I walked past the old Borders store in Glasgow the other day and had to stop when I saw all the windows lined with hundreds of sewing machines. The shop is being converted into a clothes store. I don’t know if the sewing machines will stay, or if they’re just a screen while they set up the store.
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What’s that I hear?
Stop.
Look up.
Zoom in.
Bird song……..little birds, big sounds, instantly……..I hear this…….
Sometimes when the past comes crashing into the present it’s a wholly pleasant experience.
Posted in from the dark room, from the viewing room, music, photography, video | 1 Comment »
Do you ever look up for a moment and watch a bird flying?
It’s amazing how fast some of them can fly…..
If you can capture one midflight with your camera you can see the incredible positions of their wings as they beat the air..
Then, look at this one, HOVERING! Just hanging there way above the waves, those tiny eyes keenly spotting the movements of the fish under the water, ready just to plummet instantly like a stone, and capture its prey…
Now, look……..see how they look when they fly together…
Take a look today. You’ll be amazed
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One of the main problems of reductionist thinking in health which considers each disease as complete and separate entities is that the real world is a joined up one. What changes you make in one place ripple through the networks and produce a wide range of unpredictable changes.
Here’s a recent rather unexpected story illustrating this.
Researchers at George Mason University have uncovered a link between smallpox and Aids. People who have been immunised against smallpox have a five-fold reduction in HIV-replication compared to those who have never been immunised. Could this explain the massive increase in HIV in Africa when it appeared? Smallpox was declared eliminated from the world in 1980 and nowadays only researchers working with smallpox are immunised. Could it be that stopping smallpox vaccination, left the population without some kind of protection against HIV?
It’s an interesting and plausible hypothesis.
How often, in Medicine, do we ever consider the potential increases in one disease as another declines. I often wonder what people are going to die from if the great targeted projects against heart disease pay off. After all, human mortality stubbornly remains at 100%, so which causes of death will we see rise, as other ones decline?
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Connected, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, (ISBN 978-0-00-734743-8) is a fascinating study of social networks. In the Preface they write
To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected.
This is what Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, it’s what Johansson says in The Medici Effect, Andy Clark says in Smart World, and, for me, most powerfully what Barabasi says in Linked. So what does this book add?
The clear focus of Connected is social networks – you’ll be familiar with the idea of “six degrees of separation” where it’s been discovered there are an average of only six steps between any two human beings on the planet. Christakis and Fowler take this finding a step further by highlighting and explaining “three degrees of influence”. In social networks, you influence your friend, who influences their friend, who influences their friend (and the influences flow both ways), but after that, the power of the effect tails off or disappears. The power of the effect seems related to two things – how many connections a person has, and how many of those people to whom they are connected are connected to each other (in other words how many of your friends know each other?)
These simple characteristics create very complex webs and patterns of influence and can explain a wide range of events, from the spread of a viral infection in a community, to the collapse of the financial system, to the spread of obesity, a wide range of disorders, and both cultural and political changes.
It’s a bizarre thought to learn that obesity in a community is distributed the same way as an infection. If your friend’s friend becomes obese, you’re more likely to become obese (and vice versa)! Obesity seems to be contagious.
The book is packed full of interesting and mind-boggling examples. A couple that really struck me were the spread of back pain in Germany – before the wall came down East Germany had a very, very low incidence of back pain, and in the West it was one of the highest rates in the world. After the wall came down, the incidence in the East rose to match that in the West. A study of epidemic control showed that you needed to vaccinate 90% of the population to stop the infection, but if, instead you asked a random selection of individuals who their acquaintances were, then calculated which individuals were most connected, and vaccinated only them, you could control the infection by vaccinating only 30% of the population. I could go on…..but read it yourself, it’s truly mind expanding. Really the idea that we are all separate free-thinking individuals is at best a simplistic delusion. We are who we are because of the way we connect.
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, psychology | 7 Comments »
This is superb – a short talk by Jeremy Rifkin illustrated fabulously by the RSA – please, take a few minutes and watch it. I think you’ll be inspired
Posted in from the viewing room, life, neuroscience, video | 2 Comments »
I know…..it’s an odd concept to actually see the light. We see what the light illuminates, but it’s quite hard to say we can actually see the light itself. C S Lewis wrote a story about a blind man who begins to see and goes around asking people to show him the light he’d kept hearing about when he was blind. Nobody can show him the light, only the sources of the light. Lewis used this idea to illustrate the difference between two forms of contemplation when he wrote about noticing a beam of sunlight coming in through a crack in his shed door, and stepping into that light to look along the beam itself. Nice image, interesting idea.
I took these two photos through my kitchen window the other evening because I was struck by just how different the light appeared. There’s definitely something about experiencing a different light.
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That pesky Icelandic volcano’s ash might be causing huge and recurring disruption of air travel, but it’s bringing us some spectacular sunsets.
Here’s one
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The Brain That Changes Itself. Norman Doidge (ISBN 978-0141038872)
Read this book. It’s a long time since I read such an inspiring book. Norman Doidge is a great storyteller and in this book he weaves together a number of individual stories of pioneering clinicians and researchers and remarkable people who overcame enormous difficulties. One of the most remarkable elements of the stories of the researchers is contemporary rediscoveries of decades old findings which were totally dismissed by orthodox science of the time, and which met equally harsh criticism when re-presented and developed. There’s something about scientific orthodoxy which slows up progress as entrenched authorities dismiss new discoveries. Whilst scepticism is a healthy scientific stance, there are lessons to be learned about the negative impact of closed minds.
The stories told in this book show how careful observation of, and listening to, individuals, the ability to imagine what nobody else has considered so far, and the courage to break new ground by thinking differently, all combine to break through limits, deepen understanding and show what’s really possible.
The dominant model of the brain for centuries has been a mechanical one. In particular, we’ve had (and, amazingly, many still have) a model of the brain as being a machine of many parts, with fixed areas responsible for specific functions. The discovery of brain plasticity – the capacity of the brain to physically change – has blown this old model out of the water.
In chapter after chapter of this book, Norman Doidge shows that the potential for the brain to recover from serious damage is astonishingly greater than you’d ever have imagined. He also shows how the relationships between the brain and the mind, between the brain and the body, and between the brain and other people, is completely bi-directional. Our brains physically change with our thoughts – thought patterns create and reinforce physical connections of neurons – and those connections set up thought patterns. Our brains change our relationships with others, and our relationships with others actually change our brains.
This is an immensely convincing and satisfying alternative explanation to mechanistic reductionism.
Ultimately this is an exciting read, an inspiring read, a book that will change your idea of the limits of human potential.
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