Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Creating reality together

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I’m pretty keen on biology….as you might imagine for a doctor! I’m interested in how the body works, the way the different cells, organs and tissues all function so beautifully together. I’m interested in discovering the connections within us with all the incredible feedback loops and cascades. I find it all fascinating.

But it was very clear to me from very early on in my work as a family doctor that human beings can’t be reduced to biology. There’s more to us than biology can explain. I often refer to the three flows which pulse through our very beings every moment of every day – the flows of materials, energy and information. Biology is pretty good at shining a light on the first two flows, but its the third one where things start to get so uniquely interesting when thinking about human beings.

One of the aspects of information flow is art. Now, I don’t mean to reduce art to information, or at least, not in the sense that information is “data”. I mean information as signals, not simply data. Information as meanings. So language, music and visual art all connect with us, and our whole being responds. You can blush because someone says something to you. Your heart can race because you hear a certain song. You can catch your breath, or feel a range of emotions, from disgust to delight, when you see a work of visual art.

Our lived environment is not just physical. We imbue it with meaning. We react to particular colours, designs, patterns, sounds, scents and physical touch. A particular taste can set off a cascade of memories….one of the most famous examples being Proust’s “madeleines”.

I think both street art, and advertising, affect us deeply. The images trigger certain responses within us…..maybe certain emotions, certain thoughts, or particular memories. But whatever they do, they change us. And because we are not compartmentalised, those changes ripple through our entire being. We don’t keep them in our heads.

I think we’re often quite unaware of the images and art around us. They often exert their influence in sub-conscious ways. But I like to be aware of them. I like to notice them, stop, and reflect.

In this photo I’ve captured both street art and advertising. What do you feel when you see them? What do you think when you see them? What effect do they have on you? (If any….because of course we are all affected differently by different images)

We co-create our lived reality, we humans. We do it collectively and we do it as individuals, creating and publishing, or “showing” our creations. We do that whether we are artists, or writers, or whether we simply talking to each other. We change the lived environment by constantly changing our behaviour, our language and by using our creative powers.

What kind of reality are you going to co-create today?

Read Full Post »

Everything is connected

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 4, 2020| 1 Comment »

Maybe one the most important concepts at the base of all my understanding of people, of Life, and of the world, is that everything is connected. Nothing exists in isolation.

If I want to understand a patient, a friend, a relative, or myself, I have to follow as many of the threads which create the rich tapestries of Life as I can. I can never know them all. The daily judgement is deciding that I know enough to act, keep an open mind and awareness, and watch to see how things change after the act. I don’t really know any other way to live.

In scientific terms we humans are “open systems”. That means we don’t have impermeable walls or borders which separate us out from the rest of existence. It is just not possible to know an individual in total isolation. Our whole being is continuously immersed in flows of materials, energies and information which change us as we change them. We are influenced by, and impacted by, the environment in which we live, the food and drink we consume, the behaviours and emotions of other human beings, and the experiences of all non-human life every day. And vice versa……everything we do, what we consume, what we discard and excrete, how we act towards other humans and other forms of life changes the planet we share every day.

I loved hearing the stories patients had to tell me. Every single story was unique. Every story was a story of events, experiences, and change as a result of interactions between the person and their vast interconnected webs of environment and relationships.

I was taught that good medical practice is based on making a good diagnosis. A diagnosis is an understanding. It was my job to listen to the story, examine the patient, and, if necessary order some tests, to discern the patterns within their experience which I had been taught to recognise. In my early years as a doctor those patterns were almost exclusively pathologies, or diseases. Over time I came to understand that diagnosis, or “understanding”, needed to be both deeper and wider than that. It wasn’t enough to name the disease. A doctor had to learn to see and understand the person who was experiencing the disease. That shift from pathology to person involved teasing out the threads, exploring the influences, the impacts and the personal responses.

Each of us have distinct patterns which occur and re-occur throughout our lives. Patterns of thoughts, emotions, behaviours run through our stories. Patterns of memory, experience and fantasy cycle and spiral across whole lifetimes.

They are amazing. They are remarkable. They are astonishing. I can’t see a time will come when I’m done with this. It seems to me that every day there are new patterns to discern, threads to follow, new connections to find and to create.

What a life! What a remarkable, awe-inspiring, wonderful phenomenon is Life.

Read Full Post »

A time to reflect

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on October 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I find that the turning points of the year are a good time for some reflection. We’ve just passed through an equinox last week and, here in France, the summer heat has gone, and autumn has most definitely begun. Autumn is one of my favourite seasons (I have three other favourites! Ha! Ha!) and I’m looking forward to the leaves starting to turn golden, yellow, red and orange….gorgeous. But just as New Year is a like a gate to path through, watched over by Janus, the one with two faces, one looking forward and the other looking back, I think all these turning points are like gates.

Well, what a year 2020 has been so far! I know that Life is truly unpredictable but we sure didn’t see this coming, did we? For me, there are other factors in play which have turned 2020 into a bit of a waiting game. I find I’m constantly waiting for something….when is the virus going to go away? When are the restrictions going to be lifted? When can I travel again? Will there be a vaccine? Will there be new effective treatments for people who catch the virus? When are the Brexit trade negotiations going to be completed? How is that going to affect currency exchanges and therefore my income? When are the new regulations on residency coming in here in France, and when will my application for permanent status be approved? I could go on…….

You’ll have your own list, but do you notice something? Those are all about the future? They are all about what might happen, what is said to be going to happen but hasn’t happened yet…..and so on. So, let’s take a moment to turn the other way and look back. Let’s take a moment to reflect.

I think this pandemic is having impacts which are both personal and collective. It’s provoking many of us to think about how we live our lives. It’s making us think about what’s important. It’s a brake on that human tendency to take things for granted. I’ve read a couple of articles in the French Press recently taking another look at Sartre, and what he said about freedom during the time of the Nazi occupation. There’s something about living more consciously within limits and constraints which changes what we think about freedom, and which heightens the value of conscious presence. So, I’ve found that. That now, more than ever, I’m repeatedly drawn back to the here and now. I’m becoming more aware, making more conscious choices.

Let me give you an example or two. I’m more conscious now of what I eat, wanting to have a diet which encourages health and resilience. So, I’ve discovered new places to buy locally produced foods (which haven’t been shipped from half way across the planet) and I’m actually delighting in shopping trips for fresh fruit and veg, for locally sourced foods like honey, small farm meats and dairy and so on. I have also researched supplements and started boosting my levels of Vitamins C and D, and my levels of Zinc. The top three I identified as being important in immune health. I’m also more conscious, you might even say wary, about going anywhere. I don’t just pop out anywhere unthinkingly any more. I make a more conscious, deliberate choice.

Another positive change for me is a deepening of my connection with the natural world. I’m living in a house on the edge of a village in the heart of cognac-making vineyard country. The house has a garden with a fabulous mulberry tree right in the middle. The tree has grown enormously since we came to live here. I’m convinced we like each other! So, I spend as much time outside as I can. I’ve noticed that the days have been much quieter. Not all days, but there are certainly more days which sound like Sundays. And I’m hearing more bird calls and conversations than ever before. I’ve read about others having similar experiences…..as if humans stepping back a bit has allowed other creatures to step forward. I’m also convinced that spending time in the open air is good for, and time engaged with Nature is even better.

Collectively I think this virus has brought us an enormous opportunity to see things more clearly and to speak up for change. It’s clear that our health services have been inadequate and precarious. We shouldn’t have to be exhorted to “Protect the NHS” – the NHS is there to protect US! It’s clear that huge swathes of society are living precarious lives…..the poor, the long term sick, black and ethnic minorities, and so on. It’s clear that care of the elderly is inadequate and vulnerable. It’s clear that millions of people carry out vitally important jobs but they are undervalued and underpaid. It’s clear that globalisation in favour of capital has made whole countries less resilient, with elaborate distant supply chains breaking down. It’s clear that education is a mess and stuck in some very old ways of working. It’s clear that mass spectacles, mass tourism, mass anything really, just aren’t such a clever idea.

So what? you might ask?

Well, in my work as a doctor, I always thought that everything hinged on making a good diagnosis. If I didn’t see clearly what the patient was experiencing and couldn’t make sense of it, then treatment was going to be partial at best, and useless or harmful at worst. So I think we need to start by making some good diagnoses here….and diagnosis, for me, involves a kind of reflection.

Imagining, creating and spreading the possible solutions comes next. But we’d better start doing that soon!

How about you? What comes up for you as you reflect on your own life and our collective lives in the light of the 2020 pandemic so far?

Read Full Post »

Changing the world

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on September 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

We change the world every day. Just by living. Here’s a photo of a path. It shows a distinct gathering of seeds, leaves and other plant materials in a curving line. You know, instinctively, or because you’ve seen something like this before, that water has passed this way. Sure, maybe an artist did it. Maybe someone like Andy Goldsworthy, the sculptor, who creates fabulous works of arts from natural materials, but, no, somehow we just know, this particular trail was not created by any human hand.

One of the things which fascinated me when I came across this was the fact that the creator of this “natural art”, or, more mundanely, if you wish, of these marks, was water. Water carried these seeds, leaves, etc then it seeped away, leaving them in its wake.

I look at this and I think….this is what we do, we humans. Day by day, moment by moment, actually, we change the world, we leave our traces, we gather some things together, and discard them, or set them aside. We metabolise what we take into our bodies, and we excrete the products of that metabolism. We change the world with every breath.

This is happening on such a massive scale now that some scientists refer to this present time as the “anthropocene” – because human beings are now producing large scale changes to the very geology of the planet (and certainly to the biology of the planet!)

I don’t think we can avoid this. We change the world by existing. But we can become more aware. We can, individually, and collectively, try to understand just what changes we are bringing about. We can use that understanding to ask ourselves if we want to make other choices, if we want to try to make different changes.

And yes, I think that can be applied at all kinds of scale. If we develop more inter-disciplinary, integrated sciences and arts, then I believe we have the chance to reach better understandings, and make different choices. The key, I believe, lies in exploring the trails, seeking the connections, discovering the influences and factors involved in any change, and shifting our focus from trying to control to trying to understand reality.

How does the world change when we concentrate on competition and consumption? How does the world change when we concentrate on co-operation and sustainability? How does the world change when we prioritise quantities, data and statistics? How does the world change when we prioritise qualities, experiences and relationships? How does the world change when we prioritise money? How does the world change when we prioritise health? You get the idea….feel free to add, or to choose, your own.

Read Full Post »

Direction of flow

Posted in books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on September 26, 2020| 4 Comments »

I’ve got a shelf on one of my bookcases where I keep some of the books which have most significantly changed the way I think. OK, to be honest, there are too many books in that category to fit on one shelf but I do like the little collection I’ve gathered together there. I think of them as sources of light – they have all shone some light of illumination for me – and they still have the power to do that.

I thought of one of the insights I gained from those books when I looked at this photo I took in a museum in San Sebastian. It’s a photo of a window, but isn’t it a strange kind of window? I mean, you can’t see anything out of it…..you can’t see the outside world from inside the room. But then I thought, what it is doing is letting the light in. What it’s doing is illuminating the room, changing what and how you see the world around you as you stand inside this room. And it isn’t just any old window, is it? It’s not just a plain rectangle of clear glass. It’s filtering the light, softening it, changing it, before it enters the room. The window might be passive, but it’s still actively changing the experience of being in this room. Being in this room would be different if the window was different.

All that got me thinking about flow, because that’s one of the key insights I gleaned from some of the books on my special books shelf……that all that exists emerges from within a constant flow – a flow of material substances (atoms, molecules, compounds etc), a flow of energies (light waves, sound waves, heat, gravity, strong and weak forces of attraction etc), and flow of information (symbols, words, language etc) All three of those flows are modified by contexts, changed by the world around the perceiving, experiencing subject.

I find that becoming aware of these flows makes me appreciate the world more, makes me wonder more, makes me delight more. I love to look for the connections, for the relationships and bonds between each of us, and between us and the non-human world. I love to consider the directions of these flows – to visualise the flow of materials, energies and information which are surging through my being – and to consider how they are changed within me – how they are modified just because I exist – how they are modified by the choices I make.

That makes me aware of my role as a window in other people’s worlds too. How do I illuminate (or shade) the worlds of others? How do I modify these flows and send them onwards to enter the lives of others?

Because one thing is for sure – I don’t exist in isolation – I emerge from within these three genres of flow and I affect the lives of others as I modify and/or pass on these molecules, energies, words, stories, images and ideas. So maybe I should pay attention to how I am living and how I am interacting with all these currents, these waves, these whole rivers of flow.

Maybe I should be aware of what kind of window onto the world I am, and what kind of window you are too. How do we change the rooms/communities/worlds we each live in?

Read Full Post »

The green Life Force

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on September 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Oh I just LOVE how green this image is! Such a rich green environment pulses with Life! It declares diversity, vibrancy, energy and flourishing. This green is the expression of THE core emotion experienced in some way or another by everything that lives – SEEKING (See Panksepp’s work on that – which I’ve written about in my book, “And not Or“)

All forms of Life drive themselves forward to find what they need to survive and thrive. This is what he calls “Seeking” behaviour. I chose those words carefully there…..”drive themselves forward…” because that’s another defining characteristic of living forms…..they all demonstrate “self-organising” capacities. They move, grow, change, act, according to movement and forces within themselves. Machines, on the other hand, need to be created and driven by external forces. In fact, Maturana and Varela refine this “self-organising” capacity, noting that living forms have a special kind of self organisation which they called “autopoiesis” – “self-making capacity”. We living creatures can grow and reproduce.

