“What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” (via Pedro de Bruyckere’s “From experience to meaning” blog)

I normally hate Twitter “threads”, which often seem all too pompous, tendentious, and flat out wrong. But here’s a good one, via Via Pedro de Bruyckere’s From Experience to Meaning blog.  And it is also a thread that makes me think a little better of Jeff Bezos.  Here’s the beginning :

 

When I read the first tweet of this thread by Benjamin Riley I had the feeling we were up to something good. And Benjamin didn’t disappoint. I won’t make it into a habit of posting something like this on this blog, but I do wanted to share this here as I know that many of my readers would otherwise miss this:

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley

Please forgive me for the following tweet thread (not to say tirade) that will attempt to connect Jeff Bezos, #edtech, predicting the future, and cognitive science together. Get ready!

4:22 PM – Aug 13, 2018

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Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley

 · 3h

Replying to @benjaminjriley

First, here’s the quote from Jeff Bezos about building a business when the future is uncertain (it’ll take a few tweets): “”I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one…”

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley

Bezos continues: “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”

PTSD | Sunday Sonnet

I came across this sonnet by Andy Maudling called PTSD. A while ago I posted a striking metaphor for PTSD used by the journalist Tom Burgis in his book about contemporary Africa. “Drowning in my memories/They draw my every breath” is an arresting evocation of the pervasiveness of traumatic memory.

What children say when they are asked what they think about the brain.

(update May 19th 2018, this is an old post I am very sporadically updating)

I am interested in what we think of when we think of “the brain.” I am planning a post compiling the various technological metaphors that are used when people talk about the brain – from the steam engine  / pneumatic metaphors of the 19th Century to the computer metaphors of today. Of course, these metaphors (especially the computer one) assume a kind of literal meaning so that we forget that the brain really isn’t  a computer.

Anyhow, one interesting topic that may or may not have been systematically and academically studied is what children think of when they think of the brain. There is almost certainly some academic work out there on this – my own plan is to ask every few months the following questions:

What is a brain?

Where is  your brain?

What does your brain do?

 Until the children in question tell me to go away.

And because I am interested in sleep also, I will ask

What happens when you sleep?

(May 2018 update — um I haven’t actually done this)

February 24^th 2015

Child aged four and four months

Where is your brain?
(touches neck, goes off and plays elsewhere)

Later on

Where is your brain?

(touches head)
What does your  brain do?

It keeps your forehead in place

May 24^th 2015

Same child

 

What is a brain?

Your forehead’s bone

Where is  your brain?

Here (touches forehead)

What does your brain do?

Makes you think. Anything else? Mmm -mmm

Oct 2nd 2015

Same child.

What is a brain?

In your head.

Where is your brain?

In your forehead.

What does your brain do?

It makes you think.

Anything else?

That’s all.

May 18th 2018

What is a brain?

A brain is weird looking thing that helps your memeory stuff and keeps you breathing. Without a brain you would forget how to breathe and die

Where is your brain?

Your brain is on the top of your head in your skull. It has bones surrounding it so you can’t get anything in your brain except for your memory love and stuff like that.
What does your brain do?

It helps you live, helps you put stuff in your mind and helps you breathe. It helps you hug and remember what your hobby is.

“Of swallows, hares and horrors” – Simon Barnes on nature in the Age of Terror

Coming across this post on my other blog last year I was struck by the link with the nature connection material I have posted about (well, posted other people’s work on) here. In a way this piece – written in the direct aftermath of last year’s terror attacks in the UK – is as timely now as it was then, and holds up well to the passage of the months.

Séamus Sweeney

Original here:

Wild June moves into Day 5 and I’m spoiled for choice again. Shall I write about the swallows above the meadow? Or the hare in the garden? We saw each other at the same time and we both froze, holding a 15 yard stand-off for a full minute. Or perhaps I’ll turn to the butterflies that –

Tell me: is it wicked to enjoy such things in a time of devastation, after the horrors of Manchester have been followed by the horrors of London Bridge? Of if not wicked, is it not infinitely trivial, lacking in all seriousness, to bother with nature at times of random urban murder?

I did a piece for The World at One the other day, on the drastic decline of lesser sported woodpeckers. They put it on right at the end, cheerily describing it as “light relief”. I was a little surprised that…

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Vierordt’s Law and experimenting with time

Karl von Vierordt has a relatively short Wikipedia bio (compared, for instance, to this) for someone who pioneered the measurement of blood pressure, the measurement of lung function and – the activity that would link his name with a “law” for posterity, the experimental study of the time sense. Indeed, he seems to have been one of the first experimental psychologists.

This excellent set of slides gives an overview of Vierordt’s career and a very detailed discussion of the time experiments, their methodology, context, and implications. So what is Vierordt’s Law? As stated by Wearden in the talk:

the proposition that short intervals
of time are judged as longer than they are,
whereas long intervals are judged as
shorter, with an indifference point, where
intervals are judged correctly, somewhere
between the two

In 1868, Vierordt published Der Zeitsinn nach Versuchen
– “The Time Sense According to Experiments.” This was not the first study of time perception, but by had by far the most data. Wearden describes Vierordt’s experimental methodology:

–

The data collected in Der Zeitsinn come from
experimental studies in which Vierordt himself,
or sometimes his pupil Höring, was the sole
experimental participant
• Höring [Vierordt’s student] not only carried out time perception
studies to qualify for a medical degree, but his
thesis work has the oddity that Höring was the
participant and not the experimenter (who was
Vierordt)
• The data were derived from very extensive
experimentation, often involving hundreds of
experimental trials carried out over many days

Two taps (on a glass plate) define a target
time interval and the participant must
make a response so that the time between
the second tap and the response is equal
to the time between the two taps

A very full account of the Vierordt effect (perhaps a better term than “law”) is given in Wearden’s paper linked to above. Wearden has an intriguing conclusion:

A potential conclusion is that the Vierordt effects
shown in different tasks don’t actually have any
common cause, and that different processes are
responsible in the different cases

• Here, unusually, theoretical analysis seems to
suggest that things that look the same aren’t
really the same at all, a kind of theoretical
“disintegration” rather than the usual theoretical
“integration” of different phenomena within the
same theoretical framework

He ends with two points that should give pause to those who see the science of today as inherently superior to the science of the past:

You can see that this 19th. Century work, in spite
of some peculiarities, not only produced reliable
data, but also has posed some problems which
are unsolved (and, it seems, quite difficult to
solve) even today in the light of many recent
advances in our understanding of time
perception
• More generally, Vierordt seems to be a pioneer
of experimental Psychology who is unjustly
neglected….until now

“Working here makes us better humans”

A daily thought from Leandro Herrero:

I have had a brilliant two day meeting with a brilliant client. One aspect of my
work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes the culture of the company. This is a set of actionable behaviours that must be universal, from the CEO to the MRO (Mail Room Officer). They also need to pass the ‘new hire test’: would you put that list in front of a prospect employee and say ‘This is us’?

There was one ‘aspirational’ sentence that I put to the test: ‘Working here makes us better human beings’.

It was met with scepticism by the large group in the meeting, initially mainly manifested through body language including the, difficult to describe, cynical smiles. The rationalists in the group jumped in hard to ‘corporatize’ the sentence. ‘Do you mean better professionals?’ The long discussion had started. Or, perhaps, ‘do you mean…’ – and here the full blown corporate Academy of Language – from anything to do with skills, talent management, empowerment to being better managers, being better leaders, and so on.

‘No, I mean better human beings. Period!’- I pushed back. Silence.

Next stage was the litany of adjectives coming form the collective mental thesaurus: fluffy, fuzzy, soft, vague…

I felt compelled to reframe the question: ‘OK, so who is against working in a place that makes you inhuman? Everybody. OK, ‘ So who is against working in a place that makes you more human? Nobody. But still the defensive smiling.

It went on for a while until the group, ‘organically’, by the collective hearing of pros and cons, turned 180 degrees until everybody agreed that ‘Working in a place that makes you a better human being’ was actually very neat. But – there was a but – ‘Our leadership team wont like it. They will say that its fluffy, fuzzy, soft etc… In the words of the group, it was not ‘them’ anymore who had a problem, it was the infamous ‘they’.

The “difficult to describe” cynical smiles are familiar…. indeed I am sure I have perpetrated such smiles more than once myself!

Medicine can be a dehumanising profession, sometimes literally. Dehumanising in both ways – patients, especially some categories of patient, colleagues, but also we ourselves. Of course, the rationalist part of us can pick apart what “better humans” means…

“Sober Minds” Documentary Trailer

Sober Minds [2017] Short Documentary Trailer from Zimmerhands Films on Vimeo.

Sober Minds is an uplifting autobiographical documentary that showcases the beauty of urban wildlife through breathtaking photography and powerful anecdotes.

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS 2017

Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival US (World Premiere)
Fingal Film & Arts Festival IRE (Irish Premiere)
DocUtah International Documentary Film Festival US.

Website: CharloJohnson.com/SoberMinds
Facebook: facebook.com/SoberMindsFilm

This trailer looks really interesting – even the trailer powerfully depicts the power of nature connection and suggests that nature can be a source of connection that more mainstream education (for instance) misses out on

Language recognition in the womb – Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination – study from NeuroReport

I have blogged before about on the tendency to grandiosity of neuroscience, or rather (very often) how the science media portray neuroscience. This phobia of neurohype is not the same as a suspicion of neuroscience. The ingenuity of the methodology of studies like this is staggering. I don’t have access via my usual library sources to recent issues of NeuroReport so I’m afraid that I can’t assess the study directly (in so far as as I am at a certain stage of clinical practice, and the consequent distance from what personal study of relevance I have done)

Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination: a biomagnetometry study
Minai, Utakoa; Gustafson, Kathleenb; Fiorentino, Roberta; Jongman, Allarda; Sereno, Joana

Neuroreport: 5 July 2017 – Volume 28 – Issue 10 – p 561–564
Abstract

Using fetal biomagnetometry, this study measured changes in fetal heart rate to assess discrimination of two rhythmically different languages (English and Japanese). Two-minute passages in English and Japanese were read by the same female bilingual speaker. Twenty-four mother–fetus pairs (mean gestational age=35.5 weeks) participated. Fetal magnetocardiography was recorded while the participants were presented first with passage 1, a passage in English, and then, following an 18 min interval, with passage 2, either a different passage in English (English–English condition: N=12) or in Japanese (English–Japanese condition: N=12). The fetal magnetocardiogram was reconstructed following independent components analysis decomposition. The mean interbeat intervals were calculated for a 30 s baseline interval directly preceding each passage and for the first 30 s of each passage. We then subtracted the mean interbeat interval of the 30 s baseline interval from that of the first 30 s interval, yielding an interbeat interval change value for each passage. A significant interaction between condition and passage indicated that the English–Japanese condition elicited a more robust interbeat interval change for passage 2 (novelty phase) than for passage 1 (familiarity phase), reflecting a faster heart rate during passage 2, whereas the English–English condition did not. This effect indicates

that fetuses are sensitive to the change in language from English to Japanese. These findings provide the first evidence for fetal language discrimination as assessed by fetal biomagnetometry and support the hypothesis that rhythm constitutes a prenatally available building block in language acquisition.

What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in a Long-term Care Setting, Barsdale and O’Neill 2014

I have blogged before about the relationship between morale and clinical outcomes. From 2014 in Administrative Science Quarterly , a paper which links this with another interest of mine, workplace friendships .

Here is the abstract:

In this longitudinal study, we build a theory of a culture of companionate love—feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others—at work, examining the culture’s influence on outcomes for employees and the clients they serve in a long-term care setting. Using measures derived from outside observers, employees, family members, and cultural artifacts, we find that an emotional culture of companionate love at work positively relates to employees’ satisfaction and teamwork and negatively relates to their absenteeism and emotional exhaustion. Employees’ trait positive affectivity (trait PA)—one’s tendency to have a pleasant emotional engagement with one’s environment—moderates the influence of the culture of companionate love, amplifying its positive influence for employees higher in trait PA. We also find a positive association between a culture of companionate love and clients’ outcomes, specifically, better patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the emergency room. The study finds some association between a culture of love and families’ satisfaction with the long-term care facility. We discuss the implications of a culture of companionate love for both cognitive and emotional theories of organizational culture. We also consider the relevance of a culture of companionate love in other industries and explore its managerial implications for the healthcare industry and beyond.

Few outcomes are as “hard” – or as appealing to a certain strand of management – than “fewer trips to the emergency room.” The authors squarely and unashamedly go beyond the often euphemistic language of this kind of paper to focus on love:

‘‘Love’’ is a word rarely found in the modern management literature, yet for more than half a century, psychologists have studied companionate love— defined as feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others—as a basic emotion fundamental to the human experience (Walster and Walster, 1978; Reis and Aron, 2008). Companionate love is a far less intense emotion than romantic love (Hatfield and Rapson, 1993, 2000); instead of being based on passion, it is based on warmth, connection (Fehr, 1988; Sternberg, 1988), and the ‘‘affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined’’ (Berscheid and Walster, 1978: 177). Unlike self-focused positive emotions (such as pride or joy), which center on independence and self- orientation, companionate love is an other-focused emotion, promoting interdependence and sensitivity toward other people (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Gonzaga et al., 2001).

Companionate love is therefore distinct from the romantic love which so dominates our thought when we think about love. As is often the case, we moderns are not nearly as new in our thinking as we would like to see ourselves:

Considering the large proportion of our lives we spend with others at work (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011), the influence of companionate love in other varied life domains (Shaver et al., 1987), and the growing field of positive organizational scholarship, which focuses on human connections at work (Rynes et al., 2012), it is reasonable to expect that this basic human emotion will not only exist at work but that it will also influence workplace outcomes. Although the term ‘‘companionate love’’ had not yet been coined, the work of early twentieth-century organizational scholars revealed rich evidence of deep connections between workers involving the feelings of affection, caring, and compassion that comprise companionate love. Hersey’s (1932) daily experi- ence sampling study of Pennsylvania Railroad System employees, for example, recorded the importance of caring, affection, compassion, and tenderness, as well as highlighting the negative effects when these emotions were absent, particularly in relationships with foremen. Similarly, Roethlisberger and Dickson’s (1939) detailed study of factory life provided crisp observations of companionate love in descriptions of workers’ interactions, describing supervisors who showed genuine affection, care, compassion, and tenderness toward their employees.

There is nothing new under the sun. In subsequent decades this kind of research was abandoned.  The authors go on to describe the distinctions between strong and weak cultures of companionate love:

Like the concept of cognitive organizational culture, a culture of companio- nate love can be characterized as strong or weak. To picture a strong culture of companionate love, first imagine a pair of coworkers collaborating side by side, each day expressing caring and affection toward one another, safeguarding each other’s feelings, showing tenderness and compassion when things don’t go well, and supporting each other in work and non-work matters. Then expand this image to an entire network of dyadic and group interactions so that this type of caring, affection, tenderness, and compassion occurs frequently within most of the dyads and groups throughout the entire social unit: a clear picture emerges of a culture of companionate love. Such a culture involves high ‘‘crystallization,’’ that is, pervasiveness or consensus among employees in enacting the culture (Jackson, 1966).

An example of high crystallization appears in a qualitative study of social workers (Kahn, 1993) in which compassion spreads through the network of employees in a ‘‘flow and reverse flow’’ of the emotion from employees to one another and to supervisors and back. This crystallization of companionate love can cross organizational levels; for example, an employee at a medical center described the pervasiveness of companionate love through- out the unit: ‘‘We are a family. When you walk in the door, you can feel it. Everyone cares for each other regardless of whatever level you are in. We all watch out for each other’’ (http://auroramed.dotcms.org/careers/employee_ voices.htm). Words like ‘‘all’’ and ‘‘everyone’’ in conjunction with affection, caring, and compassion are hallmarks of a high crystallization culture of companio- nate love.

Another characteristic of a strong culture of companionate love is a high degree of displayed intensity (Jackson, 1966) of emotional expression of affec- tion, caring, compassion, and tenderness. This can be seen in the example of an employee diagnosed with multiple sclerosis who described a work group whose members treated her with tremendous companionate love during her daily struggles with the condition. ‘‘My coworkers showed me more love and compassion than I would ever have imagined. Do I wish that I didn’t have MS? Of course. But would I give up the opportunity to witness and receive so much love? No way’’ (Lilius et al., 2003: 23).

In weak cultures of companionate love, expressions of affection, caring, compassion, or tenderness among employees are minimal or non-existent, showing both low intensity and low crystallization. Employees in cultures low in companionate love show indifference or even callousness toward each other, do not offer or expect the emotions that companionate love comprises when things are going well, and do not allow room to deal with distress in the workplace when things are not going well. In a recent hospital case study, when a nurse with 30 years of tenure told her supervisor that her mother-in- law had died, her supervisor responded not with compassion or even sympathy, but by saying, ‘‘I have staff that handles this. I don’t want to deal with it’’ (Lilius et al., 2008: 209). Contrast this reaction with one from the billing unit of a health services organization in which an employee described her coworkers’ reactions following the death of her mother: ‘‘I did not expect any of the compassion and sympathy and the love, the actual love that I got from co-workers’’ (Lilius et al., 2011: 880).

This is obviously a paper I could simply post extracts from all day but at this point I will desist. Perhaps rather than “What’s Love Got to Do With It? the authors could have invoked “All You Need is Love?”

“#Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts.”- #Borges and #sleep in #literature

I have blogged both here and on my other blog quite a few quotes from novels and other literature on sleep. I have found these passages capture a sort of phenomenology of sleep as effectively as any clinical text. In this post I use a quote from Jorge Luis Borges as the starting point for a more general, although ultimately quite personal, discussion of literature and sleep and other altered states of consciousness.

Séamus Sweeney

Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it is no more than an eclipse of wakefulness, for others, a more complex state spanning at one and the same time past, present, and future,; for still others, an uninterrupted series of dreams. To say that Mrs Jáuregui spent ten years in a quiet chaos is perhaps mistaken; each moment of those ten years may have been a pure present, without a before or after. There is no reason to marvel at such a present, which we count by days and nights and by the hundreds of leaves of many calendars and by anxieties and events; it is what we go through each morning before waking up and every night before falling asleep. Twice each day, we are the elder…

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