Speak like Churchill and Stand like Lincoln by James C. Humes
21 powerful secrets of History’s greatest speakers.
Every time you open your mouth your capability as a leader is judged.
1. Power pause
I stand in pause where I shall first begin - William Shakespeare.
Try
staging the strategic delay the next time you deliver a sales pitch or
answer a query put to you during a conversation. Napoleon knew the keys
to charisma and the power pause method was his key to magnifying his
message. Before you answer, take time to look directly into the eyes of
your questioner and hold his or her gaze a beat.
Stand Stare and command your audience
Before
you speak, try to lock your eyes on each of your soon-to-be listeners.
Force yourself before you begin your presentation to say in your own
mind each word of your opening sentence. Every word you wait will
strengthen the impact of your opening words. Stand, stare and command
your audience and they will bend your ears to listen.
2. Power opener.
The
prime time of any talk or presentation you give is during your opening
words. Everyone in the audience is waiting to see what you look and
sound like. Do not waste that psychological edge with trite blather. Go
for the power opener. Begin with a bang. Prepare it, polish it and
practice it.A power opener is an attention grabber and an audience
awakener.
3. Power presence - “Clothes, which as it seems, makes thee” - William Shakespeare.
Clothes
make a statement. The selection of garment should not be causal or by
chance. Adapt a style that suits you and that people will identify with
you.
Style
for men: Shoe - dark brown or black cordovan. Two piece rather than
three piece suit in gray or navy blue is appropriate. ‘The most
underused and understates piece os clothing: the classic white shirt”.
Straight collar with buttoned cuffs is hard to beat. A blue button-down
Oxford is always appropriate
4. Power point - “Speak plain and to the purpose” - William Shakespeare
What
is it you want the audience to do when the speech is over? what is the
bottom line - in one sentence. Plan your speech like a Symphony.
5 Power Brief.
Less
is more in an adage that has been identified with architecture and
fashion. Terse is better than tedious. Shorter is sweeter. Short is
sharper and brief is better.
Tell a story, not a speech.
The exceptional is often the unexpected -
6 . Power quote.
First rule with quotes. Be comfortable with the quote;
Second rule: prominent and pithy (the name should be recognizable and the quotation brief)
Good
communication spells the difference between a leader and a manager.
Speech is theater - so dig up one apt quotation and frame it with props.
Dramatize and emphasize your quote to make it a power quote.
Produce
present perform your quote.Before your next talk, look over your file
and pick the most apt quotation for your talk or presentation, one that
will support your data and reinforce your facts.
7. Power Stat - “A statistic should tell a story” - Margaret Thatcher.
Some
statistics are cited precisely and up front to obtain immediate
credibility; otherwise are frames more roundly to be remembered by the
audience. Too many numbers numb an audience. Pick the strongest and the
finest data (statistics). round your statistics (such a way that it is
easy to understand or correlate (Sweden is five times bigger than Connecticut than saying Sweden is 150 K sq. miles)
Relay your statistics to your listeners and compare to the familiar.
Audience remember odd number than even numbers.
Figures lie and liars figure
8. Power outage. “Too many slides make audience sleepy” = Richard Nixon.
Slides are no substitute for speaking.
A prop, not a crutch. If you aim to be a leader, let your slides be a prop , not a crutch.
Reinforcement rather than replacement. Visual aids should be used to reinforce, not replace the speech.
Keep slides simple.Don’t let your slides become your security blanket.
Slides: an appetizer, not the mean
9.
Power wit. Don’t tack on jokes. The difference between a joke and a
humor is the difference between a pornography picture and a love scene
in a good move. Aristotle once wrote. “The essence of humor is
surprise”. As Shakespeare observed, “It makes a speech amble easily”.
Humor is a change of pace that refreshes.
Great speakers often use humor to lighten the mood of their audience.
The three Rs of humor. - Make it realistic, make it relevant and don't read it
Make
stories realistic and relevant Leaders don’t begin speeches with stale
old jokes; but they do spice up their talks with humorous anecdotes.
Adopt and Anecdote: The secret to presenting speech humor is to weave it in as part of your own experience.
Humor and poetic license:
Illustrating with a Parable: Benjamin Franklin also stressed the importance of investment with a story.
10. Power Parable.
Parables provide picture of abstractions
Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream
Turn concepts into concrete
Arsenal of anecdotes
Storehouse of stories
When
you share a bit of yourself with others, you win their trust and
affection and they will more readily buy into what you are promoting.
11. Power gesture.-
A
master of body language and bonding through body language. Leadership
sometimes demands more than verbiage. It requires visible acts. Ghose
and use a power gesture.
12. Power Reading.
Memorize then conventionalize
Don’t speak while looking down
See-Stop
- say technique: Pause are what make a speech sound conversational.
When you pause, you sound sincere, as if you are trying to come up with
the right words to express your thoughts.
13. Power poetry.
Churchill would argue that an article should be written for the eye and speech for the ear.
Transform a speech into poetry. If speech is prose, the phrase-by-phrase technique can transform it into poetry.
Make
your layout luminous - for any talk, little or long, take your types
speech and space it out in bite-size phrases. Following are some of the
rules that help to do so:
When you come to a comma, cut the line off
If your subject is followed by its predicate, don’t separate them
When a preposition is succeed by its object, don’t dissect the two
Never end a line with a or the
When you see a period, make sure to call a halt.
Churchill
believed that in remarks directed to the ear, a semicolon was verboten,
whereas a dash fit the rhythm of a speech of talk.
Let
the layout leap out at you. The layout lets the key words and phrases
leap out at you. You don’t have to be glued to the text. Secret of
changing the old typed article layout into a format approaching that of
verse. Students tell me that this way of laying out a talk into phrases
is the most useful advice they have taken away from my class. Change
your format to Churchill’s. Lay out your lines like a leader and you
will sound like one.
14. Power line.
There
Is a secret to coining a power line. And I doubt it will surprise you
that Churchill reportedly came up with a formula that’s easily
remembered by its acronym: C-R-E-A-M
(Contrast-Rhyme-Echo-Alliteration-Metaphor)
Contrast:
Opposites attract (only answer to defeat is victory)
Rhyme:
Versifier
as well as speechwriters often turn to the Rhyming Nine - AME, AIR,
ITE, AKE, OW, AY, ATE, EEM, AIN - for coining zinger lines.
AME - aim, blame, claim, fame, name, shame, same, game, reclaim, proclaim, flame
AIR - bear, care, dare, fare, fair, share, aware, swear, pare, declare, where, scare, prayer, beware
ITE - bite, cite, fight, fright, height, light, night, right, quite, sight, write, delight, foresight, ignite, tonight
AKE - ache, break, fake, sake, shake, stake, take, make, awake, undertake, mistake
OW - dough, flow, foe, glow, go, grow, know, low, show, slow, throw, ago
AY - day, pray, stay, say, way, pay, play, away, stray, they, array, display
ATE - ate, date, fate, great, late, state, slate, straight, wait, weight, abate, donate
EEM - beam, cream, dream, gleam, steam, scheme, seem, stream, team, theme, esteem, redeem
AIN - gain, pain, reign, stain, strain, wane, vein, attain, retain, regain, explain, remain, sustain,
The echo effect :
Echo is repetition of a word or a phrase. (only thing we have to fear is fear itself).
1. repeat the word in the second phrase that you used in the first.
2. Repeat the noun
3. Repeat the verb
Alliterate and activate:
Consonants
are better for alliteration than vowels and the best of the consonant
is P. Churchill once framed his secret of speaking in a series of P.
Vary the pose and vary the pitch and don’t forget the pause.
Metaphor (Analogies)
Aristotle once wrote: ‘the highest line of the poet is sometimes the hardest to image.
15 Power question
The question as a quip.
Know
the answer - in cross-examination of witness, an iron-clad rule is to
never ask a question if you are not sure of the answer.
Using series of questions:
Rhetorical power:
Sometimes
rhetorical questions - those to which no answer is expected - are posed
as a speech device to motivate listeners to get involved.
16. Power word and power phrases
Churchill would introduce compelling or unusual words with a deliberate stuttering pause.
17. Power active
Passive is pale and verbal constructions employing the passive voice too often suggest the passive state of mind
Avoid Whabby words - such as Were, Have/Had, Are/is, Be/Been. These are potential overuse of pause.
Passive is for ‘cover-your-ass types and the active choice is for the take-charge leaders.
The active voice provides force to your speech, whereas the passive voice sounds spineless and deadens your delivery.
18. Power dollar.
We can describe the Franklin formula for fund-raising with these four words that begin with D:
Defiance, Design, Donation and duel.
Defiance is a strong word - it suggests presumptuous, audacious, or even cocky attitude.
Design - paint a picture
Donation - faint hear wins not
Dual: high noon at the OK.Corral.
Don’t think a letter will take the place of a personal visit.
19. Power Button.
power button says to the audience - ready-set-listen to set them up for the power line that follows.
Light up a line like a neon sign
Switch on the ignition with a power button.
One power button per speech.
20. Power closer.”Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending”- H.W. Longfellow.
A strong last impression
Scripture or Shakespeare
For a strong ending, said Churchill, you have to appeal to the emotions - pride, hope, love and occasionally, fear.
Apply their anecdotes and draw from history.
Create a Cathedral (story /history)
Pick proven closer.
Plant a flower
Crisp closer - electric endings
21. Power Audacity.
Surprise the audience - communication is more than just the words you express. it is also the impression you make.
Leader’s don’t always follow the script. They make moves that live in the memories of their listeners.
Stage
your scene - speakers can’t gain podium power by doing the predictable
and prosaic. One can gain a great deal by taking the risk of doing the
unexpected. An unconditional display of courage can send an unusually
strong message.
September 30, 2012
The spark of life by Frances Ashercroft
The spark of life by Frances Ashercroft
Electricity in the Human Body.
[Includes many new information on human body and how things works in human body - esp. poisons work].
Warning : Reader is strongly advised not to try any of the experiments described in the book on themselves or others or on animals. The author and publishers accept no responsibility for any resulting harm if the reader should fail to heed this advice.
There is a fundamental difference between the electricity that powers our bodies and that which lights our cities. The electricity supplied to our homes is carried by electrons. Electrons always flow from a region of negative to positive charge. which means that the current in a wire moves in the opposite direction to that in which the electrons flow. In contrast, almost all currents in the animal kingdom are carried by ions - electrically charged atoms. There are five main ions that carry currents in our bodies. Four are positively charged - sodium, potassium, calcium and hydrogen (protons) and one, chloride is negatively charged. Because they are electrically charged, the movement of ions creates an electric current. In the case of positively charged ions, the current flow is in the same direction as the flow of ions, whereas for negatively charged ions 9as the electrons) it is in the opposite direction.
[An atom can be an ion, but not all ions are atoms. When an atom's outermost orbital gains or loses electrons (also known as valence electrons), the atom forms an ion. Ions are atoms or molecules that have gained or lost one or more of their valence electrons and have a net positive or negative charge - copied from about.com]
Maintaining the ion gradients is expensive; it is extraordinary to think that about a third of the oxygen we breathe and half of the food we eat is used to maintain the ion concentration gradients across our cell membranes. The brain alone uses about 10 percent of the oxygen you breathe to drive the sodium pump and keep your nerve cell batteries charged.
An ion channel is no more than a tiny protein pore. It has a central hole through which the ions move, and one or more gates that can be opened and closed as required to regulate ion movements. When the gate is open, ions such as sodium and potassium swarm through the pore into or out of the cell, at a rate of over a million ions a second. Conversely. when gate is closed, ion flux is prevented. The very largest ion channels are simply giant holes, so big that many ions can go through at a time and both negatively charged ions (anions) and positively charged ions (cations) can permeate as well as quite large molecules. Such channels are not common as it may cause the cell to die. All those ion concentration gradients that the cell setup and protects so carefully would immediately be dissipated if such a channel were to open, causing the cell to die. Some bacterial toxins kill cells in exactly this way. Most channels are choosy about the ions they allow to pass through their pores (potassium channel only permits potassium ions).
The tetrodotoxin contained in the liver and other tissues of this fish is a potent blocker of the sodium channels found in your nerves and skeletal muscles. It causes numbness and tingling of the lips and mouth within as little as 30 minutes after ingestion; gradually paralysis skeletal muscles and ultimately the respiratory muscles are paralyzed which can be fatal. Fugu is considered great delicacy and unfortunately the first is expensive in more ways than one, as unless it is carefully prepared the flesh can be toxic and every year several people die. Properly prepared, the fish is supposed to cause a very mild intoxication and produce a stimulating, tingling sensation in the mouth. A wide variety of animals contain tetrodotoxin, from reef fish, crabs and starfish to marine flatworms, salamanders, frogs and toads.
