Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography, tagged nature on November 10, 2009| 1 Comment »
This isn’t a quiz….well, at least, not in the sense that I know the answer! I came across these strange marks on fallen trees in a forest recently. Have you any idea what makes this happen? Is it a fungus? An insect? A worm?? Look at the variety, it’s quite astonishing!
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography on November 5, 2009| 4 Comments »
How does your day begin?
I took this photo of the sun rising behind the old factories on the other side of Stirling station yesterday, and it got me thinking about the start of the day. Every day the sun comes up (but we don’t always notice it). In some cultures and traditions this simple, daily event was/is marked with some kind of ritual or acknowledgment – some “salute to the sun”, or some contemplation or prayer. I guess it’s no surprise in a country like Scotland where its not likely you can actually see the sun every morning that we don’t have that kind of start to our day.
But how DO you start your day?
Do you start on auto-pilot? Some combination of washed/dressed/breakfast/out the door? If so, is there a point where you take over from the auto-pilot? At what point in the day do start to live more consciously?
Or do you start your day with some personal ritual of waking or beginning? Feel free to share if you’d like.
Posted in from the living room, life, psychology, tagged meditation on November 1, 2009| 2 Comments »
How often do you find yourself going over something upsetting? Something someone said or did which you found hurtful? Hurts have an impact. They make their marks on us. The bigger the hurt, the deeper, more long-lasting the mark.
Is there anything we can do reduce the impact? Or do we have to just stand and accept whatever comes our way, feeling the impacts deeply, and for the rest of our lives?
Whatever builds up our resilience, both reduces the strength of any impact, and increases our ability to bounce back, to stand back up, to find a way to go forward.
One aspect of resilience is equanimity. Balance. Stability. A kind of strength. Over centuries in many traditions and cultures people have practiced meditation to gain this kind of strength. One of the goals of meditation is increased equanimity, or greater resilience. You can’t stop events from happening, but you can have an influence on how you experience those events. My meditation teacher used the following analogy (the photos are mine!)
A mark in rock lasts a long time
A mark in sand disappears more quickly
Imagine what it’s like to make the mark on water
Now imagine what it’s like to make the mark in the air
Regular meditation practice builds resilience. Things still happen, but more and more, what people say, what people do, has less of an impact. You begin to experience less marks in the stone, less in the sand, more in the water, or, ultimately, in the air.
I like that analogy.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, photography, psychology on October 27, 2009| 2 Comments »
Look at the colour of this water. It’s an amazing colour isn’t it?
Why is it that colour? It’s the effect of all the leaves on the trees of the forest through which the stream is flowing. On another day, in another season, this very water (well, actually, this very stream, not this very water!), looks an entirely different colour. In fact, a few hours earlier, or a few hours later, it looks completely different.
This got me thinking. Not just thinking how beautiful it is. It is stunningly beautiful. But how change is a such a constant, and, how whatever we see is the result of many factors, and how everything needs to be understood in it’s context, and how nothing can be reduced to some simple set of data, or simple description, without, in fact, obscuring its reality.
Maybe it’s just the way my mind works, but it also got me thinking about the interactions between the environment and the elements of the environment. I’ve just taken out a subscription to a new journal titled Ecopsychology. I’ve never come across this term before, but its the area of study which looks at the interactions between behaviour and the environment. I love it when I come across these whole new fields of human exploration and knowledge.
Posted in from the living room, tagged economy, inequality on October 24, 2009| 3 Comments »
First this week we have the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lord Griffiths, saying
We have to accept that inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all.
No we don’t. It’s just not true. Inequality is NOT a way of making life better for ALL. The evidence actually points the other way. Inequality is a BAD way of trying to make life better, even for the privileged.
Then the Duke of York chips in to defend the bonuses –
I don’t want to demonise the banking and financial sector. Bonuses, in the scheme of things, are minute. They are easy to target. A number will have abused their privilege of a bonus, so get rid of the excesses, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Have these guys never read the research on the effects of inequality? Take a look at just two books – The Impact of Inequality, and The Spirit Level, and make up your own mind. Or go to The Equality Trust and read more.
Posted in creativity, from the living room, life, narrative, perception on October 14, 2009| 3 Comments »
Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related.
The first skill is pattern spotting.
What do we think when we look up and see this?
We pick out the colours, the shapes and the contexts of what we see, and we name it – sunlight behind oak leaves, casting overlapping shadows.
This happens so quickly and effortlessly that we don’t even pause to wonder about it. In fact, we’re seeing patterns everywhere, all the time. It’s a fundamental skill needed for understanding.
The other skill we use is storytelling, or narrative. We “join the dots”, or “put things together” by creating narratives. By creating stories we make sense of the patterns we see. Personal sense. When you look at this oak tree for example, you’ll perhaps become aware of certain feelings, and maybe those feelings related to previous experiences involving oak trees. As a species we create stories about trees, and, specifically, about oak trees, so maybe some of those stories will come to mind and your experience of looking at this tree will be enriched by that.
Well, here’s an interesting study which explores how we might enhance these core skills. The first sentence of the report caught my attention –
Reading a book by Franz Kafka –– or watching a film by director David Lynch –– could make you smarter.
Pardon?
Well, according to the psychologists who conducted this study –
exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions
It appears that reading a text, or watching a movie which is challenging to understand because it doesn’t appear to make sense, enhances our skills in making sense! I suppose it’s a bit like going to the gym (I wouldn’t know….never been!) and practising using your muscles so that they then work more efficiently and with greater strength.
Well, the questions which arise about what do they mean by “smarter” are answered by the specifics of the study. What they actually showed was that after reading Kafka, or watching a David Lynch movie, a person’s ability to spot patterns was enhanced.
Interesting. Actually, I spend most of every day trying to spot patterns, listening to stories, and trying to make sense of what I’m seeing and hearing. You could say that’s my job. But how interesting, even from the perspective of training doctors. Maybe we should be encouraging doctors and medical students to encounter surrealism, to read Kafka and watch David Lynch. Maybe that would help them to become more skilled doctors. The practice of medicine isn’t all about learning facts after all.
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, tagged coincidence, serendipity on September 1, 2009| 1 Comment »
The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it seemed to be a plea for a human approach to medicine, instead of a protocol-imprisoned one. I clicked “buy’ from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I do that quite a lot!). I then picked up a book from my bookshelf as I walked out of my front door. I wanted something to read on the train and I’d just finished reading “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (VERY enjoyable). The book I picked up was “Pharmakon“, by Dirk Wittenborn, and I’d read a review of it in the BMJ about a month before, thought it sounded like just the kind of novel I’d like to read, and clicked “buy” from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I told you I do that quite a lot!)
I settled down on the train and started to read it. I got to page 21 and this little piece of dialogue hit me between the eyes
“But how did you get it here?” “Friends in low places.”
The identical phrase. Twice in the same morning. No, twice in the same hour! What are the chances of that? Have you ever even come across that phrase before?
Spooky?
This story isn’t finished yet. Pharmakon is a great novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The following day, before leaving for work I was browsing through my rss feeds in googlereader and came across this astonishing video –
Go on, watch it. It’s amazing. It’s about how the Hubble telescope was pointed by scientists at a part of the sky where they could see nothing. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Watch the video to see what they saw when they looked where there seemed to be nothing……! Then I left for work, got on the train and continued reading Pharmakon. Page 95. Here’s what I read…..
Caspar tried to distract himself by looking out of the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye
Well, I don’t know about you but it sent shivers down my spine. How does that work?
Posted in art, from the living room, health, life on August 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »
If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme
I saw this quote at an exhibition of the work of Picasso and Cezanne in Aix en Provence. You only need to think about Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St Victoire to understand this. Or think of Picasso’s re-working of the themes of other great painters…Manet, Goya, and so on.
I find this also extremely applicable in health care. A patient never has only one story to tell, because as human beings, life is not like that. Not only is every patient’s story fascinating, but I find every time I meet a patient there’s a new story to hear and explore. Truth is never single. And it’s never complete. It’s always worth taking another perspective, hearing another story, exploring from a different angle
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, psychology on August 12, 2009| 2 Comments »
Everyone has to deal with this paradox – how can I preserve my individuality, yet not be isolated? I think of it as a spectrum, with individuality at one end of the line, and shared membership of a group at the other. Our immune systems are designed to recognise anything that is “not me” and reject it, so our prime defence mechanism is to reject anything that we don’t recognise as consistent with our individuality. We all need a coherent sense of an individual self. We create that through the stories we tell ourselves and others. At the other end of the scale, solitary confinement is one of the worst imaginable punishments, used to control prisoners since time began. We need to belong. We need to know we are not isolated, unrecognised or unloved. I think we all juggle that paradox throughout our whole lives. It’s a dynamic. Some of us hover mainly around the individuality end of the spectrum and others hover around the group end, but we all need to satisfy both needs in our lives.
It’s this photo I took in Japan earlier this year which got me thinking about this. See how almost all the turtles are trying to crowd onto the one little rock! They need to be together! I say “almost all”, because if you look closely you’ll see one little guy out there on the right happily paddling his own way.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, music, perception, photography on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part of the way I work, but sometimes it just becomes a more conscious issue. Last week I had to conduct a training session for a junior doctor about consultation technique and one of the things I mentioned was how doctors are trained to spot patterns. We do that to make a diagnosis for example (“Oh, I know what this is. This is a thyroid problem”) In parallel with this I’m reading the novel “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (and thoroughly enjoying it by the way!), and the part I’m reading just now is about the links between code-breaking, mathematics and music – the link being patterns and the ability to spot patterns. While I was driving at the weekend I caught the end of a discussion in a programme on Radio 4 about musical scales, and Pythagoras’ view of harmony. Didn’t hear enough of it to understand what it was about, but then, last night the chapter I read in the novel explained exactly the role of Pythagoras in the connection between music and mathematics (subject of another post I feel!). How strange, isn’t it?
Here’s a photo I took recently. What I noticed here was the pattern of the flowers. I thought it looked like a constellation of stars in the sky.
Heroes Not Zombies 