
(** Side note from LynnOC: Getting Things Done --or GTD-- refers to a method of work and life organization developed by leading business and productivity consultant David Allen, and spread throughout the contemporary culture with the publication of his smash-hit book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published first in 2001, Viking Penguin.)
QUOTE CONTINUES "That way, you're continually improving your process, painlessly, without having to interrupt much of your present workflow or take anything new by storm. There's the thing with Kaizen: you have to stick to it. It doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of discipline front loaded, but you have to hold on to each small gain you make. Since each step is a small increment, that's easy enough to do.
Kaizen in practice
To start your own personal Kaizen, sit down and make a list of the areas you want to improve. If you're not sure where you can make your day more efficient, try timing your activities during a representative day. You may be surprised atthe result -- you might be wasting a great deal of time in places that you don't expect. Check out Gina's previously-featured Time Map for a good way to track where your day goes.
Say you find three areas you can streamline: you spend a lot of time processing email, taking phone calls interspersed throughout the day, and writing reports. Say that email is the single greatest source of lost time, disorganization and thrash. You lose them. You forget to respond to them. Every time you read one or respond to one, you need several minutes to find where you were in the report that you were writing. So you should deal with the email problem first. It's fairly easy to tackle, and that's another idea of Kaizen: to take on the low-hanging fruit first. Then you're getting tangible benefits right away that will stand you in good stead while you conquer the more difficult problems later on.
You might introduce a folder flow. You're all email wizards by now, so this is just an example. You might have an inbox and an urgent box. You set up a filter so that all email marked urgent go into the urgent box, and all others sit in the inbox. You set aside five minutes every hour, right before you refill your coffee cup, to deal with the urgent items as quickly as possible-- you want that coffee, right? And twice, right before lunch and before you leave for the day, you clearout the inbox, reading and dealing with all items that weren't marked urgent. Easy and simple, with process improvements and thinking built in.
Kaizen in principle
You want to externalize thinking and book-keeping as much as possible, and you also want them to happen "for free" as much as possible, or as artifacts of other tasks. You also want to build in error-proofing as much as possible. The "urgent" filter is an example: by clearing the "urgent" box, you know that you haven't missed any urgent items. By chunking it together into a small piece of time at the end of every hour, you're cutting down on thrash time, the reorganizing overhead that happens at the beginning and end of every task when you're trying to reorient your brain.
Kaizen also focuses on eliminating waste. On the factory floor, this means wasted movement. Setting up tool stations so that everything is within arm's reach is an easy way of cutting out wasted steps, and iterated over the course of a day, or a month, for two hundred workers, this means greatly increased productivity. It also means less wear and tear for the workers themselves, and
that's good for everyone.
In the office environment, "waste" might refer to wasted brain time. Hemming and hawing to think of what to do with a given email. Having to look up from your report every five minutes to answer an "urgent" email that ends up having to do with someone needing to find a home for his kitty-cat. Across the course of a day, these little interruptions add up.
Standardization is another Kaizen principle. With standardization, you think about what "best practices" are, and you do so in advance. Then you externalize those best practices as much as possible, and you work those practices so that they become automatic. When things get hectic, when you have ten things to get done before tea and they're shelling the trench lines for the third time today, you can just fall back on your habits and follow the procedures that you decided upon during a calmer time.
My Kaizen
I've been adopting one new practice every month. As I got more and more freelance writing assignments, I had to set up a folder pipeline to keep track of that. Folder pipelines include error proofing and memory aids built in so that you don't need to think about them, and if you perform the menial Tetris tasks of moving things from folder to folder as required, they don't take much thought at all. Seconds per day, really. Compare that to time spent looking for documents, deciding if the documents are the right one and wondering whether you already pitched a story to a given editor.
A few months back, I started using GTDTiddlyWiki. It's packed with features, and I've found a number of them that I like very well-- really, it's just a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows. I store lots of data there. I back it up by sending it to my Gmail account. I'm continually tearing apart my system of hyperlinks and reconfiguring them in ways that make more sense, are simpler and easier. It took some time getting used to it, but that single, free HTML document ended up being my killer app, and I would miss it terribly. Now I use it every day, and using it is unconscious. I don't have to think about what I'm going to do with a phone number or a contact name. I don't need to wonder where I wrote that little idea. All that thinking is inbuilt.
Another month, I started using a Hipster PDA. It was very quick to get used to. Kind of like crack in that way. It also solved numerous problems related to forgetfulness, lost slips of paper and clutter.
Kaizen for a better way of life
Kaizen is a system for introducing process improvements. But the most important thing is to use these systems to make your life easier. You can use them to pump out more work, and that's a good thing, but remember that the whole purpose is so that you don't have to work those twelve-hour Fridays.
Organization systems are there to remove hair-tearing and nail-biting and rushed deadlines. They don't have to become a way of life, like that guy sitting next to you who sanitizes his own phone handset with industrial disinfectant before and after he's using it, the one who has different color-coded file totes for each day of the week. He worships that stuff. Those totes aren't just totes, they're totems. It doesn't have to be that way.
Make your improvements small and gentle and you'll stick with them."
http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php
Jason Thomas is a writer and computer professional living in the Twin Cities.
As I confessed a few days ago, although obliquely, in the past several years I've become a follower of David Allen and the "Getting Things Done" methodology of how to work and how to live one's life, and perhaps even get a few things done along the way. As a rather sloppy kind of person by nature, along with my scientific bent, I always believed that one was either born organized or disorganized, much the way the twins studies tell us that the tendency to neatness (or to messiness as well) is a heritable quality. Twins separated at birth who find one another years later, discover to their surprise, that their twin shares the same proclivities in the neat/messy department of life. And it seems, the neatness or messiness of the enviornment in which they developed was irrelevant to how they turned out on this variant. So I assumed that my proneness to ignore all the things that needed to be put away or otherwise tended to was an expression of my genetically inherited --ok I admit- messiness "by nature." I excused my lack of calm methologies by claiming that my love of fast excitment and discovery just didn't go along with a great sense of organization, this was a gift I failed to have and would have to live without. But then I fell into what some have called "a cult," the world of David Allen and "Getting things Done," inhabited by CEOs of Fortune 500s, and the genius geeks who I so admire and who brought me to GTD. And low and behold, I discoverd that good organization, unlike neatness, is something that is LEARNED, and that anyone can learn. I'm still a novice, and I sure am still messy, but as the Kaizen method goes, we only make small improvement a bit at a time, one thing at a time. Maybe one of these days I'll remember to put my laundry away and I should because my husband does our laundry. We're both packrats, we're both messy, but he is far less lazy than myself. All that aside, this is just to introduce a great article that appeared in Lifehacker.
I understand that the blog world differs from the world of my listservs in which we forward whole articles to one another, and it is well-thought of if you distributed someone else's writing about research findings, no matter who does the reporting. This is probably due to the fact that as scientists we want to ge the latest findings OUT, and if someone forwards a report of our findings that adds to our personal reputation. In fact it often isn't the scientist himself or herself writing the brief report that gets forwarded. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't, but the pride is not in the writing, its in the discovery. However, I've learned that in the world of blogs this is not considered a kind and honoring thing --in other words, the author of this wonderful article that follows, won't get credit because I felt I just had to pass this on to you and I didn't want to chop it up, I wanted those of you who wouldn't follow a lead, to read the whole thing, that is how good I think it is. I think this may be because in the blog world, if I have it right, the honor is in writing, not in being cited, or quoted, or passed on in whole form. Futhermore I've learned, I need to pass on the URL address move obviously, because that does lend status to the original writer. I am trying and trying to make this happen and my pseudo geekiness is now confessed. I can't seem to get the thing here to put the URL in a form that anyone can click on it and get to the original article. So bear with me, I think within 24 hours I'll have this right, but if you happen to read it before I do, I apologize, and this really SHOULD be acknowledgement of the great article below, written by Jason Thomas of Lifehacker. And the URL is right here, even if you can't just click on it and get to it, you can copy and paste it into your browser and not only find Thomas, but also find Lifehacker, both of which are a real treat. Everything that follows except for two small factual additions by me, is all from and by Jason Thomas and Lifehacker.
http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php
by Jason Thomas.
The following article appeared in "Lifehacker" a very cool blog, in November 2006.
QUOTE BEGINS "Practice your Personal Kaizen"
"A Japanese* management strategy called Kaizen roughly translates to "continuous slow improvement." In the corporate world, it's an efficiencyand defect-proofing system often used on factory floors. But Kaizen emphasizes the well-being of the employee, working smarter, not harder and developing best practices so that workers don't have to think. As such, Kaizen is an ideal approach to improve one's personal workflow."
(*Sidenote from LynnOC: Kaizen actually was developed first in the US, during WWII. After the war it was exported to Japan where it really took off, as Japan rebuilt its economy, post WWII, a small fact picked up from an interesting short book about Kaizen --Maurer, R. (2004) One Small Step Can Change Your Life,Workman Publishing Company Inc.
QUOTE CONTINUES "Getting Things Done with Kaizen"
"Getting Things Done** methods work well within the practice of Kaizen. Kaizen would be the overall strategy, and GTD a collection of tactics for process improvement. To apply GTD in a Kaizen way, you might choose a few related ideas from GTD that will help you immediately in areas where you need the mostwork. Then you'd implement one tactic every week for a month. You'd work on that one tactic-- 43 folders, say-- for a week, consciously using it and thinking about it. After a week, you'd have it down to the point where you don't have to think about it anymore. The next week, you'd move on to the next device while continuing to use the one you just mastered."
(** Side note from LynnOC: Getting Things Done --or GTD-- refers to a method of work and life organization developed by leading business and productivity consultant David Allen, and spread throughout the contemporary culture with the publication of his smash-hit book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published first in 2001, Viking Penguin.)
QUOTE CONTINUES "That way, you're continually improving your process, painlessly, without having to interrupt much of your present workflow or take anything new by storm. There's the thing with Kaizen: you have to stick to it. It doesn't necessarily require a huge amount of discipline front loaded, but you have to hold on to each small gain you make. Since each step is a small increment, that's easy enough to do.
Kaizen in practice
To start your own personal Kaizen, sit down and make a list of the areas you want to improve. If you're not sure where you can make your day more efficient, try timing your activities during a representative day. You may be surprised atthe result -- you might be wasting a great deal of time in places that you don't expect. Check out Gina's previously-featured Time Map for a good way to track where your day goes.
Say you find three areas you can streamline: you spend a lot of time processing email, taking phone calls interspersed throughout the day, and writing reports. Say that email is the single greatest source of lost time, disorganization and thrash. You lose them. You forget to respond to them. Every time you read one or respond to one, you need several minutes to find where you were in the report that you were writing. So you should deal with the email problem first. It's fairly easy to tackle, and that's another idea of Kaizen: to take on the low-hanging fruit first. Then you're getting tangible benefits right away that will stand you in good stead while you conquer the more difficult problems later on.
You might introduce a folder flow. You're all email wizards by now, so this is just an example. You might have an inbox and an urgent box. You set up a filter so that all email marked urgent go into the urgent box, and all others sit in the inbox. You set aside five minutes every hour, right before you refill your coffee cup, to deal with the urgent items as quickly as possible-- you want that coffee, right? And twice, right before lunch and before you leave for the day, you clearout the inbox, reading and dealing with all items that weren't marked urgent. Easy and simple, with process improvements and thinking built in.
Kaizen in principle
You want to externalize thinking and book-keeping as much as possible, and you also want them to happen "for free" as much as possible, or as artifacts of other tasks. You also want to build in error-proofing as much as possible. The "urgent" filter is an example: by clearing the "urgent" box, you know that you haven't missed any urgent items. By chunking it together into a small piece of time at the end of every hour, you're cutting down on thrash time, the reorganizing overhead that happens at the beginning and end of every task when you're trying to reorient your brain.
Kaizen also focuses on eliminating waste. On the factory floor, this means wasted movement. Setting up tool stations so that everything is within arm's reach is an easy way of cutting out wasted steps, and iterated over the course of a day, or a month, for two hundred workers, this means greatly increased productivity. It also means less wear and tear for the workers themselves, and
that's good for everyone.
In the office environment, "waste" might refer to wasted brain time. Hemming and hawing to think of what to do with a given email. Having to look up from your report every five minutes to answer an "urgent" email that ends up having to do with someone needing to find a home for his kitty-cat. Across the course of a day, these little interruptions add up.
Standardization is another Kaizen principle. With standardization, you think about what "best practices" are, and you do so in advance. Then you externalize those best practices as much as possible, and you work those practices so that they become automatic. When things get hectic, when you have ten things to get done before tea and they're shelling the trench lines for the third time today, you can just fall back on your habits and follow the procedures that you decided upon during a calmer time.
My Kaizen
I've been adopting one new practice every month. As I got more and more freelance writing assignments, I had to set up a folder pipeline to keep track of that. Folder pipelines include error proofing and memory aids built in so that you don't need to think about them, and if you perform the menial Tetris tasks of moving things from folder to folder as required, they don't take much thought at all. Seconds per day, really. Compare that to time spent looking for documents, deciding if the documents are the right one and wondering whether you already pitched a story to a given editor.
A few months back, I started using GTDTiddlyWiki. It's packed with features, and I've found a number of them that I like very well-- really, it's just a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows. I store lots of data there. I back it up by sending it to my Gmail account. I'm continually tearing apart my system of hyperlinks and reconfiguring them in ways that make more sense, are simpler and easier. It took some time getting used to it, but that single, free HTML document ended up being my killer app, and I would miss it terribly. Now I use it every day, and using it is unconscious. I don't have to think about what I'm going to do with a phone number or a contact name. I don't need to wonder where I wrote that little idea. All that thinking is inbuilt.
Another month, I started using a Hipster PDA. It was very quick to get used to. Kind of like crack in that way. It also solved numerous problems related to forgetfulness, lost slips of paper and clutter.
Kaizen for a better way of life
Kaizen is a system for introducing process improvements. But the most important thing is to use these systems to make your life easier. You can use them to pump out more work, and that's a good thing, but remember that the whole purpose is so that you don't have to work those twelve-hour Fridays.
Organization systems are there to remove hair-tearing and nail-biting and rushed deadlines. They don't have to become a way of life, like that guy sitting next to you who sanitizes his own phone handset with industrial disinfectant before and after he's using it, the one who has different color-coded file totes for each day of the week. He worships that stuff. Those totes aren't just totes, they're totems. It doesn't have to be that way.
Make your improvements small and gentle and you'll stick with them."
http://lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php
Jason Thomas is a writer and computer professional living in the Twin Cities.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Learning & the Brain
Teachers & Neuroscientists Coming Together: Excitement, Discovery & Collaboration
I just finished attending a remarkable conference, "Enhancing Cognitions and Emotions for Learning." With over 1400 people attending, many of whom were teachers for grades K-12, the rest of whom were neuroscientists or those in related fields of science like myself, the meetings were conducted with a mood of excitement, discovery and collaboration. The neuroscientists were obviously eager for a dialogue with teachers, as the teachers were with the neuroscientists. From the perspective of the brain researchers, they described needing the real "in the field" perspective and experiences of the teachers, as they felt it would inform and propel their future directions and give meaning to their work, far beyond the laboratory. Likewise the teachers were eager to learn about every project, study, discovery put forth by the scientists, as they were looking for anything that might help them with the problems they confront in the classroom on a daily basis.
Cross-Discipline Atmosphere: The Future of Clinical Training & Practice
The cross-discipline atmosphere and goals of the conference brought to mind our goals in training clinicians --to help our students become avid consumers of research, who then apply it to their practice. The similarity between teachers and clinicians was obvious throughout these meetings, and I hope that in the future the group that put that put the conference together will expand it to more directly appeal to clinicians as well as teachers. An aside, the conference was put on by co-sponsors including scientists and educators from Harvard, Stanford University School of Education, and the Neuroscience Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara. This conference has been put on for 16 seasons, but it has always been held at Harvard. This year it was held both in Cambridge and here in SF at the Marriott at SF Airport. In the following I report on meetings I found most impressive or significantly related to the problems I face, both in my lab and/or in the classroom, although my students are all engaged in doctoral-level training and my Research Assistants are college students or those who recently completed their undergraduate degrees. As a clinician I had already been fairly up-to-date in terms of neuroscience research, however I had never spent such a prolonged and concentrated period applying the new findings in neuroscience to education.
Lessons of Neuroscience & Education: How to Structure a Conference
The conference was organized into sections, with major keynote presentations by well-known neuroscientists and educators taking place in the first half, and at the end of the day. In between these large lectures by scientists, smaller breakout sessions, also delivered by prime educators and scientists and covering related though more specialized topics, made room for those interested in a smaller, more topic-specific format. In this way, the conference mirrored the needs of learners everywhere, that is while learning through a large lecture format, a great deal of time was also scheduled for those who learn best in a smaller, more targeted format. In addition, throughout, there was time allotted for audience participation through question and answer periods either immediately following a talk, or in a panel discussion following several talks, tying the talks together.
The Essence of the Conference
In the following, I discuss the introduction to one of the plenary speakers, that was perhaps most salient to me in my role as an educator and scientist. Overall, the fundamental message of the conference was something we based our PsyD program upon, namely that students learn best in the context of close relationships and meaningful activity. Lecture after lecture drove home the point that we can no longer speak of something being primarily "cognitive" or primarily "emotional" but instead, we need as a basis a conceptual understanding of the brain as a whole package, in which cognition and emotion are entirely integrated, and neither one can exist in isolation from the other. I recently developed an online course, "Advances in the Cognitive and Affective basis of Behavior" and in the process it became clear to me that we can no longer speak of cognition and emotion as separate entities or constructs. There is no cognition without emotion, and no emotion without the structure of cognition, no matter what the age or state of the learner. As neuroscience has increasingly influenced the two ostensibly separate disciplines, they have joined completely, as the brain is fundamentally a unified, interrelated constellation of functions, and the important questions are no longer "Where is the area for X?" or "Where is the area for Y?" Instead we are asking: Why is a given function operating where and how it does? What interrelated functions are occurring? There are differing structures and plans for different neurons, and in the end, a neuron serves multiple functions.
Bottom Line the Brain is Social
We are only beginning to understand how complex and multifaceted our neural apparatus is, and perhaps most important, absolutely everything about our brains is, bottom line, social. Thus, today we know that not only can cognitive and emotion branches of psychological science not be disconnected, but social psychology is always a part of the package. Therefore, in educating our children, adolescents and adult learners, and in conducting any kind of psychological science, the link to success is understanding and integrating at every moment and every level, the primacy of the social brain. This reminded me of an article some years ago in the American Psychologist, The Greening of Relationship Science. The author (whose name escapes me for the moment) was prophetic in declaring the future of our field is found in human relationships.
Introduction by Kosik: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Practice
Taking Neuorscience to the "Bedside"
A striking presentation was not a "talk" per se, but the "opening remarks" by Kenneth Kosik, M.D., from UC Santa Barbara. In this introduction to Gabrieli, Kosik spoke to the overlap in "learning and memory" that brought cognitive scientists together with teachers/educators. Please understand that I am not reporting verbatim here, but putting my own spin on this, and perhaps putting words into his mouth, but only in the interest of conveying what I think he was meaning. He spoke of two cultures meshing, be it physicians and scientists, or in the case of this conference, teachers and scientists. He noted that this time in history is "translational" in that we are taking cognitive science to the "bedside," speaking in the medical analogy. He said that the conference serves to catalyze the issue, the link between neuroscience and teaching.
The Centrality of Single-Case Observation and Narrative
He noted that in medicine some of the greatest advances have occurred in the wake of simple observations of single cases, and the narratives told by patients and physicians. He noted that likewise, in education, so much of what is needed and what is happening begins with single-case classroom observations and narratives told by teachers and students. However, he suggested, it is often believed --and is, indeed, within reason-- that in order to have "proof" of processes and to further develop our understanding of phenomenon, we need to move on to larger numbers and to statistically significant correlations. Here, he commented, the cultures sometimes have difficulty getting together, and the problem is one of method. In education he noted, it is hard to rely on correlations, one has to return to close observation. He pointed out that in other branches of science and social science, for example meteorology and anthropology, knowledge was gained by way of single case observation as the primary method. To further our knowledge in multiple areas, we need massive amounts of single case observation, and he suggested that the field of education is in the perfect position to conduct exactly that, massive amounts of data collection.
Differences in Methods and Time Scale: Problems in the Classroom & in Neuroscience
This Kosik notes, is a problem of time scale, and how to approach problems in the classroom with the addition of neuroscience methods. He pointed out that neuroscience itself has made its greatest advances based on initial single-case observations, for example, the split brain cases. It struck me as he spoke how very true that is; in fact we all learned neuroscience through stories of specific cases or types of cases. We learned through observations of epileptic patients whose corpus callusom, the bundle of axons that connects the two hemispheres, had been severed in the hopes of preventing seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to another. While the treatment in some cases controlled the spread of seizures, it leaves patients with brains whose interconnections between hemispheres had been severed. These cases have allowed us to learn what functions are unable to happen when the hemispheres can no longer communicate with one another. We learned the special functions of the hemispheres, though observations of these single case split-brain epileptic patients. And we all learned neuroscience through the story of Phineas Gage, whose whole personality changed when a tamping iron accidentally went through his frontal lobes and he transformed from a pleasant well mannered man, into a difficult and unpleasant character. Another famous single case is H.M., a patient who, again in a treatment for epilepsy, underwent a surgery that left him with severe anterograde amnesia and is completely unable to commit new events to long-term memory. Phineas Gage, H.M., and split-brain patients are all "single cases" who have changed the state of our knowledge and in differing way have formed the foundation of modern neuroscience.