Like tetrodotoxin, saxitoxin blocks sodium channels and saxitoxin can be found in some mussels, clams and crabs. Both tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin are molecular mimics and both are also valuable research tools because they block sodium channels rather specifically; leaving most other channels untouched. Saxitoxin was exploited by US agents engaged in covet gov. operations both as a suicide and an assassination agent. It has the advantage that is highly poisonous so that only tiny amounts (which can be easily concealed) are needed and it is faster and more effective than cyanide.
Aconite (aconitine) is colloquially called the Queen of Poisons and it comes from monkshood, a pretty plant with a tall spoke of blue helmet-shaped flowers often grown in gardens. Because the toxin is absorbed through the skin, even picking the plant without wearing gloves may cause symptoms.
Another potent sodium channel opener is batrachotoxin, which is secreted from glands on the backs of the vividly marked yellow and black ‘poison dart’ frogs of South and central America. Like aconitine, there is known antidote for batrachotoxin.
Equally fascinating is grayanotoxin, which also locks sodium channels open. It is produced by some species of rhododendron and becomes concentrated in the honey of bees that feed on the flowers’ nectar.
A vast number of toxins that target sodium channels - far more than interact with other types of ion channel. One Reason for this may be that sodium channels are specialized for fast conduction of nerve and muscle impulses. Block then and your prey will be swiftly paralysed and more easily caught.
Botox is the latest tool in the armory of the cosmetic surgeon and is used by film stars and ordinary people alike to smooth out the wrinkles etched on our face by age. But it is actually a virulent poison called botulinum toxin and in my youth it was far more famous for causing fatal food poisoning. Botulinum toxin is one of the most potent natural poisons known. An amount sufficient to cover the head of a pin is more than enough to kill an adult and is estimated as little as gram would kill a million people.Botulinum toxin acts by preventing muscle contraction. When ingested, it gradually relaxes the respiratory muscles until they stop functioning, causing paralysis and death from asphyxiation. In the last decade or two, however, it was realized that if a minute quantity of the toxin is injected under the skin, it will paralyze the muscles in a highly localized way. The virtue of botox is that it blinds so tightly to its target that it is only slowly washed away and the muscles remain relaxed for many months. But every six months of so, the procedure must be repeated. The downside is that the toxin also blocks contraction of the muscles used in facial expressions such as smiling and thus tends to produce a smooth expressionless sphinx-like stare.
A large number of drugs and poisons work by interfering with the action of acetylcholine at its muscle receptor. The most famous is curare -the poison used by South American Indians to tip their arrows and the darts used in their blowpipes. Curare blocks binding of acetylcholine to its receptors in the muscle membrane and so prevent the nerve from stimulating the muscle fiber. Consequently an animal hit by a dart is completely paralyzed and falls out of the tree to the ground., where it is either slaughtered or dies from respiratory failure. Fortunately curare is poorly absorbed by the digestive system, so animals killed in this way are safe to eat. Curare can be extracted from many different S. American plants, but the best known is the climbing pareira vine Chondrodendron tomentosum. Another substance that inhibits the action of acetylcholinesterase is physostigmine, the active ingredient of the Calabar bean.
Why should chemical transmission be preferred over electrical? One answer is that both its slower speed and the intricacies of its mechanism are better suited where integration of a plethora of signals might be advantageous. Another is that it may simply reflect the way in which cell signalling has evolved. Many simple organisms that consists of single cells, such as bacteria, communicate with one another via chemical messengers, enabling them to act as a vast team with coordinated defensive and attack strategies. large-range chemical messengers known as hormones transmit information between cells in our bodies that lie some distance apart from one another. many different hormones circulate constantly throughout our bodies, influencing our mood, maintaining salt and water balance, stimulating cells to grow, readying our bodies to cope with stressful situation.
Why did the shark attack AT&T fiber-optic cable under the sea? It is presumed that the sharks were attracted by the surrounding electric field, as a shark can sense the tiny electric field caused by normal muscle activity in other organisms and so detect its prey even if it is well camouflaged. A human standing still and immersed in seawater up to their nect will produce an electric field of about 0.12 micro-volts per centimeter for about one meter around the body, which is easily large enough to be sensed by a shark.
The electrical signals produced by heart cells give rise to tiny fluctuations in the electrical potential at the surface of the body that can be picked up by surface electrodes attached to the skin. This is the basis of electrocardiogram (ECG). Nitroglycerin acts by releasing a natural gas called nitric oxide which stimulates the production of a chemical called cyclic GMP that causes blood vessels to relax. Viagra works in a similar way: by elevating cyclic GMP levels in the blood vessels of the penis it causes them to dilate, resulting in an erection.
Pleasure, pain, indeed the evolutionary success of any organism, ourselves included, depends on our ability to perceive the world around us; to see, hear, smell, taste and touch it. Our sense organs convert the myriad signals that constantly bombard us in multiple modalities into a single form that the brain can interpret - electrical energy encoded in our nerve impulses. And in all cases ion channels are needed to transduce sensory information into that electrical signal.
Humans have three cone photopigment whereas most mammals such as dog and cats, have only two cone photopigment and so see only a limited range of color:contrary to popular belief, bulls do not see red. Other creatures live in a world entirely without color. Mantis shrimp which enjoys ten or more different visual pigments and even tropical fish possess four or five types of cone.
We can discriminate five basic tastes - sweet, salt, sour, bitter and savory (umami). All the many different flavors we taste, however, are really smelt, for these senses work in combination. This explains why your sense is blocked. The ability to identify the correct flavors is also reduced if the food is the wrong color; raspberry juice doesn't taste quite right if it is colored orange or green. Try it, and see if you agree.
Humans have around 350 distinct types of olfactory receptor proteins, although each olfactory neuron carries only a single kind. But we can detect far more than 350 aromas; most people can distinguish many thousands of substances, often in tiny amounts. It is widely believed that humans have a poor sense of smell. One reason for our supposed poor sense of smell is that walk around with noses high in the air, while scenes are at their strongest close to the ground and quickly dissipated by air currently at higher levels. When you smell a rose, the scent is wafted up to your olfactory epithelium, where the many different chemicals that make up the smell bind to their receptors on different sets of olfactory neurons. These impulses pass along the olfactory nerve to a region of the brain known as the olfactory bulb where they hand their signals on to other nerve cells in deeper regions of the brain. One of the these is the limbic systems, which is involved in emotion, which explains why smells can trigger such powerful emotions and memories.
In 1912, Wilbur Scoville calibrated the strength of chillies. On the Scoville scale, the mild bell pepper notches up less than one heat unit, a jalapeno pepper has 2,500 to 5,000 units and famously incendiary Bhut Jolokia well over a million. Capsaicin receptor is the ion channel that sense the chilli effect. Binding of capsaicin opened the pore and stimulated electrical activity in the sensory nerve. The channel was also opened by noxious heat. So the reason chili peppers taste so hot is that they open the same ion channel as high temperature and because brain cannot tell the difference between the two stimuli it interprets them both as heat.
