Minding mental health

Guidelines to deal with mental health discrimination -
Time To Change | let's end mental health discrimination

Information on relationship issues -
One Plus One

Findings that retired people benefit from keeping active -
PsycNET

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com

"In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one..."

The full article is at: Mind - How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com

Giovanni Sollima - Sogno ad Occhi Aperti (Daydream) PART 1

Directed by Lasse Gjertsen
Copyrights: Casa Musicale Sonzogno, Milan, 2007

This is a music video for the italian cellist Giovanni Sollima, on two of his compositions; "Terra Aria" and "Concerto Rotondo". Enjoy!

www.sonzogno.it

"So this is the project I've been working on for the last 5 months, and heres how part 1 of it is made:

On the six arms parts, which by the way took most of the time to make, I filmed Sollima playing the different layers of cello after each other. I then edited the video frame by frame in Photoshop (remember, it's 25 frames per second of video), cutting his arms out from the other layers and pasting it on top, matching the movement of the cello. This was done ca 4000 times, by myself... (more on youtube)



YouTube - Giovanni Sollima - Sogno ad Occhi Aperti (Daydream) PART 1

I Will See You In Far-Off Places; Morrissey

Nobody knows what human life is.
Why we come, why we go.
So why then do I know
I will see you,
I will see you in far off places?

The heart knows why I grieve
And yes one day I will close my eyes forever
But I will see you
I will see you in far off places.

It's so easy for us to sit together
But it's so hard for our hearts to combine
And why?
And why?
Why? Why? Why? Why?

Destiny for some is to save lives
But destiny for some is to end lives
But there is no end
And I will see you in far off places.

If your god bestows protection upon you
And if the USA doesn't bomb you
I believe I will see you somewhere safe
Looking to the camera, messing around
and pulling faces.

YouTube - Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected' (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

"We Are All Connected" was made from sampling Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The History Channel's Universe series, Richard Feynman's 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye's Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking's Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music. MP3 available at http://www.symphonyofscience.com.


YouTube - Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected' (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

Charles Dickens: Christmas as we grow older

TIME was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then, very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just as well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when we intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one’s name.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of the rainbow! That was
the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities achieved since, have been stronger!

What! Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at daggers-drawn on our account? When brothers and sisters-in-law who had always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected, perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us with unlimited incomes? Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten, after which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to our late
rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging friendship and forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be surpassed in Greek or Roman story, which subsisted until death? Has that same rival long ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and married for money, and become usurious? Above all, do we really know, now, that we should probably have been miserable if we had won and worn the pearl, and that we are better without her?

That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we had been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and good; when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived and were received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that that Christmas has not come yet?

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have been and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?

No! Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on Christmas Day!..."

Read the rest at: http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Dickens/Dickens_Christmas.pdf

Stephen King Pens Poem for Playboy Magazine

The Bone Church, By Stephen King

When traveling to the heart of darkness, terror is not an emotion—it's a destination.

If you want to hear, buy me another drink.
(Ah, this is slop—slop, I tell you—but never mind; what isn’t?)
There were thirty-two of us went into that greensore
and only three who rose above it.
We were thirty days in the green, and only one of us came out.
Three rose above the green, three made it to the top:

Manning and Revois and me. And what does that book say?
The famous one? “Only I am left to tell you.”
I’ll die in bed, as most obsessed whoresons do.
And do I mourn Manning? Balls! It was his money
put us there, his will that drove us on, death by death.
But did he die in bed? Not that one! I saw to it!
Now he worships in that bone church forever. Life is grand!
(What slop is this? Still—buy me another, do. Buy me two!
“Put another nickel in…the nickelodeon——”
In other words I’ll talk for whiskey; if you want me
to shut up, switch me to champagne.
Talk is cheap, silence is dear, my dear.
What was I saying?)...

...I don’t remember how I got back; it’s a
dream of green with dark faces in it,
then a dream of blue with light faces in it,
and now I wake in the night in this city
where not one in ten dreams of what
lies beyond their lives—for the eyes they
use to dream with are shut, as Manning’s
were, until the end, when not all the bank accounts in hell
or Switzerland (they may be the same) could save him.

I wake with my liver bellowing, and in the dark
I hear the thunder of those great gray ghosts rising
out of the greenroof like a storm set loose on the earth
and I smell the dust and shit, and when they
break free into the sky of their undoing, I see
the ancient fans of their ears and the hooks of their
tusks; I see their eyes and their eyes and their eyes.
There’s more to life than this; there are maps
inside your maps and time beyond your time.

It’s still there, the bone church, and I’d like to
go back and find it again, so I could throw myself
over and be done this comedy. Now turn away
your sheep’s face before I turn it away for you.
Arr, it’s a dirty place, this reality,
and there’s no religion in it, so buy me a drink,
goddam you. We’ll toast elephants that never were.

[ENDS]

The above, with the middle chunk, can be found at:
Stephen King Pens Poem for Playboy Magazine

The Century of the Self

A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered, he said, primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces, if which not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.

This BBC documentary series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.

http://www.rewtube.com/the-century-of-the-self-episode-1/

http://www.rewtube.com/the-century-of-the-self-episode-2/

http://www.rewtube.com/the-century-of-the-self-episode-3/

http://www.rewtube.com/the-century-of-the-self-episode-4/

Broadcasting information at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432232/

Walking Straight into Circles - Science News

Reports of research into whether people go round in circles when lost, which found that they do, appeared in several scientific publications September 2009. -

"...Souman wanted to test whether people wander when lost and, after meandering back to where they started, erroneously think that they have walked in a circle. His team first instructed three men—ages 24, 35 and 41—to walk in a straight direction in part of the Sahara desert. Each man set out from a different starting point, trailed at a distance by an experimenter in an all-terrain vehicle. Over 2 ½ to 3 ½ hours, walking trajectories were recorded by GPS receivers that the men carried in backpacks.

Two men walked during the day, with the sun visible. They veered off course but did not go in circles. One man walked at night during a full moon. After clouds hid the moon, he made several sharp turns in the same direction, nearly bringing him back in the direction from which he came.

In a second experiment, six college students walked for about four hours in a dense German forest where the landscape provides no clear cues to direction. Four of them walked on an overcast day. GPS data showed that each of those students walked in a series of circles. Three didn’t notice when they repeatedly crossed their own paths.

The other two students walked on sunny days. Both followed an almost perfectly straight course, except during brief periods when clouds blocked the sun.

Animals such as bees and pigeons compensate for changes in the sun’s position as they fly from one spot to another. People may do the same while walking, Souman speculates.

In a third experiment, 15 blindfolded college students tried to stride straight forward in a large, flat field. In a series of 5- and 10-minute trials, participants walked in circles that often were no more than 20 meters wide. Only three veered consistently to the right or left..."

More at: How To Walk In Circles Without Really Trying / Science News

Parasites & Our Immune Systems

"The long battle between humans and infectious microbes has left its marks all over us.

It shows up most obviously in the way our bodies are constructed. The thousands of species of bacteria that swarm over us cannot penetrate our multilayered skin. Entry points, such as the eyes and nose, are bathed in moisture to help flush out pathogens. The lining of our lungs releases bacteria-killing compounds. Viruses that manage to infect cells are greeted by proteins that attempt to shred them into genetic confetti. Any pathogen that sneaks past all these defenses then faces an army of immune cells, which can devour and destroy the invaders. Immune cells can also manufacture antibodies, which allow them to launch swift attacks if they encounter the same infection elsewhere in the body.

This elaborate defense system dates back billions of years. Our single-celled ancestors were infected with viruses; when they got bigger they were infected with bacteria; and after they evolved guts, those guts were infected with worms. Any mutation that offered even a little protection against those pathogens had a chance to be favored by natural selection. Over thousands of generations, mutation upon mutation built up our diversity of immune cells, signals, and weapons. There was never a point at which our defenses stopped evolving, because the pathogens were evolving as well. New generations of invaders slipped past our lines of defense, spurring the evolution of immune upgrades.

But it is not just our bodies that have been shaped by this tug-of-war. A number of scientists now argue that the battle against disease has left an indelible imprint on our minds as well.

Over the past few years, Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, has been developing an intriguing theory that behavior can be just as effective as microbiology at warding off disease. According to this theory, we have what Schaller calls a “behavioral immune system.” It’s a way of responding to the outside world, and to the people around us, that is so deeply embedded in our minds that we are hardly aware of it.

Schaller and his colleagues have been busily running psychological experiments to test his hypothesis. The results so far are preliminary but provocative. If Schaller is right, this behavioral immune system may prove to have a big influence on our day-to-day lives. It might even influence human nature on a global scale, shaping cultures around the world.

