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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

Music and the geography of the spirit

Posted in from the living room, from the music room, life, music on November 25, 2007| 4 Comments »

I’m enjoying a series on BBC Scotland just now. It’s called Scotland’s Music with Phil Cunningham. Phil’s an amazing contemporary Scottish traditional musician and each part of this short series examines the relationship between some aspect of Scotland and Scottish music. This week’s episode (Part 4) was entitled ‘Heaven and Earth’ and explored what Phil called the soul of Scottish music. I loved this and understood with every fibre of my being. I liked the way he showed such diverse ‘spiritual’ inspirations for Scottish music, from superstitions and beliefs in magical creatures like selkies, to Christian traditions both Protestant and Catholic, to the ‘spiritual’ inspiration of the land itself. It’s this last that means most to Phil, and it’s this last that means most to me, but to range over such a diversity of sources for inspiration to produce music that connects the individual to something much greater, be it Life, or God, or the Natural World is quite unusual.

Take a look at the BBC site dedicated to this series. In particular take a look at episode 4, ‘Heaven and Earth’ and play the video entitled ‘Soraidh Leis An Ait’ which is played by all the musicians appearing in this part. If you’ve any Scottish blood in you, I swear this will touch your soul! And even if you’re not Scottish, Tommy Smith playing his sax in the Hamilton Mausoleum is enchantingly beautiful.

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Squeezing the world into pigeon-holes

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life on October 30, 2007| 6 Comments »

Don’t you hate it when people judge you? And don’t you hate it when people assume they know all about you because they’ve stuck you in some pigeon hole? You know the kind of thing. I mentioned in another post sitting on the train recently next to two men who spent the whole journey dismissing huge swathes of humanity – doctors they said were only interested in one thing – money; Iraq was always a hell-hole, now it was just a hell-hole with less buildings; everyone who lives below the Mason-Dixon line is an in-breeder……and on and on and on. These are not uncommon conversations.

One way we function as human beings is to focus on part of reality, classify it and judge it. We do that to try and get a sense that we understand the world and we also do it to try and control our experience of reality. The thing is this strategy brings loads of bad side-effects. For a start, generalised judgement stops thought. Once you judge a whole class of something, you stop thinking about it. By that I mean you stop seeing, stop hearing, stop experiencing the context-sensitive reality of the individual member of that “class”.

I find this way of thinking very, very disturbing. I understand why it’s there, and I know that human beings are incapable of experiencing the totality of experience as it is. We can only perceive and experience aspects of reality at any given moment. But when we are not aware of the enormous down-side of this human function then we are no longer living in the real world. Instead we limit our experience of reality to our pigeon-hole set. We see everything through the thick discoloured lenses we’ve made for ourselves.

This happens in all areas of life. In Medicine, it happens with diagnoses. How sad it is to see people classified as a “case of X” and how much more sad it is to meet a person who can only see themselves as a “case of X”. When we squeeze every patient into a tightly defined diagnostic box we stop seeing them as who they are. People with mental illnesses experiences this a lot. Once they’ve been given a “diagnosis” they often find that all of their experience is interpreted by the doctors as part of that diagnosis. This is what leads to bad and dangerous prescribing. I recently saw a patient who had suffered from a variety of symptoms for the last couple of years. He was investigated at the outset of the illness and given a particular diagnosis. The diagnosis was wrong. But despite the fact that every time he saw his doctors he told them that certain treatments weren’t working they wouldn’t listen. The doctors said they were prescribing the right medicine for his problem. But they weren’t! Luckily, he got sicker and ended up with other doctors and a different investigation which revealed the true diagnosis. Since getting the appropriate treatment for that condition he’s not in a wheelchair any more.

We also stop experiencing the reality of the rich uniqueness of every human being when we classify them according to race, religion, accent, or life-style. It’s sad and it’s such a stupid way to live. Next time you catch yourself, or somebody else, saying that “all X are Y”, challenge them. All X are never all Y! And if you think they are, you’ve lost touch with reality.

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Conversations with sugarmouse

Posted in from the living room, health, writing on October 27, 2007| 1 Comment »

One of the great and surprising joys of blogging is the making of connections with people who you’d probably never ever have met in any other way. It’s one of the best reasons to blog in my opinion. I’ve made a good new friend with a fellow blogger who goes by the name of sugarmouseintherain. We’ve been having email discussions as well as sharing things on our respective blogs and one of his ideas was to have a conversation on the net. (the newer Web 2.0 technologies really make this possible – we used google documents – if you don’t know this tool, google it and explore it!)

Sugarmouse has posted our first conversation about health and healing on his blog today. Please follow this link to go to his blog and read it. We’d both be really keen to have your feedback which you can do by either commenting on the post on his site or by emailing us.

And why is he called sugarmouseintherain? You can find that out on his blog too!

Thankyou for taking the lead on this sugarmouse. It’s really great to make new friends this way.

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Improving health by aiming at something else….

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, science, Uncategorized on October 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

 Now, here’s an interesting study. It’ll soon be published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health. There’s a way of considering the amount of health benefit from an intervention. It’s to assess the number quality-adjusted life-year gains per dollar invested. That is, not just benefits in terms of greater life expectancy, but also a measure of quality of life in those years. It’s a cost benefit analysis so the economic payoff is measured by assessing how much the intervention costs so you can work out how much it would cost to get the benefit of the better, longer lives. These researchers claim to have found an intervention which brings greater payoffs in these terms than most other interventions. What amazing new drug is this? Or is it a life-style change?

Nope.

You’re going to be surprised.  It’s reducing class sizes at school!

The class size reduction was from 22 – 25 kids per class, down to 13 – 17. From kindergarten through to Grade 3. The better education, produced better educational outcomes leading to better, less hazardous jobs and the ability to move out of poorer housing etc. I won’t bother you with the details of the figures here (you can follow the link and read more yourself if you like). But what I think makes this study especially fascinating is thinking out of the box.

These days we hear endless claims for technological fixes – from wonder drugs, to vaccines, to new claims for possible genetic engineering. But, historically, the greatest improvements in the health of populations do not come from medical interventions, they come from things like improving water supplies, sanitation, reducing overcrowding and so on. There’s been an enormous movement towards looking at smaller and smaller parts over the last couple of hundred years – reductionism. In the future we’ll see the greatest health gains by focusing holistically, considering the environments and contexts in which individuals are embedded and studying what happens within these systems instead of exclusively studying what happens at molecular levels.

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Living with uncertainty

Posted in from the living room, life, personal growth on October 15, 2007| 14 Comments »

Two things got me thinking about certainty, uncertainty and risk on the way to work today.

First off, as I started to descend the two flights of concrete steps to the low-level platform at Queen Street Station, I heard this disembodied voice of a Scotrail employee saying “Customers are reminded to take care on the stairs and use the handrail provided”. I realised that they’d installed an automatic system which would play this message repeatedly every time somebody stepped onto the staircase. AAAAAARRRGGGHHH! I felt like shouting! “Thankyou for reminding me! I was just about to throw myself recklessly head-first down your concrete steps cocking a snoot at your shiny metal handrail! I won’t do it now! You reminded me just in time!” Good grief! What next? What with hot water taps that have warnings that say “This water is hot” (!!! Really???!!) So, that was my first thought. What is all this about warnings of all the terrible things that might happen these days? A variation of this same theme is surely those government bods who reckon they can keep us safe from terrorism by confiscating toiletries and baby milk before people get on planes!

Then I get on the train (having successfully managed yet again to negotiate a whole flight of stairs without falling down!) and I pick up a copy of the free newspaper “Metro”. My eye is caught by a piece about genetic tests to predict what diseases we might get, and here’s this quote from a woman in England who has a family history of breast cancer and she’s saying how great it would be to have genetic tests that told us exactly what diseases we were going to get and goes on to express her preference for the development of tests that would tell you exactly when you are going to die too!

What do you think about that?

Would you like to have a test that would tell you exactly what disease you were going to get and your exact time and date of death? (Of course, no test in the world will ever predict the chances of you dying in an accident – make sure you pay attention to that Scotrail message when negotiating stairs!)

But, seriously, do we want such certainty? Do you?

In Reckoning With Risk, Gerd Gigerenzer, repeatedly returns to Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

But this really is at the core of a tricky issue. As far as I’m aware, human beings are the only creatures endowed with an imagination capable of enabling them to imagine their own deaths. Psychologists say that all fears are, at source, ‘existential’ fears (the fear of death, of ending, of non-existence). This knowledge of this one certainty can make life difficult for people. Many people consult doctors because they are afraid that a symptom is a feature of a mortal disease. Many people are trapped in routines because they fear what might happen if they try something different, or stray into previously unexplored territory. We even have a certain type of “scientist” who seeks to present every one of their findings and opinions as the certain Truth, and there are goodness knows how many experts who reckon they know for sure what is best for us!

OK, I accept that I need security in life. We all do. If I really couldn’t reasonably expect to travel to work tomorrow why would I even set out? But these things are variables and probabilities. There really are no guarantees – well, except death and taxes (Benjamin was right again)

Tell me what you think.

How much do you want certainty? What kind of risks are you prepared to take?

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Life

Posted in from the living room, life on September 2, 2007| 3 Comments »

What are the characteristics of Life? (as opposed to those of inanimate objects and the dead?)

It’s a strange truth that if you consult a textbook of biology you probably won’t find an entry in the index for “life” (it’s equally strange that the standard medical textbooks, such as Davidson’s Principles of Medicine, don’t have an index entry for “health”)

Varela and Maturana at MIT invented a word – “autopoiesis” – for what they thought was the key characteristic of living organisms. They explain that autopoiesis means “self-making capacity” and say that only living organisms can do this.

I think Life has at least these two main characteristics –

  1. the capacity to detect and respond to change AND
  2. growth.

We are continually perceiving and sensing the world and constantly responding to all the signals we are picking up. We respond to maintain our health (a function known as homeostasis describes the organism’s capacity to maintain internal stability). But we don’t just maintain an adaptive status quo……we grow.

Growth involves development, expansion, and novelty. Growth is our creative function.

Zombies don’t perceive and adapt. Heroes are consciously aware, reflective and responsive.

Zombies don’t grow. Heroes accept challenges and grow in the process.

That’s why I think our true nature is as heroes, not zombies.

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Here comes autumn – coming to fruition

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography on August 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

blackberries, originally uploaded by bobsee.

This season, moving out of summer and into autumn, is a time of berries coming to fruition.
These ones look juicy and ripe. They are the advance guard. The first to come to this stage.
Ripe. Ready. Just waiting to be picked and enjoyed. I never buy berries like this but I do enjoy them as I walk to work only at this time of year. This is one of the tastes of autumn for me.
What tastes, colours, smells, do you associate with particular seasons of the year?

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Here comes autumn – endings or beginnings?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, photography on August 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

brown leaves falling, originally uploaded by bobsee.

Look at this! I took this photo this morning (August 30th) – look how many leaves have turned brown and fallen already!
So its the start of the season of autumn (or Fall as people in the US call it)
Is this the season of endings or beginnings?
It’s the end of summer (OK, in Scotland we’re thinking “what summer?”) but its traditionally been the time to start a new academic year. In the UK doctor training jobs all start for the first time after graduating at this time of year.
Of course some of you will be saying every ending is a beginning and I’m sure that’s true too – its all about what perspective you view it from isn’t it?
But what does it say to you? On balance, does this time of year give you turn over a new brown leaf feelings of starting anew? Or does it feel a time of endings and loss?

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The geography of self

Posted in from the living room, life, photography on August 29, 2007| 3 Comments »

Thistle, originally uploaded by bobsee.

How do we get a sense of self?
I think “self” is created by the narratives we tell ourselves and others. We make our own sense of self from our experiences, mixing them constantly with our memories with our imaginations.
One of our key capabilities as humans is language and our ability to handle metaphors is at the root of this.
So, what I suggest you do is to see if you can become aware of the stories you tell yourself every day. The ones you create the sense of “Who am I?” from. There are many. Really many. But one that came to my mind was provoked by the sight of this thistle.
I took this photo of a thistle on my morning walk to work the other day. This is SUCH a powerful symbol for me. The thistle is Scotland. And I am Scottish. This place, this physical place, where I live, towered over by Stirling Castle high on its rock, surrounded by green fields stretching to the brown and grey and green hills, this is where I come from. This is where I belong. My family goes back in this town for a couple of centuries and more. I can feel my roots here. I feel sustained here. The energy, the colour, the smell of the air, the sunshine and the rain, the rocks, the trees and the plants, they all imbue me with a strong sense of who I am.
What’s your geography of self?
How does the place where you live, the physical environment in which you live, create your sense of who you are?

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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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