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Hugs

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, photography on December 19, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Can hugs make you healthier?

Here’s an interesting study from Carnegie Mellon University. The researcher, Sheldon Cohen, said

We know that people experiencing ongoing conflicts with others are less able to fight off cold viruses. We also know that people who report having social support are partly protected from the effects of stress on psychological states, such as depression and anxiety. We tested whether perceptions of social support are equally effective in protecting us from stress-induced susceptibility to infection and also whether receiving hugs might partially account for those feelings of support and themselves protect a person against infection.

 

The researchers measured over a two week period, frequencies of interpersonal conflicts, the level of perceived social support and receiving hugs in about 400 healthy adults. They then exposed the participants to a common cold virus and monitored in quarantine to assess infection and signs of illness.

The results showed that perceived social support reduced the risk of infection associated with experiencing conflicts. Hugs were responsible for one-third of the protective effect of social support. Among infected participants, greater perceived social support and more frequent hugs both resulted in less severe illness symptoms whether or not they experienced conflicts.

 

“This suggests that being hugged by a trusted person may act as an effective means of conveying support and that increasing the frequency of hugs might be an effective means of reducing the deleterious effects of stress,” Cohen said. “The apparent protective effect of hugs may be attributable to the physical contact itself or to hugging being a behavioral indicator of support and intimacy. Either way, those who receive more hugs are somewhat more protected from infection.”

Hugs, however they actually do their stuff, have long been one of my most favourite ways of staying healthy! (And even if they had no “protective effect”, they’d still be good, wouldn’t they?)

 

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Found in translation

Posted in art, books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on December 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

John Berger writes –

Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the “thing” that is waiting to be articulated.

Interesting, huh? That mechanical translation matches word to word then seeks to get the grammar correct, but is the original idea or meaning translated well that way?

As I begin to live in a country where the language is not my first language, I find that, at least in this first phase, I’m translating all the time. Reading or hearing French and translating it into English in my head to understand the meaning. But already there are phrases which seem to require no translation, and phrases that pop into my head fully formed in French. I’m guessing that gradually I’ll do less and less translation.

But actually although Berger is talking about translating a text from one language into another, I think maybe the same issues apply to all communication. I have an idea or a feeling to express, pick some words, some phrases. I’m translating it into written or spoken language. Aren’t I? Which leads me to wonder about the rich diversity of inner lives. I’m sure we all get that experience, from time to time, where we think that someone else seems to come from another planet. Where their worldview is so different from ours that we don’t even seem to be speaking a common language, despite the fact that a superficial observation would lead to the conclusion that we are indeed speaking the same language.

When Berger mentions the third point of the triangle, I suspect he is thinking of our inner lives. That leads me to three questions today.

  1. How can I know my inner life?
  2. How can I express or show my inner life?
  3. How can I know the inner life of another?

For me, the first involves practices of awareness and reflection, the second, creative acts, and the third requires ongoing dialogue. Isn’t it interesting that all three have no end? I will never know myself completely, never be able to fully express myself, and never fully know another. That makes me feel both excited and humble.

Excited because all that is an adventure, a voyage of discovery, and a constant stream of revelation and wonder. It is the ‘émerveillement du quotidien‘.

Humble because nothing can be known completely, fully or finally. Montaigne knew that with his ‘Que sais-je?‘

Over to you now. How do you answer those three questions? You, personally, in your own life?

  1. How can I know my inner life?
  2. How can I express or show my inner life?
  3. How can I know the inner life of another?

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Bienveillance

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, writing on December 11, 2014| Leave a Comment »

heart in the keystone

I read an interview with the author, Alexandre Jardin, in the new edition of Cles magazine . He was asked why he is optimistic about the future and the first reason he gave hinged around a word which was new to me –  bienveillance – so I looked it up.

It means benevolence, or kindliness.

In his interview he said he thought there was a reaction to the negativity and extremism of fundamentalism and far right politics, and that reaction had the quality of “bienveillance” – benevolence or kindliness.