If the familiar, biological immune system were foolproof, it would be pointless to evolve a behavioral immune system too. In reality, however, our defenses are far from perfect. Some pathogens can disguise themselves well enough to go unnoticed, and others breed so fast that our immune systems cannot keep up. Then again, sometimes our immune system succeeds too well, using such overwhelming force against pathogens that it damages our own tissues in the process.

Not getting infected in the first place is a far safer alternative. Scientists have discovered a wide variety of animal species that use behavioral strategies to avoid becoming sick. Some caterpillars blast their droppings like cannons so that parasitic wasps that lay eggs in the droppings won’t be able to follow their scent. Sheep instinctively avoid grazing on grass near their own manure, advantageous because many sheep parasites release their eggs in the animals’ droppings. A female mouse can smell the difference between a healthy male and one infected with intestinal worms. She will avoid the latter and mate with the former.

Our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, also display behavioral responses to signs of disease. When the primatologist Jane Goodall observed chimps in the 1960s, one of her subjects was a male she called McGregor, who suffered from polio. He dragged himself around by his arms after his legs became paralyzed, and his loose bladder attracted clouds of flies. Before McGregor got sick, he enjoyed hours of grooming from other chimpanzees, who picked out fleas, mites, and other parasites from his fur. But Goodall watched in amazement as the other chimpanzees stayed away from him once he became ill..."

Read article here: CarlZimmer.com: Articles

35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography | Wired

This is a photograph of a cross-section of a mangrove leaf.


The other winning pictures from wired.com magazine can be seen at:

35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography | Wired Science | Wired.com

On Writing by Raymond Carver

This essay first appeared in the "New York Times Book Review" in 1981 as "A Storyteller's Notebook." Entitled "On Writing," it is included in "Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories" (Harvill Press) by Raymond Carver. © 1968 to 1988 by Raymond Carver, 1989 to present by Tess Gallagher

Prospectmagazine.co.uk has published it online under the title Principles of a Story for general viewing:

"Back in the mid-1960s, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvellous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time."

Principles of a story « Prospect Magazine

Ostrom's Economic Nobel Prize

Jamie Bartlett, writing for open Democracy News Analysis on 30th October, debates another controversial Nobel winner this year. -

"This month's most surprising Nobel Prize winner was not Barack Obama but Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist from the University of Indiana who picked up the coveted Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science.

Jamie Bartlett is head of the independence programme at the think tank Demos. Not only is Ostrom the first female recipient, she is also not an economist...

...Ostrom has been entirely devoted to understanding one thing: managing what are known as common pool resources. Common pool resources are resources that are ‘non-excludable' (it is impossible to prevent individuals from using them) and "rival" (use by one individual means that there is less available for next). In other words, no one really owns them, and we can all use them to destruction. Farming on a public field or fishing in common waters are the classic examples. The problem is this that is in everyone's interests to limit usage to ensure there are enough cod in the North Sea for the stock to replenish. But, left to our own devices, we will all over fish and exhaust these finite resources, and all be worse off for it..."

The rest is at: Common sense Nobel | open Democracy News Analysis

A related appeal by revisioning academics for biophysical economics is here - Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?: Scientific American

The Illusion of Past, Present, Future: Intent.com, Chopra

Deepak Chopra co-wrote this article in October last with Robert Lanza, MD is considered one of the leading scientists in the world, and the author of "Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe". Challenging the immutability of the past, it was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"The universe evolves backward in time, not the other way around as we were taught in school. "The histories of the universe," concedes Stephen Hawking, the famed physicist "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

Life is not just a collection of atoms — proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun. It is true that the laws of chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, but there is more to us than the sum of our biochemical functions. Conversely, physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal life that coordinates experience. We are connected not only by intertwined consciousness, but by a pattern that is a template for the universe itself.

Quantum physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended physical state until observed, when they collapse to just one outcome — we don't know what happens until we investigate, and our investigation influences that reality. Whether or not certain events may have happened some time ago, may not actually be determined until some time in your future — it may actually be contingent upon actions that have not yet taken place...

The Illusion of Past, Present, Future | Intent.com

Making up the Mind - Chris Frith

Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Chris Frith, award-nominated after its release last year, rounds up findings to date on brain function at a smart gallop. Apparently, the brain frees us from the everyday tasks of moving about in the world around us, letting us concentrate on the things that seem important to us; making friends and influencing people. However, the 'you' that is released into this social world is also a construction of the brain. It is our brain that enables us to share our mental life with the people around us.

From the contents

Prologue: Real scientists don’t study the mind
The psychologist’s fear of the party

Part I Seeing through the brain’s illusions

1 Clues from a damaged brain
When the brain tells lies
How do we know what’s real?

2 What a normal brain tells us about the world
Illusions of awareness
Our creative brain

3 What the brain tells us about our bodies
Privileged access?
My brain can act perfectly well without me

Part II How the brain does it

4 Getting ahead by prediction
The feeling of being in control
The invisible actor at the centre of the world

5 Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality
Is there a rhinoceros in the room?
Imagination is extremely boring

6 How brains model minds
Humans and robots
Illusions of agency

Part III Culture and the brain

7 Sharing minds – How the brain creates culture
People are contagious
Closing the loop

Epilogue: Me and my brain
Even an illusion has responsibilities

Lots more information at: Making up the Mind - Chris Frith

Ludwig Borne's 1823 Essay on Writing

Born Juda Löw Baruch in Frankfurt am Main’s Jewish ghetto in 1786,
LUDWIG BÖRNE wrote an essay that has found its way into the hands of many a cultural player since its creation in 1823. It's called How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days.

Ludwig Börne proved himself from early on an original writer. He was a gifted scholar and pursued his studies in the most important centers of German learning. He began in the legendary university in Halle, specializing in medicine (the vocation that offered the greatest possibility of advancement for a German Jew of his day). In 1808, new political developments (Napoleon) changed the rules of political engagement and posts in the ministry and in civil service were opened to Jews. Börne took advantage of these winds of change blowing from the west, changed his course of study, and soon received his doctorate in political science. In 1811, he joined the civil service in his native Frankfurt. A few years later, the liberation of Frankfurt from Napoleonic control brought with it the repeal of Napoleon’s liberal laws and unhappily forced Börne to seek a new career. The career he chose was the only one he saw left open to him: that of an original writer...

The essay, translated by Leland de La Durantaye, starts -

There can be found today men and works which offer instruction in how to learn such things as Latin, Greek, and French in a mere three days, and such things as accounting in a mere three hours. How one might become in three days a truly original writer has, however, yet to be indicated. And yet it is such a simple thing! To do it there is nothing one needs to learn, only much one needs to unlearn. There is nothing new one need to experience, only much that one need forget.

In today’s world, the minds and works of the learned might be compared to ancient manuscripts where one must scrape away the boring disputes of would-be Church Fathers and the ranting of inflamed monks to catch a glimpse of the Roman classic lying beneath. With the birth of every new mind comes the birth of beautiful new thoughts. With every individual, the world is reborn. And yet, somehow, the unnecessary and distracting scrawl of life and teaching conceals and obscures these original texts.

One can arrive at a fairly precise view of this state of affairs if one thinks of the following. We recognize an animal, a piece of fruit, a flower, and things of this sort as what they are. Could one, however, say that someone who knew partridges, raspberry bushes, or roses only by means of partridge pie, raspberry juice, or rose oil had a full and accurate understanding of these things? And yet, this is how the arts and sciences—and indeed all realms in which we first approach things through thought rather than the senses—proceed. These things are laid before us prepared and transformed and, in truth, in such fashion that we never come to know them in their raw and naked form. Opinion is the kitchen in which all truths are slaughtered, plucked, minced, stewed, and spiced. We are in need of nothing so much as books without reason—books, namely, that present to us actual things and not mere opinions.

There are but a tiny number of original writers and the best of them differ from those less good not nearly so much as we might, after a superficial consideration of the matter, think. One creeps, another runs, one limps, another dances, one drives, another rides to his destination. But route and destination are in every case the same. Only in solitude can one arrive at new and great thoughts.

The question is: how can one arrive at solitude? One might flee his fellow man—but then one finds oneself in the noisy market of books. One can throw one’s books away, but how does one free oneself from all the conventional knowledge that schooling has stuffed in one’s head? In the true art of selfeducation, what is most needed and most beautiful, but also rarest and often poorly accomplished, is the art of making oneself ignorant...

The rest of the essay and its adventurous history, can be viewed at: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/art_of_ignorance_harvard_review.pdf

Simon's Cat: 'Fly Guy'

This clean animation, of a hungry cat resorting to increasingly desperate measures to catch a housefly, has become insanely popular in a short time -



YouTube - Simon's Cat 'Fly Guy'