Free Burma! - International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October 2007
posted by Jay at 1:05 PM

A Family in Baghdad
We are from a country that floats over lakes of oil...
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Peace be upon you…
Through my work and visits to the Iraqi families here in Jordan for some months, I found that a lot of them live here without a legal residency permit, without the right to work, the right of free education for their children, or someone to cover the cost of their medical treatment if they suffer an accidental or chronic health condition…
I tried to visit rich Iraqi families; merchants, contractors, Sheiks, or parliament members, I tried to push them to donate something to such poor families, but they turned their heads away with disturbed moods, or either they changed the subject. I always tell them- let us make a donation box from the rich to the poor, don't we all love Iraq? Let us express our love by helping each other; a $100 from me, a $100 from you, a $100 from this and that, and we can come up with $1000 a month from 10 families, a fine figure, with which we can cover the needs of 10 poor Iraqi families, or more, or less, which means we can reduce the feelings of estrangement, loss, and sadness for each other…
But no one responded…
One day, someone called me from Baghdad to ask for help for an Iraqi girl called "Zemen"; she is sixteen years old, she was at school when a mortar shell fell in the school yard, a shrapnel piece hit her in the back of the neck, causing a paralysis of both hands and legs…
We joined efforts and bought a wheel chair for her, then I started the journey of looking for a way to treat the girl inside or outside of Iraq…
I cannot recall how many times I called Baghdad and talked to her father and mother, to tell them where to go to get a medical report of her case, to send it to me by e-mail, so I could show it to a doctor in Jordan, and get his opinion if there is any hope in treating her case? About a month and a half of efforts went on, until I met a doctor here from the Al-Adamiyah hospital who helped me, spoke with another doctor from the same hospital and gave them the girl's name, so we called her to go with her father for examination. And finally the doctor sent a hand-written report, describing the girl's case as he saw it…
I typed the report and took it to an Iraqi doctor in a private hospital here in Amman, I told him: tell me how to help the girl; do we bring her to Jordan for treatment, or do we keep her in Baghdad?
He read the report calmly and said: the hope, in this girl's case, is to strengthen her muscles and make her rely on her self to move the wheel-chair into the toilet or to take a bath, we do not hope to see her walking on her feet…
- well, ok., we agree, do we bring her here?
- He said: I wouldn't advice you; here, there is a state hospital for physical therapy, but the equipments in it are half there is at the Ibn Al-Qaf hospital in Baghdad, treat her there, let her stay in hospital for months, they will give her a long treatment program, and she will get well, by the will of God…
- I said: she is poor, the doctors and nurses won't take care of her, for they all seek money now; humanity is no longer in the hearts…
- He said: so, you assign a budget for her; some $1000 or a little more, out of the donations, and follow up her case, this is better than bringing her out of Iraq; for then you'll pay $500 for each passport, $500 for the car that would bring them from Baghdad, or some $1200 of plane tickets for her and her father, and then, she might be allowed to enter Jordan or they might refuse, so, why take the chances with all this? Send her a $1000, and let her go to Dr. "……." At Beirut Sq. in Baghdad; he will examine her case and refer her to hospital, and there she will find good care, as long as she has that much money to pay tips to the nurses or buy better food than the hospital's…
Well; I liked the idea, so I called her parents and told them, gave them some money to help…
A few days later, I received a donation from a friend in America, which he said was devoted to treat the girl "Zemen". I told him I would give her only a $1000 of the money, and can use the rest of it here in Amman to help poor Iraqi families. He sent me an e-mail saying- do what you see fit, I trust you, just notify me how you spent the rest of the money…
Ok., that's a deal…
I sent $500 to Zemen's parents; they took her to a good specialist, who directed her to the x-ray lab, where he discovered more shrapnel pieces in her neck that should be removed by another operation and to correct the position of the vertebra, then perhaps her condition would become better, the paralysis would be gone and she won't need the physical therapy…
By God I felt happy, this was good news…
Today they called and said- the date of the operation became near, and I promised them I will send another $500 soon so they could pay the doctor and the hospital…
I kept thinking how to use the rest of the money to help people?
I don't know where I got the idea to give loans without interest to some of the families I visited…
I found that a $100 or $200 might save a family from doom and loss, a family of five children plus the mother and father, for instance…
Now, after two weeks of intensive visits to the houses, I completed giving loans to five Iraqi families, something I consider as a first experience in my life…
The loans varied between buying an oven for baking bread to sell to the neighbors or to the Iraqi restaurants here, or to buy a sewing machine for a lady who can use it to sew for the neighbors or to nearby shops, bringing a small income to the family that can provide for their basic necessities. Or to buy a skin-cleaning set for a lady who works in a beauty salon, who wants to become a partner instead of a worker in the shop, threatened to lose her job any minute…
To another lady I gave a capital to manufacture straw baskets, very beautiful, and she also wants to make pickles to sell to neighbors…
The ladies I gave the loans to are either widows, or their husbands are around but are not allowed legally to work, and who are afraid to work illegally as they would then be liable to be deported from the country, according to the law here…
How can a family of six or seven people live, if the mother and father aren't allowed to work? How will they earn their daily bread?
These small loans brought happiness into their hearts, and sunshine into their homes. They might be temporary solutions until the fire in Iraq dies down, and we go back home one day….
I wrote a small agreement with each lady, like a small contract, in which she takes upon herself to pay back the price of the item I bought for her after two or three months, by small installments alternating between 10 to 20 Jordanian Dinaars a month, without any interest. This is called in Islam: the fair loan.
I ask God to grant me success in this- small project, so I can, through it, help the largest number of families in need… and they all know that when they pay back the loan, it will go to other families… I called my friends to buy the products of straw or embroidery the women made, and we actually sold some pieces, making us all happy.
This is better than knocking on the doors of the stupid, hard-hearted rich, who turn away their faces when we ask them to help a poor family.
I am so happy with this project, I have a feeling it will grow day by day, that I will visit more Iraqi families here to see how they are going, and to think of other small projects to help them… the money I have comes from private donations from friends in America, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. God bless them for helping their brothers and sisters in humanity.
The sum of the loans for five families cost about $950 only. We also collected donations from my small family and other friends, and sent 21 thermoses of 40 liters capacity each, to fifty displaced families living in skeleton houses on the outskirts of Baghdad, after they were driven away by sectarian militias… I sent the money to Baghdad to a friend I trust, he bought everything, and sent back the receipts and photos.
The weather is very hot in Baghdad now, and a drink of cold water is a blessing to poor and displaced families, as there is no electricity available. The water could be provided by tankers, and ice could be bought from factories that have generators to produce it. These thermoses are used to keep cold water so the young and the old could drink from it…
We also collected donations and sent them to Baghdad to buy two sewing machines that can be operated by hands and by feet, to send them to that same fifty families' camp, as there are four professional seamstresses among them. We also bought them 300 meters of summer cloth to make some summer nightdresses to boys and girls under 12 years of age. These cost $600, and everything is documented by receipts and photos.
I mean- these projects didn't cost large sums of money, but reduced a lot of the suffering of poor, displaced Iraqi families that endure poverty and negligence, in these tough conditions that befell Iraq… and to bring joy into their hearts with small projects, is to tell them- we are with you, we remember you while you suffer the ordeal.
**************************************************
Then I visited some Iraqi families whose children are being treated here from Cancer… I mean; every family is living a catastrophic condition that cannot be described, so that I found the afore mentioned poor people live in an indescribable paradise, for they are healthy… I found the others afflicted with legendary expenses; most of their children passed the critical stage, the tumors were removed and their conditions stabilized, but they need radio-chemotherapy, one year long for each case. And this treatment costs $1000-$3000 a month. Meaning- each family needs an average of $15,000- $40,000 a year…
The families say- in that Cancer hospital there are families from Yemen, Libya, and Qatar treating their children, and all their expenses are covered by their respective embassies, even down to the transportation and taxi fees are paid by the embassy, so why has the Iraqi embassy abandoned us, and we come from a country that floats on top of lakes of oil?
And where are our food monthly rations? Doesn't the Iraqi Trading Ministry import food rations for the citizens? Where are the rations of the families that emigrated from Iraq to neighboring countries? Where are the rations of the families that were displaced from their houses to other provinces in the west, south, or north of Iraq? Why do they live without their food monthly rations?
I don't know who has the answers to these questions.
The Iraqi government lives in another world, of tittle-tattle, armed and non-armed conflicts, and empty talk; who cares about the suffering of the afflicted Iraqis, as if they are orphans, without a father to protect them, or a mother to care for them.
So, for how long will this extraordinary situation go on, this suffering, and who will put an end to it?
Shall we blame the international organizations because they abandoned the Iraqis?
Shall we blame the American government because it destroyed Iraq and scattered the Iraqis?
Shall we blame the Iraqi government because it stole Iraq's money and didn't provide security, settlement or happiness to the Iraqi families inside Iraq and outside?
I don't know who to blame…
But I personally do not clear any of these parties from blame about what happened to the Iraqis; the calamities, the disasters…
And they will carry that responsibility until the day of judgment…
Where will they go, from facing God?

# posted by Faiza Al-Arji @ 4:39 PM
posted by Jay at 10:30 AM

The Charleston Gazette
June 22, 2007
Where’s ‘Aqualung’?

By Jim Balow
Staff writer

Bill Dunn, probably Charleston’s best-known street person, is missing.

Charleston police haven’t seen him for weeks. Nor has Kim Pauley, lead dancer with the Charleston Ballet and its downtown dance school, who called the Gazette to check on him.

Dunn, sometimes called ‘Aqualung’ because of his resemblance to a character on the cover of a 1971 Jethro Tull album by the same name, has been a fixture on city streets for more than 30 years. You’ve probably seen him in his coat, hat and scraggly beard, pushing a shopping cart overflowing with who knows what.

Pauley often sees him rooting around the Dumpster in the alley behind her dance studio.

“I was just concerned because I always save my cans for him,” she said Thursday. She fills a big garbage bag for him every month or two. “When I see him I ask him to wait while I go get the bag. He always says ‘thank you.’”

Lately Dunn hasn’t been around, she said. “I thought maybe he’d gone away for the winter. I started looking for him in the spring, and now it’s late June.

“I actually called someone in the Police Department. They hadn’t seen him either.”

Dunn has disappeared before, but always returns.

During the winter of 1984-85 he took off on his own to Washington, D.C. “We found his shopping cart in an alley off Hale Street,” recalled former Police Chief Dallas Staples, now commissioner of the state Alcohol Beverage Control Administration.

When Dunn returned the following spring, he seemed surprised anyone was worried about him. There were more empty buildings in Washington in which he could spend the night, he told a reporter.

Dunn wound up in a Cumberland, Md., jail the following year after police caught him trying to enter a Department of Highways maintenance garage with a loaded pistol.

“We contacted them, told them his history and they resolved the issue,” Staples said. Dunn returned to Charleston on a Greyhound bus.

Another time, city police tracked him down at the home of a brother in Ohio, Staples said.

Dunn endeared himself to police in 1978 after finding key evidence that helped them convict the murderer of a nightclub dancer. “William Hawkins,” Staples said. “Bill found a belt, a wallet and the gold jumpsuit the guy wore. He brought all the evidence in to us.”

Sgt. Allen McNeil, head of the bike patrol unit, said police haven’t seen Dunn lately.

“He does this from time to time. The rumor going around is he supposedly has family members who pick him up, clean him up and put him back out on the street. They do that about once a year.”

Do you know where Bill Dunn is? Click here to e-mail us.

To contact staff writer Jim Balow, use e-mail or call 348-5102.
posted by Jay at 9:19 AM

Huntington NewsMay 23, 2007

Project’s First Home Wastewater System Goes In

By HNN Staff

Nestled up a narrow hollow close to Flat Creek in the Left Fork of the Mud River Watershed is the home of Beecher and Judy Adkins, the first installation site of Lincoln County’s Alternative Wastewater Demonstration Project.
Flat Creek is nestled back among twisty roads and narrow, rural hollows in the southeastern corner of Lincoln County. At this time of year, honey suckle scents the air and people work until dusk in their gardens. Just a short distance up the road is the home of Beecher and Judy Adkins. Their home is the first installation site of a US Environmental Protection Agency and Lincoln County Commission project. Lincoln County is one of several national EPA alternative wastewater demonstration projects. These federally funded projects seek to demonstrate that new alternative sewage treatment systems can help decrease e. coli and other bacteria coming from home septic systems that non-existent or failing.

Beecher and Judy’s home will have a new system on Thursday, May 31. A special ceremony will take place that afternoon at 2 pm, recognizing this first installation and the people whose work has made the system possible. Lincoln County Commission President Charles McCann will spearhead the recognitions. “This is an important milestone, “said McCann. “We think what we are doing here will not just help local people in this watershed, but will demonstrate how new technologies can help in similar communities throughout Lincoln County, West Virginia, and this region.”

This first system will include a peat filter module and will be installed by Ashco-A-Corporation from Morgantown. Instead of a traditional septic system with a tank and leach field, the new system will have a septic tank, then a peat filter to further clean the effluent from the septic tank, and finally a drip system which will disperse the nearly clean water evenly through the soil. New technologies such as peat systems have been very effective in reducing bacterial content. They also take up much less room and can work moiré effectively in difficult situations where homes are close to creeks or in areas with high water tables.

Lincoln County’s project has brought community members together in meetings stretching over a two year period. Citizens have designed the criteria for deciding what families get these new systems. Key considerations include low income status, homes near creeks with high e. coli content, and participation in community planning. Nearly $500,000 has been set aside for systems and installation costs. Planners hope that another 20 systems will be installed in this area, the Left Fork of the Mud River, during the project.

The project has been supported by a variety of organizations and agencies including the Lincoln County Commission, West Virginia University, WVU Extension, the WVU National Research Center for Coal and Energy, the Lincoln County Health Department, DHHR’s Onsite Sewage Program, Congressman Nick Rahall, and the citizens of the Left Fork community.

For additional information including directions to the site for the 31st, contact Ric MacDowell (304-824-7911) or ric.macdowell@mail.wvu.edu
posted by Jay at 10:30 AM

from William James Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals 1899 - The Gospel of Relaxation

The Gospel of Relaxation
William James

I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and show their practical applications to mental hygiene,—to the hygiene of our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.

The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not so much feel fear as call the situation fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.

The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend to. . . . Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases, and make no account of them either way. . . . They really have nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of your present physical condition."

But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written about the Binnenleben, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's Binnenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary anæsthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at all. In the healthy minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and readiness for anything that may turn up.

Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the ski, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the I gentle and refining influence' sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our American life.

I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system. Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his own account. So that, if the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man' direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go, along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute our most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.

And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard," continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr. Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was irresistibly conveyed.

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak. Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual life. This follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breathe out at that,—what mental mood can you be in but one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed?

Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well, our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme in every great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.

To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about? Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality chimed in. just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own characteristic national type,—a type with the production of which, so far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically nothing at all to do.

This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be wholly disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad coordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run. Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where be may be when you most need his help,—he may be having one of his 'bad days.' We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer mariner in us, caught from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to do more by the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different. There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My colleague, Professor Münsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently, has written some notes on America to German papers. He says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of our people. I think myself that it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this over-tension,—and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts,—where does the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed. And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn't work contagiously in some particular. The very idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities. And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little volume called 'Power through Repose,' a book that ought to be in the bands of every teacher and student in America of either sex. You need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of one thing be confident: others still will follow you.

And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed. Become the imitable thing, and you may then discharge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of one's objective ideas and motor processes. We get the extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. Arid this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful. joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Ob, it was fine! it was fine! it was fine!" is all the information you are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably every one of my bearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. "Good! GOOD! GOOD!" is all we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get rattled' in the recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other band, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one band nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful. But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In her later book, entitled 'As a Matter of Course,' the gospel of moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not 'caring,' is preached with equal success. Not only our preachers, but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping on this string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our American mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth. This is charmingly illustrated by a little work with which I recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."* I extract a few passages, the conversations being given in indirect discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That be bad desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures; but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state. . . .

"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about it: I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have endeavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love Him. . . . That since then he had passed his life in perfect liberty and continual joy.

"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God, 'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss! That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness about it.

"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That he said to God, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the matter passed, but that it proved very well.

"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he had been employed there.

"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God.

"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly, and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing spectacle.


The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate,—and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.

* Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
Back to William James
posted by Jay at 8:20 PM

John Tierney: The Voices in My Head Say,"Buy It!" Why Argue? - Science Times Columnist - The New York Times
By JOHN TIERNEY


PALO ALTO, Calif.

Now that scientists have spotted the pain and pleasure centers in the brain, they’ve moved on to more expensive real estate: the brain’s shopping center. They have been asking the big questions:



What is the difference between a tightwad’s brain and a spendthrift’s brain?



What neurological circuits stop you from buying a George Foreman grill but not a Discovery Channel color-changing mood clock?



Why is there a $2,178.23 balance on my January Visa bill?



This last question isn’t yet fully answered, even after I stared at said Visa bill while lying inside a functional M.R.I. machine at Stanford University. But scientists are closer to solving the mystery. By scanning shoppers’ brains, they think they’ve identified a little voice telling you not to spend your money. Or, in my case, a voice saying, “At this price, you can’t afford not to buy the mood clock!”



For convenience’ sake, economists have traditionally assumed that buyers make rational choices: I think, therefore I shop. You pass up the George Foreman grill because you sagely calculate that the money would be better spent on, say, your child’s college fund. Or at least the mood clock. You choose to forgo one good in exchange for something better.



Even the most rational economists, though, realize that the shopper’s mind is more complicated. The brain’s “impartial spectator,” as Adam Smith warned, has to duel with “the passions.” Last year, after surveying shoppers’ passions, behavioral economists at Carnegie Mellon University developed what they call the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale.



But this kind of survey reveals only what shoppers choose to confess. To find out more, the economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of gadgets, appliances, books, DVDs and assorted tchotchkes. Lying inside the scanner, first you’d see a picture of a product. Next you’d see its price, which was about 75 percent below retail. Then you’d choose whether or not you’d like a chance to buy it. Afterward, the researchers randomly chose a couple of items from their mall, and if you had said yes to either one, you bought it; otherwise you went home with the cash.



The good news, for behavioral science, was that the researchers saw telltale patterns, which they report in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Neuron. “We were frankly shocked at how clear the results were,” said Brian Knutson, the Stanford psychologist who led the experiment. “It was amazing to be able to see brain activity seconds before a decision and predict whether the person would buy it or not.”



The bad news, for my son’s college funds, is that my responses to this experiment were not what could be called a happy medium, despite my best efforts at restraint. I passed up not just the Foreman grill but the sonic power toothbrush and the Bar Master electronic drink guide. But Dr. Knutson and his Stanford colleague, Elliott Wimmer, reported that “subject JT” chose to buy “50 percent of the items, approximately 2 standard deviations more than the average 30 percent buy rate.”



I will not try to justify my need for the mood clock, the “Dodgeball” DVD, the desk-clip lamp and the smoothie maker. I would rather pin these choices on two culprits.



The first was my nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain with dopamine receptors that are activated when you experience or anticipate something pleasant, like making money or drinking something tasty. In the experimental subjects at Stanford, this region was activated when they first saw pictures of things they wanted to buy. My nucleus accumbens just happened to respond more strongly than the typical subject’s, so what else could I do? If it feels good, buy it.



The other culprit — the main villain, really — was my insula. This region of the brain is activated when you smell something bad, see a disgusting picture or anticipate a painful shock. It was typically activated in the brains of the other shoppers when they saw a price that seemed too high. I’d like to think of my insula as particularly stoic, the strong, silent type, but he’s probably just an oblivious slob.



The lazy insula is a rarer affliction than you’d guess by looking at Americans’ indebtedness. Tightwads slightly outnumber spendthrifts, according to surveys by George Loewenstein and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, Scott Rick and Cynthia Cryder. These behavioral economists think tightwads aren’t any more rational than spendthrifts, because neither group is carefully weighing the long-term benefits of a Foreman grill versus college tuition. Dr. Loewenstein says the brain scans demonstrate that both kinds of shoppers are guided by instant emotions.



“We developed this propensity to experience direct pain when we spend money,” Dr. Loewenstein said. “This explains why tightwads won’t spend money even when they should. It also helps to explain why we overspend on credit cards, and why people prefer all-you-can-eat buffets instead of paying for each item they order. We like schemes that remove the immediate pain of paying.”



These schemes are a blessing for pathological tightwads, but they leave spendthrifts worse off. Paying cash is the usual cure suggested, but that hasn’t worked for me, presumably because my insula is such a slug. So I asked the Stanford psychologists to test another approach. After the shopping experiment, they scanned my brain while showing me a copy of my $2,178.23 Visa bill and a control image of Dr. Knutson’s credit card bill for a similar amount.



“When we compared your responses,” Dr. Knutson told me, “we saw a little spot of insula activation when you saw your own bill.”



This gives me hope for a technological cure for spendthriftness: a credit card that would remind you of your outstanding balance every time you started to buy something. It could flash the total in large numbers, or announce it in a voice (say, Simon Cowell’s) designed to arouse any insula.



I realize there are certain practical obstacles to this scheme, like the unwillingness of merchants or credit -card companies to put themselves out of business. Even if a bank were willing to market the card, it would be tough to get spendthrifts to sign up for it.



But what’s the alternative? You might remove the pleasure of shopping by somehow dulling the brain’s dopamine receptors so that not even the new Apple iPhone would get a rise in the nucleus accumbens, but try getting anyone to stay on that medication. Better the occasional jolt of pain. Charge it to the insula.
posted by Jay at 4:32 PM

In Clue to Addiction, Brain Injury Halts Smoking - New York Times

The finding, which appears in the journal Science, is based on a small study. But experts say it is likely to alter the course of addiction research, pointing researchers toward new ideas for treatment.

While no one is suggesting brain injury as a solution for addiction, the finding suggests that therapies might focus on the insula, a prune-size region under the frontal lobes that is thought to register gut feelings and is apparently a critical part of the network that sustains addictive behavior.

Previous research on addicts focused on regions of the cortex involved in thinking and decision making. But while those regions are involved in maintaining habits, the new study suggests that they are not as central as the insula is.

The study did not examine dependence on alcohol, cocaine or other substances. Yet smoking is at least as hard to quit as any other habit, and it probably involves the same brain circuits, experts said. Most smokers who manage to quit do so only after repeated attempts, and the craving for cigarettes usually lasts for years, if not a lifetime.

“This is the first time we’ve shown anything like this, that damage to a specific brain area could remove the problem of addiction entirely,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which financed the study, along with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “It’s absolutely mind-boggling.”

Others cautioned that scientists still knew little about the widely distributed neural networks involved in sustaining habits.

“One has to be careful not to extrapolate too much based on brain injuries to what’s going on in all addictive behavior, in healthy brains,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatric researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego V.A. Medical Center. Still, Dr. Paulus said, the study “opens up a whole new way to think about addiction.”

The researchers, from the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California, examined 32 former smokers, all of whom had suffered a brain injury. The men and women were lucid enough to answer a battery of questions about their habits, and to rate how hard it was to quit and the strength of their subsequent urges to smoke.

They all had smoked at least five cigarettes a day for two years or more, and 16 of them said they had quit with ease, losing their cravings entirely.

The researchers performed M.R.I. scans on all of the patients’ brains to specify the location and extent of each injury.

They found that the 16 who had quit easily were far more likely to have an injury to their insula than to any other area. The researchers found no association between a diminished urge to smoke and injuries to other regions of the brain, including tissue surrounding the insula.

“There’s a whole neural circuit critical to maintaining addiction, but if you knock out this one area, it appears to wipe out the behavior,” said Dr. Antoine Bechara, a senior author of the new paper, who is a neuroscientist at the Brain and Creativity Institute at U.S.C. His co-authors were Dr. Hanna Damasio, also of U.S.C., and Nasir Naqvi and David Rudrauf of the University of Iowa.

The patients’ desire to eat, by contrast, was intact. This suggests, the authors wrote, that the insula is critical for behaviors whose bodily effects become pleasurable because they are learned, like cigarette smoking.

The insula, for years a wallflower of brain anatomy, has emerged as a region of interest based in part on recent work by Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute. The insula has widely distributed connections, both in the thinking cortex above, and down below in subcortical areas, like the brain stem, that maintain heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the body’s primal survival systems.

Based on his studies and others’, Dr. Damasio argues that the insula, in effect, maps these signals from the body’s physical plant, and integrates them so the conscious brain can interpret them as a coherent emotion.

The system works from the bottom up. First, the body senses cues in the outside world, and responds. The heart rate might elevate at the sight of a stranger’s angry face, for example; other muscles might relax in response to a pleasant whiff of smoke.

All of this happens instantaneously and unconsciously, Dr. Damasio said — until the insula integrates the information and makes it readable to the conscious regions of the brain.

“In a sense it’s not surprising that the insula is an important part of this circuit maintaining addiction, because we realized some years ago that it was going to be a critical platform for emotions,” Dr. Damasio said in a telephone interview. “It is on this platform that we first anticipate pain and pleasure, not just smoking but eating chocolate, drinking a glass of wine, all of it.”

This explains why cravings are so physical, and so hard to shake, he said: they have taken hold in the visceral reaches of the body well before they are even conscious.

Other researchers have found that the insula is activated in unpleasant circumstances, like a bad smell or the anticipation of a painful shock, or even in shoppers when they see a price that seems too high. Damage to the insula is associated with slight impairment of some social function.

While antismoking treatments based on the new findings are still a long way off, the authors suggest that therapies that replicate some of the physical sensations of the habit, like inhalers, could be useful.

And at least two previous studies suggest that people can reduce the sensation of pain by learning to modulate the activity in an area of their brain.

In experiments, healthy volunteers watched real-time M.R.I. images of a cortical region linked strongly to pain sensation and learned to moderate that neural activity, reducing the pain they felt from a heated instrument pressed to their palms. The same kind of technique could be tried with addicts watching images of their insulas.

“The question is, Can you learn to deactivate the insula?” Dr. Volkow said. “Now, everybody’s going to be looking at the insula.”
posted by Jay at 4:27 PM

A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects - New York Times
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: February 6, 2007


The recent news about smoking was sensational: some people with damage to a prune-size slab of brain tissue called the insula were able to give up cigarettes instantly.

Suppose scientists could figure out how to tweak the insula without damaging it. They might be able to create that famed and elusive free lunch — an effortless way to kick the cigarette habit.

That dream, which may not be too far off, puts the insula in the spotlight. What is the insula and how could it possibly exert such profound effects on human behavior?

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.

Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals.

The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine. So insula research offers new ways to think about treating drug addiction, alcoholism, anxiety and eating disorders.

Of course, so much about the brain remains to be discovered that the insula’s role may be a minor character in the play of the human mind. It is just now coming on stage.

The activity of the insula in so many areas is something of a puzzle. “People have had a hard time conceptualizing what the insula does,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego.

If it does everything, what exactly is it that it does?

For example, the insula “lights up” in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone’s face, are shunned in a social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate.

Damage to the insula can lead to apathy, loss of libido and an inability to tell fresh food from rotten.

The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula. It provides unprecedented insight into the anatomy of human emotions.

Of course, like every important brain structure, the insula — there are actually two, one on each side of the brain — does not act alone. It is part of multiple circuits.

The insula itself is a sort of receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making, especially the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices.

The insula was long ignored for two reasons, researchers said. First, because it is folded and tucked deep within the brain, scientists could not probe it with shallow electrodes. It took the invention of brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to watch it in action.

Second, the insula was “assigned to the brain’s netherworld,” said John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology. It was mistakenly defined as a primitive part of the brain involved only in functions like eating and sex. Ambitious scientists studied higher, more rational parts of the brain, he said.

The insula emerged from darkness a decade ago when Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist now at the University of Southern California, developed the so-called somatic marker hypothesis, the idea that rational thinking cannot be separated from feelings and emotions. The insula, he said, plays a starring role.

Another neuroscientist, Arthur D. Craig at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, went on to describe exactly the circuitry that connects the body to the insula.

According to Dr. Craig, the insula receives information from receptors in the skin and internal organs. Such receptors are nerve cells that specialize in different senses. Thus there are receptors that detect heat, cold, itch, pain, taste, hunger, thirst, muscle ache, visceral sensations and so-called air hunger, the need to breathe. The sense of touch and the sense of the body’s position in space are routed to different brain regions, he said.

All mammals have insulas that read their body condition, Dr. Craig said. Information about the status of the body’s tissues and organs is carried from the receptors along distinct spinal pathways, into the brain stem and up to the posterior insula in the higher brain or cortex.

As such, all mammals have emotions, defined as sensations that provoke motivations. If an animal is hot, it seeks shade. If hungry, it looks for food. If hurt, it licks the wound.

But animals are not thought to have subjective feelings in the way that humans do, Dr. Craig said. Humans, and to a lesser degree the great apes, have evolved two innovations to their insulas that take this system of reading body states to a new level.

One involves circuitry, the other a brand new type of brain cell.

In humans, information about the body’s state takes a slightly different route inside the brain, picking up even more signals from the gut, the heart, the lungs and other internal organs. Then the human brain takes an extra step, Dr. Craig said. The information on bodily sensations is further routed to the front part of the insula, especially on the right side, which has undergone a huge expansion in humans and apes.

It is in the frontal insula, Dr. Craig said, that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions. A bad taste or smell is sensed in the frontal insula as disgust. A sensual touch from a loved one is transformed into delight.

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

People who are better at reading these sensations — a quickened heart beat, a flushed face, slow breathing — score higher on psychological tests of empathy, researchers have found. The second major modification to the insula is a type of cell found in only humans, great apes, whales and possibly elephants, Dr. Allman said. Humans have by far the greatest number of these cells, which are called VENs, short for Von Economo neurons, named for the scientist who first described them in 1925. VENs are large cigar-shaped cells tapered at each end, and they are found exclusively in the frontal insula and anterior cingulate cortex.

Exactly what VENs are doing within this critical circuit is not yet known, Dr. Allman said. But they are in the catbird seat for turning feelings and emotions into actions and intentions.

The human insula, with its souped-up anatomy, is also important for processing events that have yet to happen, Dr. Paulus said. “When you decide to go outside on a cold day, your body gets ready before you hit the cold air,” he said. “It starts pumping blood to where you need it and adjusts your metabolism. Your insula tells you what it will feel like before you step outside.”

The same goes for drug addicts. When an addict is confronted with sights, sounds, smells, situations or other stimuli associated with drug use, the insula is activated before using the drug.

“If you give cocaine to an addict, you are affecting their brain’s reward system, but this is not what drives the person to keep using cocaine,” Dr. Paulus said. The craving is what gets people to use.

For example, smokers enjoy whole-body effects, said Nasir Naqvi, a student at the University of Iowa Medical Scientist Training Program, who was the lead author of the recent article on smoking. It is not just nicotine binding to parts of the brain, he said, but sensations — heart rate, blood pressure, a tickle in the lungs, a taste in the mouth, the position of the hands, all the rituals.

The insula’s importance makes it an ideal target for many kinds of treatment, Dr. Paulus said, including drugs and sophisticated biofeedback. But methods to quell insular activity must be approached carefully, he said. People might lose the craving to smoke, drink alcohol or take other drugs, but they could simultaneously lose interest in sex, food and work.

As clinicians explore the possibilities, Dr. Craig is thinking about the insula in grander terms.

For example, lesions in the frontal insula can wipe out the ability to appreciate the emotional content of music. It may also be involved in the human sense of the progress of time, since it can create an anticipatory signal of how people may feel as opposed to how they feel now. Intensely emotional moments can affect our sense of time. It may stand still, and that may be happening in the insula, a crossroads of time and desire.
posted by Jay at 4:23 PM

The Myth od Redemptive Violence

Babylon Revisited: How Violent Myths Resurface Today

By Walter Wink

Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. What is generally overlooked is that violence is accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience-unto-death.

Its followers are not aware that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety, however. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not appear to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the Left and on the Right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives.

That threat of violence, it is believed, is alone able to deter aggressors. It secured us 45 years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the bomb to grant us peace.

The roots of this devotion to violence are deep, and we will be well rewarded if we trace them to their source. When we do, we will discover that the religion of Babylon -- one of the world's oldest continuously surviving world religions -- is thriving as never before in contemporary life...it, and not Christianity, is the real religion of (the United States).

Jesus taught the love of enemies, but Babylonian religions taught their extermination. Violence was, for the religion of ancient Mesopotamia, what love was for Jesus: the central dynamic of existence. For this early civilization, life was as cruel as the floods and droughts and storms that swept the Fertile Crescent. Recurrent warfare between the various city-states in the region exhausted resources. Chaos threatened every achievement of humanity. The myth that enshrined that culture's sense of life was the Enuma Elish, dated to around 1250 B.C.E. in the versions that have survived, but based on traditions considerably older.

In the beginning, according to this myth, Apsu and Tiamat (the sweet and saltwater oceans) bear Mummu (the mist). From them also issue the younger gods, whose frolicking makes so much noise that the elder gods resolve to kill them so they can sleep. This plot of the elder gods is discovered, the younger gods kill Apsu, and Tiamat pledges revenge.

The rebel gods in terror run for salvation to their youngest, Marduk. He exacts a steep price: If he succeeds, he must be given chief and undisputed power in the assembly of the gods. Having extorted this promise, he catches Tiamat in a net, blows her full of an evil wind, shoots an arrow that bursts her distended belly and pierces her heart; he then splits her skull with a club, and scatters the blood in the out-of-the-way places. He stretches out her corpse full length, and from it creates the cosmos.

We are indebted to Paul Ricoeur for his profound commentary on this myth. He points out that in the Babylonian myth, creation is an act of violence: Tiamat is murdered, dismembered, and from her cadaver the world is formed. Order is established by means of disorder. The origin of evil precedes the origin of things. Chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, god of Babylon). Evil is prior to good. Violence inheres in the godhead. Evil is an ineradicable constituent of ultimate reality, and possesses ontological priority over good.

Good vs. Evil

The biblical myth is diametrically opposed to all this. There, a good God creates a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is a part of the creation, but enter as a result of the first couple's sin and the machinations of the "serpent." A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, evil for the first time emerges as a problem requiring solution.

In the Babylonian myth, however, there is no "problem of evil." Evil is simply a primodial fact. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our blood. Humanity is not the originator of evil, but merely finds evil already present and perpetuates it. We are the consequences of deicide. Cosmic order results from the violent suppression of the female (Tiamat) and is mirrored in the social order by the oppression of women by men.

Thus, human beings are naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence; order must continuazlly be imposed upon us from on high. Nor are we created to subdue the Earth and have dominion over it; we exist but to serve as slaves of the Gods and of their earthly (representatives.).

Do you begin to sense where all this is leading?

The ultimate outcome of this type of myth, remarks Ricoeur, is a theology of war founded on the identification of the enemy with the powers that the god has vanquished, and continues to vanquish, in the drama of creation. Every coherent theology of holy war ultimately reverts to this basic mythological type. According to this theology, the enemy is evil and war is its punishment. Unlike the biblical myth, which sees evil as an intrusion into a good creation and war as a consequence of the fall, this myth regards war as present from the beginning.

This myth is the orginal religion of the status quo, the first articulation of "might makes right." The gods favor those who conquer. The mass of people exists to perpetuate that power and privilege which the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood. Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat.

The Myth Today

This myth of redemptive violence inundates us on every side. We are awash in it yet seldom perceive it. Its simplest, most pervasive, and finally most influential form, where it captures the imaginations of each new generation, is children's comics and cartoon shows.

Here is how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic strip or television cartoon sequences: An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy, though for the first three-quarters of the strip or show he (rarely she) suffers grievously, appearing hopelessly trapped, until somehow the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villian, and restores order until the next installment. Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance, whether he is soundly trounced, jailed, drowned or shot into outer space.

The psychodynamics of the TV cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: Children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the shadow side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over thier own inner tendancies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero.

Cartoon strips like Superman and Dick Tracy have been enormously successful in resolving the guilt feelings of the reader or viewer by providing totally evil, often deformed, and inhuman scapegoats on whom one can externalize the evil side of one's own personality and disown it without coming to any insight or awareness of its presence within oneself. The villain's ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression.

No premium is put on reasoning, persuasion, negotiation or diplomacy. There can be no compromise with an absolute evil. (It) must be totally annihilated or totally converted.

Lawless Solutions

The classic gunfighters of the "Western" settle old scores by shootouts, never by due process of law. The law, in fact, is suspect, too weak to prevail in the conditions of near-anarchy that fiction has misrepresented as the Wild West. The gunfighter must take matters into his own hands, just as, in the anarchic situation of the big city... (in movies such as Dirty Harry , and, in real life, Bernard Goetz, a beleaguered citizen finally rises up against the crooks ...and creates justice out of the barrel of a gun.

As Robert Jewett points out, this vigilantism betrays a profound distrust of democratic institutions, and of the reliance on human intelligence and civic responsibility that are basic to the democratic hope (the movie High Noon). It regards the general public as passive and unwise, incapable of discerning evil and making a rational response. Public resources are inadequate, so the message goes; we need a messiah, an armed redeemer, someone who has the strength of character and conviction to transcend the legal restraints of democratic institutions and save us from an evil easily identifiable in villainous persons.

These vigilantes who deliver us by taking the law into their own hands will somehow do so without encouraging lawlessness. They will kill and leave town, thus ridding us of guilt. They will show selfless and surpassing concern for the health of our communities, but they will never have to practice citizenship, or deal with the ambiguity of political decisions. They neither run for office nor vote. They will reignite in us a consuming love for impartial justice, but they will do so by means of a mission of personal vengence that eliminates the due process of law.

The possibility that an innocent person is being executed by our violent redeemers is removed by having the outlaw draw first, or shoot from ambush. The villain dresses in dark clothing, is swarthy, unshaven, and filthy, and his personality is stereotyped so as to eliminate any possibility of audience sympathy. The death of such evil beings is necessary in order to cleanse society of a stain. The viewer, far from feeling remorse at another human being's death, is actually made euphoric. Some movie audiences actually stand and cheer when the villain is blown away...

Rather than shoring up democracy, the strong-man methods of the superheros of popular culture reflect a nostalgia for simpler solutions. They bypass constitutional guarantees of legal procedure in arrest, or an appreciation for the tenet that a person is to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty.

What we see instead is a mounting impatience with the laborious processes of civilized life and a restless eagerness to embrace violent solutions. Better to mete out instant, summary justice than risk the red-tape and delays and bumbling of the courts. The yearning for a messianic redeemer who will set things right is thus, in its essence, a totalitarian fantasy...

Violent Lessons

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation...

Estimates vary widely, but the average child is reported to log roughly 36,000 hours of television by the time she or he is 18, including some 15,000 murders. In prime time evening shows, our children are served up about 16 acts of entertaining violence (two of them lethal) every night; on the weekend the level of violent acts almost doubles (30.3). By the age of 16, the average child spends as much time watching TV as in school.

From the earliest age, children are awash in depictions of violence as the ultimate solution in human conflicts. And saturation in the myth does not end with the close of adolescence. There is no rite of passage...but rather a years-long acclimatization to adult television and movie fare. Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself (in) a religion in which violence has become the ultimate concern, an elixie, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships.

The modern individual, stripped of the values, rites and customs that give a sense of belonging to traditional cultures, is the easy victim of the fads of style, opinion and prejudice fostered by the communications media...people live under the illusion that the views and feelings the have acquired by attending to the media are their own. Overwhelmed by the giantism of corporations, bureaucracies, universities and the military, individuals sense that the only escape from utter insignificance lies in identifying with these giants and idolizing thenm... one's personal well-being is tied inextricably with he fortunes of the hero-leader. Right and wrong scarcely enter the picture.

Thus the myth of redemptive violence has become the cornerstone of foreign policy, enshrined in the doctrine of the national security state. Might is right. Everything depends on victory, success, the thrill of belonging to a nation capable of inposing its will in the heavenly council and among the nations. For the alternative-ownership of one's own evil and acknowledgement of God in the enemy-is for many simply too high a price to pay.



Author:
Walter Wink is a professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. Originally taken from his book Engaging the Powers, Copyright 1992, by Augsburg Fortress, this selection is an edited version of an article published in Sojourners in April, 1992. www.walterwink.com, wwink@bcn.net
posted by Jay at 1:26 PM