He has initiated a movement/website called “bleublanczèbres” – I know, sounds strange, huh? Blue and white zebras? Even if you don’t speak French take a look and get a feel for it. The focus is on acting. On doing. Which is totally consistent with my focus this year on the verbs of becoming (search on my site here for “a to z of becoming”). If you scroll down on the bleublanczèbres.fr site you’ll see a whole host of projects. Every project offers you opportunities to get involved and the things you can do are divided into three categories – things you can do if you have a minute, things you can do if you have an hour, and things you can do if you have a day. I love it. He describes the over all project as not a “think tank” but a “do tank”.

Whether you go and look at that idea or not, I think a good takeaway for today would be to ask yourself how you can ACT with benevolence or kindliness to the others you meet or share some time with (at home, in your neighbourhood, or at work or school) today. How about we put benevolence and kindliness at the heart of whatever we are building – make it the keystone.

Try it, and see what it feels like.

Alexandre Jardin seems to believe we can grow the amount of “bienveillance” in the world by our actions. I think he’s right.

As Gandhi said

We must become the change we wish to see in the world

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Imagination and grounds for hope

Posted in books, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, writing on December 8, 2014| 1 Comment »

where I write

Here’s where I write.

The reflection of the sky in the window of my study really caught my eye. In fact, I’d say it caught my imagination.

Imagination.

Too often these days imagination is harnessed to fear. Our daily newsfeed from the media provokes us to think about and worry about the most awful horrors. During the Referendum campaign in Scotland this year the No camp bombarded people day in, day out, with scare story after scare story. How else can a minority continue to hold power over the majority? How else can a fraction of the 1% who grow richer by the day, no, by the minute, continue to exert power over the 99%? Is it any wonder that in democratic societies so many are disenchanted with politics? Where are the politicians and parties with vision….with spectacular, engaging ideas and passionately held values which motivate us to create the solutions to the problems which face us?

It seems to me that we need to fire up peoples’ imaginations.

Where else are we to get our new ideas from? Where else are we to get our hope from?

Ursula Le Guin, the author, received a medal at the National Book Awards recently, and she said this –

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

I so agree.

Hard times seem to be coming. For many, they are here already. We DO need the writers who can see a way ahead and inspire us to create a better future. We do need to writers who “remember freedom” and count it as “our beautiful reward”. And we certainly need writers who can “imagine some real grounds for hope”.

I hope that, daily, little by little, I am becoming one of those writers……

After all, if we can’t imagine real grounds for hope, how do we carry on?

Imagination is such a precious and amazing facility. We can use it to solve problems. We can use it to create – art, music, literature, new thoughts and new acts…..not just, as Ursula Le Guin says “other ways of being”, but other ways of becoming!

If we are to realise our potential to become heroes not zombies, we’re going to need those writers who can fire up our imaginations…….. to think creatively, and, importantly, to DO things differently.

If we believe freedom is possible, aren’t we going to have to use our imaginations to create it?

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An ancient, but insightful teaching on placebo

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, from the viewing room, health, life, personal growth, science on December 4, 2014| 5 Comments »

Rainbow fountain

I’m using this photo of a rainbow appearing in a fountain because I think rainbows are a symbol of hope, as well as being a phenomenon which exists only in the presence of the subject (the observer), and a fountain which is symbolic for me, of the life force, that flowing healing energy which enlivens and heals us all.

Isaac Judaeus lived from 855 to 955. He was physician to the Fatimid rulers of Qairawan in Tunisia, and his works were amongst the first to be translated from Arabic into Latin at the time of the great translations which brought Arabic thought and science to the notice of the West. His books had a big influence on Western medieval medicine, still being read into the 17th century. There’s a small book of his, Guide for Physicians, which only exists in Hebrew translation, where he sets out his ethical conception of medical practice (remember this is writing from the 9th and 10th centuries). I’ve only read a few of his aphorisms, but this one, in particular, caught my eye.

Comfort the sufferer by the promise of healing, even when thou art not confident, for thus thou mayest assist his natural powers

What’s he saying here?

First of all that physicians should comfort the sufferer. Sadly, that’s an element of health care which patients don’t always experience. Shouldn’t physicians always offer care and comfort?

Secondly, they should do this “by the promise of healing”. He goes on to say “even when thou art not confident”. Wouldn’t this be deceit in some situations? One of my earliest experiences as a young doctor was admitting a very elderly, very ill lady to the ward where I worked. Her also very elderly daughters were hugging each other on the seat outside the ward, wringing their hands, crying and upset about what was happening to their mother. I thought I’d comfort them and said “Don’t worry. Your mother is in the right place now. I’m sure she will be fine” They smiled to me just as one of the nurses came out of the ward and called me aside. “That patient you just admitted doctor? She’s just died”. Well, that taught me a lesson. But it didn’t stop me practising with hope, practising with the expectation that there was a potential for things to go well. It just taught me never to assume I could accurately predict the future!

I still believe that. I believe none of us can predict the future….especially not in the case of the particular, the specific, individual circumstance. I was surprised many times throughout my career when patients did so much better than the textbooks would have predicted. So, I often thought, the truth is that as you look forward from this point in time, there are a whole range of potential paths leading from here into the future. In the situation of illness, some of those paths will be largely ones of decline, some of stumbling along, and some of steady, or sudden, improvement. And nobody, but nobody, can accurately predict which path this particular patient will take. Therefore, at each stage of the process, hope is not only possible, but is as reasonable an option as any other.

That’s what I understand about “the promise of healing” – it’s not really a promise, in the sense of a guarantee, but a potential (in the way we say something may be “full of promise”). And I think acting from that perspective contributed to the improvements patients experienced.

That’s the final part of Isaac Judaeus’s aphorism – “for thus thou mayest assist his natural powers”.

I can’t see there is any healing other than that brought about by the human being’s “natural powers”. I’d describe them now in terms of systems theory, or complexity theory. Those natural powers are the power shown in any “complex adaptive system” – the powers of self-regulation, self-defence, self-healing…..the “autopoietic” “self-making capacity” of a person.

Medical acts, medicinal substances, physicians’ interventions are only truly healing when they work with, not against, this capacity. That’s why doctors should always remain humble. It’s not what we do that heals. It’s what we stimulate and/or assist….the astonishing self-healing powers of the human being.

In contemporary thought, these “natural powers” Isaac Judaeus refers to are often wrapped up in the idea of the “placebo effect”, but, sadly, that’s a concept so entangled with ideas of trickery and deceit that the “self-healing” powers get lost in it.

So, here’s what I get from that old aphorism –

  • offer comfort and care
  • offer hope and the promise/potential of healing
  • and in so doing assist the natural or self-healing powers found in every human being

One of my hopes for the future of Medicine would be that we learn many other ways to assist those “natural powers”.

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Time to tackle inequality?

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, humour, life, photography, video on November 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Tiffany time Ginza

Money, money, money……time to change?

Oxfam recently reported that the 85 richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest HALF of the population of the world.

Oxfam said that this elite group had seen their wealth collectively increase by $668m (£414m) a day in the 12 months to March 2014. It found that it would take the world’s richest man – Mexico’s Carlos Slim – 220 years to spend his $80bn fortune at a rate of $1m a day

The rate of inequality is increasing rapidly. Thomas Picketty, the French economist whose book “Capital” has taken the world of economics by storm, has shown that this trend is set to continue because the returns on capital are so much greater than the rate of growth in the economy.

Is this accumulation of wealth into the hands of so few healthy? Is it just? Is it fair? Is it acceptable?

The extent to which inequality causes harm was laid out very clearly a few years back in “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (no relation to Picketty!). Their work showed strong correlations between the degree of equality in a country and the extent of a wide range of social and health problems.

What can we do about it?

The Oxfam report makes a number of suggestions –

With an endorsement from Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, the report said a 1.5% billionaire wealth tax would raise $74bn a year – enough to put every child in school and provide health care in the world’s poorest countries.

A billionaire tax? Is there the political will in the world to deliver that? What else does Oxfam suggest?

a clampdown on tax dodging; investment in universal, free health and education; a global deal to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030; shifting the tax burden from income and consumption to capital and wealth; ensuring adequate safety-nets for the poorest, including a minimum income guarantee; equal pay legislation and promote economic policies to give women a fair deal; and the introduction of minimum wages and moves towards a living wage for all workers.

Herman Daly, who worked for the World Bank from 1988 – 1994 suggests two very interesting measures to tackle this growing problem.

we need a serious monetary diet for the obese financial sector, specifically movement away from fractional reserve banking and towards a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would end the private banks’ alchemical privilege to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest. Every pound and dollar loaned would then be a pound or dollar that someone previously saved, restoring the classical balance between abstinence and investment.

Now, there’s a fascinating idea! That money should represent something REAL in the world! With all these elaborate “financial instruments” money and measures of economic “health” of countries is becoming increasingly detached from real activities, real use of resources and real people. Maybe such a proposal could begin to shift the balance back from capital to labour? He also suggests

a small tax on all financial trades would reduce speculative and computerised short term trading, as well as raising significant revenue

That latter idea is what others call “the Robin Hood tax“.

So, there’s an interesting selection of ideas – a billionaire tax, a move towards 100% reserve requirements and a financial transaction tax. Which political party is trumpeting these ideas? Which political party is prepared to put tackling inequality these ways at the heart of its manifesto for upcoming elections?

Anyone? Anyone?

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Relational science

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on October 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

hollyhock

I recently stumbled across a reference to the paradigm of “relational science”. I hadn’t seen that term before but here are a list of characteristics of “relational science” with each one compared to its “Cartesian” counterpart.

  • PROCESS vs substance
  • BECOMING vs being
  • HOLISM vs atomism
  • RELATIONAL ANALYSIS vs either/or split analysis
  • MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES vs dualistic objectivism/subjectivism split
  • COACTION vs split interaction
  • MULTIPLE FORMS OF DETERMINATION vs efficient/material causality

If you’d like to read about this in more detail google “Fundamental Concepts and Methods in Developmental Science: A Relational Perspective” – which is an article by Willis Overton and Richard Lerner. In that article the authors write –

As a derivation from these relational categories, the relational developmental systems paradigm characterizes the living organism as a spontaneously active, self-creating (autopoetic, enactive), self-organizing, and self-regulating nonlinear complex adaptive system. The system’s development occurs through its own embodied activities and actions operating in a lived world of physical and sociocultural objects, according to the principle of probabilistic epigenesis. This development leads, through positive and negative feedback loops created by the system’s action, to increasing system differentiation, integration, and complexity, directed toward adaptive ends.

Some of this language might be familiar to you from other posts I’ve written on this site, but I’ve never seen them pulled together as “relational science” or come across the concept of “relational developmental systems” before.

If change is the pervasive phenomenon which it seems to be, it makes much more sense to focus on process instead of arbitrarily separated parts. In terms of health, I think this means we need to understand the processes of repair, resilience and effective functioning of healthy organisms, not trap ourselves in the limited focus on pathological change within tissues or organs.

A focus on becoming instead of being also undermines the outcome based approaches to care which are so prevalent. Health is a dynamic, lived experiences, not a series of fixed states.

Multiple perspectives allow to understand illness much more fully – again, not limiting ourselves to the pathological changes within cells, tissues and organs, but taking on board the subjective phenomena of illness (pain, stiffness, breathlessness, dizziness, weakness etc), as well as the narrative of the person who is ill through which we make sense of the experience, and beyond all that, to situate the individual person’s illness within the contexts in which they live – their relationships, family, genes, work, social and environmental conditions etc.

Co-action shows that change comes about not least from the interactions between individuals. This knowledge gives us the opportunity to shift the perspective of health care from that of a doctor treating an object, to that of a doctor and a patient co-creating better health for an individual.

Last but not least, all of this thinking leads us to a consideration of the emergent nature of change in living organisms – which means we can never be completely certain how things are going to go in any individual situation. Something which, surely, should bring some healthy humility to the practice of Medicine.

You’ll see this is all entirely consistent with the features of complex adaptive systems, and of integral theory. And it is also utterly consistent with my blog byline of “becoming not being” which I first encountered in the study of Deleuze’s work.

I really think this “relational science” explains reality much better than the old, reductionist, mechanistic, linear paradigm which is still so prevalent.

Let me finish this post with a re-iteration of Overton and Lerner’s excellent summary –

the living organism as a spontaneously active, self-creating (autopoetic, enactive), self-organizing, and self-regulating nonlinear complex adaptive system

 

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Trying to understand natural phenomena with linear thinking

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy on October 23, 2014| 2 Comments »

Honey bee

Swan reflecting

cogwheel

arches

Alan Watts wrote, in his collection of essays, “Does it matter?”

an enormous amount of current intellectual, philosophical, and even scientific discourse strikes me increasingly as absurd. It is an attempt to translate a nonlinear and multidimensional system of vibrations into a linear (alphabetical or mathematical) system of symbols; and it just can’t be done

Human beings have learned to do amazing things using mathematics, technology and our advances in materialist, reductionist sciences. But these advances tend to fool us into thinking that we can approach all of Life with the same ideas, concepts and methods. Alan Watts nails this error with his usual focused clarity. He wrote that back in the 1960s but 50 years on we are still making the same fundamental mistake.

Living organisms are not machines. Natural ecosystems are not elaborate mechanical technologies. We can’t squeeze open, dynamic phenomena into the same mechanical models which work in the fields of engineering and technology.

 

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Categorical or dynamic

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

left hemi right hemi

In “The Secret Life of Pronouns”, the psychologist, James Pennebaker discusses two different kinds of thinker – categorical or dynamic. I hadn’t heard of this distinction before but in the briefest of nutshells –

A categorical thinker is someone who tends to focus on objects, things, and categories. The opposite end of this dimension are people who are more dynamic in their thinking. When thinking dynamically, people are describing action and changes

That sounds very familiar to me. In fact, its got a lot in common with Iain McGilchrist’s left and right hemisphere approaches to life. The left hemisphere RE-presents reality to itself, labelling, listing, naming, categorising. Whereas the right hemisphere focuses on what he calls “the between-ness”, connections, relationships, or the whole.

For the last few months, I’ve been sharing on this blog a series of posts under the title “The A to Z of Becoming” where I take one verb each week for you to think about, and play with. I deliberately chose verbs because I think it’s the “doing words”, the “action words” which determine the kind of life we experience. This is partly in tune with William Glasser’s Choice Theory, and partly with Deleuze’s focus on change, or difference, which provided me with the fundamental principle of this blog – “becoming not being”.

So, there is something insightful about this distinction, but, the way my mind works, I also find myself balking at the “two value” use of “or” – I SO much prefer “and”! (Which is something I picked up from the General Semanticists, before I even heard of Deleuze.

So, maybe now I can be more aware of when I am thinking categorically and when I’m thinking dynamically (and, yes, I DO have a preference!)

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Healing wounds faster

Posted in books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative, personal growth, psychology on October 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I’m always interested in research which demonstrates ways in which we can support natural healing – after all, there isn’t any other kind of healing, is there?

Here’s an interesting study using writing practice

49 healthy adults aged 64 to 97 years wrote about either upsetting events or daily activities for 20 minutes, three days in a row. After a time lag of two weeks, to make sure any initial negative feelings stirred up by recalling upsetting events had passed, all the subjects had a biopsy on the arm, and photographs over the next 21 days tracked its healing. On the 11th day, 76 percent of the group that did expressive writing had fully healed as compared with 42 percent of the control group.

This particular exercise – writing about an important or upsetting event for 20 minutes each day for three days in a row – has been around for quite some time. James Pennebaker pioneered it, and has studied the effects of writing on health extensively. He says

People who are able to construct a story, to build some kind of narrative over the course of their writing seem to benefit more than those who don’t,” Pennebaker says. “In other words, if on the first day of writing, people’s stories are not very structured or coherent, but over the three or four days they are able to come up with a more structured story, they seem to benefit the most

What’s particularly interesting here is how the creation of story goes along with changing perspectives and understanding better what’s been happening.

Pennebaker’s research developed a computer-based, text analysis program to analyze word counts in different categories, such as emotion words (e.g. happy, sad, angry, joyful), cognitive words (e.g. realize, understand, think), self-reference words (e.g. I, we) and an additional 70 categories. Much to the surprise of the researchers, the change in emotion words didn’t correspond to improved health. The more powerful predictor of improved health was the use of cognitive words–that is, individuals who showed an overall increase in the use of causal words (e.g. because, reason) and insight words (e.g. realize, know, understand) showed improved health.

So it’s not just about telling a story, changing perspective or increasing understanding, it’s about improving immune function and both physical and mental health.

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