The Slippery Brain Sodality

 I appreciate the discussion we shared yesterday about this challenging book.   I've been thinking about boundaries recently and noticing how often my habit of mind is to fix and "police" them -- to let boundaries, and a certain anxiety about them (perhaps growing from experiences of beleaguered knowing) -- set the terms of my thinking and interaction.  It's been fun and enlightening to notice this and feel freer to choose a different course. Tiger, Tiger is so much about boundaries, and so is "analyzing" it -- what do we take as the unit of analysis: the individual, the family, the generation, the patriarchy, the era?  Of course, the idea of a "unit of analysis" is also a boundary set-up. This reminds me of Paul's exchange with Warren Hampe and Paul's conclusion, in which he writes of the usefulness of paying "attention to the verbs instead of the nouns."  It also connects, stunningly for me, with an article I just read in Oprah Magazine ("Letting Go," by Harriet Brown, May 2011, voi. 12, no. 5) about Stanford psychologist Fred Luskin's work on forgiveness.  Brown says Luskin identifies two steps in the process of forgiveness: grieving and letting go.  I note that these are both verbs!  In a seminar Brown attends with Luskin, he says bad things happen and there's no such thing as fair -- whether it's someone stealing your parking space or killing your child.  Brown: "A ripple of shock runs through the room.  How can anyone compare losing a parking spot to losing a child? 'It's better not to get caught up in content,' Luskin say" (p. 160).  Later in the piece Brown asks Luskin how she can forgive her mother when her mother keeps hurting her, when it's not something over and done.  He says, "It's not happening now, this second. . . . So try again" (255).  She shifts the question to: "How can you keep yourself safe with a difficult person?"  The answer that they co-construct is to keep needed distance with an open heart.  

So, in connection with Tiger, Tiger, is there a way to think about the people in these relationships as verbs, rather than nouns, and to think of responding to them in the same way?  I think it has to do with not getting "caught up in the content" -- not fixing the boundaries but instead focusing on these individuals as actively part of myriad stories, myriad creative and destructive actions/interplays, in and over time?

Hi All,

I enjoyed the discussion yesterday and the way it opened the film and many interesting ideas for further exploration.

One idea that stays with me is that perhaps some people (perhaps those with less experience of slippery brain) are apt to recruit others to affirm/confirm/ratify their/our subjective states, while others (perhaps with more slippery brain experience) are not apt to do this, either because they don't think of other people playing this role, or because they don't want to think of it (perhaps because they don't want to put other people into this position, to impose on/bully people in this way).  This raises a question about the social "career" if you will of the brain, slippery or no, -- and how the social history of one's brain influences one's tendency to experience slipperiness.  With the understanding of slippery brain as a feature not a bug, I wonder about how people can encourage each other to experience slippery brain as another mode of being, and to experience what I think of as sticky brain as another mode of being.  Could we think of these as places for brains to pass through, especially in concert with other brains, rather than as characteristics of individual brains regardless of context?

A second idea, related, comes out of our discussion of whether Clementine's (the Kate Winslett character in the movie) instability needs an explanation.  Does "need" here pertain to certain modernist conceptions of narrative, or to a certain deterministic conception of personal psychology arising from the sense that her character is often distressed?  That she struggles in a way that could be explained and thus eased?  And, one more, does this way of thinking about source tales/creation myths for personal struggle depend on an outmoded notion of the self as bounded, as isolated from the rest of the universe?

One of the independent studies I'm supervising this semester is Exploring Happiness. In our most recent reading, a workbook by Hanson and Mendius called Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, I came across this passage which made me think of "slippery brains." I wonder what it would mean to members of the group to think of their brains in this sort of evolutionary context? And/or in the context of the meditative practices described in the text?

"Concentration is the natural ally of insight…We find ourselves in a forest of ignorance and need a sharp machete to clear a path to liberating understanding: insight makes the blade shape and concentration gives it power….

Meditation is a great way to pressure test your attention in order to strengthen it--precisely because it goes against the grain of the tendencies we evolved to survive. Consider focused attention practices, in which you become absorbed in some object.... Animals that locked their attention on to one thing for many minutes in a row...wouldn't notice omnious slithers or shadows nearby and thus wouldn't pass on their genes. Monkey mind is the traditional, critical term for skittish attention–-this is exactly what helped our ancestors stay alive.

Or consider open awareness meditation, where you practice choiceless awareness of whatever comes to mind without becoming engaged by it; this is equally contrary to our evolutionary nature" (pp. 191-192).

I am interested in hearing more about what was brought up in relation to suicide and the author. Why hadn't that ever crossed his mind? (Though perhaps it did and he just didn't elaborate on this in the memoir.) Someone (?) suggested it may be because he was not able to imagine alternative scenarios--what things would be like without him, so it just didn't occur as a viable option. Could this be a function of his age? I read something recently about depression and suicidal (or lack thereof) in children; suicide never crosses their mind, instead profound depression often times manifests simply as violent thoughts about the world around them (as opposed to soley around his/herself). So, in children and perhaps in this authors case, the "storyteller" has not developed enough to imagine alternate possibilities, thus he succumbs to the only option available to him, becoming a solider. Although, as we discussed with the monkey & the hunter story, he obviously had a pretty precocious "storyteller" to come up with his response.

So here's what (@ least one) briar-ly brain "looks like," amidst multiple slippery ones!

Hi All,

I appreciate yesterday's discussion and look forward to the next one.

I suspect that my frog brain has reasons of its own for very strenuously resisting the idea that there is no evil without story, without the storyteller brain, and without, in particular, the victim's story.  What about things that happen to people that they don't have stories, or words, for?  I have long been fascinated by the idea of false consciousness, for example, which is concerned with the same problem.  And one of  my earliest conversations with some of you, at a GIF meeting, had to do with whether oppression exists without stories about it.  Baumeister seeks to tell a story of evil that can emerge only when we set aside, temporarily, the victim's story.  He tries to take analysis out of the realm of right and wrong -- or take right and wrong out of the analysis -- then says we should put them back at the end.  The moral lens demands universality while his treatment of evil is based on the different particularities of the victim and perpetrator outlooks.  My sense is that his analysis would benefit by including Foucault; his treatment of "society" is simplistic.  He doesn't address the ways in which discourses have a kind of life of their own -- act as a third term with the individual and the group.  I agree that both individuals and groups condition as well as are conditioned by discourses, but the process is . . . demanding.

In the place where I sometimes do yoga, there are quotations painted on the wall.  One reads, "No one can diminish you without your consent."  I don't believe that.  That is, I think other people's stories signify in one's own stories of oneself.  I sense that my unconscious is strongly attached to this prospect.  Why?  I am guessing that my unconscious is attached to strong, competing desires: one for power and one for giving in/giving out/just being there.  I was struck by Baumeister's claim that the desire to be powerful, to have an impact on other people, is a driver of evil.  I tend more often to think of it (and I believe, to experience it) as a driver of good.  This puts me in mind of the lilies of the field.

Also of these lines by Laurie Lee: "Does a hill defend itself? / does a river run to earth / to hide its quaint neutrality? / A boy is shot with England in his brain, / but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun, / she has no honour and she has no fear."  (from "The Evening, The Heather").  If I can figure out how to type a poem so that it looks nice here, I'll write out the whole thing -- I think it could be an interesting frame for our next book!

Looking forward to our next meeting.  In meanwhile, many thanks for conversations to date that contributed importantly to Cultures of Ability, my recent effort to pull some threads together.  Let me know what you think, in the forum there or otherwise ...

This article from the NY Times was forwarded to me: Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves, which discusses the work of psychologist Russell Hurlburt. The article essentially concerns the attempts and feasability of getting a look at what goes on inside our heads and it is implied that there is a reality to the inner self. From how the article portrays Dr. Hurlburt, I think I like him. He says: "Maybe it’s a defensive maneuver on my part, but my rationale is that I don’t want to infect myself with some theory about how the world is. I would like to see the way the world is without having a theory about it." At any rate, his approach is to probing the inner self is introspection. His experiements have had people wear beepers throughout the day which beep at random times and prompt the individuals to record what was going through their head.

Whether or not this is a good experimental methodology, I find it really fun to think about the ways in which people differ from one another in their stream of consciousness. Evidently, people differ quite significantly:

“My research says that there are a lot of people who don’t ever naturally form images, and then there are other people who form very florid, high-fidelity, Technicolor, moving images,” he said. Some people have inner lives dominated by speech, body sensations or emotions, he said, and yet others by “unsymbolized thinking” that can take the form of wordless questions like, “Should I have the ham sandwich or the roast beef?”

... Differences in thinking style may also help explain some aspects of mental illness. In studies conducted with Sharon Jones-Forrester and Stephanie Doucette, Dr. Hurlburt found that bulimic women experienced a clutter of simultaneous thoughts that could often be cleared by purging.

I'm pretty sure I know how to characterize my own stream of consciousness, which I think is dominated by visual images as well as emotion, often simulatenous different "things". But I plan to pay more attention. Maybe this is something we can discuss as it relates to "slippery brains".

On a somewhat related note (I'm not yet sure how though), I have been thinking of the virtue of "reacting" to things rather than "critiquing" them. Maybe being more aware of the nature of one's stream of consciousness would let someone react more to things, though presumably with such variability this would be easier/harder for some people. Reacting to things versus critiquing them would seem to add a much richer, subjective perspective on things, contributing to the diversity of other perspectives...

Have been talking with Professor Grobstein about "doing things with no clear or decided overall purpose". To be less abstract, for me personally there's lots of things I like/would like to do (job-wise, hobby-wise, etc.) but they don't seem to "go together", I don't see where they will all lead. I feel like they have to all come together to fulfill a single, ultimate purpose. William James came up in this discussion and he is apparently one who did what interested him without any consideration of the bigger picture.

There was an op-ed piece in the NYT ("More Poetry, Please" - 31 Oct, 2009) about Obama that reminded me of this particular way of doing things. The writer in the column is voicing a concern that Obama's (seemingly-disconnected for the moment) efforts on health care, foreign policies, education, economics, and so on lack a "narrative". To quote,

"He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected."

Maybe Obama is like James, and we should give his policies time to come together, maybe that will lead to something better than it otherwise would. At any rate perhaps those of us who are slippery-brain/James likeminded and lack clear goals or narratives should be patient with ourselves, and others should be patient with such personality characteristics.