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

Hermosita

I board the surf-liner headed south ..hop in my sister’s lexus ..zip through the streets of Irvine to Woodbridge .. where there are no corner-malls ..only town centers and village squares, which I believe were planned by the same group of students who did the Hobbit-land dormitories at UCI. We have wine and dinner ..then watch women’s half-pipe and men’s figure skating.

The next morning we go out for bagels and coffee ..and watch school kids walk past the shop and wave. We wave back and a tune comes to mind “.. where the children go to summer camp/and then to the university/where they’re put in little boxes/and they come out all the same.” Wicked of me.

We take the 405 to the 91 to Pier Street to Hermosa Beach ..a funky little town with lotsa’ clubs and great places to eat and hang-out. We cruise the strand before the show and I talk incessantly about boring shit.

We’re standing in line talking with some girls from 7th and Redondo ..then we’re seated in a small dinner theater, two tables away from the stage .. listening to a pianist, who was conceived during an affair, and consequently raised by his mother and father/step-father, who remain married. I know this because he wrote a song about it called ‘greatest mistake’ ..which turns out to mean ‘best mistake’.

Sarah Bettens, who we came to see, has been sitting at the table next to us for I don’t know how long. On stage she plays: ‘can’t get out’ ‘..not an addict’ ‘..shine’ ..and somewhere along the line she goes into ‘damage done’ by Neil Young ..and for a moment I’m transported. After the show, I see a chance to chat with her ..and take it. She’s attentive and responsive ..making me feel like there’s nowhere else she’d rather be ..and I can’t help but think, what a great musician ..and lovely person she is.

On closer inspection

“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence which is perceived is rapidly forgotten and the memory is then for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” ~ J. Sachs, 1967.

In the 1960’s, psychologists broke away from the long-standing traditions of behaviorism, and the field of cognitive psychology emerged. This act of secession was inspired by advances in fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics and linguistics. In the area of language development, psychologists adopted linguistic principles, introduced by Noam Chomsky, as a method for measuring verbal learning and behavior. These principles were more consistent with natural observations of language development. Chomsky’s model recognizes that language is expressed on at least two different levels ~ a ‘surface structure’, representing the audible/visible properties of a sentence (i.e. morphemes and syntax) ~ and a ‘deep structure’, representing the underlying semantic relationships conveyed by a sentence.

What they found is that the deep structure of a sentence is what people retain. Surface-structure is purged within milliseconds and no longer available for recall. The resulting memory is not a literal transcript of written or spoken language. It is more like a coded network of related concepts and ideas derived from the original sentence, as well as from the past experience of the listener. What we come away with is a feeling of resonance and familiarity, based largely on beliefs and experience ..and not necessarily the meaning intended by the speaker [link]

An early ancestor

HOMAGE TO THE
TREE SHREW

It is interesting to learn how much the tree shrew can tell us about human nature. They were one of the first primates on the evolutionary branch leading to humans. Neuro-anatomical studies reveal that they were also the first primate with a significantly more elaborate and differentiated visual system. Psychological tests show how this development gave them the ability to perform two tasks with equal skill: 1) focus attention on features of interest (while filtering out irrelevant features) and 2) swiftly shift attention from one interesting (or alarming) feature to another in a visually heterogeneous environment.

We take these contributions for granted now, but both abilities were not equally present in mammals before the tree shrew. It is an adaptation that had survival value, allowing them to track prey without losing sight of their predators – a trick of nature that makes them equally suited to act as hunters, as well as survive being hunted as prey. We appreciate these contributions when something goes wrong, resulting in one form of attention-deficit or another. I think we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these little beings. They mark the beginning of neocortical evolution in man.

Presented at seminar in sociobiology

3D head

A model for the fabric of the mind has been tentatively settled-on. It’s one that characterizes what’s inside my skull as a 3-dimensional network of delicately connected instances of prior experience and feeling. Under ordinary circumstances, signals from the senses produce ripples that spread out over this fabric, like stones on a pond, activating network-connections until a clear mental representation is formed. However, when something goes wrong, and there’s a disturbance in the fabric, activation may become amp’d and diffuse ..compounding insubstantial phenomena until, what may have started out as a gentle hummingbird .. becomes a ferocious beast. Sometimes I think it’s only a matter of degree between clarity and delusion ..especially when I consider how many times I mistook a perfectly innocent remark as hostility.

Bird man

Where I live you can’t separate the water from the weather ..or from the people for that matter. I have salt water running through my veins ..and white water on the brain.

Now I hear that giant tropical squid are buying property off the coast. Prices are low and they have fewer competitors. Their closest relative is the octopus, whom we know can learn from experience. Squid communicate by displaying different colored patterns on their skin. Like a lexicon of tattoos ..or alien communication ..we haven't got a clue.

An early ancestor of the bird is the huxleyi dinosaur. Around 155-million years ago, the adults of the species were horrified when their offspring started coming home with their feathers styled into bright-red Mohawks.

..and they’ve revised the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Now my obsessive interest in subjects outside the mainstream puts me on a spectrum of autistic disorders.

Toon town

Lately it seems like I’m living in a cartoon. I used to get this way on occasion, usually after sharing a spliff with my neighbor, but now it’s more like everyday ..spliff or no spliff. I watch Señor Jim walking home. He looks like a two-story dinosaur. He lives in a tudor-style house that looks like its made out of gingerbread. He just finished chatting with Dr Jones who, as the name implies .. looks like Indiana Jones. I’ve even started greeting him that way, imitating the low booming voice of his adversary Dr. Belloq in the movie. Fortunately he gets a kick out of it. Dr Jones is a vigilante. He patrols the neighborhood on a bicycle .. or sometimes on a stakeout with night-vision goggles and automatic weapon. He’s trying to keep Orange County developers below the LA County line. Unfortunately he sometimes blows the head off an innocent neighbor adding a deck. Today, however, it’s infiltrators from within that have got him on-edge. This could be anyone from high school students to dirt-bike riders. Apparently some guy named Sperling is bank rolling the operation. Dr Jones is not short on conspiracy theories.

I continue on a path leading to the County Bowl. ..stopping along the way to chat with Marleña through the window of a house that looks like something out of hobbit-land. She tells me Sugarland tickets go on sale tomorrow .. people are already camping out around the Bowl. David and Julianne appear out of nowhere ..dressed in saffron threads and ugg boots. Looking like a swami and goddess. I put my hands together in gassho. They say they walked down the steps of the Bowl ..but now they are looking for a trail to climb back up. The terrain looks kind of steep and overgrown to me ..so I offer to drive them back. Not a problem, David says ..and I hear Julianne go “here it is” ..and they vanish. I turn to ask Marleña if she saw anything remarkable about that ..but she’s disappeared too.

NYC

Usually when someone tells me what they expect to see in a place they’ve never been before ..I think it says more about the place where they’re coming from. Like, what else do they have to go by. But, more often it's like, what a stupid generalization I go by. Joey is a screenwriter from NYC who I met last night at the baths. When I asked what surprised him most about California, Hollywood in particular, he said he expected sharper teeth. Not sure what he meant, I asked him to tell me more. He goes “I expected sharper teeth because Hollywood always seemed like such a far-away fairytale place ..sitting inside of a fort ..surrounded by a moat ..guarded by sharks.” I laughed my ass off. What an illustrative mind ..! Not much about NYC there, expect, perhaps, the part about the sharks. But then again, that’s another stupid overgeneralization of mine ..it comes from watching too many TV shows..

Charlie II

It’s my nature to try and make sense of outwardly irrational behavior like the kind that happened with Charlie last night [link].

Information, rattling around the brain, is followed by a process that clears waste from the transmitter-sites (synapses). There’s a maintenance-network (glial cells) that picks-up whatever chemicals are left behind by the re-uptake process. A milliseconds delay in that action is long enough to produce a gap in transmission. A few gaps can lead to false impressions ..too many gaps .. hallucinations and delusions. It’s the nature of the brain to fill-in missing pieces, which often goes well ..but it is based on a principle of probability ..inserting the most likely, but not necessarily the most accurate, elements of a missing scene. This may distort events ..or momentarily launch them in another direction. The brain is self-correcting however, and can usually recover ..unless too many gaps occur consecutively. Then these excursions begin to create a story of their own. When fabrications get superimposed on actual events ..other people’s actions appear distorted and confounding ..facial gestures are skewed and incomprehensible ..voices blend and words and phrases arrive out of sequence. Suspicion mounts ..creating anxiety that only exacerbates things by accelerating the process of mis-information. The first sign that things aren’t going well is an outburst of non-sensical speech. The way to tell if they’re kidding, or not, is by the sight of sweat ..sometimes accompanied by clenched fists. When others don’t know what to expect, they get concerned. When they re-direct their attention .. breaking with the ongoing chain of events ..it looks like a bunch of faces looming up and bearing down on our sufferer. This can create panic. Panic is often met by the arrival of police officers, which can create a disturbance so charged that it shuts down consciousness .. until the next thing to appear are doctors, with masks and syringes, holding you down while trying to coax a more tolerable stream of events into place.

I realize that nothing I write in these boxes contains anything close to the boundlessness of life .

Charlie

An unexpected turn of events occured at the poker game this evening. Charlie stood up and slammed down his cards, one by one, shouting (in beat to the rhythm of the slamming cards) “This ..is ..not ..the ..hand ..I ..was ..dealt ..Goddamn bunch of thieves!!!” This shocked the shit out of us. Brian went looking for his bat, while I go: “OK Charles, tell me whose hand you think it is ?” He bellows “The cards I had went up to 0.732 ..these are only around like 0.53” I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked at his cards ..queen of hearts ..seven of spades ..two of diamonds ..they did look random, which is kind of like a 50/50 proposition. I thought about the winning hand he had a while back ..a full house. “Charles, you’re thinking about a hand you already played.” He goes “No fucking way, Jose ..” spraying food everywhere “..not even the same ballpark ..but let me tell you something ..I am foursquare against these goddamn revisions and .. hey, what the hell’s inside my mouth (mouff) .?” “Doritos” I tell him, hoping feedback might help him feel a little more grounded. It was a little too late. We took the mountain roads back to my place, with the top down, freezing cold ..but hoping it would put psychological distance between home and the scene back at Bri’s. I even offered to give him my share of the winnings. He had no idea what I was talking about. I thought it best to leave it that way.
 

continued here~>[ link ]

Looking back

I put on a pair of hiking boots, goggles and miners’ cap ..and follow a trail leading back into my mind. I'm looking down the long haul of history ..the light from my miners cap illuminating the dark ..and the goggles pick up energy that ordinarily passes outside the reach of consciousness. I watch a lunatic pacing the street shouting something ..and I realize he’s ruminating over a disagreement that I thought I had forgotten a long time ago. Farther down ..I enter a passageway that leads to a hallway at a place where I use to work. I greet everyone I meet ..then duck into an office where someone is shouting at a computer and swearing it wasn’t his fault. I duck out of there before he sees me and starts swearing that it was my fault. Back out on the street, I crank up the resolution to see how far these goggles will take me ..and locate the stoners I used to hang out with in high school. I stumble over a field of mental instability, anxious to see them again. They’re getting high before class and they pass me the pipe. A haze builds-up behind my eyes lids and wisps of long forgotten memories drift by. I’m watching Blues Image playing at the Gem .. photons are flashing ..I cross a bridge, under which a brightly colored stream passes. I follow a thousand steps to the beach. I walk through the tide pools and enter a cave. Now I’m floating in Grecian pools carved smooth out of the coastal rocks and stones. Ocean water pours over the sides ..and the level rises to a pool of infinity where there’s no sign of separation between me ..the sea ..and the rest of humanity.

Dreamwork

I had a vivid dream last night. This morning I hear the echo of Fritz Perls going: “Make sure you take ownership of the different parts of your dream.”

The dream: I pull off of the 605 freeway ..park in a gravely construction yard and walk toward a trailer-office. Inside, there’s a guy in his twenties, dressed like a hiker, carrying a gun in a holster. He’s asking the clerk behind the counter for directions .. saying he wants to see more of California ..he turns to me and asks for a ride. I reply (telepathically) “No ..because of the gun that you are carrying.” He relies (telepathically) “Yes you will ..because of the gun that I am carrying.” I concede, thinking “Hey, I’ll make it a trip to Big Sur.” As we head down the 605 freeway, toward the coast ..he asks me why we aren’t heading up the 605, and toward the I5. I say (verbally this time) “Hey ..you want to see California, right ..not just another freeway.” He sits back with a satisfied look on his face. As I’m on that long swooping connector-road at the end of the 605, heading into Long Beach ..we hit traffic and come to a halt. He looks nervous and asks what we’re stopping for. I tell him I’ll go have a look and get out of the car ..surprised that he doesn’t object. Underneath the overpass, I walk into another trailer-office, where a surveillance-team is huddled around a computer. It’s somehow apparent to me that they’re tracking my carjacker, and I feel relieved ..telling them he’s right above us. I climb back into the car, the undercover cops are somewhere behind, and without a word, my carjacker flies out the passenger door ..on a surfboard. As he hovers above the traffic, I ask the cop how he does that. He looks at me and says “we don’t know” and I feel surprised, wondering how come they don’t know that if they’ve had him under surveillance.

Dreamwork: I am the car ..I am the gravely construction yard ..mechanical and characterless. I am the young man ..I am the gun ..calm and controlling. I am the surfboard .. flying unfettered. I am the surveillance-team ..secretly tracking my impulses. I am the cop ..confused and un-comprehending. I am the question ..asking myself how come I don’t know these things about myself. I raise my head up from the desk, and think: “I just might take that trip to Big Sur after all.”

A blurb about dreamwork can be found here ~>Fritz Perls

Iconic discourse

I can see a day when text-based communication becomes obsolete. Sentences take too long to process. Images and video clips are more suited to the task. Graphemes will replace phonemes. Graphemes are like logos ..they convey concepts more quickly. All that’s required is a brief sensory flash, which decays rapidly so that the next impression can follow. This allows greater throughput and more rapid exchange of ideas. I believe that the mind of the future will be shaped more by images than words. Mental imagery will occur spontaneously among those who are “tuned-in” ..and will spread through the population like a virus. Viral marketing is already the buzz in advertising. Nobody reads a movie review anymore. They’ve got a buddy, with an iPhone, sitting in the front row at opening night. That way they’re already tuned-in ..receiving the look and feel of a film along with an emoticon that gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, before the end of the first scene.

Catastrophe theory

I’m always fascinated by the way people explain events to themselves ..especially when the cause is obscure and not directly observable. In Haiti, for instance, the local population believes that the earthquake was caused by angry mystical entities known as ‘gedes’ ..or spirits of the dead. Evangelical Christians, arriving on the scene, say the earthquake was caused by exactly that kind of superstitious thinking .. if only they had switched their beliefs, none of this would have happened. According to Pat Robertson (no relation) “ ..they made a pact with the devil” when they won independence from the French (and Christian rule) “.. and now they’re paying for it.” No one talks about fault lines or tectonic plates, I guess that sounds way too much like scientific ideology. So now I’m going to say that the mudslides in LA this week were brought about by the kind of decadent behavior LA is known for, and has nothing to do with the fires last summer ..those happened way too long ago.