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Archive for the ‘books’ Category

Johnny Bunko

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, personal growth on July 7, 2008| 1 Comment »

Daniel H Pink, who wrote “A Whole New Mind“, has written what he calls “America’s first business book in the Japanese comic format”. Now, I don’t know how you feel about comics, graphic novels and so on, but I know my mum really didn’t like them! She was never keen on the comics I used to look forward to every week, rather disdaining them as something inferior to “proper” books. But I liked them. And I still do. The graphic novel is whole art form in its own right and in France the “bandes dessinees” (sorry, don’t know how to get an “e acute”!) section of the bookshop is always VERY busy. I’ve picked up some utterly beautiful examples over the years. The graphic novel has developed in a very distinct way in Japan. They call it Manga. It’s this latter style which Daniel Pink has chosen for his latest book. You can actually read it online. Don’t be put off by its pitch as a business book. It’s a simple, easy to read, fun, but thought provoking self-development book.

He makes just six points, each of which is delivered to Johnny Bunko, an accountant who is bored with his job, by Diana, a sprite who appears when he breaks magical chopsticks (I know, I know, stay with me here, you have to take the genre as it is!). Here they are –

1. There is no plan (“It’s nice to believe that you can map out every step ahead of time and end up where you want. But that’s a fantasy. The world changes“)

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses (you know this one – it’s the positive psychology message)

3. It’s not about you (“the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others‘ lives”)

4. Persistence trumps talent (“practice and practice and practice some more”)

5. Make excellent mistakes (that’s a well-rehearsed one. One of the key messages of “Feel the Fear“)

6. Leave an imprint (“use your limited time here to do something that matters“)

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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!

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Book market

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on May 6, 2008| 2 Comments »

In Aix en Provence last weekend there was a regular book market in the main square opposite the Hotel de Ville. It’s lovely to be able to browse a book market outside under a blue sky and these photos show how the books attract such a diverse range of people.

bookbuyers
bookworms
booklovers
stylish
When was the last time you went to a book market? Do you have favourite book markets you’d recommend?

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The reductionism vs holism debate

Posted in books, from the reading room, science on April 11, 2008| 4 Comments »

I’ve just finished reading Michio Kaku‘s “Hyperspace” – it’s a book I’ve had on my shelves for years but didn’t get round to reading (I’ve got LOADS like that – but I’m still convinced I’ll read them ALL eventually!). It’s about multi-dimensional thinking in physics and maths, and I read it because of a dream I had. It’s a fabulous book, which really does make difficult concepts understandable. I highly recommend it.

In the last chapter of the book, Michio tackles the reductionism vs holism issue, because in Physics, apparently, there are two very different groups of adherents to each of these viewpoints. He has an interesting exposition of the more extreme forms of these two groups, referring to the reductionists as “Belligerent science” and holists and “Know-nothing science” – OK, I know, both extremely judgmental and controversial terms but read this paragraph where he describes them –

Belligerent science clubs the opposition with a heavy, rigid view of science tht alienates rather than persuades. Belligerent science seeks to win points in a debate, rather than win over the audience. Instead of appealing to the finer instincts of the lay audience by presenting itself as the defender of enlightened reason and sound experiment, it comes off as a new Spanish Inquisition. Belligerent science is science with a chip on its shoulder. Its scientists accuse the holists of being soft-headed, of getting their physics confused, of throwing pseudoscientific gibberish to cover their ignorance. Thus belligerent science may be winning the individual battles, but it is ultimately losing the war. In every one-to-one skirmish, belligerent science may trounce the opposition by parading out mountains of data and learned PhDs. However, in the long run arrogance and conceit may eventually backfire by alienating the very audience that it is trying to persuade.

Know-nothing science goes to the opposite extreme, rejecting experiment and embracing whatever faddish philosophy happens to come along. Know-nothing science sees unpleasant facts as mere details, and the overall philosophy as everything. If the facts do not seem to fit the philosophy then obviously something is wrong with the facts. Know-nothing science comes in with a preformed agenda, based on personal fulfillment rather than objective observation, and tries to fit in the science as an afterthought.

I recognise these attitudes clearly. I have been on the receiving end of classic “belligerent science” communications – some of it so offensive, I just delete it straight after reading it (and wish I’d never read it in the first place!) “Belligerent scientists” clearly don’t like homeopathy! In fact, the tone of some of the comments I have received to posts I put up concerning homeopathy, led me to create a “Commenting policy” which you can read at the bottom of the right hand sidebar of this blog. On the other hand, I’ve read plenty of comments from the other extreme end of this axis. I find this latter group to be a lot nicer than the belligerent crowd I must say, but often not any easier to have a discussion with.

I confess to having a strong affiliation to holistic perspectives on the world, but science has always been a fascination for me and it thrills me to understand how things work so I see a real value in reductionist thinking too.

How to reconcile these two viewpoints? Well, you could read Kaku’s final chapter, but essentially he argues for taking a higher perspective and seeing that both methods are appropriate in different circumstances.

One contemporary philosopher who has considered this issue is Mary Midgely.

She argues against reductionism or the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world as the only right way to see things. She suggests that there are “many maps, many windows” on reality and argues that “we need scientific pluralism – the recognition that there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge – rather than reductivism, the conviction that one fundamental form underlies them all and settles everything” and that it is helpful to think about the world as “a huge aquarium. We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows … We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. but if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far”

I like that. I like it a lot.

Here’s to an understanding of the value of different viewpoints, and different methods in diverse circumstances. I think we could advance the lot of humankind so much more if we attempted to engage with, and understand, each other, rather than bashing each other about the heads! In particular, less arrogance and conceit would be good!

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William Glasser’s Five Basic Needs

Posted in books, from the reading room, personal growth, psychology on March 25, 2008| 21 Comments »

In his Choice Theory, William Glasser make the point that we are all born “genetically programmed” to have five basic needs. However, we don’t all have each particular need to the same degree as another person. Our personal mix of these five needs will tell us a lot about our personal motivations and what lies behind the choices we make in life. The five needs are

  1. Survival
  2. Belonging (love and loving sex)
  3. Power
  4. Freedom
  5. Fun

He makes suggestions to help you figure out the strengths of these various needs in your own life.

If you have found that you are less willing to take risks than most people, you have a high need for survival.

The key to assessing the strength of your need for love and belonging is how much you are willing to give.

To assess the strength of your need for power, ask yourself if you always want to have your own way, to have the last word, to own people, and to be seen as right in most of what you do or say.

If you can’t stand the idea of following rules, conforming, or even staying in one place or with one group of people for very long, you have a high need for freedom.

If you enjoy learning and laugh a lot when you do, you have a high need for fun.

You get the idea? Of course, you could say that ALL of us have ALL of these needs. The point is to understand which of these resonate most strongly with you. Because that’ll be your prime motivator.

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The past is past. It’s the present you need to pay attention to.

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on March 24, 2008| 6 Comments »

William Glasser, in his Choice Theory, says this –

I disagree with the usual psychiatric thinking that you can learn from past misery. When you focus on the past, all you are doing is revisiting the misery. One trip through the misery is more than enough for most people. The more you stay in the past, the more you avoid facing the present unhappy relationships that are always the problem.

I’m with him on that – “One trip through the misery is more than enough for most people” – what a great quote! Whilst telling the story of the past can be important part of making sense of an experience and of understanding something of another person’s life, the solutions to the present suffering or distress don’t lie in revisiting. It’s not enough to just “get it out”. What matters is what you are choosing to DO today. How are you coping with life NOW as you are living it. That’s an empowering point of view because you can’t change the past, but you sure can change something about what you are doing today. Glasser believes that “present unhappy relationships that are always the problem”. Well, I’m always wary when I see that word “always”! It’s unlikely that there is a single cause, or type of cause, for all problems. He says –

What I will teach him is that he is not satisfied with a present relationship, the problem that always brings people to counselling. His past could have contributed to the problem, but even though most current psychotherapies initially focus on it, the past is never the problem.

I do think he’s onto something here, even if he’s pushing  things a bit with his “always” and “never”. There are, of course, a number of psychological approaches which focus on the present as opposed to spending hours digging through the past but not all so explicitly attempt to uncover the present unsatisfying relationship as the thing to focus on. The following three quotes make this very clear –

There is no need to probe at length for the problem. It is always an unsatisfying present relationship.

Since the problem is always in the present, there is no need to make a long intensive investigation of the client’s past. Tell him the truth: The past is over; He cannot change what he or anyone else did. All he can do now is, with my help, build a more effective present.

In traditional counselling, a lot of time is spent both enquiring into and listening to the clients complain about their symptoms [which makes it harder to get to the real problem]……..what the client is choosing to do now.

I remember the first time I realised I was on the wrong path when counselling a patient with postnatal depression who had been sexually abused as a child. On one of the one hour sessions she said to me “Look, I really do appreciate you taking all this time to listen to me, but every time I spend an hour talking to you about the past abuse I feel worse. I think I need a break from this. I think I need to live now.” Well, that woman taught me an important lesson about counselling – that it wasn’t enough to just let someone talk about the past, and that the present is where we live now so we all need better tools to live now, not better tools to remember the last miseries. I also realised at that point that different people had different needs and there was no one model of counselling which would fit everyone.

As I’ve learned from patients and learned from further reading and training, I’ve discovered I’ve a great affinity for focusing on what’s in life NOW and what coping strategies we’re using NOW. But I haven’t had the thought before that the problem ALWAYS lies in a current unsatisfying relationship. Maybe that’s worth exploring a bit more, but, what has made sense for me so far is that there are different areas of focus (and therefore different priorities) for different people. Sure, for many people, the most significant area is relationships, emotions and feelings. But for others the most significant area is something physical, practical, maybe work-oriented. And for yet others, the focus is on something spiritual, their disconnectedness to whatever is greater than themselves, or their search for meaning.

What do you think? Do these theories ring true for you?

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How Doctors Think

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on February 19, 2008| 3 Comments »

“How Doctors Think” by Jerome Groopman (ISBN 978-0-618-61003-7) should be on the recommended reading list of every medical student and doctor. Dr Groopman is a physician who specialises in Haematology. This book is the best presentation on the cognitive processes involved in medical decision making I’ve ever read. Actually it’s main focus is on how doctors make a diagnosis and on their cognitive errors which result in them missing or mistaking the correct diagnosis. It’s clear and it’s comprehensive. It’s the kind of book that stimulates me to think about a number of aspects of medical practice and I’ll probably do individual posts about a number of them.

My summary understanding of this book would be that doctors make diagnoses by recognising patterns – that certainly seems consistent with what I think about my own practice. The key to this is the doctor-patient relationship. It’s the patient’s narrative that holds the key and the effect the patient has on the doctor colours how he or she hears that narrative.

My one criticism of this book would be that the whole focus is on the discovery of the “lesion” which is the source of the symptoms. Trouble is, as Kroenke and others have shown us, the vast majority of symptoms presented to doctors don’t come from “lesions”. I’d have liked to read Dr Groopman’s take on that huge issue.

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Creativity the Medici Effect way

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room on February 13, 2008| 6 Comments »

The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson (ISBN 978-1-4221-0282-4) says on the front “If you can’t read it and come up with at least a minor Mona Lisa or two, you’re not trying”. Pretty enticing, huh? Well, so far, it hasn’t done that for me. Am I not trying? Well, actually, as Johansson shows, just reading about something isn’t enough. You have to turn your reading into actions.

The front cover quote is kind of misleading – this is an inspiring book but it certainly isn’t a “how to do it” kind of book.

The Medici Effect is an exploration of a single, simple concept – the intersection. The author’s claim is that innovation and creativity flourishes in the intersections. What intersections? Where different disciplines come together in the same team or project; where cultures meet; where languages meet. This concept reminds me strongly of the network science ideas which I read about in the fabulously inspiring “Linked“.

I think it’s very true. Some of my most creative times come around my visits to France and Japan. I spend most of my holiday leave in France and I love to go to the bookshops and the newsagents. The French publish utterly different magazines and books from the kind I find anywhere else in the world, and there is something about their perspective which I find so different from the one I find in the UK. In fact, for me, there’s something about reading French which is stimulating and exciting. I also visit Japan a couple of times a year and there the culture, the architecture, the contrasts of the spiritually ancient and the gaudy new sitting side by side, the design ethos focussed on transience and the constant dynamism of change, I find totally inspiring. When I go to Japan, I teach, with the aid of an interpreter which slows down my presentation style and gives me much more time to reflect. I come up with a new way to communicate something every time I go there.

The Medici Effect is what happens when you bring together diverse influences, and Johansson makes the claim that creativity and innovation is, in the final analysis, something that happens randomly. He gives the example of Edgar Allen Poe, who used to randomly choose three words from the dictionary and try to tie them together to make a new story.

As well as the valuing of difference and diversity which challenges and shifts our perspectives and stimulates our creative flow, Frans Johansson recommends abundance. He gives the example of Joyce Carol Oates, who published 45 novels, 39 collections of stories, 8 poetry collections, 5 dramas and 9 essay collections in four decades.

I especially liked his point that to be an innovative person you can’t just come up with ideas, you have to come up with ideas which are valuable and which are taken up by society or by other people. That seems so true to me. The truly creative people produce. They don’t just think. They do.

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The enigma of health

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, philosophy on February 5, 2008| 8 Comments »

Maybe, like me, you have a collection of “significant” books. By that, I mean books which had a big impact on the way you think, or the way you understand life. I’ve written about some of those books here already, but here’s another one which I read a few years ago. Hans-Georg Gadamer‘s “The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age” is a collection of essays by this professor of hermeneutics (I know, I had to look it up in a dictionary too, but, trust me, this man had a brilliant mind!)

Gadamer died in 2002, and while I was visiting Tokyo, a copy of the Japan Times slid under my hotel room door early one morning, included an obituary about him. I’d never heard of him, but it’s amazing what you’ll read in the wee small hours in a foreign country when your body and your head are still half a day away in your home town! I was completely fascinated with what I read and his thinking about health really captured my imagination so I went online and ordered up “The Enigma of Health” from Amazon. By the time I got back home it was waiting for me. Let me share a few quotes with you. I wrote them down in my Moleskine (as I do!)

Although health is naturally the goal of the doctor’s activity, it is not actually ‘made’ by the doctor.

I make this point with every new patient I see. It’s the big unspoken truth about medical practice. Doctors’ treatments might reduce or remove a pathology, might even redress an inner imbalance, but they don’t cure – only the body does that. He says more about here –

Yet the goal of the art of medicine is to heal the patient and it is clear that healing does not lie within the jurisdiction of the doctor but rather of nature. Doctors know that they are only in a position to provide ancillary help to nature.

Franklin put it another way when he said “God heals and the doctor takes the fees”

I often ask medical students to tell me the answer to this – if a patient with a urinary tract infection gives a urine sample which grows bacteria which the lab shows are sensitive to a particular antibiotic and the patient is prescribed that antibiotic, what will the antibiotic do? The ones who don’t think carefully say the antibiotic will cure the infection. It won’t. It’ll kill the bugs. That’s it. The inflamed bladder wall, which might even be bleeding from the effects of the infection will be restored completely by the body’s repair processes. The healing is natural. The antibiotic only removes the offending bug to let the healing system do its job. This might seem like nit-picking, but it isn’t. It involves a profound change in thinking. Doctors aren’t gods. At best they assist healing and all healing is a natural process.

…the doctor’s power of persuasion as well as the trust and the co-operation of the patient constitute essential therapeutic factors which belong to a wholly different dimension than that of the physico-chemical influences of medications upon the organism or of ‘medical intervention’.

There are some who think that health and illness can be understood in purely physical terms and that treatments can be understood to work, or not work, on the basis of their physico-chemical effects. That’s a limited way of thinking. Healing involves more than that, and may not even involve any physico-chemical intervention at all. Those who think medicine can be reduced to a science (as opposed to a science and an art) rely on measurements of phenomena. Gadamer is brilliant about this –

….modern science has come to regard the results of such measuring procedures as the real facts which it must seek to order and collect. But the data provided in this way only reflect conventionally established criteria brought to the phenomena from without. They are always our own criteria which we impose on the thing we wish to measure.

I believe it was Max Planck who said “facts are what can be measured”. Well, reality cannot be reduced to facts. The tendency to reduce understanding to physical measurements is accompanied by a concept of health as some kind of product – an end point or state which can be known and measured. Gadamer argues instead –

…physicians do not simply create a product when they succeed in healing someone. Rather, health depends on many different factors and the final goal is not so much regaining health itself as enabling patients once again to enjoy the role they had previously fulfilled in their everyday lives.

This clear statement suggests to us that health is an experience and it’s an experience which in its detail will be different for every person depending on the characteristics and environments of their lives. Later in his essays Gadamer considers how far from being a measurable product, health is really what is experienced when illness is not present or goes away. This is the “enigma” of health – that we only know it by its absence. Consider the fingers of your right hand. Right now you’re not really aware of them. Trap them in a car door and then you instantly become aware of them. You get the idea?

This post could go on forever! I’ll stop, but suffice it to say this is a deeply thoughtful consideration of our concepts of health, illness and healing.

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The importance of story

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, life, narrative, philosophy on January 30, 2008| 39 Comments »

The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.

Robert Coles in “The Call of Stories”.

Stories have always fascinated me. I love them. Every day when I sit in my consulting room patients tell me the most amazing, fascinating and unique stories. As a medical student I was taught how to “take a history” – I hate that phrase actually – who’s doing the “taking” and what exactly are they “taking” and from whom? Doesn’t seem right to me at all. Instead I prefer teaching medical students how to listen to patients’ stories. However, the point is that this is the beginning of all diagnosis. To a certain extent listening to the patient’s story is a diminished art. There’s an over-reliance on technology and a lot of doctors just don’t seem to be able to make a diagnosis without a test these days. Diagnosis is a form of understanding. It’s a process of trying to make sense of somebody’s experience.

If stories are so important in clinical practice, then how can I learn to handle them better I wondered? There is a developing area of medicine known as “narrative-based practice”, with associated “narrative-based research” methodologies, but materially-orientated, reductionist scientists look down on narrative. They prefer data. So, when I started to study narrative (which, technically is the story AND the way that story is told), I couldn’t find much work from a scientific perspective. I had to turn to the humanities.

One of the books which I really love in this area of study is “On Stories” by Richard Kearney (ISBN 9-780415-247986). Not only is it a fabulous exploration of the place of story in human life, but it’s written completely beautifully. Richard Kearney is a philosopher but he’s also a magnificent writer. This one book taught me more about the importance of story than any other.

Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

This sets stories at the heart of human existence – not optional, but essential.

Aristotle says in “Poetics” that storytelling is what gives us a shareable world.

The key word there is “shareable”. It’s through the use of story that we communicate our subjective experience and its through the sharing of subjective experience that we connect, and identify with others.

Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life could ever be considered a truly human one.

Beautifully expressed. Sets narrative at the heart of what it means to be human and stands it against those who would take a materialistic view of life which they claim can be reduced to data sets and DNA.

Every life is in search of a narrative. We all seek, willy-nilly, to introduce some kind of concord into the everyday discord.

This is one of my favourite lines in the whole book. This is exactly the power of story – it enables us to “get a handle on” life, to bring some kind of order out of chaos.

What does Richard Kearney mean by story then? Well, I’ll finish this post with two more quotes from his book which make it very clear and very simple.

When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations.

This shows that story collapses time, bringing the past and the future into the present. Story telling requires memory, imagination and expression.

Every story requires –

a teller, a tale, something told about, and a recipient of the tale.

Nice and simple, but what profundity lies in there. For every story, there is a unique human being doing the telling, there is the story itself and its subject matter, and, very importantly there’s the recipient – the listener or the reader. Story is, as Aristotle said, a way of creating a shareable world. That’s the greatest potential of blogs, I reckon. By sharing our stories we create a shared world. Yes, sure, stories can divide as well as connect, but without stories, there is no potential for connection, no potential for compassion and no potential for the creation of a meaning-full, and better world.

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