Got Wolf? (Yes, you do.)

Why the long face?

2012-01-13T18:44:00.001-08:00

Chances are, if you are a horse or a human at an equestrian barn, that hang-dog look means you have just suffered a humiliation.

The other day my San Francisco daughter (who has been riding horses since she was 7, including, in better times, our magnificent 18hh Hanoverian, Owen) called to say, "Well, good. I finally met the Barn Bitch." She had decided to reallocate her discretionary income, from hanging with 20-somethings at Frisco watering holes, to hanging with a 20-something horse in Oakland, name of Zachary. (Which is also her boss' name, innit?) Until that day, everyone she had met at the barn had been helpful and welcoming.

I, too, began riding at the age of 7; and have never, in more than a dozen different barns, in the US and Europe, failed to encounter at least one trainer stuck in a permanent state of rage. There is also always at least one horse in a permanent Bad Mood. In the UK, where horses are not exotic, and mingle freely with motorists and pedestrians, such a "known kicker and/or biter" is likely to have a red ribbon tied to its tail. If only the Barn Bitch came with such a warning label!

Let's do a bit of ethology, to try to figure out why "There's (at least) one in every crowd." Horses, it must be understood, are both pack animals and prey animals. In the wild, survival depends on being "well in" with the herd, whose members can better fend off predators. Yet, when forage is scarce, survival depends on being of high enough status to get first dibs on the food. Battles for supremacy involve biting and kicking; and size does not always matter. (Even a fierce little dog can growl a horse away from food which is of no nutritional value to the terrier, itself. Hence, the English expression, "to act like a dog in the manger.") Indeed, at riding barns, it is most often a small mare or even a pony who wears the red ribbon.

And so, to the psychology of the Barn Bitch. It is rarely the owner of the establishment who snarls (at potential customers). It may not even be the head trainer, whose alpha status allows first pick of horses, tack, and students, making it more likely that they will win the on-going zero-sum-game, into which all human/horse endeavors [not just show events, or races, but even lessons] morph. It is the "Not Quites," the Wannabe trainers, who are left with the nags, the old tack and the less promising students, who suffer humiliation, which they pass along, like the Old Maid card, usually to unsuspecting newcomers.

Once you know who should be wearing a red ribbon, it's easier to put out your own subtext message, loud & clear: "I'm not your enemy, but I'm not your victim." Now, jump out of the manger, and let my horse eat. An old hand at such scenarios, my daughter held her ground; and the erstwhile Barn Bitch morphed into a lap dog.

Nostalgia

2011-12-31T08:32:00.000-08:00

Do you know the MGMT song, "Kids"? It's the 21st Century version of Cat Stevens' "Remember The Days in the Old School Yard." These world-weary 20-something lyricists [Ingrosso, Goldwasser & VanWyngarden] are reminiscing about their lost youth: "Take only what you need from it. A family of trees wanted to be haunted." When the howling wind made the trees in the Smithsonian woods creak and groan, I couldn't get that song out of my head.

Notice the past tense. A few weeks ago, the policy of allowing leashed dogs to transit school property to enter the woods was rescinded. A batty lady very loosely in charge of 3 free-range dogs [whom we had unpleasantly encountered earlier that month] had let her Lab menace a walking party of school children; and now all dogs are banned. Highly inconvenient, since we have yet to find another way into the nature preserve. Highly ironic, too, since we had just been given the blessing of the Smithsonian Police to patrol the woods for hunters, innit?

It's not only the intrusion of having to find another place for Lili's daily trek; it's the humiliation of remembering the time when Lili was the Off-the-Hook bad dog [and I, the bad owner], several years earlier, when she menaced a Vizcla on the school grounds. Ironically (again), just the day before I got warned off by the School Safety Officer, Lili & I met the [always unleashed] Vizcla & her owner in the parking lot, without any drama. After I had loaded Lili into the car, I made friendly overtures to the other dog, who seemed to chagrin her owner by coming over and licking my proffered "paw."

But now to the heart of the matter. As I have made clear in such posts as "What's keepin' ya?" and "The Holy Ground," our walks in those particular woods have given structure & meaning to my life [Can't speak for Lili's existential experience.]; and the prospect that they may be forever lost to us causes me emotional pain & suffering (aka, nostalgia).

Having done this Wolf Work on myself, I knew that the only way out of my anger was to seek out another "family of trees [that] wanted to be haunted." Before we had discovered the joys of the Smithsonian woods, we used to walk Lili in a municipal sports park [on an erstwhile landfill, now converted to a nature preserve]. It has much to recommend it. It's about equidistant from our house, but nowhere near a school. The dogs-on-the-leash rule is strictly enforced by park rangers. In previous years a family of Blue Herons graced the wetlands pond. (This year we've spotted turtles, beavers, deer, and the occasional snake.) In the past, I had found the paved paths a bit too safe & boring, compared to the rough & ready challenge of the Smithsonian woods. However (hurrah!), the other day I discovered a dirt path leading into some woods on the edge of the park, complete with trip-you-up tree roots & a bluff with a stunning view of a tidewater inlet way below. Reminds me of when I was a kid in Tarrytown, overlooking the Hudson River.

So, see? The cure for nostalgia is...nostalgia. The cure for one Paradise Lost is to find another Paradise (which might one day also be lost), innit?

Meanwhile, during Winter Break it's been "crickets" @ the old school yard. No children to menace and no authorities to enforce the No Walkies Zone. We may have revisited "The Holy Ground" a time or two; but when it's term time, we'll make new memories in "another part of the forest" that graces this Chesapeake estuary.

"I have a bone to pick with you."

2011-12-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

Like most idioms in your first language, the meaning of this one seems obvious: "You and I have a score to settle." But why does it mean that? Why a zero-sum-game power-struggle vibe, rather than, "Oh, look! I've brought a bone that we can share, cuz I'm an altruistic mammal." [See this week's NYTimes Science section, for a heart-warming University of Chicago study of (relatively) "free" rats liberating caged rats, even if they did not then get to enjoy the newly-freed rats' company. They even saved and shared their chocolates with their less fortunate brethren, like something out of a Festive Seasonal Disney flick.]

My extensive collection of Word & Phrase Origin books shed no light on the (bone) subject, so I ventured into [onto?] the web, where I found a site (Usingenglish.com) intended for the wising up of those for whom English is a second language. Mint, nar'mean? They don't bother with derivations, just plug & chug ["This means that. Just memorize it, already."] definitions. Other sites attempting to explain whence cometh the bone-to-pick-with-you idiom get all vague and say "Dating from the 15th or 16th century. Referring to two dogs fighting over a bone. See bone of contention."

So, what? Before the 1400s, English dogs behaved with ratlike altruism and shared their bones? I should cocoa! [Try finding the derivation of that idiom, I dare ya. I've been looking ever since I first heard it used in Ealing Studios comedies, in the (19)60s.] Then came the reign of the Tudors, and the Great Bone Panic. [I just made that up. Use of the Poetic speech function.]

And thus, to the bone I have to pick with the NYTimes science reporter, Sindya N. Bhanoo. As with most attributions of species-wide behavioral traits [including the sweetie-sharing rats of Chicago], there is the danger of extrapolating beyond the data. I suspect, for instance, that the "altruism" of the lab rats [which was found more consistently in the females, incidentally] is another manifestation of the Oxytocin effect, in which In-group members are tended & defended, whereas Out-group members [street rats, for instance], would receive short shrift.

Likewise, the Tudor dogs who were observed [proverbially] contending over bones may have been those indolent little hand-fed ones who hung around Hampton Court Palace [not the noble Big Dogs who went out with the hunting parties, and could forage bones galore out in the woods].

Alas, the thoroughly modern Lili is only allowed stage prop Nylabones, which she nevertheless seems to value highly, since she usually tries to pick [gnaw] two of them at once.

No Teddy Bears' Picnic

2011-11-29T13:39:00.000-08:00

If you're familiar with Harry Hall's 1932 recording of "The Teddy Bears' Picnic, " you're in distinguished company. For more than 30 years, BBC sound engineers used it to check frequency cycles before broadcasts, because of the fidelity of the recording and the wide-ranging pitches of the little ditty. Tell you something else that was wide-ranging: Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy's various attributions of the danger posed by Teddy Bears in the woods. For a supposedly light-hearted children's song, it's as full of dark foreboding as a Twilight flick. "If you go into the woods today, you'd better go in disguise...you'd better not go alone. It's lovely out in the woods today, but safer to stay at home." And why all the angst? "Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their picnic."

I'm not a big fan, never was, of sending mixed messages to children about safety hazards. Seems to me there are enough truly scary things and situations out there "in the woods" to worry about, without setting up "straw men" like picnicking Teddy Bears, nar'mean? But that's me being literal-minded, rather than Poetic, about it. I've read [and recommended] Bruno Bettelheim's book, The Uses of Enchantment, the point of which is, that Grimm fairy tales [and zombie films, and their ilk] afford a less amygdala-setting-off, more reassuringly metaphorical way of facing our fears.

About 2 months ago, as Chris & I were walking Lili into the thick of the woods, a middle-aged woman [I should talk!], clad in a brown velour track suit which the 80s wanted back, jogged up to us and said, "Better be careful! There are police in the woods!" Intrigued, Chris & Lili forged ahead, while I stumbled behind them [my ankles suddenly turning to jelly from anxiety]. "A dead body? An armed & dangerous felon?" I wondered. What did their presence betoken, that had so freaked out the Lady in Velour? When Chris saw them, he asked "What's up?" They said, "We're looking for hunters." They were U.S. Federal Special Police Officers, from the Smithsonian Institution Office of Protection Services [Did I mentions that "our" woods are a Smithsonian nature preserve?], acting on a tip that hunters had been spotted in the area. So we regaled them with anecdotes of our many encounters with [apparently illegal] hunters in the woods over the years, and they admired Lili, and gave me a business card with their phone & fax numbers, asking that Lili & I be their "eyes & ears" on our daily rounds. "Our office is just around the corner, and we'll be waiting to hear from you."

Talk about an official seal of approval! It was as if Lili had been transformed from a ravening beast, to a Deputy Dawg! I may continue to experience fear, intrusion, and even pain & suffering when I trip over a hidden tree root; but I think my days of humiliation in the woods are over.

But what, we wondered, was Brown Jogging Lady so spooked about? Was she a superannuated Hippie, who still regarded the Fuzz as the foe? [This was before OWS, mind.] Had they advised her not to wear deer-colored clothing in the woods during hunting season, or she could get shot?

Like Jimmy Kennedy, she manifested ambivalence about the threat level in the woods that day. I do, too, of course, always dreading my next encounter with Skipper the Unleashed and his insouciant owner. As it happened, the very next day Chris, Lili & I were once again menaced by the appalling pair; and I just happened to drop the name of the Smithsonian Police.

Haven't seen them since. Still, with other free-range dogs about, newly fallen lumber every day, and muddy footing, it's no picnic.

The Uncanny Valley

2011-11-13T07:56:00.000-08:00

This highly technical term, coined in the 70s by the Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori, could just as well be the title of a Hollywood horror flick, nar'mean? What Mori-san meant, though, was that sudden dip in a graph measuring the "appeal" of humanoid robots, that occurs when The Thing looks both Too Human, yet Not-quite Human, and the observer gets freaked out.

Dr. Christian "Jeepers" Jarrett's article, "The Lure of Horror," in the Halloween issue of The Psychologist, tries to account for the apparent predilection among current cinema-goers [it's a British journal] for being freaked out. Despite what you might gather from the weekly Box Office grosses listed in The Hollywood Reporter, not everyone craves creepiness. In fact, it's mostly males aged 6 to 25 who really dig "trips" to the Uncanny Valley. The rest of us get quite enough of that eery sensation, thank you very much, from our nightmares, hypnogogic illusions [in that twilight state between sleep & waking], and the weird coincidences of everyday life.

The concept predates modern film-making. Freud & his contemporaries were writing articles about Das Unheimliche [the Uncanny] in the early 1900s, pondering the scariness of dolls with missing eyes [remember the cartoons of Orphan Annie?], clowns, and anyone hiding their face behind a mask [or veil]. The limbic explanation, then and now, is that we vulnerable mortals need all the visual cues we can get, to determine whether a stranger poses a threat or not. If we think someone is PLU [People Like Us], and suddenly the mask slips, to reveal that they are [gasp!] non-PLU, our visceral response may be so dramatic that we get vertigo.

Back in the day, when I was a VA Trainee, I was interviewing a young "woman" veteran, to assess whether the first government-funded sex-change operation would increase or decrease his/her suicidal acting out. I had lived in Greenwich Village, the mecca of glamorous transvestites; but the individual before me looked and acted more like an Amish farm girl. When I asked about an incident from adolescence, the person's voice, body language and facial expression morphed into the 16-year-old boy he had been; and I nearly fell out of my chair. It wasn't scary; it was uncanny. We both had a good laugh about it, and carried on with the interview, in the safe surroundings of the Manhattan VA hospital. As a transsexual individual trying to live a "normal" life in 1970s NYC, however, the uncanny feelings my patient evoked in macho men often turned violent. [ See The Crying Game, not so much Tootsie.]

In this regard, Jarrett reports a startling finding from my least favorite research tool, the fMRI. 40 subjects watched creepy clips from scary movies and also boring clips from the same films. The researchers expected the amygdala to light up during the creepy bits; but, no, the intracranial wolf did not howl. What lit up were the "visual cortex, the insular cortex (a region involved in self-awareness) and the thalamus (the relay centre between the cortex and the sub-cortical regions)." I hate to admit it, but this is heavy. It suggests that members of that coveted demographic, males between 6 and 25, do not seek out horror films to get scared. They are there to get schooled. They are practicing [in what they are quite aware is a safe, pretend setting] vigilance. They're getting good at discriminating the PLU from the non-PLU, innit?

Their motto is not, "Jeepers, creepers!" It's "We won't be fooled again."

Throwing Shade

2011-10-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

Talk about humiliating! What kind of music have I been listening to for the last 15 years, that I missed out on the idiom, "to throw shade"? Well, obviously, not to Li'l Kim (nee Kimberly Denise Jones), the Bed/Stuy (Brooklyn) rapper, whose 1996 hit "Crush On You" contains the lyric, "I'ma throw shade if I don't get paid." Back in the day, the only American rapper I cared about was Eminem [for the arbitrary reason that his hometown, Sterling Heights (Michigan), is where we stabled our horses, Dusk & Owen].

These days I am obsessed with UK rappers, but mostly guys, as heard on BBC Radio 1.

Anyway, the phrase was being bandied about in the middle of the night this weekend, by "tired & emotional" [a euphemism used in the UK press, to avoid libel actions] young people, who couldn't clarify its meaning just then. "Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, to 'throw shade'?" I kept asking, to no avail. For the rest of you tragically un-hip, I can now inform you [according to the Urban Dictionary], it's a bad thing, similar to dissing someone. As to its derivation, their guess is that it comes from that old expression, "to put someone in the shade." [To outshine them, with one's wonderfulness.] As used on the Night in Question, I would speculate that it could be a corruption of the German word, Schadenfreude [joy in another's shame], which (though actually pronounced "shodden froy-deh") might be transliterated "fro da shade." [Nar-mean? "Throw the shade," innit?]

So, who is likely to "throw (da) shade," and why? Well, duh! Individuals who feel dissed, themselves, are gonna want to diss the disser back, in retaliation. Or...should the disser be unavailable [or too dangerous to diss directly], a proxy target of our aggression [cuz, let's face it, a diss is an act of aggression] may be substituted. A small example from last week comes to mind. Ruth, the Maine Coon, has made bold [in her 21st year] to usurp the couch pillow [next to me, as I type this] from the erstwhile Top Cat, Zanzibar. She was ruling this roost when Zanzibar came up to roust her [or at least share the spot with her]. The couch is big. They're small. All 3 cats plus Lili could fit on it easily, with room to spare for a blogger. But Ruth was having none of it. She blasted young Zanzibar with a sustained, foul-smelling hiss [a clear diss], until he backed off, pivoted, and smacked sleeping Lili upside the head with his paw [an act of displaced aggression]. Since Lili is besotted with Zanzibar, she did not appear to feel dissed [perhaps, mistook his bop for a love pat], and, in the event, she did not retaliate.

As noted in previous posts, a diss is often in the eye of the beholder. Think of the last time you felt humiliated by the basking of another in the [often arbitrary] limelight of fame, fortune or admiration, while you have been toiling, thanklessly, in the shadows. Gets right up your nose, nar'mean? A former patient of mine described being on the losing end of Fate's Wheel of Fortune as, "An existential smack on the snout." It makes you [or me, at least] want to howl, "Das ist nicht FAIR!" like the Clever Dogs of Austria.

I say, first do the Wolfwork of admitting how angry the [implied or in-your-face] diss makes you feel. Then, try to resist passing on the pain by dissing an innocent proxy [a sleeping dog], rather than the actual source of your humiliation [Ruth]. If possible, throw shade so subtly that you don't get into trouble for it.

The tree that is throwing shade on Lili in the picture is, alas, in big trouble, leaning as it does perilously close to our house in a time of howling winds & earthquakes. The axeman cometh.

"Lean Toward the Sunny Side, but Don't Overdo It"

2011-10-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog might expect this to be a post dissing the latest article from the Science section of the NYTimes, but no! This is the title of an inane article from the Business section [of the NYT], from September 23rd, so there. Its author, Alina Tugend, has combined a 2007 article by Profs. Puri & Robinson of Duke Business School, with Positive Psychologist Martin Seligman's 1995 book, The Optimistic Child, adding contradictory [undated] "findings" from Prof. Sweeny of UC-Riverside and Prof. Phelps of NYU, to make rather a dog's dinner of the topic, The Efficacy of Optimism. Her high-concept title says it all. Her experts would all [probably] agree, that [to use her own metaphor] being a bit more like Winnie-the-Pooh than like Eeyore [more optimistic than pessimistic] is often [not always] a better strategy for success [at least, in financial affairs, getting hired & promoted, and in managing stress while waiting for test results, whether academic or medical]. She has the grace to point out that all the research she cites was published long before our current all-bets-are-off economic predicament.

Quibbles about murky research and comparing apples to oranges, aside, she kinda has a point.

The Duke biz-whizzes were trying to say that both wild optimism and profound pessimism often result in an individual's doing a whole lot of nothing: the Pooh bears, because everything will be all right anyway; and the Eeyores, because no personal effort will make things turn out all right anyway. One could say that both character types manifest external locus of control. Enter a more resilient character [Who, Piglet? Or maybe Tigger because of his bounces...], who is Cautiously Optimistic. He believes that most circumstances are temporary, not permanent (Where have you heard that before?), and that his personal efforts might affect them, thus manifesting internal locus of control. This character is willing to expend Therbligs galore, in the guarded hope of Good Outcome. He knows that Life offers no guarantees of success, but he likes his odds.

This weekend, we flew up to Boston to watch our elder daughter expend Therbligs galore, in her first ever half-marathon. Since her previous sporting triumphs have involved rowing boats over water and riding horses over fences, she and we were Not Sure of the Outcome. Her stated goal was to avoid being scooped up by one of the "Lame Gazelle" wagons that hounded the back of the pack of 7000 runners. My secret goals were that she avoid humiliation [however she chose to define it], and that she not incur an injury resulting in chronic pain & suffering. To counter my fear, I willed myself into a mindset of Cautious Optimism.

And it worked! My biggest challenge, as we scuttled from the 3-mile point to the 7-mile point, was the intrusion of desperately needing a restroom [which a kindly native informed me I would find at the boathouse in the park]. By the time we had found a legal parking spot (What are the odds?) on a side street not far from to the Zoo, just in time to see her make her way down the home stretch into the stadium, we were all in floods of joyful tears.

Meanwhile, remember Ruth [our spindly 21-y.o. Maine Coon]? Having spent the last few years as a howling Banshee on the top floor of our house (like a feline Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre), she has decided to venture down (into the realm of the Big Dog), just Looking for Some Touch, which I am giving her every few minutes, as I type this blog. Somewhere in that tiny cat brain, the fear of the dog is trumped by the Need for Affection; and with Cautious Optimism, she expends the Therbligs to get her arthritic 5-pound body downstairs and onto the couch, where purring (not howling) ensues.

Never the Same Woods Twice

2011-09-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

Or maybe it is? Pre-Socratic philosophers started debating this point around 500 BC. Heraclitis may (or may not) have said "Panta rhei" ["Everything changes (or, possibly, flows)"], famously declaring that one could never dip one's toe into the same stream twice. Pamenides, on the other hand, was an early conservation-of-matter guy, declaring "Change is impossible." There is nothing new under the sun. [Not even the sun.] Wade Lassister set this idea to music in the finale of the 1980 musical & film, Fame: "I sing the body electric (a line lifted directly from Leaves of Grass). I celebrate the me yet to come. I toast to my own reunion, when I become one with the sun." The song ends cute with the astrophysical & show biz prediction, "and in time, and in time, we will all be stars."

It's still a hot topic for Presidential candidates, whether the Earth's climate is actually, irreversibly changing, or just going through what David Bowie might call one of its cyclical "Ch-ch-changes." If only we were French, and could simply finesse the argument with a bon mot: "Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose."

For a while this summer, every walk in the woods lent support to what Parmenides termed dismissively "the mistaken opinion that things had changed." In the wake of the earthquake, and tropical storms, many mighty trees had fallen. Some of them, eerily, days later. [Thank goodness for Lili, the "timberwolf," who in the past has given me a "heads up" of falling lumber, and so allayed my fear of being poleaxed.]

But falling trees have not been the only hazard on our woodland walks this summer. A few weeks ago we were assailed by an unleashed, Hound-of-the-Baskervilles-type dog, who came growling and charging at us, leaving its (oblivious? psychopathic?) master far behind. It was fear that got up my nose, but Lili might have been merely affronted by the intrusion. In the melee of snarls & skirmishes that ensued, I was dragged off my feet (not once, but twice), in an attempt to keep hold of Lili's leash. Only when I was on the ground the second time, did the other owner speak. "I'll call my dog, and he'll follow me," he said. By now, my humiliation and pain & suffering had banished all Japanese commands from my consciousness, and I was reduced to shouting "God damn it!" to all and sundry. I can vouch for the efficacy of swearing as an analgesic, though [see "Why Keep a Dog & Bark Yourself?"]. On the wings of my adrenaline, we flew through the woods in record time; and only later at home, when the bruises "bloomed," did I realize that I could have been seriously injured.

Since then, I have "played Backgammon" with the incident, revisiting it in my mind, trying to figure out what would have been a better "Not your victim, not your enemy" response to the situation, to make it stop haunting me. In retrospect, I decided I should have told the owner to grab hold of his dog. [Nar'mean?] I should also have taken off my over-the-shoulder European leash and held it in both hands, for better leverage. Every time I've seen his telltale Range Rover illegally parked at the entrance to the woods (where are the police when you want them?), I have rehearsed my "flame-out chart" what-to-do list, ready for action.

Yesterday was the rematch. This time, the owner was strolling even farther behind his snarling, charging dog. Initially, I commanded Lili [in our Japanese code] to "lie down" and "stay"; but when the other dog made aggressive contact, I realized our power subtext was "lame gazelle," so I just held onto Lili's leash as she barked and lunged. This time I yelled, "Do you have a leash?" No reply. Eventually, the owner called "Skipper" a few times, and reluctantly the dog left the fray and headed back to its master, only to turn around and make a second sortie. This time I shouted, "Do you have a leash?" until he beckoned Skipper again, and they proceeded on their way.

So, that was my Parmenidian moment: "Nothing changes. You can try to rewrite the script, but you'll still end up looking (and sounding) like a shrill, histrionic loser who can't take the heat, while the smug thug with the flash car and the free-range dog looks like a winner."

Ah, but was it a complete rerun? At least this time I didn't fall down and get dragged like a rodeo clown; and I communicated clearly that the guy should have put his dog on a leash [which is both the custom and the law in these woods]. So, encouraged, we forged ahead with our walk.

Just as we were cresting the hill where the mid-summer fracas had occurred, I made out the outlines of a tall man and a large dog approaching. But I took the Heraclitian view, that these two were not my old nemeses, that each man/dog encounter was "a different stream," and that things might turn out differently for us this time. So I put Lili at a "down/stay," ensuring her compliance by stepping on the leash to keep her there. A totally different man, with a Cockney accent and a huge black lab on a chain, smiled as they passed peaceably by, and said, "I do that, too. I put my foot on the lead sometimes, for more control."

Heraclitis was right! It's never the same woods twice.

Hide or Seek?

2011-09-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

When you find yourself in times of trouble (you know, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, extended power outages), do you want to hide under the covers until it's over, or seek out the company of others? One day in 1975, while sitting in the back row of an American Airlines jet out of LaGuardia, I had a great view of the port-side engine exploding on take-off. The laid-back voice of the pilot came on, drawling, "Now, folks, those of you on the lefthand side of the aircraft might have noticed a loud bang and some sparks coming out of the engine just now. We've shut it down, and we'll be circling Long Island Sound for a little while, before returning to LaGuardia Airport. We regret any inconvenience this might cause y'all."

Naturally, I took this as my cue to begin cracking wise to my fellow back row passengers, in an effort to provide a little comic relief and team-building. Trust me, I was hilarious; but did any one of them make eye contact, smile, or even lift their shoulders in the Phatic, "I know, right?" gesture signifying "I heard you, but I don't want to get into it right now"? Nary a one. The young man next to me was underlining his textbook so intensely, that his pen tore the page. Others literally pulled their blankets (remember airline blankets?) over their heads for the duration of our half hour flight, back to a foamed runway flanked with a contingent of firetrucks. You know when a stand-up comic is losing the crowd and asks, "Anyone here from out-of-town?" I figured these stiffs were all just visiting from Cincinnati (the flight's putative destination), since no self-respecting group of New Yorkers could have resisted my schtick. They would have joined my improv and tried to top my gallows humor with their own zingers, ya know?

It's easy to guess what was up their noses, though, right? Fear of crashing; and, who'd a thunk it, the intrusion of my banter into their silent recitation of the Act of Contrition (or whatever).
I, on the other hand was feeling humiliation, that my attempts to Find the Funny in the situation were Not Well Received; and the pain & suffering of feeling All Alone.

That's what's so sad about last week's contretemps with Billie Joe Armstrong on Southwest. The airline whose best feature had been its cabin crews' ability to Find the Funny in every situation, and transform nervous strangers into a jolly group of Fellow Travelers, became known as the Uptight Enforcers of a Strict Dress Code (No Saggy Pants Allowed). What a somber little half hour flight from Oakland to Burbank that must have been, after the obstreperous Greenday frontman was frog-marched off the plane. Did any remaining passenger have the moxie to crack wise to his fellow row-mates, I wonder, or did they all just hide themselves away in their paperbacks and iPods?

Good thing the fuselage of that plane didn't deconstruct like a sardine can, right? (Or a wild goose wasn't sucked into the left engine, as happened to us, back in 1975.) It would have been every man for himself.

Wolverhampton Wolves

2011-08-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

I refer not to that ancient city's alliteratively nicknamed football club [officially, the Wanderers], but to the flash-mob packs of masked looters and arsonists, who are the subject of my contempt, yet also of my attempt to understand what on earth has got up their noses this week.

That sociological sage [and, allegedly, appalling father] John Phillips, late of The Mamas and the Papas, wrote these lyrics to "Safe In My Garden" (1968), concerning the rioting youth of that era: "Could it be we were hot-wired? Late one night; we're very tired. They stole our minds and thought we'd never know it. With a bottle in each hand; too late to try to understand. We don't care where it lands--we just throw it. When you go out in the street, so many hassles with the heat [hippie slang for the police]; no one there can fill your desire. Cops out with the megaphones, telling people stay inside their homes. Man, can't they see the world's on fire?"

The riots he was describing ostensibly arose from the twin "root causes" of an unpopular war [Vietnam] and racial injustice in 20th Century America; yet he posits a very 21st Century "spark" that ignited that summer of burning cities: some kind of subliminal, electronically-mediated GroupThink, that robbed young people of their individual will and transformed them into the mobile vulgus [the wandering mob], wreaking seemingly random havoc, but not getting much satisfaction from it. Pretty prescient, for a guy who died in the Spring of 2001, no?

Many of this week's unrepentant pillagers, when asked by BBC reporters, what got up their noses to provoke such displays of rage, answered, "It's a Class War, innit? We've got nuffink, so we're takin' it from the rich, nar'mean?" Mind you, they all seemed to own Blackberries, on which they BBM'd {"hot-wired"?] each other the list of successive targets, most of which were modest "mom & pop" shops owned by Sikhs & Hindus [not by "rich snobs," as one boy put it]. So, why the disconnect between the looters' Robin Hood myth of robbing the rich, and the reality of their robbing the barely-making-ends-meet South Asian shopkeepers?

Well, [pace The News of the World] I blame the UK's gutter press, of which The Daily Mail is the prime surviving example, whose narrative subtext is "Everyone we photograph is richer, luckier, and more powerful than you, Dear Reader. Envy them. Feel humiliated by them. Cut them down to size, if you get the chance." That's right. I blame the media for the mayhem that continues to spread throughout England tonight, perpetrated not by "werewolves" [who spend the daylight hours adhering to the social norms] but by packs of wolfish youths [boys and girls] who declared proudly to daytime reporters, "No snobby cop's going to tell us what to do!"

Yeah, right. But the cynical editors of The Daily Mail and their ilk are profiting from your shenanigans. Their motto is: "Long live the Class War! [Let's hope there are still some corner shops left tomorrow, to sell our Schadenfreude.]"

What's your point?

2011-07-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been asking the "What's up my nose?" question about an insidiously lovely song by Ed Sheeran [currently #3 on the BBC 1 chart] called, innocuously enough, "The A Team." As the [you should excuse the expression under the circumstances] "addictively" catchy lyrics clarify repeatedly, it is the "Class A team" to which the heroine/victim in the song belongs [meaning that she is fatally attracted to drugs classified in the UK as Class A, such as crack cocaine]. I badgered my visiting 20-something daughter about 2 aspects of this song. Why, when it seems to glamorize, without irony, lethal drug abuse, is it so popular? [Because it's beautifully written, played & sung.Very few listeners downloading the song are thinking critically about its message.] And why, when such glamorization is as old as the opera La Boheme [and its current iteration Rent], does it make me so angry? As it happens, I was doing all this heavy "wolf-work" a week before Amy Winehouse's untimely death.

Before I deconstruct my "issues" with Ed Sheeran, let me draw your attention to an editorial in yesterday's NYTimes, entitled "Addictive Personality? You Might be a Leader," by David J. Linden, "Professor of neuroscience @ Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods,Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good." [2 fun facts about the author & then my critique of his research: before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, he worked for Big Pharma; and his father is a high-profile "shrink to the stars" in Santa Monica, CA.] The burden of his argument, taken from the animal & human research of others [some of it, decades old], is that "addicts want their pleasures more but like them less." This he attributes to "blunted dopamine receptor variants" in these individuals.

Point of order. As its title suggests, this is a very informally written Pop Psych book [not a peer-reviewed journal article]. How large was his human sample size? In the NYTimes, he cites mostly anecdotal evidence concerning famous dead guys [such as Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, and Otto von Bismarck]. How do we know that these "I can't get no-o satisfaction" folks are actually getting less satisfaction from their "cocaine, heroin, nicotine or alcohol" than their peers are? Just guessing, here: he asked them? [Or the researchers who actually carried out the studies did.] And the addicts said [in a variant of the old Irish joke], "This blow is terrible, and there's not enough of it!"

And don't even get me started on Theory of the Mind, which posits that we can never truly know another individual's experience, so how can we possibly know that we liked the drug less than the Man on the Surbiton Omnibus [British legal term of art for "the average guy"] did?

Is the circularity of Linden's argument making you dizzy yet? If you are an addict, there's something wrong with your dopamine receptors. [Not your fault, you poor victim.] To quote one of my favorite famous dead guys, the comic novelist Evelyn Waugh [who wrote brilliantly about alcoholism in Brideshead Revisited], "your brains is all anyhow."

Is this supposed to mean that everyone with this genetic variant is doomed to substance addiction? Back in the 70s there was a controversial theory that sought to "explain" [excuse?] alcoholism as the result of a genetic variant that metabolizes ethanol in the [poor victim's] brain more slowly than in your man on the Surbiton omnibus' brain, storing it as a morphine-like substance. [Thus, alcohol addiction was actually morphine addiction; and we all know how to "cure" that, right?] Studies suggested the prevalence of this gene variant in certain ethnic populations [such as my own, the Irish]. It's not our fault! We've got a disease, innit? What? Like an allergy? Like a peanut allergy? Jeez! Well then, let's just avoid peanuts. Or, mutatis mutandis, alcohol.

What's my point? What's up my nose, about Messrs. Sheeran & Linden? The fear, that by ceding locus of control over what we choose to ingest [by mouth, nose, or vein] to an "accident" of our brain physiology, we are condemned to fulfill the dark prophecy that "anatomy is destiny." The humiliation, that we have no option but to follow our noses to the irresistible substances that we crave, even though they will [glamorously or sordidly] kill us.

As the Brits would say, "Blow that for a game of soldiers!"

"Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair"

2011-07-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of Spin magazine, Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner explains how a song was "born": "We were in the studio and I pulled someone's chair out."

Do ya see, now, he was trying to circumvent Gestalt psychologist Edward Tolman's Expectancy Effect, defined in The Dictionary of Psychology [ed. Ray Corsini, 2002] thus: "a tendency for an expectation to cloud a person's ability to observe or reason, that may lead to an error or bias in the direction in which the person expected the results to go." Or, to apply Occam's Razor, we are all creatures of habit. We expect a chair to be where it usually is.

When I say "all," I include Tolman's lab rats, who were trained to run a maze, at the end of which they had come to expect a High-Value Treat. When the fiendish experimenter substituted a Treat of Lesser Value, "the rats displayed disgust."

There is a British idiom, "Sick as a parrot!" Maybe its corollary could be, "Disgusted as a rat!"

The Expectancy Effect does not always result in disgust [or a pratfall from sitting down where a chair no longer is]. Sometimes it causes a better-than-it-really-is distortion [called a Positive Halo Effect in Educational Psychology, where certain students are given the benefit of the doubt & inflated scores, while others (under a Negative Halo) are expected to do badly & downgraded accordingly].

Get this, from yesterday's London Evening Standard. A man [who had recently quit taking his meds] fatally stabbed a perfect stranger in the street, because he "mistook him for a Zombie." See? If you're expecting Zombies, you're likely to "see" them everywhere.

Oh, come on. Who hasn't done it? Your beloved black cat has died, and now every dark sweater or towel, glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, "is Midnight!" It's only delusional if you open a fresh can of FancyFeast for "him." In certain cultures, not even then.

Returning to the Zombie hunter example, hands up if you expect all rich Frenchmen [or rich Italians, for that matter] to be lechers. Or all mothers to be paragons of virtue.

Oopsie daisy! It ain't necessarily so. Rules of thumb concerning human nature, like chairs, are subject to change without prior notification.

Who's Got Your Back?

2011-06-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

While watching Wimbledon tennis on telly with the sound muted, I'm listening to Radio Wimbledon, which provides commentary on all the matches [from Center Court to Court 14], as well as traffic, transport & weather advisories for those in the stands. If you're in SW19, Radio Wimbledon's got your back. As young girls in the 60s, clutching General Admissions tickets to the grounds and CheapDayReturn train tickets back to our town, my sister & I had each other's backs, too, minding the time to make sure we had enough of it to hoof it back to Wimbledon Station and get our tickets punched by the Station Master before rush hour [when our CheapDayReturns expired]. All this, without the aid of Radio Wimbledon, cellphones, debit cards, or even wristwatches! What a team we made.

We still do. The British relationship therapist, Dr. Sue Johnson, quotes "a traditional Irish saying" [although I can't find it in any of my aphorism reference sources] thus: "We stand in the shelter of one another." Or, if we are gazelles @ the LA zoo, we lie down in the shelter of one another. If Chris had used a wider-angle lens, you could have seen a spindly-legged baby gazelle, toddling around under the vigilant gaze of these 3 "lifeguards," all of whom had its back.

Ah! It's soothing, just to see them. No, really. Watching a cohort of furry creatures tend & defend their vulnerable members has been shown [in those studies I'm not wild about, for ethical reasons] to lower cortisol, not just in the creatures themselves, but in the observer. [Except maybe not in would-be predators, like those leopards from the previous post, who chunter to themselves, "Curses! Foiled again!"]

The Radio Wimbledon commentators make frequent reference to each contestant's looking up to the Player's Box where their entourage of "lifeguards" [coaches, family, friends] are sitting, "seeking their sympathy, or approval, or their righteous indignation at a bad line call." The exchanges are all done non-verbally, but sometimes with operatic intensity. Unfortunately, when members of a player's cohort see themselves on a telly camera [via the Jumbotron], they tend to stiffen up, cast their eyes down, and leave their vulnerable Young One momentarily undefended. That's why it's heartening to hear the radio accounts [or to be there in person, to see the authentic exchange of give-a-damn looks]. As my favorite Radio 1 Scottish DJ, Edith Bowman, says, wherever in the world Andy Murray is playing, she is listening, "Willin' him on, just willin' him on!"

Such fan support helps the player [if he or she is aware of it, and our Andy is a keen Twitterer]; but it also helps the sports fan. Remember the truth about oxytocin? It makes you want to tend & defend those in your reference group, but not the opponent. Nar'mean?

"Can a leopard change its spots?"

2011-06-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Rhetorical questions get right up my nose. [Just for fun, notice how many RQs I sneak into this post, and how annoying they are.] This famous RQ is from the Old Testament prophet Jeramiah [13:23], who prefaces his animal metaphor with what these days would be called a racial slur: "Can the Ethiopian change his skin?" In both cases, one might be moved to reply, "Why would he even want to [change]?" [Jeramiah's answer would be, to avoid the destruction of Solomon's temple, silly! Go read his whole sarcastic, "Now you've gone and done it, and you're gonna get it!" rant for yourself, if this isn't ringing any distant bells from your Judeo-Christian-Islamic upbringing.]

Ever since I was assigned my first patient in 1971, the leopard-spot-changing question has dogged me. [Remember this variation on the theme of an old joke? Q:"How many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb?" A:"Just one; but the lightbulb has to really want to change."] Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels a little bit defensive about the efficacy of The Talking Cure. In this month's issue of The California Psychologist, there's an article with the subheading, "Psychotherapy is Effective!" Here's what various cited outcome studies have "shown" it can do: "provide symptom relief and personality change, prevent future symptomatic episodes, enhance quality of life, promote adaptive functioning in work/school and relationships, [and/or] increase the likelihood of making healthy and satisfying life choices." Not to mention buying a little time, when your colleagues, constituents & the media are baying for your blood. Nar'mean?

How do you suppose most of these studies determine whether the desired outcome has been achieved? Why, by self-report questionnaires, mostly. "After 10 sessions, I can definitely see my spots fading!" Got any methodological problems with that? Remember the principle of Cognitive Dissonance? [The more Therbligs/money/effort you invest in achieving a goal, the more likely you are to believe that you achieved it.] That's why, explained our grad school profs, "no-cost" psychotherapy hardly ever "works." "Charge 'em at least fifty cents, if you want 'em to change," they advised. [The APA Ethics Committee is constantly chasing its tail, as to whether barter is a therapeutic form payment. "Taking it out in trade" (as the lewd British euphemism has it), is definitely not, and is punishable by loss of license to practice.]

But, even if a paying leopard really wants to change its spots, can it? How much of brain function is "hard-wired" [as neuro-scientists used to like to say], and how much is "plastic" [as they like to say, these days]? Turns out, the more the patient and the therapist believe in the plasticity of brain function, "the more positive change is observed." Even if they insist on calling it "rewiring."

These days, I regard "a good therapeutic outcome" as "changing a leopard into a snow leopard."

And I hate RQs because they are at best intrusive [a big waste of time, since they promise an answer which they don't deliver], and at worst humiliating [since, like Jeramiah, they imply, "Schmuck, you should know this already!"].

On a Wild-Goose Chase

2011-05-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

It's probably not what you think it is. In the 16th Century, as if horses didn't have enough to do already [what with pulling plows & carriages, carrying warriors into battle, or on hunts for wild boar, deer, or foxes], they were ridden [for sport & for wagers] over the fields and stone "fences" of England, in a variety of contests of speed, agility & endurance. The Steeple Chase [also called the Point-to-Point] involved racing from one church steeple to the next. In the Paper Chase, directions to the next "point" on the route were written on pieces of paper [like a treasure hunt]. More arcane than these was the Wild-Goose Chase [used as a metaphor in 1592 in Romeo & Juliet], in which the lead horse is the "alpha wild-goose" who chooses the route, which all the others must follow in the chevron formation of geese in flight. Since the interval between lead "goose" and the others must be maintained [in an apparent race of attrition], the enterprise became a metaphor for "a fool's errand" [a futile waste of Therbligs], since the only way to beat the "goose" in pole position would be for it to fall at one of the fences. As in modern steeplechases [such as the Grand National], however, many fewer horses finish the race than start it, so it's a Schadenfreudelich, Survival-of-the-Fittest wager the punters are making.

What a great concept for a reality TV show, no?

Most mornings, Lili gets to engage in a more literal wild-goose chase, charging the flock of insouciant, poo-dropping Canada geese who congregate on the school playing fields, and sending them off in a honking, airborne chevron [possibly just to the nearby golf course]. The school groundskeepers love this, as do the kids out for PhysEd [who whoop and applaud, and shout "It's a wolf! It's a bear! It's the Goose-anator!"]. Haven't heard the last moniker much, since the Fall of Arnie, though.

Unlike the English sporting event, no animals are harmed in the making of Lili's morning show. The geese do not seem to experience her intrusion as awful [after all, they come back again the next day]; just highly inconvenient. Her efforts could be viewed as futile, in that they offer no permanent "goose-anation." This is not a trivial matter for the keepers & users of airport runways, as Sully the Hero of the Hudson could tell you. Indeed, many airports have hired wild-goose-chasing dogs, since that high-profile [but not uncommon] bird-strike incident.

The mission [as they say in government-speak] is "on-going." Win some, lose some. [Supply your own triumphs and disasters from this month's headlines.] Disasters cause pain & suffering to their immediate victims, fear to the rest of us [that we could be next], intrusion [of additional security measures] and humiliation [that we can't seem to find a "fool-proof" fix for the given threat]. No wonder the wolf is howling!

But, if we can focus on some of the triumphs, we might believe that our efforts are not futile. Our personal wild-goose chase may not be a "fool's errand," even if it must be "repeated, as necessary." Our Therbligs will have not been expended in vain.

"(Venez) M'Aider!"

2011-05-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

In 1923 Frederick Mockford, the senior radio operator @ Croydon Airport, near London, was asked to come up with "the international radiotelephone signal for help, [to be] used by ships and aircraft in distress." [Webster's 1988 ed.] Since much of Croydon's air traffic plied the route to and from LeBourget airfield in France, Mockford thought of the French phrase, "Venez m'aider!" ["Come help me!"], which was shortened to "Mayday," then lengthened to "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!" [since the redundancy makes it clear that you really mean "Help!" and are not just talking about the 1st of May].

In this April's issue of AOPA Pilot magazine [the official publication of the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association], an article called "High Anxiety" recounts the consequences of a Panic Attack, suffered by a private pilot "with 20 years of flying experience" while he was flying solo and practicing an Instrument [as opposed to Visual] approach into Oceanside Municipal Airport [near San Diego, CA}. "Shortly after I entered the clouds, a wave of incredible panic and terror came over me. I believed I was completely out of control of the situation. I was afraid of losing control of the airplane, as well as the repercussions of [Air Traffic Control] if I got on the radio and told them I was losing control of the airplane." [In other words, he feared that if he called a "Mayday," he might lose his pilot's license.]

Well, since this is a nonfiction article [not an episode of Lost], we can assume that he managed to overpower his "howling wolf" [fear-fueled amygdala, which was freezing up his hippocampus] and get it together for long enough to land, yah? Here's what he recalls of that process: "I started talking to myself out loud, telling myself that there was nothing that needed to be done that I hadn't done many times before. I got the needles centered where they were supposed to be and completed the approach successfully."

Thereafter, though, he developed the symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress, becoming unable even to fly as a passenger in a commercial airplane, and sought psychotherapy [of which more, later]. Meanwhile, what may have saved his life during the event was talking out loud to himself. If he had burst forth into song [maybe "I believe I can fly," or "Off we go into the wild blue yonder"], he might have gotten a good result, as well, since his vocalizations short-circuited the unhelpful shallow breathing which fuels Panic. Speaking, singing, and whistling a happy tune really do work as anti-anxiety strategies, just as Rogers & Hammerstein told us.

His psychotherapist used 2 non-pharmaceutical techniques with our grounded pilot. He suggested a bit of in vivo desensitization [taking aerobatic gliding lessons with a seasoned instructor as his co-pilot], and cognitive challenging of any feelings of anxiety he experienced while flying, with reality-testing. If he began to feel anxious, he would quickly realize that he "was in complete control of the airplane and there was no reason to feel that way." [And even if he "lost it," the co-pilot could take over the controls at any time, if necessary.]

It is unclear, whether our pilot also took medications to control his anxiety. At the end of the article there is a message from the AOPA Medical Services Program, setting out the regulations for becoming recertified as a private pilot, after taking SSRIs or benzodiazepines. We do know that he has currently chosen to fly ultralight aircraft, for which no pilot's license is required.

Be that as it may, the article offers insight into the onset, course, and successful treatment of a first-time Panic Attack, when a seasoned pilot who always thought he had "the right stuff," got "tangled up in blue," lived through it, and found the courage to take aother leap of faith "into the wild blue yonder." Once again, he believes he can fly.

"I Believe I Can Fly"

2011-04-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

Are you familiar with R.Kelly's 1993 Grammy-winning R&B song? If you flew Northwest in the 90s, you heard it as part of their pre-flight informational video, apparently designed to spare the cabin crew the Therbligs it takes to perform the safety spiel, which [up until last week] bored everyone but rookie passengers. On several flights I was on, the song caused nervous laughter and wisecracks: "Oh they believe they can fly? How strangely not reassuring!"

My fellow travelers were engaging in Poetic speech, as was a youth [at the foster care agency in Detroit where I consulted], in response to a certain card on Murray's Thematic Apperception Test. The decidedly literal-minded and unhip lady who had administered his psychological test battery wrote in her report, "The subject began to sing a song, to the effect that he believed he could fly." She thought he was delusional. I [her supervisor] thought he was quick-witted, creative and funny. After a brief lecture on psycholinguistics (and particularly, Pragmatics), my opinion prevailed.

Funny old phrase, though, innit? TAT creator Murray, himself, spoke of the "Icarus Complex," defined in The Dictionary of Psychology [ed. Ray Corsini, 2002] as "a desire to be important and gain fame and fortune, but paired with a tendency to not succeed, in part because of refusing to try or giving up too quickly." Okay, Test Lady and Murray, which would you have us do? Take a leap of faith into the wild blue yonder, and hope our feathers don't melt in the sun's heat, or shut up and obey the laws of gravity?

My father had at least two things in common with singer/songwriter Robert Kelly. He was born on the South Side of Chicago, and he believed he could fly. For high school credit, he and some classmates got to go over to nearby Midway Airport and learn to repair and fly the Sopwith Camel of a WWI flying Ace. Rosie [known more prosaically as Red in his pre-Naval Academy days] was the most promising pupil; and the Ace hatched a plan for him to become the youngest American to fly solo over an ocean. Therefore, on Easter Break of 1936 [after the 16-year-old had earned his pilot's license] the two of them flew the biplane down [in fuel-limited hops] to Florida, and waited for good enough weather for a flight to Cuba. Time ran out before the skies cleared; and they despondently "puddle jumped" their way back to Midway, not having succeeded in their quest. [As NASA has learned to its cost, you can control alot of things, but not Florida weather.]

"Nevermind," thought he, "I'll go to the Naval Academy and become a Marine Aviator." But on Service Selection night in December of 1941, the flight school quota for the top 10th of the Class had already been filled by the time his number came up; and he was consigned to the "Black Shoe Navy" [as Surface Warfare was called, then and now]. So, on his 61st birthday [geddit?], he renewed his private pilot's license, bought a Cessna, and once more took to the skies.

The next post will consider the case of a private pilot with 20 years' experience, who suddenly experienced an in-flight Panic Attack, and no longer "believed he could fly."

This is a picture of Lili (who turns 7 next week), taken several years ago, when she joyfully "flew" over obstacles with the greatest of ease. Now, she has to be asked to do so; and sometimes she "dogs it" by leaping beside [not over] the barrel. C'mon, Lili! Even in dog years, you're not 61 yet.

Just in case...

2011-04-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

The ramshackle buildings of the school my sister & I attended in the 60s, in Bushy Park, Greater London [in transit to which, we passed by Hampton Court Palace], had served as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, where Ike & the Yanks hammered Gen. Sir Frederick E. Morgan's plan, "Operation Overlord," into a viable strategy for the invasion of Europe. The Kindergarten classroom had been the erstwhile "Eisenhower Room."

By March 1961, JFK had succeeded Ike as President, and inherited from him the never-viable plan, "Operation Pluto," for a CIA-caper [the invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro counter-revolutionaries], known since its spectacular failure as "The Bay of Pigs." Two days before the debacle, Radio Moscow, in an English language broadcast aimed at listeners in the UK, had predicted such an "adventure" [and its failure]. So too, it turns out, had the British Ambassador to the US, warning that UK intelligence sources advised that the Cuban populace were overwhelmingly pro-Castro; and they were likely to meet an intrusion onto their soil with hostility, not joy & gratitude. Nobody @ the CIA passed his message along to JFK, though.

We & our Bushy Park classmates [most of whose parents worked in or for the US military in London] were humiliated at our nation's fiasco, and terrified by Moscow's predicted anti-NATO ballistic retaliation [since the UK was likely to be their proxy whipping-boy]. Almost to a child, we became Nihilists, refusing to do our homework, since "What's the point? We're all going to be blown to smithereens by the Russians, anyway."

So our beloved teachers, most of whom had been through the London Blitz about 20 years earlier, gathered us together and shared their experiences of Back in the Day, when actual bombs were actually falling [not just maybe, mind], every night, sometimes on friends & family, before the Yanks condescended to become Allies. "Of course we all thought about giving up," they said. "How trivial & pointless homework seemed, when London was burning every night. But, if we hadn't just kept on doing it, we wouldn't have been able to go on to University and become your teachers, now would we? And where would you be then, eh?"

Concrete, but compelling role-modelling, is what they offered us. Not any of your "Not to worry. Everything is going to turn out fine." Just the Existential question, "What if we don't all get blown to smithereens? Maybe it would be best to have done your homework, JUST IN CASE (of survival).

So we pulled ourselves together and did our homework.

Zanzibar is sitting in a Flight Bag [also known as a Chart Case], which pilots always carry with them, even to this day, so that if their more sophisticated methods of navigation "go down," they can still figure out where to land safely. Just in case.

Taking the Mick Out of Murphy's Law

2011-03-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

In 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base, a team of military engineers were studying the effects on the human body, of "sudden deceleration," using a speed sled on rails & brave volunteers. The lead researcher, Capt. Edward A. Murphy, annoyed with the imprecision of one of his technical assistants, remarked that if a device could be fitted incorrectly, this clown would do it. Later, Dr. John Paul Stapp, who survived a 40-G [sic] deceleration in the sled, told reporters that, "the good safety record on the project was due to a firm belief in Murphy's Law."

So, how did the 20th Century dissing of one schlemiel in the California desert morph into the pessimistic worldview now implied by the idiom, "It's Murphy's Law, isn't it?" uttered whenever [as the 18th Century Scottish poet, Robert Burns, wrote] "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley"?

Well, as long as we've wandered back to the British Isles, let's consider the far older [but unattributed] expression, "It's sod's law, innit?" In post-1950s dictionaries [both British & American] the two phrases are listed as interchangeable. But dey're not really, are dey now? Cuz your British lexicographer was until recently reluctant to codify pejorative references to the Irish, even referring to a certain AKC breed of dog as a "red setter," lest offense [and, presumably, reprisals] be taken. [Compare this to the linguistically insouciant Yanks, who t'row scores of Hooligans into Paddywagons every March 17th, for da love o' Mike!] Mind you, there also are no "German Shepherds" in the UK; there are instead "Alsatians," n'est-ce pas? ["Don't mention the War!"]

Cultural nuances aside, though, there are important locus-of-control differences in the lessons to be drawn, between Sod's and Murphy's Laws. The former posits "a perversely malignant universe," in which "dropped toast always lands buttered-side-down," and bad things happen to good people. It is essentially Nihilistic. Murphy's Law, on the other hand, suggests the adoption of a "belt & suspenders [or braces, as the Brits would have it]" approach to human endeavors. There may be no such thing as a "fail-safe" plan; so there should be at least one back-up plan. Written down & rehearsed [since, once the limbic system is lit up, hippocampus-mediated problem-solving will go off-line.] Yeah, sure, that plan might not work, either. Score one for the Nihilists. But, then again, it just might. Worth a try, yeah?

For Lent, I'm trying to give up seeing the world in Sod's Law terms. I still believe in Murphy's Law, of course. I know, for instance, that at the end of an hour-long, free-range adventure in the woods, Lili will still feel the need to "leave a message" for her canine correspondents on the lawn of the public schoolyard. Never let the other guy have the last "word," is her motto. Luckily, though, this time she was "only taking the Mick" [Google it]; and no deployment of a New York Times blue plastic bag was necessary. [But I always carry at least one in my pocket, pace Capt. Murphy.]

"Just looking for some touch."

2011-03-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

That's a canny wee lad, yon man fro' Nazareth. Meaning, of course, Dan McCafferty, the legendary frontman of that Scottish rock band which took its name from the first line of the song "The Weight" by that Canadian rock band, The Band: "Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' 'bout halfpast dead." D'ye ken? [By which they (The Band) meant, of course, the little town in the LeHigh Valley of Pennsylvania, not far from the towns of Emmaus and Bethlehem.] Dearie me! How Metalingual this post is turning out to be!

What the brilliant Mr. McCafferty did, while singing his live cover of the ZZ Top song, "Tush," was to replace that arcane and confusing word [Dusty Hill pronounces it to rhyme with "hush"; yet he seems to be "looking for" the shortened form of the Yiddish word "tochus," which rhymes with "push."] with the universally understood and desired, by man, woman, and beast, "touch." Download the lyrics from Hair of the Dog, Live to see what I mean.

Now, let us segue back to 14th Century France and the [slyly political] poem by Gervais du Bus, Roman de Fauvel, in which all the rich but not-so-powerful people seek to ingratiate themselves with a self-important brown horse [in some translations, a donkey] named "Fauvel," by stroking [currying] his coat. Thus, in France, a "curryfavel" came to mean a flatterer. By 1530, the idiom had crossed the Channel, cut loose the brown horse part of the metaphor, and become the compound verb, "to curry favour." They have disagreed about much, but both the French and English have long known that the way to gain favour with a horse is to stroke its fur in the direction in which it lies flat [from the Old French correire, "to put in order"].

Conversely, the idiom, "to rub (a person or animal) up the wrong way" means "to be annoying."

Still, why all the idiomatic hostility towards currying? Why is it considered a duplicitous thing to do? Perhaps because [look it up, skeptics] stroking a mammal's fur (hair) produces oxytocin [Get this!] in both parties: the groomed and the groomer. This, theoretically, fosters trust, which [if the "groomer" is a sexual predator and the "groomed" is a vulnerable individual] is not only manipulative, it's against the law [in many places].

With that caveat, now you know how to get "that warm, fuzzy feeling," without ordering dodgy nasal sprays claiming to contain oxytocin ["the love hormone"] online. Pet your pet. Brush the hair of the dog. Curry a brown horse. [Here are Dusk the mare & our younger daughter, when she was just a canny wee lass.] Or [with their permission] stroke or brush the hair of someone who is already in your circle of trust. Pace the Broadway musical Hair, this is unlikely to bring about World Peace; but it may strengthen the impulse to "tend and defend" those within your own reference group.

Remember, "we're all looking for some touch," but not from a stranger on the subway.

Big Love & Other Oxytocin Myths

2011-02-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

My husband snapped this photo of me & our firstborn enjoying a stroll through the Muir Woods redwood park this Valentine's weekend, exactly 30 years after he & I walked the same path. Everybody say, "Aww," cuz that's the last sentimental sentence in this pseudo-science-debunking post.

In 1953 Vincent du Vigneaud synthesized the so-called "pro-social" neuropeptide, Oxytocin (OT), for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1956 [but not for Peace]. Until the 21st century, researchers mostly studied the effects of this hormone in nonhuman mammals, concluding that it facilitates labor and lactation. From whence, it was only a short anthropomorphic leap of logic, to conclude that OT acts like a maternal love potion, cementing the mother-offspring bond, at least until the young can fend for themselves. Having witnessed at an impressionable age my cousin's pet mouse giving birth and then eating all of her young that we were not quick enough to rescue from her, I can tell you [as they say Up North in England], "It don't necessarily follow." Apparently, the amount of OT sufficient to induce labor & delivery is not always sufficient to guarantee maternal feelings [let's say, behavior] towards her progeny. Anyone who raises livestock is aware of this, and has one or two "foster mothers" on hand, to "adopt" the rejected newborns. Those who work in neonatology or "foundling" rescue have seen this occasional failure of Oxytocin to vincit omnia in humans, as well.

Nevertheless, OT has lately been hailed by [mostly European] neuroscientists, as the "Love Hormone" for shy, fearful and/or autistic humans, now available as a nasal spray [talk about "Gets Right Up Your Nose"], at least for research purposes. In April '05, Kosfeld et al. [from Zurich] proclaimed "Oxytocin increases trust in humans." In December '05, Kirsch et al. [from Germany] reported "Oxytocin modulates neural circuity for social cognition and fear in humans." By April '10 Hurlemann et al. [from Bonn], in the article "Oxytocin enhances amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in humans," began, "OT is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders."

