Mental barrier

The reverend Jisho Perry just returned from a monastic retreat in Japan. He told me a story that, I think, is a good example of how the mind imposes order on what we see. At the foot of Mount Omine there is a ‘gate’ made up of little more than three tree stumps in the ground. It means: “Off Limits to Women.” It doesn’t actually say that. Women can go there and step right over them if they wanted to ..there is nothing stopping them. There are no guards ..no one to tell them that they can’t. But these three logs have kept women out for over 1,300 years. In a culture where conformity rules, few dare cross the invisible lines. To these women, the gate is a psychological barrier. The sight of a few sticks, and a little cultural background, is enough to create a ‘no trespassing sign’ on an open mountain trail.

Fear incorporated

Presented to the

Seminar in Neuroscience

“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” Arthur Somers Roche

Anxiety is a feeling of dread or apprehension that occurs for no apparent reason. It is distinguished from fear because it occurs in situations where there are no outward signs of eminent danger. It becomes debilitating when it grows out-of-proportion to ordinary events in life. Anxiety is deceptive. First it focuses attention, and then it clamps the brain into rigidity by obsessively replaying past traumas.  Read more ~> [ link ]

“O.K.
Just a little pinprick.
There'll be no more aaaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick.
Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working, good.
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on it's time to go”

Psychotic episode no. 133

I walk home from State Street sometime after midnight, counting the blocks as I go. I unlock the door, climb the stairs and slowly walk down the hall. The hallway turns into an underground tunnel where menacing-looking apparitions reach out to grab me from between the bars of their cells. I walk as close to the middle of the hall as I can. Events of the evening dissolve ..the crowd at Sohos dissolves.. my bedroom door looms up and I push it open with my shoulder. Books have always been a source of refuge for me, so I pick one off the shelf and fall into bed. I turn the page, the room dissolves ..and the letters rise up like pillars. Somewhere a voice whispers “if it’s refuge you’re after ..you’re in the wrong place ..there’s nowhere to hide ..people will only make up what they can’t see anyhow.” Now the letters are forming words ..and the words, like thoughts, are circling my head ..mockingly ..pronouncing judgment .. like a booming voice, from a higher authority, coming down from the sky.

Buzzed

I walk to state street and get buzzed sipping iced coffee at ‘the bean’, while watching tourists stream in and out of starbucks across the street. Ryan shows me a clip of women skim boarding on youtube ..his daughter is competing this summer ..I tell him I’d like to go see that. Now I’m watching an intense game of ‘go’ next to us .. “takes cojones” he says. I go what, playing ‘go’ ..? No, competitive skim boarding .. she’s cracked her head twice already. I go “No shit ..why don’t you make her wear a helmet or something ..?” when I remember she’s grown up now ..and I’ve never seen anybody wearing a helmet skim boarding. We duck into the ‘fiesta’ to see the movie ‘runaways’ ..but 30 seconds into it we realize we’re watching ‘repo men’. ‘Runaways’ ‘repo men’ ..it’s a common mistake, I tell him. We switch to door number two. ‘Runaways’ isn’t bad, kinda’ historical ..shows me how little I know about Joan Jett. About three-quarters of the way through, I’m thinking I’d like to see more musical performance than personal drama ..but I guess I was expecting something like ‘prey for rock and roll’, which is actually in my collection of concert DVDs, along with Tom Petty and Flyleaf. Afterward, Ryan asks if I want to go see ‘English Beat’ at Soho’s tomorrow ..takes me longer than usual to find them in my mental collection of 80’s music ..which is pretty slim and makes me think how pathetic I am ..that and how old I am.

Dr Gregg

“ADHD is built-in ..it’s part of our nomadic heritage ..otherwise our ancestors would have been eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago. Try wringing-out that kind of adaptation from kids by the second or third grade.”

..or so says Dr Gregg, speaking to me from his estate in Ann Arbor, where he’s surrounded by books from the 16th - 17th century, depicting life in Indian communities before the arrival of the conquistadors. He’s a one-man research institute. He’s writing a book on stress ..or ‘cortico-tropin releasing factor’, which he says gets triggered by the ‘reptilian’ part of the brain in response to sensory signals that haven’t reached the recognition-centers yet. Transmission to this area is more channel-direct, he tells me ..and it releases stress-hormones in response to anything unfamiliar, which means pretty much everything that hasn’t reached the recognition-centers yet. I called because I was reading about a group of neuroscientists at Emory University who have discovered pretty much the same thing he’s been lecturing about for decades ..that is, we’re not the brightest species on the planet. At best we come in a distant third. He goes on to tell me that whales have much greater potential for intelligence ..their brains are real well-suited for processing their underwater environment. And they have language. Their bio-sonar system allows them to communicate with whales in any ocean on the planet. Their language is complex, comes in different dialects, and they pass it on from one generation to the next. He cites linguists who have reported changes recently. Whales off the coast of California are chatting in deeper voices, which carry farther. Apparently local supplies of salmon are running low so they’re contacting suppliers off the coast of Japan. Whenever I get off the phone with Dr Gregg, I detect a mid-range humming sound running through my own brain.

Dr Rama

It is fascinating for me to see how the early teachings of Eastern Philosophy prefigured the findings of modern-day Neuroscience.

A reply

to my post
‘Coherent curriculum’

Overhauling No Child Left Behind might be one of the worst ideas President Obama has had. Being a student, I understand more than many people that teachers have very little to do with how students succeed. I have had great teachers who made the class compelling and interesting -- and there were still students who didn't pass. To put all the responsibility on the teachers is a huge mistake. Changing a student's mind about doing well in school takes everyone in their lives -- from their friends to their parents. We should stop trying to blame the teachers for a low pass rate in high school.

Emily Jones
Rancho Santa Margarita

Coherent curriculum

No other country, with a history of successful education, applies economic principles of competition and incentives to the teaching profession. It’s too narrow-focused. There are so many other variables to consider. Community, family, individual differences. Schools are not factories. No other nation, with a successful school system, abandons courses in cultural subjects, like music and foreign languages, to focus only on basic skills and testing. Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help students, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses. Otherwise, the lesson we’re teaching our children is: how best to be nothing more than a fucking commodity.

In education, collaboration is not socialism !!

Wednesday morning

The telephone rings, waking me from catatonic deep-sleep. There’s no way I can reach the phone before it goes to machine “Bill, it’s Amanda ..can you come over .. they want to run a sewer line through ..” but I’m already up and don’t catch the rest of the message. I’m putting on overalls and wondering who the hell wants to start excavating, thinking the canyon’s gotten way too crowded ..you can’t even put an extra bathroom without crossing over someone else’s property ...shit, I’ll wake up Dr Jones, he’ll know what to do. I remind myself to wait until I hear the whole story before going defensive, but I think the dominoes are starting to fall. I’ll blame it on Don ..he still refuses to give Aaron easement rights. Son of a bitch. I’ve never gotten an urgent message from Amanda before. I tap-out my usual drum-solo on her door. She answers, whispering because the baby’s asleep. I tell her I got the message and ask who the culprits are ..(?) She tells me she didn’t call ..(!?) I stand there uncomprehending. She laughs and says I must’ve been dreaming, and asks if I actually checked my messages. I refuse to answer on grounds it may give her reason to call the county ..and walk away feeling shook. I’m afraid my dreams are becoming way too literal.

Sanctuary

The ocean has always been my sanctuary,
..it fills my head with wonder.

Photo by ~> Shin Lee

Verbal history

Chomsky's review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior has been hailed as the most influential document in the history of psychology. This is especially true in my line of work.

In his book Verbal Behavior, psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that language development occurs when: “..differential reinforcement shapes relatively unpatterned vocalizations into grammatically correct forms”. Linguist Noam Chomsky refuted this claim, declaring that principles of ‘differential reinforcement’ cannot ‘shape’ comprehension and construction of sentences never heard before. He goes on to say that behavioral psychology cannot possibly account for the way children learn languages. He argues that children do not acquire a finite set of well-formed sentences, but rather a system of rules from which they can generate an infinite set of well-formed sentences. Chomsky was so persuasive that psychologists adopted his linguistic principles as a method for observing language development. Chomsky’s ‘transformational grammar’ is a system of abstract rules designed to produce sentences of varying complexity starting from a simple conceptual-base. Sentences can be ranked in order of ‘derivational complexity’. Derivational complexity refers to the number of transformation rules required to produce complex forms from simpler forms. For example, a passive rule transforms a simple declarative sentence like “John hit the ball” into “The ball was hit by John”. A possessive rule transforms it into “My ball was hit by John”, adding another degree of complexity, and so on. Chomsky was right. Transcripts of early speech show a definite trend. Development does, in fact, occur in stages that correspond to levels of derivational complexity.

Presented at a seminar in language learning

Another language

A survey of the literature on language suggests that the process of learning another language is no different than learning the first. If the focus of instruction is on communicative intent, rather than phonological repetition, then learning a foreign language recapitulates the stages that children follow when learning their native language. Contrary to popular belief, adults have an advantage over children when learning a second language. It’s just not apparent because repetition drills are so dissimilar to the language environment of early childhood. I think language instruction should include beaucoup more exposure and social interaction.

Presented at seminar in language learning