Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind

 

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind

Information Overload is the Bane of my Life

My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet.  

What can and should be ignored?  

Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? 

Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge?  

What do I hope to accomplish?

“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."

- Yuval Noah Harari   

  

And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Serenity Parayer Adapted for ADD

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; 

The insight to prioritize wisely what I want to change; 

The patience to resist trying to control everything I could, had I the energy and time; 

The courage and skill to change the things I have chosen to change; 

And the wisdom to know the differences among all these.

- Dr. Edward Hallowell   

Quotes - Be Here Now

“When the mind is full of memories and preoccupied by the future, it misses the freshness of the present moment. 

In this way, we fail to recognize the luminous simplicity of mind that is always present behind the veils of thought.”         

– Matthieu Ricard

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”

~Albert Einstein

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

- Voltaire

"There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread."

- Mother Teresa

~ JUDY COLLINS ~ In My Life ~

Link: http://youtu.be/iRYMdAQWsmc

Pipeline

Jamie O'Brien In Mainland Mexico© Surfline/A-Frame/Justin Smith





A Taste Of Cloudbreak© Surfing Life/Andrew Shield









Link: http://www.redbull.com/us/en/surfing/stories/1331592326442/five-photos-you-ve-gotta-see-this-week-may-24

The madness of Crowds

 Madness is rare in individuals but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras its the rule.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I've always been attracted by the fantastic. - Dorothea Tanning

Portrait de famille (Family Portrait), 1954

Portrait de famille (Family Portrait)

1953-54
Oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in.

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

" ....I've always been attracted by the fantastic.  You see I was born in Galesburg, a hamlet of Illinois, which is nothing exciting in itself, but my father, of Swedish origin, a very authoritarian man ...

Marcel Duhamel:   This is particularly evident in Family Portrait, where all the characters are represented in proportion to the importance they had then in your eyes.  Looks like you settled accounts?

Not really ... It is more generally a comment on the hierarchy within the sacrosanct family.  My father, despite everything, brought us a breath of exoticism.  He told stories of distant snows, the fleeing boy skates on the ice, fast, fast ... the wolf at his heels ... I felt the hoarse wolf breath on my neck ... it was delicious.


[....J'ai toujours été attirée par le fantastique. Voyez-vous je suis née à Galesburg, un patelin de l'Illinois, ce qui n'a rien d'exaltant en soi, mais mon père, Suédois d'origine, homme très autoritaire ...

Marcel Duhamel:   C'est particulièrement visible dans Portrait de famille, où tous les personnages sont représentés proportionnellement à l'importance qu'ils avaient
alors à vos yeux. On dirait que vous y réglez des comptes?

Pas vraiment... C'est plus généralement un commentaire sur la hiérarchie au sein de la Sacrosainte Famille.  Mon père, malgré tout, nous apportait un souille d'exotisme. Il racontait des histoires de neiges lointaines, de garcon chaussé de patins fuyant sur la glace, vite, vite.  Le loup à ses trousses ... Je sentais l'haleine rauque du loup sur ma nuque ... c'était délicieux.]

     —from interview with Marcel Duhamel, Dorothea Tanning: Numéro Spécial de XXe Siècle.  Paris: Editions XXe Siècle, 1977, p. 110.

Source: http://www.dorotheatanning.org/

Malcolm Gladwell Critique

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/200912/gladwells-stickiness-problem

Gladwell's Stickiness Problem

There's a danger in crafting ideas that are more compelling than accurate.

Published on December 22, 2009 by Jeff Wise in Extreme Fear

The aughts been a good decade for Malcolm Gladwell. The reigning king of urban intellectuals has never not had a book among the New York Times's top 10 bestsellers since his first book, The Tipping Point, debuted in 2000. (Currently, he has four.) With so much success, of course, invariably come brickbats. The latest volley of slings and arrows has arrived from the direction of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor who, reviewing Gladwell's book What the Dog Saw in the New York Times Book Review last month, declared that the author "unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and... occasionally blunders into spectacular failures."