Hope for the Future: The Teaching School
Kosik went on to describe his hope for the future of the "teaching school" where researchers and teachers work hand in hand all day long, one informing the other (rather like the hemispheres of our intact brains). He went back to the time scale distinctions, and described the plight of the child who has done badly in a paper. It is not a simple matter for him, it is not such a time-limited disaster. His failure at a school task goes on and on, time moves slowly to the child in the agony of failure. It is hour-to-hour and day-to-day for all of our real world cases. The child has to tell his friends and he faces that humiliation. Next he has to tell his parents of his failure, and see the look of disappointment move across their faces. What is happening to that child, minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment? This is the single case observation that science has to address, that we all have to address together. We are now speaking of "personalized medicine" as we increasingly become aware of how a drug works on an individual is related to his genetics, his unique biochemistry. We need to be moving into personalized teaching as much as we are into personalized medicine. Only as we gain more detailed information from our classrooms, will we achieve more in research. This message from Kosik, which I elaborated upon some for purpose of description of his message, was perhaps for me one of the most compelling in the whole conference, and this occurred in the first half hour of the first day of these remarkable meetings.
A Personal Afterthought: What it Means to Me as a Scientist
I am still thinking about the interactions between single case observation and large number quantitative studies. I began my academic life in anthropology and sociology, and so I have never understood the need that some have to turn narrative science into quantitative methods, no matter how awkward and sometimes even useless. Single case observations in my own research have led every time to later quantitative hypothesis testing. But in order to have meaning, the real story begins and returns to the single case observation, whether the case is a child in school or at home, a couple dealing with a difficult child with ADHD, a whole extended family, a class room, a community. As a scientist I have had no interest in turning my interview studies into quantitative grounded theory something. The interviews themselves, read over and over, provide themes and observations about how the world works, and then I can devise a quantitative study based on some small detail observed in the world.
A Case of Philosophical Confusion
Another thing that has baffled me is why so many seem to link narrative and observational studies with postmodern philosophy, in which everything is "subjective." Of course everything IS subjective in one way or another, however observational studies are no less empirical than are statistically based correlational studies, or statistically based laboratory studies. I interpret "empirical" to mean "in the real physical world." When I am engaged in an interview study, I am no less a scientist than when I am analyzing data based on larger numbers. I don't understand the connection to post-modern analysis, with the interview studies that I conduct with so much pleasure. (This is just my personal commentary, no one needs to agree with any of it, and if someone can explain why narrative has come to be so associated with "post-modern" philosophy, I sure wish they would share it with me. Kosik did not move into this more philosophical realm, his message ended with the report above).
I just finished attending a remarkable conference, "Enhancing Cognitions and Emotions for Learning." With over 1400 people attending, many of whom were teachers for grades K-12, the rest of whom were neuroscientists or those in related fields of science like myself, the meetings were conducted with a mood of excitement, discovery and collaboration. The neuroscientists were obviously eager for a dialogue with teachers, as the teachers were with the neuroscientists. From the perspective of the brain researchers, they described needing the real "in the field" perspective and experiences of the teachers, as they felt it would inform and propel their future directions and give meaning to their work, far beyond the laboratory. Likewise the teachers were eager to learn about every project, study, discovery put forth by the scientists, as they were looking for anything that might help them with the problems they confront in the classroom on a daily basis.
Cross-Discipline Atmosphere: The Future of Clinical Training & Practice
The cross-discipline atmosphere and goals of the conference brought to mind our goals in training clinicians --to help our students become avid consumers of research, who then apply it to their practice. The similarity between teachers and clinicians was obvious throughout these meetings, and I hope that in the future the group that put that put the conference together will expand it to more directly appeal to clinicians as well as teachers. An aside, the conference was put on by co-sponsors including scientists and educators from Harvard, Stanford University School of Education, and the Neuroscience Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara. This conference has been put on for 16 seasons, but it has always been held at Harvard. This year it was held both in Cambridge and here in SF at the Marriott at SF Airport. In the following I report on meetings I found most impressive or significantly related to the problems I face, both in my lab and/or in the classroom, although my students are all engaged in doctoral-level training and my Research Assistants are college students or those who recently completed their undergraduate degrees. As a clinician I had already been fairly up-to-date in terms of neuroscience research, however I had never spent such a prolonged and concentrated period applying the new findings in neuroscience to education.
Lessons of Neuroscience & Education: How to Structure a Conference
The conference was organized into sections, with major keynote presentations by well-known neuroscientists and educators taking place in the first half, and at the end of the day. In between these large lectures by scientists, smaller breakout sessions, also delivered by prime educators and scientists and covering related though more specialized topics, made room for those interested in a smaller, more topic-specific format. In this way, the conference mirrored the needs of learners everywhere, that is while learning through a large lecture format, a great deal of time was also scheduled for those who learn best in a smaller, more targeted format. In addition, throughout, there was time allotted for audience participation through question and answer periods either immediately following a talk, or in a panel discussion following several talks, tying the talks together.
The Essence of the Conference
In the following, I discuss the introduction to one of the plenary speakers, that was perhaps most salient to me in my role as an educator and scientist. Overall, the fundamental message of the conference was something we based our PsyD program upon, namely that students learn best in the context of close relationships and meaningful activity. Lecture after lecture drove home the point that we can no longer speak of something being primarily "cognitive" or primarily "emotional" but instead, we need as a basis a conceptual understanding of the brain as a whole package, in which cognition and emotion are entirely integrated, and neither one can exist in isolation from the other. I recently developed an online course, "Advances in the Cognitive and Affective basis of Behavior" and in the process it became clear to me that we can no longer speak of cognition and emotion as separate entities or constructs. There is no cognition without emotion, and no emotion without the structure of cognition, no matter what the age or state of the learner. As neuroscience has increasingly influenced the two ostensibly separate disciplines, they have joined completely, as the brain is fundamentally a unified, interrelated constellation of functions, and the important questions are no longer "Where is the area for X?" or "Where is the area for Y?" Instead we are asking: Why is a given function operating where and how it does? What interrelated functions are occurring? There are differing structures and plans for different neurons, and in the end, a neuron serves multiple functions.
Bottom Line the Brain is Social
We are only beginning to understand how complex and multifaceted our neural apparatus is, and perhaps most important, absolutely everything about our brains is, bottom line, social. Thus, today we know that not only can cognitive and emotion branches of psychological science not be disconnected, but social psychology is always a part of the package. Therefore, in educating our children, adolescents and adult learners, and in conducting any kind of psychological science, the link to success is understanding and integrating at every moment and every level, the primacy of the social brain. This reminded me of an article some years ago in the American Psychologist, The Greening of Relationship Science. The author (whose name escapes me for the moment) was prophetic in declaring the future of our field is found in human relationships.
Introduction by Kosik: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Practice
Taking Neuorscience to the "Bedside"
A striking presentation was not a "talk" per se, but the "opening remarks" by Kenneth Kosik, M.D., from UC Santa Barbara. In this introduction to Gabrieli, Kosik spoke to the overlap in "learning and memory" that brought cognitive scientists together with teachers/educators. Please understand that I am not reporting verbatim here, but putting my own spin on this, and perhaps putting words into his mouth, but only in the interest of conveying what I think he was meaning. He spoke of two cultures meshing, be it physicians and scientists, or in the case of this conference, teachers and scientists. He noted that this time in history is "translational" in that we are taking cognitive science to the "bedside," speaking in the medical analogy. He said that the conference serves to catalyze the issue, the link between neuroscience and teaching.
The Centrality of Single-Case Observation and Narrative
He noted that in medicine some of the greatest advances have occurred in the wake of simple observations of single cases, and the narratives told by patients and physicians. He noted that likewise, in education, so much of what is needed and what is happening begins with single-case classroom observations and narratives told by teachers and students. However, he suggested, it is often believed --and is, indeed, within reason-- that in order to have "proof" of processes and to further develop our understanding of phenomenon, we need to move on to larger numbers and to statistically significant correlations. Here, he commented, the cultures sometimes have difficulty getting together, and the problem is one of method. In education he noted, it is hard to rely on correlations, one has to return to close observation. He pointed out that in other branches of science and social science, for example meteorology and anthropology, knowledge was gained by way of single case observation as the primary method. To further our knowledge in multiple areas, we need massive amounts of single case observation, and he suggested that the field of education is in the perfect position to conduct exactly that, massive amounts of data collection.
Differences in Methods and Time Scale: Problems in the Classroom & in Neuroscience
This Kosik notes, is a problem of time scale, and how to approach problems in the classroom with the addition of neuroscience methods. He pointed out that neuroscience itself has made its greatest advances based on initial single-case observations, for example, the split brain cases. It struck me as he spoke how very true that is; in fact we all learned neuroscience through stories of specific cases or types of cases. We learned through observations of epileptic patients whose corpus callusom, the bundle of axons that connects the two hemispheres, had been severed in the hopes of preventing seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to another. While the treatment in some cases controlled the spread of seizures, it leaves patients with brains whose interconnections between hemispheres had been severed. These cases have allowed us to learn what functions are unable to happen when the hemispheres can no longer communicate with one another. We learned the special functions of the hemispheres, though observations of these single case split-brain epileptic patients. And we all learned neuroscience through the story of Phineas Gage, whose whole personality changed when a tamping iron accidentally went through his frontal lobes and he transformed from a pleasant well mannered man, into a difficult and unpleasant character. Another famous single case is H.M., a patient who, again in a treatment for epilepsy, underwent a surgery that left him with severe anterograde amnesia and is completely unable to commit new events to long-term memory. Phineas Gage, H.M., and split-brain patients are all "single cases" who have changed the state of our knowledge and in differing way have formed the foundation of modern neuroscience.
Hope for the Future: The Teaching School
Kosik went on to describe his hope for the future of the "teaching school" where researchers and teachers work hand in hand all day long, one informing the other (rather like the hemispheres of our intact brains). He went back to the time scale distinctions, and described the plight of the child who has done badly in a paper. It is not a simple matter for him, it is not such a time-limited disaster. His failure at a school task goes on and on, time moves slowly to the child in the agony of failure. It is hour-to-hour and day-to-day for all of our real world cases. The child has to tell his friends and he faces that humiliation. Next he has to tell his parents of his failure, and see the look of disappointment move across their faces. What is happening to that child, minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment? This is the single case observation that science has to address, that we all have to address together. We are now speaking of "personalized medicine" as we increasingly become aware of how a drug works on an individual is related to his genetics, his unique biochemistry. We need to be moving into personalized teaching as much as we are into personalized medicine. Only as we gain more detailed information from our classrooms, will we achieve more in research. This message from Kosik, which I elaborated upon some for purpose of description of his message, was perhaps for me one of the most compelling in the whole conference, and this occurred in the first half hour of the first day of these remarkable meetings.
A Personal Afterthought: What it Means to Me as a Scientist
I am still thinking about the interactions between single case observation and large number quantitative studies. I began my academic life in anthropology and sociology, and so I have never understood the need that some have to turn narrative science into quantitative methods, no matter how awkward and sometimes even useless. Single case observations in my own research have led every time to later quantitative hypothesis testing. But in order to have meaning, the real story begins and returns to the single case observation, whether the case is a child in school or at home, a couple dealing with a difficult child with ADHD, a whole extended family, a class room, a community. As a scientist I have had no interest in turning my interview studies into quantitative grounded theory something. The interviews themselves, read over and over, provide themes and observations about how the world works, and then I can devise a quantitative study based on some small detail observed in the world.
A Case of Philosophical Confusion
Another thing that has baffled me is why so many seem to link narrative and observational studies with postmodern philosophy, in which everything is "subjective." Of course everything IS subjective in one way or another, however observational studies are no less empirical than are statistically based correlational studies, or statistically based laboratory studies. I interpret "empirical" to mean "in the real physical world." When I am engaged in an interview study, I am no less a scientist than when I am analyzing data based on larger numbers. I don't understand the connection to post-modern analysis, with the interview studies that I conduct with so much pleasure. (This is just my personal commentary, no one needs to agree with any of it, and if someone can explain why narrative has come to be so associated with "post-modern" philosophy, I sure wish they would share it with me. Kosik did not move into this more philosophical realm, his message ended with the report above).
Saturday, February 17, 2007
How do you get referrals? How do you get new clients? How do you build your private practice?
Matt Cornell put out this wonderful question on "linkedin," I heard it somewhere (Seah? Mann?) and felt like answering because its something my students are asking me weekly. This is a wonderful question for those aiming to build a private practice when they graduate, or at some point in the future (or present). Basically, people find me because of my research and publications, or by word of mouth. I'm usually not looking for clients, as I am always trying to get more time for my research and writing, which is slightly disconnected from my consulting/psychotherapy practice, (or what I think of as "executive coaching"), i.e., my private practice. People may arrive to see me with an Axis I disorder (for those of you who are not psychologists, Axis I disorders are clinical "diagnoses") and when I do my job right, and the illness is not too severe, they recover from that fairly quickly, and then I am in essense, a coach, mentor, professional supporter and "professional friend." Therefore, the way I think of attracting clients might include principles that apply to any endeavors related to consulting or to providing service.
Our business is highly competitive and what people do is always private, by law. I find referrals often come from other clients, rather than from colleagues who are in essence, in competition for business. I was and still am, very selective. I only see people who have been referred by people I know (in one way or another). I don't accept referrals who are very close to my clients. Each client deserves to have me without sharing me with their family members or close friends. I help my clients find psychotherapists or coaches for their friends and family. I tell them I will be their "psychotherapy broker."
I never take on new clients from the programs in which I formally teach, although my work as a clinician is quite like my work as an academic, a professor, an educator. Students and patients/clients are very vulnerable in terms of ranking and power position, and so their protection from any kind of exploitation is a first consideration (and that would include by me, or any other formal teacher/professor, etc.). My students are always asking "how can I start a private practice?" and my answer is simple.
Find out what theoretical perspective seems best suited to YOU. Join the "groups" following that perspective, go to all of their events, their Case Conferences, classes. Hire a consultant from that theoretical perspective, who seems both collaborative and well-known to the people in that group. Show up at everything, make friends with the psychotherapists there. Present cases at Case Conferences, disguising any identifying details, in order to protect your clients/patients/consultees. Become a person who people know. Have integrity in everything you do. Don't discuss patients without disguising any identifiable details.
Figure out and then define your natural "specialty" meaning, ask yourself: 'What do I love to read about when no one is looking?" Your specialty should be connected to your passion, be it explicit or implicit. Keep up to date with psychological science, bring it to your patients. On an ongoing basis, offer up the results of research findings, that are relevant to their problems or needs. That's why people find it useful to hire a psychologist instead of a counselor. Counselors are excellent, but when someone wants to have their own information worker, someone who keeps up with massive amounts of research coming out all the time (and psychologists are able to do that more easily today, by joining listservs that provide daily abstracts of the latest findings from multiple areas of psychological science, psychiatry). Be known for being kind, and smart. Become a great diagnostician. Be able to spot physical problems that may be confused with psychological problems. Tell clients what you think, or what you think that is relevant to their problems and concerns, and that may help them.
Think frequently about your current clients, be their secret weapon in life, helping them to fight their guilt, helping them to problem solve. Start writing, do research (either empirical studies, or library research, etc.).
"Find out what you patients need and give it to them."
(Hal Sampson said that to me, and it stuck.)
"It takes a person to cure a person" Joe Weiss said. He was right.
"We make the rules" Joe Weiss said, meaning that within every relationship, there are rules established, a frame established. You and your clients make the frame for your relationship, the rules that guide you both as you work together. Never exploit a client, but work with each client to find out what frame is most helpful for them. Sometimes a depressed client needs to talk to me every day, once or twice a week sessions are important, but don't take the place of knowing that I will be checking in with them every day, so they never have too go too long feeling anxious, or down, without sharing it with me. This makes them feel far more secure. While "we make the rules" in general, one rule is universal. Never have sex with your client. This is a rule that must be kept, always. No client really wants to have sex with his or her therapist. Clients do not want to have sex with their parents either. If they think they do, they are "testing" you, to find out if you are going to exploit them. If clients believe that they wanted to have sex with a parent, it is only because they believed that they could make a parent (usually a depressed parent) come alive by having a sexual relationship. It is because they believe (erroneously) that sex is the only way to help a parent feel better. If a client wants to do something you deem "inappropriate" they have to be testing you. Clients want to get better, they do not want to engage in self-destructive behaviors.
Perhaps the most important thing -- be a clinician who "goes the extra mile" and does everything possible to help their patients/clients. Leave no stone unturned, pay close attention to what works with each client, we are each unique, as much as we are all alike. Provide limbic regulation for your clients, hope that they always leave an hour with you feeling stronger than when they arrived. Yes, go the extra mile, whatever that means in each case, go the extra mile. Be a real person, don't try to hide yourself behind a professional facade, and go the extra mile. You will have clients and a successful practice.
Go the extra mile and clients will come to you. Smile and go the extra mile, love your clients, as a parent, mentor, advisor, and healer. Don't take on too many clients, and don't take on too few. Be real, write, study, conduct research, be a true psychologist bringing to your clients the thing that no one else can bring to them, be their researcher, their library, their expert who goes out and finds the information they need. That is our job, be outstanding at this job and you will have as many clients as you want or, as many as you are comfortable with. Establish a real "working alliance" with each client, be "co-scientists" together, working on their problems. Don't be afraid to encourage your clients. Adler once said "Patients aren't sick, they're discouraged." Function as your client's guilt-reducer, teach them to forgive themselves. You are your clients' own, private, knowledge worker, and your job is to share your knowledge with them.
Our business is highly competitive and what people do is always private, by law. I find referrals often come from other clients, rather than from colleagues who are in essence, in competition for business. I was and still am, very selective. I only see people who have been referred by people I know (in one way or another). I don't accept referrals who are very close to my clients. Each client deserves to have me without sharing me with their family members or close friends. I help my clients find psychotherapists or coaches for their friends and family. I tell them I will be their "psychotherapy broker."
I never take on new clients from the programs in which I formally teach, although my work as a clinician is quite like my work as an academic, a professor, an educator. Students and patients/clients are very vulnerable in terms of ranking and power position, and so their protection from any kind of exploitation is a first consideration (and that would include by me, or any other formal teacher/professor, etc.). My students are always asking "how can I start a private practice?" and my answer is simple.
Find out what theoretical perspective seems best suited to YOU. Join the "groups" following that perspective, go to all of their events, their Case Conferences, classes. Hire a consultant from that theoretical perspective, who seems both collaborative and well-known to the people in that group. Show up at everything, make friends with the psychotherapists there. Present cases at Case Conferences, disguising any identifying details, in order to protect your clients/patients/consultees. Become a person who people know. Have integrity in everything you do. Don't discuss patients without disguising any identifiable details.
Figure out and then define your natural "specialty" meaning, ask yourself: 'What do I love to read about when no one is looking?" Your specialty should be connected to your passion, be it explicit or implicit. Keep up to date with psychological science, bring it to your patients. On an ongoing basis, offer up the results of research findings, that are relevant to their problems or needs. That's why people find it useful to hire a psychologist instead of a counselor. Counselors are excellent, but when someone wants to have their own information worker, someone who keeps up with massive amounts of research coming out all the time (and psychologists are able to do that more easily today, by joining listservs that provide daily abstracts of the latest findings from multiple areas of psychological science, psychiatry). Be known for being kind, and smart. Become a great diagnostician. Be able to spot physical problems that may be confused with psychological problems. Tell clients what you think, or what you think that is relevant to their problems and concerns, and that may help them.
Think frequently about your current clients, be their secret weapon in life, helping them to fight their guilt, helping them to problem solve. Start writing, do research (either empirical studies, or library research, etc.).
"Find out what you patients need and give it to them."
(Hal Sampson said that to me, and it stuck.)
"It takes a person to cure a person" Joe Weiss said. He was right.
"We make the rules" Joe Weiss said, meaning that within every relationship, there are rules established, a frame established. You and your clients make the frame for your relationship, the rules that guide you both as you work together. Never exploit a client, but work with each client to find out what frame is most helpful for them. Sometimes a depressed client needs to talk to me every day, once or twice a week sessions are important, but don't take the place of knowing that I will be checking in with them every day, so they never have too go too long feeling anxious, or down, without sharing it with me. This makes them feel far more secure. While "we make the rules" in general, one rule is universal. Never have sex with your client. This is a rule that must be kept, always. No client really wants to have sex with his or her therapist. Clients do not want to have sex with their parents either. If they think they do, they are "testing" you, to find out if you are going to exploit them. If clients believe that they wanted to have sex with a parent, it is only because they believed that they could make a parent (usually a depressed parent) come alive by having a sexual relationship. It is because they believe (erroneously) that sex is the only way to help a parent feel better. If a client wants to do something you deem "inappropriate" they have to be testing you. Clients want to get better, they do not want to engage in self-destructive behaviors.
Perhaps the most important thing -- be a clinician who "goes the extra mile" and does everything possible to help their patients/clients. Leave no stone unturned, pay close attention to what works with each client, we are each unique, as much as we are all alike. Provide limbic regulation for your clients, hope that they always leave an hour with you feeling stronger than when they arrived. Yes, go the extra mile, whatever that means in each case, go the extra mile. Be a real person, don't try to hide yourself behind a professional facade, and go the extra mile. You will have clients and a successful practice.
Go the extra mile and clients will come to you. Smile and go the extra mile, love your clients, as a parent, mentor, advisor, and healer. Don't take on too many clients, and don't take on too few. Be real, write, study, conduct research, be a true psychologist bringing to your clients the thing that no one else can bring to them, be their researcher, their library, their expert who goes out and finds the information they need. That is our job, be outstanding at this job and you will have as many clients as you want or, as many as you are comfortable with. Establish a real "working alliance" with each client, be "co-scientists" together, working on their problems. Don't be afraid to encourage your clients. Adler once said "Patients aren't sick, they're discouraged." Function as your client's guilt-reducer, teach them to forgive themselves. You are your clients' own, private, knowledge worker, and your job is to share your knowledge with them.
From David Seah: people get together from those they dislike
This is a quote from Seah's Blog. I don't know how to format this yet, so quotes from other's are more easily identified as quotes (than is the case with the small quotation marks below). To see the whole blog in which this appeared:
http://davidseah.com/?s=my+friend+is+the+enemy+of+the+enemy&submit=search+site
I haven't figured out how to make references "clickable" (i.e. linked to their source) but I'm working on it. Meanwhile, Seah published this item in the above link, and if I read it right it previously appeared in: New York Times Online via the Hill Holliday company blog. :: [1] #
"My Friend is the Enemy of My Enemy According to three researchers, the easiest way to make friends is to dislike the same things. Excerpt: “We found a very robust tendency for people to mention more negative than positive attitudes about other people,” Bosson says, and the closer the friends were, the more negative attitudes toward others that they shared. Apparently, stronger feelings are associated with things we dislike than things we feel good about, and that creates a bond. Is it true? As positive as I try to be, I must admit that when expressing why I have certain values, it often is in terms of what it is that I believe is wrong. Maybe it's time to rethink this." Seen on the New York Times Online via the Hill Holliday company blog. :: [1] #
http://davidseah.com/?s=my+friend+is+the+enemy+of+the+enemy&submit=search+site
I haven't figured out how to make references "clickable" (i.e. linked to their source) but I'm working on it. Meanwhile, Seah published this item in the above link, and if I read it right it previously appeared in: New York Times Online via the Hill Holliday company blog. :: [1] #
"My Friend is the Enemy of My Enemy According to three researchers, the easiest way to make friends is to dislike the same things. Excerpt: “We found a very robust tendency for people to mention more negative than positive attitudes about other people,” Bosson says, and the closer the friends were, the more negative attitudes toward others that they shared. Apparently, stronger feelings are associated with things we dislike than things we feel good about, and that creates a bond. Is it true? As positive as I try to be, I must admit that when expressing why I have certain values, it often is in terms of what it is that I believe is wrong. Maybe it's time to rethink this." Seen on the New York Times Online via the Hill Holliday company blog. :: [1] #
From Michael Lovitch, The Construction of Memory: Interview with Dr. Andrew Yonelinas, Human Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis.
There are many misconceptions about memory influencing psychotherapy practice. Its time for us psychologists to integrate new findings in memory research with our daily practice. This is essential, to protect our clients and patients from the mysterious memory fabrications of older psychology practice. The following arrived in my inbox a few days ago.
Michael Lovitch from The Hypnosis Network, interviewed Dr. Andrew Yonelina, Human Memory Lab at University of California, Davis, finding support for the position taken by contemporary scientists: Memories are Constructed.
"Memory research has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the 'audio recorder' view of memory is wrong. The first person to clearly point that out about 100 years ago was Sir Fredric Bartlett. He showed how memories do change every time we recall them, and he argued quite convincingly that the act of remembering is a constructive process, full of inferences and distortions. One classic example was a study called the 'war of the ghosts' where a story about ghosts is told to subjects who have to retell it. He found that they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and it was this revised story which then became incorporated into their memory.
There is also a nice study by Neisser & Harsch (1992) who looked at people's memory accuracy for the Challenger crash, which was a very traumatic event for many people who profess very high confidence about their memory for these 'flashbulb' like memories. Neisser & Harsch looked at their reports 24 hours after the crash, and then again 2 years after the crash, and found that 40% of subjects reported dramatic distortions in their delayed final memory reports even when they were highly confident about these false memories.
If you are interested in a more detailed discussion of this point, there is a book by Dan Schacter called The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers that reviews the most recent literature on this. If you are not already depressed about how error-prone memory can be, then you will be after reading that book."
(Here's the study Dr. Yonelinas mentioned: Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). "Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger." In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall-Studies of "flashbulb" memories: Vol. 4. Emory Symposia in Cognition (pp. 9-31). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.)
Michael Lovitch from The Hypnosis Network, interviewed Dr. Andrew Yonelina, Human Memory Lab at University of California, Davis, finding support for the position taken by contemporary scientists: Memories are Constructed.
"Memory research has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the 'audio recorder' view of memory is wrong. The first person to clearly point that out about 100 years ago was Sir Fredric Bartlett. He showed how memories do change every time we recall them, and he argued quite convincingly that the act of remembering is a constructive process, full of inferences and distortions. One classic example was a study called the 'war of the ghosts' where a story about ghosts is told to subjects who have to retell it. He found that they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and it was this revised story which then became incorporated into their memory.
There is also a nice study by Neisser & Harsch (1992) who looked at people's memory accuracy for the Challenger crash, which was a very traumatic event for many people who profess very high confidence about their memory for these 'flashbulb' like memories. Neisser & Harsch looked at their reports 24 hours after the crash, and then again 2 years after the crash, and found that 40% of subjects reported dramatic distortions in their delayed final memory reports even when they were highly confident about these false memories.
If you are interested in a more detailed discussion of this point, there is a book by Dan Schacter called The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers that reviews the most recent literature on this. If you are not already depressed about how error-prone memory can be, then you will be after reading that book."
(Here's the study Dr. Yonelinas mentioned: Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). "Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger." In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall-Studies of "flashbulb" memories: Vol. 4. Emory Symposia in Cognition (pp. 9-31). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.)
Friday, February 16, 2007
Some history, old commentary follows
I'm going to have a bunch of posts right at the start, because I've been writing a blog in BackPack, only I didn't know that's what it was, until Seah woke me out of what I think might have been years of narcolepsy, trying not to see things my eyes to see preferred not seeing (but not repression, I don't believe in it), or maybe it makes more sense to say, trying not to think things that I figured I shouldn't be thinking. Third time today, thank you David Seah.
So having been awakened, and realizing the things I've posted on BackPack (and before that on my student listserv) for my students and friends (and my friends admitted having trouble finding it) were blog material, I'm going to post them here, on a real blog, now. On occassion I might even post the last five years of writing notes to my students, with various clippings from other listservs (mainly in psychology/evolutionary psychology), but I think I should approach that slowly. I always thought "this is just for my students" and the idea that others might spy on me and my students, is unnerving. I have not made the whole world privy to my mutterings and psychology-gossip. But a few might fill in now and again, should I have a moment when I don't feel like writing. Good fortune or not, my mother often told me that my problem was talking too much, and when I put that in print, which I have a history of doing, it might really be too much. On the other hand maybe this will inspire my students to do more writing, at least to argue with me. This is then, an invitation. Thank you Dave Seah. I'm going add the letter you just published the other day, so here's the fifth, thank you.
So having been awakened, and realizing the things I've posted on BackPack (and before that on my student listserv) for my students and friends (and my friends admitted having trouble finding it) were blog material, I'm going to post them here, on a real blog, now. On occassion I might even post the last five years of writing notes to my students, with various clippings from other listservs (mainly in psychology/evolutionary psychology), but I think I should approach that slowly. I always thought "this is just for my students" and the idea that others might spy on me and my students, is unnerving. I have not made the whole world privy to my mutterings and psychology-gossip. But a few might fill in now and again, should I have a moment when I don't feel like writing. Good fortune or not, my mother often told me that my problem was talking too much, and when I put that in print, which I have a history of doing, it might really be too much. On the other hand maybe this will inspire my students to do more writing, at least to argue with me. This is then, an invitation. Thank you Dave Seah. I'm going add the letter you just published the other day, so here's the fifth, thank you.
Old Blog New Blog
I've been writing a blog for years, in the form of "Notes to my Students" sent out to my "StudentListServ." I didn't realize it was a blog until David Seah, Merlin Mann and recently Matt Cornell caught my attention, and I now admit in public, my heart. David Seah began to put a structure around my so-called "work day" which often starts late, like at noon, and runs late, like 5 AM give or take a few hours. You all thought I was really working from 9 until 5 AM, when in fact I was sleeping until noon. I'm trying to change that, getting up at 5:30 AM so I have more writing time before I'm tired from a day of interacting.
I've been writing notes to my student listserv for years. The student listserv has grown exponentially over the years, and is now running to about 250 psychologists (first you are in-training, then you graduate, have your doctoral degrees, are working at agencies, in private practice, and a few of you, like me, are doing research, teaching, as well as privite practice, and you are my first blog-readers). Turning this list into a blog might make it easier to respond, for those of you who have been wanting to respond to my notes to you over the years. Go ahead, I think you were held back by the nature of the listserv, but this is a blog, and many (most?) of you are no longer students. So you can respond freely, with no inhibitions. Maybe that is the theme of this blog, fight inhibitions, fight survivor guilt (those of you who don't know me will find out about this in good time), and start writing to support or --yes, even dispute-- my latest mind wanderings, findings, or as David Seah has put a frame to it, my endless pursuit of discovering patterns in anything and everything. David, there's my second thank you for the morning. Thank you. Its far easier for me, as a sociologist, to find and organize those patterns, than it is for me as a psychologist, easier yet to admit to always searching out the patterns when someone else has admitted the same.
Psychologists are masters at personal obfuscation (making easy things indecipherable), and this is also true of me because I'm a psychologist. I know that when you (or I) see patterns a psychologist doesn't see, or doesn't want you to see or when you don't agree with them (us), the response is generally some kind of psychobabble, the psychologists' weapon. "You're projecting" or "You're in denial." Of course how could we know we were in deinal, if we are in denial. And how do psychologists think they know you're in denial, where do they get their evidence, since, after all, you can't tell them, because you're ostensibly in denial. This is unclear thinking, or to make it sound softer, a profound inability to use logic. Along with accusing people of projecting or being "in denial," psychologists also, when speaking about YOU, suggest: "You're repressing your hatred, (or your rage, or anything else negative you care to consider). That's another piece of verbal trickery; how can psychologists possibly know that someone else has information that is repressed, when if there really were such a thing as repression (thus far unsupported by science), how could it be known by psychologists, or by you. Its a contradiction.
Of course I make interpretations all the time, make up stories to explain things, as you will come to see. For example if you told me that you threw a horrible temper last night, threatened to throw a chair against the wall, and otherwise scared your spouse, I wouldn't tell you that you were projecting, or denying. I'd probably tell you that your behavior was a nonconscious effort to be loyal to your father who was famous for his tempers. See, we are a conundrum of poor logic, unclear thinking, and made up stories. The only difference between me and many other psychologists is that I would be interpreting up, not down. Point of this comment, is that I plan to defend the patterns I see and I am as convoluted as any other psychologist. But I wish there weren't so many jokes about us, and I wish people would stop believing psychologists can read their minds.
Welcome to you all, and welcome to me. Thank you David Seah, for making this possible. I'm running off right now to attend the morning session of a great conference I'm attending, "Learning and the Brain," aimed at bringing real live teachers together with real live neuroscientists, and happens to be one of the greatest meetings I've been to in years.
More later...
I've been writing notes to my student listserv for years. The student listserv has grown exponentially over the years, and is now running to about 250 psychologists (first you are in-training, then you graduate, have your doctoral degrees, are working at agencies, in private practice, and a few of you, like me, are doing research, teaching, as well as privite practice, and you are my first blog-readers). Turning this list into a blog might make it easier to respond, for those of you who have been wanting to respond to my notes to you over the years. Go ahead, I think you were held back by the nature of the listserv, but this is a blog, and many (most?) of you are no longer students. So you can respond freely, with no inhibitions. Maybe that is the theme of this blog, fight inhibitions, fight survivor guilt (those of you who don't know me will find out about this in good time), and start writing to support or --yes, even dispute-- my latest mind wanderings, findings, or as David Seah has put a frame to it, my endless pursuit of discovering patterns in anything and everything. David, there's my second thank you for the morning. Thank you. Its far easier for me, as a sociologist, to find and organize those patterns, than it is for me as a psychologist, easier yet to admit to always searching out the patterns when someone else has admitted the same.
Psychologists are masters at personal obfuscation (making easy things indecipherable), and this is also true of me because I'm a psychologist. I know that when you (or I) see patterns a psychologist doesn't see, or doesn't want you to see or when you don't agree with them (us), the response is generally some kind of psychobabble, the psychologists' weapon. "You're projecting" or "You're in denial." Of course how could we know we were in deinal, if we are in denial. And how do psychologists think they know you're in denial, where do they get their evidence, since, after all, you can't tell them, because you're ostensibly in denial. This is unclear thinking, or to make it sound softer, a profound inability to use logic. Along with accusing people of projecting or being "in denial," psychologists also, when speaking about YOU, suggest: "You're repressing your hatred, (or your rage, or anything else negative you care to consider). That's another piece of verbal trickery; how can psychologists possibly know that someone else has information that is repressed, when if there really were such a thing as repression (thus far unsupported by science), how could it be known by psychologists, or by you. Its a contradiction.
Of course I make interpretations all the time, make up stories to explain things, as you will come to see. For example if you told me that you threw a horrible temper last night, threatened to throw a chair against the wall, and otherwise scared your spouse, I wouldn't tell you that you were projecting, or denying. I'd probably tell you that your behavior was a nonconscious effort to be loyal to your father who was famous for his tempers. See, we are a conundrum of poor logic, unclear thinking, and made up stories. The only difference between me and many other psychologists is that I would be interpreting up, not down. Point of this comment, is that I plan to defend the patterns I see and I am as convoluted as any other psychologist. But I wish there weren't so many jokes about us, and I wish people would stop believing psychologists can read their minds.
Welcome to you all, and welcome to me. Thank you David Seah, for making this possible. I'm running off right now to attend the morning session of a great conference I'm attending, "Learning and the Brain," aimed at bringing real live teachers together with real live neuroscientists, and happens to be one of the greatest meetings I've been to in years.
More later...
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