We are programmed to seek pleasure. Food, sex drink, exercise - all produce feelings of enjoyment that drive us to seek more. But our impulse to do is more than hedonism or sheer sensual delight; it is a way of ensuring that our species survives. Dopamine, one of the most crucial neurotransmitters in the brain, is intimately involved in desire and addiction. Pleasurable experiences such as sex, love, and food trigger the release of dopamine in the brain's reward center, which increases nerve cell electrical activity, reinforcing our sensation of pleasure and coercing us to have yet another chocolate or glass of wine - too much in some cases. many drugs of addiction act by increasing the concentration of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, thereby producing feelings of euphoria.
Happiness and despair are the two faces of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin is produced by neurons of the raphe nucleus, whose process ramify throughout the brain. Elevated levels of serotonin are associated with feelings of optimism, contentment and serenity. Too little brings despair, depression, anxiety, apathy, and feelings of inadequacy. One way of increasing your serotonin levels by vigorous exercise, which is why brisk walk or a game of squash helps relieve the blues. Modern antidepressants such as Prozac also act by elevating serotonin concentrations.LSD is one of the most powerful hallucinogens known. It has extraordinary effects on auditory and visual perception, producing a sparkling world in which color, brightness and sounds are intensified, objects morph into strange shapes and wall may breathe.
It is impossible to tell, but what i do know is that understanding how the body uses electricity and how memories are laid down, stored and retrieved by the electrical circuits in our brain will be the key to future success in human life.
Electricity in the Human Body.
[Includes many new information on human body and how things works in human body - esp. poisons work].
Warning : Reader is strongly advised not to try any of the experiments described in the book on themselves or others or on animals. The author and publishers accept no responsibility for any resulting harm if the reader should fail to heed this advice.
There is a fundamental difference between the electricity that powers our bodies and that which lights our cities. The electricity supplied to our homes is carried by electrons. Electrons always flow from a region of negative to positive charge. which means that the current in a wire moves in the opposite direction to that in which the electrons flow. In contrast, almost all currents in the animal kingdom are carried by ions - electrically charged atoms. There are five main ions that carry currents in our bodies. Four are positively charged - sodium, potassium, calcium and hydrogen (protons) and one, chloride is negatively charged. Because they are electrically charged, the movement of ions creates an electric current. In the case of positively charged ions, the current flow is in the same direction as the flow of ions, whereas for negatively charged ions 9as the electrons) it is in the opposite direction.
[An atom can be an ion, but not all ions are atoms. When an atom's outermost orbital gains or loses electrons (also known as valence electrons), the atom forms an ion. Ions are atoms or molecules that have gained or lost one or more of their valence electrons and have a net positive or negative charge - copied from about.com]
Maintaining the ion gradients is expensive; it is extraordinary to think that about a third of the oxygen we breathe and half of the food we eat is used to maintain the ion concentration gradients across our cell membranes. The brain alone uses about 10 percent of the oxygen you breathe to drive the sodium pump and keep your nerve cell batteries charged.
An ion channel is no more than a tiny protein pore. It has a central hole through which the ions move, and one or more gates that can be opened and closed as required to regulate ion movements. When the gate is open, ions such as sodium and potassium swarm through the pore into or out of the cell, at a rate of over a million ions a second. Conversely. when gate is closed, ion flux is prevented. The very largest ion channels are simply giant holes, so big that many ions can go through at a time and both negatively charged ions (anions) and positively charged ions (cations) can permeate as well as quite large molecules. Such channels are not common as it may cause the cell to die. All those ion concentration gradients that the cell setup and protects so carefully would immediately be dissipated if such a channel were to open, causing the cell to die. Some bacterial toxins kill cells in exactly this way. Most channels are choosy about the ions they allow to pass through their pores (potassium channel only permits potassium ions).
The tetrodotoxin contained in the liver and other tissues of this fish is a potent blocker of the sodium channels found in your nerves and skeletal muscles. It causes numbness and tingling of the lips and mouth within as little as 30 minutes after ingestion; gradually paralysis skeletal muscles and ultimately the respiratory muscles are paralyzed which can be fatal. Fugu is considered great delicacy and unfortunately the first is expensive in more ways than one, as unless it is carefully prepared the flesh can be toxic and every year several people die. Properly prepared, the fish is supposed to cause a very mild intoxication and produce a stimulating, tingling sensation in the mouth. A wide variety of animals contain tetrodotoxin, from reef fish, crabs and starfish to marine flatworms, salamanders, frogs and toads.
Like tetrodotoxin, saxitoxin blocks sodium channels and saxitoxin can be found in some mussels, clams and crabs. Both tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin are molecular mimics and both are also valuable research tools because they block sodium channels rather specifically; leaving most other channels untouched. Saxitoxin was exploited by US agents engaged in covet gov. operations both as a suicide and an assassination agent. It has the advantage that is highly poisonous so that only tiny amounts (which can be easily concealed) are needed and it is faster and more effective than cyanide.
Aconite (aconitine) is colloquially called the Queen of Poisons and it comes from monkshood, a pretty plant with a tall spoke of blue helmet-shaped flowers often grown in gardens. Because the toxin is absorbed through the skin, even picking the plant without wearing gloves may cause symptoms.
Another potent sodium channel opener is batrachotoxin, which is secreted from glands on the backs of the vividly marked yellow and black ‘poison dart’ frogs of South and central America. Like aconitine, there is known antidote for batrachotoxin.
Equally fascinating is grayanotoxin, which also locks sodium channels open. It is produced by some species of rhododendron and becomes concentrated in the honey of bees that feed on the flowers’ nectar.
A vast number of toxins that target sodium channels - far more than interact with other types of ion channel. One Reason for this may be that sodium channels are specialized for fast conduction of nerve and muscle impulses. Block then and your prey will be swiftly paralysed and more easily caught.
Botox is the latest tool in the armory of the cosmetic surgeon and is used by film stars and ordinary people alike to smooth out the wrinkles etched on our face by age. But it is actually a virulent poison called botulinum toxin and in my youth it was far more famous for causing fatal food poisoning. Botulinum toxin is one of the most potent natural poisons known. An amount sufficient to cover the head of a pin is more than enough to kill an adult and is estimated as little as gram would kill a million people.Botulinum toxin acts by preventing muscle contraction. When ingested, it gradually relaxes the respiratory muscles until they stop functioning, causing paralysis and death from asphyxiation. In the last decade or two, however, it was realized that if a minute quantity of the toxin is injected under the skin, it will paralyze the muscles in a highly localized way. The virtue of botox is that it blinds so tightly to its target that it is only slowly washed away and the muscles remain relaxed for many months. But every six months of so, the procedure must be repeated. The downside is that the toxin also blocks contraction of the muscles used in facial expressions such as smiling and thus tends to produce a smooth expressionless sphinx-like stare.
A large number of drugs and poisons work by interfering with the action of acetylcholine at its muscle receptor. The most famous is curare -the poison used by South American Indians to tip their arrows and the darts used in their blowpipes. Curare blocks binding of acetylcholine to its receptors in the muscle membrane and so prevent the nerve from stimulating the muscle fiber. Consequently an animal hit by a dart is completely paralyzed and falls out of the tree to the ground., where it is either slaughtered or dies from respiratory failure. Fortunately curare is poorly absorbed by the digestive system, so animals killed in this way are safe to eat. Curare can be extracted from many different S. American plants, but the best known is the climbing pareira vine Chondrodendron tomentosum. Another substance that inhibits the action of acetylcholinesterase is physostigmine, the active ingredient of the Calabar bean.
Why should chemical transmission be preferred over electrical? One answer is that both its slower speed and the intricacies of its mechanism are better suited where integration of a plethora of signals might be advantageous. Another is that it may simply reflect the way in which cell signalling has evolved. Many simple organisms that consists of single cells, such as bacteria, communicate with one another via chemical messengers, enabling them to act as a vast team with coordinated defensive and attack strategies. large-range chemical messengers known as hormones transmit information between cells in our bodies that lie some distance apart from one another. many different hormones circulate constantly throughout our bodies, influencing our mood, maintaining salt and water balance, stimulating cells to grow, readying our bodies to cope with stressful situation.
Why did the shark attack AT&T fiber-optic cable under the sea? It is presumed that the sharks were attracted by the surrounding electric field, as a shark can sense the tiny electric field caused by normal muscle activity in other organisms and so detect its prey even if it is well camouflaged. A human standing still and immersed in seawater up to their nect will produce an electric field of about 0.12 micro-volts per centimeter for about one meter around the body, which is easily large enough to be sensed by a shark.
The electrical signals produced by heart cells give rise to tiny fluctuations in the electrical potential at the surface of the body that can be picked up by surface electrodes attached to the skin. This is the basis of electrocardiogram (ECG). Nitroglycerin acts by releasing a natural gas called nitric oxide which stimulates the production of a chemical called cyclic GMP that causes blood vessels to relax. Viagra works in a similar way: by elevating cyclic GMP levels in the blood vessels of the penis it causes them to dilate, resulting in an erection.
Pleasure, pain, indeed the evolutionary success of any organism, ourselves included, depends on our ability to perceive the world around us; to see, hear, smell, taste and touch it. Our sense organs convert the myriad signals that constantly bombard us in multiple modalities into a single form that the brain can interpret - electrical energy encoded in our nerve impulses. And in all cases ion channels are needed to transduce sensory information into that electrical signal.
Humans have three cone photopigment whereas most mammals such as dog and cats, have only two cone photopigment and so see only a limited range of color:contrary to popular belief, bulls do not see red. Other creatures live in a world entirely without color. Mantis shrimp which enjoys ten or more different visual pigments and even tropical fish possess four or five types of cone.
We can discriminate five basic tastes - sweet, salt, sour, bitter and savory (umami). All the many different flavors we taste, however, are really smelt, for these senses work in combination. This explains why your sense is blocked. The ability to identify the correct flavors is also reduced if the food is the wrong color; raspberry juice doesn't taste quite right if it is colored orange or green. Try it, and see if you agree.
Humans have around 350 distinct types of olfactory receptor proteins, although each olfactory neuron carries only a single kind. But we can detect far more than 350 aromas; most people can distinguish many thousands of substances, often in tiny amounts. It is widely believed that humans have a poor sense of smell. One reason for our supposed poor sense of smell is that walk around with noses high in the air, while scenes are at their strongest close to the ground and quickly dissipated by air currently at higher levels. When you smell a rose, the scent is wafted up to your olfactory epithelium, where the many different chemicals that make up the smell bind to their receptors on different sets of olfactory neurons. These impulses pass along the olfactory nerve to a region of the brain known as the olfactory bulb where they hand their signals on to other nerve cells in deeper regions of the brain. One of the these is the limbic systems, which is involved in emotion, which explains why smells can trigger such powerful emotions and memories.
In 1912, Wilbur Scoville calibrated the strength of chillies. On the Scoville scale, the mild bell pepper notches up less than one heat unit, a jalapeno pepper has 2,500 to 5,000 units and famously incendiary Bhut Jolokia well over a million. Capsaicin receptor is the ion channel that sense the chilli effect. Binding of capsaicin opened the pore and stimulated electrical activity in the sensory nerve. The channel was also opened by noxious heat. So the reason chili peppers taste so hot is that they open the same ion channel as high temperature and because brain cannot tell the difference between the two stimuli it interprets them both as heat.
We are programmed to seek pleasure. Food, sex drink, exercise - all produce feelings of enjoyment that drive us to seek more. But our impulse to do is more than hedonism or sheer sensual delight; it is a way of ensuring that our species survives. Dopamine, one of the most crucial neurotransmitters in the brain, is intimately involved in desire and addiction. Pleasurable experiences such as sex, love, and food trigger the release of dopamine in the brain's reward center, which increases nerve cell electrical activity, reinforcing our sensation of pleasure and coercing us to have yet another chocolate or glass of wine - too much in some cases. many drugs of addiction act by increasing the concentration of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, thereby producing feelings of euphoria.
Happiness and despair are the two faces of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin is produced by neurons of the raphe nucleus, whose process ramify throughout the brain. Elevated levels of serotonin are associated with feelings of optimism, contentment and serenity. Too little brings despair, depression, anxiety, apathy, and feelings of inadequacy. One way of increasing your serotonin levels by vigorous exercise, which is why brisk walk or a game of squash helps relieve the blues. Modern antidepressants such as Prozac also act by elevating serotonin concentrations.LSD is one of the most powerful hallucinogens known. It has extraordinary effects on auditory and visual perception, producing a sparkling world in which color, brightness and sounds are intensified, objects morph into strange shapes and wall may breathe.
It is impossible to tell, but what i do know is that understanding how the body uses electricity and how memories are laid down, stored and retrieved by the electrical circuits in our brain will be the key to future success in human life.
