Warding off the Darkness

"If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself.

Buy coffee for the person behind you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc.

The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical."

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/08/tim-ferriss-tools-of-titans-depression/

Your homecoming will be my homecoming

"...Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is a part of a local network that shares information.

...All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of one another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending their emotional world with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

...The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable - the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. ... We would scarcely imagine that identity could be as fluid as the seas that the supposed self rides on.

E.E Cummings paints a lover's power to render identity in this way:

your homecoming will be my homecoming -

my selves go with you, only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming

(an almost someone always who's noone)

a noone who, till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies....

Page 142, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

A relationship is a physiologic process

"Dozens of studies demonstrate that solitary people have a vastly increased rate of premature death from all causes - they are three to five times likelier to die early than people with ties to a caring spouse, family, or community.

With results like these backing the medical efficacy of mammalian congregation, you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine.

Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don't believe in them; they can't bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment.

The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."

Page 80, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Limbic Resonance, or the Ancient Ability to Read Minds

"...Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance - a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity.

Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.

So familiar and expected is the neural attunement of limbic resonance that people find its absence disturbing. Scrutinize the eyes of a shark or a sunbathing salamander and you get back no answering echo, no flicker of recognition, nothing. The vacuity behind those glances sends a chill down the mammalian spine.

...To the animals capable of bridging the gap between minds, limbic resonance is the door to communal connection. Limbic resonance supplies the wordless harmony we see everywhere but take for granted - between mother and infant, between a boy and a dog, between lovers holding hands across a restaurant table. This silent reverberation between minds is so much a part of us that, like the noiseless machinations of the kidney or the liver, it functions smoothly and continuously without our notice.

...It seems a strange irony that we need science to rekindle faith in the ancient ability to read minds. That old skill, so much a part of us, is not much believed in now. Those who spend their days without an opportunity for quiet listening can pass a lifetime and overlook it altogether.

The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses - a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began."

Page 63 - 65,  'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Evolution is not an upward staircase. And why we write/read poetry

Evolution is not an upward staircase

"Many people conceive of evolution as an upward staircase, an unfolding sequence that produces ever more advanced organisms. From this perspective, the advantages of the neocortex - speech, reason, abstraction - would naturally be judged the highest attributes of human nature.

But the vertical conceptualization of evolution is fallacious. Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today.

We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three [the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex], but simply the most recent.

Poetry, a bridge between two brains

.....Because people are the most aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure of argument and will. Not so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of three. Much of one's mind does not take orders. "From modern neuroanatomy," writes a pair of neuroscience researchers, "it is apparent that the entire neocortex of humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it is evolved.

...A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency in discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview.

...Only the latest of the three brains traffics in logic and reason, and it alone can utilize the abstract symbols we know as words. The emotional brain, although inarticulate and unreasoning, can be expressive and intuitive, Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move us in ways beyond logic that have only the most inexact translations in a language the neocortex can comprehend.

...And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straitjacket of verbal expression....Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful."

Page 32 - 34, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

The Acquisition of Language

From 'Strange Behavior, Tales of Evolutionary Neurology', Harold Klawans, M.D:

"...While improved hunting implements could assure a better supply of food, and therefore a decrease in infant mortality (the key to true Darwinian biological superiority), it is difficult to ascribe to such a technological advance any changes other than a mere increase in numbers. Certainly not man's cultural explosion, nor the development of language.

So if it wasn't "man the hunter" who was responsible for the explosive biological advantage of modern humans, what was?

Our advantages over other species are most probably due to the development of a complex language. And women are far more likely to have played the more significant role in this than men. Women were the ones who did the tough job: raising the juvenilized children in caves or any other environment and teaching those children what they needed to know to survive in the world while they were still dependent, weak and slow.

Teaching survival to the juvenilized infant depended on language. Language gave the human the distinct advantage for survival. And over a million years or two, the result was the evolution of brains selected for acquisition of language and other skills during the period of prolonged juvenilization."

Page 35

Tell me your story

".....one Sunday morning in 1971, Lewis was summoned to a terrifying scene. A man was holding a loaded gun on his family, threatening to kill them and himself and anyone else who got in the way. Lewis walked right into the man's house, sat down beside him, and said quietly: "Tell me your story."

Ten hours later, the man gave him his gun.

The truth buried in this drama gets to the very heart of Crisis Center work: each of us has a story, each of us has a loaded gun that we aim at ourselves. After hours, or years, of talking, the story can at last be told in its fullness, and the gun can be laid down.

The story has both happy and sad chapters, and parts if it may be forgotten. Sometimes it takes an outsider to help remember or clarify it. Lose your story and you lose the pageant of your life."

Page 23, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

Lithium

"The Pleiades, an open star cluster, sparkles in the constellation Taurus. ..Although I can't see it with the naked eye, I know a "brown dwarf" lives there, a faint denizen of deep space too large to be a planet but too tiny to be star. Brown dwarfs, which form from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust, are suns that for some reason didn't ignite into leaping infernos. Frigid to the core, not bright enough to see, they're only detectable because of their abundant lithium.

Lithium, the chemical manic-depressives take to stabilize their moods. I bet manic-depressives would enjoy knowing they share an elemental chemistry with huge objects in the far reaches of space, wondrous objects located and defined by their use of lithium."

Page 157, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

The Enemy

"...Storr sees in Churchill's story a classic relationship between depression and hostility, in which an emotionally deprived child resents his deprivers but can't risk showing any anger or upset, since he desperately needs the very people who are torturing him.

Depression results from turning that hostility against oneself.

Sometimes such people aim at opponents in the outside world. As Storr observes, "It is a great relief to find an enemy on whom it is justifiable to lavish wrath."

In Churchill's case, "fighting enemies had a strong emotional appeal to him....and when he was finally confronted by an enemy whom he felt to be wholly evil, it was a release which gave him tremendous vitality."

Page 183, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman​

An Innate Sense of Value

"...For most of his life, he (Winston Churchill) crumbled under the repeat blows of a depression so familiar, loud, and unshakable, that he called it his "Black Dog" - I suppose because it hounded him. It had its own life and demands, was uncompromisingly brutal, and became a monstrous family member to be reckoned with.

It seems to have been an affliction he shared with a number of his ancestors, including his father, who suffered from what was described as "melancholia". A small, feeble boy, bullied at school and neglected by his remote, glamorous, high-society parents, Churchill grew into a dynamo of a man packed with energy, assertiveness, bravery to the point of recklessness, a tough attitude, extreme ambition, plentiful ideas, willfulness, aggression alternating with compassion, artistic tastes, egomania, and a yen for daring adventures.

The deprivation he felt as a child may well have fueled his ambitions, but, having no innate sense of value, he was easy prey for the armies of depression that plagued him throughout his life.

..In psychiatrist Anthony Storr's fascinating character study of Churchill, he argues that in 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, it took a bold conviction for Churchill to rally the British people, but "it was because all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome."

...For the last five years of his long life, Churchill sat in a chair staring at a fire, partly paralyzed by a stroke, wholly demoralized by depression. He stopped reading, he rarely spoke. The Black Dog finally caught up with him and pounced, flattening him under its rough weight.

But what a dynamo he had been, so inventive, so courageous, so resilient. A history-making, difficult life."

Page 183, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

Seeing Truly

"You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.

It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth."

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share/transcript?language=en#t-603082

Near-death experiences are 'electrical surge in dying brain'

"A lot of people thought that the brain after clinical death was inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show that is definitely not the case.

"If anything, it is much more active during the dying process than even the waking state."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23672150

What can a brain scan tell about free will?

Will scientific progress undermine our sense that we have free will? Will it eventually lead us to conclude that free will is an illusion?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23666726

A continuing act of creation

"Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation.

Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input."

The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions
Maria Popova

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/

Buck Up

 Continued, from the post below:

"In June 1974 the Broadway producer Joshua Logan described his manic-depressive illness to a session of an American Psychiatric Association meeting in New York. Logan was one of the most talented producers, having a string of hits, including the musical South Pacific to his name. In the course of his frank and revealing address he had this to say about the 'come on and buck up' approach.

"It seemed to me that all friends of the average human being in depression only knew one cure-all, and that was a slap on the back and 'buck up'. It's just about the most futile thing that could happen to you when you're depressed. My friends never even hinted to me that I was really ill. They simply thought I was low and was being particularly stubborn and difficult about things. If anyone had taken charge and insisted that I go to a mental hospital I probably would have gone straight off. Instead they simply said 'Please don't act that way. Please don't look at your life so pessimistically; it's not as bad as you think. You'll always get back to it. Just buck up."

The point of this book is for fewer people to say 'buck up' and more people to know what to say and do when confronted by a depressed person or when depressed themselves. Given the prevalence of depression, all of us at some time in our lives will either be depressed ourselves or close to someone who is.

"Depression and How to Survive It"

Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare

Arrow Books 1994

Another one gives up

So friend calls to say that X committed suicide today, after a long struggle with depression. In spite of all the help we tried to get for her, she'd remained inaccessible, trapped behind a wall that no one could get through.

Remembered these lines from a book I read after I discovered that Spike Milligan, the man I always considered the funniest guy ever (And then a passing hippopotamus stopped by and said: "Hi, I'm a passing hippopotamus!", "Der British is terrible cooks, thought Looney, they even burnt Joan of Arc") "suffered from severe bipolar disorder for most of his life, having at least ten major mental breakdowns, several lasting over a year":

 "A reason why people are often hesitant about offering help is that someone who is depressed may appear changed in one or more ways. People who have interviewed Spike Milligan when he is depressed and who may never have known him any other way often describe him as misanthropic, angry, bitter, unforgiving, even humorless. When depressed,  many of us become more unattractive than usual. People who can only see disaster, who fear the worst, who believe the worst about themselves and their fellow-men, are rarely stimulating companions. This is one of the reasons why people who are depressed become socially isolated even if they were not that at the outset.

One way to cope is to remember that the side of the person you see is just that - one side. Every one of us, however, is multidimensional, multifaceted. However, the depressed person recognizes and shows but one side. Don't get taken in."

Page 196. The Role of Relatives and Friends
from "Depression and how to survive it" Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare

A First-Rate Madness

Description of 'A First-Rate Madness, Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness', Nassir Ghaemi. The Penguin Press, 2011. Got it from http://www.flipkart.com.

..................................................................................................................

An investigation into the surprisingly deep correlation between mental illness and successful leadership, as seen through some of history's greatest politicians, generals, and businesspeople.

In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, who runs the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, draws from the careers and personal plights of such notable leaders as Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, and others from the past two centuries to build an argument at once controversial and compelling: the very qualities that mark those with mood disorders- realism, empathy, resilience, and creativity -also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. By combining astute analysis of the historical evidence with the latest psychiatric research, Ghaemi demonstrates how these qualities have produced brilliant leadership under the toughest circumstances.

Take realism, for instance: study after study has shown that those suffering depression are better than "normal" people at assessing current threats and predicting future outcomes. Looking at Lincoln and Churchill among others, Ghaemi shows how depressive realism helped these men tackle challenges both personal and national. Or consider creativity, a quality psychiatrists have studied extensively in relation to bipolar disorder. A First-Rate Madness shows how mania inspired General Sherman and Ted Turner to design and execute their most creative-and successful-strategies.

Ghaemi's thesis is both robust and expansive; he even explains why eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made such poor leaders. Though sane people are better shepherds in good times, sanity can be a severe liability in moments of crisis. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, can leave one ill equipped to endure dire straits. He also clarifies which kinds of insanity-like psychosis-make for despotism and ineptitude, sometimes on a grand scale.

Ghaemi's bold, authoritative analysis offers powerful new tools for determining who should lead us. But perhaps most profoundly, he encourages us to rethink our view of mental illness as a purely negative phenomenon. As A First-Rate Madness makes clear, the most common types of insanity can confer vital benefits on individuals and society at large-however high the price for those who endure these illnesses.

The Malleable Brain

"...Central to answering these questions are two fairly recent insights of brain research. One concerns the parts of the brain that produce a sense of well-being: our brains have a special circuitry for joy, pleasure, and euphoria - we have a happiness system. Just as we come into the world with a capacity for speech, we are also programmed for positive feelings. This discovery will shape our understanding of mankind as powerfully as Freud's theories of the deep unconscious did in the last century.

The other, still more surprising discovery is that the adult brain continues to change. Until a few years ago scientists believed that the brain, like bones, was fully grown by no later than the end of puberty. But exactly the opposite is true: the circuits in our brain are altered whenever we learn something, and new connections are forged in our network of nerve cells. Using the right microscopes, we can even see these transformations within the skull. After you have read this book, your brain will look different than it did when you started."

Page xv, Introduction, 'The Science of Happiness, How Our Brains Make Us Happy - and What We Can Do to Get Happier', by Stefan Klein, PhD

Cricket and the Primitive Mind

 From 'The Decisive Moment, How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind' (Page 31), Jonah Lehrer:

"...So how do professional cricketers manage to play a delivery from a fast bowler? The answer is that the brain begins collecting information about the delivery long before the ball leaves the hand. As soon as the bowler hits the crease, the batsman will automatically start to pick up on 'anticipatory clues' that help him winnow down the list of possibilities. He'll notice specific features of the hand and arm of the bowler that allow him to predict where, exactly, the ball will end up after it has been pitched.

The batsmen, of course, aren't consciously studying these signs: they can't tell you why or how they decided to play a particular ball. And yet, they are able to act based upon this information. (A similar process is at work with goalkeepers during a penalty shot. They have to predict where the ball will end up before it is even kicked, which forces them to rely on subtle, subliminal cues.)

A study of professional cricketers, for instance, demonstrated that the players could accurately predict the speed and location of the ball based solely on a one-second video of the bowler's wind-up. Each well-trained brain knew exactly what details to look for. And then, once it perceived these details, it seamlessly converted them into an accurate set of feelings, which allowed the expert batsmen to play the ball effectively.

We take these automatic talents for granted precisely because they work so well. There's no robot that can hit a baseball or throw a football or ride a bicycle. No computer program can figure out which actor should play a villain or instantly recognize a familiar face. That is why, when evolution was building our brain, it didn't bother to replace all of those emotional processes with new operations under our explicit control. If something isn't broken, then natural selection isn't going to fix it. Our mind is is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker.

The end result is that the uniquely human parts of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking requires feeling, for our feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend.

Reason without emotion is impotent."

Chess grandmaste​rs are not more intelligen​t

"In today's excerpt - chess grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess, and only show their extraordinary skills within the discipline of chess.

This suggests that expertise in chess (and most other areas) has less to do with analytical skills - the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options - and more to do with long-term immersion and pattern recognition - having experienced and "stored" thousands of game situations and thus having the ability to pluck an optimal answer from among those stored memories.

It also suggests that expertise may be less a result of analytical prowess and more a result of passion, love or obsession for a given subject area - enough passion to have spent the hours necessary to accumulate a robust set of experiences and memories in that area:"The classic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.