As someone who has just published a somewhat Gladwellian tome myself, I have a somewhat different perspective. The problem, I've discovered, isn't just that Gladwell is wrong. It's that his formulations are so darn sticky.
I stumbled upon this realization when, last year, I began writing my book, Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. In the course of my research I delved into all the major manifestations of the emotion, including the phenomenon of athletes choking on the playing field. Gladwell, I already knew, had famously dealt with the subject in a 2000 New Yorker article entitled "The Art of Failure." He summed up the topic with breathtaking concision. Choking, he declared, is the opposite of panic. "Choking is about thinking too much," he wrote. "Panic is about thinking too little."
It was the epitome of a Gladwellian idea: counterintuitive, startling, yet immediately graspable. In other words, sticky -- the supreme attribute for a successful meme. And thus it spread. Read anything about choking in the popular press these days and you'll likely get the Gladwell line. Here's Jonah Lehrer, writing in his book How We Decide: "Choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much." (Italics his.) And here's John Paul Newport, writing this February in the Wall Street Journal: "Choking... is essentially the opposite of panic."
The only problem is that, from a neuroscientific perspective, Gladwell's "choking is the opposite of panic" doesn't make any sense. It's like saying "dogs are the opposite of cats" - a stimulating proposition, perhaps, but logically unparsable.
Meanwhile, as it happens, a great deal of fascinating research has gone into figuring out how choking actually works. The phenomenon is an expression of a specifically social kind of fear, a variety of performance anxiety related to stage fright, panic attacks, and the "shy bladder" syndrome familiar to men at airport urinals. It has nothing to do with a negation or undersupply of panic.
Okay, so who cares? If half the United States is walking around with the erroneous notion that they are in possession of a really nifty insight into the nature of choking, so be it. No harm, no foul. But some bogus memes are less innocent.
One of the chapters in Gladwell's second book, Blink, concerns the work of the University of California psychologist Paul Ekman, a man who, according to Gladwell, has mastered the secret of lie detection. Thanks to a combination of innate skill and scientific savvy, Ekman has supposedly trained himself to detect fleeting "micro-expressions" on a liar's face and so can determine their true emotional state with stunning accuracy.
It was the best chapter of the book, maybe the best chapter Gladwell has ever written. When Universal Studios paid $1 million for the movie rights to Blink, this was the part they really wanted; when the deal was inked, the studio announced that Steven Gaghan was attached to the project to write and direct, and Leonardo DiCaprio would star as an Ekman-like character. That film is still gestating, but meanwhile the Gladwell/Ekman juggernaut has already steamrollered across the public consciousness through the Fox TV show "Lie to Me," currently in its second season. In the show, Tim Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, the protagonist with Ekman-type powers. The real Ekman serves as a script adviser to the show and writes about each episode on his blog.
The chapter's most profound impact played out not on the screen but in the real world, when the Department of Homeland Security enlisted Ekman, soon after Blink's publication, to help implement a project to detect would-be terrorists in airports around the country. Called "Screening Passengers by Observation Technique," or SPOT, the program debuted in December, 2005. By 2008, TSA officers were pulling aside nearly 100,000 passengers a year for screening. (Of those, fewer than one percent were eventually arrested, and the TSA won't say how many were convicted.)
You might think, given Ekman's cultural ubiquity, that his discoveries on the subject of lying have laid the groundwork for a whole sub-field of research psychology. On the contrary. In fact, it has been well established by peer-reviewed studies that, Ekman's claims notwithstanding, no person can reliably tell whether or not another human being is lying simply by looking at them. "It's hokum," says Yale psychologist Charles A. Morgan III.
So SPOT, it turns out, was a $3-million-a-year waste of taxpayer money. So "Lie to Me" is scarcely more scientifically grounded than "Ghost Whisperer." Well, okay. Dumb TV shows and wasteful government programs are nothing new. What's really disturbing, though, is that once Gladwell had granted Ekman his intellectual seal of approval, no one in the popular media was willing or able to point out that the good professor's claims were spurious.
For four years.
That's the problem of Gladwell in a nutshell. He's masterful at brewing up memes so potent that they travel far beyond the realm of where the mere modest truth would go. They spread. And they stick. And having stuck, they proceed to affect the decisions that people make, the policies they implement, the laws that they pass. A normal person, when he is wrong, adds a little drop of erroneousness in the great sea of human conversation. Gladwell, when he is wrong, creates a tsunami of wrong.
And it just goes on and on.

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Jeff Wise is a New York-based science writer and author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn has been instrumental in Mindfulness achieving widespread acceptance  in a variety of applications, such as in public schools.

Mindfulness has been defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment” 
 (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).

 Mindfulness can be used to increase the space between a stimulus and one’s response to it, enabling improved decision making ability and shifts in long-standing behaviors.



 Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present and
future. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10, 144-156.

http://www.mindfulschools.org/resources/materials/.
 

the Stress of Life

NOTE: Like many people in the grinding business of understanding the stock market and finding value in financial markets "The Stress of Life" by Dr.Selye held an important place in my life.  He made it clear that distress is the great enemy.  If you are enjoying the 'Battle for Investment Survival' as you would a game, you are not risking "getting sick" from the distress of the activity.  He talks about stress as a good and motivating force whereas distress is the killer.  Good stress would probably be considered "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow - YouTube Oct 24, 2008 ... http://www.ted.com Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living ?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs

BrainConnection.com - Hans Selye and the Discovery of Stress - Part 1



Hans Selye: The Discovery of Stress
by Gerald Gabriel

G.A.S. Spells Stress

As with so many wondrous discoveries of science and medicine, it was by chance that Hungarian-born Hans Selye (1907-1982) stumbled upon the idea of the General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.), which he first wrote about in the British journal Nature in the summer of 1936. 

The G.A.S., alternately known as the stress syndrome, is what Selye came to call the process under which the body confronts "stress" (what he first called "noxious agents"). 

In the G.A.S., Selye explained, the body passes through three universal stages of coping. 

1) First there is an "alarm reaction," in which the body prepares itself for "fight or flight." No organism can sustain this condition of excitement, however,

2) and a second stage of adaptation ensues (provided the organism survives the first stage). In the second stage, a resistance to the stress is built.

3) Finally, if the duration of the stress is sufficiently long, the body eventually enters a stage of exhaustion, a sort of aging "due to wear and tear."

"Stress," in Selye's lexicon, could be anything from prolonged food deprivation to the injection of a foreign substance into the body, to a good muscular workout; by "stress," he did not mean only "nervous stress," but "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand."

Though his efforts were met with skepticism early on (he did suggest some fairly radical things, including the idea that stress had a causal relationship to a number of major illnesses - heart disease and cancer, among them), Selye's impeccable methods and research gradually won out, and his ideas were eventually treated with respect by health and science professionals of every stripe.

In Selye's own words, his discovery was just "enough to prevent the concept from ever slipping through our fingers again; [making] it amenable to a precise scientific analysis."

Stressed-out Lab Rats

Selye had actually been searching for a new hormone when he stumbled upon all of this. In 1934, at the age of 28, he was an assistant at McGill University's Biochemistry Department in Montreal. He was a promising young endocrinologist carrying out quite orthodox biochemical experimentation involving the injection of rats with ovarian extract. His hope was to uncover changes in the organism that could not be caused by any known sex hormone, and the initial results gave him cause for great optimism.

The rats developed a triad of symptoms from the extract injections, including enlargement of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, spleen, and lymph nodes, and deep bleeding ulcers in the lining of the stomach and duodenum -- all of which could be increased or decreased in severity by adjusting the amount of extract.

It seemed obvious to the young Selye that he was on the verge of pinpointing a new hormone, as none then known produced these sort of symptoms. "You may well imagine my happiness!" he writes. "At the age of 28, I already seemed to be on the track of a new hormone."

His hopes began to diminish, however, when, first, placental extract and, later, pituitary extract brought about the same symptoms. But he was not yet defeated, for, he writes, "mine was supposed to be a new hormone and (who knew?) perhaps the pituitary could also manufacture this one."

Next, however, he injected the extract of kidney, spleen and numerous other organs, all of which produced the same effect. He was baffled. In a last ditch effort to clarify these bizarre results, he injected a toxic liquid, Formalin, (used in the preparation of tissues for microscopic study) and when even it produced these symptoms, he knew he had failed in discovering a new hormone.


The Unique View Afforded to the Young and Ignorant

He was left, at this point, with two options. The first and most apparent was to give up on this line of research. There was plenty of reason to believe that this trail would lead to nothing of worth, and, he knew, many capable scientists had wasted their best years being led around by just such a red herring. "I became so depressed that for a few days I just sat in my laboratory," he writes, "brooding about how this misadventure might have been avoided and wondering what was to be done now."

The other, much more difficult, possibility was to devise some new way of examining his data. This, of course, is the option he chose.

Selye revisited a theory he first began to formulate years before at the German-speaking University of Prague, where, at the age of nineteen, he began medical school. It was here that Selye unwittingly developed ideas that would eventually lead to the discovery of the G.A.S.

Selye recalled years later that as the various patients were brought in and examined during his introduction to clinical medicine, they all "felt and looked ill, had a coated tongue, complained of more or less diffuse aches and pains in the joints, and of intestinal disturbances with loss of appetite." They also generally "had fever, enlarged spleen or liver, inflamed tonsils, a skin rash" and a number of other general symptoms. It wouldn't be until later that the telltale signs would appear of, say, liver disease, and treatment could be recommended.

"Since these were my first patients," Selye writes, "I was still capable of looking at them without being biased by current medical thought. Had I known more I would never have asked myself questions, because everything was handled just the way it should be."

The main question that stuck in Selye's mind was a simple one really: how was it that doctors over the long history of medicine had spent so much time and energy on the discovery and treatment of individual diseases and had given discovery and treatment of individual diseases and had given so little thought to:

 "the syndrome of just being sick"? 


Though captivated by this idea, being young and inexperienced - and working under the deadlines and demands of medical school - Selye hadn't the time, energy or expertise to pursue it. He briefly mentioned the idea to his advisor who promptly chuckled at the young mans naivete, and thus the idea fell dormant for the better part of the next decade.

On "the Syndrome of Just Being Sick" and Bloodletting

The memory of the nonspecific illness did not altogether abandon Selye, though, and years later, when he was casting around for a rubric under which he could examine his failed hormone experiments, he was reminded of the symptoms of the patients in the Prague hospital. Those patients, he understood, shared something in common with his sick rats. His intention was to find out what that connection was, and he in fact decided very quickly to devote his life to the discovery of the root of this nonspecific illness.

"If there was such a thing as a single nonspecific reaction of the body to damage of any kind," he writes of his jubilant epiphany, "this might be worth study for its own sake. Indeed, working out the mechanism of this kind of stereotyped syndrome of response to injury as such might be much more important to medicine than the discovery of yet another sex hormone."

In piecing together the puzzle, Selye was aided by two other bits of medical knowledge. Certain treatments, he knew, were useful to patients suffering from just about anything. Doctors prescribed to most patients things like rest, eating easily digestible food, and protection against great variations in temperature. Also, he recalled that there existed a number of nonspecific treatments in the history of medicine - and, in fact, in contemporary medicine, too - that, though odd (some would say barbaric), had met with undeniable (if sporadic) success: practices like the injection of foreign substances into the body, fever therapy, shock therapy, and bloodletting.

It didnt take long for Selye to formulate an idea that made all of this seemingly disparate information coalesce.

There was some mechanism in the body, he rightly surmised, whose response to external agents - "noxious agents" was the best term he could then muster - was somehow general. 

The quality of just being sick he had seen in the Prague patients, the shared symptoms in his experimental rats, the universal usage of certain treatments, as well as the successful practice of stressful remedies like shock therapy, when taken together, suggested that specific illnesses, if not wholly caused by a single influence, were certainly bound by similar forces; there was a link in the body's reaction to illness that gave the appearance of some internal mechanism combating the stressing agents.



The Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal System

Selye's genius, then, was in suspecting and, through research, identifying this complicated internal stress-processing mechanism, which came to be known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal system.

This system, in short, governs the amount and kind of response the body produces to combat a stressing agent.

Simplified, the hypothalamus (the bridge between the brain and endocrine system) sends a message to the pituitary gland (a hormone-producing gland embedded in bones at the base of the skull) to release ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) into the blood stream. This signal prompts the adrenal cortex (located above the kidneys) to create corticoids, another hormone, from available raw material. These corticoids are then dispersed to the places in the body they are needed, where they are put to use in the various stages of defense against a stressing agent.

This was the fruition of Selye's goals: the identification of stress based upon "demonstrable biological laws." 

Sometimes a discovery is in part remarkable for the fact that nobody has made it before; this was just such a discovery.   It "could have been discovered during the Middle Ages," writes Selye. "[Its] recognition did not depend upon the development of any complicated pieces of apparatus, but merely upon an unbiased state of mind, a fresh point of view."

The Legacy

With the knowledge of the G.A.S. and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal system, it was all of a sudden possible to begin gauging the role of stress in our lives - which is precisely what Selye and a multitude of researchers have been doing for the last half century.

Selye himself went on to publish 33 books and over 1,600 scientific articles, almost all of them on the subject of stress. Among his many scientific texts, he also wrote a handful of popular books intended to educate about stress, the most popular of which was The Stress of Life, an in-depth explanation of the stress syndrome and its origins.

Selye served as professor and director at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal from 1945 until retiring in the mid-1970s. But he also evolved into a sort of philosophical leader whose views on health helped to change the way the body and mind were viewed in the decades after World War II.

Selye moved easily into the role of well-being representative, and was just as likely to be asked to speak to a religious group as to a medical group. 

He often spoke of the value of love, and of the essential importance in our own well-being of helping others.

 He was not, at any point in his career, anyone's vision of a "normal" scientist. But he was indeed an innovator, and his influence stretches behind him still, nearly twenty years after his death, as his students and colleagues continue to toil in the wake of his ideas.



This article was created by Scientific Learning.
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