The science of autism is a story of real people (Books - In a Different Key by John Donvan & Caren Zucker)

Ruth had stopped doubting herself the morning she saw Joe do a jigsaw puzzle upside down.  For some time, she had been nagged by a feeling that he was not like her other children in some crucial way.  Six months earlier, Joe had stopped speaking, even though, up to that point, he had seemed to be developing normally...

And then there were these puzzles.  He was working on one just then, a map of the United States whose parts were sprawled, like him, all over the kitchen floor and through the doorway into the living room.  He was getting it done: New Hampshire met Maine, and New Mexico snapped in next to Arizona.  But he was getting it done fast, almost too fast, Ruth felt, for a two-year-old.  On a hunch, she knelt down to Joe's level and pulled the map apart, scattering the pieces. She also, deliberately, turned each piece upside down, so that only the gray-brown backing was showing.  Then she watched what Joe did with them

He seemed not even to notice.  Pausing only for a moment, Joe peered into the pile of pieces, then reached for two of them.  They were a match.  He immediately snapped them together, backside-up, between his knees on the floor.  It was his new starting point.  From there he kept going, building, in lifeless monochrome, out of fifty pieces, a picture of nothing. 

What John Donvan's and Caren Zucker's In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (Crown Publishers, 2016) is especially good at, is conveying a picture of autism historically, scientifically, and socially, by telling the stories of the people involved.  One in 68 children have a diagnosis, so it's hard to live in today's America without hearing about autism.  Understood as a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder, it is diagnosed based on impairments in communication, especially social relatedness, and a restricted repertoire of activity and interests. The dysfunctions it results in manifest themselves in different persons as impaired eye contact, failure to develop peer relationships, an absence of or delay in developing communicative speech, an inability to conceive of other people's mental states or emotions, lack of spontaneous imaginative play, inflexible adherence to routines which are disruptive to daily functioning, and persistent preoccupation with part of objects rather than their conventional uses, symptoms which must be present prior to three years-of-age to be diagnostically relevant and which often are noticed suddenly, after a period of apparently typical development.

The Unexpected World of Cage Fighting and What It has to Do With Us (Books - Beast by Doug Merlino)

I am as guilty of it as the next person - reading for comfort.  Either we read about worlds with which we are familiar or, and I think worse, to confirm what we believe we already know. I say 'what we believe we know' because that's the risk - isn't it? That we might learn something new, or that we might change our minds, and sometimes that comes in unexpected packages. I read Doug Merlin's Beast: Blood, Struggle, and Dreams at the Heart of Mixed Martial Arts (Bloomsbury USA, 2015) because Doug is a friend and, frankly, would never have read it if left to my own reading habits. I'm glad that I did.

Jeff Monson was, as usual, running late.  He was trying to get his two-year-old daughter, Willow, to eat.

"Here comes the plane, Willow," he said in a singsong voice, holding out a spoon to the girl, who was sitting in her high chair. "Are you ready for the plane?"

Willow threw back her head, covered in red curly hair, laughed, and refused.

Monson wore shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that stretched to cover his muscled frame.  His head, which rose out of a triangular based of trapezius muscle, was bald.  FIGHT was tattooed on the left side of his neck, directly above an exhortation to DESTROY AUTHORITY.

Distinguishing between data & interpretation in popular science can help the public learn to think about the evidence (Books - The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin)

Nowadays, the outcome of every scientific study is expected to be instantly useable by the public.  News media demands ready-made dietary and medical advice, politicians and business people demand data to shore up the opinions they already hold, many funders want only outcomes that will translate to curing disease now.  As nice as it would be to cure on demand, that would be as likely as making a hits of every Broadway tryout.  Scientific "hits" are the product of fortuitous accident and incremental accumulation of knowledge, which usually includes more rejected possibilities than confirmed ones.

Pop-neuroscience satisfies this expectation with books falling somewhere between science and self-help.  Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind (Dutton, 2014) creatively hews to this formula. I thank Dutton, a Penguin imprint, for my copy.  Of course the popularity of science, is not all bad.  It is wonderful to have the ear of non-scientists and encouraging that interest requires that the public enter the discussion somewhere.  But books that realistically convey how experimental outcomes find their way into the fund of general knowledge are in short supply.  The wider the dissemination of half-baked knowledge, the more discerning the eager-to-consume non-scientist must become.  In this age in which everything from raw experimental data and top notch interpretation to crackpot appropriation of small study outcomes and outright lies are easily available on line, and look superficially the same, the scientist has a responsibility to help the public develop a critical eye.

Humane political thought as it arises from facing the conflict in ourselves (Books - Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff)

I had felt enough of the influence of Isaiah Berlin on contemporary political thinkers and writers who I like to read, that I wanted to know who he was.  For this, I turned to Michael Ignatieff's affectionate biography Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Vintage 2000).  Born in Latvia in the early 1900s, living briefly in Russia, and an eventually taking refuge in England, he became more English than the English, rising through the ranks of academia to the level of Oxford don.  He was an intellectual with a powerful gift for talking about ideas. His mature thought brought together history, philosophy, and psychology to consider contemporary politics with complexity and compassion.  He served as a valued advisor to Churchill and John F. Kennedy.

Aesthetics transforms vision and the mind, which transforms aesthetics... (Books - The Age of Insight By Eric Kandel)

There has been a bevy of books examining wider aspects of culture as they intersect with brain science written by scientists in the past year:  Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist by Christof Koch, The Age of Insight by Eric R. Kandel, Who's In Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.  They are written by senior neuroscientists and written for the general public I wrote about the Gazzaniga here, I will write on Koch in the coming weeks, and I have yet to finish the Kahneman, but I just completed Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight (Random House, 2012). 

The eminent Nobel-Prize winning neuroscientist satisfyingly brings together modernist art, the Viennese Secession to be precise, the study of the unconscious mind emerging during the same period, and what the development of neurobiology and cognitive psychology can contribute to our understanding of human-ness.  His self proclaimed aim is to bring together science and art, his mechanism is to address what we know about how the brain accomplishes visual perception, creativity, and feeling.  The result is a fluidly written account, fueled by a lifetime in neuroscience and a passion for painting, particularly portraiture.    

Sanity: a key to the good life? (Books - Going Sane by Adam Phillips) The Tyranny of Positive Thinking II

I read Adam Phillips's Going Sane (Harper Perennial, 2007) as part of my project looking at America's obsession with feeling good.  This idea that one needs to be continually happy or positive in order to sell a product, audition for a role, deliver the news, teach, provide care, or otherwise live productively mystifies me.  "I have to try to be positive," people say to me.  Really?  Why?  It's fine to be genuinely satisfied, I like going there myself, but that such a state is possible or desirable when we are frightened, angry, or bereaved, that it is indeed the antidote to physical illness, or negative experience is a denial of our psyche's expression of want or dissatisfaction.  It cuts off an aspect of our humanity.  Not only do we demand this false positivity of ourselves, we want negativity-free politics, sweet things that add no calories, scientific experiments that only produce positive results and lead directly to cures, and if we don't have non-stop economic gain year-in and year-out we think something is wrong with the market.  The only thing we seem content to go down are our taxes. The fault is not in the market, to paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar, but in ourselves.

Unlive a little.

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips (On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane) a sensible and erudite thinker about the human mind its products has a new book out: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life and so is profiled in the Guardian. 

"I'm not on the side of frustration exactly, so much as the idea that one has to be able to bear frustration in order for satisfaction to be realistic. I'm interested in how the culture of consumer capitalism depends on the idea that we can't bear frustration, so that every time we feel a bit restless or bored or irritable, we eat, say, or we shop."

He's great at where culture meets feelings.  And there is a picture of his bookshelves.

Hat tip: Bookslut

Dastardly art about the forces that spur vioence (Film: Inglourious Basterds (2009) by Quentin Tarantino)

Quentin Tarantino's use of violence in films like Pulp Fiction is supposed to be commentary on violence in film and television, but I have found them merely exploitative. This is not because media does not glorify violence, but because Tarantino's use of self-referential gestures and cute trademarks while using slaughter patently as entertainment is too cavalier. We already live surrounded by bloodshed - take the last 48 hours: with the murder of seven victims by a militant in Southwestern France and the outrageous shooting of an unarmed 17-year-old in Florida by a man claiming he was feeling threatened - I find the irony too disrespectful of lost lives. What the hell is so funny? So my own positive assessment of his film Inglourious Basterds (2009) surprised me.

The alternative to positive thinking is not despair (Books - Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich) - The Tyranny of Positive Thinking I

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided is a feisty analysis of the American obsession with positive thinking that includes its hypothesized origins, the areas of culture that it infiltrates - big business, religion, psychology - the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around coaching and products to maintain that cockeyed optimism no matter what the weather tells us, a debunking of many of the beneficial outcomes claimed by proponents of positive thinking such as improved cancer prognosis or material wealth, and finally the usefulness of negative emotions, stress, and vigilance. The anecdotes as well as the facts (if you choose to listen to them) are delivered in accessible prose with a hefty dose of irony. In addition, Ehrenreich is emotionally open about the part her own experience plays with the subject she writes about as in, for example, this about her wait for test results to confirm or reject a cancer diagnosis:

Writing to defeat the darkness (Books - The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon)

I really have no business being here, as I'm in the middle of writing a final paper on depression, hence the parade of cheerful books, however, I did find The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression written by Andrew Solomon in 2001 remarkably well-written. Like Styron's Darkness Visible it is a writer's memoir of the experience of depression, but where Styron's is a fleeting paean to the indescribable blackness, his white flag to the black dog, Solomon unleashes a flood of fellow sufferer's personal narratives, merciless descriptions of his defenseless self, a history of melancholia from the Greeks to Freud to the latest genetics research, as though the very acts of knowing and writing will vanquish his demon. They make for a bone-shaking, yet gripping account of suffering that, though it is 300 pages long, one can fly through.

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work... In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

It would be worth going on at length if I convince you to read Solomon's book, but I have to get back to convincing a professor that I've done some substantive reading on psychopathology. I'll close with a brief plug for Solomon's earlier book: The Irony Tower, which is also well worth a read. It follows a group of contemporary Moscow artists as they try to figure out what their art means and why they make it, as their country transitions from Soviet empire to whatever Russia is now - plutocracy? Capitalist anarchy? I found it fascinating.

It's bite is worse than its bark (Books - Darkness Visible by William Styron)

William Styron is best known as the author of the novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, books about moral responsibility. He suffered from episodes of major depression, once facing hospitalization for it. Darkness Visible is his memoir of that experience. It is as cuttingly brief and eloquent a literary description of the deep suffering of depression as you are likely to find. I found it interesting how frequently Styron made reference to the experience of depression as indescribable, while producing a volume on it - quoting many other writers on the themes of depression, suffering, and suicide - William James, Albert Camus, and Dante. The inadequacy is exemplified by his dissatisfaction of the fitness of the word itself - depression - a the descriptor our age is stuck with.

"Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated - the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer - had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering "depression" as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. "Brainstorm," for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone's mood disorder has evolved into a storm - a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else - even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that "depression" evokes, something akin to "So what?" or "You'll pull out of it" of "We all have bad days." The phrase "nervous breakdown" seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with "depression" until a better, sturdier name is created.

Styron's literary evocation of being in the hole is relentless, and even while his discussion on medication and presumed mechanisms is dated, the way he captures being inside of it has not lost its bite. I'm beginning work on a paper on geriatric depression for school and although journal articles on psychological and neurobiological mechanisms is going to be its mainstay, literature seemed the place to start. I'm looking forward to reading Styron's Lie Down in Darkness this summer, once the term has ended, so taken was I with his voice. I found a copy on a curbside bookseller's table a few years back.

Being stereotyped doesn't just feel bad, it's bad for you (Books - Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele)

Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi is an excellent new work of social science for the lay-reader about how stereotypes impact the performance and even the long-term health of stereotyped group via a phenomenon called stereotype threat. There is an ever-growing mountain of experimental evidence for the existence of such a phenomenon, which Steele contends has less to do with a stereotyped person internalizing their society's racism as part of their personality, although that is one influence, and more to do with the way these social realities are ubiquitous, resulting in the stereotyped party receiving continual cues about the poor expectations of his performance from his environment. Steele presents research that debunks the myth that the simple solution to this problem is always to work harder. In fact, having a lot at stake and working at the most challenging level are two important contributors to the threat effect.

Steel tracks the evidence collected to-date about the mechanism of stereotype threat at three levels - society, identity, and brain (though he offers the least support for the last, sadly, as there are some very good studies out there). Although Steele's history explores newsworthy domains such as as stereotypes about women being poorer at math than men, and about those with dark skin being less academically strong than those with light, but he makes the point repeatedly that identity threat can and does effect most everyone, offering good examples. He chooses not only the obvious settings of the classroom and the running track to make his point, but some unlikely ones as well - such as the Supreme Court. Steele's writing is attractively free of self-serving hyperbole, his anecdotes illustrate his points clearly, he doesn't oversell them, and the book is both compact and fast-moving.

Serious cardplaying and how we make up our damn minds! (Books - How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer & The Cardturner by Louis Sachar)

The two books I just finished share a theme. Both address the mechanisms and consequences of decision making and both use card playing as an example, but one is fiction and the other non-fiction.

Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide begins with the premise that the age-old preference for rationality over emotionality does not always lead to better decision-making. He introduces the roots of this notion with a 101 of Western thought - Plato, Ovid, Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and finally Sigmund Freud covered in about three pages, all leading up to:

The simple idea connecting Plato's philosophy to cognitive psychology is the privileging of reason over emotion. It's easy to understand why this vision has endured for so long. It raises Homo sapiens above every other animal: the human mind is a rational computer, a peerless processor of information. Yet it also helps explain away our flaws: because each of us is still part animal, the faculty of reason is forced to compete with primitive emotions... This theory of human nature comes with a corollary: if our feelings keep us from making rational decisions, then surely we'd be better off without any feelings at all. Plato, for example, couldn't help but imagine a utopia in which reason determined everything. Such a mythical society - a republic of pure reason - has been dreamed of by philosophers ever since.

But this classical theory is founded upon a crucial mistake. For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting... If it weren't for our emotions, reason wouldn't exist at all.

Actually, we're all animal. Lehrer's book goes on to illustrate the value of the "emotional brain" over its alter-ego the "rational brain" with effective anecdotes, which first build a case for its superiority and then concede that effective decision making depends, in fact, upon the type and context of the decision and that really both are useful. Lehrer's writing strength is an apparent ease and fluidity that gives his work accessibility. Each chapter begins with an illustrative story that is unthreateningly situated in a non-scientific genre: aviation, football, poker, directing television, battlefield maneuvers, politics. This device almost becomes gimmicky but it is effective. Lehrer skirts defining what rational thought or emotion are - he assumes that if we all use the terms that we know what we mean. Often, the data he cites situates a brain process in a particular region of the brain and supports this with fMRI data. "Twinges of feeling" originate in the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex coordinates this visceral data into the stream of more rational measurements and out pops a decision - or something like that. He offers a brief summary of the evolutionary development of the human brain which, unlike our phylogenetic predecessors, does not merely rely on "instinct" but allows us to organize cognition, give symbolic expression to abstract thoughts and emotions, accumulate knowledge to invent novel solutions, and to think about our feelings and our thoughts giving us distinct advantages as well as liabilities:

This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic better than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe computer can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation with correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn't had time to work out the kinks.

It's also what gives us by-products like rumination and neuroticism but, hey, there's a cost for everything.  Evolution is a process without a planned end product, so its results don't exist without "kinks." However, one could say that our ability to prioritize data is superior to that of the computer. We calculate more slowly but we have the capacity to tell the important from the unimportant. We work on different scales and solve different problems, is all. Sometimes Lehrer's story telling can make things a bit mushy. For instance, in an example from baseball he offers the reader a batter unconsciously interpreting anticipatory clues from minute details he perceives in how the pitcher grips the ball, the angle of the wrist - these are then somehow "seamlessly converted" into a feeling about the pitch. He does not say how or by what structures. Do these feelings precede the prediction or are they the prediction? And by feelings does he mean the emotion that he has written about, or an unconscious calculation (which strikes me, rather, as rational thought).

Lehrer offers a good chapter on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in making predictions by pitting what has been learned about nature to what is being observed. He focuses to largely good effect on the anterior cingulate cortex and its role in error detection - a vital ingredient in our brain's ability to predict - offering clearly explained examples from a variety of scientific literature including not only anatomy but physiology, chemistry, and artificial intelligence, keeping the examples focused and the writing chatty. He connects these concretely to the role of practice in learning and both the behavioral and the neural necessity of experiencing the "unpleasant symptoms of being wrong" so that our brains can revise their model. This would seem to belie the fashionable over-reliance on constantly shoring up self-esteem at any cost in the name of learning.

Lehrer also offers a chapter on the disadvantages of "relying upon our dopamine neurons" (a physiological oversimplification) and how this makes us vulnerable to seeing patterns in nature even when they don't exist, producing our belief in fallacies like winning streaks.  He presents equally engaging examples from the worlds of basketball, gameshows, and economics and some of the classic work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. But Lehrer offers a frustrating example of loss aversion on the stock market which I believe he gets exactly wrong. His description of the neuroeconomics is fine, he just confuses probabilities calculated about the stock market in general with the likelihood of particular results for individual investors. It all very well to talk about the irrationality of investing in bonds because they give lower yields than stocks, but those probabilities are calculated over time for the entire market. Individual investors however purchase their investments on given days and must sell them on given days to achieve the benefits of their yield. Bonds may yield half of what stocks do in theory but in practice if you are retiring or must sell some of your shares to purchase a house or pay a large bill, you are stuck with the yield on that day. The reason to diversify ones portfolio is because the invidual's interaction with the market is actual not theoretical. If the stock market automatically yielded 8% for every investor regardless of timing and the bond market automatically yielded 4%, the brokers and advisers would be out of business!

Once covering the advantages and disadvantages of emotion, Lehrer goes on to do the same for rational thought, owning that one great use of rational thought is as a regulator of emotion:

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them.

The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition...The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.

This chapter offers some knuckle whitening writing from Lehrer as he describes the events in the cockpit during the famous Flight 232 as an example of the successful regulation of emotion by rational thought. However, there are times we evidently think too much.  Another chapter is devoted to that subject (after a detour into the application of all of these processes on making moral decisions). Finally, Lehrer reconciles the dual realms in a couple of chapters which employ examples from the world of professional poker and offers us some practical advice of how we may apply the knowledge we have gained. How We Decide is an eminently readable, almost breezy book that benefits from Lehrer's wide interests and effectively communicated enthusiasm for all things brainy, even if it sometimes suffers from some oversimplification or some conflation of neurophysiology with behavior. It dips into the hard science as necessary but should not unduly stress out the lay reader. While less dazzling than Lehrer's debut book Proust was a Neuroscientist, it tells a good story, hitting many of the key points of the psychology of making decisions, communicating all the while how this is a story about us.


Ironically, although The Cardturner is a work of fiction, it is less effective storytelling. The book is the latest effort of Louis Sachar who wrote the wildly popular Holes. While it leaves no doubt for Sachar's love of bridge, it doesn't leave me with any burning desire to go out and learn the game. About one-third of this novel is devoted to descriptions or bridge terms, bridge strategies, and bridge games, a fact which Sachar's narrator - the teenage Alton - apologizes for continually. He conveniently offers a little symbol where these passages begin and end so that one can skip over them and simply read the boxed summary at the end. This could potentially make for a very short read. Tolstoy might have thought of this technique and saved us all a whole lot of time. If Sachar knew he was writing a book on a subject no reader would be interested in, why did he bother? If he conversely believed that the story, his cleverly written narrative voice, or his believable enough teenage characters would interest us enough to be tricked into reading about bridge and discover that - hey this isn't so bad - why doesn't he allow one of those things to do the job? But he does neither. The narrative becomes a thinly veiled expression of his insecurity that we will find bridge either boring or inscrutable - and consequently I did. The story of teenage romantic confusion and coming into ones own is enjoyable enough. Alton's parents are in bad financial straits and they want him to befriend his very wealthy uncle so they are assured of an inheritance. Alton becomes the cardturner for his uncle, an avid bridge player, who has lost his sight. It has a convincingly writtten teenage first-person narrator, some dumb jokes about the Nixon era (one character's psychiatrist is named Dr. Ellsworth - get it?), a couple of well drawn characters - particularly in the rich uncle Lester Trapp, one or two suspenseful sequences, lightening-fast writing, and a lot of bridge. It will no doubt entertain some young adult readers and perhaps even make them curious about the game and, if so, Sachar will have achieved his goal. I was mildly entertained for a couple of hours but I was never wowed.

Silver Lining?

Jonah Lehrer has an excellent article in today's New York Times Magazine about a new way that a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist, Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson, are thinking about depression, or at least one of its features - rumination. If it such a widespread condition, they ask, then is it possible that it is somehow adaptative? Don't worry, both the article and the scientists are not belittling the pain of being depressed.

Lehrer explores their idea that rumination, which is typical to the grief reaction, is more than simply pessimism, it is also the kind of extended expenditure of mental energy on a problem out of which can be born new understanding. The ruminative feature resembles a part of the cognitive process that often results in successful creations. I would add my thought that, in a situation of pain or loss, the lack of interest in activity, food, or sex, keeps one physically passive at a time when the prediction-making part of us does not have the optimal setting for activities requiring good coordination and fast reaction-time, and we may therefore make bad judgments. So instead our body demands that we sit, collect, and turn things over. This could also be another adaptive feature of the mechanism. Lehrer also gives space in his article to discuss the criticisms many psychiatrists have of this new notion.

I would have appreciated brief inclusion of the current theories of what is happening not just in the psyche, but in the brain, during depression. One theory receiving a lot of attention is that of reduced neurogenesis (less creation of new neurons) in certain parts of the brain. I wonder how this correlates with or contradicts Andrews and Thomsons hypothesis? Their idea began with the prevalence of depression, which Lehrer describes as 7 percent. Is that a world-wide statistic? A Western society statistic? An American statistic?

I have often heard the construct of depression critiqued as an illness of wealthy privileged societies. That made me think two things: a) adaptation occurs by random mutation (although it's the Natural Selection part that people most like to focus on) and, b) the notion of which features are adaptive for humans needn't be monolithic. Humans haven't all evolved to one perfect homogeneous species and stopped. We are evolving many different features. Some of us are hairy, some smooth. We have different pigments shading our skin, which were adaptations to different environments. We have different length femurs, so why not different cognitive styles? Most of us are no longer hunters and gatherers. Perhaps we are becoming aware of a random mutation that gives us a different default setting for our prediction-making organs (our brains) to favor periods of less action, less reproducing, and more rumination. Perhaps in certain contexts in which humans live this will make us more adaptive and therefore it will survive over the long run. Perhaps the features of it that are maladaptive in other contexts will result in it disappearing over millenia. We won't be around to find out. But I am glad for Lehrer's thoughtful look at scientists who are trying to look at a cultural and scientific phenomenon with a longer view. I always admire his writing and, as usual, this piece gives us insight into novel thoughts about topical issues of mind and psyche. It also rekindled in me some thoughts about our society's knee-jerk propensity to always value happiness above grief, anger, passion, or doubt. We have a range of affective states. Perhaps each part of that range has its uses.

The inexorable drive forward or just a way out of the rat-race? (Books - The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris)

I am not one of the bookish set that raved on about Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, but that may only be because I have not yet read it. If his new The Unnamed is any indication, I should go out and get a copy immediately. Mark Sarvas's gush sealed the deal on my picking up The Unnamed, a novel about a high-powered New York attorney who contracts an illness which compels him to walk without stopping until he drops in his tracks from exhaustion. Or is it an illness? Perhaps is his psyche calling out for a break from the rat-race. And no, the treadmill doesn't work. He has to cover ground.

'...a dazzling book about a marriage and a family...' the jacket waxes on. Dazzling maybe, but no, it's not. As I read it, this book is about an individual and nature. His nature. This is King Lear, and Ferris writes some chapters that are a worthy analogue to Lear's howl on the moors. Tim's drive forward is bigger than marriage, it's bigger than career, it's more essential than family. He walks right out of a multi-million dollar case he is in charge of for his law firm, he sacrifices body parts to frost bite. I'm reading Freud's seminal work on understanding the mind through dreams for a class right now. Our favorite Viennese Victorian doctor envisions the events of dreams as encoded messages about those deepest wishes and fears we cannot give voice to. The mind symbolizes them (says Freud) so that in their disguise they get past the censor (our conscious mind) and find a partial expression that can then be interpreted. That is what Ferris has created in The Unnamed, a Freudian symbol for the inexorable drive forward. Sometimes that drive is the life force itself. Sometimes it can take on a more destructive character but can be sublimated, kept within the lines culture approves of, as career ambition. But then there are those other times that it takes on a more elemental cast. Witness, for example, Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. What possessed him, we ask? Well, something bigger than the either his marriage or the presidency - institutions that we imagine should be strong enough to keep our natures in line.

So much of who he was was involuntary...The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.

Every drive forward, we would like to think, can be answered by turning around. Except at those times when it can't. This beautiful, sad, strong novel is about those times.

The 20th century as patient (Books - The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas)

I read D. M. Thomas's 1981 novel, The White Hotel, in connection with a class I'm taking on psychoanalytic theory - how it was born out of the science and the symbols of its time and place, how its practice impacted individual lives and culture, and how psychotherapeutic processes evolved from it. The novel is a remarkably potent record of the life of one woman, a Ukrainian opera singer, living in Vienna in the early part of the 20th century. To say she is one woman is misleading, she is a many-layered affair and that is one of the book's points. One of Freud's chief metaphors for his psychoanalytic process was archeology, and that is an apt and visible metaphor played out in this novel as it is the unearthing of the meanings of not only one individual's life, but the lives of the denizens of the 20th century. It also evoked for me Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and his discovery as the end of his life as he faces the Button Maker (the play is a must read) that a person's identity is like an onion. As you peel away the layers, you keep finding more.

One could say that the book's different sections introduce us to our protagonist as biographical fact, as dream, as a third person's imagining of her, as a result of natural forces (the drive for pleasure, or toward death), or her self as the product of world events, or fate if you prefer. Or one might say that the book's structure, which includes her life as a fever-dream of a poem, her journal, a case study of her psychoanalytic sessions with Sigmund Freud (this chapter is in a tour-de-force act of ventriloquism. Thomas as Freud is superb), a more conventional third-person narrative of the facts of her life without psyeudonym, and the aftermath of these creative acts - each of which were 'her' - as they unfolded into what became her life. Id. Ego. Super-ego. One can look back and create sense through narrative, Thomas seems to say, but no analysis has all the answers. The only final version of a life, is discovered after it was lived. Analysis is not about truth per se, it's about interpretation so that one can live with the events that came before. However, it does not determine what will happen in the future. The forces that impinge on a single life are more than personal or even interpersonal. We are also made by our culture, and by history. In the final chapter we see how the pieces that make up I/Anna/Elisabeth live in the punishing facts of Stalin's selling out the Jews of Russia to Hitler and his SS and, at once, how the symbols that have been born again and again through the different narrative interpretations that are all aspects of the same woman are finally given their ultimate truth. The facts are searingly cruel but one's experience of life is itself a creative act, and one can see how our protagonist finds coherence and solace through what she has created and Thomas (the ultimate creator in this case, no matter how temporarily real she becomes) makes a wounded patient of each inhabitant of the 20th century and attempts to help us find beauty (for there isn't much sense) there as well.

When I finished Thomas's novel at 1 am, there was no way I could go to sleep, so, at the recommendation of Mark Sarvas, I started The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris's new novel. I barely began it before the effects of the White Hotel began to wear off enough for me to go to sleep, but The Unnamed already has me in an iron grip. I expect that you should hear more soon.

Creative analysis - in truth fiction, in fiction truth (Books - The Semantics of Murder by Aifric Campbell)

Irish novelist Aifric Campbell's debut, The Semantics of Murder, was published last year in England and just this month in the U.S. I'm delighted to have been sent a copy so that I might tell you about it. The story is based upon the still unsolved murder of linguist Richard Montague in Beverly Hills in 1971. An erudite scholar and organist, Montague was gay and preferred the company of what is known as rough trade, by whom he was presumed to have been murdered. Montague's chief contribution to linguistics was a method of analyzing language employing mathematical logic that admitted no difference between natural languages like French and artificial languages like those used in programming. An idea whose resonance is felt in Aifric's novel which is centered around two users of language - Montague's (here Robert Hamilton) fictional brother Jay Hamilton, a psychoanalyst living in London - and writer Dana Flynn, Robert Hamilton's biographer. Both create characters based upon the lives of others and perhaps one could look at the analyst's semantics as "natural" and the writer's as "artificial," although nothing is really that simple, where the heck does that leave the biographer?

The neon eye of his sleeping laptop pulsed in the shadowy outreaches of the desk. Jay opened Cora's casebook. during his psychoanalytic training, Metzling had encouraged the class to make detailed notes straight after each session, like how a suicide fantasist sat in a chair, or how a depressive avoided eye contact. Jay used to fill pages with his clients' free associations, tracing the footprints of their childhoods, the forgotten tastes and sensation that lingered between the shadowland of memory and imagination, until he realised the futility of it all, the stunning irrelevance of the truth. After all, even Freud had admitted that it was the imagined past he was seeking, that biographical truth could be left to the historians. These days Jay's notes were outline sketches, a series of fragments, sometimes just single words that blossomed into the stories they might later become. An impressionistic starting point was all he needed to begin. The light sharpened, a plot slowly emerged and then he could stop listening to the client and simply select what suited.

Jay Hamilton, as a psychoanalyst, listens to the associations of others. The hope is to discover the truth (although there could be 100 of them) that lives beneath their words, helping them to frame a coherent narrative - one they can live with - that is the process of a successful psychotherapy. This indeed is an issue of semantics - the study of the meaning of language. Jay Hamilton also creates fictions under a pseudonym that are based upon his more interesting cases - hey, it worked for Freud. The trouble here is that Hamilton has stopped listening for the purpose of treating his patients and now relates to his patients only as fodder for fiction.

Dana Flynn, having earned a reputation for her biography of Alan Turing (another brilliant and complex thinker, who was gay, and whose life ended under suspicious circumstances), has turned his interests to Robert Hamilton (aka Richard Montague). She visits Jay to learn about his brother, exhuming Robert's memory for Jay in a challenging way, one that raises his defenses.

'Sometimes we look for conspiracy theories when we are unwilling or unable to accept the truth. When it is too painful. We rail against the truth when we think it's unfair. A little childish don't you think?' Her mouth stretched into a grim smile. 'You were angry that Turing died young and brilliant. You believed he was betrayed in the end by those who courted him. And now you're angry about Robert, so you want to make his murder more than it is. You want a better story.'

Ain't that just the pot calling the kettle black? Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of psychoanalysing going on in this novel. The story is an intelligent one with both an intellectual and a murder mystery element. There is a well integrated side-plot, in which one of Jay's patient's - Cora, the subject of his latest fiction - acts out in a surprising way. Cora is an analogue of Freud's famous case study 'Dora,' a patient through whom Freud explained some of the more influential of his ideas of repression, hysteria, and transference. This case is one critics point to as illustrative of the fact that Freud insists to strictly upon the objective truth of his analytic interpretation.

Aifric's book is more a contemporary novel with an unsolved crime in its plot than a conventional who-done-it. I have to say, I found the intertwined concepts of narrative identity, personal history, and truth and fiction more compelling than the mystery, which I had figured out fairly early in my reading. Perhaps everyone will not find the secret as obvious as I did, but given that fact, I would have preferred more of Aifric's smart cat and mouse maneouvering between Jay and Dana Flynn in which the reader knows something that one character does not. I think I would have found that more suspenseful than what felt to me like an artificial holding out. I would like to go more into the ways the secret fits well with the book's subject matter, but I feel that would give a little too much away.

Lastly, the theme of life-as-narrative is satisfyingly complemented as well as complicated by the mirror image theme of narrative-as-life. Aifric herself holds a linguistics degree. She has also studied both psychoanalysis and creative writing. If she will indulge me in a little creative analysis, it seems to me that we have in Jay and Dana two stand-ins for Aifric as she deals with the competing drives of the excitement to discover the truth of Montague's murder (semantics of a natural language), and the guilt of raising the dead by probing that history and then creating fiction of it (semantics of the artificial language). But as the truth remains unknown, it can only result in a fiction, and Aifric has created, in The Semantics of Murder, a smart and multi-layered read. And anyway, didn't Montague say that the natural and artificial languages are no different?

Such stuff as dreams are made on...

Benedict Carry reports today in the Science Times on recent research into the role of dreams by Dr. J. Allan Hobson of Harvard.

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking.

Hobson sees this state tuning the brain for what it will encounter while awake. Dr. Mark Mahowald, another sleep researcher, praises Hobson's work for not letting psychological or literary notions of dreams drive his hypotheses.

Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those. What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.

I appreciated the reporting which restrained itself from making fantastic claims and instead offered competing interpretations and some of the current sleep and dream research of other labs. The article made a point worth emphasizing - this neuroscientific research on the nature of dreams does not empty a dream of its narrative content nor obviate its psychological interpretation. It makes a hypothesis built on neuropsychological bases and tested with the tools of that trade, and offers an interpretation of its results about what function dreams might fulfill in the brain.

The uses of poppycock.

In today's Science Times Benedict Carey reports on a series of studies about total nonsense.

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...The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

Experimentally this was investigated by Drs. Travis Proulx at University of California and Steven J. Heine at University of British Columbia by exposing subjects to either an absurd short story or to a more conventional one. Following this exposure, the students studied strings of letters with no apparent relationship to one another. Those students exposed to the absurd story remembered the letter strings far more accurately than the group that read the other story. The experimenters attribute that accuracy to their ability to create new patterns. Here's a link to the study.

Artists have used this technique for years. Courting a sense of disorientation can often be better fuel for creative explosion than a technique or rehearsal process that proceeds logically through steps of increasing knowledge and order. I'd love to do a variation on the reported study. It might be meaningful to find two varying situations for the same story rather than test two different stories, that is, create or identify one group for whom the story or some other stimulus is absurd and another for whom it is not and test their memory accuracy. A religious stimulus could be interesting - there are people for whom certain patterns of information or iconography possess serious meaning but which non-believers find to be absurd nonsense. How would these groups perform on the memory test if exposed to the exact same stimuli? This makes me want to run out and read Jabberwocky rather than an article on sub-cortical brain systems involved in visual perception in order to prepare for this morning's test.

Don't!

Today's Science Times has an article by Benedict Carey about why unwanted or rude impulses seemingly arise at the worst possible times:

Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoiding specific errors or taboos. The theory is straightforward: to avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.

One cannot perform a negative task. There is no such thing (for the brain) as not thinking about something or not eating that chocolate cake, or not looking at the little spit bubbles collecting in the corner of the mouth of the person interviewing you for an important job. This brings up one of my favorite misunderstandings about the brain. The brain produces thought, but its processes are not thought-like, they are computational. As an acting teacher it has long been evident to me that, if one want to perform a negative action one has to translate it into a positive one.

Soccer players told to shoot a penalty kick anywhere but at a certain spot of the net, like the lower right corner, look at that spot more often than any other.

To not kick the ball to the lower right corner of the net has no meaning for the brain. What one can do is aim with extraordinary concentration and extraordinary interest for the upper left corner. To not think about the white elephant one must think of something infinitely more compelling to us than that elephant. In fact, I think one of the chief ingredients of great talent involves these 3 feats - learning how to translate useless instructions (fears of failure, negative criticism, performing impossible tasks...) into things we can do, knowing oneself well enough to know which doable tasks are the most compelling to us, and long practice at performing these tasks relentlessly no matter what else passes through our minds. The most talented sports players, artists and surgeons know how to re-direct themselves relentlessly.