September 23, 2012
What money can’t buy by Michael J Sandel
What money can’t buy by Michael J Sandel
The moral limits of markets
[More on ethical discussion and narrates markets where moral seldom exists]
Economists often assume that market are inert, that they don’t affect the goods they exchange. But that is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out non market values worth caring about. When we decide certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings (Slavery, child trafficking).
As a result, without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having market economy to being a market society. The difference is: A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity and a market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s the place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
Now, we have short-cuts of every queue by paying more for the privileges. First class passengers do have fast track option, amusement parks, Empire state buildings et al, people can shorten queue time by paying surcharges.
If you ride the Paris Metro without paying $2 fare, you can be fined up to $60. Recently a group of habitual fare dodgers came up with a clever way of converting fine into fee and a modest one at that. They informed an insurance fund that will pay their fine, if they get caught. Each member pay in about $8.50 per month a month to the fund, far less than the $74 it costs to buy a legitimate monthly pass.
In the 1990, South African government began to consider using market incentives to protect endangered species. If private ranchers were allowed to sell hunters the right to shoot and kill a limited numbers of black rhinos, the ranchers would have an incentive to breed them, care for them and fend off poachers. The first legal hunt in decades commanded a handsome $150,000 paid by an American hunter in the financial industry. Subsequent customers included Russian petroleum billionaire who paid to kill three black rhinos. Landowners in S. Africa now have a monetary incentive to devote large ranchers to wildlife, the black rhino population has begun to rebound. (Black Rhinos are notoriously dangerous and difficult animals to kill and the chance to hunt one is highly prized among trophy hunters).
Today, rich trophy hunters from around the world make their way to Artic for the chance to shoot a walrus. They pay $6500 for the privilege. So why shoot walrus? Apparently the goal of killing one specimen of every creature on lists provided by hunting clubs - the African Big Five (leopard, lion, elephant, rhino, and Cap buffalo) or the Arctic Grand-Slam (caribou, musk, ox, polar bear, and walrus).
As per Paul Samuelson, he identified economics with its traditional subject matter:”the world of prices, wages, interest rates, stocks and bonds and credit, taxes and expenditure’. The task of economics was concrete and circumscribed: to explain depression, unemployment and inflation can be avoided, to the study the principles ‘that tell us how productivity can be kept high” and “how people’s standards of living can be improved”.
There are certain things money cannot buy - friendship, Sport’s MVP titles, Olympics medals, Nobel prizes, etc.
(theperfecttoast.com is one of the leading websites offering ghostwritten wedding speeches).
The viatical business - life insurance settlement - is another example there is a conflict of interest. Insurance company wants the person to live long & pay monthly fees as long as the insured person lives; however the one (person or bank or hedge fund) who bought viatical insurance wants to have the insured person to die fast. If the insurance industry has the right to lobby for its interest in prolonging life (through mandatory seat belt laws of antismoking policies), should n’t the viatical industry have the right to lobby for its interest in hastening death (through reduced federal funding for AIDS or cancer research?).
A closer analogy to viatical is death pools, a macabre gambling game that became popular on the internet in the 1990s about the same time the viatical industry took off. Death pools are the cyberspace equivalent of traditional office pools on who will in the Super-Bowl, except that instead of picking the winner of a football game, players compete to predict which celebrities will die in a given year.There are many such sites and one of the most popular is stiffs.com which help its first fame in 1993 and went online in 1996. For a $15 entry fee, contestants submit a list of celebrities they think are likely to die by year’s end. Whoever makes the most correct calls wins the jackpot of $3,000.
By the mid-2000s, the secondary market in life insurance had become big business. Hedge funds and financial institutions were spending billions buying the life insurance polices of wealthy seniors. As the demand for such policies increased, some brokers began paying elderly people who held no insurance to take out large polices on their lives and then flip the policies to speculators for resale. These policies were called speculator-initiated or spin-life policies. In Minnesota, an 84 old man bought $120 million worth of life insurance from seven different companies and then sold the policies to speculators at a handsome profit. The insurance companies cried foul, complaining that the purely speculative use of life insurance was at odds with its fundamental purpose of protecting families from financial ruin, and that spin-life policies would drive up the cost of life insurance for legitimate customers.
One unhappy spin-life client was TV talk show Larry king who had bought and immediately sold two polices on his life with a total face value of $15 million. King complained that he could not find out who now held a financial interest in his death. By 2009, most states had enacted laws banning spin-life or stranger-originated-life-insurance (STOLI) as it came to be called,. But they permitted brokers to continue trading in life insurance policies from ill or elderly people who had bought them on their own, unprompted by speculators.
Sometimes we decide to live with a morally corrosive market practice for the sake of the social good it provides.
The moral limits of markets
[More on ethical discussion and narrates markets where moral seldom exists]
Economists often assume that market are inert, that they don’t affect the goods they exchange. But that is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out non market values worth caring about. When we decide certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings (Slavery, child trafficking).
As a result, without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having market economy to being a market society. The difference is: A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity and a market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s the place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
Now, we have short-cuts of every queue by paying more for the privileges. First class passengers do have fast track option, amusement parks, Empire state buildings et al, people can shorten queue time by paying surcharges.
If you ride the Paris Metro without paying $2 fare, you can be fined up to $60. Recently a group of habitual fare dodgers came up with a clever way of converting fine into fee and a modest one at that. They informed an insurance fund that will pay their fine, if they get caught. Each member pay in about $8.50 per month a month to the fund, far less than the $74 it costs to buy a legitimate monthly pass.
In the 1990, South African government began to consider using market incentives to protect endangered species. If private ranchers were allowed to sell hunters the right to shoot and kill a limited numbers of black rhinos, the ranchers would have an incentive to breed them, care for them and fend off poachers. The first legal hunt in decades commanded a handsome $150,000 paid by an American hunter in the financial industry. Subsequent customers included Russian petroleum billionaire who paid to kill three black rhinos. Landowners in S. Africa now have a monetary incentive to devote large ranchers to wildlife, the black rhino population has begun to rebound. (Black Rhinos are notoriously dangerous and difficult animals to kill and the chance to hunt one is highly prized among trophy hunters).
Today, rich trophy hunters from around the world make their way to Artic for the chance to shoot a walrus. They pay $6500 for the privilege. So why shoot walrus? Apparently the goal of killing one specimen of every creature on lists provided by hunting clubs - the African Big Five (leopard, lion, elephant, rhino, and Cap buffalo) or the Arctic Grand-Slam (caribou, musk, ox, polar bear, and walrus).
As per Paul Samuelson, he identified economics with its traditional subject matter:”the world of prices, wages, interest rates, stocks and bonds and credit, taxes and expenditure’. The task of economics was concrete and circumscribed: to explain depression, unemployment and inflation can be avoided, to the study the principles ‘that tell us how productivity can be kept high” and “how people’s standards of living can be improved”.
There are certain things money cannot buy - friendship, Sport’s MVP titles, Olympics medals, Nobel prizes, etc.
(theperfecttoast.com is one of the leading websites offering ghostwritten wedding speeches).
The viatical business - life insurance settlement - is another example there is a conflict of interest. Insurance company wants the person to live long & pay monthly fees as long as the insured person lives; however the one (person or bank or hedge fund) who bought viatical insurance wants to have the insured person to die fast. If the insurance industry has the right to lobby for its interest in prolonging life (through mandatory seat belt laws of antismoking policies), should n’t the viatical industry have the right to lobby for its interest in hastening death (through reduced federal funding for AIDS or cancer research?).
A closer analogy to viatical is death pools, a macabre gambling game that became popular on the internet in the 1990s about the same time the viatical industry took off. Death pools are the cyberspace equivalent of traditional office pools on who will in the Super-Bowl, except that instead of picking the winner of a football game, players compete to predict which celebrities will die in a given year.There are many such sites and one of the most popular is stiffs.com which help its first fame in 1993 and went online in 1996. For a $15 entry fee, contestants submit a list of celebrities they think are likely to die by year’s end. Whoever makes the most correct calls wins the jackpot of $3,000.
By the mid-2000s, the secondary market in life insurance had become big business. Hedge funds and financial institutions were spending billions buying the life insurance polices of wealthy seniors. As the demand for such policies increased, some brokers began paying elderly people who held no insurance to take out large polices on their lives and then flip the policies to speculators for resale. These policies were called speculator-initiated or spin-life policies. In Minnesota, an 84 old man bought $120 million worth of life insurance from seven different companies and then sold the policies to speculators at a handsome profit. The insurance companies cried foul, complaining that the purely speculative use of life insurance was at odds with its fundamental purpose of protecting families from financial ruin, and that spin-life policies would drive up the cost of life insurance for legitimate customers.
One unhappy spin-life client was TV talk show Larry king who had bought and immediately sold two polices on his life with a total face value of $15 million. King complained that he could not find out who now held a financial interest in his death. By 2009, most states had enacted laws banning spin-life or stranger-originated-life-insurance (STOLI) as it came to be called,. But they permitted brokers to continue trading in life insurance policies from ill or elderly people who had bought them on their own, unprompted by speculators.
Sometimes we decide to live with a morally corrosive market practice for the sake of the social good it provides.
August 14, 2012
The age of insight by Eric R Kandel
The age of insight by Eric R Kandel
The quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind and brain
(Eric a Nobel prize winner of 2000 did a research on art & aesthetics and book covers it. The first part of the book mainly on five famous people who lived Vienna).
Freud’s theorizing,Schnitzler’s writings and the painting of Klimt. Schiele and Kokoschka had a common insight into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1918, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna to become the center of modernist thought and culture. We still live in that culture today.
Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. The enlightenment or age of reason was characterized by the idea that all is well with the world because human action is governed by reason. It is through reason that we achieve enlightenment, because our mind can exert control over our emotions and feelings.
Ernst Gombrich says on art: “Art is an institution to which we turn when we want to feel a shock of surprise. We feel this want because we sense that it is good for us once in a while to receive a healthy jolt. Otherwise we would so easily get stuck in a rut and could not longer adapt to the new demands that life is apt to make on us. The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected”.
In Vienna, modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. Unconscious conflicts are present in everyone in their everyday actions. The second characteristic of Modernism was self-examination. The third characteristic of Modernism in Vienna was the attempt to integrate and unify knowledge, an attempt driven by science and inspired by Darwin’s insistence that human beings must be understood biologically in the same way as other animals.
Freud's three key ideas have held up well and are now central to modern neural science. The first idea is that most of our mental life, including most of our emotional life, is unconscious at any moment, including a small component is conscious. The second major idea is that the instincts for aggressive and for sexual strivings, like the instincts to eat and drink are built into the human psyche, into our genome. The third idea is that the normal mental life and mental illness form a continuum and that mental illness often represents exaggerated forms of normal mental process.
What are emotions? Why do we need them? Emotions are instinctive biological mechanism that color our lives and help us deal with the fundamental tasks of life: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Emotions are dispositions to act in response to someone or something important to us. Emotions arise from the very core of our physical and mental states, and they have four independent, though related purposes. Emotions enrich our mental lives, they facilitate social communication, including the selection of life partner; they influence our capability for rational action; and perhaps most important, emotions help us escape potential danger and approach potential sources of good or pleasure (Animals have two major opposing class of motivators: approach and avoidance).
According to Darwin, there are six universal components that lie along a continuum from approach to avoidance. These six include the two major emotional primitives - happiness (ranging from arousal from ecstasy to serenity) that encourages approach and the other, fear (ranging from terror to apprehension) that encourages avoidance. Between these two extremes lie four sub-types: surprise (ranging from amazement to distraction), disgust (from loathing to boredom), sadness (from grief to pensiveness), and anger (from rage to annoyance). Darwin was careful to indicate that discrete emotions can be blended: awe, for example, is a mixture of fear and surprise; fear and trust give rise to submission; trust and joy produce love.
Darwin’s observation that faces are a primary means of conveying emotion was extended a century later by the American psychologist, Paul Ekman whose detailed study on the subject found much the same six facial expression of emotions that Darwin described. There is now evidence that in addition to these common expressions, specific cultures have added nuances that outsiders must learn to recognize in order to fully understand the emotion being expressed.
In addition to providing dynamic information, faces also provide static information - skin color shows the ethnic group, wrinkles provide age related information, etc. Dynamic information like rapid facial signals with eyebrows and lips provides information about attitude, intent and availability. Thus face broadcasts messages not only about emotion and mood, but also about capability, attractiveness, sex, race and other matters.
When we look at a beautiful work of art, our brain assigns different degrees of meaning to the various shapes, colors and movements we see. This assignment of meaning, or visual aesthetics, illustrates that esthetic pleasure is not an elementary sensation like heat or cold. Instead, it represents a higher order evaluation of sensory information processed along specialized pathways in the brain that estimate the potential for reward from a stimulus in the environment. In art, as in life, there are few more pleasurable sights than a beautiful human face. Attractive faces activate the reward areas in the brain and inspire trust, sexual attraction and sexual partnership. Studies of attractiveness in life and art have led to a number of surprise insights.
What males a face attractive? One characteristic is symmetry which is preferable to asymmetry. Symmetry indicates good genes. During growth, challenges to health and environmental stressors can result in asymmetrical growth pattern in face. The degree of symmetry in a person’s face may therefore indicate how capable that person’s genome of resisting disease and maintaining normal development in the face of challenges. In addition to symmetry, other features are universally considered attractive in a female face: arched eyebrows, large eyes, small nose, full lips, narrow face, and small chin. Attractive masculine features are based on different criteria: sharply angled (other than curved) shoulders, elbows, and knees are associated with both masculinity and aggressiveness. A protruding chin, jaw-line, brow-line and cheeks, along with elongation of the lower face - characteristics caused by increased testosterone production during puberty - are also considered attractive in men. These facial characteristics and the implied excess of testosterone suggest not only hyper sexuality but also the potential for a social behavior, aggression and dominance.
In his book, The Art Instinct, Dennis Dutton says that we care about art because it gives us ‘some of the most profound emotionally moving experience available to human beings” Story telling is pleasurable, he explains, because it extends our experience by giving us opportunities to think hypothetically about the world and its problems. It also a source of information. along with the size of human brain, language and storytelling enables us to model our world uniquely and to communicate those models to others. Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to recreate in our own brains the creative process - cognitive, emotional and empathic- through which the artist produced the work.
Art if an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every human brain - a process that leads to an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen into another person’s mind and that allows us to see the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.
The quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind and brain
(Eric a Nobel prize winner of 2000 did a research on art & aesthetics and book covers it. The first part of the book mainly on five famous people who lived Vienna).
Freud’s theorizing,Schnitzler’s writings and the painting of Klimt. Schiele and Kokoschka had a common insight into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1918, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna to become the center of modernist thought and culture. We still live in that culture today.
Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. The enlightenment or age of reason was characterized by the idea that all is well with the world because human action is governed by reason. It is through reason that we achieve enlightenment, because our mind can exert control over our emotions and feelings.
Ernst Gombrich says on art: “Art is an institution to which we turn when we want to feel a shock of surprise. We feel this want because we sense that it is good for us once in a while to receive a healthy jolt. Otherwise we would so easily get stuck in a rut and could not longer adapt to the new demands that life is apt to make on us. The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected”.
In Vienna, modernism had three main characteristics. The first was the new view of the human mind as being largely irrational by nature. Unconscious conflicts are present in everyone in their everyday actions. The second characteristic of Modernism was self-examination. The third characteristic of Modernism in Vienna was the attempt to integrate and unify knowledge, an attempt driven by science and inspired by Darwin’s insistence that human beings must be understood biologically in the same way as other animals.
Freud's three key ideas have held up well and are now central to modern neural science. The first idea is that most of our mental life, including most of our emotional life, is unconscious at any moment, including a small component is conscious. The second major idea is that the instincts for aggressive and for sexual strivings, like the instincts to eat and drink are built into the human psyche, into our genome. The third idea is that the normal mental life and mental illness form a continuum and that mental illness often represents exaggerated forms of normal mental process.
What are emotions? Why do we need them? Emotions are instinctive biological mechanism that color our lives and help us deal with the fundamental tasks of life: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Emotions are dispositions to act in response to someone or something important to us. Emotions arise from the very core of our physical and mental states, and they have four independent, though related purposes. Emotions enrich our mental lives, they facilitate social communication, including the selection of life partner; they influence our capability for rational action; and perhaps most important, emotions help us escape potential danger and approach potential sources of good or pleasure (Animals have two major opposing class of motivators: approach and avoidance).
According to Darwin, there are six universal components that lie along a continuum from approach to avoidance. These six include the two major emotional primitives - happiness (ranging from arousal from ecstasy to serenity) that encourages approach and the other, fear (ranging from terror to apprehension) that encourages avoidance. Between these two extremes lie four sub-types: surprise (ranging from amazement to distraction), disgust (from loathing to boredom), sadness (from grief to pensiveness), and anger (from rage to annoyance). Darwin was careful to indicate that discrete emotions can be blended: awe, for example, is a mixture of fear and surprise; fear and trust give rise to submission; trust and joy produce love.
Darwin’s observation that faces are a primary means of conveying emotion was extended a century later by the American psychologist, Paul Ekman whose detailed study on the subject found much the same six facial expression of emotions that Darwin described. There is now evidence that in addition to these common expressions, specific cultures have added nuances that outsiders must learn to recognize in order to fully understand the emotion being expressed.
In addition to providing dynamic information, faces also provide static information - skin color shows the ethnic group, wrinkles provide age related information, etc. Dynamic information like rapid facial signals with eyebrows and lips provides information about attitude, intent and availability. Thus face broadcasts messages not only about emotion and mood, but also about capability, attractiveness, sex, race and other matters.
When we look at a beautiful work of art, our brain assigns different degrees of meaning to the various shapes, colors and movements we see. This assignment of meaning, or visual aesthetics, illustrates that esthetic pleasure is not an elementary sensation like heat or cold. Instead, it represents a higher order evaluation of sensory information processed along specialized pathways in the brain that estimate the potential for reward from a stimulus in the environment. In art, as in life, there are few more pleasurable sights than a beautiful human face. Attractive faces activate the reward areas in the brain and inspire trust, sexual attraction and sexual partnership. Studies of attractiveness in life and art have led to a number of surprise insights.
What males a face attractive? One characteristic is symmetry which is preferable to asymmetry. Symmetry indicates good genes. During growth, challenges to health and environmental stressors can result in asymmetrical growth pattern in face. The degree of symmetry in a person’s face may therefore indicate how capable that person’s genome of resisting disease and maintaining normal development in the face of challenges. In addition to symmetry, other features are universally considered attractive in a female face: arched eyebrows, large eyes, small nose, full lips, narrow face, and small chin. Attractive masculine features are based on different criteria: sharply angled (other than curved) shoulders, elbows, and knees are associated with both masculinity and aggressiveness. A protruding chin, jaw-line, brow-line and cheeks, along with elongation of the lower face - characteristics caused by increased testosterone production during puberty - are also considered attractive in men. These facial characteristics and the implied excess of testosterone suggest not only hyper sexuality but also the potential for a social behavior, aggression and dominance.
In his book, The Art Instinct, Dennis Dutton says that we care about art because it gives us ‘some of the most profound emotionally moving experience available to human beings” