Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

The great leap

Posted in books, education, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology, science on May 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Diving for silver?

 

It seems we didn’t evolve into human beings in a smooth, seamless way, but more with a pattern of great leaps and long, slow changes.

One of these great leaps was in the growth of the size of the brain. One of our pre-human ancestors, Homo erectus,  had much smaller brains than we do, but over the course of 200,000 generations (2 million years), their brain size roughly doubled in size, taking them up to about the same size as brain as we humans have (since about 500,000 years ago).

As Stephen Oppenheimer states, rapidly increasing brain size was a key feature that set humans apart from the walking apes that lived before 2.5 million years ago. Since then our brains have trebled in volume. This increase was not gradual and steady: most of it came as a doubling of volume in Homo erectus 2 million years ago. The greatest acceleration in relative brain size occurred before 1.5 million years ago – early in our genus. Modern humans – and Neandrathals – living before the last ice age 20,000 to 30,000 years ago had bigger brains than do people living today. (from)

Interestingly, brain size in humans hasn’t increased over the last half million years (indeed it’s shrunk a bit!), but what has happened is rapidly increasing asymmetries in the brain. It’s not just that our massive cerebral cortexes are asymmetrical, but within each area of the brain there are highly specialised areas. In other words, its a story not just of an increase in size, of adding more and more neurones, but of complexity.

Here’s one of the puzzles about evolution though – how on Earth did brains evolve so quickly? You might say 2 million years doesn’t seem that quick but look at the speed of change.

cerveau_evolution

 

This is why some people refer to the growth of the human brain as the second “Big Bang”…….although I do like the idea of a “Great Leap”!

Read Full Post »

Swans

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, photography on May 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Swan cruising

 

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Swans” (which you can read in full here) ends……

What we love, shapely and pure,
is not to be held,
but to be believed in.

Does that resonate with you? “Not to be held, but to be believed in”? That has echoes for me of the “witnessing not measuring” I woke with the other day. It speaks to the subjective world of values over the objective world of things which can be possessed.

Read Full Post »

Maslow’s hierarchy – becoming fully human

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on May 6, 2014| 1 Comment »

I’ve been familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for some time, but I’ve recently discovered I was only aware of part of his schema.

His idea was that we have many needs which motivate us to act and to choose how to act, and those needs are, to some degree, prioritised with the more basic needs demanding attention before “higher” needs emerge.

His most basic needs are those related to physical security – the needs for food, drink and shelter. Without food, without drink and without shelter we are unlikely to survive.

All human beings need love. We need relationships. If you think that’s not true, pause for a moment and ask yourself why solitary confinement is used as a punishment in prisons, or why “sending to Coventry” ie enforcing social exclusion has historically existed as a community punishment. These love and relationship needs are about emotional security. In Maslow’s hierarchy, first you need to attend to your physical security, then your emotional security.

However, he isn’t finished there. Next up is self-esteem, without which we don’t feel we matter. This is closely bound up in our sense of identity, our “worth”.

So far, so good, and this is where my familiarity ended. But in fact there is a whole other level above these needs in Maslow’s description.

All of these needs so far can be thought of as “deficiency needs”. They are based on “lack” and meeting them is useful to us, so they can be thought of as “utilitarian”, or as about “getting” things.

Above this, Maslow describes “being needs”, which are ends in themselves. They are about “giving”, and are more creative than utilitarian. Being needs are those related to purpose, value and meaning. These needs, he says, “express an overflow of our own being”.

It is these “being needs” which make us “fully human”.

When we recognise that animals occupy only the lower rungs of Maslow’s ladder of needs – those for sustenance, shelter, and some form of social life (but of course not all animals belong to groups) – we can see what this means. We are only fully human when we pass beyond these, as the being or meta-needs that lie ahead can be pursued only by us, or by beings like us ……. As far as we know, no animal wonders why it exists. Or, to put it another way, we are the only animals that do, and that wonder is precisely the threshold between our being only animals and being fully human. (Gary Lachman)

Read Full Post »

From the top of the mountain

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on May 5, 2014| 1 Comment »

sunset over ben ledi

 

I look out at this mountain every day (It’s called Ben Ledi), but how different the world might look to me if I actually climbed to the top of it (I haven’t done that….yet!)

Climbing a mountain for aesthetic reasons was, apparently, a defining moment in the development of human consciousness. The famous climb was that of the Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) in the fourteenth century. He was the first to record climbing a mountain to see the view.

We can say that the origins of our modern appreciation of nature go back to 26 April 1336, when the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), better known as Petrarch, made his famous ascent of Mount Ventoux in France. This event has gone down in history as the first time someone climbed a mountain solely to see the view. Clearly people had scaled heights before, but Petrarch claimed he was the first to do so solely out of curiosity, for what we might call aesthetic reasons. He recounted his excursion in one of the letters making up his Epistolae familiares (1350)

That’s a quote from Gary Lachman‘s “Caretakers of the Cosmos”. He points out that several thinkers and writers reflected on this famous ascent.

Ernst Cassirer saw in Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux ‘testimony to [the] decisive change in the concept of nature that began in the thirteen century’ and which led to nature becoming a ‘a new means of expression’ for human consciousness, as well as to a ‘desire to immediately contemplate nature’.

Cassirer wrote brilliantly about how human beings create a world of symbols. Unlike other creatures which live on their instincts and sensory organs, we humans use symbolism to create a richer world and to live in it quite differently from other forms of life.

what began with Petrarch’s ascent, for Gebser, was the age of what he called ‘perspectival consciousness’, the perception and representation of the world from a unique human vantage point.

Jean Gebser’s “Ever-Present Origin” describes an evolution of consciousness from the archaic, to magical, to mythical and mental, and up to the present evolution of  an “integral” form.

I’m sure you can discover many other references to Petrarch’s ascent, but as I look out again at Ben Ledi, I’m able to imagine being at the top and to see Scotland from there. That profoundly influences my sense of who I am and my place in the world. I wonder what it’s like to live in a country without mountains?

Read Full Post »

Who are you?

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy on May 1, 2014| 1 Comment »

It’s very common for us to say something like “My head is sore”, or “My stomach aches”, or even “I have a rash” when we experience one of those symptoms. So who is it who has this head, stomach or rash? This way of talking confirms our feeling that we “have” a body, but that our bodies are not us. Stop and think about it for a moment. Are you your body?

You might answer that your body is part of you but it isn’t YOU. That the you who has this body is maybe your mind?

But then we do the same thing with our minds too, don’t we? We say “I’ve lost my mind”, or “I’m out of my mind with worry”. Who is the “I” who is referring to this mind?

So your body isn’t you. Your mind isn’t you. But both your mind and your body are a part of you.

The physicalist approach to this claims that this “you” which you experience is an illusion. It’s just something your brain makes up.

But stop and think about that one for a moment. If “you” are an illusion, who is having this illusion?

This is what Mary Midgley is exploring in her latest book, “Are you an illusion?”

I highly recommend you read it. It’s short, and it’s an easy but deeply thought provoking read.

She asks of those who write the books claiming that only the physical is real, and that the subjective sense of self is an illusion

Unkind observers sometimes enquire who, in that case, actually writes the books that expound this doctrine? Do the brain cells really do this work on their own?

She quotes the neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, saying in an operating theatre, “This was all there was to Sarah, or indeed any of us…..we are but sludgy brains” and Colin Blakemore saying “The human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions” and she responds

Thus if we want to understand why (for instance) Napoleon decided to invade Egypt or Russia, what we need is not – as we might think – some knowledge of the political background and of Napoleon’s state of mind, but simply facts about the state of his brain, which alone can account for his action.

Does the claim that you are only your brain cells, or only your DNA, ring true for you?

The materialist credo rules that thoughts, not being physical, cannot cause physical events. And as we know from every activity of our lives that thoughts actually can and do affect those events – that they are often all too effective, producing practical results in the world even when we wish they wouldn’t – this doctrine puts materialism into a radical conflict with reality.

This is the nub of it for me. These materialist beliefs don’t only not ring true, they don’t adequately explain reality. So why are they so prevalent? One of the authors she draws on to answer this is Iain McGilchrist who has shown us how the left and right hemispheres of the brain work together to produce and integrated understanding from their two very different ways of approaching reality. She quotes him saying

Mind has the characteristics of a process more than of a thing; a becoming, a way of being rather than an entity

This is almost identical to the way Dan Siegel and the Interpersonal Neurobiologists put it – “the mind is a process of regulation of energy and information flow”.

She hits the nail on the head time and again. Let me finish with this one

The bizarre anti-self campaign which is the main subject of this book is surely intended, among other things, to put us off taking notice of everybody’s inner life: to persuade us that this is a trivial, contemptible subject by the simple device of pretending that it isn’t there.

 

Read Full Post »

Witnessing not measuring

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, photography on April 26, 2014| 2 Comments »

Seedling

 

I woke up up the morning with this phrase in my head “witnessing not measuring”, which was quickly followed by “witnessing not controlling”.

I’ve been wondering about that since.

That’s the essence of my work. I sit with people, engage with them, enable them to tell their stories and be heard without judgement which leads to understanding and recognition. Everything I do therapeutically is intended to support and stimulate the individual’s self-healing. I think this is something we often forget in health care – there really is only one way to heal, and that’s by the person’s own ability to self heal. Stop and think for a moment. If you have a cut, how does it heal up? If you break a bone how does it knit back together? If you have a viral infection how does your throat return to normal? Ultimately it’s done to your amazing capacity to self heal and self repair. Any therapy should assist that process if it is to be effective. It’s not ME who produces healing. It’s not my therapies which produce healing. It’s the patient’s own healing system which does the work.

And I can’t control that. Nobody can accurately predict the outcome of any particular treatment given to any particular individual on any particular day.

We like to pretend that by making measurements we can predict and so control. It’s an illusion.

I amazed every single working day by human beings and their amazing healing powers. Witnessing this is powerful. Understanding and caring come with the witnessing, and therapies are then tried within that context. It’s humbling.

Today I read in Gary Lachman’s excellent “Caretakers of the Cosmos”

Love, for Scheler, was the sine qua non of phenomenology, which in its essential form, is a way of allowing the world to be what it is, without interference by human concepts or aims. It is, in a sense, a way of listening to what the world has to say to us, from which follows the recognition that it has something to communicate, and is not simply a vast inanimate machine.

I think, by the way, there is a lot to be gained from witnessing yourself……whether through mindful meditation, reflective writing, or however you might do that for yourself.

Maybe that’s the third variation of the phrase I woke with – witnessing not judging.

Read Full Post »

Drawn towards, or competing against

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on April 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

In Mary Midgley’s excellent new work, “Are You an Illusion?”, which sets out strong arguments against reductionist materialism, one of the issues she raises is about the competitive basis of the physicalist approach so dominant in the world today. The Neo-Darwinist emphasis on “survival of the fittest” is too simplistic alone to explain evolutionary change. This is not a new argument of course, but one of the points Mary Midgley makes is about how before the emergence of this theory, the more dominant strain of thought was magic….which was based on attraction. She quotes Marcilio Ficino

“All the power of magic consists in love…..The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another in virtue of their natural sympathy. The parts of the world, like the members of one animal….are united among themselves in the community of a single nature. From their communal relationship a common love is born and from this love a common attraction, and this is the true magic….Thus the loadstone attracts iron, amber, straw, brimstone, fire; the Sun draws leaves and flowers towards itself, the moon, the sea.”

This general assumption about the importance of attraction is surely just as rational a place to start from as the contrary one, popular today, that the universal force is competition.

Thought provoking.

Imagine how the world would be if we put love and attraction at the heart of our thinking instead of how to succeed at the expense of others?

Read Full Post »

From a gift to a poison

Posted in from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health on April 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lewis Hyde, in the excellent, “The Gift” writes about the origins of the word “dose”

The French etymologist Benveniste writes: ‘There is a … medical usage in which [the Greek word] dósis denotes the act of giving, whence develops the sense of the amount of medicine given, a “dose” … This sense passed by loan translation into German, where Gift, like Gr.-Lat. dósis, was used as a substitute for venēnum, “poison.”

How fascinating that it began as a gift, and how sad that it turned into poison!

Read Full Post »

What can you fit a mind into?

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth on April 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »

In the wonderful “The Republic of Tea” Mel says

The whole problem with Western civilisation is that ever since the Greeks we’ve been trying to squeeze the mind into the brain and it won’t fit.

Wonderful!

My first thought was Alva Nöe’s point in “Out of our Heads” – “Brains don’t have minds, people do”

Then I recalled Dan Seigel’s definition of mind as being an “embodied inter-relational process of regulation of energy and information flow” – which certainly doesn’t fit the mind into the brain!

Andy Clark talks about the “extended mind” in his “Supersizing the Mind” –

According to BRAINBOUND, the (nonneural) body is just the sensor and effector system of the brain, and the rest of the world is just the arena in which adaptive problems get posed and in which the brain-body system must sense and act.
Maximally opposed to BRAINBOUND is a view according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment. Call this model EXTENDED. According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realise certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops; loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.

And then there was that recent map of body emotions which showed where we locate different emotions (certainly not just in our brains!)

But the mention of the brain-based focus of Western civilisation since the time of the Greeks producing such limits to our understanding, I couldn’t help thinking again of Iain McGilchrist and how I’m sure he’d say it’s not just that we’ve been trying to squeeze the mind into the brain, but that we’ve been tried to squeeze it into the left hemisphere!

Read Full Post »

Scheler’s hierarchy

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on March 31, 2014| 5 Comments »

You might be familiar with Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, but perhaps more interesting is Max Scheler’s “hierarchy of values”.

IMG_0572

At the base of this pyramid are feelings of bodily sensations such as “a tickle, an itch, a fragrance, a taste, pleasure, pain, hunger, thirst, intoxication”. These are sometimes referred to as feelings of “utility” – because the “usefulness” of a sensation is the extent to which they are “agreeable or disagreeable”

Above these feelings of utility are “vital feelings” – which are those of the lived body as a whole – “health, vigor, strength, tiredness, illness, weakness, advancing age”

Then he describes those psychic feelings which have an ego quality – “happiness, sympathy, enjoyment, sadness, sorrow, anger, jealousy” – those which generate our values of beauty, truth and justice.

At the top of the pyramid are “holy feelings”, which come with a kind of dissolution of the ego – “bliss, awe, wonder, catharsis, despair, shame, remorse, anxiety, pangs of conscience, grief” – none of which can be reasoned with, but, rather are “heart-felt”

It can take a wee bit to get your head around this, but I do think it’s worthy of exploration.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »