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Leisure

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on August 22, 2007| 1 Comment »

Christopher Richards who writes slowdownnow said that the book that got him thinking about the whole slow idea was “Leisure. The Basis of Culture”, by Josef Pieper. So I got myself a copy – a lovely hardback edition published by Liberty Fund with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. I really enjoyed doing a dissertation at school (several decades ago!) on T.S. Eliot so finding an introduction by him was a special treat. Josef Peiper was a Catholic Philosopher (which is not something that would usually appeal to me!) and his writing can be both elegant and difficult. But this little essay certainly provoked my thinking.

He makes the point that leisure, not work, is the basis of culture, and a fully human life. He also makes the point very, very clearly that leisure is not the same as idleness. It’s not about doing nothing, slobbing around, or just passing time. It’s about being fully engaged with the world in a non-active, non-doing way.

Whilst Max Weber said “one does not work to live; one lives to work”, Pieper instead reminds of Aristotle who said

We work in order to have leisure

(In fact, the direct, literal translation of this quote from Greek to English is “We are unleisurely in order to have leisure”)

In our frantic, Getting Things Done, To-do list obsessed society, this seems an incredible statement. But the Greeks had it right I think. They had two main “arts” – the liberal arts (ars liberales), and servile work (ars serviles). Work doesn’t sound so great when you add the adjective “servile” does it? But that captures so much of our experience in modern society. For many people, work is just something they have to do, but which is so demanding and consuming that when they are not working they are totally unable to experience leisure.

Pieper points out that leisure is……

a mental and spiritual attitude – it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.

and, that it is…..

an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy’, but letting things happen.

This description is highly reminiscent of meditation and it’s no surprise that Pieper frequently refers to the activity of contemplation as a way of experiencing reality.

I can see why this essay provokes self-questioning about the all-consuming busy-ness of current lifestyles. It reinforces for me the importance of one of the key groups of virtues is around “Calm” – for me, I’ve identified the three virtues of Slow, Silence and Tranquillity under this umbrella. This is not an argument in favour of doing nothing in life, it’s an argument which turns our priorities on their heads, stressing the absolute importance of leisure. I agree with Aristotle – we work in order to have leisure (and, I guess, many of us work to enable others, too, to have leisure)

I particularly liked his holistic description of leisure.

The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man – and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should continue to be capable of seeing life as a whole and the world as a whole; that he should fulfil himself, and come to a full possession of his faculties, face to face with being as a whole.

OK, not the easiest sentence to read, but you get the point, don’t you? This is what life is about. This is what being a hero is about. To fulfil yourself, to be in full possession of your faculties and to be at one with life and the world. It strikes me that zombies aren’t fulfilled and although they might work or be idle, the one thing they cannot experience is leisure.

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Conscious and aware

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, personal growth on August 22, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The main theme of this blog is the challenge to reject the zombie way of life, stumbling unconsciously through the average, and wake up, get involved and consciously choose how to develop your way of life. In short, become the hero of your own story, the principal character in your own narrative, accepting challenges, reflecting on your experiences and growing.

I was struck by how well the problem was described by Sebastian Faulks in his Engleby

This is how most people live; alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

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Engleby

Posted in books, from the reading room on August 20, 2007| 1 Comment »

Engleby is Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel. It’s written in a very different style from his previous novels but touches on some of the same themes. I read Human Traces recently and really loved it. Both novels are concerned with ideas of consciousness and the creation of the sense of self, but they deal with this in very, very different ways.

The first thing which strikes you about Engleby is that it is written in the first person. It’s difficult to do this successfully for the course of a whole novel, but Sebastian Faulks is a great writer and handles it beautifully. It really works. You have the sense that you are inside the head of the narrator, seeing and experiencing the world the way he does, and, more importantly, getting some sense of his subjective, inner mental processes. The narrator, it quickly becomes clear, is not “normal”. At best he’s a misfit, and, at worst, may even be mentally ill. This reminded me of the excellent “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon (excuse me while I digress, but I also recently read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, and one of his chapters starts with a quote from one of the Sherlock Holmes novels where Holmes solves the crime by noticing “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” – so THAT’S where the title came from!). In Mark Haddon’s novel the narrator is a boy with autism and the fact it’s told in the first person gives you an understanding of what it’s like to experience the world from the viewpoint of an autistic mind. I think “The Curious Incident…” is a much funnier book than “Engleby” (to be fair, Engleby isn’t supposed to be a funny book!) but it also packed a bigger emotional punch for me than Engleby did (“Human Traces” packs a more powerful emotional punch too). The narrator of Engleby has a mental disorder which means he has difficulty making healthy relationships so the whole experience of the novel is from the standpoint of someone who is a bit cut off from others, who finds social interaction difficult and who is seen by others as strange.

It’s a bit of a whodunnit too because one of the students Engleby knows disappears and for much of the novel it’s not clear what’s happened to her. I’m not going to reveal any of the endpoints of this novel because I do think the suspense adds to the enjoyment of reading it.

Consciousness, memory and the self are core themes of this novel and that really appeals to me. Consciousness, for example, is still not clearly understood and I do think our understanding of it increases by considering it using ALL the tools of philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology AND literature. Drop any of these approaches and it’s harder to understand.

Taken together, “Human Traces” and “Engleby” really contribute to our understanding of the workings of the human mind. I highly recommend both of them but the reader should be prepared for two VERY different books.

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You can’t judge a reader from the cover of the book he’s reading

Posted in books, from the living room, life, perception on August 18, 2007| 7 Comments »

I was heading home on the train from Glasgow to Stirling the other day. I enjoy having my daily commute of about an hour in a train or a bus either way because it gives me quiet, undisturbed time to sit and think, or read, or write, or listen to my ipod. This particular day there was a young, blonde woman opposite me. At one of the stations she moved and sat in another seat (I think to have a table to herself!). The train arrived at Stirling station and I gathered up my belongings and headed for the door. As I passed her table she said, in an American accent, “Excuse me sir. I feel I’m supposed to give you this” and handed me this –

thebox.jpg

I was a bit taken aback and without thinking stepped off the train with the gift in my hand. It was a metal box. I unclipped its magnetic catch and opened the lid to reveal this –

insidethebox.jpg

So now I’m thinking……what??!! A bible!!?? Why me? What did she see in me to make her think she should give this to me! Worse, it was a well worn box which was obviously her frequently used personal copy of the bible. She wasn’t even a bible distributer handing bibles out to strangers like some kind of Scotrail Gideon! What had she seen in me? Did I look depraved and in need of saving? Was I looking weary and worn and needing my spirits lifted? It was all deeply disturbing! What did she think was wrong with me? What need did she think she saw in me?

Then I remembered what I had been reading as she had sat opposite me. Here’s what she would’ve seen –

reading.jpg

OK, so now I understand! She thought I was searching for happiness and I guess she thought I’d be more likely to find it in the pages of her bible than in Daniel Gilbert’s book. Well, it was a kind thought. It involved some sacrifice for her to give away something that was important and personal to her. But! She judged me! She saw what book I was reading and figured not only what kinds of problems I might be facing but how I might best find the answers! Thank you for your kindness, anonymous American girl, but I wasn’t searching for how to be happy. I am happy. And you can rest assured your gift will not get any more worn out than it was the day you gave me it.

An interesting variation on the old saying, huh? Not only can you not judge a book by its cover, but you shouldn’t judge a person by the cover of the book they’re reading!

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Stumbling on Happiness

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on August 15, 2007| 4 Comments »

I’ve been reading some of the happiness literature recently. Not because I’m not happy – I am! But mainly because the area of medicine in which I work is based on two things – taking a holistic view, which really just means engaging with a person instead of just a person’s disease! And, secondly, it’s based on trying to aid recovery and increase resilience, as opposed to just trying to rescue a situation, or repair some damaged tissues. There’s a lot involved in helping someone to get better including enabling self-understanding, instilling hope, encouraging a positive attitude, as well as tackling disease processes. I’m especially interested in an approach to medical care which seeks to understand the uniqueness of each and every patient I see and enabling them to develop in the face of their illnesses – by develop I mean to adapt, to become more creative and to be more fully engaged with their lives (see here)
I read The Happiness Hypothesis and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thought provoking and enlightening. I then moved on to Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert (ISBN 978-0-00-718313-5). These two authors have completely different styles but both are tackling the question of what makes people happy. Gilbert’s book is much more a psychologists approach – in fact, I’d go as far as to say an experimental psychologist’s approach. In the opening chapters he lays out his strong belief that the way to understand how the human mind works is to study phenomena of large numbers of people. He says we can’t rely on the experiences of individuals but we can rely on phenomena which can be demonstrated time and again in group studies. That made me a bit uncomfortable because as a clinician I find that often the statistical “evidence” from group trials turns out not to be appropriate for an individual. Drugs are a great example of this. There isn’t a single painkiller on the market which you can guarantee will take away the pain of a particular patient. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from a particular treatment, this particular patient today may well turn out to be the one who gets no response at all. We see the same phenomenon with blood pressure pills, sleeping pills, anything really. Obviously a doctor should recommend the safest treatment which seems to have helped a significant number of patients but he or she must remain open to understanding that for this patient this pill just might not work. We are all actually different. I’ll return to this issue shortly.

I really didn’t want to like Gilbert’s book because of the cover. It looks cheap and puerile. However, you can’t judge a book by its cover! Once I started to read it, I loved it. I’ve read criticisms of his familiar, humorous writing style but it really works for me. It’s a treat to read and it often made me laugh. His cultural references, especially to Beatles songs hit the spot for me. The content was fascinating too. OK, many of these studies published by psychologists have been written about in other books, but Daniel Gilbert presented a fair number of interesting studies which I’ve never read anywhere else.

After a while, psychology experiment after psychology experiment begins to feel like a magic show. So often the result is a surprise. I could almost hear “abracadabra!” in the background! This is fun and interesting but its novelty begins to wane. (Actually his section on magic tricks themselves is particularly interesting – check this post) Throughout the book he held my interest, and he made a good, clear case for the claim that memory, perception and imagination are all imperfect representations of reality –

Foresight is just as fallible as eyesight and hindsight.

I have no doubts about that. However, for me, I’m more comfortable with the understanding that memory, perception and imagination are all creative processes – individual, subjective, creative processes.

Having demonstrated that we are not reliable judges of either what did make us happy, or what will make us happy, he ends up with a recommendation that totally baffled me. In his final chapter (the one before the “Afterword”) he seeks to answer the question “how should we decide what to do?” Somewhat astonishingly he says that as we can’t rely on our memories or our imagination, we should rely on the experiences of others. He claims this will work because we have an over-inflated sense of our individuality and uniqueness. He says “What makes us think we’re so damned special?” and argues “Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates……..surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realise just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method…”

Pardon?

The best way to predict how I’m going to feel in a situation is to ask others who have already been in that situation? Yes, I understand the importance of empathy and of sharing stories and learning from others, but, you know something? There’s only ONE Daniel Gilbert! And there’s only ONE me! I liked some of the same Beatles songs as you, Daniel, but I don’t rate statistics and experimental psychology as highly as you do because we’ve lead different lives, in different cultures with a myriad of different experiences.

Just stop for a moment and think about taking his recommendation to rely on the reports of others to predict how you’re going to feel in a certain situation. When was the last time you read a movie review, went to see the movie and had such a different experience from the reviewer that you thought “did we see the same movie?!” In “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” you can go 50/50, phone a friend or ask the audience – you might get some clues from what they say but they don’t always give you the right answer – why not? Well Daniel Gilbert answers that himself – they too are humans with fallible memories, fallible perception and fallible imagination. Why should the report of someone else be more reliable than what I know about myself?

I think there are two crucial elements missing from this exploration of happiness – narrative and the importance of meaning. We experience life through the creation of stories – the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling involves using memory, perception and imagination. Through the creation of stories we gain a sense of self AND we make sense of our experiences. Human beings are meaning-seeking, meaning-creating creatures. And two people in the same circumstance will have vastly different experiences because the circumstance is interpreted differently, made sense of differently, means something different to each of them.

Yes, yes, yes, we share more than we often realise. With a bit of empathy we can realise just how much we do share with other people, but I insist, we are all different, all unique and, you know what?

YOU ARE SPECIAL!

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The Happiness Hypothesis

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, psychology, science on August 5, 2007| 4 Comments »

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathon Haidt. ISBN 978-0-099-47889-8.

This book is by a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia. The book’s subtitle is “Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science”. I read it because it was one of three books about happiness discussed by Jean Kazez here. I really enjoyed it. His writing style is easy and at times humorous. He discusses the understanding of happiness from the perspective of ancient Buddhist and Greek thinkers and in the light of findings from cognitive science and the more recent positive psychology.

He makes a good case for the idea that happiness in the result of several factors – some genetic (the given of the physical functioning of an individual brain), some situational (the conditions of life) and some behavioural (the choices we make, the actions we take). I’ve not really considered the first of those before. I guess I’ve thought that things like happiness, depression, optimism and pessimism are all learned phenomena that emerge from the experience of the events which happen in an individual’s life and the sense that individual makes of those experiences, the stories they tell themselves and others about their life. Recently though, both with certain patients in my practice and with what I’ve been reading in that crossover area between neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, I’ve been coming to understand the more complex and intimate links between the body and the mind and between the physical and the subjective. So it makes sense to me that as we don’t all have either a body or a mind which functions exactly the same way as anybody else’s that experiences of positive and negative emotions will be present to different degrees in different people. What he refers to as a person’s “affective style” emerges from the interplay of approach and avoidance behaviours which is influenced both from their genetic make-up and their early life experiences. I find that a helpful concept.

He shed a light on quite a few other issues for me. I like this phrase –

…those who think money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop

He then goes on to explain the different effects of spending money on objects as opposed to spending it on quality time and activities with loved ones.

He distinguishes pleasures from gratifications – a pleasure is a sensory and/or emotional delight. It’s transient and if repeated too often the brain adapts to the stimulus and the amount of pleasure drops (you might like ice cream but eat too much of it at a sitting and the pleasure payback fades). A gratification is an activity which fully engages you, draws on your strengths and allows you to lose your self-consciousness. Gratifications improve your mood for longer and you don’t tire of them in the way you tire of pleasures.

He comes down in favour of positive psychology and its emphasis on understanding your strengths and playing to them, linking this to the older idea of acquisition and development of virtues. What goes along with this is his emphasis on taking actions rather than passively sitting waiting for happiness to just float past.

It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. (Charlotte Bronte)

I liked what he had to say about goals. I often find that talk of goal-setting lacks something but I found it quite hard to put my finger on why. Here’s the explanation. First from Shakespeare –

Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.

And from the scientific perspective he describes “effectance motive” – we are all driven to make things happen. We get more pleasure from striving towards our goals than we do in achieving them.

His conclusion is this –

Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait.

And he recalls Tolstoy to point to the areas where we need to get the conditions right –

One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love…..

Through love and through work (in the broadest sense, not work just as employment) we can be engaged with others and with the world and we can experience the joy of making things happen, drawing on our strengths, building our characters, and experiencing meaningful lives.

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The evolution of heroes

Posted in books, from the reading room, life on July 21, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Evolution is a passage from the most automatic to the most voluntary.

Sebastian Faulks. Human Traces.

The zombie life is the automatic life. Becoming the hero of your own personal story involves developing awareness and making more and more conscious choices.

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traces…..

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the reading room, health, life, photography on July 21, 2007| Leave a Comment »

ripples in the sand, originally uploaded by bobsee.

Then the long trail of her footprints, stretching back towards the sea, became slowly indistinct as each one filled with water and edged in upon itself; and in a matter of minutes, as darkness began to fall, the shape of the foot was lost at every place until the last vestiges of her presence were washed away, the earth closing over as though no one had passed by.

Sebastian Faulks. Human Traces

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Human Traces

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life, neuroscience on July 21, 2007| 6 Comments »

Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks (ISBN 978-0-099-45826-5) is a novel of ideas. Set in the late 19th, early 20th century it tells the story of two young men who become idealistic doctors, determined to work together to understand mental illnesses so that they can cure them. In addition, they hope that in understanding the interface between the body and the mind they will understand what it is to be human.

I found it really absorbing. Much of the discussion was around subjects which are very familiar to me – consciousness, the relationship between the body and the mind, the debate about whether mental illnesses have neurological bases or not, and the still young area of evolutionary biology. However, as a doctor, the book has additional relevance. After all, my experience is also one of idealism and hope; the belief that doctoring will be about curing, and the gradual erosion of that to aim at managing diseases instead of curing them (that last is a painful loss – for sure, doctors have cures for many acute diseases now, but the burden of illness is chronic disease and, sadly, we seem a long way off from finding genuine cures for those)

Sebastian Faulks floats an incredibly interesting hypothesis about the hearing of voices, having one of the characters, Thomas, propose that this was a facility that all human beings possessed but which has since been lost by most of us. He cites the literary evidence of Man’s relationship to God/gods where the earlier stories show people hearing voices which they obeyed – they experienced the daily reality of their gods; and later stories showing that people no longer reliably heard those voices and had to throw lots, examine entrails, find unusual characters (prophets) who could still hear the voices, in order to know what the gods wanted. He links this idea to the emerging concept of evolution and natural selection by proposing that the hearing of voices was linked to the development of consciousness and the loss of the voices was related to the development of self-awareness through the acquistion of language. If you are not familiar with any of these ideas this novel is a great place to introduce yourself to this area of thought.

However, this 609 page novel did not engage me emotionally……..until page 595. From page 595 to the very last word of the novel, it hit me like a sledgehammer. I didn’t just cry. I sobbed. I was totally unprepared for it. This is quite honestly one of the most powerful pieces of writing I’ve read. Maybe it hit me so hard because it touched so many issues which lie in the core of my being – what is it to be a doctor? what use am I to others? how do we get a sense of self and how does it feel to lose that to an illness like dementia? what does it mean to become invisible? and, ultimately, what trace do I leave on this Earth?

There are a number of phrases and passages which have stimulated a whole lot of things for me, and I’ll return to post about some of them separately.

Thought provoking, educational, well-written, and, ultimately, powerfully emotional.

Highly recommended.

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Getting published

Posted in books, from the reading room on July 19, 2007| 1 Comment »

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Hands up if you recognise that opening line……

David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath decided to copy out opening chapters of Jane Austen novels, changing only character names and send them to publishers as his own work to see what would happen. He sent Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and, yes, even Pride and Prejudice (that’s the opening line up there….!) to a number of big publishers and agents.

Two interesting things happened. Firstly, they all got rejected – the publishers didn’t want to publis them. Secondly, nobody seemed to spot the plagiarism – well, apparent from one person at Jonathon Cape. But here’s the bit that really struck me – Penguin said this about his Pride and Prejudice look-a-like

It seems like a really original and interesting read

When challenged about this later they said

A spokeswoman for Penguin pointed out that its letter had said only that it “seemed” original and interesting. “It would not have been read,” she insisted.

What??! They said it “seemed” interesting but they didn’t read it? Oh dear, is publishing totally random? Is it just luck? I suppose it would have been worse if some publisher had offered him a contract and published it without realising the book was actually a Jane Austen novel, but that probably was never going to happen. The saddest part of this tale is the way the rejections either suggested the book was not good enough to be published (poor Jane Austen!), or gave false hope. Wouldn’t it be better for a manuscript to either be sent back with a note saying the company did not want to look at it, or for it to be taken seriously and a clear, honest communication about it to be given to the author?

Why does this interest me? Well, one of the key themes of this blog is a call for individuals to matter more than institutions and systems. The more impersonal and systems based our society becomes the more we are all poorer.

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