Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for June, 2008

Becoming more child-like

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on June 4, 2008| 4 Comments »

I came across a great post entitled “Why it may be worth becoming more like a child” on the slow leadership blog. The main reasons to become more child-like laid out in this post were – being more imaginative, being encouraged to learn, forgiven for mistakes and becoming more creative. Carmine Coyote, the post’s author, asks what would work be like if people started to be a bit less adult? She argues it could be more exploratory, experimental, exciting and passionate. I like this post, and agree with it too. But let me tell you a little story, because this post fits in with one of those strange, synchronicity moments for me.

I regularly spend time in France. My French language skill isn’t great. I get by, understanding most of what I hear, but I’m not good at expressing myself in French. I love to read French however and I’m not too bad at that. I take my time and consult a dictionary when I need to. I never let a visit to France pass without a good browse in the bookshop. French language books are SO different from the English language ones I find in the UK. It’s really like a whole other world for me. Last month, as I browsed in one of my favourite bookshops, “Vents du Sud“, up past the market in Aix-en-Provence, I picked up an interesting-looking book, entitled “Donner un sens a l’existence” by Jean-Philippe Ravoux. I guess you could translate that as “Making sense of existence”, but “donner” means to give, so it’s more “Giving sense to existence”. I am convinced that one of the essential characteristics of human beings is that we are meaning-seeking/meaning-creating animals. A closer look revealed that this book is by an Aix-based philosophe and is an exposition of the work of Antoine Saint-Exupery – in particular, “Le Petit Prince” (The Little Prince) and “Citadelle” (Wisdom of the Sands). “Le Petit Prince” is THE top selling book in the world, second only to the Bible. I bought it, and I’ve been reading, underlining and annotating it since. I SO enjoyed it! I also decided it was time to refresh my memory of “Le Petit Prince” so re-read that too (first in French, then I bought myself a new English language copy and read that too, in case I didn’t understand anything in the French version). Well, I finished it during a train journey yesterday, and I’ve already gone back to the beginning to re-read the parts I’ve marked up for myself. I’m intending to write a few posts about the main themes over the coming days. But here’s the connection and the strange part –

The main theme of Le Petit Prince is how child-like innocence and wonder can challenge the adult view of reality. The little prince questions everything. He doesn’t just take things for granted. Ravoux claims that Saint-Exupery based this attitude on Descartes‘ “Discours de la Methode” (but more of that in another post!) Through his wonder and questioning, the little prince challenges our rather unthinking ways of living, our attitudes to power, money, belief and so on, and this questioning makes us “wake up” (become heroes not zombies?)

My head is full of these thoughts just now, so what a surprise to stumble this very day upon a post about becoming child-like!

What an amazing and curious world we live in! I love how it continually surprises me!

Read Full Post »

The end of May moment

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on June 3, 2008| 4 Comments »

the moment of the setting sun

This is the moment, the present moment, that time we call sunset, and as the sun sinks behind the mountains, it throws up a final farewell flare. I’ve never seen it do that before. Not behind these particular hills. The unexpected, the unpredicted, how it jumps up and grabs our attention, demands we pull ourselves right out of the dreams and worries about the future, right out of the memories and reveries of the past, and just for this brief moment, we are reminded that the present is sliding past our eyes, so maybe, just maybe, it would be good to open them.

Read Full Post »

Figuring out how your brain handles the meanings of words

Posted in neuroscience, perception, psychology on June 2, 2008| 8 Comments »

fMRI is definitely the “in” tool in neuroscience. It allows a scientist to see what areas of the brain light up while a person is doing something. A study I recently came across is using this technique to work out how the brain deals with words. More specifically they are mapping the areas of the brain that light up when someone here’s a word associated with a “concrete noun” – a noun related to something experienced with one of the five senses.

Hmm, not quite sure how interesting that is, but then I read this –

“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” he said. “So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”

This is SUCH an important point in understanding how human beings function. Our nervous systems involve a whole network involved in sensing stimuli from the environment and a whole network involved in carrying out actions. These two networks are intensely and complexly (is there such a word?) linked up to each other. At a simple level, that implies we sense things then we act in response. In fact, it’s more complicated. Some neuroscientists and philosophers have suggested that sensing and acting are actually two aspects of the exact same thing – that sensing is a kind of an act. That seems right at some level, but it’s also quite challenging. This particular insight from these researchers makes that idea a little clearer I think. We can see that the brain actually represents what it perceives by using the areas that are involved in carrying out the actions normally associated with the object being perceived. In other words, perception and understanding are fundamentally entangled with acting.

Read Full Post »

It’s good to talk……except sometimes it’s not!

Posted in from the consulting room, health, psychology on June 2, 2008| 12 Comments »

I find that people are all very different. One of my core values as a doctor is that there are no one-size-fits-all medicines or approaches. Because people are different, the ways in which they get better differ, and the treatments which work best for them are different. That’s why I have concerns about the more extreme “evidence based medicine” fanatics, who see only two classes of treatment – “proven” and “unproven” (as if you can be sure what’s going to work for an individual before you’ve even met them)

One of the significant differences I see between people is that some really need to talk. They want to talk, and encouraging them to talk about their traumatic experiences is a way of enabling them to cope and to improve. Others, however, are quite unlike that. Some, even if encouraged, really do not want to talk about past traumas. I think it’s important to understand these differences between people and to offer them the kind of help which is best for them.

Psychologists have studied the particular issue of talking about trauma post 9/11. Their work was reported today on the BBC news site. What I found very interesting was their discovery that contrary to popular opinion that it’s always better to talk about such things, they found a significant number of the people who did well after that event, had chosen not to talk about their feelings at that time.

So, it appears, it’s good talk……..sometimes, and for some people, but don’t apply that advice indiscriminately.

Read Full Post »

Medical immortality?

Posted in from the consulting room, health on June 2, 2008| 3 Comments »

I had a letter published in the BMJ today. Here’s the text –

What exactly does it mean to say that a treatment produces a decline in “all cause mortality by 21%” in a group of patients aged 80 and over? How long did the treatment postpone deaths from “all causes?” A month? A year? Forever? Use of all cause mortality without a time frame stops researchers and readers asking what the treated group end up dying from. By focusing too narrowly we fail to clarify the true consequences of taking a particular treatment.

I wrote this in response to an Editorial about the treatment of elderly patients with high blood pressure. Somewhat astonishingly the article claimed a study had shown that treating over 80 year olds with antihypertensives not only reduced their chances of having a heart attack or a stroke but produced a reduction in mortality “from all causes” by 21%.

That just cannot be true……..not without qualification. And the qualification is the time period under study. The author of the editorial made no mention of the time period. Mortality remains 100%. Everybody, but everybody, dies. If we effectively reduce the chances of dying from one particular kind of disease, then before we make an informed choice to do what will achieve that, don’t we need to know what we’re MORE likely to die from instead? In fact, it’s not just a matter of death, it’s a matter of life. With an increasing emphasis from biomedical medicine to take drugs for life for a healthier life we desperately need some good whole of life research to show what the impact these interventions have on not just the kinds of deaths such people experience, but the kinds of lives they experience too.

There is a terrible tendency still in Medicine to think in too small pieces. We need the bigger picture.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts