bore me to tears

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged humor | 18 Comments

18 Responses

1. on January 4, 2010 at 7:44 am JJ

   He has a point, especially when it comes to “big picture” thinking:
   Aging Brain

   
   
2. on January 4, 2010 at 8:52 am JJ

   And this is thought-provoking (need subscription to read but here’s an old-man brain excerpt, about using mindful human reason and brainpower to advantage):

   Re: Ellen Langer’s most recent book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (Ballantine Books).

   In 1979, Langer and her students invited two groups of eight men in their late 70s and early 80s to go on a retreat for a week and spend time reminiscing about life 20 years earlier. “When they first showed up at the office, their daughters usually brought them,” remembers Langer, who was in her early 30s at the time. “They were walking down the hall to my office, and they looked like they were just about to keel over. I remember thinking, What am I getting myself into?”

   The researchers took each group of eight for a week at a time to an old monastery in Peterborough, N.H., which they had filled with props to make it look as it might have two decades before. The men watched Sgt. Bilko and The Ed Sullivan Show on a black-and-white television and listened to Rosemary Clooney and Nat King Cole on the radio. All the men (who were used to being taken care of) were encouraged to be active—for example, to help serve meals and clean up.

   The first group was instructed to behave as if it really were 1959. Ahead of time, they had written autobiographical statements that stopped in that year. During the week, they spoke in the present tense as they discussed the threat of communism, the Baltimore Colts’ 31-16 defeat of the New York Giants in the NFL championship game, and recently published books.

   Men in the control group, which went on a separate retreat, followed a similar program but were permitted to speak of the past as the past. They spent time reflecting on their younger days, while the first group in effect tried to take themselves back in time.

   What happened? After just one week, both groups tested better on hearing and memory. The men gained an average of three pounds each, and their grips were stronger. “At the end of all this, I was playing touch football with some of them,” says Langer.

   But the changes were especially striking in the first group: Their joints became more flexible and their hands more nimble. Sixty-three percent of them improved on intelligence tests, compared with 44 percent of the control group. And people unaware of the purpose of the study rated every member of the first group younger in photos taken after the retreat than in photos taken before.

   “When I first described the study, I was hesitant to spell out just how big the changes were,” says Langer, who wrote about it in her 1989 book, Mindfulness (Addison-Wesley), but did not publish the study in a psychology journal. In a field experiment like this one, lacking the controls of the lab, many factors might have explained the results.

   “The most important part of the study,” she says, “was that people who are only supposed to get more debilitated over time showed great improvement—regardless of the reason.”

   Langer has come to question whether any medical knowledge—about aging, about diagnosis, about the natural course of diseases—is necessarily true. Medical science is imperfect. Probabilities—that cells are cancerous, for example, or that a person with those cells will survive—are abstract mathematical constructs, she points out: They do not account for outliers, and they are based on a limited number of cases, which are analyzed by fallible human beings, who are making judgment calls.

   “I am not arguing against medical tests,” she writes in Counterclockwise. “I am arguing against mindless reliance on them and the mindless state they lead to.”

   She is now emboldened to offer an explanation for the results of the counterclockwise study: that the subjects’ mental states had direct, physical effects, an explanation that has been borne out in her subsequent, peer-reviewed research.

   
   
3. on January 4, 2010 at 8:58 am suchlovelyfreckles

   So, wait… young people as in me? Or young people as in my kids?

   
   
4. on January 4, 2010 at 1:45 pm Lynn

   JJ,

   That’s such an interesting study. So, you are as young as you feel think.

   Plus, I’m assuming that if I start wearing hot pants, halter tops, Farrah hair and rekindle my long-ago crush on Danny (a drummer in marching band), I’ll feel young again, right?

   
   
5. on January 4, 2010 at 1:48 pm Lynn

   Ute,

   I got the impression crabbyoldfart limits the term “young people” to teens and twenty-somethings. :) …Or, is that just wishful thinking on my part? :S

   
   
6. on January 4, 2010 at 4:43 pm JJ

   The study reminded me of an old Christopher Reeve-Jane Seymour movie called Somewhere in Time, do you know it? He wanted to time travel back to her time and so he bought clothes from that era, removed all signs of the present from his rooms in an old hotel that she’d stayed in back then, and voila! When he woke up, he was actually there. The mind is a terrible thing to waste!

   
   
7. on January 5, 2010 at 6:58 am Meanie

   @JJ – I (for one) loved Somewhere in Time. So sad. The hotel is on Mackinac Island in Michigan. If only I had clearer memories of my 20′s, perhaps I could transport myself back to a time when I was 40 pounds lighter!

   
   
8. on January 5, 2010 at 9:06 am JJ

   Yeah, the problem with Meanie’s trip would be actually getting into the smaller clothes from the past in this present, long enough to set up the conditions for it to work! ;-)

   
   
9. on January 5, 2010 at 9:11 am JJ

   Seriously though, before religion got so Palin-pentecostal literalistic, I always thought heaven and hell were mind trips, in which we create the reality here and now, by how we think and what we choose to focus on, what we surround ourselves with or exclude from our environment and experiences. Very Power of Story.

   So in a literary and also even a literalistic sense, these stories are human truth on every level that matters, both science and philosophy.

   
   
10. on January 5, 2010 at 9:15 am JJ

    When I was a teen back in the swinging sixties, I bought this paperback book from Cosmopolitan magazine in my sleepy southern town. Devoured it as great truth! One of the things that particularly stuck with me all these years was about how the same person would literally become different depending on whether she interns in a fashion house, goes to work for a newspaper, chooses a certain kind of college or starts a family early, etc. . .

    
    
11. on January 5, 2010 at 9:24 am JJ

    Serendipitously, I just saw this FB note from someone I don’t know, linked by homeschooler emeritas Valerie Moon:

    It is a given that almost every time I see X, we will talk about her nutty family.
    Most people have several abiding themes in their lives that preoccupy them, whether they are aware of this or not. As a result, they incessantly return to them in different guises and conversations. Someone I know is always agitated about the difficulty of everyday life. Nothing seems to fit right for them; nothing really functions the way it should. Another friend obsesses about the ongoing challenge of finding the right life partner.Yet another talks about real estate and where is the best place to buy property.

    I am convinced that if I were to say to any of these friends ‘do you know we have talked about this subject from different angles a zillion times over the years?’ they would be flabbergasted. An interesting experiment is to step outside yourself and ask what are my ongoing themes? What rattles endlessly around in my mind and heart like a marble(s) in a clothes dryer?

    
    
12. on January 5, 2010 at 10:30 am Lynn

    Maybe because “culture war” stuff has been an ongoing theme rattling around endlessly in my head, I read your last comments, JJ, and immediately thought “worldview.” When you’re immersed in a way of looking at the world, every idea and circumstance can be tied directly to that theme. – lol :)

    As a Christian, I was taught that you must always be very mindful about the power of “internships.” One must always be dilligent about censoring and steering clear of contradictory influences. When you’re experiencing doubts, listen to praise music, call a small group member, read a (“Bible-based”) inspirational book. Don’t even entertain contrary views, except to refute them.

    Of course, you must also protect your children’s worldview,… by homeschooling them :) We’ve heard this verse a million times, right?

    And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. – Deuteronomy 6:6-7

    Of course, to be fair, secular hs’ers and unschoolers protect their worldviews and “themes,” too. They’re just probably less willing to see them that way. Maybe. I don’t know…

    And, there you have it. The marbles rattling around in my washing machine.

    Such interesting ideas, as always, JJ. Thanks. :)

    
    
13. on January 5, 2010 at 11:17 am JJ

    Exactly! :)
    Religion isn’t anything if it isn’t a worldview, though not all worldviews are religion. I think a good working definition of worldview would be something like “how I perceive and process and alter reality to fit through my own looking glass and reflect me” –

    
    
14. on January 5, 2010 at 11:20 am JJ

    Anorexia nervosa, clinical depression and schizophrenia would be worldviews though, hmmm . . . but maybe that’s not so far off? I mean, they ARE reality for the person seeing the world through that reflection of themselves . . .

    
    
15. on January 5, 2010 at 11:21 am JJ

    And old age. And youth. Motherhood. And so on –

    
    
16. on January 5, 2010 at 11:26 am JJ

    IN short, maybe a human life is in its whole a form of stem cell, capable of becoming anything at all depending on the need presented to grow and develop a certain way? And it can be altered throughout life. I would think that’s the true miracle, rather than the opposite view of a life as fixed and immutable and imposed by supernatural rule from the moment of conception.

    
    
17. on January 5, 2010 at 11:27 am JJ

    Lynn, thanks for encouraging me to take over your comments now and then! :D

    
    
18. on January 5, 2010 at 12:24 pm Lynn

    Any time. I always enjoy hearing your thoughts. :)