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Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category

The human layer

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, philosophy, photography, psychology on June 8, 2020| 1 Comment »

In one of my most favourite villages in France, Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, there are two natural objects hanging on doors, above doors, and on walls, throughout the whole village. This is one of them. It’s a “cardabelle”.

A cardabelle is a kind of thistle which grows abundantly in this area.

Mostly you see dried specimens pinned to doors, but in some places there are copies sculpted in stone.

The other natural object you find is…..

….the scallop shell.

Why these two objects?

Well, the cardabelle is thought to be a good luck token. I suppose in a similar way to the horseshoe you see in some other cultures. It’s also been used traditionally to make predictions……about the weather! That’s partly because it changes shape according to the humidity levels and atmospheric pressure, so it acts a bit like a natural barometer. I’m told it’s also eaten and tastes a bit like an artichoke (not my favourite vegetable!). But I think its utility is a lot less significant than its power to give meaning. It changes life through the power of symbol.

The scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrim. Specifically, the pilgrim making his or her way along the “Camino de Santiago”, or, in French, “Chemin de Compostelle”. It is used along these paths to indicate some support for, or welcome to, any passing pilgrims. The photo above indicates drinking water (“eau potable” in French, which is worth remembering if you are thirsty while walking in France!). It is also hung outside certain inns and hostels for the pilgrims to find something to eat or somewhere to rest for the night. I hadn’t realised just what an extensive network of paths make up the “Camino de Santiago”.

What really interests me about the cardabelle and the scallop shell is that both are transformed from their original, natural purpose in the world by this distinctly human capacity to make one thing represent another.

They both become powerful symbols. Symbols of place, of belonging, of tradition, of belief, and of purpose. There are a million stories connected to them.

How are we to understand this? I think symbolic thought, metaphoric thought, represented by objects, artistic creations, words and stories, are a kind of invisible, global network connecting us all. They are part of Jung’s “collective unconscious” drawing from our archetypes and myths. They are part of Teilhard de Chardin’s “no-osphere”, that extra layer of atmosphere encompassing the Earth, composed of human reason and thought. They are a world wide web of deep, complex, living and growing sense-making and meaning-giving phenomena which we can draw on to make more sense of our individual lives.

I love this power we humans have – the power to create this vast uniquely “human layer” of existence which is embedded in, and emerges from, the natural world, deepening and widening our experiences and understanding. It’s a shared phenomenon, a collective effort stretching back over centuries and we are adding to it every day, drawing from it every day, living it every day.

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We need more bridges

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on June 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Ok, I’ll be honest, this is NOT a bonny bridge! In fact, it’s pretty much devoid of any appealing aesthetic, in my humble opinion! I know some people think concrete is fab, but I’m not one of them! However, what I love about this image is…….

…..look at this divide!

Look at this craggy, rocky, deep, divide. How on earth would you cross from one side to the other? Without a bridge, you just wouldn’t really try. Well, probably hardly anyone would. But build a bridge, even a concrete, not pretty bridge, and you make connections possible. You make it easy for people to cross from one side to the other. You set up the possibility that new relationships will be formed, new bonds forged, different terrains and different ways of living can be discovered.

I have this strong, core belief – making connections matters.

We have two brains, or, more properly, two cerebral hemispheres. The left hemisphere is great for separating things out, for spotting differences, for finding what’s familiar, and sticking with it. But the right is great for seeing connections, contexts and patterns which let us see the bigger picture, let us see what is particular and unique in every case, rather than what is generic and general.

Bridges are a practical and symbolic form of connection.

Don’t you think we need that more, in our seemingly more polarised, more divided time? Don’t you think we need to offer a hand over to the other side now to heal our deep divisions?

Here are some of my favourite bridges….

This is a bridge in a park in Nara, Japan. I love its shape and colour. And, of course, the reflected image in the water makes it even more appealing.

This is the “new” bridge over the Bracklinn Falls, near Callander, Scotland, the “old” one having been swept away in a storm.

Part of the incredible bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden.

The three “Forth” bridges – the old railway one on the right, the more modern road bridge to its left, and the newest, spectacular one to the left of the other two.

Do you have any favourite bridges?

I think it’s good to contemplate them – maybe they are beautiful in their own right – but, always, they help us to remember we need to make connections, heal our divisions.

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Seeing with the heart

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on June 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Isn’t this a great door?

Rather than having a tiny peephole to secretly look out through, this person has carved a heart. Sure, some peepholes have lenses in them which give you a wider angle range of view, but the clue to their limitation is in their name – they are just a little hole which allows you to have a “peep”. The view is limited, partial, incomplete. Instead of that, this person has a larger, big-hearted view of the world.

I don’t know how this works in practice, and it may be that there was a secondary door behind this one (otherwise it’d let in quite a draft!) but it’s interesting to me that a peephole is normally known as a security device, something put there because of fear, but this open heart says something entirely different.

This is one of my favourite passages from “The Little Prince” –

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

What can we do to create a world where more people can engage with an open heart, rather than through the debilitating lens of fear?

What would the world look like if we looked at it with the heart more than with the eye? If we gave more weight to the invisible? After all, the invisible includes the Self, subjectivity, consciousness, feelings, love, care, relationships and attention. None of those can be seen with the eye, or measured and presented statistically. None of those have easily defined borders or limits.

What would life feel like when lived with a more open heart?

Can love flow through a closed heart and a hardened mind?

I reckon it’s worth some consideration.

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Close to the edge

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on June 3, 2020| 1 Comment »

We like to be close to the edge, don’t we?

I think that the “call of the sea” is real. We are pulled towards the oceans. Are houses with seaviews the most expensive houses in any country? Why is that? Is it that the sea represents both freedom and adventure? When we look out across the water towards the horizon it is somehow incredibly appealing when all we can see is water and sky. We don’t need to glimpse any distant coastlines to feel drawn to the edges of our land.

It does seem as if the sea, itself, stirs our souls.

But I think there is another factor. The edge.

I am naturally drawn towards the edges. I love to walk along a beach, gazing at the far horizon, breathing in tune to the rhythm of the breaking waves. That constantly changing, dynamic, irregular, line which marks where the water meets the sand, and the sand meets the water.

It’s the same with rocky outcrops. Just like the fisherman in the second photo there, we love to get to the edge (of course, he’s hoping to catch fish so if he doesn’t go to the edge, he’s not going to have much success!). But it’s not only the fishermen who like to stand, or sit, at the edge of a rock.

I wonder how much this instinctive attraction is due to a basic law of Nature – that all complex adaptive systems move towards “far from equilibrium” points? All living systems do. All ecosystems do. In fact, I think the concept of “steady state”, or “balance” misleads us. When I was taught about “homeostasis”, the idea that our “internal environment” has multiple checks and balances to maintain a constant inner state, I thought it made a lot of sense. I learned about all the feedback loops which kick in to ramp up or damp down activity in the body, to keep things ticking along in the “normal range”. But gradually I realised that was a bit simplistic.

The missing pieces included growth and adaptation, both of which are linked to creativity. That creativity manifests itself in “emergence” – the appearance of new behaviours and conditions which couldn’t have been predicted from the pre-existent ones. It manifests itself in novelty and difference. It manifests in growth, development, and maturity.

Once we start to understand that Life is based on a dynamic equilibrium – the kind of balance which never settles down – then we notice that everything tends to be drawn towards the edges.

It’s the same when we look at the activity of organs like the heart and the brain. The rhythm of the heart is constantly changing. You can measure the “heart rate variability”, and find that when there is next to none, the heart has become rigid, non-adaptive, and is about to fail. On the other hand, when you find that it’s chaotic, the heart is also about to fail. The sweet spot is the zone at the edge of both of those extremes. Same with the brain. When a seizure occurs the somewhat chaotic activity of the brain waves suddenly develop zones of constancy. It’s the imposition of rigid, regular wave patterns which seems to obliterate the underlying, normal, variable rhythms. The sweet spot, again, is in that zone at the edges of these two extremes – the zone between rigidity and chaos.

If we are going to learn from this pandemic we’re going to need new thinking, new ideas, different ways of living and organising ourselves. We aren’t going to learn if we try to “return to normal”.

The future is still to be invented, and we’re going to find it at the edge.

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Freedom of movement

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on June 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a photo I took a few years ago when I was visiting friends in South Africa. There were kite-surfers skimming across the sea, pulled at great speeds by the wind, as the sun began to set.

I’d never seen kite-surfing before and it was pretty spectacular. Quite something to use the power of wind and sea at the same time to experience the joy and freedom of movement.

On the horizon you can see the outline of a cruise ship.

During this pandemic all of these activities have been curtailed. It’s been quite a trauma for we human beings to have our freedom of movement taken away. We are the most social of all creatures with complex skills which enable us to establish bonds with others which enable us to create relationships and connections. We are able to read the emotions of others in their faces. We are fabulous copiers, learning from the actions, behaviours and thoughts of others.

We are also highly mobile creatures. I know there are many people who never leave the town or village they were born in, but over the centuries we have migrated from continent to continent. Every single one of us has ancestors around the world. If you were to try to draw out as complete a family tree as you could, following all the branches of siblings, cousins, and all their spouses and children, you’d end up with a giant web rather than a tree. I’d be surprised if that web didn’t span great distances. DNA analysis shows us that we all have threads which connect us to ancient peoples in distant places.

Sometimes I think we forget that. We become too insular, too separated. History, archeology and biology tell us a story of hyper-connectedness and mobility. We are ONE species and we have spread across the entire planet.

This second photo has a very pleasing symmetry for me. If you look very very closely, you can see a crescent moon at the top of the frame, which is echoed in the shape of the kite. This photo also shows that we social creatures like to do things together. The first photo might have led you to believe there was just one person kite-surfing, but you can see, from this one, that there are several (and in fact there were several more you can’t see in this frame)

I think these are two of our most precious values – our connectedness and our freedom of movement. It saddens me when either, or both, of these are constrained. I’m a fan of making connections and building relationships, and I’m a fan of freedom of movement.

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The view from the left brain

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on May 31, 2020| 1 Comment »

I have a shelf in my bookcase where I collect some of the books which have made the biggest impact on my thinking and understanding. On that shelf sits a first edition of Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary”. If you’ve been reading these posts for a while you’re bound to have come across my references to his description of how our two cerebral hemispheres engage with the world in different ways.

When I came across this old photo from Marseilles the other day I immediately thought of the “left brain” view of the world. The left cerebral hemisphere is utterly brilliant at focusing in on whatever we are considering. It helps us to see the trees in the wood. It picks out elements, features, characteristics or parts. Then it helps us to analyse, label and categorise whatever it is that can be recognised.

It needs to have a narrow focus to be able to do that. It zooms in. It hones our attention. It separates and abstracts by blanking out the connections, the contexts and the environment.

This long corridor of arches looks very much like that kind of focused attention to me.

But there’s more. At the end of this passageway what do we see? It’s kind of hard to make out, isn’t it? What you are looking at here is an installation of irregular, angled mirrors. So you aren’t seeing a complete picture. Rather you are seeing a number of disconnected views or parts.

Our left brain is pretty good at doing that too. Its preference is for the parts, not their connections.

How the brain is supposed to work is that the after the left side does this focusing, separating, labelling and categorising, it’s supposed to pass this information back to the right side to have it contextualised. In other words, after seeing and recognising the pieces, the left passes over to the right to recreate the whole picture, to help us to understand whatever it is we’ve “grasped” by seeing how it connects to everything else.

Iain McGilchrist’s thesis is that this natural flow has become rather disrupted. The left brain has a tendency to hang on to what it grasps, and to convince us that whatever it has analysed is “correct”. Over the centuries we’ve evolved a complex society and civilisation which has encouraged us to prioritise the left brain over the right.

That’s a big mistake. That’s only using half a brain. To rectify this we have to learn how to use the whole brain again, and to practice doing that as often as we can. That’s going to involve deliberately returning again and again to the right brain functions – seeing the connections, discovering the particular, appreciating the whole, and weaving together the multiple threads to enjoy the entire tapestry of the world.

I don’t know about you, but that excites me!

I love that this idea is not about abandoning our left brain functions but re-integrating them into the right brain ones. How satisfying!

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Reality looks like this

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on May 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Last week, one day, while sitting in the garden having a coffee, we looked up and saw what looked like a rainbow all around the Sun.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

I hadn’t.

Do you know what it is called?

A corona.

Can you believe that? A corona round the Sun during a pandemic of coronavirus.

Seriously?

There it is, up there, behind the mulberry tree, clear as anything in the morning sky.

Now I think that’s pretty spooky.

But there’s more…..because don’t you think this looks like a giant eye? Doesn’t it look like a iris, with a white pupil?

Well, you know what? This is reality. These are the kinds of things which actually happen. Maybe only once in a lifetime. But they happen. And it feels special, feels a privilege, to witness it.

Reality looks like this. It’s amazing every day. You just have to be present and aware and you’ll see, hear, smell, taste, or touch something wonder-full every day. Everything you notice will seem to connect to something else, and those connections, echoes, memories, symmetries, imaginings…..well, they are quite simply breathtaking.

If you don’t believe me. Just try it. Find out for yourself.

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Contexts

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on May 7, 2020| 1 Comment »

I took this photo at noon one January 1st.

You might think its pretty much just a photo of some grass, so, hold on, let’s look more carefully, and consider the contexts. If it was simply a photo of a patch of grass it wouldn’t be particularly interesting but what caught my eye wasn’t the grass, it was the interplay of shadow and light.

Despite it being noon, the Sun is still pretty low in the sky. Well, it’s taken in the wintertime in Scotland, so that’s normal. But, normal or not, the effect of the low sunlight streaming through the trees is spectacular. The angle of the light makes the shadows SO long and the spaces between the trees show frosted grass sparkling brightly.

I love the forms and the patterns of the shadows, the light, the frost and the grass. It takes all of them together to create the scene.

Here’s another scene –


This is a huge puddle which is there more often than it’s not in this particular field. I once saw swans swimming on it! But today, what makes this image so beautiful is the trees and their reflection. Without the trees, the clarity of the light and the stillness of the water, this just wouldn’t be the same. It has echoes of the previous photo but it’s completely different. However, both photos were taken within minutes of each other, the flooded field lying just a short walk along the road from the shadowed park.

I’m struck by how important the contexts are in these photos. If I’d “abstracted” just one element in each – a grassy patch, a section of the puddle, a single tree – I’d lose all the context. It’s the interplay of all the elements which makes these images more than the sum of their parts.

Life is like that.

When we focus too narrowly, when we consider only a part in isolation, we achieve only a partial understanding. It’s the whole experience, in all it’s contexts and environments, with the story which holds them together, and the remembered subjective experience of being there which makes them so unique, so particular to me.

So, if I am to share any of that with you, I need to show you, and tell you, at least some of the contexts. That way, you’ll come closer to experiencing what I experienced.

That was my everyday working reality. Every single patient who came to see me had a unique story to tell. If I were to understand them I had to hear their story. I had to try to have some experience of their experience, to feel what they were feeling, to know what they knew, if I was to understand, diagnose and help them.

But it’s the same for all of us. If we are to understand anyone, friend, relative, colleague, stranger, we have to hear their story, and try to experience some of their experience.

It’s always partial. It’s never fixed. It’s never completely knowable. But there’s no substitute.

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Looks like…..

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, psychology on May 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

This is a spider web, but doesn’t it look spooky?

It looks like the big hole in it is an eye socket and the central lower part looks like a beak, or a nose.

I see a mask when I look at this.

And a pretty disturbing mask at that!

I think this is a bit like one of those drawings you look at which at first glance might be an abstract pattern, but once you’ve seen a face or something in it, you just can’t unsee it ever again.

It really can be hard to see something “as if for the very first time” when you’ve already seen it and “made up your mind” what it is you can see.

 

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Influencers? What influencers?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on May 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I can remember science lessons in High School where we studied waves. I thought they were fascinating. I still do. All kinds of waves. Waves in the sea

waves in a pond

the electromagnetic spectrum which includes the light and colours we can see, the radio waves we can tune into and many other varieties of invisible waves which affect us.

the waves produced by our hearts and brains which we can’t see, but we can measure and represent on charts (did you know that when your heart rhythm emits a wave pattern which can influence the heart rhythms of people who are physically close to you? 

Even the representation of waves drawn in the stones in a temple or shrine (like the one at the start of this post).

Waves change us.

Waves carry energy and information.

As energy and information reaches into our bodies and minds it changes us.

I read the other day that “influencers” are having a hard time. Bear with me, I’m 66 next month, and “social media influencers” are not my specialist subject, but as best I can tell people who make a living from advertising and marketing revenues from companies by sharing pictures and videos of themselves wearing or using those companies’ products have seen a sharp decline in their income.

Seems one of the things during this pandemic is that people are consuming less “stuff”. Well, given that around the world millions of shops are closed and production lines are at a standstill, maybe this is no surprise. But there’s another element to this story which seems to be a sort of re-evaluation that’s going on. Less people seem interested in the lives of “celebrities” (ie people who are famous for being famous) just now. Priorities and values are changing.

However you want to look at this, the underlying reality is that we are all influencers. There is nothing I do, from the breaths I take, to the beating of my heart, to the communications I make and the behaviours I show, which doesn’t change the world. OK, yes, of course, not the whole world! Well, probably a very small part of the world actually. But collectively we are all influencers.

We send out materials, energy and information into the world constantly. Unceasingly.

What materials do you send out? What “waste” do you produce and what do you do with it?

What energy do you send out? How does that energy affect your relationships?

What information do you send out? What are your messages? How do you say them? Are they based on kindness or hate? Hope or fear? Anger or Joy?

You cannot escape being an influencer.

The question is – what waves are we making? You and I.

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