I know nobody has ever identified a particular “force” or “mechanism” for all of this. I know that “vitalism” has been dismissed by most scientists. But clearly there is something there we could call “the Life Force” isn’t there? Even if all we are doing is describing the presence of a phenomenon, a behaviour or characteristic. I think that’s how I see it. It’s this “self-organising”, “autopoietic” characteristic which vibrates, throbs, beats, resonates, responds, adapts, grows and acts…..I don’t think it comes from somewhere else…..I think it infuses the entire universe and expresses itself in what we call Life.

So, it’s not a thing or an object, this “Life Force” for me. It’s a presence, an experience, a colour, a sound, a scent, an ever-changing phenomenon.

This is it. This green vision of a forest. This is vibrant, pulsating, Life.

Read Full Post »

We love mysteries, don’t we?

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on September 22, 2020| Leave a Comment »

What is this?

Seriously, I have no idea! I took this photo just over two years ago but I don’t remember it! I’m not sure if this is a rock, a tree, a fossilised tree, a fallen Roman column…….there are elements which make me think of all of those.

But you know what? That makes this more of a mystery! And I love that! Well, actually, even if I knew what it was, there would still be plenty of mystery. More than what is it, how did it come to be this shape, and how did it come to be lying there? And here’s another one….is that a cave entrance under there? It looks like one.

We humans have a bit of a penchant for mystery, don’t we? Put the word “mystery” in the title of a book, a movie, or an article, and people will be enticed to check it out.

I think curiosity might be my strongest characteristic. I am unceasingly curious. As a child I remember getting two different “part works”….magazines which came out once every couple of weeks, and which you collected together into special binders. One was called “Knowledge” and the other was “Look and Learn”. I loved them both. When I graduated from university with my medical degree, with my first month’s salary as a Junior Doctor, I bought a complete set of “Encyclopaedia Britannica” (It’s in the attic! Can’t bring myself to get rid of it even though I use Wikipedia and all the other internet sources to go exploring these days).

I think this same characteristic contributed a lot to the kind of Medicine I practiced, to the way I worked as a doctor. I always looked forward to meeting the next patient, to hearing their story, to unravelling the mysteries of their illnesses. I loved making diagnoses, and I still believe that skill is THE key skill of a doctor. Without a good diagnosis, you’re stuffed! You can only find the treatment which will work best for you patient if you make a good diagnosis.

AND it doesn’t stop there….because how each, individual patient will respond to this particular treatment is a mystery. We don’t know. Nobody can accurately predict it. Will this person get the benefits that “most” people get? Will this be the person to suffer a serious side effect? Will this person find that this treatment actually does nothing for them at all? The only way to know is to stay curious, to follow up, and to listen carefully to what experience the patient has had since this treatment was started.

You’d be amazed how often that is neglected. A distorted use of “Evidence Based Medicine” claims absolute truths where the doctor thinks they know better than the patient what benefit the patient will experience. There are no absolute truths. Evidence changes all the time….informed by more experiences, more experiments and more studies. Treatments are always context-dependent. Two patients receiving the same treatment may well have two diametrically opposed outcomes.

We have to stay curious.

We have to retain our delight in mystery. And, here’s the paradox, we have to keep trying to discover, to learn and make the best decisions we can in every present moment.

There’s a humility which comes with curiosity and mystery. A humility which is the result of realising that there is always more to know.

So, now, bring all that to this pandemic. How many times have you heard the word “unprecedented” in relation to this disease? Over the course of this year we’ve developed our knowledge and understanding of this virus. Learning how it behaves, how different people respond to it, how we can influence the spread and the patients’ responses. And we are far from done yet.

All that can feel a bit more like frustration and uncertainty rather than mystery and curiosity can’t it? I think that’s true. I’ve experienced, and continue to experience, a lot of both frustration and uncertainty these last few months. But hey, you know my “and not nor” theme, don’t you? I think BOTH of these themes exist – mystery and uncertainty, curiosity and frustration. Becoming aware of them is the first step. Learning how to respond to, and adapt to, them, is the next.

So, I’m reflecting on this today and maybe you might too……how am I responding to the uncertainties, and how might I adapt better to them? How am I responding to the mysteries, and how might I make the most of them?

Read Full Post »

co-creating, co-shaping, co-making

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, science on September 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »

You’ve probably looked over the edge of a cliff, or stood on a shore somewhere and seen something like this image. Isn’t it beautiful? You can almost hear the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks and the foaming of the sea.

What I see when I look at this photo is the constant interplay of two distinct media, or elements – rocks and water. The rocks look as if they are dancing a circle dance, with the sea swirling between them. I can almost hear the sound of ceilidh music! (well, I am Scottish!)

The rocks form a boundary. They are the limits of the reach of the water. The water can go no further. It crashes against the rocks, foams, splinters, evaporates, and falls back.

But the water changes the rock every time the two make contact. Look at the particular shapes of the rocks, with their smoothed, yet pitted surfaces. How do you think they came to be that shape? Only by years and years and years of constant interplay between the sea and the rocks.

What isn’t so easy to see from this distance, is that every time the water washes over the rocks it takes into the sea some of the atoms which the rock is made of. It dissolves some of the rock.

The sea changes the rocks. The rocks change the sea. Both in form and in substance. Both in shape and in content.

The rocks and the sea co-create each other, co-shape each other, co-make each other.

Isn’t it beautiful to witness?

All of Nature is like this. All of Life is like this. All of Existence is like this.

Read Full Post »

Co-creators

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on September 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I didn’t really know what this was when I took this photo, and years later, when I look at it again, I realise I still don’t really know what it is. One thing I am sure of, however, is that this shape didn’t appear on the wall all by itself.

I don’t know if it started with a damp patch, then some growth of moss, then some shaping and trimming by someone…..but I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

I think it’s a great example of co-creation. Human and non-human forces working together to produce something unique, something which could only be produced by the human and non-human forces working together.

Co-creation is one of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems. I know we often think of healing as an individual activity but it’s not. It is always a co-creation with others, with other human beings, with other life forms which are not human, with other energies and forces in the world.

We are co-creators, we humans, and we co-create our Selves, our Lives, our communities, societies, environments. There are even some who now call this period of the Earth, the “anthropocene” – a time when human activities are changing the geological nature of the Earth.

So, here’s the thought worth having……what am I co-creating today?

Read Full Post »

Round again

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on September 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »

It’s tempting to think that time is linear, especially when we look at a calendar and can mark off first one day, then the next and then the next. The sequence seems clear and if it’s Saturday today I know that tomorrow will be Sunday…..”as night follows day”.

So what’s going on when we get that feeling of “a return”? Either a “deja vu” experience where you FEEL you’ve been exactly here before, seeing the same scene, hearing the same words, feeling the same feelings. Or, like now, with a daily rise in Coronavirus cases, followed by a daily rise in hospital admissions, and we think “Oh no, here we go again” and dread we are back to where we were about four or five months ago.

Well, in both those cases, we are joining up some dots with straight lines. We are recognising something, or several things, which are strikingly similar to something we experienced already and we think we have jumped back down that straight line to the past.

But that’s a pretty superficial understanding of Life, isn’t it? Because time isn’t linear. Lived time (as opposed to artificially measured time) goes at different speeds, flying by some days, dragging on others. And lived time is influenced by three different streams…..streams of memories, streams of perception, and streams of imagination. The “I remember”, “I can see”, and “I imagine” actions which never seem to cease…even when we are asleep. That means that events don’t neatly flow from one to the other. They leap, jump, circle round, associate, resonate and echo (amongst other things!)

And here’s the other thing to keep in mind…..Life is a creative process. We are “emergent” creatures, constantly changing, transforming…becoming not being. Every day is a first for us. Every day is a last for us.

So, as people talk about a “second wave” of this pandemic, there is definitely a feeling of “here we go again”. Except a lot has changed since this pandemic began. We can’t go back to the beginning and hit the reset button. (I know, I know, much as many of us would like to!) We bring our changed selves into this “second wave” and that means, whilst there might be much that we recognise, there will be more which is truly brand new.

I thought of this when I looked at this photo of this circular ceiling window, with the paper birds flying round in it. I thought, yes, this is what it is like….cycles and spirals which change with every turn around the circle.

We have learned some things, you and I. Learned some things about our lives, our selves and our societies. We will bring these changes to this new cycle, some in a way which reinforces some of what we learned first time around, and some in a way which transforms what we learned first time into something brand new.

Do you feel that?

Does that encourage you to make any different choices? To act differently? To engage with the problems and the solutions differently?

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »