The Quarry

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Recommended link: How You Really Make Decisions

Some time ago I blogged about Daniel Kahneman’s recent book – Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow  – and first of all did a simple two part review of some basic aspects, following up with a more complex analysis of what I think his model is failing to take account of.

Last night I watched the Horizon Programme, How You Really Make Decisions, which looked in detail at his work. There is also a piece on the BBC News website (see link).

For anyone wanting a digestible run through of the basics of his model, the programme is ideal. You get a very clear sense of what the two Systems do, though it fails to deal adequately with the way that System 1 is able to move through experience to  a point where it can respond very quickly to complex but predictable environments such as fire fighters, emergency nurses and psychotherapists have to deal with. It also persists in using the word intuition where instinct would be far better as a descriptor.

While it completely fails to deal with the possibility that we have at least one more deeply creative system for processing reality and deciding what to do which could more fairly be labelled intuition (see links above), it does contain a fascinating account of work being done since the financial crisis to study rhesus monkeys on the island of Cayo Santiago. This isolated community of monkeys, who are well accustomed to human contact, give researchers an unparalleled opportunity to test whether one of the most crucial biases operating in human societies has ancient evolutionary roots.

Without introducing plot spoilers I can safely say the work they have done so far seems strongly to support the idea that the roots of loss aversion, and the consequent risk taking behaviour it triggers, goes back 35 million years. It is not going to be a habit we can shake off by waking up each morning and telling ourselves  we’re not going to do it anymore. We have to use System 2, they argue, to set up institutions and regulations to counteract this otherwise unavoidable human tendency.

The programme is well worth watching even though its failure to dig a bit deeper frustrated me somewhat. There was just no mention of what developing our spiritual capacities might do, no attempt to look, for example, at the way that mindfulness and meditation work. Still, you can’t have everything.

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Connecting with Old Friends

I knew I would have to come back to the encounter with RS Thomas before too long. Don’t worry – this is not going to be a soul-searching exploration of his anthology of religious poetry whose purchase I described about six months ago. Nothing so heavy.

It has taken me all this time to get round to reading it from cover to cover. I will probably return at some point to the unlikely companions who find themselves right beside each other in its pages. What I want to mention now is my surprise at finding a poem by Kathleen Raine that I actually liked – well, most of it anyway (page 153).

Now when nature’s darkness seems strange to you,
And you walk, an alien, in the streets of cities,
Remember earth breathed you into her with the air, with the sun’s rays
Laid you in her waters asleep, to dream
With the brown trout among the milfoil roots,
From substances that are in the ocean fashioned you,
At the same source conceived you
As sun and foliage, fish and stream.

This set me thinking. What if I’d misread her before and unfairly dismissed her as an endearing eccentric, but definitely far too eccentric for my taste.

William Blake by Thomas Phillips (for source of image see link)

I brevitted around on my bookshelves looking for a book I had not read for about 20 years. After a struggle, because I couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like, I found it: Golgonooza: city of imagination. I started reading it again.

It was fascinating and off-putting both at the same time. It surprised me to see that Golgonooza means ‘the city within the brain’ – Page 4) – a theme close to my heart if ever there was one. And it was good to be reminded (page 5) that:

[Blake] saw his nation ‘sunk in deadly sleep,’ victim of the ‘deadly dreams’ of a materialism whose effects in all aspects of national life were destructive and sorrowful, wars, exploitation of human labour, sexual hypocrisy, a ‘cruel’ morality of condemnation and punitive laws, the denial and oppression of the soul’s winged life.

I was not so thrilled when the four Zoas came in – my reasons for backing off from Raine, and from the Blake of the ‘didactic’ works, rather than from his ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ which I continue to like, came flooding back. Still I pulled my volume of Blake down from the shelf to have a look. I opened it at The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which Raine was quoting from quite frequently. I read as far as:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death. But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties. It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

William Butler Yeats (for source of image see link)

Blake rapidly returned to his shelf for another day, perhaps, or maybe not.

What caught my eye next were her frequent references to Yeats, whom she describes as Blake’s ‘disciple’ (page 51). You can probably see where this is going. Another brevit. Another book. This time it was Yeats’s collected poems edited by Daniel Albright.

I have always admired Yeats but am only really familiar with a small number of his greatest poems, my favourite probably being Prayer for my Daughter. The opening lines always hook me and I always read till the very end:

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

I have never studied him systematically nor read a biography about him. I had never realised that he had any affiliation with Blake.

The introduction to Albright’s edition really got me hooked with (page xxi):

[Yeats] came to the conclusion that there was in fact one source, a universal warehouse of images that he called the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. Each human soul could attune itself to revelation, to miracle, because each partook in the world’s  general soul.

And this (ibid):

As a poet, Yeats hoped to subvert a language created for the description of the everyday world, in order to embody visions of the extra-terrestrial.  The mirror of his art must not merely reflect, but kindle, start to burn with images hitherto unseen.

Yeats’s poetry shows a lifelong search for such images, images that were not reflections but illuminations.  He sought them in translations of old Irish myths.  He sought them in visionary poetry, especially that of Blake and Shelley.  . . .  He sought them in séances, alchemical research, spiritualistic societies, telepathic experimentation, hashish-dreams, meditations on symbols.  When old, he sought them in philosophy, from Plato to Berkeley to the Indian Upanishads.  Wherever anyone purported to find revelation – even the most disreputable places – Yeats was willing to look.

And as I went on to skim the poems themselves there was more magic that I didn’t expect. I hadn’t realised that he had written the lyrics for what came to be tagged as a ‘traditional’ song: Down by the Salley Gardens (page 46):

Down by the salley gardens
my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
with her would not agree.

In a field by the river
my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
and now am full of tears.

Until I was reminded, I had also forgotten that a Bahá’í scholar, Soheil Bushrui, had the highest regard for Yeats for reasons I need to rediscover as I’ve completely forgotten them.

All in all, I don’t think this will be the last time I come back to his poems. I am adding him to a list of poets that I intend gradually to re-acquaint myself with, as they seem all to be striving to do what fascinates me at the moment, which is find a language to describe the transcendent. The list so far includes Hopkins, Shelley and Herbert as well as Yeats and Blake. Watch this space!

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Winter Song

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Recommended link: The Placebo Effect – BBC Horizon

Paul Pattison found a placebo helped his Parkinson’s

The other night I watched a BBC programme I had recorded on the placebo effect – not surprisingly a subject of interest to me. Though its treatment of the subject did not go as deep as I would like it was good to see this subject treated seriously in a mainstream programme. They stopped short of spelling out the possible implications of such a mind-brain relationship. Next time maybe! Below is an extract from the BBC News website – for the full story see link. The programme is currently still available for download at the iPlayer site.

They are the miracle pills that shouldn’t really do anything. Placebos come in all shapes and sizes, but they contain no active ingredient. And yet, mysteriously, they often seem to work.

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a huge amount of research into what dummy pills can do and how they work.

We know that in the right situations, they can be very effective at relieving self-reported conditions like pain and depression.

But the latest research suggests they might even be able to help relieve the symptoms of a major neurological disorder, as Paul Pattison found out.

In many ways, Paul is just like anyone else with a love of the outdoors.

He spends much of his spare time cycling in the hills on the outskirts of Vancouver, where he lives.

And every day, he walks his dog through the pine forest that starts where his garden ends.

But there’s one big difference between Paul and your average outdoorsy type.

Whether he’s walking or cycling, Paul needs medication to help him do it, because he has Parkinson’s Disease.

Without his drugs, even walking can be a major struggle.

Parkinson’s is caused by an inability of the brain to release enough dopamine, a neurotransmitter that affects our mood, but is also essential for regulating movement.

Luckily for Paul, his medication can give him the dopamine he needs to keep his symptoms under control.

Given everything we know about the disease, it’s hard to believe that a placebo – a ‘dummy pill’ with no active ingredients – could do anything to help someone with Parkinson’s.

And that makes Prof Jon Stoessl’s experiments all the more remarkable. He is the director of the Pacific Parkinson’s Research Centre at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.

A few years ago, Paul took part in a trial that Prof Stoessl was conducting. It required him to stop taking his medication.

The next day he headed into hospital, his symptoms in full flare-up.

He explains: “That’s when they gave me this capsule, and they gave you a half-hour….a normal period of time for the meds to kick in. And boom!

“I was thinking this is pretty good, my body becomes erect, my shoulders go back. There’s no way that I could be like this without having had my medication.”

Except that Paul hadn’t been given his medication – he’d been given a placebo.

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Deep conversations

. . . almost all of the commuters I interviewed said that even a brief nod constituted a fairly drastic escalation of intimacy. . . . ‘Once you start greeting people like that – nodding, I mean – unless you’re very careful, you might end up starting to say “good morning” or something, and then you could end up actually having to talk to them.’

(Watching the English by Kate Fox: pages 139-40)

Some of my recent posts have been rather heavy going. I thought I’d lighten it up a bit for a change.

When I go by train to London for meetings, which is usually about once a month, I tend to travel in the quiet carriage. This is not just because I am a bit introverted after the fashion described by Susan Cain in her excellent book, Quiet (see her talk below), but also because I usually have a load of reading to do in preparation for the meeting.

When I get on the train in Hereford, the carriage is usually fairly empty and I have a table to myself, as in the picture at the head of this post. By Worcester or soon after I usually have company.

So, introvert or not, for some reason I sometimes I can’t help breaking into conversation with someone at the same table, perhaps because people like me tend to choose a quiet carriage only to discover we’ve lots in common with the person behind the book across the table. And we’re obviously not as inhibited as commuters seem to be.

Talking in this way may seem to some of you an anti-social habit. It’s a quiet carriage after all. True, and I know I shouldn’t play music out loud, or have long conversations on my mobile, which I usually remember to switch to silent. However, I have never seen the quiet carriage as a kind of mobile Trappist capsule, where all talk is banned.

None the less, I have fallen foul of the quiet carriage chat police on several occasions. Once a red-faced man stood up at the far end of the carriage and hollered at the two of us who were deep in conversation: ‘This is a quiet carriage. Go and have your meeting somewhere else!’

I think he called it a ‘meeting’ because we weren’t talking about shopping or football, but about the impact of supermarkets on local trade, obviously not something he recognised as a topic suitable for conversation between acquaintances on a train.

But it is exactly this kind of deeper conversation that I really enjoy and am on the watch for more or less all the time. My encounters with the chat police have rather inhibited me now from starting up such conversations on the train.

Take my most recent attempt for example.

On my way to London I started a conversation in a quiet carriage, even at the risk of righteous anger from somewhere uncomfortably close.  The only reason I started it was because my signal went on the mobile so I couldn’t tether the laptop any longer to keep on working.

‘I’ve got no signal,’ I said to the pale man diagonally opposite me across the table, who had boarded at Evesham. He smiled in sympathy.

‘I’ll have my coffee, I think.’ I got out my flask and my chocolate bar, and started munching and slurping.

‘Are you going to London?’ I asked. He looked up from his mobile phone, obviously with a different company.

‘Bit further than that,’ he replied. ‘France.’

‘Which part of France?’ I spluttered through my chocolate.

‘Chamonix.’

‘Skiing?’ I said pointing to his absence of the essential equipment, his only luggage being the grey rucksack on the seat next to him. He gave a slight smile in acknowledgement of the observation.

‘My friend is driving down there right now taking my kit.’

We slid into talking about Schumacher’s accident and he shared with me that his son had hit a hidden bump under the snow and been turned head over heels. He’d over-corrected with the result that he landed on his head at such an angle that he could have broken his neck. No harm done though as it turned out. Luckier than Schumacher.

I discovered, as he tapped it to demonstrate, that snow is often as hard as the table we were sitting at, it gets so compacted by the weight of the skiers sliding over it.

‘Just one of those things,’ he said of his son’s accident.

‘Not a reason for not skiing though,’ I responded.

The conversation then turned to how poorly we understand risk and I gave the illustration, from Gardner’s book on the subject, of the post-9/11 reaction in America where multitudes took to the roads in preference to the air and 1,595 extra people died as a result in road accidents. We were clearly on the edge of making the conversation really interesting.

He asked me to watch over his things as he went to the restaurant car for a coffee.

‘I’ve obviously triggered something,’ I joked pointing to my flask. He laughed.

I caught the withering glance of the woman opposite. ‘I forgot we were in a quiet carriage,’ I whispered.

We shut up after that. I didn’t have the nerve to re-start a conversation as I’d heard the shrill voice of a vigilante ticking off a family who had boarded at Oxford for making too much noise.

‘This is a quiet carriage,’ she squeaked. ‘If you want to talk go back down the train.’ At least I think she said ‘train.’

I was remembering the excited four-way conversation I’d had with the three young professionals when I was coming to a Chaplaincy meeting a few weeks earlier.

What triggered us into our deep exchange of ideas was that all bar one of us had a connection with St Thomas’s Hospital where I was heading for the meeting. Mine was obvious and fairly meaningless, the woman had been born there (how likely was that?) and one of the men had been trained there – still a pretty improbable connection and even more so when you put it with the others.

Not sure what Gardner would’ve made of all that but Kahneman would have had a field day quoting baseline probabilities. It was enough to get us going about the meaning of such things, anyway.

We were in full flow when we had been interrupted by someone behind my head shouting at us with a typical rebuke. We had continued in whispers because the conversation had simply been too interesting to stop – coincidence, synchronicity, NDEs, theodicy, evolution. No way we could shut up about that kind of thing.

Perhaps I have to accept that cafes are better places to hold this kind of exploration.

The week before last was a good example. I met up with two former colleagues in a local coffee shop. We covered a lot of ground – psychopaths, psychotherapy, NDEs (again!) and planned obsolescence to quote the ones I can remember.

The only downside was the over enthusiastic proprietor. We had admittedly placed rather a frugal order of two soups, two coffees and a fruit juice between the three of us to justify unlimited chatting time. But he was more than half empty and he was a bit trying. Just as one of us was launching into a fascinating point, up he would pop.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a piece of cake.  We’ve a delicious selection,’ he’d offer brightly.

‘No thanks. We’re fine,’ we’d explain patiently. ‘Now as I was saying, according to one guy on this programme, society needs psychopaths . . . ‘

And again the bad penny.

‘More coffee anyone? Or cake now perhaps?’

Some people never give up.

From his point of view, of course, it was quite logical.  Our unnoticed coffees had got colder as the conversation had warmed up, and our bowls of soup were empty. Why wouldn’t we want a top up? He was assuming we had gone there to eat after all, whereas really we were there, three introverts in their element, to talk about really serious things.

Eventually, it became obvious that our welcome was hugely overstretched. We headed for the exit. Even as we queued to pay, each of us separately, the conversation carried on apace.

‘How much? Can I pay by card? And there was this study done, this other programme said, that showed that 1% of people don’t mind killing because they are almost certainly psychopaths . . .  £4.50 is it? OK . . . and the army definitely doesn’t want them in its ranks – too unpredictable . . . Yes, I’m putting my pin number in now . . . . there’s another 1% of completely ordinary people who don’t mind killing either. The army has a heck of a job to induce the other 98% to kill anybody. Thank you for a nice meal. Whoops, my card, nearly forgot.

So, in quiet carriages they don’t want you to talk because you disturb other people, and in cafes they don’t want you to talk too much because you can’t talk and eat at the same time.

I have a serious problem here and I’m working on it. Not everyone wants to sit at home and talk.  No one wants to pay money just to sit at a table so they can talk. And going to a park in winter is not an option. I’ll let you know if I find the solution.

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