Half of U.S. doctors say they use placebo treatments.
About half of American doctors in a new survey say they regularly give patients placebo treatments – usually drugs or vitamins that won't really help their condition.
And many of these doctors are not honest with their patients about what they are doing, the survey found.
That contradicts advice from the American Medical Association, which recommends doctors use treatments with the full knowledge of their patients.
“It's a disturbing finding,” said Franklin G. Miller, director of the research ethics program at the U.S. National Institutes Health and one of the study authors. “There is an element of deception here which is contrary to the principle of informed consent.”
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Most doctors used actual medicines as a placebo treatment: 41 per cent used painkillers, 38 per cent used vitamins, 13 per cent used antibiotics, 13 per cent used sedatives, 3 per cent used saline injections, and 2 per cent used sugar pills.
Placebo from the Latin I will please. A doctor pleases the patient by prescribing a placebo, a treatment that the doctor knows is ineffectual but the patient is led to believe is effective.
A placebo won't work if the patient knows it's a placebo. So what to do about the ethical challenges?
Well to start, doctors shouldn't be prescribing antibiotics or sedatives.
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of the study’s authors, said doctors should not prescribe antibiotics or sedatives as placebos, given those drugs’ risks. Use of less active placebos is understandable, he said, since risks are low.
“Everyone comes out happy: the doctor is happy, the patient is happy,” said Dr. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the health institutes. “But ethical challenges remain.”
Mindful Hack writes about placebos and nocebos.
Doctors use the placebo effect automatically in their work. For example, they behave confidently and reassuringly even when completely stumped by the patient's symptoms or faced suddenly with a life-threatening disorder. They are right to behave this way. A doctor's anxiety would trigger the placebo effect's evil twin, the nocebo effect. "Nocebo" means "I will harm," and nocebos really do harm. Patients may be ill for longer periods and suffer worse symptoms if nocebo effects convince them that they are doomed.
Some consider the placebo effect a mystery. In March 2005, British science magazine New Scientist listed thirteen "Things That Don't Make Sense", and the placebo effect was number one on their list. Of course, the placebo effect doesn't "make sense" if you assume, as they do, that the mind either does not exist or is powerless. The traditional Christian view is that the mind is grounded in the brain so long as we live in this world. Therefore, what the patient's mind perceives expresses itself in the brain and body. Both the placebo and nocebo effects are strong support for the traditional view.
A question of character. The idea of 'good character' sounds old-fashioned and patronizing, but it may be the answer to some of our most entrenched social problems writes Richard Reeves.
The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck." A mixture of courtesy and courage used to be essential to the idea of a British citizen's character. Brits were the sort of people who knew both how to survive a Blitz and queue politely. Similarly, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, aimed to induce in his young charges "some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make 'character.'" He described his movement as nothing less than a "character factory."
But in the postwar shift towards a less constrained and judgemental society—"character-talk" in Stefan Collini's phrase—dropped out of public discourse, except when considering someone's suitability for high office. The idea of good character came to sound old-fashioned and patronising.
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The three key ingredients of a good character are: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification.
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inequality of character may now be as important as inequality of economic resources.
The Research Digest of the British Psychological Society hails The return of 'good character' and its importance for a successful society while our fave Sissy Willis writes It's the character, stupid.
By focusing only on symptoms and not on causes, has psychiatry incorrectly diagnosed too many cases of ordinary sadness - what Thomas `å Kempis called "the proper sorrows of the soul" - as depression?
Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts, outlines some of the conceptual and scientific problems in Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness.
The most amazing personal stories are always about transformation. That's why conversion stories are so compelling. Today for example we have the story of Joe Eszterhas and he's written a book about it.
"Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith" (Joe Eszterhas)
He wrote dark thrillers like Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge and lived a wild life. After moving to Cleveland with his second wife, he was diagnosed with throat cancer.
Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately...
"I was going crazy. I was jittery. I twitched. I trembled. I had no patience for anything. … Every single nerve ending was demanding a drink and a cigarette," he wrote.
He plopped down on a curb and cried. Sobbed, even. And for the first time since he was a child, he prayed: "Please God, help me."
Mr. Eszterhas was shocked by his own prayer.
"I couldn't believe I'd said it. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd never said it before," he wrote.
But he felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a "shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands."
Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Mr. Eszterhas had been blinded by God. He stood up, wiped his eyes, and walked back home a new man.
In a phone interview this week, Mr. Eszterhas said it was "an absolutely overwhelming experience."
'Basic Instinct' author writes book about faith.
But after his spiritual transformation, he said, he had had enough of death, murder, blood, and chaos.
"Frankly my life changed from the moment God entered my heart. I'm not interested in the darkness anymore," he said. "I've got four gorgeous boys, a wife I adore, I love being alive, and I love and enjoy every moment of my life. My view has brightened and I don't want to go back into that dark place."
Mr. Eszterhas' love and appreciation for life was magnified even more last year when his surgeon told him he didn't need to schedule another visit.
Gerald Vanderleun gives us The Frame-Up. The mystery of the world revealed in a backyard using an empty picture frame.
The world is made of a perceptible mystery beyond our means of measuring, but not beyond all sight unless we will ourselves blind.
Talking about a trauma has for some time been the default position to help people recover.
A new study lead by UC Irvine psychologist Roxane Cohen Silver suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work. The study is published in the June issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
in the immediate aftermath of a collective trauma it is perfectly healthy not to want to express thoughts and feelings.
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“Some people don’t need to express thoughts and feelings after trauma and do just fine, and it’s a myth that you must express your distress in order to recover,” Silver said. “Mandatory or required psychological counseling is often unwarranted and universal intervention is likely to be a waste of resources.”
Via Neuranthropology where Greg Downey wrote
The research looked at the effects of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and found that ‘individuals who communicated their thoughts and feelings about the attacks reported more physical health problems and emotional distress over time, even after controlling for exposure to and distance from the attacks.’
Brits at their Best have more to say about the traditional stiff upper lip.
Words are powerful, perhaps more secretly powerful than we know. People who repeatedly relive a trauma by describing it in detail in psychological counselling sometimes find they have burned it into their souls.
Those of us, like me, who have always enjoyed good health still read accounts of those who are and who have been ill as messages from another country we never want to go to much as we wish the inhabitants well.
Cardiologist Dr. Thomas Graboys writes what it's like to be trapped in your own body with Parkinson's disease and betrayed by your own mind with an Alzheimer's-like dementia at 62. My Daily Battle. proves to be much easier with the support of a loving wife.
A riveting account of a brain scientist who suffered a stroke offers far more reports Tara Parker-Pope.
After you watch Jill Bolte Taylor give her 18 minute address to the TED conference last month, you will never think of the right and left hemispheres of the brain in the same way. She calls it her Stroke of Insight. I call it a must-watch.
Making art, whether it be singing, writing, painting or crafts seems to be the key in the art of growing older happily, still contributing, still creating.
Studies Suggest There's An Art to Getting Older
In 2006, the preliminary findings from the federally funded Creativity and Aging Study suggest that
making art, or even listening to music or viewing paintings, supports physical, mental and emotional well-being and eases some symptoms of illness, including dementia.
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Sometimes arts participation can be powerful therapy. Susan Perlstein, the founder of the National Center for Creative Aging and New York's nonprofit Elders Share the Arts, recalls a Holocaust survivor who sat watching her peers perform theater for a year before she told them how she escaped death more than 60 years earlier. The group turned her story into a play and made her the star.
"She said to the group . . . she felt for the first time she could feel at home," Perlstein said. "This process of being able to share your stories and transform them into art is actually a deeply healing process. She went from a depressed, sick older person to a lively young person. It was phenomenal to watch this change."
Taken as a whole, the benefits to the well-being of the old who participate in creative arts are quite extraordinary:
• new growth of brain cells stimulated
• better overall physical health
• less depression and loneliness
• medication use down
• a heightened sense of control and social engagement
• increased sense of independence
Anti-depressants 'no better than dummy pills'
Millions of Britons are taking anti-depressants for no reason, according to a study that found they made little difference to the condition.
Researchers discovered the drugs, which cost the taxpayer almost £300 million a year, generally work no better than dummy pills, and said exercise and therapy should first be prescribed instead.
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The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science: Medicine, looked at the results of 35 clinical trials in the US involving 5,000 patients taking SSRIs, including Prozac, Efexor and Seroxat. Prof Kirsch said patients taking the drugs did improve, but so did those on a placebo - showing most of the effect was psychological.
Thank God for the placebo effect.
Says a GP
I see ever-increasing numbers of patients coming to my surgery because they feel psychologically out of sorts. In the main, a little sympathetic probing will get to the bottom of the problem: they are tired, stressed and finding it difficult to cope with the increasingly hectic pace of life. Generally drug therapy is not the solution.
But expectations of health and healthcare are changing and the public looks to medicine for an instant cure for any number of lifestyle troubles, even something to treat a general feeling of ennui.
Lacking time to talk and the reassuring community of a social network, we are increasingly prone to think that a bottle of pills might be just what the doctor ordered.
It isn't.
But it is Good news for therapists
"For many, medication is successful. But talking therapies can have dramatic effects. We have put a lot of emphasis on medication in the past and it is about time we redressed the balance and put more emphasis on talking treatments."
Maybe "compassion is an aphrodisiac." After watching In Treatment, I'm convinced of it.
Even if He Listens. He Cares. He Isn't Real.
Jason, an autistic boy and the manager of his school's basketball team with responsibilities to hand out water and lead the cheers, was tapped by the team's coach to suit up for the last game and then to play for the last few minutes.
"If I weren't there, I wouldn't have believed it," said the coach.
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It was just luck that six months ago I had scheduled a retreat at St.Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.
After two weeks of the flu, I needed some time to re-energize and get back on track before I took up again all the things I had to do.
So I looked forward to some time with the Trappist monks, to put my ordinary concerns aside, to get away from it all including the Internet and reconnect with my inner self. I wasn't disappointed.
"What was it like?" a friend asked when I got back yesterday.
"Like honey," I said.
It was slow. Time expanded in a miraculous way. I had plenty of time to read "St. Augustine Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)" , a book I always meant to read but never got around to. Time too to take long walks and long naps.
It was sweet, the atmosphere one of concentrated holiness and peace. The meals delicious and taken in silence while we listened to tapes of John Shea, a gifted spiritual writer on the Gospel of St.Luke.
It was beautiful. The monks, no matter the age, all work to make the community self-supporting. At St. Joseph's they are most famous for their Trappist Preserves.
No matter what they wear as they work and some wear blue jeans,
when they gather for song and prayers, seven times a day, they put on their monk's robes.
And when they sing ancient psalms and antiphons, they are as one, joining with monks around the world and in ages past in a timeless singing of praise and thanksgiving. To hear them them is to be lifted up in a sublime experience of beauty.
It's said that monasteries are powerhouses of prayer and spiritual energy. All I know is there is no better place to recharge.
"Gratitude is the seedbed of joy," wrote Peter Kreeft.
If we practice more gratitude, we will all be happier.
Yet sometimes when we feel a sudden rush of gratitude, we do nothing because it's awkward and we don't know quite what to do.
Say you're in an airport and you see a bunch of soldiers walking by.
You want to say thanks for your service, but you don't want to make a fool of yourself or of them.
The Gratitude Campaign has devised a simple gesture that says it all.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Put your hand on your heart, then move your hand down and out extending it towards the person you're thanking.
Watch the movie if you want, about a minute long.
Spread the gratitude. Thank you.
" It's like you take your base line [which is] fear, and you throw some self-doubt on top of that, and then you throw some desperation on top of that, and, before you know it, you got a seven-layer burrito going there. I mean I can feel every one of them. I don't know how to express it, but I can feel them . . . just one right on top of the other, and maybe I've done that for so long, that when the rape happened, that was maybe the straw that broke the camel's back, and my mind said, 'Okay, that's enough, you're cut off, no more.' There's no more room on the pile."
Donna Kilgore's life was destroyed after the rape which left her with post-traumatic stress disorder where she couldn't feel her body and nothing felt real
She is one of the first patients to undergo experimental therapy with MDMA, a psychedelic drug better known as ecstasy. In Mithoefer's Psychedelic Medicine article, he theorizes that the breakthroughs came from having the psychic calm -- the feeling Donna had of being protected -- that allowed subjects to meaningfully reexperience and reassess the events that traumatized them, and at the same time be able to feel a powerful new connection to positive aspects of their lives. In Donna's case it was the love of her husband and children.
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"OH, MAN, I'M IMPRESSED," SAYS MARK WAGNER, a clinical psychologist on faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, an expert in psychological testing and an independent evaluator conducting the before and after PTSD assessments in Mithoefer's study. "I didn't know much about the clinical use of MDMA before this," Wagner says, "But I've seen each and every one of these patients, and, just as a clinical psychologist, it is impressive to see the degree of treatment response these folks have had. There are a couple of areas in medicine, like hip replacement, where one day you are bedridden, and the next you're out playing tennis. Or with Lasik surgery, you're blind, and then you can see. Nothing in psychology is like that. But this was dramatic."
Others were not so sanguine. The whole story is told in the Washington Post Magazine, The Peace Drug
We are designed to be sad when faced with a loss whether it be a romance, a parent, a job or a dog. Being sad is not a chemical disorder that needs treatment with powerful drugs.
But the wide availability of anti-depressant drugs and the easy access to them has confused the distinction between normal sadness and the major disorder of depression which is the breakdown of normal psychological functioning. Even people who just have a case of the"blahs" say they are "depressed."
So take with a grain of salt, reports that depression in the United States increased 300% from 1987 to 1997 or that 1 in 10 adults struggle with depression each year.
The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Horwitz and Wakefield are right: Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed.
David Warren quit school at 16 and hit the road.
In retrospect, it was the best personal decision I ever made, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to the young of today; at least, to those whose minds are not already imprisoned. Get out of that education “system” while you still can, and before it has made you into a spiritual corpse, mouthing politically-correct clichés along with all the other zombies. Get yourself a real education, in what you can find of the world, and see what you can accomplish without participating in the credentials racket. Make your “core relationship” with God, rather than with some Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Discover a vocation in which you can advance the cause of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And raise children -- in poverty, if necessary -- who will also defy the zombism of our post-modern age.
Education reform
UPDATE: Gaghdad Bob points out that Joseph Campbell did the same thing.
".... So I said to hell with it. I went up into the woods and spent five years reading.... It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was read, read, read, and take notes. It was during the Great Depression. I didn't have any money...."
Importantly, this wasn't just aimless reading, but what someone else once called the "mystery school of individuation." Perhaps you're familiar with the concept. You find one book that speaks directly to your soul, which tips you to another one that does the same. Pretty soon you're embarked on a wild nous chase, not for any "exterior" purpose, but for the purpose of trying to articulate the idiom of your own soul. The end result -- among other things -- is that 1) you know you have a soul, 2) you are aware that your soul is very specifically yours (i.e., it has its own language, so to speak), and 3) you don't want to do anything in life that would interfere with the intrinsic joy of living from your soul.
So did he. Wandering, Wondering and Blundering into the Mystery
I can relate to Campbell's story, because in my case I quit college in my junior year (before they could expel me), and spent the next five or six years wandering, but not idly. Rather, it was a period of intense non-doodling, as if my soul were on fire and I was looking for water. By the time I entered graduate school in 1982, I was an utterly different person than I would have been had I spent all those years in the idiot factory. In short, I never would have become me. Whether it was luck or destiny, I cannot say.
So what is sleep for? More and more, it looks like memory and learning. And naps have the same effect!
the new research underscores a vast transformation in the way scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a blank screen, a metaphor for death, it has emerged as an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play — and to work — during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep
An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play
Since then the study findings have come almost too fast to digest, and they suggest that the sleeping brain works on learned information the way a change sorter does on coins. It seems first to distill the day’s memories before separating them — vocabulary, historical facts and dimes here; cello scales, jump shots and quarters over there. It then bundles them into readable chunks, at different times of the night. In effect, the stages of sleep seem to be specialized to handle specific types of information, the studies suggest.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
William Shakespeare
Being conscientious apparently dramatically lowers your risk for Alzheimer's, showing again the power of the mind over the body, in this case the brain.
A surprising study of elderly people suggests that those who see themselves as self-disciplined, organized achievers have a lower risk for developing Alzheimer's disease than people who are less conscientious.
Astoundingly, the brains of some of the dutiful people in the study were examined after their deaths and were found to have lesions that would meet accepted criteria for Alzheimer's - even though these people had shown no signs of dementia.
"This adds to our knowledge that lifestyle, personality, how we think, feel and behave are very importantly tied up with risk for this terrible illness," Wilson said. "It may suggest new ideas for trying to delay the onset of this illness."
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Renee Goodwin of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health was not involved in the new study but has done similar work that found a connection between conscientiousness and better health.
"It's having self-discipline and energy, doing the healthy things," Goodwin said.
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The new findings, appearing in Monday's Archives of General Psychiatry, come from an analysis of personality tests and medical exams of 997 older Catholic priests, nuns and brothers who participated in the Religious Orders Study.
Some of the most interesting articles published are not accessible to the average reader, hidden behind the subscriber walls of very expensive trade journals.
In the Washington Post, Shankar Vendatam writes about one such study - Is Great Happiness Too Much of a Good Thing?
But according to the new study, led by University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, people who report a large ratio of positive to negative events also seem to derive diminishing returns from additional happy events -- and ever larger adverse effects when they encounter negative events.
By contrast, Oishi found that even though Japanese people were less happy overall than Americans, they needed only one positive event to regain their equilibrium after experiencing a negative event. European Americans needed two positive events on average to regain their emotional footing.
Oishi's research also provides an intriguing window into why very few people are very happy most of the time. Getting to "very happy" is like climbing an ever steeper mountain. Additional effort -- positive events -- doesn't gain you much by way of altitude. Slipping backward, on the other hand, is very easy.
Slipping backwards is what Jeffrey Lord calls "Aeschylus moments" those difficult times when everything goes seriously off track from what we expected life to be.
Aeschylus moments can include the death of a family member or close friend, a serious illness for yourself, the ending of a treasured relationship. It can, in short, be anything that qualifies as trauma, a turning of one's world upside down -- or, to use the term associated with Aeschylus, tragedy. And when the pain of that moment passes, after it has fallen "drop by drop upon the heart," the person in question comes out the other side a different person than he was before he had his Aeschylus moment. If he's lucky, he is wiser, more thoughtful, determined to use his hard earned wisdom for something greater than himself.
Martin Seligman identified the three components of happiness as pleasure, engagement and meaning with the later two being far more significant. Meaning comes later in life, most often after an "Aeschylus moment", after pain, after suffering. Life becomes more precious after being broken which calls to mind the Asian practice of filling cracks with gold.
“When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful,” Barbara Bloom.
LifeTwo, a new site about midlife improvement, is getting happy this week with a series of articles and exercises over seven days on how to become happier. So even if you think you are already happy, if you do the exercises over seven days, you can get even happier quickly.
Wesley Hein is basing his articles and exercises on a new book 
"Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment" (Tal Ben-Shahar)
by a Harvard professor named Tai Ben Sharar who has the most popular class at Harvard. I wrote about the professor last year in Harvard Teaches Happiness and again in a Happiness Roundup.
What we are seeing is the outgrowth of the positive psychology movement begun by Martin Seligman that I wrote about in The Science of Happiness.
Seligman has found three components of happiness.
1. pleasure- we all know about what feels good.
2. engagement. - the depth of involvement with one's family, work, romance and hobbies .
3. meaning - using personal strengths to serve some larger end.
Of those three roads to a happy, satisfied life, pleasure is the least consequential, he insists: "This is newsworthy because so many Americans build their lives around pursuing pleasure. It turns out that engagement and meaning are much more important."
I understand the premise of Ben-Shahar's book is you can teach yourself mental habits that will make you happier. While some people are genetically disposed to be generally happier than others, everyone can learn to be happier if they adopt simple habits like being grateful for three things during the day.
Your grandmother called it "counting your blessings'.
What's still remarkable to me new is that so many people never heard or never paid attention to what their parents and grandmothers said. After all, Happiness, It's Not Rocket Science.
So head on over and get happier. It's not selfish at all. I think we have a moral obligation to be happy. If you want to have a happier world, you have to work on yourself first. After all, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "We have to be what we want to see"
In fact one of the great pleasures of maturity is a growing happiness, a fact that is inexplicable to the young.
Kevin Kelly writes about My Life Countdown
I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Nowhere close.
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Another friend, a musician, told me about a recurring dream he had in which he could see the exact number of days left in his life. His days were numbered, literally. He recounted how invigorating this knowledge was, because while he could never be certain that number was true, it did help him prioritize his choices and defuse his procrastinations
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I've been using this system for several months now and it has been very powerful. Day to day I am aware -- and can rattle off if I am asked - how many days I have left.
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The time left is still too short. And too close. And getting closer. And I'm sorry but I need to do something else right now....
According to his calculations, 8500 days left. He even tells you how to configure your own life countdown
I've never liked the way Hollywood and the mainstream media depicts the world of business as if everyone in business were greedy, arrogant and corrupt. So, I was happy to learn about a new documentary entitled The Call of the Entrepreneur that follows the stories of three entrepreneurs, a farmer, a merchant banker and a fashion CEO. The trailer gives a fine taste of
In his review at First Things Saint Duncan of Wall Street, Ryan Anderson finds that commerce can be a pathway to holiness.
So, what do these three stories in The Call of the Entrepreneur demonstrate? They show that an entrepreneur—even when just trying to keep his family farm afloat—is always other-regarding: always looking and reaching outside of himself to think of a product that others need and of innovative ways to make it. And in this creative act he cooperates with God and participates in divine creativity. Creation is an ongoing reality in which God upholds the world and empowers human agents to participate.
The emphasis, thus, is not on free markets as an end in themselves but rather, as Gilder points out, as a means to free human beings—free inventors, free producers, and free consumers. Brad Morgan took an unlikely resource and turned it into a highly demanded product. Frank Hanna identified the people who had entrepreneurial vision and enabled them to succeed. And Jimmy Lai worked his way from factory worker to fashion and media CEO thanks to the structures in place in Hong Kong. He now works to make the freedom and prosperity he enjoys available to the country he left behind.
An expanding body of research is showing that exercise can create a stronger, faster brain reports the New York Times in Lobes of Steel.
scientists have been finding more evidence that the human brain is not only capable of renewing itself but that exercise speeds the process.
Other factors contributing to neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells: marijuana, moderate alcohol intake, sociability and chocolate while heavy alcohol consumption, stress and a diet high in saturated fats and sugar inhibit the production of new brain cells.
What are gestures all about anyway. It's not communication, but helping memory it seems
Gestures Convey Message: Learning in Progress
These are the kinds of gestures that offer a window on the murky link between body and mind, and which in recent years have given rise to an International Society for Gesture Studies, a scientific journal (aptly named Gesture) and a newsletter called Manufacts.
"I've really been struck by how sophisticated and focused the field has become," said David McNeil, a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, the hotbed of gesture studies where Cook did her seminal work on the educational value of gestures. "It's really gaining momentum very rapidly."
If you want people to understand and learn from what you are saying, gesture more. If you want to remember something, gesture more.
After reading What's So Friggin' Funny by Steven Johnson, a fascinating article, I think I want one of those Tickle Me Elmo dolls. I've never seen them and they sound hilarious.
Sometimes you need to "laugh and let go" of mental or emotional tensions. Laughter feels great and does a body good.
Saturday-Review editor Norman Cousins wrote his best-selling "ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS AS PEREIVED BY THE PATIENT" in 1979 about how he recovered from an incurable, terminal condition with laughter, rest and vitamin C and brought to the country's attention to the reality of the mind-body connection in what he called the "biology of hope."
The revelation that your mental attitude could affect your physical recovery, that laughter really was the best medicine, affected millions. When Cousins "made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect that would give me at least two-hours of pain-free sleep," sales of videotapes of Groucho Marx and The Three Stooges soared.
Now neuro-scientist Robert Provine is teaching us even more about laughter as he investigates its source and purpose.
As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else—not humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, one analyzing people’s laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts. “You’re 30 times more likely to laugh when you’re with other people than you are when you’re alone—if you don’t count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television,” Provine says. Think how rarely you’ll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you’ll be to give a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch is a response to pain or a shiver to cold. Humor is crafted to exploit a form of instinctive. social bonding.
Laughter is simply how we connect in good cheer.
"The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that's laughter. The moment it arises, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place,"
Mark Twain.
Harvey Mansfield talks about the soul and the importance of naming people and things in their individuality in the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.
First he introduces us to the notion of thumos that Plato and Aristotle talked about - that part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.
The biology of Plato and Aristotle, unlike modern biology, takes account of the soul, the sense of human importance. Modern biology saves lives, but the old biology understands them better. The notion of thumos reminds us of our animality because it is visible to the naked eye when we observe animals. Modern biology uses the microscope and uncovers chemical and neurological counterparts to thumos, which actually distract us from analysis of the behavior they are meant to explain. We rest satisfied when we have pronounced the word testosterone and fail to observe as carefully as old-fashioned naked-eye science. Sociobiology has come up with the concept of turf, an unnoticed reference to thumos that we all use today to designate the marking out of one’s own. But in human beings, one’s turf is one’s family, one’s party, one’s country, one’s principle.
..... Having eliminated the soul, modern science cannot understand the body in its most important aspect, which is its capacity for self-importance. Modern biology, particularly the theory of evolution, is based on the overriding concern for survival in all life. This is surely wrong in regard to human life. If you cannot look around you and must insist on indulging a taste for the primitive, you have only to visit the ruins of an ancient people and ponder how much of its GNP was devoted to religion, to its sense of the meaning of human life rather than mere survival.
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Coming to religion, we arrive in the realm of what is particular and individual. Science and religion are nowhere more opposed than in regard to human importance. Religion declares for the importance of humans and seeks to specify what it is.
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True religion shows its concern for the human species by addressing individual human beings. Science for its part speaks against the special importance of any object of science, including human beings, and in the theory of evolution it seeks to erode the difference between human beings and other animals.
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Literature takes on the big questions of human life that science ignores—what to do about a boring husband, for example.
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Altogether thumos is one basis for a human science aware of the body but not bound to it, a science with soul and taught by poetry well interpreted.
"..whenever I had a problem, I went to something wholesome to solve it."
One of the “wholesome” things that helped, he said, was bowling.
That's about as good an explanation of dealing with problems as I have ever heard.
The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis in the New York Times Sunday magazine.
The popular image of the Wise Man usually does not include a guy in a bowling shirt, but several qualities have emerged again and again in older people like J. who score high on Ardelt’s wisdom scale. They learn from previous negative experiences. They are able to step outside themselves and assess a troubling situation with calm reflection. They recast a crisis as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be solved. They take action in situations they can control and accept the inability to do so when matters are outside their control.
so how do academics define wisdom now that they have begun studying it? For one thing, you don't have to be smart or accomplished or even old, though most older people are more even-keeled and emotionally resilient.
Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential.
Vivian Clayton whose research has made many breakthroughs in understanding, first analyzed the Hebrew bible
“What emerged from that analysis,” she says, “was that wisdom meant a lot of different things. But it was always associated with knowledge, frequently applied to human social situations, involved judgment and reflection and was almost always embedded in a component of compassion.” The essential importance of balance was embodied in the Hebrew word for wisdom, chochmah, which ancient peoples understood to evoke the combination of both heart and mind in reaching a decision.
Another researcher Birren boiled it down to the "Berlin Paradigm" and defined wisdom as
an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.
Ardelt who's now doing research in Boston analyzing Harvard University graduates says
People who rated high in wisdom, she adds, were “very generous,” both financially and emotionally; among those who rated low in wisdom, “there was this occupation with the self.”
What is very clear is that old people with a more positive attitude towards old age lived seven and a half years longer.
They can regulate their emotions better, registering the negative, focusing on the positive.
It may be that the seeds of wisdom are planted early in life with exposure to adversity or failure, that one called a "stress inoculation" that enhances the person's ability to regulate emotions.
Yoga has now been shown to give an immune boost to breast cancer survivors even as it promotes psychological well-being and delivering the physical output equivalent to a moderate-intensity exercise.
Yoga gives immune boost to breast cancer survivors
I've been practicing yoga for over 15 years now, albeit only in classes. Apart from walking, yoga is my principal form of exercise. I'm lucky to have a teacher who understands middle-aged bodies so we're not endlessly doing upside down dog and sun salutations. Instead he aims to get us to a state of energized relaxation and often incorporates elements of qi gong.
For those who have never tried yoga or for beginners, here are some of the physiological and psychological health benefits of yoga. For the middle-aged, I believe yoga is better than most other forms of exercise because of the low risk of injury, the focus on the breath and the relaxed nature of the "asanas" or postures that build strength and balance.
According to medical scientists, yoga therapy is successful because of the balance created in the nervous and endocrine systems which directly influences all the other systems and organs of the body.
Most teen-agers multitask because they can and they have the gadgets to do so. Yet some neuroscientists are raising red flags that those teenagers may be harming their still developing brains.
Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?
Here's Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
"Introducing multitasking in younger kids in my opinion can be detrimental. One of the biggest problems about multitasking is that it's almost impossible to gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you're multitasking. And if it becomes normal to do, you'll likely be satisfied with very surface-level investigation and knowledge."
Russell Poldrack, associate professor of psychology at UCLA, who did a study
Multitaskers "may not be building the same knowledge that they would be if they were focusing. While multitasking makes them feel like they are being more efficient, research suggests that there's very little you can do that involves multitasking that you can be as good at when you're not multitasking."
But researchers don't know for sure. David Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan.
"The belief is they're getting good at this and that they're much better than the older generation at it and that there's no cost to their efficiency."
Seems to me, teenagers should learn both multitasking and deep concentration if they really what to prepared for becoming a fully-functioning grown-ups.
Some jobs, like air traffic controllers, may demand multi-tasking, but others, like surgeons, demand absolute focus.
Well this is good news. The mere belief that you're getting a workout affects physiology as much as an actual workout does.
Sharon Begley reports in the Wall St Journal about Ellen Langer's findings. Why Thinking You Got a Workout May Make Your Body Healthier
"If you can put the mind in a healthy place, you can have dramatic physiological consequences," says Prof. Langer, whose study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science.
It's an Aerobic Placebo .
Who knew that the word placebo - I shall please - comes from the rite of Vespers for the Office of the Dead or that it's now obsolete meaning referred to someone who came to the funeral claiming a connection with the deceased to get a share of any food or drink handed out at the funeral? In France, placebo singers were archetypical simulators.
Wikipedia goes on to explore placebo in Chaucer , a Yes man character and its meaning a sycophant.
Today we know that many who get a placebo - a substance containing no drug and completely useless - often get better, a phenomenon known as the placebo effect.
The FDA published an article on The Healing Power of Placebos
"Expectation is a powerful thing," says Robert DeLap, M.D., head of one of the Food and Drug Administration's Offices of Drug Evaluation. "The more you believe you're going to benefit from a treatment, the more likely it is that you will experience a benefit."
You may not of heard of the insula before, but you'll hear more about this Small Part of the Brain and Its Profound Effects
According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.
They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.
Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals.
The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine. So insula research offers new ways to think about treating drug addiction, alcoholism, anxiety and eating disorders.
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The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula. It provides unprecedented insight into the anatomy of human emotions.
Why career planning is a waste of time
Or why your best guess beats careful planning.
In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it.
We are very poor at what will make us happy in the future, We "miswant."
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
Maybe the Chaos Theory of Career Development makes more sense.
if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.
This seems to tie in with Purposive Drift: Making it Up as We Go Along by Richard Oliver at Change This
Your life is not a project plan. Nobody knows where they will be in five years time.
Life is more open, much messier, more ambiguous, more complex, more mysterious, more surprising and filled with more possibilities for good or for ill than we can possibly imagine.
He argues that we revert to "machine-like' thinking because it promises a world of predictability and certainty to mask the frightening thought of our own fragility.
He says we are all more ignorant than we know and smarter than we think and believes our real compass point is our sense of well-being.
Making it up as you go along, he calls Purposive Drift and that's a perfectly reasonable, responsible and realistic approach to life.
Seems to be the one I took.
Last week the Pope said the saints have not 'fallen from heaven'.
"They are men like us, with complicated problems. Holiness does not consist in not making mistakes or never sinning," Benedict XVI continued. "Holiness grows with the capacity for conversion, repentance, willingness to begin again, and above all with the capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness.
Saints Weren't Perfect, Pope Says
Today in the Wall St Journal, Jeff Zaslow tells the stories of three people and the lessons they learned from the losses they've endured.
Former Army Staff Sgt. Robbie Doughty lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Thomas Sullivan lost 96 colleagues in the Sept. 11 attacks. Laurie Johnson lost her husband and young son in a small plane crash that left her seriously injured.
And yet today, all three of them remain positive about life. They even seem upbeat.
Mr. Doughty, 32, will host a grand opening today of his new Little Caesars pizza franchise in Paducah, Ky. Since his 2004 injury, "I've done so many things, even skiing," he says. "If there's something I can't do, there's always a way to work around it."
Plane-crash survivor Laurie Johnson sells stylish crutches.
Mr. Sullivan, 35, is now an Army Reserve captain in Iraq. In 2001, as a Fiduciary Trust employee, he worked on the 95th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower, and escaped minutes before it collapsed. Yes, he feels survivor's guilt, but serving as a wartime officer helps to ease that.
Ms. Johnson, 46, is now an entrepreneur. That 2002 plane crash left her on crutches for two years. Since then, she has created LemonAid Crutches, which sells "designer crutches" with comfortable fabrics. It was her way of "turning lemons into lemonade," she says.
Are there lessons for us in these people's experiences? Researchers say yes, because the root of resilience is an ability to keep adversities in perspective, while making peace with things that can't be changed.
Being creative with what life deals you is key.
Dr. Zausner says that her own greatest achievements came after surviving ovarian cancer. "We don't know how strong we are until we have the occasion to find out. Our strengths are like icebergs, mostly hidden." Her new book, "When Walls Become Doorways," details her research into artists "who turned setbacks into launching pads."
Key too is pressing on, helping others and finding purpose.
Sounds something like saints-in-the-making doesn't it.
The Real Live Preacher makes a good case that male yoga is nothing more than playing catch
Right in the middle of the conversation, I asked Cristopher, “When was the last time you played catch?”
“Just catch?”
“Yeah, just got out with a friend and threw the ball back and forth.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Years, I guess.”
“So why did we stop doing that? I mean, I LOVE playing catch. I wish I could play catch right now!”
And so was born a new kind of lectionary study group. I pulled my old glove out of the closet – the one I’ve had since I was 12. I had to re-lace parts of it, but it still feels perfect on my hand. Cristopher and I get together once a week or so. We throw the ball around while talking about the passages in the lectionary for the coming Sunday. Sometimes we just play catch and say nothing. Or we might stop, sit down and talk more seriously. We do whatever we want to do.
I was scared the first time we met, wondering how long it would take before I regained my instinctive feel for my arm and my release. The baseball felt very small in my hand, and I was pretty wild. And man, was I ever sore the next day. We’ve gotten together three times now, and my arm has loosened up considerably. It’s starting to feel natural for me to throw a baseball. I don’t worry about it. I just let it loose and feel the power of my arm. My whole body moves in the follow-through, and when our "study session" is done, I feel loose and warm all over.
It’s like the ultimate male yoga.
Tom Brokaw found the World War II generation astonishingly straight, decent and steadfast. A lot of it had to do with the way they were brought up and the culture in which they lived.
Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian, sends off his father and looks at the life of John Sheridan, an ordinary, extraordinary man of his generation.
It is an intense paradox of our situation that people of my father's generation were routinely much better educated than people today. You couldn't go through the Christian Brothers in those days without reading the great books, learning of the great music and studying the great history. Today we have a surfeit of information points and a dearth of education, a flood of trivial information and a lack of knowledge of who we are or where we come from.
My father tried twice to enlist in World War II but was knocked back on medical grounds both times. But he always did the right thing. Except on occasion of grave illness, he never missed Sunday mass in his entire life. One wife, one family, one profession, one religious faith, one house, his sons at the same school as him: a life as unfashionable in its limits and commitments as anything could be today. And yet a life within those self-imposed limits and commitments of vast, imaginative richness.
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His son is a baby boomer. My father came from much the better generation, and was much the better man.
The best of a generation via Tim Blair.
In the Wall Street Journal, Danielle Crittenden reviews "Unprotected" by a doctor who remains anonymous, fearing that she would be punished personally and professionally if her employer or colleagues knew what she really thought.
Hard to believe isn't it in this day and age? What is it that she says that's so shocking?
"My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?" So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. "Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds."
Unfortunately, the young women described in "Unprotected" have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their "sexual choices." And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.
Young women are rarely told that there are physical, emotional, psychological, moral and spiritual consequences to their behavior.
Apparently, 'being judgmental" trumps everything, even common sense.
How do you live after an inexplicable accident becomes an unimaginable tragedy?
The psychiatrist who blogs as Shrinkwrapped encouraged a commenter known as "Jimmy J" to write about his journey. Jimmy J was deadened by grief, a human "doing" not a human "being," when he was struck by grace.
One Man's Journey
It was too simple to be effective.
That's what Harvard graduate, motivational speaker and executive coach Caroline Adams Miller thought about thinking of three good things that happened during the day.
But she did the homework assignment and found
"The quality of my dreams has changed, I never have trouble falling asleep and I do feel happier,"
she said in Researchers Seek Routes to Happier Life.
Seems like a lot of those exercises suggested by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania work like
* think of three good things that happened during the day
* find your personal strengths and apply one or more of them in a different way every day for a week. (You can take the test and find your strengths at authentic happiness.)
* savor the pleasing things in your life - the first cup of coffee, a hot shower
* practice random acts of kindness for 10 weeks
* write down what you want to be remembered for. (This suggestion falls into my idea of your Personal Legacy Archives and keep your life aligned with your legacy)
For a full understanding of Seligman's work and his own journey nothing beats Eudeamonia, The Good Life by Martin Seligman, published in Edge.
About 25 years ago I began to ask the question, who never gets helpless? That is, who resists collapsing? And the reverse question is, who becomes helpless at the drop of a hat? I got interested in optimism because I found out that the people who didn't become helpless were people who when they encountered events in which nothing they did mattered, thought about those events as being temporary, controllable, local, and not their fault; whereas people who collapsed in a heap immediately upon becoming helpless were people who saw the bad event as being permanent, uncontrollable, pervasive, and their fault. 25 years ago I started working on optimism versus pessimism, and I found that optimistic people got depressed at half the rate of pessimistic people, that optimistic people succeeded better in all professions that we measured except one, that optimistic people had better, feistier, immune systems, and probably lived longer than pessimistic people. We also created interventions that reliably changed pessimists into optimists.
For more than 26 years, Larry Stewart was the Secret Santa who gave away millions of dollars and no one knew who he was.
Now that he has cancer,
he wants to inspire others to do the same. He said he thinks that people should know that he was born poor, was briefly homeless, dropped out of college, has been fired from jobs, and once even considered robbery.
But he said every time he hit a low point in his life, someone gave him money, food and hope, and that's why he has devoted his life to returning the favors.
Returning the kindness of strangers.
Another reason not even to try steroids if you're an athlete. That explains a lot.
A new study shows taking steroids to bulk up can lead to a "catastrophic loss" of brain cells.
Large doses of steroids were already known to boost levels of the male hormone testosterone and cause heightened aggression.
This could be evidence of impaired brain function, according to Professor Barbara Ehrlich, from Yale School of Medicine.
That explains a lot.
HT Siggy.
Dubbed the "MacBeth effect", it's the human compulsion to clean up physically after doing wrong morally.
researchers found that study participants who focused on unethical behaviours such as lying, stealing, or betraying friends were more likely to follow up with activities that indicated they felt physically dirty.
Those who were given an opportunity to wash their hands after recalling incidents of immoral behaviour showed signs of a clearer conscious than those who had not washed.
“After we feel morally threatened, we have this deep psychological urge to cleanse ourselves,” says Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the study.
From the New Scientist, Physical washing may help your conscience.
I've written about Masuro Emoto's extraordinary photographs of water crystals
as they are affected by the thoughts, intentions and prayers of the people viewing the water in What is the Shape of the Water Within You.
I've been watching to see if any scientist could or would test his hypothesis by attempting to replicate his results. So far none to my knowledge have even tried.
Rebecca Marina, a spiritual healer and energy therapist, is not the traditional, creditable scientist I was hoping for. Nonetheless, her photographs of the effect of emotions at the cellular level are quite remarkable.
I must add that I have found EFT, a process in which you tap on certain points on your body that correspond to the Chinese meridians has remarkable effects on unresolved emotional issues. EFT is simple, free, fast and effective and involves no drugs. More and more psychotherapists are using EFT in their practices because of it often works where nothing else will. Here is the main site for EFT.
Here are photographs of her blood showing the effect of her emotions at the cellular level.
Before and after photos of "blood cell clumping"
We instinctively know that how a question is "framed" - think leading the witness or negative ads - can distort our decision-making. Now scientists have brain images that confirm what we know in our guts.
Emotion rules the brain's decisions.
But Following Your Gut is a good thing when it comes to life decisions and choices.
In Gut Reactions,, Jesse Prinz argues that emotions are embodied appraisals - they are perceptions of the body, but, through the body they also allow us to literally perceive danger, loss and other matters.
"Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Philosophy of Mind)" (Jesse J. Prinz)
Mitch Albom interviewed Tony Bennett in this week's Parade magazine to find out what makes him so satisfied.
1. He loves what he does.
"A certain contentment has settled over me."
2. He is not a "things" person.
He doesn't own a car, a boat, nor a house.
"I'm one a perpetual vacation. I stay in a perpetual creative zone at all times."
3. He's held firm to his ideals.
"When you do something greedily, you might make a lot of money, but in no way makes you happy. When you do something well and with care...when you hit the pillow at night, you can say, 'At least I did it right.'"
4. He never forgets where he came from.
"Life is a gift, a magnificent gift."
Katie Paine, a serial entrepreneur, battled and survived breast cancer.
From her blog, True Survivor, comes The Ten Stages of Breast Cancer
1. Denial
2. Fear
3. Information addiction
4. Decision shock coupled with analysis paralysis
5. Organizational compulsion
6. Fear of baldness
7. Everything is just peachy
8. You survived, boo hoo
9. I'm a survivor, now how can I give back
10. The fear i