Oh, yeah? Show me the data. More to the point, show me the methodology. The slender bough from which all these "findings" hang, is the Multifaceted Empathy Test: a self-administered computer instrument, on which a subject first categorizes a series of photos [happy, sad, or angry], and then rates [0 to 10] "how much you feel for the person in the photo." With and without OT up your nose, double-blind. Seriously? Why not just ask subjects to rate Facebook pictures? "Would you 'friend' this person? Now, with OT up your nose, would you?"

Did I mention that trans-nasal Oxytocin is chemically similar to MDMA? [Google it.]

Let's hear it for the Dutch [Carsten De Dreu et al., June '10, Amsterdam], who used a slightly more real-world scenario, involving a game of strategy, allocating wealth [10 Euros] to Self, the In-Group, and/or the Out-Group. [Not unlike the contentious bail-out of debtor EU nations by (ahem) the Germans, nicht wahr?] They use wonderfully evocative terms, like "in-group love" and "out-group hate." Here's what they found: "The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans." Absent OT up their nose(s) the (male) subjects mostly opted to keep their Euros to themselves. With a snootfull, though, they would sacrifice their Euros for the good of their in-group, especially if it "hurt" the out-group. Conclusion: OT "drives a 'tend and defend' response in that it promoted in-group trust and cooperation, and defensive aggression (including protectionism and preemptive strike) against perceived out-group threat."

Sound familiar? Sounds like Circle-the-Wagons, Jets-versus-Sharks, Small Love [not Big Love] to me. Next time, a discussion of how OT gets into the bloodstream [other than via a nasal spray].

Hint: Consider the old English expression, "to curry favour."

Does a hangdog expression betoken guilt?

2011-02-21T11:36:00.000-08:00

Funny, how old words morph their meanings, innit? Take "hangdog," which has been around since the 1670s, adjective & noun, originally meaning "contemptible & sneaking." [Think Dickens' passive-aggressive character, Uriah Heep, always presenting himself as 'umble, while surreptitiously scheming to bring the high & mighty down.] By 2010, The American Heritage Dictionary defined a "hangdog expression" as "looking shamefaced & guilty."

Consider the word "guilt," even. As late as 1934, the only definition in The Concise Oxford Dictionary was "culpability." Guilt wasn't a psychological construct. None of your subjective, self-referential, conceptual feeling [as in "survivor guilt," or "Jewish/Catholic/Protestant guilt"]. Just the objective fact of the case: "How does the defendant plead? Guilty or not guilty?" Also, "How does the jury find: guilty or not guilty?" [Their verdict is a subjective opinion, but it's presumably based on the objective, admissible facts presented.] The notion of remorse doesn't come into it, until the sentencing phase of the trial, if the erstwhile "not guilty" defendant is found "guilty" [at which point, his lawyer advises him to show how sorry he is by adopting a hangdog expression].

So, here we are in the 21st century, with the burgeoning field of Social Neuroscience and its ugly Iron Maiden, the fMRI [colloquially referred to in the media as The Brain Scanner], claiming to have located the Seat of Guilt in the Brain, no less! Point of order, would that be the seat of objective or subjective guilt, they've found? Let me not bore you with my observations on the flawed research designs of such studies [like, having a subject read or watch scenarios of other people behaving badly, in order to light up the Guilt center(s) in the subject's own brain... What? When I watch Othello snuff Desdamona, I'm the one who feels/is guilty?]. Let me instead quote the brain-imager, Dr. Gregory Miller of the University of Illinois: "Functions do not have a location. Decisions, feelings, perceptions, delusions, memories do not have a spatial location. We image brain events... We do not image, and cannot localise in space, psychological constructs."

At most, then, the fMRI is currently no better than the 20th Century polygraph at measuring physiological changes correlated with limbic system changes correlated with psychological constructs, such as fear and humiliation. From which I know, having treated several Intelligence Officers who had failed the annual polygraph test because of an exaggerated sense of guilt, over sexual peccadillos, rather than because they were actually guilty of breaching national security. So dedicated were they to their Intel work [from which they were sidelined by the failed polygraph test], that some of them would ask [semi-jokingly], "Is there such a thing as a 'guilt-ectomy' that I could have, just so I could pass the polygraph?" Just give those brain-imagers a chance, and they'll be in there before you can say "knife."

Back to the title question, addressed on a pet behavior blog, in the form, "Do dogs feel guilt?" Their answer was, "No. Guilt is an abstract concept. Dogs express fear & submission, in response to the owner's anger, which they sense through body odor, glaring eyes, stance and tone of voice." The dog "looks hangdog" to avoid or lessen the Alpha Dog's punishment [just like a defendant who has been "found guilty"].

The wolf looks "sheepish" in the presence of a more powerful wolf. It has correctly read the power subtext of the situation. It endures the humiliation of acting submissive, to avoid the pain & suffering of being put in its place [which might be completely beyond the pale, where chances of survival are slim] by the Big Dog. That's more useful than guilt. That's Social Intelligence.

"T'es folle ou quoi?"

2011-01-24T08:29:00.000-08:00

French slang for, "Are you crazy, or what?" Also, the title of a 1982 comedy, ads for which were plastered all over the Metro station walls that winter [the coldest on record, at the time]. It became my lingua franca catchphrase during our Eurail Pass honeymoon, as effective in Milan and Vienna as it was in Paris, to back off street hasslers without giving offense. It conveyed the power subtext, "I am not your victim, nor am I your enemy," in a way that the more common but histrionic "Laissez-moi!" ["Leave me alone!"] just misses.

As effective as the phrase is, after 40 years of close, professional encounters with Those Who May Be Crazy, I don't like its implication. Now, for a bit of Attribution Theory. Do you imagine that what I object to is the use of a derogatory term for those suffering from Mental Illness? Not me. Sticks & stones and all that. I object, Ladies & Gents, to the overuse of the Insanity Defense, to excuse wolfish behavior, nar'mean?

In March of 1981, you may recall or have read, one John Hinckley, Jr. fired 6 exploding bullets at President Reagan, hoping to win the admiration & love of the actress Jodie Foster. He was a lousy shot, and managed to kill and maim several people; but only one ricocheting bullet entered the armpit of the President, who survived. The shooter copped an Insanity Plea [which a DC jury bought] and remains to this day an inpatient @ St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC [which advertises monthly for clinical staff, if you're interested in a job opportunity]. For years, he has been granted weekend passes to visit his parents.

I'm no fortune teller, but I bet the Tucson shooter's defense team are pouring over the transcripts of the Hinckley trial, to unearth bits of jury-swaying gold dust. A spate of articles, both in the popular and scientific press, have addressed the thorny "T'es folle ou quoi?" question, in hopes of being better able to identify and forestall future pistol-packin' werewolves from acting out. Presciently, in the 24 July 09 issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin, William T. Carpenter wrote a pros & cons think piece, "Anticipating DSM-V: Should Psychosis Risk Become a Diagnostic Class?" Under "cons," he notes that the proposed criteria for a diagnosis of Psychosis Risk Syndrome [PRS] or Attenuated Psychotic Symptoms Syndrome [APS], are commonly found in "non-ill" young people; and so the risk of needless stigmatisation and overtreatment is high.

Even if the Syndrome makes it into the next edition of the so-called "Book of Broken Things," the last people who are going to be able to inform the authorities about a perceived loose cannon will be Mental Health providers. Unless HIPAA is amended or repealed, that is. Back in the day, in pre-HIPAA times, one of my jobs as an active duty Navy Psychologist was to do annual assessments of veterans receiving disability pensions for service-connected Mental Illness. It was a Hobson's Choice the vet faced in his interview. Too sane, and he would lose his benefits. Too crazy, and he might get rehospitalized on the spot. In the summer of 1981 a vet told me that it was his ambition, "to become another Hinckley." Without fear of litigation or loss of my license to practice psychology, I informed my Department Head, who called the FBI, who arrived promptly, to "continue the interview process" with the vet.

Couldn't get away with that nowadays. Not even sure if I could get away with remarking, to a weird-acting, in-my-face pavement artist on the streets of Paris, "T'es folle ou quoi?" But I bet he could get away with murder.

Buffalo Springfield Redux

2011-01-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

Stick around 3 score years or so, and you're likely to have a certain number of deja vu moments. Cue Stephen Stills' 1967 hit, For What It's Worth. ["There's battle lines being drawn. Nobody's right if everybody's wrong."] It became the anthem of the anti-Vietnam War movement, although he wrote it in response to a scuffle between rowdy clubbers and policemen in NYC [4 years before the student deaths @ Kent State, mind you, as mourned in his former bandmate Neil Young's song, Tin Soldiers.]

[Music trivia note: The band's name, Buffalo Springfield, has nothing to do with the Wild West, where endangered species roam, play, etc. It was inspired by a steamroller parked in the street outside their LA house, manufactured by the Buffalo-Springfield Roller Company.]

For me [who took to playing it on "infinite repeat" during those anarchic, all-bets-are-off days of the late 60s], the song had the power to transform my overwhelming fear (for myself, for my classmates who were facing the nightmarish fight [in Nam] or flight [to Canada] dilemma, and for my going-to-the-dogs country) into something less primal. Like all works of art (and this one earned the band induction into the Roll & Roll Hall of Fame, ya know), it imposed some order on the chaos, partly by making the general particular: "There's a man with a gun over there." As the song implies, it doesn't much matter if he's a public servant or a vigilante. Either way, it lights up our limbic system.

Good ol' Stephen Stills channels his pre-frontal cortex, and advises, "I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down."

There you have it. That's the whole, sane, soothing message of his song. Not an empty promise of "Everything is going to be all right." Not the braggadocio of "We will rock you." Just, "Stop. Everybody look what's going down."

Cuz, as he said in another song, with another band, "We have all been here before..."

"Howl": But Is It Art?

2010-12-28T08:32:00.000-08:00

Didn't see the movie, having met the man in the flesh, in the 1960s at Duke, wolfing down Oreo cookies at a classmate's off-campus kitchen table. (Allen Ginsberg, not me, eating the Oreos.) Made a nice change from all the narcotics and hallucinogens, I suppose.

I always thought it was a pity Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia [for writing an ironic rude message in the grime of his unwashed dorm window, addressed to his "slatternly" maid, yet], before he read James Joyce. Well, I assume he hadn't read Joyce, or else he wouldn't have taken credit for "inventing" stream-of-consciousness prosody. Nar'mean?

Consider the social contract, concerning listening to the non-linear musings of another. If you forked over whatever the admission price was, to see Howl in an art film house, it'd get right up your nose if the projector broke down in the middle of reel 2, and the rest was silence. But if, on the subway ride to the art cinema, a raving loony inflicted his own brand of stream-of-consciousness "performance art" on you and your fellow straphangers, you'd be likely to regard it as a bloody intrusion, and to wish he would shut up, already.

How come? Possibly, because [unless you mistakenly thought the James Franco vehicle was yet another werewolf flick] you were expecting to hear poetry, and therefore perceived it as such. [Poetic speech: the "just kidding; don't take this literally" speech function.] Whereas, the unknown [if not uncommon] loony on the subway might be spouting Referential [fact-giving] speech ("The aliens are coming!"), or even Conative [orders-giving] speech ("Get on your tinfoil hat!"), either of which could trigger the "Fear!" message in our amygdala, since this guy might not be "just kidding"; and he just might get up in our grille for emphasis.

Same sounds; different attribution, as to what they betoken. Sometime over the holidays, I just bet you were in a public place where you heard the howl of a young child. How did your amygdala process that? Merely intrusion? [Not my kid, not my job, man.] Vicarious pain & suffering? [Ah, the poor wee mite! Or, perhaps, those poor parents!] If you sense that the howl is strategic [a Poetic simulation of distress to manipulate the public], and you initially "fell for it," you might even feel humiliated at having been schmized.

We pay for, and expect, to be "deceived" by the artistry of professional performers. Not by the artifice of amateurs, whether they be cunning children, subway soliloquists, or even that "difficult" family member, who always seems to tune up for a long, loud howl, just as the entree is taken out of the oven. Nar'mean?

"A cat may look on a king, ye know."

2010-12-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

The earliest citation for this egalitarian proverb is 1546 [Oxford English Dictionary], when the king in question was Henry VIII. I was going to apply it to the case, a couple of weeks ago, of the Bishop of Willesden's snarky Twitter response to the engagement of Prince William [heir to the throne and therefore this cleric's eventual boss]: to paraphrase,"I give it seven years. The Royal Family are all philanderers. When the wedding date is announced, I'll be booking my republican day trip to France." The next day, the Bishop issued a pro forma "No offense intended" statement; but by the end of the week he had been relieved of his public duties.

But that puny piece of lese majesty has since been overshadowed by last week's riotous assault [by disgruntled students] on Prince Charles' official car and his current wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, who may actually have been "poked with a stick" through the broken window of their Rolls. [All of us curious cats may look at the now-famous photo of Camilla and the future king, wearing matching WTF facial expressions, under siege.] 182 protesters had been arrested by the following Tuesday, on the basis of CCTV footage.

Can you hear the hoofbeats of my hobbyhorse approaching? Det. Chief Superintendent Horne had this to say about the alleged perpetrators: "There was a stark contrast between scenes in Westminster and homes with crying parents and shocked young people when the police turned up. When they are shown footage of their actions that day some are shocked by the impact of their behavior." Or to put words in their slack-jawed mouths, "I have no idea what got into me! I'm just not like that!"

To use another of my favorite Mancunian expressions, then "What are you like?" [It means "Your behavior is so bad, that similes fail me."]

My own answer, to the Bishop and to the revolting students, is "You are like anyone else who ever got a snootfull of one or more of the Big Four Precursors: angry." Was it intrusion? The tuition fees are set to treble in the next few years, meaning that almost all "Uni" grads will incur significant debt. Fear? "How will I ever find a job, if I can't afford an education?" Pain & suffering? "If the government cuts back on 'the dole,' [unemployment benefits], I may not even be able to afford food & shelter!"

But consider the targets of their [and the Bishop's] anger: the Royals. The ostentatiously wealthy, "Bow-to-me-when-you-address-me," unelected, Ruling Class.

I'm thinking it was humiliation, that got up their noses. It usually is, when revolution is in the air.

"Dig it"

2010-11-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

"...like the FBI, and the CIA, and the BBC." So goes the Beatles' shortest song, from the 1970 Let It Be album (now available for legal download on iTunes). Beat musicians had been saying "Can you dig it?" or "Ya dig?" for decades [the American version of "nar'mean?"], to ask "Do you understand what I just said?" but by the time the Beatles used it, the phrase had morphed from the Metalingual [message clarification] speech function to the Phatic. It had come to mean "Listen" [as in "do you want to know a secret?"]

Well, do ya? [Want to know a secret, that is.] In the 60s, Daniel Ellsberg was convinced that we all wanted to know the contents of secret briefing papers on strategies for vanquishing North Vietnam [thereafter known as The Pentagon Papers]. So he dug up some classified information and gave it to the press, for all us quidnuncs to read.

La plus ca change, la plus ca meme chose. Nar'mean? Julian Assange? WikiLeaks? Ya dig?

Guess who thinks Mr. Assange is a swell guy for sharing with the whole [cyber-linked] world the classified information he was able to dig up? Why, Mr. Ellsberg, of course.

Whether you do, too, depends on your reference group. Are you more "The truth will set you free"; or more "Loose lips sink ships"? Far be it from me, to try to get you to switch groups. None of us can predict the effect of the WikiLeaks disclosures on global security. I'm more curious about the precursors. [As in, what got up Assange's nose, that he decided to crack the code of encrypted websites and report his findings?] Mind you, that's the basic mission statement of those who work for the FBI, and the CIA, and the BBC.

Our [often fear-based] Need to Know What's Happening is the key to our individual and collective survival. Curiosity saved the cat, the dog, and us. We all "want to know a secret," but we don't all "promise not to tell."

"Softly, softly..."

2010-11-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

"...catchee monkey," goes a proverb so old that its origin is anybody's guess. Early 20th Century Britons assumed it came from somewhere in Asia [China or India, somewhere with free range monkeys, don't you know]. It means, "You are more likely to catch a fugitive (thought or creature) by guile, than by charging at it directly, all guns blazing."

My absolutely fave UK telly show in the early 60s was Z Cars, a cop show, wherein the Baddies were pursued by pairs of what are now called "gavvers" in unmarked Ford Zephyrs [whence the show's name]. Car chases took a back seat to good character acting, some of it undoubtedly improvised, since the shows were broadcast live. By 1966, our heroes had been promoted to detective status, and appeared in a new show, Softly, Softly. All subsequent cat & mouse, "I'll trick the truth out of you, Clever Clogs," police procedural shows owe a debt to these 2 series.

One of these, The Bill, ran from the 80s right up until this year, when its producers decided (gasp!) that the story lines were becoming repetitive and predictable! Give over! That's part of what we all loved about it. In its first decade there was a dour young Scottish detective who, in every episode, to signify that the villain was now ready to "cough" (confess), intoned, "In your own time..."

Which is the point of this post. "Ticking bomb" scenario or not, centuries of clinical experience and modern neuroscience agree: "You can't hurry truth. You just have to wait." Remember how Ronald Reagan excused his filmography of grade-B movies: "The studio had us on a tight schedule. They could have it good, or they could have it Tuesday." Same thing when it comes to actionable intel. We can, by word or deed, exhort the (putative) Bad Guy to "Spit it out!" and get a quick (possibly false) confession; or we can "go all round Robin Hood's barn" and catch him up in his own tangled web of lies.

The same choice of strategies applies to our own attempts to recover a fugitive thought. No matter how vital a piece of information may be, if we "rack" our brains for it [as in "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"], we redirect blood away from the hippocampus [the site of memory & problem-solving] to the amygdala [site of "OMG!"]. In academic settings, this is called "brain freeze," or "an attack of stupid." Like coaxing a skittish monkey [or dog] across a rickety footbridge to our side, we are likely to get better results with a "softly, softly" approach. Like the Scottish detective, we might try acting less humiliatingly desperate to get our uncooperative brain to "cough" the crucial but elusive intel, and instead intone, "In your own time..."

"Dai-jo-bu!" ["Everbody cut footloose"]

2010-10-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

Where would the business based rom-com [from The Pajama Game to MadMen, which, don't kid yourself, is a comedy, whatever its Emmy category] be, without the office party, or better yet, the off-site office picnic? Nowheresville, that's where! (Hold that thought.)

How do drug/bomb/corpse-sniffing dogs learn their trade? Through rewards for accurate scent detection, sure; but what's the most commonly used reward? Why, play time with the "Boss."

In the Navy, we mice learned at "salute school," there are 3 basic postures, in the presence of the Boss Cats: "Attention on deck" [stand up straight, "eyes in the boat," and don't move]; "At ease" or "Fall out" [you are free to mill about smartly]; and (for me) a useless middle-ground position, because it was less comfortable than standing to attention [hands folded at the small of one's back, as if handcuffed] "Parade rest."

Lili's trainer [a former Marine] taught us to tell her "Zen-zen" [literal translation, "Never"] for the "Don't move" command, which we were encouraged to extend, for distance and duration, as we left her in the "Down/stay" position in an open space. The release command, "Dai-jo-bu!" [literally, "All right!"] is more festive than merely "At ease," or "Fall out." It means "Party time!" It's an exhortation to "cut footloose," to do a little dance of joy, to "play with the Boss Cat," not just to follow orders.

And therein lies the conundrum. In the Navy, a junior officer used to parse a "command performance" [an "invitation" to a social event that one could not refuse, without negative consequences], using a Germanic funny voice, "You will come! You will enjoy it!" So, too, do some reluctant attendees to the company party/picnic mutter to themselves, "Aye, aye, sir. Three bags full, sir. It's not 'play' if it's required, no matter how much booze is on offer." The well-meant but ham-fisted proclamation of the Boss Cat(s), "Let the revelries begin!" is experienced as an intrusion into one's private time off. Worse, if one "befriends Ethyl" [gets drunk] to get through the event, one risks humiliation or even the fear of the Boss Cats' displeasure.

So, what's the upside of such jollifications? Well, believe it or not, they work best if the captive merry-makers are divided [randomly] into teams, to compete in a bit of low-stakes zero-sum-gaming [ranging from silly, pseudo-athletic events to charades and Trivial Pursuit]. To promote the "We're all in this together" spirit, the Boss Cats have to muck in with the mice [at least one per team], thereby showing what Jolly Good Eggs they are, really. To encourage reference group cohesion, each team should devise a clever name for itself [not necessarily by democratic means]. If all goes well, the use of the Poetic Speech function [jokes, plays on words, mimicry, and general Mick-taking] will increase, and laughter will follow. Stress will decrease. Cortisol production will be slowed.

The "play drive" in dogs has long been recognized and used strategically by their Boss Cats, to increase on-duty "productivity." ["All work and no play makes Jack a burnt-out, distracted dog."] It is also a powerful motivator in humans, as taught in Management Courses for Boss Cats. No matter how deadly serious the mission we're on, inside of each of us there is a Party Animal, waiting for a moment of comic relief. Waiting for the release command, "Dai-jo-bu!"

A Pot & Kettle Situation

2010-10-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

Our theme today is Freud's charging horses, back at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. They of his hypothetical question, "Would you rather be pulled apart by two horses, or charged by two horses?" To be less Poetic and more Metaligual about it, we're talking the defense mechanism of projection. Here are some of Ray Corsini's definitions [in The Dictionary of Psychology, 2002]: "attributing to others what is actually true of the self, often used to justify prejudice...the process by which impulses, wishes, or aspects of the self are imagined to be located in some external object."

Thus, the premise behind Projective Tests is that the subject will see in ambiguous visual stimuli, unconscious aspects of himself. You may recall from an earlier post that, unlike most "subjects" who think Lili looks like a wolf, a municipal workman thought she looked like a bat. Two more recent "responses" [as they are called on the Rorschach]: this summer a general contractor for the school, taking smoke breaks in a shady passage to the playing fields, would routinely greet Lili with, "There's my bear!" More bizarrely, a middle school boy, rambling in the woods with his science class to collect leaf specimens, asked "Is that a mountain lion?"

Instead of the deadpan "yes" I gave him, I could have said [in my best Cockney accent], "Oooh! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!" but that archaic expression has long since been shortened to the title idiom. It would have been an obscure joke, anyway, like the recurrent SNL sketch where two dorky Bostonians keep saying, "No, you ah" to each other. But that's what projection is: saying "No, you ah" to the "charging horse," rather than owning the "wolfish" aspects of oneself. Remember the middle school retort, to being called something negative [like a bat, or a bear, or a wolf, or a mountain lion]? "Takes one to know one."

Well, precisely. That was Freud's point. Well spotted, you middle schoolers and SNLers! Be a detective of human nature with me, and notice, on any given day, who is screaming the loudest imprecations against the "despicable" behavior of his/her foes. Wait one news cycle, and behold the hideous portrait [or skeleton] hidden in said screamer's own closet.

Less fun, but more to the point, we might ask ourselves why a friend's or relative's Highly Inconvenient behavior is Driving Us Howling Mad. Whatever else is "up our nose" about their shenanigans, there might just be a whiff of humiliation, as we grudgingly recognize in our own sweet selves a similar impulse to be beastly.

That "Frenemies" Thing

2010-09-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

Well, stone the crows, all these years I have been attributing this zero-sum-gaming motto to Gore Vidal; but now I find it, in a 1966 TIME magazine article, falling out of the gob of the hugely successful Broadway producer, David Merrick: "It is not enough for me to succeed; all others must also fail." How humiliating, to have gotten it wrong! (Although I'm not alone. Others have credited Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. Do I hear a nomination for Machiavelli?) The article, incidentally, in that halcyon, less in-your-face-snarky era of journalism, was called "The Be(a)st of Broadway," geddit? Cuz, Mr. Merrick was (ahem) ambivalently regarded by the theatrical community.

Now, a short diatribe on the clinical meaning of "ambivalence" (as opposed to the "street" meaning, of "I hate his guts!"): "simultaneous conflicting feelings toward a person or thing, as love and hate" [Webster's, 1988 ed.] Not, "as fear and loathing," nar'mean? To illustrate this point in therapy sessions, I hold out my hands in the "supplicant palms" position, and intone, "On the one hand, ya-dah-ya-dah. On the other hand, la-di-dah." I then say, "There are very few things or individuals in our lives, about which we humans are not ambivalent."

Oh, but how we hate to admit it! Even to ourselves. So, hurrah for the new portmanteau word, "frenemy," which captures the both-hands [simultaneously positive & negative] feelings which we can sense in others [but only bald-faced truth-tellers, like Merrick & Vidal, will acknowledge in themselves]. We'll know that this brave willingness to admit to ambivalent feelings, about even our Nearest & Dearest, has made it into mainstream consciousness, when "to frenemy" someone becomes a transitive verb in Facebook parlance.

The next post will deal with the ways people avoid Owning their Inner Wolf [as in, acknowledging that another's success can stir feelings of humiliation that they got the "prize" we wanted, and even fear that there won't be enough "prizes" to go around].

Meanwhile, here are Seamus & Finn, locked in some sort of close contact. Is it a hug or combat? That's easy. It's both.

Working on a Clear Round

2010-09-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

Those of us who have watched our share of televised equestrian events tend to put the sound on "mute," to avoid hearing this inane, now-you've-jinxed-it phrase, which seems to guarantee that horse & rider will knock over the next fence. In the first place [where this "doomed" equine/human team are now not likely to finish], why state the obvious? It's not a radio broadcast. Anyone who cares about the outcome of the event will be able to work out if all the jumps have remained up so far, or if some rails have fallen. It's not a judgment call. As for time penalties, there is usually a graphic in the corner of the TV screen, keeping track for the viewers [but not the rider, who has to make an elaborate, on-the-hoof compromise between haste & accuracy, to win this zero-sum game].

Okay, so horse people are "a breed apart," notoriously superstitious; but so are theater folk. It's bad luck to wish an actor "good luck" before a performance: hence, the Poetic [as in, "I mean the opposite of what I'm saying"] phrase "Break a leg." In the UK it's bad luck to say "Macbeth" [especially if that's the show you're in]: hence, "the Scottish play." My favorite line from the 1947 musical comedy send-up of Irish-American folkways, Finian's Rainbow, is "Don't be superstitious! It's bad luck!"

So, that's my excuse. I'm a horse-loving, theatrical, Irish-American. What's yours? Cuz everyone is superstitious about something or other. Black cats? Friday the 13th? Announcing that you're expecting a baby before all & sundry have guessed, anyway? This latter, culturally supported taboo falls squarely in the "working on a clear round" category. It avoids an air of hubris; of "pride goeth before a fall"; of "counting your chickens before they've hatched" [as it were]. We all remember that obnoxious student in high school, usually [not always] a girl, who after every test would set up a caterwaul of doom: "Oh, I just know I failed it!" And the rest of us just knew s/he got an A, maybe even the highest grade in the class, and were less than sympathetic with this ritual of "needless" worry. Ah! But it does not seem needless to the hand-wringer [any more than compulsive hand-washing seems optional, to the compulsive hand-washer]. It is a magical, albeit Highly Inconvenient, attempt to counter the fear of Bad Outcome. Sometimes, as in the post-test-hand-wringer scenario, it is an attempt to counter the anticipated humiliation of getting anything less than a perfect score.

However, and this is the point, these little anti-hubristic peregrinations most of us indulge in are the lesser of two evils, compared with not trying at all. One summer day, while riding hired horses through the Vienna woods, my elder daughter & I overheard our guide ask her young son, "Max, bist du brav? " [which we took to mean, "Are you brave?" but Cassell's dictionary translates as "Are you well-behaved, a good boy?"]. Then she directed him & his mount to jump a newly-fallen tree trunk, which they did, after a few false starts, much to everyone's delight [and our relief]. Now, when we are facing a daunting challenge, where the odds of success seem long, we ask each other "Bist du brav?" If what it takes, to be brav enough to put all our effort on the line, is a bit of "aw, shucks, I probably will make a dog's dinner of this" lowering of expectations, than so be it.

Whatever helps you to take that leap. [Incidentally, this is the fallen tree described in the "Timber Wolf" post.]

The Hoon Report

2010-08-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the personable young British Formula One racer, Lewis Hamilton [whose shenanigans in his Mercedes-Benz AMG C63 "road car" two days before the Australian Grand Prix cost him a slap-on-the-wrist fine of "just under 300 pounds" for "acting like a hoon"], those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have learned a new epithet, that we can hurl at "aggressive drivers" who set off our limbic system alarms with their risky moves. Mystery shrouds the derivation of this Antipodean term [which originally referred to any "young person who engages in loutish, antisocial behavior," but has more recently become a "semi-official term" for street drag-racers, as in "Australia considers anti-hoon legislation"]. I have two theories. One, that "hoon" is merely a contraction of "hooligan." Two, that it comes from the objective case of the Gaelic word toin [as in the Irish imprecation, Pog ma hoin], and so originally meant "ass." [As in "Quit acting like a hoon, you silly ass!"] Not all that farfetched, considering that the First Wave of "immigrants" to the Land Downunder were predominantly Irish. [If you don't get the quotation marks in the previous sentence, look up meaning 4 of "transportation" in Webster's, innit.]

Anyway, here is Fionbharr [Finn to his friends], a San Francisco rescue, to keep not-so-solipsistic-Seamus company in the new place. If Finn were, indeed, writing a blog, it would seem to be coming right out of his hoin, now, do you see?

Back to Hamilton, though, who serves as Formula One's "ambassador for [its] global road safety campaign and has given speeches in Westminster [Parliament] on the subject." Through his lawyer, he issued a statement to the Australian court [and the rest of us], that he had suffered "embarrassment, humiliation and distress as a result of the episode." We're going to consider if Hamilton has truly "owned his wolf" in a moment; but here's how it played in court. "Magistrate Clive Alsop said he would not convict the 25-year-old because he was ashamed and remorseful. However, he added that Hamilton's behavior was unacceptable. 'This isn't about somebody's character, this about somebody in a responsible position behaving like a hoon.'"

But, do yah see, now, Magistrate Alsop, in my book [well, blog], "character" is exactly what this is about? It's all very well to acknowledge that having one's car impounded two days before the Oz Grand Prix is "embarrassing, humiliating, and distressing." That's being sorry you were caught. It does not address the question: "What got up my nose, that I decided to violate the rules of the road [and the core values of the road safety campaign for which I am a high-profile spokesman]?" As with all the grabbed-from-the-headlines cases I cite, I realize that once the accused has "lawyered up," the odds of such public self-disclosure lengthen considerably. But we, the mere readers of the story, can ask the up-your-nose question on their behalf [and vicariously, on ours]. For unless "out-of-character" behavior is understood, it is likely to recur.

As with the ponytaail-yanking soccer player in the post "In Hindsight," perhaps the question does get asked and answered, in private, after the news media have cleared off. Having served a 2-game suspension, that young lady is back playing for the Lobos. Maybe she has done her "wolf work," and has figured out how, in that aggressive sport, to avoid acting like a Red-Card-level hoon.

As for my boy Hamilton, he won the Belgian Grand Prix yesterday, by "driving safely and keeping out of trouble." Even though Chris Rock laments that "There is no rehab for stupid," there may be rehab for acting like a hoon. Let's hope so, anyway, since we've all been there, if we're honest with ourselves.

Feeling Threatened?

2010-08-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, before the advent of the Homeland Security Advisory System [as in "A day without Orange is like a day without sunshine."], there were other semiotics for indicating that it was time to "Be afraid. Be very afraid." There were the DefCon levels, whereby [counter-intuitively], DefConOne betokened Doomsday, whereas DefConFive was the Peaceable Kingdom. Since most non-combatants thought it was the other way round, it wasn't all that useful as a civil defense advisory. In my Naval family of origin, we used the traditional "Go to General Quarters" to signify that we were in crisis mode.

But, whatever you call it, your limbic system usually gets there way ahead of your pre-frontal cortex; and you are already engaging in a [possibly ill-advised] Fight, Flight, or Freeze response, "before you can say knife" [as the English measure it, as compared to the American "say Jack Robinson" unit of time]. Absent an airport Tannoy announcement, what cues the threat response? For most of us warmblooded creatures [including, as usual, Lili the dog], it's the fur on the back of our neck standing on end. This is most amusingly obvious with cats' tails puffing out, of course. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. In the dualistic parlance of the Mind/Body dance of anxiety, it's usually the body that leads. [You can search-engine iconic studies from the 60s involving the IV administration of adrenaline, the physical effects of which "undergraduate volunteers" (an oxymoron) were "contextually manipulated" to interpret as either fear or excitement.]

Other physical changes include pulse and respiration rate, as well as increased muscle tension. Those of us in the business of devising ways to "smooth ruffled feathers" often resort to reverse-engineering tactics. Big Pharma, and brewers before them, recommend skeletal muscle relaxants: "How dire can things be, if I'm feeling this loosey-goosey?" Despite the risk of inconvenient side-effects [DUIs, addiction, or respiratory collapse], ya gotta admit, the euphoria that comes with chemically-induced muscle relaxation really beats being told, "Oh, relax!" by an unsympathetic companion. We Mental Health providers try to suggest alternative routes to tranquility: yoga, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation exercises, hypnotic trance induction... "Too New Age-y" complain the uptight. "I can never remember my mantra in a crisis." So, I try to reverse-engineer the shallow breathing: "Sing!" I command. "Whistle, if you know how!" [Remember my post on Bridge on the River Kwai? The ditty the POWs whistled in the face of their implacable captors, "Colonel Bogey's March"?] Besides sublimating fear with an inside joke against the enemy, whistling (like singing and humming) normalizes breathing. It is what Behaviorists call an Incompatible Behavior (with the panting that accompanies anxiety).

Recently I have found that singing to Lili is as effective for "standing her down from General Quarters" as the Freeze commands to "Lie down" and "Stay down" are. She just can't resist coming over and singing along. [It may have to do with the overtones I produce.] Another explanation is that my carefree singing lowers her level of perceived threat: "How dire can things be, if my Pack Leader is so loosey-goosey?"

So, in this picture, is Lili a threat, or threatened? [Well, in the event, neither, since the shadow is cast by her trusted Pack Leader.] But if she were confronting a stranger, the correct answer would be "both." Next time you encounter a dog who's "going to General Quarters" [or find that the Wolf in Your Head is howling], you might try a little musical reverse-engineering, yourself.

"Wild horses..."

2010-07-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

What? "...couldn't drag me away" [Richards & Jagger, 1971]? Well, of course they couldn't, or more accurately, wouldn't, you City Slickers, cuz they is wild, innit? They neither bear weight on their backs, nor pull it via harness. Their theme song is, "I'll Never Be Your Beast of Burden" [Richards & Jagger, 1978]. What they will do, if you intrude into their established territory, however, is charge you and possibly trample you.

Which is not to say that they run amok, or obey no Code of Conduct, according to the equine ethologists who study them, particularly the band of 250 [wild horses, not ethologists] who live on Cumberland Island, Georgia. The observers note that the horses tend to organize themselves into Family Groups [a stud, his mares, and their offspring], who rotate through the various grazing venues on the island: meadows, marshes, woods, and beach dunes. An anthropomorphic explanation of this nomadic behavior might be that the families are altruistically sharing the nutritional wealth of the island with their equine brethren. There are two flies in that Utopian ointment, though. One is, well, flies. Inland, where the grass is lush and plentiful, the horses are tormented by flesh-eating flies; whereas on the shore, where the sparse, tough dune grass grows, the constant sea breeze blows the flies away. So perhaps [as Harris opined in Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches] local geography shapes what is considered to be The Right Thing to Do. [In this case, to keep hoofing it, to the next ambivalent stand-off between eating well and being "eaten alive."]

Also, as in most human cultures, there is an Out Group, who are forcibly excluded from the Happy Families scenario: bands of Bachelor Horses. The observers offer an illustrative vignette, in which a bold Bachelor Horse put just one hoof onto the territory of a Family Group, which was marked by what is euphemistically called a Stud Pile [of dung], and was immediately charged by the stallion and "shown off the property." Insert your own current human example of such behavior here. It is not clear [Is it ever?] how the hapless members of the Out Group drew the short straw. What is inspiring is that, every so often, a pariah horse bravely challenges the authority of the humiliating and/or fearsome studs.

Speaking of inspiring, this photo of two Bachelor Horses was taken by my [90-ish] mother-in-law, who trudged 10 miles down the beach to find them, yet [uncharacteristically, for her] heeded the warnings of the island guides, to keep a respectful distance away from her subjects, lest they "pass on the pain" and trample her. Having got what she came for, she trudged the 10 miles back to rejoin the Band of Ecotourists, of whom she & my father-in-law were the oldest by several decades, though not made to feel like members of an Out Group, for all that.

Who Says?

2010-07-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Not only is this a song title from John Mayer's latest musings on interpersonal ambivalence, Battle Studies, it's what all and sundry are asking and/or acting out, these days. "The peasants are revolting!" goes the old double-entendre, and so are Army generals, Hollywood starlets, and all the drivers who blow past me daily, on a narrow road clearly marked 40 mph and crawling with police. Sheesh!

In Ireland these days, such behavior would be labeled "bold" [as in "...as brass"], which no longer means brave, but just impudent, shameless, feckless, or insouciant. Is there more of this about, or am I just an old stick-in-the-mud? I blame reality TV, ya know, which gives viewers a false sense that the risk of legal sanction is outweighed by the prospect of fame [and, occasionally, fortune]. Back the the 70s in Manhattan, some of my acting school friends who didn't have day jobs would audition to be contestants on a quiz show called Jackpot! To make the otherwise boring show watchable, the talent-spotter rewarded the most over-the-top, crazed members of the studio audience by choosing them to [the uncopyrighted equivalent of] Come On Down, and play the game. They shot 5 "episodes" of the show in one day, so the semper paratus acting student bought a hold-all with 4 other shirts, just in case. One of our friends got selected for bellowing "Crackpot!" instead of the show's catchphrase. He used the video of his 5-show "performance" [during which he "chewed the scenery" shamelessly] as a cheap & cheerful audition tape for the consideration of various theatrical agents; and it got him work.

These days, in the lyrics of the Scouting for Girls song, "Everybody wants to be on TV." As an erstwhile student of Sociology, I could make a connection between the dearth of actual Day Jobs, and the fantasy of "quitting [one's] Day Job" (to become rich & famous); but it's belaboring the obvious. My actual point is a more universal, psychological one. If virtue [observing the speed limit, graduating from college, obeying one's Code of Conduct] is not rewarded, it is less likely to occur. In situations where the fear of punishment for Engaging in Shenanigans is outweighed by the humiliation of having Done the Right Thing and still gotten a Bad Outcome, stand by for more Shenanigans.

This is Lili, boldly ignoring my command to jump over a barrel to my right. Although it is high summer again, the picture is from 2 years ago, before we had truly appreciated that You Get What You Reward, and You Reward Disobedience by Letting It Slide. Silence gives consent. These days, this seemingly trivial moment of noncompliance would be met with, "Oooy! Ali Oop!" followed by a heartfelt "Yosh! Ichibon Inu!" [Good! Number One Dog!] as she completed the jump. Not a contract for her own reality show, mind, or even a high-value treat. What Lili and the rest of us need, to keep on doing the dorky Right Thing, is for our masters to notice, and acknowledge, our efforts.

Are You Gaslighting Me?

2010-06-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

By 1994, when Victor Santor published his creepily serious book, Gaslighting: How to Drive Your Enemies Crazy, the term had come to mean "a form of intimidation or psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory and perception." Most Americans will associate this with the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman & Joseph Cotton, which was a remake of a 1940 UK film of that name [later released in the States as The Murder in Thornton Square], based on the 1939 West End play Gas Light, which opened on Broadway in 1941 as Angel Street, starring Vincent Price in his debut role as a Baddie, where it ran for a record-setting 1,293 performances. In a real-life attempt to gaslight American movie-goers ["British version? There was never a British version."], MGM arranged to have the negative & all the prints of Thorold Dickinson's 1940 film destroyed [but he surreptitiously made a print for himself and squirreled it away].

In all the versions, our heroine notices that the gaslights on the lower floor of the house intermittently go dim [indicating that someone has lit up a gaslight in the attic]; but the complicit housemaid [Angela Lansbury in the MGM flick] denies that anyone is upstairs and she denies that she notices the downstairs lights dimming, at all. It's another case of, "Who ya gonna believe? Me, or your lyin' eyes?"

Apparently, humans can't resist this form of Poetic deception, often rationalizing it as "just a bit of fun." According to my Dad, each Junior Officer, upon arrival at his first Pacific port of call, was gaslighted in the Officers' Club, thusly. The Newbie would spy his first gecko, peering down at him from one of the corners of the room, point to it and say, "Oh, look! A lizard!" As one, the Old Hands would turn variously to every other corner of the room and say, soothingly, "Yes. I see it. Of course I do." "No! Really! Over here!" the Newbie would insist; at which the Old Hands would all switch their gazes to another [gecko-free] corner and reiterate, "A lizard. Yes." Of course, the wheeze would only work if there was only one gecko in the room. A log was kept, of how long it took for "the penny to drop." And don't you just know, the ex-Newbie was the most enthusiastic gaslighter, when the next Junior Officer arrived.

Why do we humans feel the urge to deceive? Probably, for the usual reason we resort to Poetic communication: because we reckon that the truth will get us in trouble. The Baddie in Gaslight fears his wife will dime him out as the murderer, so he seeks to turn her into an unreliable witness. The Old Hands seek to assuage the humiliation of their own Newbie cluelessness, so they ritually pass on the pain to the new Newbies. This is especially likely to happen if there is the perception of scarce resources [such as available females, or supplies, or even space] in the area, into which the Newbie has unwittingly intruded.

Turns out, we're not the only creatures who engage in intra-species deception, as Jakob Bro-Jorgensen reports in his recent article, "Male Topi Antelopes Alarm Snort Deceptively to Retain Females for Mating." [First of all, that title is far too high-concept to get green-lighted as an MGM film. I'm thinking, Don't Be That Schmized Gazelle!] Quoting here, "male antelopes snort and look intently ahead if an ovulating female begins to stray from their territory [which] suggests to the female that there is danger ahead...[such as] lions, cheetahs, leopards [or] humans...the snort and intent look were a false call...and there was no danger nearby." The article asserts, "This type of intentional deception of a sexual partner has not been documented before in animals. Previous studies have shown that animals do deceive each other but mainly in hostile situations or to protect themselves." Bro-Jorgesen ponders "why females keep responding to alarms at all"; and concludes that "females are better off erring on the side of caution, because failing to react to a true alarm could easily mean death in a place...full of predators."

So, here's my suggestion, whatever your species happens to be. If you begin to suspect that you are being gaslighted, ask yourself, "How might the [would-be] gaslighter benefit from the deception? What's up his [or her, let's not forget Angela Lansbury's shenanigans] nose, anyway?" If you come up clueless, you always have the option of reading the power subtext back to the other party: "Are you gaslighting me?"

Looking for Dr. Dolittle

2010-06-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

On Mother's Day, no less, this expectant squirrel appeared on the "Juliet balcony" of my daughter's Chicago apartment, and chose it as her nesting site, despite the presence of a fascinated ginger cat, right on the other side of the screen. Her babies arrived, and lively visits from other mother squirrels with their slightly older offspring ensued.

All very Beatrix Potter meets David Attenborough, eh? But how did this urban Mrs. Nutkin negotiate an understanding with my daughter, that the not-always-sleeping-Seamus would be kept securely on his side of the window? Don't kid yourself for a minute, that All Creatures Great and Small inhabit a Peaceable Kingdom these days, especially in cities. There is a chilling news story from last night, of 9-month-old twin girls in East London, attacked in their cribs by an urban fox who apparently came in through the bedroom window. It was "so bold," reports their horrified mother, that it didn't immediately scurry away when she turned on the light. [Assuming it wasn't neurologically impaired with rabies--which would be my first guess about a Maryland fox behaving so bizarrely--its startled limbic system probably chose "freeze" as a first response, followed by "flee."]

The authorities partially blame the careless [or naively sentimental] humans who leave out food for the foxes, the semiotics of which betoken: "Won't you be my neighbor?" As of today, in that district of London at least, each little back garden has a baited Have-a-Heart trap, beckoning: "Step into this parlour."

Apart from the obvious carrot & stick methods of trans-species communication, how do most of us talk to the animals? Often, we give them to understand what's on our minds by teaching them our "secret code" of words and gestures. When they guess our thoughts correctly [and obey our command], they get a reward.

Yeah, yeah, but what if we want to guess their thoughts? If the animal in question is right in front of us [like the balcony squirrel], we can go all Jane Goodall, and observe it closely for subtle changes in limbic arousal: pitch variation in vocalizations, fur standing on end, and so on. Even so, we may not understand just what got up its nose. So, we do what we do with what Piaget termed "cognitive aliens," pre-verbal babies: we make it up. We attribute a plausible subtext to their howling or chortling. "He's hungry." "She loves her Uncle Neddy." After all, who's going to contradict us?

The NYTimes ran a pre-Preakness article about two high-priced "psychic diagnosticians" [also known as "animal communicators"], both ladies, as it happens, who will tell you what's up your horse's nose from "anywhere in the world." A consultation costs $500. Once again, who's going to contradict the Doctors Dolittle? The horse?

A brief digression, for an apocryphal anecdote, attributed to Henry VIII: "A king once commanded his farrier, 'Make this horse talk in a year's time, or I'll have you killed.' The farrier comforted his distraught family, 'A year is a long time. Anything might happen. The king may die, or the horse may die, or the horse may talk.'" My kids were so taken with this vignette, that whenever an improbably wonderful thing seems on the verge of happening, we say, "The horse is clearing his throat."

Wanna know the relevance of animal telepathy, to those of us who haven't hung out our equine psychic shingle? Couldn't be clearer. It's about communicating with the Wolf in Our Head, to figure out what's up its [our] nose. If you feel confident that you can "read" your baby [or your beloved pet, or the squirrel on your deck] "like an open book," so, too, might you venture to "read your inner Wolf."

Go on, have a go. The alternative is to spend $500 on a long-distance "reading" from a total stranger.

"A Penny for Your Thoughts"

2010-05-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

In 1966, a year after the Rhine Research Center [more commonly known as the Institute for Parapsychology] decamped from the East Duke campus [and curriculum] to a semi-spooky-looking house across Buchanan Street in town, I paid a visit and had my psi [telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis] tested. Guess how I did? [Feeble parapsychological joke.] Tell you later.

Incidentally, the first citation for the penny-for-your-thoughts idiom was in Sir Thomas More's book, Four Last Things. [He, who naively believed that "you can't go to jail for what you're thinking"; yet he not only went to the Tower, but lost his head, for what Henry VIII thought More was thinking.]

Mind reading is not the exclusive domain of professional psychics, ya know [or do ya know?]. Except for the truly solipsistic [and/or autistic], all of us behave as if we had "the second sight." We blithely attribute thoughts and motives to others, quite often accurately, on the basis of subtle [or even subliminal] cues. That's why when a 20th Century psi subject had to pick which card the examiner was holding [square, star, circle, cross, or squiggle], the two people had to be in separate rooms. [Now, it's ever-so-much-more high-tech, don't ya know.] My own low-tech "research" suggests that the ability to "receive" such "messages" diminishes with age. To while away long car trips with my kids and their various friends, I made up a game called "Gypsy," using an ordinary deck of cards, thoroughly shuffled. Each girl in turn had to guess whether the next card would be red or black; and if she was right, she collected the card. The one with the most cards at the end of the game was the "Gypsy." It was always the youngest kid in the car. "Ooh!" the others would predict, "You're going to clean up at the Windsor Casino!" This was back in Detroit, in the early '90s.

Speaking of which, back in the day, on the crosstown drive from our house to our horse's house, we would pass Madame Rosa's Psychic Parlor, with a neon sign saying "Call [a telephone number] for an appointment." My already skeptical older daughter would quibble, "Why would you have to call? Wouldn't she just know when you were coming in?"

For most of us, success at mind-reading is a sometime thing. But, as casino operators know, nothing is more compelling than Intermittent Reinforcement. One wonders how often the punter's Beginner's Luck at a game of chance is contrived by the "house." One even might wonder how many of my fellow subjects were found to have "significantly high psi," as I was. Bet you already guessed that, eh?

Almost 40 years of trying to "guess what's on the mind" of my clients has convinced me that I do not have "significantly high psi" [anymore, one might say]. What I do have is a Miss-Marple-like tendency to pick up on subtle [even subliminal] cues, from which I try to "get a clue" as to "what the deal is." In my line of work, the chilling motto is "You don't know what you don't know." Talk about fear of the unknown...you don't know the half of it.

Next time, telepathic communication with animals.

"Keep a Civil Tongue in Your Head!"

2010-05-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

Did you hear about the [latest] set-to between the Australian actor Russell Crowe and a member of the media [Mark Lawson of BBC 4]? There's an audio clip, if you're interested, with expletives prissily deleted. During an interview @ the Cannes Film Festival, the mercurial actor took great umbrage at Lawson's [repeated] observation that he heard "a hint of an Irish accent" in Crowe's Robin Hood, and ultimately walked out, in medias res. Apart from mild [Poetic] sarcasm, when Lawson asked him if the accent had been "more northern English," [to which Crowe retorted, "No. I was going for an Italian, yeah. Missed it? F@#k me. Anyway..."], he used the Referential speech function. Nothing went airborne except a few Emotive phrases. Wolf held in check, compared to past form.

More to the point, what do we think got up Crowe's nose, about the attribution that he sounded slightly Irish? Humiliation of some sort, one gathers. His bio says he spent his youth pinging between New Zealand & Oz; and that apart from one indigenous ancestor, his heritage is [like most Anglo-Antipodeans] Welsh, Scottish, English and (ahem) Irish. Much was made of the film's efforts to be more historically accurate than previous versions, and a dialect coach was mentioned. Was there an implied slur on that person's accuracy or efficacy? Or on Crowe's capacity for mimicry? Or was the presenter insinuating that the actor was playing Robin Hood as a crypto-Fenian [out to overthrow the English monarchy]? I'd go see that film, now.

"Anyway..." [to quote Crowe], here's the point of this post. Which would you prefer: to be told something offensive, or to be told a lie? The Indigenous American expression for the latter, is [for a European incomer] "to speak with forked tongue." After several incidents in which East Coast tribes of Indians were schmized into "peace talks" with colonists, only to be massacred, they came to fear them, having before only resented their intrusion.

For my part, as much as it angers [humiliates] me to "get panned by the critics," it is far more infuriating [as in, frightening] to be deceived. When a dog is barking at you, or a horse is pinning its ears, you know just where you stand with them [if possible, out of strike range, until their limbic system has chilled]. When poor old Russell was being interviewed by a presenter "notorious for being oleaginous and obsequious," how could he tell if the guy loved the movie or hated it? Especially if, rather than just giving him a thumbs up or down, Lawson made himself obscure, with a forked-tongued, passive-aggressive. a propos of nothing "question" about "a hint of Irish." Like Lili would have, Crowe rose to the bait and barked. But he didn't bite. He chose to disengage, to leave the field; but as he departed he was still trying to clarify whether Lawson had intentionally dissed him or not: "I don't get the Irish thing, by the way," he murmured, as he left the room. Now, that was civil enough, wasn't it?

"What Was I Thinking?"

2010-05-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

My currently fave BBC 1 radio presenter, the young-but-sage Dubliner Annie Mac, was hosting a Bank Holiday Weekend show, reading texts from listeners recounting their shenanigans. "Annie, I woke up in a wheelie bin [trash can on wheels] this morning," wrote one reveler. Annie deadpanned this response: "Now, what made you think that was a good idea? Surely, you would have been more comfortable, lying face-down on the lawn. Ah, well, you've survived it; and now it's an anecdote."

Brilliant! Here's why I love what she's done there. Without appearing to be goody-two-shoes preach-y about the perils of demon drink, she has deftly imputed internal locus of control to the texter-in. Rather than focusing on how he came to be so "trashed" that [presumably] his so-called friends decided to "bin" him, she [Poetically] implies that the decision to pass the night in a garbage can was his; and questions the wisdom of that. Under the rubric of "If you can't be good, be careful," she points out that he could have lessened his pain & suffering by stretching out, in the recommended Recovery Position, on some soft grass. [Coincidentally, last week the Manchester Guardian ran a feature on 10 common, potentially lethal, misconceptions about rendering first aid; and one was to "lay a drunk person on his/her back." Several show-biz fatalities were cited, as evidence that this is a Bad Idea.]

By implication, she suggests that the reveler might now be having a bit of retroactive fear [as in, "Bloody hell! I could have died from that!"] and humiliation [as in "Bloody hell! I just told an audience of millions how stupid I am!"]; but she reframes his shenanigans as a Lucky Escape: an event not to be repressed or dissociated [as in, "That was not me, I'm not like that."], but to be told and retold, until the ostensibly Crazy Fox's behavior is understood well enough to answer the question: "What was I thinking?"

Rx: "Waldspaziergang" (A Walk in the Woods)

2010-05-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Another case of Pseudo-scientific Over-reach, brought to you by the BBC this week: "'Green' exercise quickly 'boosts mental health.'" This, (loosely) based on a paper by Jo Barton & Jules Pretty of the University of Essex [published in Environmental Science & Technology, under the catchy title, "What is the Best Dose of Nature and Green Exercise for Improving Mental Health? A Multi-Study Analysis"]. The authors did a statistical meta-analysis of 10 completely unrelated studies involving people of various ages engaging in various outdoor activities, and answering questionnaires purporting to measure changes in their self-esteem and mood, at the intervals of 5 minutes into the exercise, 10 to 60 minutes, "half a day," and/or "a whole day."

The groups studied ranged in age from "youths" to " the elderly." The activities they engaged in ranged from walking [apparently, not part of all 10 studies] to cycling, horse-riding, fishing, sailing, gardening, and "farming activities." All the studies took place near Essex in England, at some time over the past 6 years; and the 1252 participants were "self-selecting using an opportunistic sampling method." [I think that means, these were the ones who completed their questionnaires.]

Before we get to the "data," let's ponder how on earth one "completes" 2 questionnaires after 5 minutes of horse-riding. Is it like the Kentucky Derby, where a lady with a wireless microphone rides up beside you and interviews you? Is there a staggered start to the pony trek, so she can interview each participant exactly at their 5-minute mark? Wouldn't it take longer than 5 minutes per participant, to ask & answer the 20 questions? How about the cyclists? Is it like the Tour de France, with an interviewer in a chase car? These intriguing logistical problems were not addressed in the "Materials and Methods" section of the paper.

Anyway, now for their "Results." For both self-esteem and mood, the "greatest changes come from 5 minutes of activity, and thus suggest that these psychological measures are immediately increased by green exercise." They go on to report that "the changes are lower for 10-60 min and half-day, but rise again after a whole day duration." Looking at the many data charts in the article, unless the same chipper 5-min subjects bum out @ the 10-60 min and half-day point, and then perk up a bit after the whole day, it appears that each participant was assessed at only one point. There's a clue in the "Discussion" section: "Whole-day activities are likely to be qualitatively different activities, involving in some cases camping overnight and in others significant conservation achievements."

Hmm, wouldn't it be useful to know just which Green Activities yielded "The 5-minute Fix"? I'm thinking, unless you're a professional jockey, not horse-riding. Not fishing, either. Nor, indeed, sailing. I'm thinking, probably walking. So, why not try that first? Take yourself [and any handy companion, 2- or 4-footed] on a little walk among the trees, and just see if it doesn't "boost [your] mental health." That's what the Austrians were doing to lift their spirits, decades before Freud had them lying on his couch: Waldspaziergang in the Vienna Woods. [I hear a waltz...]

Many Happy Returns

2010-04-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

I first heard this British expression for "Happy Birthday" in 1960, upon turning 12, in London's answer to FAO Schwartz, Hamley's, while being bought a life-sized [plush-toy] parrot, who is still with me. Two months into our English sojourn, I was stuck in my homesick-for-the-States phase; and my two associations to the shop assistant's remark were: "Yankee, go home," and "Keep your receipt, in case you want to bring the toy back."

This Sunday was both Lili's and my husband Chris' birthday. [I am authorized to say that Lili turned 6.] It was, indeed, a happy day, except for my having so recently returned from a California visit to the "other daughters" [and therefore missing them all the more], and our having lost both phone & Internet connectivity, so the birthday boy & girl could not receive "Many happy returns of the day" messages from their Loved Ones. Normal service returned by the evening, though; and greetings were duly exchanged.

How sentimental we humans are about observing the anniversary of our birth! A young & trendy BBC 1 presenter was offering to send [by ground post] Birthday cards, on behalf of stranded Brits in the States [whom she dubbed VAVs: Volcanic Ash Victims] to their sweethearts back in Blighty. Not enough, apparently, just to pass on a "shout out" over the airwaves. A timely, mailed & received, piece of festive stationery was required. We're just as soppy over here. No less than 5 times during one fair-to-middling meal at a "family-style" Italian restaurant in oh-so-cool LA, my girls & I were "strongly encouraged" by the management to sing a song of Birthday greetings to total strangers at other tables. In the spirit of Casablanca, we stalwartly demurred [although we didn't bust loose with The Marseillaise in counterpoint, either].

Here's my point. Lili the dog [who is blissfully unaware of the AKC registration of her date of birth] probably had a happier day [sans cards, calls & cake], than her human owners, because all she expected [and received] was her food, her walk-in-the-woods and our love. She avoided all the potential for humiliation that custom & Hallmark imposes on the rest of us: "You're nobody til somebody fetes you...in a timely manner, on the very date of your birth." That was the entire plot of Sixteen Candles, remember?

My own birthday often falls on Labor Day weekend, which is Highly Inconvenient, if one has just had one's purse snatched and all one's friends who could have lent one money are out-of-town [which happened twice in NYC in the 70s]. So, I have a lower bar than many for what I consider a Good Enough Birthday: something to eat, the liberty to walk about outside, and the knowledge that my Loved Ones wish me well, wherever they might be.

Although, I must say, that 40th in Vienna was pretty swell...

Slip Slidin' Away

2010-04-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

"You know the nearer your destination the more you're slip slidin' away," said the Bard of New York, Paul Simon. I first heard the song on my car radio in 1978, driving out of Gate 8 of the Naval Academy, having just paid off my [for those times] staggering grad school loan debt, feeling a great sense of relief and accomplishment...only to realize that I, like the woman in the song, was still "think(ing) of things that might have been." I advise against dwelling on the road(s) not taken, since, as the song says, it is highly correlated with having a "bad day."

This morning's woodland adventure featured the more literal form of slip slidin' away, since it had bucketed rain last night, and I had chosen the least non-slip of my 3 pairs of Wellington boots. I was reminded of a walk two years ago, just before flying off to Detroit [long story] to take the California Board of Psychology licensing exam, and thinking, "Boy, this would be a highly inconvenient day to take a serious tumble in these unfrequented woods." Didn't fall, made the flight, passed the test, got the license, still no nearer the destination of living on the Other Coast. This afternoon, I am flying Over There, to see not one but two daughters [since the Chicago-based one is moving to San Francisco this summer]; and the same thought occurred to me, in a particularly steep & muddy patch of the path: "What if I fall down [and brake my crown, with Lili tumbling after]?"

See, this is a Locus of Control meditation. To what degree are we destined to fall, move West, have kids, join the Navy? [You know, whatever.] My own limbic system is pre-set to fear that I will take the "wrong" road, get lost, wind up at a deadend. So, I often choose to believe that I have no choice [to cut down on all that anger-mediated-cortisol, nar'mean?]. The price I pay, though, is to endure the intrusion of An External Plan-Maker's Agenda on me. What am I, Fate's plaything? [Oops! Cortisol.]

Got to dash, now [Southwest and tide wait for no person, as it were]; but ponder a bit on the next Big Fork in the Road you're facing, and notice whether you attempt to shift the onus of the decision onto Someone Else. [You car's SatNav, your horoscope, the I Ching, what your Loved Ones really want you to do without actually telling you point blank...]

Incidentally, this picture was taken on the first day after the big snow melted, and doesn't really look like the inches of oozing mud we slogged through today. "But what was I to do? It was the only picture I had with any mud in it." [She said, externalizing the locus of control again...]

Snakes & Ladders

2010-03-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

David Lodge [one of my fave English authors] begins his 1980 novel How Far Can You Go? with a 1950s university student weighing the pros & cons of attending a mid-week evening church service. Aside from the expenditure of Therbligs, and forgoing more frivolous diversions with less conscientious college friends, there is the danger that holier-than-thou self-congratulation will result in a Net Guilt Gain! The author likens this hazard to the children's game of Snakes & Ladders. Just when you think you're ascending to the Moral High Ground, oopsie-daisy, your Pride occasions a Fall from Grace. Nar'mean?

When he chose this metaphor, I wonder, did David Lodge know that Snakes & Ladders is based on the 11th-century Hindu game Moksha-Patamu, devised to teach children how to express the 5 Virtues (while avoiding the 12 Vices), in order to reach Nirvana? [No, not the band.] Note that in the original game, there are more than twice as many "snakes" [ways to fall] as "ladders"; whereas in the UK and American versions, the ratio of "snakes[or "chutes"] to "ladders" is 1:1. [Think 7 Virtues & 7 Deadly Sins.] Wanna know the Vices the Hindu version features? [They are listed in this order in several sources. Could it be, from venial to mortal?] "Disobedience, Vanity, Vulgarity, Theft, Lying, Drunkenness, Debt, Rage, Greed, Pride, Murder, Lust." Guess you wanna hear the Virtues now, innit? "Faith, Reliability, Generosity, Knowledge, Asceticism." [Reminiscent, somehow, of Jonathan Haidt's 5 Moral Spheres model, from the post, "Crime & Punishment."]

Now, back to real snakes. In the Fall of 1984 we were living in Holden, Massachusetts [near Worcester, about which, don't get me started; talk about ambivalence (mine), talk about a sense of moral superiority (theirs)]. "We" being self, husband Chris, 9-month-old Baby Girl, and the gifted hunters, Stella [Ciotogach-looking one] & Stanley [with the white goatee]. Chris was off being a [jolly good] Fellow @ UMass Med Center; Baby Girl was napping; and I was doing laundry in the basement on a rainy day, with Nobody's Fool Stella keeping me company. I gathered that Sodden Stanley had popped through the catflap, because I heard a dong! as he landed on the dryer. Also, I felt his wet tail wrapping around my bare ankles. Hang on. There he sat, staring into middle distance, on the dryer...while the black snake he had brought in ascended my leg.

So, limbic system on Full Alert, I screamed, shook the serpent off, ran upstairs and donned my Wellies, ran back downstairs brandishing a golf club [no, I am not Swedish], onto which I "charmed" the snake, and thence threw it into a wicker basket, which I deftly flipped over, thereby trapping it. Unabashed Stanley was clawing at the basket, wanting to play with his "prey," so I grabbed him and ran back upstairs to call Chris, "insisting" that he come home "right then" and "deal with" the snake. "But, you've already dealt with it," he quibbled. "Just keep the cats out of the basement, and you'll be fine." "Nooo!" I wailed. "I'm afraid the snake is going to get out, climb up the stairs, and hurt [the baby]!" [I may be part horse.]

Having clearly exceeded the speed limit, Chris arrived shortly, flipped the basket over, bashed the snake with the golf club, saying "There!"; hopped back in his car, and returned to the hospital.

Poor old snake! Wrong place at the wrong time. [In Stanley's line of sight on a wet Wednesday.]

Chris and I both lost many karmic points that day. Yet, search as I may, I can't find my crime on the Hindu list of 12 Vices. I can identify what Got Up My Nose, though. Intrusion of an unexpected creature [not even a furry one] into my home and onto my person. Fairly far-fetched fear, that the snake would glide up the basement stairs and under a closed door, to strike at my baby [even though it had been so gentle with me, that I mistook it for my cat]. But, most shame-making, the humiliation of not being taken seriously by my husband. As if I were some [gasp!] Drama Queen, or something.

Chris would no doubt say that he displaced his Rage [at my intrusion on his workday, and possibly the humiliation of being regarded as a hen-pecked husband by his fellow Fellows] from me, onto the hapless snake. No wonder, 25 years later, he helped the young snake on our driveway to live another day. After all, if reincarnation is true, that could be you or I, Next Time.

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

2010-03-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Early last Fall Mahmood, our termite "experimenter" [as my NYC reference group ironically referred to exterminators] came up to my husband, holding a medium-sized black snake which he had just killed in our yard, saying "I know I'm here to see to the insects; but in Morocco, where I come from, all snakes are bad." [Ooh! Maybe he comes from Casablanca! How Poetic would that be?]

A few months later, over Thanksgiving, Chris encountered this spiffy-looking young specimen on our driveway, took its picture, and gently placed it back in the leafy undergrowth. Unlike Ireland [which is snake-free, t'anks to St. Padraig, so the legend goes], Maryland has its fair share of venomous serpents; and our visiting daughters were Not At All Happy with their father's sudden display of ahimsa. After all, this is the guy who routinely [if inadvertently] trampled-while-pursuing the skittering chipmunks and similar fauna, with which our cats stocked our basement in Michigan, like a small wildlife preserve. So, why spare this snake?

He gave them two reasons. Because it was outside [not in our basement]; and because it "looked so little and harmless." Thus, it did not provoke an aggressive response through intrusion or fear. This snake, it could be said, had Benign Semiotics...at least, to Chris.

Now, having grown up with Burrack, and Dusk and Owen, our girls knew that Benign Semiotics are in the eye [and species] of the beholder. All horses regard all snakes [even little ones] as alarming predators, and will often spook in a "highly inconvenient" way, if they are the first to spot one nearby, before the rider can redirect their attention. Indeed, many horses [including my uncle's Arab gelding...hmm...a desert dweller, like Mahmood] tend to err on the side of caution, and spook histrionically at undulating garden hoses, lead-lines being gathered up, or even long cloth banners fluttering in the wind. If you are the rider, taken by surprise [and possibly thrown] by your horse's sudden shying away from a snake-like "threat," you are more likely to fear & loathe snakes [even little ones], through Classical Conditioning [or even One-Trial Learning]. This is how Malign Semiotics get started, nar'mean?

Chris e-mailed his snake picture to the University of Maryland Extension Program, and was informed that it was a juvenile Black Rat Snake, not venomous, and actually quite useful for natural rodent control around rural property. Mother Nature outfits the young ones in a camouflage motif, which gradually darkens to a solid black at maturity, like the one which Mahmood killed. [Yes, it might well have been "Bambi's mother."]

Next time you find yourself [or your horse] recoiling in alarm from a creature whose Semiotics are Malign, why not do a bit of psychological detective work? "Is the threat real, or is that outlandishly coiffed, dressed, bedizened, or named individual only the signifier of a potential threat?" To make this exercise a bit more real-world, imagine that you are standing in the security line @ BWI, behind Mahmood the Exterminator, who is trying to fly back to Morocco to see the folks from his "home place," over Thanksgiving.

The Holy Ground

2010-03-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

True, full-time Hibernians [not youse who are bein' Irish just for today, to honor St. Padraig] will know that the so-called "Holy Ground" of the old song [also referenced in a second song on Mary Black's album of de same name] is not a religious place at all [like, God-save-us-all, East Jerusalem, or Mecca], but the red-light district in the port town of Cobh, in County Cork, from whence set sail many of our immigrant forebears, from the land of green fields and not enough food, to the land of green beer and food galore.

It is, thus, an ironic [Poetic] figure of speech, capturing both halves of the ambivalence which the Irish diaspora feel for their country of origin. For centuries, Eire was [as Dr. Samuel Johnson said of Scotland], "a grand place to be from." In Mary Black's song, "The Loving Time," [the first line of which is, "Reads like a fairytale, cuz that's what it was."] it connotes the power of sentimental, romantic love to [temporarily] blind a couple to their [possibly irreconcilable] differences: "...and the Holy Ground took care of everything." Spoiler alert. The last verse of this bravely wolf-acknowledging song begins, "It didn't come true in the end. They went their separate ways." Rather like Old Mother Ireland and Her then desperately hungry, later desperately nostalgic, children.

Suggested reading: Tom Hayden's [yes, that Tom Hayden] historical and autobiographical book, Irish On the Inside.

So, here's the point of this post. Any piece of real estate which holds powerful intimations [both sweet and bitter] of actual or legendary happenings, can become "the holy ground" for an individual, a couple, a family, or a tribe. In the Fall of 1957 my father drove through Gate 3 of his alma mater, the Naval Academy, and parked [illegally] in front of the Chapel for long enough to run into the Admin building and report for duty. My usually Stoic mother burst into tears. Was she afraid the Jimmy Legs [the Yard police] were going to ticket our car? Or was she overcome by the sight of the Chapel, where she & Rosie were married in a tiny, wartime service? Turns out the Chapel was a mere synecdoche for the whole USNA mystique, which, to one degree or another, our whole family [along with many others] have come to regard as "the holy ground." In 1958 my mother dramatically fell ill with MS while walking on the Academy grounds; yet I found myself inexorably drawn back to live and work there, in 1976 and in 2000. And it's not because of all the rollicking fun to be had there [especially, this last time round]. It's because of the memories of the good and bad times I had there with The Now Departed [my parents], whose presence [I believed] would feel more palpable there, than anywhere else on earth.

It was, do you see, a Transitional Object [like a Teddy bear, or Alfred the dog, or Ciotogach the cat], that helps one to feel closer to "the ones that we love true," to paraphrase the song.

How randomly can a place become "the holy ground"! Not for its intrinsic beauty, or bounty, or balmy weather, or enlightened folkways; but because it is the repository of memories, of Us interacting with [ambivalently] loved Others. When you're in it [as I learned early, in my peripatetic Navy childhood] it's often hard to believe that you're going to look back on a place with nostalgia. I spent my first two months in England [now, the holiest of my "holy grounds"] squinting at ViewMaster reels of the Naval Academy and weeping for what was lost. Who could have imagined that, one day, I would be using Google Maps to take virtual rambles round my beloved English "home place" [as the Irish say] of Stoke D'Abernon, where Ying Tong the cat was regarded with such ambivalence [mostly, negative] by all the neighbors.

Speaking of rambles, I am wise enough to know that the South River woods [in which Lili once again warned me of a suddenly-falling-but-this-time-without-audible-warning, 30-foot tree trunk, not 20 yards ahead of us, on today's walk] will be added to my list of "holy grounds" [if I am not struck down by falling lumber first].

Laissez-passer

2010-03-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

In NYC in the 70s I had not one, but two, reference groups so devoted to the 1942 film Casablanca, that they [we] had memorized every line of dialogue. Start me anywhere. If you have even a passing acquaintance with the storyline, you will recall that it's all about which two lucky people in the Nazi-controlled city of Casablanca will ultimately get to use these travel documents [les deux laissez-passers], permitting them to hop a DC-2 to Lisbon [and thence, escape to America, which was still officially a neutral country during the filming of this movie, which is regarded by some historians as the most persuasive piece of anti-Nazi propaganda ever made].

So, anyway, all these decades on, laissez-passer [literally, "Let (to) pass."] means a "guarantee" of a safe passage, through a perilous time or place. A get-out-of-jail-free-card, as it were. Or, in my case [I hope], a respite from the freakish weather that has made trekking through the woods "highly inconvenient." I know, I keep banging on about this as if it were as onerous as this season's earthquakes, tsunamis and lethal flooding elsewhere in the world. It's just a metaphor. A synecdoche, even. The Poetic use of a small, particular thing to represent the bigger thing. Nar'mean?

And now, to my point. With regard to the weather, or tectonics, or "unexpected" acts of aggression carried out by individuals who were [inevitably, reportedly] held in high esteem by their neighbors and/or colleagues, there are no guarantees. Some major irritant seems of have gotten up Mother Nature's nose, and she is smacking Earthlings on the snout, Big Time. Also, as you know, civil servants, just trying to do their lawfully mandated duties, have come under attack. Talk about synecdoche! The [attributed] on-line ramblings of these domestic terrorists seek to justify their lethal assaults on individuals, who, they believed, represented disagreed-with government policies. In a much milder form, as a Naval officer in the 70s, I experienced this part-whole confusion at the hands of brick- and bottle-hurling young Townies, when walking the the streets of Annapolis in uniform. The ridiculously simple laissez-passer that I "wrote" for myself was to change into civvies and take my hair down, as soon as I got home [2 whole blocks outside of Gate 1, big whoop]. It taught me to resist judging human "books" by their "covers," as well as to be hyper-aware of the semiotics [subtext] of my dress and behavior, as perceived by others.

So, what gauntlets do you have to run this week, without the guarantee of a safe passage? I'm not trying to scare anyone. I'm giving you credit for your bravery; and encouraging you to notice what steps you take, to "write" yourself your own "laissez-passer," that increases your sense of security.

I find, prosaically, that practical footwear helps me feel safer. Note the state-of-the-art "Bogs" boots, plus "Yak-Trax." I only slipped once Saturday [the day this photo was taken]. To paraphrase Casablanca, "I came here [to Annapolis] for the [mild winters]. I was misinformed."

"Stuck in a Moment"

2010-03-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

This meditation on the U2 song, which David ["Bono Vox"] Hewson has called an after-the-fact, imagined suicide intervention for his late friend, INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, is dedicated to everyone who has developed a de novo case of Seasonal Affective Disorder this winter. [More snow forecast for this evening in the DC area, tra-la.] It is also about the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker's concept of functional fixity, which Corsini defines [in The Dictionary of Psychology, 2002 ed.] as "the opposite of...creative thinking."

Consider the not-awful-just-highly-inconvenient intrusion of this prolonged spate of foul weather on Lili's customary, daily ramble-in-the-woods. Until this weekend, the snow in the forest has been up to 3 feet deep, swallowing up the feet [and legs] of all but the snow-show-clad. The first time this happened to me, I was alone with Lili, who was off-leash but skittered over on the frozen surface, merely to bark her encouragement [impatience?] at me; and I began to fear that I would be Stuck in the Moment until the Spring thaw.

Resisting a $100 investment in snowshoes, I began searching for alternative venues for Lili to run, which were both [relatively] safe & legal. When school was canceled, the plowed parking lots were viable, except for some tricky, hard-to-see patches of ice. A couple of days we slogged through 2 feet of slush on the paved path in a local recreational park. [By the way, why all the empty parked cars in the lot? Surveillance or shenanigans?] One day we bored ourselves silly, running up & down our own cul-de-sac street, incensing all the neighbors' penned-up dogs.

A few brilliant, but not-really-legal venues occurred to me, such as the covered parking lots @ work, the Mall, or Whole Foods. I reconnoitered them with Lili in the car; but the hostile semiotics of the security guards were discouraging. One evening at the almost deserted medical center parking structure, the golf-cart dude pulled up and asked me, "Is there a bomb scare, or something?" [Lili's semiotics aren't all that benign, either.] To avoid further humiliation, if not actual arrest, I loaded her up and drove slowly away.

So, there you have it, from one who prides herself on her non-linear, out-of-the-box problem-solving skills. Apparently, my amygdala has been so freaked out by the logistical challenges of this unprecedented spate of snowy weather, that it has hog-tied my hippocampus. [Note the paucity of posts in February.] Finally, this weekend, with a partial thaw and Chris at my side, we ventured into our beloved woods again. It wasn't easy or pretty, but it was a necessary journey. It restored limbic balance, as well as hope, that "this time will pass."

And even if Bono didn't get to save his friend's life with this song's belated argument against despair, he has helped me "get myself together" this winter. Now there's a guy not much given to functional fixity, d'ya know?

Caged Beasts

2010-02-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

Even if you don't live in the DC area, you are no doubt aware that we here are waay past "Winter Wonderland," and into "Wonder When It Will Ever End?" Let me count the ways this heinous weather pattern has gotten up all our noses. Intrusion: we are all under house arrest today, no matter how many hours we have already spent shoveling our driveways. Fear: as the howling winds threaten to blow our tall, spindly trees onto our house [and maybe even our heads]. As I write, we have so far been spared loss of power; but thousands have not, and are already enduring the pain & suffering of no heat, no light and [here in the countryside] no water. But, as usual, it is humiliation that seems to have turned the area's no-ruder-than-most drivers into what-are-they-thinking-damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead suicidal/homicidal maniacs. As today's [soggy] Washington Post Op-Ed article put it, "The snow has fallen, and the flakes are on the road."

Unlike folks in, say, Michigan, who have grasped through years of trial & error [and no-fault collisions], the humbling fact that 4-wheel drive vehicles are not laws-of-physics-defying Batmobiles which can overcome anything Mother Nature can dish out, these Mid-Atlantic road warriors...have not. Yesterday, for a change, it wasn't even actively snowing; and I witnessed 3 harrowing collisions, not to mention many flip-overs, all involving SUVs. They "didn't spend all that money on an 'all-weather' vehicle, to wuss around at half-speed just cuz of a little snow!" It's loss of face they can't abide, not loss of traction.

Meanwhile, this Winter of Our Discontent has taken its toll on Lili, who is used to her daily one-hour constitutional, featuring brisk trotting and exuberant running. Chris & I found one plowed section of road on the school grounds [about 100 meters long] over the weekend, and ran her to-and-fro between us like a yo-yo, commanding her, "A so ko" [over there] and "Oy i [d]e" [come to me], until [like the old mare, Dusk] she slowed to a walk. No such cleared road exists in our county today, however, so it's plow through the 4-ft-deep snow in our yard, or pout on the porch, for our caged beast.

So far, I must say, she has maintained her "good sense, good judgment and self-control," better than most of the snow-bound humans around here have. [I figure, it's because she is dealing with less humiliation, innit?]

Janus, the Gatekeeper

2010-01-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

As the month named for the Greek god of "Shut it!" draws to a close, here's a meditation on knowing when to say "Enough, already!" An article in the LA Times this week reports the results of an Australian study [through whose methodology one could drive a "ute," but, oh, well] published in Circulation [as in cardiovascular, not newspaper] asserting, on the basis of subjects' self-report of their hours spent watching telly in one week [What if it had been this week, and the Australian Open Tennis Tournament was on? S'truth!], that those who watched more than 4 hours per day were "18% more likely to die" than those who watched under 2 hours a day. So, what, if you have no access to telly, you're going to live forever? Outta sight!

Their point was meant to be that prolonged sitting leads to poor circulatory health. "Switch the bloody thing off and go walkabout!" Sound advice, even if not convincingly proven by their data. I have another theory, having to do with the content of the programmes [it was Oz, after all] watched. In the photo accompanying the news release in the LA Times, a guy was doing a vigorous workout at the gym, while viewing a widescreen telly tuned to a 24-hour news channel. Was this a wry editorial decision, on the part of the newspaper of record for the TV & movie capital of the world, to undercut the message that telly viewing precludes exercise? Pretty cute, if so. Also, it's grist for the mill for my alternative theory of what's hazardous to one's health: 24-hour news channels. All that vicariously traumatizing news, infinitely looped, ineptly analyzed, spun, repeated [you should excuse the expression] ad nauseam: it's a major producer of cortisol [which the researchers did measure in their 4-hour-plus subjects, and lo, it was sky high].

I'll wager that 4 hours spent watching comedies, well-made dramas, or sporting events [including horse racing, which produces adrenaline, not cortisol] would be much less toxic than 4 hours of looped news. Wonder if the researchers asked their subjects to list shows by name, or even by genre. Some great data-mining to be had, in them thar hills...

Whenever my clients complain of insomnia, I advise them to reduce their intake, not of caffeine, but of TV news. It is designed to hook you, to instill Fear Of Missing Out in you, to compel you to keep watching. I suggest substituting a cooler medium [in the Marshall McLuhen sense], such as newspapers [or online news sites]. They are less "in your face." They give you the option to skim, or even [gasp!] skip, cortisol-agenic news items. To be the gatekeeper of your vicarious trauma. To say, "Enough, already!" and get back to your own, possibly less distressing and certainly more relevant, life challenges. I'm not saying you should care less about the calamities of your fellow earthlings. I'm saying you should watch less.

It's not too late for a New Year's resolution...

Move It or Lose It

2010-01-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

How's this for a high-concept article title? Not mine. This one, hot off the press from the Proceedings of The National Institute of Sciences: "Running enhances spatial pattern separation in mice." A research team headed by David J. Creer in Baltimore & Timothy J. Bussey @ Cambridge University studied adult mice [3 months old] and "very aged" mice [22 months old]; and determined that adults with nifty, blue plastic, saucer-shaped exercise wheels in their cages [which they ran on, for up to 12 miles a day] enjoyed "synaptic plasticity and hippocampal neuro-genesis," and could do a touch-screen task [to "find Waldo," as it were] much better than their "sedentary" comrades.

Sadly, exercise for the aged mice did not significantly improve their task performance, mainly because they couldn't quite grasp what the cockamamie task was, in the foist place! Still, a little run on the wheel, what could it hoit? [Why I'm giving the alta cocka mice Brooklyn accents is anybody's guess, since they were actually living in "Bal'm're"--don't feign incomprehension, those of you who have watched every episode of The Wire--hanging out at the National Institute on Aging.]

So, let's extrapolate the findings [the way the BBC news release did] to humans. It may be that, not only is vigorous exercise good for "tying down cognitive Kangaroos" [so that they can sit still and focus long enough to learn stuff]; it may actually encourage the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus [thereby benefiting both Kangaroos & Clydesdales].

Gives a whole new meaning to the term Scholar/Athlete, no?

Now, here's what I propose for a follow-up study. Let's re-test those 3-month-old smarty-pants rodent/athletes when they are 22-month-oldsters; and see if they retain their brainey-ness. How very cool it would be, if they did.

I wonder what the human equivalent of 12 mice-miles a day is...

What's keepin' ya?

2010-01-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

My paternal grandmother Kate grew up on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands across the Galway Bay from mainland Eire, and spoke not only Irish Gaelic, but a West of Ireland dialect of English. Consider her nuanced expressions for the verb to die: if someone kills you, you are "destroyed"; if you drown [see Riders to the Sea] you are "lost"; but if you die of an illness , you "get away." [The custom on the islands is that your survivors must then "go tell the cows and the bees" of your demise. Dunno why...]

As a 5-year-old, visiting Kate in her final days, I was captivated by the idiom, to "get away." It made it seem as if each of us is just temporarily tethered here on earth, like a helium balloon anchored by a little weight, one scissor-snip away from escaping the bonds of earth. So, what's keeping us here? What are those "little weights," which serve as our Life Anchors?

This is actually [excuse the pun] a heavy Existential question, to be asked of anyone who has attempted [or is contemplating] suicide, or who is coping with seemingly intolerable pain & suffering, and especially those grieving the loss of a loved one. The question is: "Who are your Life Anchors?" Who needs you to stick around, here on Earth? Actuarial studies suggest that if your life partner "gets away," unless you have other Life Anchors, you are likely follow The Departed, within 12 months.

But here's the Beauty Part [for everyone but the undertakers]. Life Anchors come in all shapes and sizes, and need not even be human, to keep you tethered. Pets prolong life, as do other individuals who are counting on you. They help you experience your own adverse circumstances as "highly inconvenient," rather than intolerably "awful." As the English would say, they help "take you out of yourself." When my Uncle Dick "got away," my Auntie Eileen [Kate's daughter, much to their mutual chagrin], who had always been a cat person, became a Full On Cat Lady, feeding and sheltering as many as 20 at a time. Although they made her [even more] unpopular with some of her neighbors, those cats kept her anchored in life for 13 years of widowhood. Cheap at half the price, innit?

It goes without saying that Lili is one of my Life Anchors, along with my human family. What's keeping her, in this picture? After all, this is one of two doors she can open from the outside and shut behind her. I'd like to believe that I am Lili's Life Anchor, keeping her near through bonds of mutual love and loyalty. But it's more likely her lack of opposable thumbs, innit?

Plot-twists in Your Storyline

2010-01-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, so you've faced the fact that something unforeseen, unintended, and probably unfortunate is going down in your life. Well spotted. Now what?

Anger, is what. Anyone who says otherwise isn't telling the truth, or paying close enough attention. It is what to do with/about the anger, that I want to address...right after I declare how angry I am at two Post-modern Antipodeans from the 70s, White & Epston, who rebranded the ancient & universal practice of chronicling the ups & downs of the story of one's life, to try to make sense of it [to answer Alfie's (1966) question, "What's it all about?"] as "Narrative Therapy," as if it were their intellectual property. Mostly intrusion is up my nose, about this narrow redefinition of what almost everyone does, every day (even if they're not in psychotherapy): tell someone [even if it's only Dear Diary] wha' happened today, in a narrative format. Nar'mean?

"What did you do at school today?" ask the concerned parents."Ahh, nuttin'. We just had oral review." It's still a narrative.

But let's say what your 5th-grade class did today was study the oyster, including the requirement to eat one [which your personal & family culture proscribes], and you refused, and were sent to the Principal's office, occasioning humiliation and fear. As you tell your narrative to your parents, they have the power to influence the storyline, for better or worse. "That's outrageous! How dare they impose their parochial, regional folkways on a Navy kid! We'll send a note of protest to the Principal, insisting that you be exempted, without prejudice, from eating a mollusk." Or..."What makes you think you can defy your teacher? When in Rome, do as the Romans." Want to guess how the narrative unfolded for me? It was huge! It became a leitmotif of my storyline. My parents backed me to the hilt, and no mollusks were consumed [by me, or, indeed, any other squeamish classmates].

As we mature, we sometimes have to "become are own parents," and back ourselves to the hilt, in the face of criticism, adversity, and unfortunate plot-twists. That is, we need to recall earlier chapters in our narrative, when intrusion, humiliation, fear and pain & suffering were neutralized [made "all better," or at least ratcheted down to a tolerable level], against all odds. If those instances don't readily spring to mind, then look harder for them. If they hadn't occurred at all, you wouldn't be here now.

This is my Manhattan cat, St. Chuck [1974-1983], whose own storyline included a series of [at least 8] life-threatening plot-twists and miraculous comebacks. He was my loyal companion through a doctoral dissertation, 6 years of Naval service, and the transitions to married and civilian life. As this stop-action photo suggests, the leitmotif of his narrative was fear, which he overcame in his final years...which is a story for another time.

First, Face It, Head-on

2010-01-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

By "it," I mean your loss: of traction, of your wallet, of a Loved One, of your reason for living, whatever. Remember Driver's Ed, especially those of you from a cold climate? The most counter-intuitive thing to learn [and to convince yourself to do, in the actual situation], is to "steer into a skid." [Also, pre-ABS, don't stomp on the brake pedal, just "feather" it.] Yeah, yeah. You're less likely to "fishtail," or even "spin right round"; but, by definition, you're heading in the wrong direction! "Just for a moment, until you regain a bit of forward motion again," the instructor soothes. Turns out, the same paradigm applies when you're flying a single-engine airplane and it stalls. Intuition shrieks, "Pull up!" but your instructor says, "Point the nose down, to pick up air speed [and let Bernoulli's principle lift you up]."

Likewise, the first [and hardest] thing to do when something bad happens to you, is to face it, already. Boy, doesn't limbic arousal mess wi'dat? Like making the whole thing play out in slow-motion, so that you can kid yourself, "This is just a dream sequence. I'll wake up in a minute." I did that when my purse was stolen in London in the '70s [even though I had lost 3 wallets to pickpockets during my years in Manhattan]. As usual, that time distortion thing has some survival value, allowing you to postpone overwhelming panic [loss of blood flow to the hippocampus] long enough to complete your Flame Out Chart protocol. What's that? Actual pilots of actual jet planes have a laminated list of steps to take, in case of an engine flame-out [since most jets make lousy gliders & Bernoulli's principle cannot help them overcome gravity]. It's written down, because some panic is likely to trickle through to the pilot's amygdala in that situation [Right Stuff notwithstanding], causing Highly Inconvenient memory loss for "What's the first thing to do? And the second?" The Naval aviator euphemism for that is "Having a bad day."

So, assuming you're not in charge of a disabled aircraft--but still, not everything's going your way--if you can get yourself to face the bad news real time [not just after the fact], your trusty hippocampus will be able to help you through it: by remembering previously learned recovery protocols, or devising a new one on the spot.

When I faced the fact that my footing was gone for good on the black ice, and I had entered the slo-mo phase of my debacle, I remembered my acting school class [which Chevy Chase must have aced] in safe-but-convincing-stage-falls: "twist to the side, knee, hip, extend arm to protect head, boom." That's just how it went down, on the day.

As they say about airplane flights, "Any one you can walk away from, was a good one."

More of this next time. Meanwhile, this is West Coast Penny, visiting the East Coast for the holidays. Can you tell whether she's looking away, or facing you, head-on?

A Sudden Loss of Traction

2010-01-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

Dontcha just hate it when you're walking down your (conscientiously shoveled) driveway at dawn to collect the papers, and you execute an impromptu slapstick routine on black ice: the lawyer's often lucrative "slip & fall" (if there's anyone to blame for it, other than Mother Nature)? Let's do the Wolf-work. In my case there was a certain amount of pain & suffering (only bruises, though, where there could have been a broken hip bone). If there had been witnesses at that early hour, I would have been humiliated, especially as I struggled to regain my footing on drier ground. (In the event, I opted for the 2-feet-of-snow, overland route back to the house). Had I actually broken any bones, there would have been the intrusion [inconvenience, at least] of a holiday trip to the ER and the subsequent hassle of schlepping around on crutches. But, most insidious of all, I now have a fear of falling again, and not being so lucky next time. On our holiday trip [you should excuse the expression] to the Great Lakes region to see family, I doddered around the icy streets & sidewalks like an old crone, eliciting only impatience [not assistance] from my Loved Ones.

But here's the Beauty Part. Despite my loss of footing & dignity & confidence, I followed Dinosaur Barney's advice, and [mostly] "kept on keeping on." [I did beg off one side-trip in Michigan, which I felt was an icy road too far; and was chided for being a Chicken Little, since the snow had stopped by then.] But this is just a concrete example of the metaphoric [Existential, even] Loss of Traction, which is what I plan to discuss...right after a brief linguistic digression. Why is it, that the Tar Macadam form of paving [with which our road & treacherous driveway is sealed] has come to mean "Airport Runway or Apron," when actually, said runways & aprons are never sealed with Tarmac, but instead are bare, slightly corrugated concrete, said corrugation intended to prevent a Sudden Loss of Traction by landing airplanes,?[Although it doesn't always work, just read the newspapers this week, if you can get down your driveway to collect them.] Nar'mean?

It is my clinical [and personal] observation, that the holiday season causes [or worsens] an Existential Loss of Traction for many people, as they anticipate having to recount the triumphs and spin the disasters of their past year, in written [Christmas letter] and oral "examinations" [visits with the family]. Remember that inane but haunting Band-Aid [for famine relief, not slip & fall injuries] anthem: "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?" What if your answer is: "Not as much as I had intended, when I made my New Year's resolutions"? Humiliation, is what, pal. It can lead to an acute loss of self-efficacy [as the English, they who first landed "on the Tarmac," have termed it], in which it seems as if no amount of Therblig expenditure will yield the hoped-for results, so why even bother?

I was remembering the last line of the 1966 English film, Alfie, in which our cheeky Cockney anti-hero, having blithely bedded [almost] Anything with a Pulse throughout the story, finds himself dissed & dismissed by proto-cougar Shelley Winters, for a younger man. His response has become a UK cliche to express a sudden loss of existential traction: "What's it all about? Nar'mean?"

Using some concrete skid-recovery strategies as [metaphorical] paradigms, the next post will offer some suggestions for regaining traction. Meanwhile, this is Lili, on Christmas morning, having figured out a strategy for moving forward on iced-over, deep snow: "Run like a jackrabbit, skimming the surface, until gravity wins and you crash through to the snow beneath. Repeat."

Chick Cliches

2009-12-22T07:10:00.000-08:00

Let us compare & contrast two iconic chickens: Chicken Little & The Little Red Hen. "Why 'Red,' anyway?" I hear you muse. Perhaps, because she got her start in a Russian folktale. She's the chick who keeps exhorting her deadbeat comrades to lend a hand with the sowing of some grain product (possibly rye in the original version), then with harvesting it, milling it, and baking it into bread. "Nyet," they tell her, at each juncture. Not one Therblig are they prepared to expend. Yet they expect to benefit from the Red Hen's labor and nosh her bread. "Nyet," she answers them back, and feeds her children, instead. I've always felt that the BFD quotient of this story was pretty high; but the Realpolitik motto of The Little Red Hen ("If you want a thing done right, do it yourself.") has made it into the Codex of Sadder-But-Wiser-Truisms.

Chicken Little (who may have started out as a hare in African folklore, several millenia ago) is the one who extrapolates, from one acorn falling on her head, a Doomsday scenario, to wit: "The sky is falling! The King must be informed!" She demagogues a flock of concerned poultry to accompany her on a mission to the king; but they are all schmized by Foxy Loxy into taking a detour to his den, where he has them for lunch, as it were. Nevertheless, her undelivered message ("The sky is falling!") has become synonymous with Reaching-a-Dire-Conclusion-Before-All-the-Data-Are-In.

So, there was I, last Saturday morning around 9 o'clock, when we usually set off for Lili's walk through the acorn-dropping woods, with a light but steady snow a-falling, knowing from 13 years of Michigan winters, that "You'd best keep a path from the garage to the street passable, or the (eventual) municipal snow-plowing of the streets will avail you nought." My heavy hints to this effect were received by my stronger half (who can actually get our rickety old snow blower to start) as the ravings of Chicken Little. So I got all Little Red Hen about it, and set to with my trusty (ergonomic) snow shovel, commencing what turned out to be a 2-day battle with Mother Nature, to be able to get to BWI airport on Sunday evening to collect our Second City daughter. Mind you, 30 minutes into my labors, Chris was out there, coaxing the reluctant snow blower into life; and he did not rest until sunset, when I Chicken Littled him again, this time saying, "A cleared driveway will avail us nought, if you get a heart attack in the process." (This warning has a certain, wry resonance with us, since, back in Detroit, he was once the TV pundit cardiologist, who advised that, "people over 40 should not shovel snow" lest they get a...you know.)

Eerily, we were the only two folks in the cul-de-sac out there toiling on the Saturday. Shades of Aesop's Grasshopper & Ant fable. Gotta tell ya, it was a little bit humiliating, to think of our neighbors, tucked up snugly (maybe even smugly) in their warm houses, watching the two of us Chicken Littles, inflicting pain & suffering on ourselves, in our Sisyphean task. Did they know something we didn't?

On Sunday morning our next-door-neighbor (also Chris) who has a fancy, ride-on snow plow, discovered that he could not get it out of his garage, to begin to tackle the 2 feet of snowfall. He confessed that his wife was "beside herself with him," since they had to get to Dulles that night, to collect their daughter, who was weather-delayed in Amsterdam. It was one of those moral dilemmas. Should we (the Ants) forsake our own driveway project, to help our neighbor (the Grasshopper) begin his? Here is where one learns that social guilt is an uncomfortable mix of intrusion (of others' poor planning into one's own agenda) and humiliation (that one is Not a Good-enough Neighbor, even during the Christmas season). I was half-heartedly offering him the use of my trusty Jeep to get to their airport, when, miraculously, a neighbor from up the road arrived with an industrial-strength snow clearing device, and had him (and all the other driveways in the cul-de-sac, except ours) done within an hour.

No more social guilt, then. Just the humiliation of realizing that, on our road at least, Grasshoppers rule and Ants drool. (Not to mention, ache.) Lili, meanwhile, has not had a walk in the woods since the blizzard began, but gets her aerobic exercise by gazelle-leaping through the snow, to do the needful in her usual spot out front.

"Climb Every (effing) Mountain"

2009-12-16T12:19:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the actor who starred in the movie version of The Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer, found it so insufferably mawkish and goody-two-shoes, that he referred to it as "The Sound of Mucus"? Fact. The "mountain" depicted in this picture is really just a hill on our daily woodland walk; but, even though I do 50 minutes of aerobic training at home each morning before tackling this "ascent," it always leaves me dizzy and gasping for air. [Humiliation in addition to a brief bout of pain & suffering.] So, why do I do it? That's an Existential question, for another post. How do I do it? I apply the Premack Principle.

This is one of those robust, game-changing, life-enhancing concepts I learned about in grad school [back in the day], that has been completely watered down, in modern textbooks. Here is Ray Corsini's definition, in The Dictionary of Psychology (2002 edition): "David Premack's contention that given two behaviors with differing likelihoods of occurring, the behavior more likely to occur may be used to reinforce the less likely behavior." [Yawn]

Here's how we learned it: "Faced with two tasks, one of which is short & simple, and the other of which is long & complex, an individual is more likely to choose to do the short, simple task." Our example for teaching this to our Intro Psych students @ USNA was to ask them, "During which two weeks in the academic year are Midshipmen's belt buckles the shiniest?" Answer: "During the Pre-exam Reading Periods of 1st & 2nd semester." Why? Because, faced with the tasks of Brasso-ing one's belt buckle or studying for an Electrical Engineering exam, one will choose the simple but gratifying task of banishing tarnish from a belt buckle (and any other other metal surface) first. (Then, polishing one's shoes...)

So, here's the power of this principle. In order to increase the likelihood of tackling a long & complex task, you should "Premack" it into short(er), simple(r) little steps. If a grown-up says to a kid, "Pick up your room," (and it's not a scene from a Disney movie), the likely result will be...not a picked up room, I'm tellin' ya. If the grown-up says, "First, gather up all the used towels in your room," it will be (more likely to be) done.

When faced with that most onerous and complex of tasks, "Finish your doctoral dissertation," my classmates & I resorted to all manner of short & simple tasks, such as finishing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, or at least filling in all the S's for the plural clues. This was mid-70s, mind you, when a search of the relevant literature meant hunting down journal articles by pawing through tomes of indices, and then reading the articles on microfische...oh, it exhausts me even to tell you. So, I would Premack it: "I'll sit in the library, scribbling on my little index cards, until I have filled 10 of them, and then I'll rest from my labors (for the day). I'll come back tomorrow and do 10 more."

That's how I get up the hill each day. I Premack it: by keeping my eyes steadfastly fixed on each day-glow-orange-painted tree root, like the rungs of a ladder, just a short distance apart; and avoiding looking up the hill, to see how many, many more "rungs" are left ahead of me. [Also, to distract me from the agony of so many expended Therbligs, in my head I "sing" a song of non-lexical vocables, such as "Nana Window" or the "Ying Tong" song.]

So, do ya see, this could be a strategy to keep from being consumed by the Zeigarnik effect. "I'll think of 3 new places to look for those missing forage balls. I'll look, and then I'll rest from my labors." (That is, I'll move on to something completely different, also on my list of self-assigned tasks.) Between the push-me-pull-you of Premack & Zeigarnik, I get a surprising number of things done each day, especially considering that I am a cognitive Kangaroo. Not everything, mind you. But there's always tomorrow...

Task, Interrupted

2009-12-13T08:35:00.000-08:00

Remember the line from George Harrison's 1966 song, "I Want to Tell You," (off of Revolver), "I feel hung up but I don't know why"? Well, a psychologist living in Russia at the time, Blyuma Wulfovna Zeigarnik, did. (...know why George Harrison felt hung up.) When she was a graduate student in Berlin in the 20s, her dissertation adviser, Kurt Lewin (father of Field Psychology, as in "If I don't get my way, I'm going to leave the field, possibly taking my football with me") noticed that a waiter who had not yet received payment for a patron's order remembered it more accurately, than the orders for which he had been paid. "BFD," I hear you remark. "Why remember a fait accompli?"

Not the point. Why is it, that we do remember (obsess about, have nightmares about, dump cortisol about) even trivial bits of unfinished business?

Here's an example from last week, that is still intruding on our domestic tranquility, humiliating me for my failure to solve the mystery, and making me fear for my sanity (a bit). A few months ago I read about forage balls for overweight or fast-eating cats. Originally designed for pigs, to simulate rooting about for food in the wild, these plastic globes with adjustable slots must be batted about by the forager, for each ort of food to be released. Zanizbar is fed in a bathroom, which sounds like a bowling alley as he biffs his ball from wall to wall. Napster, however, is fed in a former-bedroom-now-box-room, full of nooks & crannies (as they say in English muffin ads). It's like an Easter egg hunt each morning, trying to find where he's hidden his ball. First an orange one "disappeared." After expending more Therbligs trying to find it than the task deserved, I gave up and substituted a pink ball (that we had bought for Ruth, before realizing that she was too old, blind, and thin, to be required to forage for her supper).

Then the pink ball went missing...along with my skepticism regarding the fairies, who hide objects, just to create chaos. The room, though cluttered, is finite. The door is only shut during feedings, however. Perhaps the balls had made their way to another upstairs room? Believe me, both Chris & I have searched. Maybe they rolled downstairs? Let me check behind the piano, again. We eagerly await the holiday return of our daughters, so we can put them on the case.

Having gone out and spent another $8 on a blue forage ball has not, as hoped, loosened the grip of our compulsion to hunt for the Two That Got Away. We are in thrall to the Zeigarnik Effect.

Serialized books & movies, cliffhanger season-enders on TV, crossword puzzles & that Japanese number game I can't even pronounce, much less get into, all rely on this powerful need for closure. Oddly enough, "difficulty sustaining attention in...or finishing...tasks" is listed as the hallmark symptom of Kangaroo Brain (as I fondly refer to my ADD); but clearly, there is a missing qualifier here: "assigned (tasks)."

For the interrupted tasks that we assign ourselves, there is no "forget-about-it." Just ask Lili, at the window, as she awaits the next sighting of those interloping Goldens, whom a locked front door prevented her from interdicting this morning.

You'll have to excuse me, now. I've just thought of another place to look...

"I'm wild again, beguiled again..."

2009-12-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

Lorenz Hart's original lyrics to the hit song of the 1940 musical Pal Joey, "Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered," were so risque that Bowdlerized [watered-down, Disney-fied] phrases are usually substituted, to mollify modern, Tipper Gorean sensibilities. Even if you are familiar with the song, bet you haven't heard this opening gambit, sung by a girl, already: "After one whole quart of brandy, like a daisy I awake, with no Bromo Seltzer handy..." [Talk about "Tried to make me go to rehab, but I said 'no, no, no.'"]

Sportsfans, I tell ya, simply pretending that you have no wolf [no temptation to behave recklessly and regrettably] doesn't stop your wolf from going wild. Beguiled, we'll get to in a moment.

When, in another part of the forest, I used to interview young people whose misuse of alcohol had come to the attention of the authorities, I encouraged them to recapture their [pre-bust] enthusiasm for their beverage of choice. [See the post, "Crazy Like a Fox."] To cut to the chase I would ask a young man, "Tell me what's better about an evening spent with Ethyl." [Young ladies were asked about an evening with Fred. As in Mertz. Nar'mean?] Protestations of "Nothing! Nothing was good about it! It was stupid! I was led astray by my so-called friends," were dismissed as unhelpful stonewalling. Until any of us can look back on our shenanigans from the Crazy Fox's point of view, as "seeming like a good idea, at the time," we are none the wiser about what makes us tick, and no less likely to try it again.

Even when granted amnesty [or confidentiality], though, most of my "drunken sailors" were initially reluctant to "go there": to let the Crazy Fox explain what it was trying to accomplish. The heroine of the Rogers & Hart song goes there. She tells us she is wildly, hopelessly attracted to an off-limits guy, so she spent the night with Fred [a quart of brandy]. Her Crazy Fox beguiled her into believing that Fred would take her mind off Mr. Wrong, at least temporarily. The song is a morning-after lament: "Well, 'going wild' didn't work. I'm still bewitched, bothered & bewildered by this guy, only now I have a hangover, too." I'll let you look up the original lyrics, to find out if she ever wises up, or comes to a bad end.

Trouble is, insight into the Crazy Fox's motive comes at a cost: humiliation. [Sometimes, also pain & suffering.] Not everyone is prepared to pay that price, until all other options have been exhausted. How 'bout a bit of denial? "I'm just not like that." Or rationalization? "I don't have to try to understand this, because it's a one-time-deal, not a pattern." Or projection? "I didn't start this. S/he did provoke [beguile] me."

Recommended reading: the mid-section of DFW's Infinite Jest, featuring the AA meetings.

Imagine what Lili & Zanzibar are saying in this picture. Actually, there were no shenanigans going on here, for once. Peaceable kingdom. But doesn't Lili look guilty of something?

Gingerism Is No Joke

2009-12-02T14:14:00.000-08:00

Centuries before those wiseguys, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, wrote Episode 911 of South Park ["Ginger Kids," which was first aired on 9 Nov 05], individuals with red hair were the objects of fear & loathing, as well as assault & murder. The ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice them regularly, "for good luck." In Medieval Europe, red-haired individuals were feared as vampires. In Czarist Russia they were all regarded as insane. Frank McCourt wrote that in the Limerick of his youth, redheads were assumed to be of Protestant [Scottish] descent, and therefore hated. In the UK in 2003 [2 years prior to South Park 911, mind you] a 20-year-old youth was fatally stabbed in the back "for being a Ginger," according to his assailant.

When Rosie received solo-tour orders to Shanghai, 3 months into Myrna's pregnancy with my older sister, they made a red-haired-girl contingency plan, to "give her a name with its own nickname reference to her hair color," to spare her Rosie's fate. In the Chicago of his youth, red-haired children were jeered, "Redhead, gingerbread, 2 cents a loaf." Thus, in the fullness of time, his shipmate ["Blood" Doner, speaking of onerous monickers] handed Rosie a telegram: "Baby Virginia Darling." Rosie wired back, "So it's a red-haired girl; but why the Southern middle name?" [His idea of a little joke.] As often happens with babies, Ginger's flaming red hair fell out, grew back in blonde, and then morphed into a subtle bronze, like an old penny, not a new one. [For rufus boys, the head-'em-off-at-the-pass name was Russell, so they could be called Rusty, ya know. These days, apparently, it's Rufus.]

So, what is up with all this ancient & modern "gingerism" [as the Manchester Guardian dubbed this form of discrimination, in 2003], anyway? I shall now [color]blind you with [some genetic and social] science. The rarest of hair colors, red is the result of a [recessive] mutation in the MC1R gene. Because it is highly correlated with pale/freckled skin, it offers the survival advantage of higher absorption of Vitamin D [a protection against Rickets] It is expressed in 13% of the Scots and 10% of the Irish. [Not all of dem, d'ya see, now.] It is "very common" in Ashkenazi [European] Jews. [Think Woody Allen.] Currently in the US, [natural] red hair is found in "2 to 6% of the population."

Professor Cary Cooper, a British psychologist, opines that redheads are a convenient target of malice, because they are "a visible minority, not protected by law." Without presuming to know their motives, I speculate that Messrs. Parker & Stone chose "Ginger Kids" for their parable about baseless prejudice, because they had no idea [at the time] that "gingerism" was a real problem. They might just as well have chosen sinistrality [left-handedness, with which red hair is significantly correlated]. Nevertheless, their lack of response, so far, in the face of recent Facebook-mediated, South Park inspired "Kick-a-Ginger-Day" assaults among middle-schoolers, is not very Menschlich [stand-up], in my opinion. Their disclaimer, that no one under 17 [unable to discern Poetic Speech reliably] should have watched the episode, misses the point.

Let's do a little wolf-work. [Way] back in the day, aggression against the rufus was prompted by fear: of vampires and lunatics. In Limerick [if McCourt's red-hair-means-you're-a-Prod association is right], the anger stemmed from the intrusion and humiliation that Irish Catholics felt/feel at the hands of their Scots-Irish [British] overlords. The common association of red hair with a short temper may prompt others to dread that a red-haired person is more likely to inflict pain & suffering [although the scientific evidence suggests that they are, themselves, more sensitive to (thermal) pain than others].

What I wanna know is, what about redheads got up the noses of Parker & Stone, and their media outlet, Comedy Central? Their current silence has the whiff of Unacknowledged Wolf.

Gratitude

2009-11-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

No doubt, most gatherings of family, friends & invited strangers seated around the table on this Thanksgiving were given an opportunity to express their gratitude, either individually or collectively, either sincerely or flippantly [depending on the group demographics]. Whatever was identified as a cause for giving thanks, the very act of doing so [according to Martin Seligman and other mavens of Positive Psychology] did the "thanks-giver" good.

In fact, the more unfortunate and hard-done by an individual is feeling [like Lili on the Penalty Box Rug], the more beneficial it is, to "Accentuate the Positive" [as the lyrics of a Depression-era song advised]. Irony is almost unavoidable, and totally okay, in this exercise. Such as, in the genre of joke that ends "...unless you consider the alternative." [Usually, being dead.] I wonder if there is, even now, a jolly japester fashioning zombie & vampire jokes in this vein...

As part of my dawn get-ready-to-face-the-day routine, while zoning out for 50 minutes of aerobic exercise [in the convenience & privacy of my basement, for which, I give thanks], my iPod playlist includes at least one tongue-in-cheek [but also sincere] "gratitude" song. For years, it has been a song off of The Holloways' album, So This Is Great Britain? ["Generator"], the refrain of which is, "May I remind you that you don't live in poverty? You got your youth, and you got food in your belly." [Well, c'mon, folks, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, nar'mean?] These days, it tends to be a song off of Paolo Nutini's 2nd album, Sunnyside Up ["Pencil Full of Lead"], which is a Dixeland-meets-Gilbert & Sullivan-patter-song enumerating the things for which the diminutive Glaswegian son-of-a-fishmonger is grateful, featuring the chorus, "I've got food in my belly and a license for my telly." I feel the BBC should be grateful that young Poalo makes the payment of Britain's mandatory TV & radio license fee [of 139 pounds, 50 pence, Sterling] sound so fabuloso, with every refrain.

Beyond any metaphysical benefit daily gratitude bestows upon the thanks-giver, at the corporeal level, it blocks the production of cortisol and encourages the production of endorphins. I find it a helpful antidote to the 4 horsemen of what-gets-up-my-nose, on any given day. "It's 5.15 in the bleedin' morning, and you're alive & able-bodied enough to be down here working up a sweat." [There! Intrusion and pain & suffering neutralized, with one co-ordinate clause.] "While I'm busy here in "the bike room," Lili is having a barkfest at Arnold, her neighboring German shepherd, thereby adding some joyful chaos to the morning." [Boom! Intrusion and humiliation re-framed and diminished.]

I could go on, but you get the idea.

"In hindsight..."

2009-11-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

I am somewhat reluctant to pick on her, maybe because of her team's name, but today's quotation in the NYTimes from a suddenly notorious college soccer player is exactly what I am on about, in this blog: "I look at it [the replay of her controversial, but mostly un-carded game] and I'm like, 'That is not me.' I have so much regret. I can't believe I did that."

Remember, way back in one of my earliest posts, I recounted the retrospective musings of two female college applicants, who had been caught doing the same antisocial deed. One made a sincere attempt to understand "what got into her," to provoke her to violate her own [and society's] code of conduct. The other simply offered the Werewolf Defense: in so many words, "I have no idea. That is not me."

To which I would reply, were I speaking to either that long-ago applicant or to today's Girl Gone Wild, "That is, potentially, all of us, kiddo. Especially if we are unwilling to 'do the wolf-work' of reviewing the regrettable event, until we come to understand what got into us [up our nose]." If you look up accounts of that fateful game, you will see several clues, as to what "got up the nose" of this young athlete. In one instance, which led to her most aggressive response, her opponent executed a crafty "crotch grab" [as one sports reporter terms it]. Let's do the wolf-work, shall we? Ya got yer intrusion, possibly yer pain, and I would guess some humiliation goin' on. Three precursors to anger, delivered in one, surreptitious movement, probably not visible to the ref. Maybe not even illegal, if seen. The point of this exercise in wolf-work is not to justify the player's angry reaction, but to understand what prompted it. Not for you or me to understand it, sportsfans. For the suspended player to understand it, herself. So she doesn't have to go through the rest of her life like a werewolf, crying "That is not me."

How many of us find it totemic, that she was playing for the Lobos?

About a Bird

2009-11-17T11:45:00.000-08:00

Readers of this blog might have the impression that my mother was only a featured player in our family variety show. That flamboyant Rosie was the star. Indeed, when he was present, he was usually the Top Banana; but he would be the first to declare that my mother was the Class Act.

In telling her story, I shall try to resist the cognitive distortions of Black & White [all or nothing] and catastrophic ["This is awful!"] thinking. But it will be hard. Myrna [Deal with it. She had to.] was a precocious pianist, who began concertizing in Ohio and Washington, DC, in her early teens. She won a national piano contest, the prize for which was a scholarship to The Juilliard School of Music [whence she graduated with a Bachelor of Science (!) degree in 1943]. You are given a main mentor there, and hers was James Friskin [a Bach maven]; but Alexander Siloti [Rachmaninoff's cousin] also taught there during her Juilliard years.

Now, Mumsley [a silly name my sister & I gave her, about the time our English cat got saddled with Ying Tong] was an elfin little creature: 5'2" with very small hands. This is crucial to the absolutely true story I am about to relate [which I have fact-checked with my sister and the Internet]. One day in 1954, when we were living in Tarrytown, NY, our parents piled us into the wallowing Buick for a mystery tour, to a sprawling country house in a not-nearby-enough-for-me town [possibly Mt. Pleasant, near Valhalla, where Rachmaninoff is buried]. Myrna had been invited by "some Cousins of Rachmaninoff" [we figure, Siloti's family], to "show them how she did it." See, Rachmaninoff has been retrospectively diagnosed with Marfans. He was 6'6" with huge paws, and wrote music for big-handed folks like himself. Now, whether they had heard her nifty 15-minute wartime radio show, or read a review of a concert she gave featuring the Russian giant, they wanted to watch her in action.

At 5 years old, and already dreading the drive home, I was morose...until the Cousins let fly the parakeets. Talk about chaos! As Myrna was playing, a bird alighted on the temple of her glasses, and stared her in the eye. Trouper that she was, she just kept on playing. "Open your mouth," invited a Cousin. "He'll check your teeth." Myrna smiled, but kept her jaw clenched. When the command performance was over, a Cousin asked if we had a cat. Rosie piped up, "Yes, but we'll take another, if you're offering." "Actually, we were going to offer you 'Pretty Bird' [the avian dentist]; but you have a cat." "We'll make it work!" assured Rosie; and home we drove, with a blue parakeet, who withstood the aerobatic maneuvers of Chip-Chip the tabby tom [whom you have yet to meet], and later of Alfred the dog, for 6 years, without mishap.

When Myrna was 35 [and I was 10], she got Multiple Sclerosis. The English still call the most rapidly-progressing type [which the cellist Jacqueline du Pre had] "galloping." Mumsley had "cantering" MS. She continued to play publicly for another 10 years, although she required a wheelchair by then. She died 3 months before my first child was born, at 61 [my age now].

Because she was a Goody-Two-Shoes, teetotalling, sweet-natured person, it is tempting to reduce her life to an ironic cliche: "Virtue is its own punishment." My sister's & my fears for her led us to many impatient [angry] outcries of "Oh, Mums-ley!" As if we could shout her back to health. But she never lost patience with us, and not often with herself. She remained the mistress of the deadpan one-liner. The last time I saw her, my in-laws were visiting and she was listening, as always, to the classical music radio station. "Oh, I just love La Traviata!" enthused my mother-in-law. "How 'bout Il Trovatore?" rejoined Mumsley.

A Class Act.

Ciotogach (Kithogue)

2009-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've promised my daughters that one day we will turn the story of "Kithogue, the War Cat" into a proper book; but until then, she's going to illustrate Peckham's point about the value of chaos in uncertain times and situations. Mostly, I'm going to let Rosie's letters, written from his little ship, the USS Vammen (DE 644), during the Korean War, tell the story, with a bit of mise en scene commentary from me.

Written "At Sea, August 11, 1952," the first letter describes how he came to bring a cat aboard, on the last day before sailing from Hawaii to join his battle group in the Pacific. While visiting friends, "I made the acquaintance of a small kitten estimated at about 3 months old, and tentatively identified as a girl. What with one thing and another, she is now living in the cabin with me and eating wardroom mess cooking with no apparent harmful effects. She is not entirely housebroken. I have adopted a wait-and-see (and clean up) attitude. When we are in Midway, I will acquire a lot of sand, the island being entirely composed of this stuff, and see if her efforts cannot be localized. She spends a good part of the day playing in this typewriter. When I press the outer keys she bats at the inner ones as they come up and hit her in the nose. This pastime of ours has been observed by a few of the crew and, presumably, reported to the rest. However, I am still treated with all due respect; and cat (who at the moment is nameless) and I shall probably continue to play this damned fool game."

For awhile he and the crew just called her "Neko-san," (the Japanese for addressing a cat); but he decided the black marking on her back looked like "a lobster's left claw," so named her "Ciotogach" (which is Irish for left-handed). No surprise, I suppose, that this was also one of Rosie's childhood nicknames, since he was a South-paw. By the way, does she remind you of any other cat who has appeared in this blog? [One whom he acquired, thinking it was female?]

"Sasebo, Japan, 22 Sept., 1952" After a spell of off-shore bombardment along the North Korean coastline, the ship was back in its Japanese homeport, making ready to go back out. "I must tell you about the night the cat fell overboard. One of the officers had brought her back a ping pong ball. She had been playing with it in the wardroom, batting it around like a soccer ball and having the time of her life. About the time the movies started, someone opened the wardroom door and she managed to bat the ball out into the forward passageway, she right after it. From there, it went out on the main deck and forward to the foc'sle. She hopped right after it and got so engrossed in her game that she went right over the side between ourselves and the USS Marsh. The bow sentry heard the splash and then heard her yelling in the water. He ran aft along the side, keeping track of her as she drifted aft. She was yelling bloody murder so loudly that she could be heard over all the din of the movies. One of the men got a flashlight and shone it down in the water between the ships. She was swimming furiously and had the sense to swim into the beam of light if she drifted out of it. Another man got a swab [mop] and lowered himself down between the ships, with another man holding him by the feet. He was able to get the mop end of the swab near the cat. She swam to it and hung on for dear life. The swab was passed back up to the deck with the cat still clutching it, and we pulled the two men up. They decided they would have to give her a bath to wash the oil off her. Eventually, three big officers were able to overpower her and get her clean again. They dried her off and got some warm milk in her. She acted a little more demented than usual for an hour or so, but somebody found another ping pong ball, and she went right back to the game. This experience has given the ship a new sense of unity. Everyone aboard is concerned with the cat's welfare now. She plays all over the ship and with everybody. If she gets too close to the side someone will grab her and put her in a safe place. If she walks into wet paint and gets stuck, as she did, someone will rescue her."

"Yellow Sea, 4 Oct., 1952" This time, in the midst of battle, with a typhoon brewing. "Yesterday we nearly lost the cat again. She climbed up some rigging until she was perched in the whaleboat falls near the top of the boat davits, out over the side. About this time we turned into the wind so the carrier could launch planes. She was finally seen clinging to the ropes of the boat falls for dear life, with her fur streaming back in the 35 knot wind and, of course, hollering. One of the stewards climbed up and rescued her. I hope she stays alive until we get back to the States." [She, and the rest of the ship's crew, did.]

There are lots of other "Ciotogach" stories, like when the Rear Admiral visited the ship, and ordered that the "f%#king cat" [who was clinging to the seat of the steward's pants, howling for turkey] be fed first. Talk about the sentimental Muscovites! No one aboard "her" ship, it seems, was able to resist that cat's agenda. Yes, she was often an intrusion, but also a welcome distraction from the fearful experience of fighting in an underfunded [sound familiar?], unpopular, no-win war.

Although they remain "non-reg[ulation]," I am willing to bet that some cats [and even some dogs] are currently serving aboard our Naval vessels deployed in the Gulf, offering their shipmates the gift of chaos.

Man's Rage for Chaos

2009-11-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Morse Peckham's argument, in his 1969 book by this title, is that artists periodically save [their particular] civilization, by introducing chaos into a culture that has become too rule-bound and brittle to survive. To use my current parlance, every now and then, the Kangaroos [with their iconoclastic, outside-the-box, zigging & zagging] save the lock-stepping Clydesdales from collapsing under the burden of their hide-bound rules.

Peckham traces the progression of stylistic changes in music, poetry, painting & architecture; but [for reasons to be revealed in a future post], I'll just recap his musical musings. Let's use J.S. Bach as our exemplar of the Baroque era [1600-1750]. Are ya bored yet? Hang on, there are going to be wild dogs later. Mozart will be our guy from the Classical era [1740-1810]; and Beethoven will represent the Romantic era [1810-1910]. So, Peckham opines that each of these guys broke [some of the] the rules of the preceding era [as did their fellow poets, painters & architects], in ways that helped the people of their era(s) to roll with the changes [brought about by scientific discoveries, political unrest, and such like]. Nar'mean? The melodic line of their tunes got progressively smoother, from Bach, to Mozart, to Beethoven; and the rules of society got progressively looser. [To quote Cole Porter, "In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes!"]

And now to the subway-riding wild dogs of Moscow. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to look up this story, which appeared in [shock!] the online version of the UK tabloid, The Sun, this week. Under the Soviet system, ownerless dogs sought shelter at factory sites in Moscow, and mooched their food from sentimental Muscovites. After the fall [of the wall, ya know], the factories were relocated to the suburbs; and the dogs trotted after them, for a warm place to sleep. But the food source was still downtown, so the dogs learned to ride the Metro to their old pan-handling spots, like Gorky Park. According to Dr. Andrei Poiarkov, of the Moscow Ecology & Evolution Institute, the dogs travel in packs, and amuse themselves by waiting until the subway doors are just about to close, to jump on. ["Last one in is a sore-tailed mutt."] Now here is the Peckham part of the story. In the still photos and the video, it is apparent [to me, at least] that the human commuters enjoy their canine fellow travelers. They are standing, smiling indulgently, while the dogs sleep on the seats. In the video an old Russian Wolfhound is walking down the escalator, weaving among the standees on the stairs; and someone whistles to him softly, all on one note. Nothing. Then [as I do, to give Lili the "jump" command], he whistles a 3-note melody; and the dog sits down on the escalator stair. [He gets up again pretty quickly, mind you, and resumes his walking.]

So here's my point. Many Russians are having a stressful time, post-wall-fall, especially economically. The old rules of "obey & survive" don't apply anymore, and the new rules are...as yet, unwritten. That's a source of fear for some. The wild dogs provide comic relief. [That old juxtaposition of an animal in an unexpected venue, gets us every time.] Their presence on the Metro seems random [chaotic], yet they move with the precision of a drill team [order]. In fact, thinking back on all the animals in my past and present, I think what they always bring is the gift of chaos.

Here are our 3 cats, in harmonious repose, not in one of our daughters' [frequently] disheveled rooms, but in the Master Suite. [Napster, the black cat, is trying to use a dark pillow as camouflage. Don't be alarmed at his apparent size & shape.] Who cares if it looks like a New Yorker cartoon from the 1920s? It's not a photo shoot for Architectural Digest. Loosen up, will ya?

Bronx Cheer

2009-11-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

When my father got back from the Korean War and we moved to New York, I was 5 [and my sister was 6]. In what would be called these days, an effort to "bond" with us, he made up for 3 years of lost parenting time by teaching us to play chess and cribbage, and to use a logarithmic slide rule. [Look it up, you Young Ones; and keep the Internet handy, cuz more historical references will follow.] We also got into [radio broadcasts of] baseball. My mother & sister [both Cleveland natives] were Indians fans, while Rosie & I were all about the Brooklyn Dodgers. My enthusiasm outstripped my accuracy, as I raced around the apartment shouting, "Come quick! It's 'Dike Snooder' at bat!" [Also a big fan of "Pee Wee Weese," I was.] Our parents were fairly ecumenical about whom we could support: Anyone but the Yankees.

My father's motto was: "Rooting for the Yankees is like hoping for King Faroukh to win at roulette." At the time Rosie coined this bon mot, the penultimate King of Egypt [aka "The Thief of Cairo"] was reckoned to be the world's richest man, yet notorious for pilfering valuable artifacts from other heads of state whom he visited [including Winston Churchill]. Thus, our contempt for the Yankees was based, even in the 50s, on the egregiously "uneven playing field" that overpayment of their players created. Baseball, after all, was supposed to be a metaphor for the American Dream: a meritocracy, not a plutocracy.

When we moved to the UK, and the British tried to label me a "Yank[ee]," I would [rather cryptically] respond, "How dare you! I was always a Dodgers fan, until dey left Brooklyn, da bums!" The only part of this they grasped was "bums," which was rather a rude word for a 12-year-old girl to be using, in those days. When I went to Duke, and a "Magnolia Honey" would remark, "Whah, you mus' be a Yankee!" I would give her the same retort, leaving her baffled, as well. Ah, the power of the Poetic Speech function! Keeps 'em guessing.

So, anyway, why do we sports fans [even those of us who don't have a wager on the outcome], get so worked up when our team loses? The Manifest reason is, "Cuz we was robbed!" [The umpire was sight-challenged or corrupt. Add your own conspiracy theory here.] But the Latent reason [as in, "What gets up our nose" about the loss] is often humiliation as the victors litter Broadway with mountains of "ticker tape" [which long-forsaken paper product is as passe as the slide rule]; but also the intrusion of Farouhk-like wealth on one side, to "buy" the outcome. [A casual glance at the jubilant NYTimes headlines this week might have you wondering, were they talking sports or politics?]

There's nothing more infuriating than a fixed contest [especially when it doesn't go in your favor]. Rosie always used to stomp around the house in mock indignation while watching the Miss Universe Pageant. "It's all rigged, I tell you! It always goes to an Earthling!" [Talk about da bums...]

Tame Thing

2009-11-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

My parents may have been avant garde, in using Ying Tong [the Wild Thing] as a "therapy pet," to break my cycle of paroxysmal coughing; but earlier still [in 1956] they got Alfred [the Tame Thing], to gently awaken me from my frequent nightmares.

My father's name was Alfred, but his family called him Red, and his Naval Academy moniker was Rosie [by which he was known for the rest of his life]. Bestowing his unused name on our new puppy, he joked that Alfred-the-dog "could sign checks while (Rosie) was at sea"; and thereby hangs a tale. During the Korean War, my father's ship [a Destroyer] was catastrophically damaged [either mined or torpedoed], and the initial news reports listed Rosie among the dead. We found out the next day, via cryptic telegram, that he was alive. In fact, he had been instrumental in saving the ship [he couldn't swim]; and was then given a command of his own [a Destroyer Escort, which, years later, "starred" as the USS Kornblatt in the film Don't Give Up the Ship]. Meanwhile, when Rosie finally got some shore leave in California, between deployments, we went to visit family friends in Hollywood, just in time for an earthquake! Not a huge one, mind you; but it made a lasting impression on my young [3 or 4-year old] psyche.

From then on, I was prone to nightmares [especially when my father was about to deploy] in which earthquakes and explosions at sea were combined to harrowing effect; and I developed a nifty knack for the Hitchcock-victim-scream, thereby waking up the whole household. When I was turning 8, an Academy classmate of Rosie's, stationed with us in Newport, had a purebred Cocker Spaniel who had just had 3 puppies; and we got Alfred, whose job it was to keep watch over me by night, so that the rest of them could get some sleep.

Some years later, when both our family and Alfred's dam's family had moved to Annapolis, we took him to see his mother, who barked with disdain and chased him into the Bay. By then it had become clear that Alfred's sire was not her usual purebred Spaniel mate, but Dusty [a mix of Chow, Spitz, and Husky, who could apparently scale a 6-foot fence]. What a sweet-tempered dog he turned out to be, though. More significantly, he served as a Transitional Object for me [a living teddy], to stand in loco paternis, when his namesake was away at sea. He had hybrid vigor and lived to be 18, spending many of those years interacting with the bellicose Ying Tong, whom he never stopped trying to befriend.

So, this is a second answer to Sendak's question, "How do children survive?" When their parents are physically, emotionally, or otherwise unavailable to protect them, children rely on the comforting presence of animals [imaginary, stuffed, or real] to help them through the rough stuff.

"How do children survive?"

2009-10-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

Maurice Sendak's question is quoted at the top of an article about Where the Wild Things Are, in The Psychologist, the journal of The British Psychological Society [of which I have been a member since the 70s], written by an American psychoanalyst, Richard Gottlieb, whose thesis seems to be that Sendak had a rotten childhood, so he writes about children having rotten childhoods, who nevertheless, against all odds, survive.

Predictably, I beg to differ. Some aspects of Sendak's childhood [like yours & mine] were rotten. His genius has been to transform his tough stuff into images [visual and verbal] that kids receive with delighted recognition: "I know just how Max/Mickey/Pierre/Really Rosie feels, cuz sometimes I feel that way, too." In Gottlieb's tone, I detect the whiff of unacknowledged wolf. He even tries to make psychoanalytic hay out of Max's wearing "his wolf-suit" [which, tonight being Halloween, I'm betting we'll see more than one of, at our front door]. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a wolf-suit is just a wolf-suit.

Now, to introduce Ying Tong, the Worst Cat in the World, whom I credit with my childhood survival. Like little Maurice, I was a sickly child [although my parents didn't "make a dog's dinner" of their concerns about my health, unlike the Sendaks]. In the winter of 1961 I developed severe bronchitis, and my constant bouts of phlegmy coughing made it almost impossible to keep food down. When we had moved to the UK the previous summer, we had tearfully left our dog Alfred behind [because of the draconian 6-month quarantine rule], so on Christmas eve my father burst into the house [bleeding and swearing profusely], and pried a black & white, snarling Wild Thing off his neck, saying, "Merry effing Christmas!" My parents had secretly agreed that the family needed a local pet, to ease the loss of Alfred. The cat was a rescue from the RSPCA, supposedly female [and therefore named by my mother "Jingle Belle"]; but later assessed by the vet as Ever So Male: "Perhaps you would like to call him 'Jingle Bill'?" We fell into the habit of calling him Ying Tong, after the Goon Show song, "Ying Tong Iddle I Po." [Another gem of non-lexical vocables, suitable for lowering anxiety.]

The cat was the bane of the street, commando-raiding the neighbor children's outdoor tea table and making off with their Marmite sandwiches; climbing another neighbor's sapling tree and chewing off all the buds. Inside the house, he would lurk under my bed, snarling with menace. I would do the longjump from the hallway to under my bed covers, and he would pounce, trying to bite me through my many layers of duvet. Then [and this is the Beauty Part] he would curl up on my chest and fall asleep. My parents theorized [and I agreed] that the very credible threat of a woken up Ying Tong's wrath would strongly motivate me to resist the urge to cough, thereby keeping my food down and my strength up. And, lo, I survived! And, despite his rotten disposition, I just loved that cat.

The week we were set to move back to the US, a worried neighbor knocked at our door, asking if we owned "that large back & white smooth." My mother said, "Yes. What's he done now?" "Well, I'm afraid, been run down by a lorry. He's in our front garden," said she. Cheer up. He didn't die from his injuries, which were extensive: a broken hind leg, a broken jaw, and a gash in his side. In fact, he became [marginally] sweeter. Because he chewed off his plaster cast on the voyage home, his leg fused in a straight-out position; but that did not affect his agility or speed. When we got to our new duty station, we were [unexpectedly, but joyously] reunited with our beloved dog Alfred, and were also given a gray & white cat [whose markings were identical to Ying Tong's]. That cat had 7 kittens [none of which was going to St. Ives], all of whom learned to sit with one hind leg extended, in apparent emulation of "Uncle Ying Tong," who lived to the age of 18.

So, my answer to Maurice Sendak's question is: Children survive by consorting with fierce creatures [both human and 4-legged; both inside themselves and Out There]. To make the wolf [or a vicious cat] your friend is sometimes the key to making it into adulthood, against all odds.

Timber Wolf

2009-10-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

Before we consider the genius of Maurice Sendak [in the next post], let's hear it for the amygdala [which I am usually offering readers tips on subduing, or at least bending to their will]. If you look up "timber wolf," you will see a photo of a black wolf, who looks quite like Lili [except Lili's ears are bigger and shaggier, like an over-the-top stage version of the wolf in a melodrama]. Since she is my totem to represent the amygdala [and I am feeling particularly grateful to her, for alerting me to falling branches in the woods, this rainy season], I shall henceforth regard her as my "Timber! wolf": a niche-market service dog who warns its owner of a very specific [hopefully, rare] hazard, thereby inspiring confidence during woodland walks.

Speaking of (actual) service dogs, this week's New Yorker has an article entitled "Man's Best Friend: Scratch and Sniff," describing the ability of several dogs in the K-9 Unit of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, to detect the presence of contraband cell phones in prisons, by "scent." It's a heartwarming article [unless you are incarcerated in New Jersey, Virginia, or Maryland], but here is my favorite bit. I shall quote, as the article does, K-9 Officer Mitchell: "All our dogs right now are German shepherds or Labs. We did try one golden retriever, but we had to fail him out. That dog was too easy going. He'd come into a room on a search and just lay down. We sent him back to the Seeing Eye dog center in Morristown, where all our cell-phone dogs came from. That golden was a lover, not a fighter."

So, what breed of dog are you? What is the default setting, in your amygdala? Do you tend to "bark" at the first whiff of threat? Do you, instead, high-tail it outta there? Or do you go into the deer-in-the-headlights freeze? And, anyway, which limbic response do we think that golden was displaying, lolling around on the cellblock floor? Is that the laid-back form of freezing? [Gives "Chill out" a whole new meaning.] To use an Australian animal metaphor, in the choice of a K-9 partner to sniff out the dodgy stuff, it's a matter of "horses for courses." [By which a racecourse punter in Oz means to say, if the bobtail nag is a good mudder, and the track is listed as "sloppy" that day, bet your money on her; but if the track is listed as "fast," bet on the bay. No worries, mate.] So, if a dog is limbically wired to bark at a perceived threat, it is a better bet for contraband detection, than one wired to run away or freeze [or loll, even].

In fact, all dogs [and horses, and people] are capable of all 3 limbic responses. It's just that one response is more typical or characteristic of any given individual. Here is where I invoke our acting school aphorism: "Know your type, and love your type." I love Lili for her vigilance [even if she issues many false alarms in the course of a day]; and I know that my limbic wiring is closer to hers, than to the 2 hippy-dippy golden retrievers next door. My goal is not to "change breeds," but to become the best German shepherd [or even Timber wolf] I can, by lowering my incidence of false alarms.

Lumbered

2009-10-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

In 1961 our family [and just about everyone else in the UK] went to see Anthony Newley's WestEnd musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which was thrillingly cynical [especially to us Young Ones], about what is euphemized in the US as "a shotgun wedding." Newley wrote & sang the phrase, "I've been lumbered." It sounded like another example of Cockney slang [the meaning evident from the context]; but it's actually ever so old, dating from the 1500s in England, and the 1300s in Continental Europe. It refers to an Italian ethnic group, the Lombardi, who were pawn-brokers and money-lenders. Lombard Street in London was so named for its plethora of pawnshops. [Incidentally, did you know, "Pop goes the weasel" is a euphemism for pawning a fur garment?] The Oxford Concise Dictionary (1911 ed.) defines "to be lumbered" as "to be burdened with something unpleasant" [which pawn-brokers were: namely, the "popped" weasels, used furniture, and other old tat that their clients had exchanged, for enough money to buy more rice & treacle]. Nar'mean?

Last week's exploration of Guthrie's One-Trial Learning theory was prompted by an event in the forest, during Lili's & my morning walk. It had been raining for days, and then it got windy. The beaten path was like a waterslide in the downhill parts, to avoid which, I was detouring right through the trees, for better footing. As I came to the next downhill bit, I heard a tremendous crack, like the detonation of a shotgun, directly in front of me. First, I froze. Then I looked behind me, to see if a deer had been shot [since I, happily, had not]. Then I looked directly ahead, to see if I could spot a hunter and tell him to cease fire. Lili, meanwhile, looked straight up. Following her gaze, I saw a huge branch break off a tree, and fall right on the spot where I had planned to walk. Amazingly, I did not utter my trademark Hitchcock-victim scream, but just calmly followed Lili [my Pack Leader pro tem] along the slippery path, away from the newly fallen lumber.

We used to think Lili was silly, to look up warily at every looming object she passed [such as playing field lampposts, the water tower, and even our ceiling fan, when it first turns on or off]. Now I get her point. I was looking everywhere but up, in the woods; and without Lili's vigilance I would have been well and truly lumbered.

Then I wondered if the next day I would shy away from that specific part of the woods, or if I would be more amygdally aroused in general, especially by any "gunshot" noises. In fact, I was able to cognitively reframe the falling branch as "a lucky escape," rather than a "trauma"; and we have had remarkably serene walks. Today was the first time my husband has been able to come with us in two weeks, and it had been bucketing rain last night, so I remarked, "I hope all the branches have done their falling, by the time we pass through." Several 100 yards past the site of last week's fallen branch, he pointed to an 8-inch-in-diameter, newly fallen tree, lying directly across our path, and said, "Well, there you go." [It's not the one pictured here. No camera today.] Lili glanced up warily at an adjacent, precariously-balanced tree, decided it posed no immediate hazard, and jumped over the fallen lumber.

So, even without a tailor-made X-Box game [Timber!], I have been able to do my own limbic debriefing, and avoid being lumbered with a fear habit about our beloved walks on the wild side. In the thick of the forest, I will trust Lili's big ears and big eyes, to warn me of impending danger from above. Still, I will be the judge of whether the people and animals we encounter on the ground are friends or foes.

Meanwhile, since last week, I have not flinched once while riding shotgun with my husband. See, we can learn to tame our Wild Things [aka howling limbic wolves], of which, more next time.

Virtual Backgammon

2009-10-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, I admit it. I am a Luddite, but not a Troglodyte. Until last Sunday I regarded computer games [especially the one which spends electricity, merely to spare the player the Therbligs it would take to shuffle and lay out an actual deck of cards] as a waste of time and resources. Not any more.

I direct your attention to a BBC on-line [see, I do use my MacBook for more than word processing] article, posted on 18 Oct 09: Virtual Reality Tackles "Shell Shock." In it, the Beeb's medical correspondent, Fergus Walsh, describes the successful treatment of 30 [out of a group of 40] US military personnel diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, following several tours of duty in Iraq. Alas, the 30 who responded well to the treatment were thereafter sent back to Iraq, or on to Afghanistan. But I digress...

The [non-radioactive, non-pharmaceutical] treatment was developed by Albert Rizzo, of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, and is based on the X-Box game, Full Spectrum Warrior. We'll get to the [literally] whiz-bang features of the current treatment soon, but first, back to Vienna.

If you recall my original "Backgammon" post, Freud used that game metaphor to describe the capture and imprisonment of one's "soldiers" at the scene(s) of particularly harrowing "battles" in the course of one's life. Lose too many troops [which he conceptualized as psychic energy], and you become unable to "soldier on." His therapeutic model encouraged the traumatized individual to revisit the distressing events, recalling them in as much detail as s/he could manage, with the goal of "liberating the hostage soldiers" [regaining psychic energy]. In the actual game of backgammon, one has to throw a specific dice score, to move a "soldier" off the bar, and allow him to complete his journey home to safety ["bearing off"]. Why did this psychotherapeutic treatment take so long [or not work at all]? Resistance. Having survived [sometimes, just barely] a traumatic event, who would want to "go there" again? The Jack Nicholson censor in the mind tells the would-be recollector of a trauma, "You can't handle the truth! I'm not going to let you remember what really happened back there."

Let's use the wolf [up-your-nose] model to explain the same thing. By definition, the traumatic event was frightening. If a major injury was sustained, there was pain & suffering. Often, the trauma involved the sudden intrusion of hostile individuals or their devices of destruction. Less obviously, but saliently, there may have been humiliating circumstances [such as a momentary loss of nerve, or loss of continence]. When the amygdala is thus aroused, the hippocampus is deprived of blood. Therefore, the brain's most direct information-processing site is "off-line" during the traumatic event. Victims of violent crime are notoriously bad at picking their assailant out of a line-up. Back in college, I was a very weak witness during my deposition for my roommate's totalled car lawsuit: unable to remember the make of the car that hit us, or even the make of the car we were in! [Luckily, the guy settled out of court, just as our case was called.]

Guthrie's One-Trial Learning model is also relevant here. The complex stimuli of a traumatic event [the cue] may be followed by an evasive movement [as is my case], or by an aggressive movement, or by a catatonic freeze. When I was a VA Psychology Trainee in 1973, working with veterans "fresh out of the jungle" [of Vietnam], the most commonly cued movement in our clientele was aggression. Assaulting a stranger who accidentally brushed up against you from behind would get you arrested in a New York minute, back in the day. The best explanation the assailant could offer the judge was the non-specific, "All-of-a-sudden, I was back in Nam." [Just like, all-of-a-sudden, in that shotgun seat, I am back in Durham.]

In 1999, Rothbaum et al. modified an X-Box wargame to treat a 50-year-old Vietnam vet, who had been suffering flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms since that war. Their hope was that Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy would overcome the patient's resistance [or limbically-induced amnesia], allowing him to re-experience, in a safe and controlled setting, the traumatic events that had held him hostage for 3 decades. Once the memories were recovered, the conventional therapeutic work of processing the information and assisting the patient to "handle the truth" could begin.

As the lead clinician in the current San Diego study says, "Our different senses are very powerful cues to our memory." Therefore, as well as tailoring the sights and sounds to re-enact the individual soldier's traumatic event(s), the Virtual Reality program adds realistic motion [such as vibrations and sudden impacts] and smells: burning rubber, cordite, garbage, smoke, diesel fuel, Iraqui spices and what is euphemized as "body odor" [but was more likely ordure]. The subject's heart rate and galvanic skin response [both measures of anxiety] are constantly monitored during the 30-minute VR sessions, to "keep it real," but not so real that the original [fight/flight/freeze] movement is triggered. Then an hour of debriefing and talk-therapy ensues. The entire treatment consists of only 4 once-weekly sessions.

Just think of all the Therbligs such a treatment method could save the government! More importantly, just think of all the "hostage soldiers" it could "liberate" from their traumatic war experiences.

One-Trial Learning

2009-10-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

The American philosopher-turned-behavioral-psychologist, Elwin R. Guthrie (1886-1959), challenged other Behaviorists of his time, by declaring: "A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement." BFD? You're missing the "heaviosity" of his premise. Unlike Pavlov [Big Daddy of Classical Conditioning] or Skinner [BD of Operant Conditioning], Guthrie was the BD of Associative Learning. No reward need be given, said he, for a movement to become "cued" by a stimulus. Forget the all the use of High-Value-Treats to reward the desired response, advocated by dog trainers, or the symbolic reward, the clicker [which betokens to the dog that a treat has been earned, redeemable at a later time]. According to Guthrie, it only takes one coincidence of stimulus and movement, for the two things to become forever paired. Boom! Done! [Pavlov's dogs had to have many pairings of sub-lingual meat powder with a bell, before the bell alone elicited drooling.]

To the extent that Guthrie's theory is true, it is not altogether good news. In college I was riding shotgun in my roommate's car, when a motorist failed to observe the Stop sign at an intersection, and plowed into the side of the car. Having caught a glimpse of his not-slowing-down car in my peripheral vision [the cue], I crouched into the fetal position recommended for airplane crashes [the movement]. Nevermind that my addled hippocampus had applied the wrong transport safety tip [and I consequently suffered gory-looking but superficial facial abrasions that I would have avoided, had I remained sitting upright]. To this day, 4 decades later, when a I see a car approaching an intersection "too fast to stop," I have to fight the reflex to cringe. It doesn't happen when I am driving, mind you, just when I am riding shotgun; but this One-Trial Habit [as Guthrie called it] annoys the hell out of whoever is driving "Miss Crazy."

Let's do the wolf-work. It is humiliating to them, that I appear not to trust their driving skills. Further, my sudden movement is both intrusive (sometimes blocking their view of the other car) and frightening (since it betokens a "clear & present danger," rather than a remembered danger from long ago).

Guthrie's own recommendation, to diminish the power of a problematic cue/movement connection, was called Sidetracking. One must endeavor to discover the initial cue, and then deliberately associate a different [incompatible] movement with it. Alrighty, then. What's incompatible with cringing? Why, sitting upright (as I should have done in the first instance), with my forearms resting on my thighs (rather than covering my face). Unfortunately, whenever I abruptly assume this crash-test-dummy position, it is almost as alarming [therefore, annoying] as the cringe. At least it doesn't obstruct the driver's view. In recent years, I've taken to wearing sunglasses while being driven [avoiding harmful UV rays, you know], behind whose dark lenses I close my eyes when a car rushes up to the Stop sign. I also contrive to sit in the back seat whenever possible, where I am blissfully oblivious to the threat of reckless drivers. I am unflappable in taxis, even in Manhattan.

Not all instances of One-Trial habit formation are as trivial as my intersection cringe, however. The cue/movement nexus might account for the intractability of various substance addictions. Today's New York Times has an article speculating that Adam Goldstein [aka DJ AM], may have relapsed into drug abuse because of filming a documentary in which a young woman injected herself with heroin. An individual's first use of an addictive substance is likely to occur in the presence of others who are using the substance. According to Guthrie's model, the cue [of others shooting/lighting/drinking up] will be forever associated with the movements one made, in connection with the first use of that substance.

Nor need the cue be visual. Even in 1960s Britain, the sound of an air-raid siren sent survivors of the Blitz diving for cover under a table or bed. The whiff of that certain food you ate just before you got sick can, years later, activate your gag reflex. The song you were listening to when that false love in high school broke up with you can still make you cry, a lifetime later.

Yesterday, while making his weekend rounds at two DC hospitals, my husband discovered that his car had [at least temporarily] "died," and he came home in a rental car. Lili, who was awaiting the return of her beloved master, saw the intrusion of a strange white vehicle in the driveway [the cue], which set up a barrage of histrionic barkitude [the movement]. Even when her master emerged from the rental car, she could not stop herself from barking at it. Just now, his arrival in the cue vehicle again sent her into a reflexive barkfest, despite my commands to her to assume a position [presumably] incompatible with barking ["Foo-say!" Lie down!]. When the UPS truck cues Lili to bark, she has learned the incompatible movement of sending herself down to the basement [where she can't see the offending vehicle]; but apparently this weekend's "combination of stimuli" [strange car, beloved master] presents a more difficult cue to Sidetrack.

It was Guthrie's contention that "excitement facilitates associative learning," making the cue/movement connection even stronger. Lili is very excited whenever her master comes home.

To be continued.

What are you laughing at?

2009-10-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Tell you what Arthur Koestler thought. In 1964 he wrote a tome on the subject, The Act of Creation, the burden of whose 751 pages, is that all humor, scientific discoveries, and works of art occur when two worlds collide. He put it rather more ponderously, "when two matrices bisociate." By this he meant, when two frames of reference [each with its own rules of logic] are unexpectedly juxtaposed. Abstract and boring enough for ya, so far?

Consider this visual joke: Penny the Cucamonga cat is "wearing" a [photo-shopped] party hat, looking anything-but-in-a-party-mood, being held by my daughter [most of whose festive facial expression I have discreetly cropped away, to preserve her privacy]. Koestler would say that there are at least two matrices bisociating here. Penny, a cat, is impersonating a human "party animal," which is also a pun; and the obvious photo-shopping of the party hat is my daughter's mockery of the shoddy paparazzi "photo-journalism" ubiquitous in LA, where this picture was taken. Not unlike those ancient philosophers, Koestler believed that in all humor there is an element of defensive-aggression, against the butt of the joke. In this case, the joke is metaphorically on Penny [since we know how much pets detest wearing silly human costumes for gag photos]; but it's actually on the paparazzi. Geddit?

Let's go back to my fave joke, introduced in the "Funny Bone" post. "Horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, 'Why the long face?'" One matrix is the well-worn, formulaic [mostly New York-based] genre of "guy-walks-into-a-bar-bartender-says-why-the-long-face?" joke. This collides with a more obscure joke tradition [mostly in Ireland & the UK], of placing horses in unusual settings. Back in the day, there was a series of print ads for whiskey, using the slogan, "You can take a White Horse anywhere." Near the beginning of the cult Irish flick, Into the West, a [white] horse is taken by lift up to the top floor of a council housing flat in Dublin, and the human passengers on the lift don't bat an eye. [A nod to the whiskey slogan.] That gets the horse into the bar, in my fave joke. The second matrix is a pun: a play on the words, "long face."

But where's the element of defensive-aggression in this oh-so-sophisticated joke? The butt of the joke is the genre of joke, itself. It is what Jon Stewart would call a meta-joke. It is a joke about a type of joke. Probably, it resonates most with those of us who have tried to "be funny," for a living [or for a grade in acting school].

Those of you who remember Jakobsen's six Speech Functions will be raising your hands and "chirping" [@ 50 KHz], "Oooh! Oooh! This is Poetic Speech we're talking about! Designed to Tell the Ugly Truth without Suffering the Ugly Consequences." That is exactly what we are talking about. The teller of the joke [little David] gets to poke fun at big, bad Goliath; and the laughers at the joke get to expend their adrenaline in a non-combative manner. If they laugh until they cry, they even get to purge themselves of some cortisol. Goliath is mocked, but everybody survives. That's what Koestler thought; and his most enduring book is Darkness at Noon, a repudiation of the "Goliath" of Communism, with whom he had previously cast his lot in the 1930s.

Now, back to Jaak's laughing rats and tickling. [I'll leave the cocaine commentary to the Wallabies among you.] Koestler believed that what rats [and little children] find laughable about tickling is that it is a mock attack. It's funny because they know they are not really in danger of pain & suffering. The tickler is only impersonating an attacker. If actual pain results, or even the fear of pain, it's no laughing matter. In fact, Jaak found, if even one cat hair [a signifier of threat from a predator] is in the room where a rat is being tickled, the rat will not "chirp" [@ 50 KHz]; it will bum [@ 22 KHz].

The rough-and-tumble play of all baby mammals produces "chirps" of glee. In developmental psychology, this epitomizes the concept, "This is only pretend." Sigmund's daughter, Anna Freud [she of the German Shepherd "Wolf"], called this Regression in the Service of the Ego one of the most important defenses older humans can use, as a respite from the real [not mock] threats in their lives. When we laugh at Jon Stewart poking fun at Kim Jong Il, we are pretending that the threat that little martinet poses to the world is "only pretend." For that little moment, we are regressing to a childlike belief that Kim is just a joke [and giving our overtaxed limbic system a rest].

So, go ahead and laugh it up, folks. Feels great, doesn't it?

"It would have made a cat laugh..."

2009-10-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

"or a dog; I'm bid to crave an audience for a frog!" This first citation of a common British idiom [meaning, "so ridiculous, it would coax a laugh out of an improbable source"], is from The Queen of the Frogs, the last of 176 plays written by James Robinson Planche, in 1879. Besides turning French fairy tales into satirical comedies for the London stage, he was the father of the English costume drama. [Helpful for 19th Century "Kangaroos," don't you know.]

Now, back to what makes a rat laugh [according to Jaak Panksepp and his merry pranksters]. Before I tell you what, I'll tell you how he knows [that a rat is laughing]. He uses the Mini-3 Bat Detector [made by the Ultra Sound Advice company, of London]. Cue the Pied Piper, in historically accurate costume. I'm not making this up. Laughing rats [also cats, dogs, primates, and human children] emit ultrasonic vocalization patterns (USVs) at the frequency of 50 KHz, which Jaak calls "chirping." [This is in contrast to "long-distress" USVs @ 22 KHz, which express negative emotions, such as fear, "social defeat," or anticipation of pain & suffering.] So, how do you make a rat laugh? Tickle him [or let him self-administer cocaine]. Seriously. And how do you bum a rat out? Mix cat fur into his cage bedding [or take away his blow]. Whom shall we call first: the Nobel prize committee, or PETA?

While you're pondering that, you should know that these rats have no personal experience of cats as predators; but even one cat hair in their cage freaks 'em out. Panksepp opines that lab researchers who own cats skew rat-study data all the time, due to this overlooked fear factor on their clothing or person.

But we humans have more degrees of freedom than lab rats, many of us. What other stimuli (besides tickling & coke) might make us laugh? The ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, thought they had the definitive answer: a feeling of superiority. According to this cynical lot, all human hilarity arises from Schadenfreude: delight at another's humiliation. Hmm. Maybe for grown-ups. Not so much for human babies and other young mammals [who are suckers for the tickling]. Heroditus [484 - 425 BC], used historical vignettes to explain how tears of joy can so quickly turn into tears of sorrow. [How the USVs can drop from 50KHz to 22 KHz, in the blink of an eye.] He tells, for instance, of Xerxes, who is kvelling over his fleet at a regatta at Abydos, then suddenly becomes all verklempt; and when his uncle asks him,"Boychick! Was ist los?" Xerxes says, "In 100 years, all these people will be dead, and no one will know how powerful I am!" Solipsistic, much?

In 1979 psychologists Efram & Spangler posited that all tears [whether of sorrow or joy] occur during the recovery phase of limbic arousal. "All tears are tears of relief." Miss America cries because she was so afraid she would lose. Mourners cry [according to these guys] because they are so glad that the bells are not (pace John Donne) tolling for them.

Back to our putative laureate, Panksepp. He would assume that all tears [whatever the frequency of our USVs] contain cortisol: that the relief we are experiencing [whether we label ourselves "over-the-moon" or "down-in-the-dumps"] is, whatever else, neuro-chemical.

Personally, I'm saving up for a Mini-3 Bat Detector, to find out what makes a dog [like Lili] laugh. And meanwhile, I suggest we all take careful note of what makes us laugh and/or cry. I just know there are more triggers for mirth than tickling, blow & Schadenfreude. Tell you about some of them next time, yah?

Turn On the Waterworks

2009-10-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

What's the good of crying? [That's not a rhetorical question.] Sir Henry Maudsley (1859-1944), a neurologist and psychiatrist who took care of shell-shocked Australian soldiers during World War I, knew the answer: "Sorrows which find no vent in tears may soon make other organs weep."

Ancient Greek dramatists knew it, too, staging tragedies so shockingly blood-thirsty [remind you of a current genre?], that audiences were guaranteed to have a good, cathartic cry. Today on the Beeb [BBC radio 1, that is], as Trueblood makes its UK debut, a group of media mavens were asking each other, "What is this current fascination with vampires and such?" One pundit opined that "in times of economic distress, people need an outlet for their own misery and fear, so they give themselves a socially acceptable reason to weep and wail."

Cue the Possibly-Mad-Scientists. My personal fave is Jaak (not-a-typo) Panksepp [originally from Estonia], who coined the term "affective [pertaining to the emotions] neuroscience." He studies the vocalizations of animals, such as rats, and has found that they wail with distress and laugh with delight. [Today's post is no laughing matter. Later for that.] So, guess what familiar substance is found, in significantly elevated levels, in the saliva of wailing rats (inasmuch as they do not shed tears of sorrow)? CORTISOL. It's also found in the tears and saliva of crying humans, folks. Talk about catharsis!

So, when Lili makes that keening noise as she is sent [or, these days, sends herself] to the basement, for the misdemeanor of barking at the UPS guy, an analysis of her saliva would likely show a whole lot o' cortisol, which she cleverly lets "Duck" [her comfort stuffed animal] absorb, as she holds him in her mouth. In a few moments, she regains her composure and is back upstairs, happy as Larry [an Australian idiom, meaning "very happy"]. Very few of Maudsley's wartime patients were Happy as Larry, one gathers.

How lucky for Lili (and Jaak's rats, and human children), that society permits them this low-tech method of ridding the body of toxic cortisol. How unfortunate, that when grown-ups (especially men, or women in non-traditional jobs, such as the military) weep, they are humiliated with labels such as "weak," "manipulative," or "suffering from a Mood Disorder." Recent research purporting to demonstrate that weeping only makes men more distressed [especially studies using my least favorite research tool, the fMRI], have been critiqued as culturally-biased. The subject's (radio-active) brain is registering the anticipated, negative social consequences of crying, not a "hard-wired" neuro-chemical consequence. The brain of a male actor anticipating an Oscar nomination for his convincing on-screen crying [I hypothesize] would look very different in such a study, from his brother, the Marine Corps Drill Sergeant.

Which reminds me of a harrowing but invaluable class in our acting school, in which male & female students alike had to produce real tears on cue, for a grade. In keeping with the school's Method Acting approach, no artificial means of lacrimation [such as onion juice on one's fingertips, or a tack in one's shoe] were permitted. The actor must Prepare: conjure up a powerful, tear-jerking memory, and use it as the spigot, to Turn On the Waterworks. Just imagine the endorphin hit which follows the [male or female] acting student's right-on-cue crying jag. Talk about tears of joy!

Which we will, in the next post.

"Nana Window"

2009-10-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the cover story in this week's NYTimes magazine, which I knew would get my amygdala aroused [and it did]. It's about people whose amygdala gets aroused "too easily." Oh, yeah? Says who? Jerome Kagan has been doing a longitudinal [Bad Fairy at the Christening] study at Harvard, starting with babies in 1989, whom he identified as either highly reactive [to novel stimuli], somewhere in the middle, or "low-reactive." I'm going to let anyone interested look up the article; and instead I shall cut right to the chase. "Mary" was one of his "high-reactive" subjects, and he predicted that she would grow up to be a worrier. And, lo, she did. She's worrying her way through Harvard as I write this. To which I respond, "Oh, come on! If that's ''bad outcome,' whaddaya call 'good outcome,' Jerry?"

Many pages into this up-till-then uncritical review of Kagan's findings, the NYTimes author cites a researcher with a quibble: Dr. Robert Plomin of King's College, London, wonders if, perhaps, subjecting these kids to the daunting fMRI, itself, might not account for much of their amygdalar arousal. Nar'mean?

Towards the end of the article, other dissenting voices are quoted, wondering why all of the "high-reactives" haven't developed clinically significant anxiety [as predicted by Dr. Kagan]. Turns out some of the subjects are schmizing themselves into interpreting their racing pulses and dilated pupils as "being jazzed," which they describe as "vaguely exhilarating or exciting." Others [T.S. Eliot is mentioned] somehow manage to channel their amygdalar arousal into creating works of art [for the amusement & edification of the more laid-back among you, apparently]. Yet, the Bad Fairy gets the final word: "In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold."

If that weren't such an obvious load of old cobblers, I [the Exemplar of "High-Reactive" infants] would find it humiliating. Anyway, for those of you who would like a low-tech coping strategy to deal with anxiety, go to YouTube and look up "Nana Window." On 23 April 2009 [St. George's Day in England], the usual gang on the Chris Moyles [BBC Radio 1] show were joking around with Carrie, who had said, "My Nan always puts one in her window on St. George's day." [Her grandmother displays the Cross of St. George flag, which is England's (red-cross-on-a-white-field) part of the United Kingdom's "Union Jack."] Chris & Comedy Dave chose to find a double-entendre in her innocent remark, and immediately improvised a Reggae song with the following lyric: "Nana Nana window. Nana window." If you can't find it on YouTube and still want to sing it, it's all on one note, except for the "dow," which is a 5th higher. Commence singing at the first sign of anxiety and repeat until you feel better.

In scientific point of fact, singing almost any song will reduce most anxiety symptoms, for the following reasons. Singing regulates breathing [thereby countering hyperventilation]. The sillier the lyric, the more likely you are to laugh [thereby relieving muscle tension]. The louder you sing, the more adrenaline you expend [thereby restoring homeostasis to your body]. Cognitively, you are likely to distract yourself from the alarming stimulus for long enough to get some perspective on it. [Is the irritant really awful or just...you know the mantra by now.]

The lyric "Nana Window" is the latest in the long and worthy tradition of non-lexical vocables [such as "Hey nonny nonny" from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and more recently, "Ob-la-di-ob-la-da" from the Beatles' White Album], which multitask, by fulfilling [at least] two Speech Functions. They are Phatic [imparting no factual information, just keeping the listener listening] and/or Poetic [since they may, indeed, be a secret code for something else[such as "Carrie's Nan is displaying something in her window."]; and they often are also Emotive [expressing a particular feeling]. ["Hey nonny nonny," according to Shakespeare scholars, expresses dismay.]

Here is Lili, displaying herself in the window, while keeping [hypervigilant?] watch for intrusions. The other day, I was upstairs brushing my teeth, when I heard [evidence of] her aroused amygdala: barking. I planned to go down and assert my Pack Leader status over her, by telling her to "Yaka mashie. Asoko." ["Be quiet. Go down to your room in the basement until you can compose yourself."] But before I could even rinse my mouth out, there was silence. I discovered that Lili had piped down and taken herself downstairs, all on her own. Now, that's what I'm talkin' about! So, okay, our amygdala gets aroused easily; but we humans, too, can learn to tell it to "Yaka mashie. Asoko," [perhaps by singing the "Nana Window" song], and thus stand ourselves down from our many alarums.

Too "Wired" to Sleep?

2009-09-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

Whereas yesterday's post dealt with getting back to sleep in the middle of the night, today's topic is Getting to Sleep in the First Place. Brace yourselves. I am going to fly in the face of New Age holistic medicine here, and share the wisdom gleaned from years of Continuing Education seminars presented by molecular biologists. As they say in the UK, I'm going to "blind you with science." [That's not what happened to Lili. She's posing as an insomniac.]

First, of course, we need an animal metaphor. Let's go with twin ferrets. These well-meaning creatures inhabit our Autonomic Nervous System [a kind of auto-pilot, formerly believed to be unconscious and involuntary, which regulates stuff like heart rate, breathing, and speed of digestion]. One ferret, with the clunky name of Parasympathetic, just wants us to chillax, already, so he uses that ever-so-trendy neurotransmitter, serotonin, to slow down the beating of our heart. His [please don't think of him as evil] twin, Sympathetic, is there to prevent us from flat-lining, and uses the much-maligned norepinephrine to jolt our heart back up to a life-sustaining rate [like a furry little pacemaker]. Though seeming to work at cross-purposes, they both want the same thing: homeostasis. Like Goldielocks, they want the rate of everything in the body to be Just Right.

So, now, have you ever noticed that on the nights when you are utterly shattered, whacked, whipped to the bone, and you figure it should be easy to fall asleep, what happens instead is a series of short dreams, in which you are falling, and from which you jerk awake, often with an audible gasp? Yeah, that's the Twin Ferrets, just trying to keep you alive, man. "Paras" knows you need the rest, so he slows your heart rate way down [whence, the falling sensation]. Then "Sym" wigs out, for fear that your heart will stop altogether, and zaps you "back to life." [The jerk.] [That's what your body does. I'm not dissing "Sym," here.] Eventually, these guys find a homeostatic heart rate and let you go to sleep; but the more fatigued you are, the more jactitation [jerking awake] you have to go through, to get there.

Back to Sleep Hygiene for a moment. Sleep is more easily initiated when the body's core temperature is warm, but the room temperature is cool. One traditional way to warm your core is a hot bath; but who, other than little kids, has time for that at night? An even older strategy is a warming beverage. But which one? The traditional "nightcap" of high-proof alcohol doesn't actually warm your body's core [only the cockles of your heart], unless you go to the trouble of heating the liquid, itself, in which case, as long as you're in the kitchen anyway, you might as well make the gold standard of soporific drinks, beloved by Europeans since the Explorers brought the main ingredient back from the New World: a cup of hot chocolate.

"No way!" I hear you object. "Chocolate has caffeine in it! That'll just keep me up!" Obviously, you are only thinking about the agenda of "Paras." "Sym" has a horse in this race, too, ya know. Here's what the molecular biologists say. The milk and sugar contain tryptophan, which turns into serotonin [the sleepytime molecule] in the body, thus satisfying "Paras." Also, the heat of the drink warms your core. But here's the Beauty Part! The small amount of caffeine in the chocolate speeds up the heart just enough to mollify "Sym," who can then hold off on delivering that jolting dose of norepinephrine.

Frequently Asked Questions: "How 'bout sugarfree cocoa mix?" That works, but add more milk, as your source of tryptophan. "How 'bout a glass of cold Nesquik?" Did you miss the part about warming the core? Now you'll need to take a bath, just like a kid. "What if I can't stand/am allergic to chocolate?" You can try a cuppa [hot tea with milk], but don't try coffee, unless you make it weak and add lots of milk.

Final observation: Europeans consume far fewer pharmaceutical sleep-aids [per capita] than we do in the US; and they manage to get through their days & nights fairly well, non? There is a British watchdog of correct English usage who deplores the current fad of prefacing remarks with, "At the end of the day..." She declares, "The only correct use of that phrase is, 'At the end of the day I drink a cup of hot chocolate.'" Nar'mean?

The Sandman Cometh

2009-09-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Here is Solipsistic Seamus Sleeping Supine on a Chicago Sofa. [Say that 3 times, fast.] The topic is Getting Enough Shuteye (without further enriching the fat cats @ Big Pharma). He is your role model, not I. My expertise on this subject comes as much from personal experience, as from all the Sleep Hygiene lectures & literature I have absorbed over the decades, since I inherited the tendency for insomnia from the gent who also brought me Non-linear Thinking: my father.

Thus, I know that "better lifestyle choices," while helpful, are not the complete solution. Unlike my father [for large parts of his life], I neither drink distilled spirits, nor smoke tobacco--both of which interfere with the brain's natural circadian rhythm. Where I can control my nighttime environment [at home, not in hotels], I go for dark, cool & quiet. If quiet isn't an option, I go for white noise [like a fan]. After you live in a big city for awhile, though, you become so used to the soundtrack of "the lullaby of Broadway" [emergency vehicle sirens, mostly], that it becomes the white noise; whereas those suburban or rural crickets make an infernal, sleep disturbing, racket. My family moved to Tarrytown, NY in 1953, just as the Tappan Zee Bridge was being built; and our white noise was the bang-bang-bang of steam pile drivers. On the rare days when work was suspended, "the silence was deafening," and nobody could get to sleep.

But now for a little myth-busting. Contrary to what sleep-aid vendors would have you believe, mankind was not meant to sleep "8 uninterrupted hours." There is meant to be a brief intermission in the middle of the night, for a bit of a walkabout: to do the needful (see to the children, visit the loo, stoke the fire, ward off ravening beasts). It is not so much this interval, but the sleeper's negative response to it, that leads to most of the inconvenient [not awful] amygdalar arousal [known in the Sleep Hygiene biz as Subjective Insomnia]. We got fear: "Oh no! I'll never be able to get back to sleep, and I'll be useless tomorrow!" [Notice that this line of thinking occurs most often on a week night?] We got intrusion: "Gordon Bennet! Your snoring/that commotion in the street/my hypervigilant-not-to-say-paranoid dog just woke me up from a sound sleep!" [But your own alarm clock? Not always...] And we got the pain & suffering of just lying there [or prowling around in the dark, stubbing your toe, or worse], feeling all alone [even in a crowded house], and trying not to dwell on Dark Thoughts.

Well, here's what I do about the Dark Thoughts. I have someone read me a bedtime story. Low-fidelity cassette tape players cost about $20 tops these days; and the public library is full of Books on Tape. I try to choose a narrator whose voice is pleasant, and a story that is distracting enough to derail my train of Dark Thoughts [but not so riveting that it keeps me up nights, ya know?]. I made a big mistake with a this week's selection: the late Frank McCourt reading his own last book, Teacher Man. It's wonderful [yet triste] to hear his voice again, but it's too compelling; and I fought falling back to sleep [even though I knew I had the option of rewinding the tape in the morning and listening to it again in daylight]. This is rather ironic, since the main point of the book is McCourt's career-long quest to hold the interest of his public high school students. [Well, he got mine.] I got about 3 hours' sleep the night of Teacher Man; but, lo! I was still able to drive adequately, to scamper through the woods with Lili, to do hours of clinical paperwork, and [tra-la] to write this blog. [I loaded up a duller Book on Tape for the next night, though.]

More on sleep anon. Meanwhile, try out Seamus' new yoga position: Flaked-Out Ginger Cat.

"A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse."

2009-09-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

This old Cockney expression, first cited in 1794, means, "Do I have to spell out the obvious to you? You know what I mean." [Lately, contracted to the Phatic, "Nar'mean?"] Well, here is my corollary: "A diss is as bad as a threat to a young man."

Waratu Sato [& colleagues] of Kyoto University have made headlines this week with their research on 24 incarcerated juvenile delinquents, compared to 24 "control" subjects, whose average Verbal IQs were 28.4 points higher than their jailed brethren. [The Controls' mean Verbal IQs were in the High Average range, whereas the JDs' were in the Low Average range.] As the discussion portion of this breathlessly-hyped-in-the-media article points out, the IQ factor might account for all the difference between the two groups' performance on the task. Meanwhile, let us consider the task, itself. Each subject was shown a series of photographs of faces "portraying" one of 6 emotions, which they had to identify correctly. [Wait. Remember the dog-bark-translator, also from Japan, which categorized canine utterances into one of 6 emotions? Hmm...] Anyway, the headline was that the 24 JDs kept "misrecognizing" facial expressions of disgust for anger. So, incidentally, did the Control subjects, but 17.2% less often [which the researchers, themselves, acknowledge is "not a large difference"]. And their conclusion? "One of the underpinnings of delinquency might be impaired recognition of emotional facial expressions, with a specific bias toward interpreting disgusted expressions as hostile angry expressions." On the other hand, as has been empirically demonstrated for centuries, one of the underpinnings of delinquency might be lower verbal IQ. Nar'mean?

But this is not Sato & Co.'s first foray into studies involving distressingly Photo-Shopped facial expressions. As reported in NeuroImage in 2004, 5 females and 5 males [mean age 24.4 years] volunteered for a [non-diagnostic] fMRI study, comparing their amygdalar responses to facial expressions described as angry or neutral, sometimes facing head-on, and sometimes slightly averted. Guess what they found. Head-on angry faces aroused an amygdalar response [in both men & women], whereas averted angry faces did not. Nor did neutral faces, no matter which way they were pointed. And these subjects weren't even delinquents!

Apparently, even in Japan, researchers enjoy circling the lamppost, in order to discover that which is already known. Are you tellin' me, the culture which introduced the Western World to the notion of seppuku [aka, hara-kiri] as a rational response to "loss of face" [aka, receiving a look of disgust, or a diss] doesn't see the nexus between disgust and anger? Well, I do, and I'm Irish. Anyone who has ever read urban anthropology [or the newspapers] is aware that most youthful violence is triggered by one party giving the other party such a look [of disrespect], that honor demands a hostile response [usually towards the dissing party, but sometimes, turned inwards towards the dissed, himself, out of unbearable humiliation]. Nar'mean?

Street savvy youth [and their elders] learn to avoid inadvertently giving such facially expressed offense by taking a leaf out of the Viennese [Dissed] Clever Dog's book, and averting their gaze. Further, those of us using public transport in the wee hours, learn to "keep our eyes in the boat" and/or to monitor our facial subtext for inadvertent expressions of disgust, and to verbally override them, with such remarks as, "Yuck! I think I may have food poisoning! Oh, well. Worse things happen at sea, right?" The only threat such a remark poses to fellow travelers, is to their clothing, not to their self-worth. No diss, no hostilities. [Usually, not always.]

I was waiting on line at the clinic pharmacy today, where the TV had some inane talk show on, with a guest who may have been the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy; and the interviewer said to him, "What other people think of you is none of your business." Well, the studio audience applauded. [And so would I have, except that I was at the clinic pharmacy.] What a wonderfully powerful antidote to the infuriating toxin of humiliation! If someone gives you a look of disgust, it's none of your business. Avert your gaze and tell the wolf in your brain to pipe down, already. Nar'mean?

Attractive Nuisance Doctrine

2009-09-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

First let me make a cheap pun at Zanzibar's expense, and say that because he is usually purring at my elbow when I'm writing this blog, it is his fault that I don't catch all the typos before hitting "publish." Like typing "Packer Leader," when I meant, of course, "Pack Leader," in the previous post. "If only his eyes weren't so adorably blue..."

As those of you who have a swimming pool on your property know [and we learned, when we bought Dusk the QuarterHorse], an "Attractive Nuisance" is a term of art in tort law, referring to any animate or inanimate object which poses a threat, "because of its attraction, to children who will be unlikely to recognize its dangerous quality." [Webster's 1988 ed.] In Michigan [where tort lawyers abound] we had to buy Attractive Nuisance liability insurance on Dusk, even though she lived at a private riding stable, across town from our home. [In fact, she lived in Sterling Heights, whence cometh Marshall Mathers III. Check it.]

Now let us consider the External/Internal Locus of Control doctrine, which the UK researchers tried to measure in 10-year-olds, with a self-report questionnaire. A girl with a high level of External Locus of Control will tell her parents, "The horse whinnied at me, so I knew it was hungry, so I gave it my Ice Lolly to lick [remember, we're in the UK], and it bit my hand!" [In Michigan, that would be a Popcicle.] Was a sign posted on the stall door, saying "Do not feed this horse without owner's permission"? Not good enough. What if the child is too young to read? Tell you what the management at the London Zoo do. They post this surreal but high concept sign with a human hand, out of which a cookie-cutter-[or, biscuit-cutter]-shaped chunk is missing, near the cages of animals whom it is dangerous to feed. Next time I own a horse, I'm posting that sign on the stall door.

What if the horse spared the child, but ate the rod [in this case, the Ice Lolly/Popcicle stick]? Would the family of the young doner of the ill-advised confection be liable for the vet bill, to remove the wood splinters from the horse's throat? Not bloody likely! The horse would be diagnosed with "Dietary Indiscretion," and its owner would be charged for its treatment.

So, you see where I'm going with this, right? Up to a certain age, the law attributes External Locus of Control to young ones, and blames bad outcome on others [man & beast]. After that age, though, all bets are off. If, as a teenager, you schmize my horse into eating a dangerous stick [and I catch you at it], you're guilty of animal abuse. An adult caught feeding a zoo animal will be prosecuted [right after being discharged from the ER]. So, how is this shift from External to Internal Locus of Control supposed to happen? Passage of time? Trial and error? Fairy dust?

I happen to believe it happens by grown-up Pack Leaders [there!] keeping an eye on young ones, and issuing Conative commands to them [such as "Don't feed the animals, unless you ask first."], along with a Sound-Bite-on-Why-Not. ["Cuz I say so," does not count as a Sound-Bite-on-Why-Not, incidentally.] So, here's what I'm saying, grown-ups. Man up, and risk the humiliation of a hissy fit from the thwarted young person [or their doting parents], in the name of animal welfare, of child welfare, of public order. Think of these Sound-Bites-of-Why-Not as your own, award winning Public Service Announcements. The more novel and amusing [usually], the more effective they are.

The alternative is the intrusive mission creep of increasingly silly tort avoidance notices from which we now suffer, warning us that a cup of Hot Chocolate "might be hot." That raw eggs may contain salmonella. That roads may be slippery when wet.

Get working on those PSAs, folks.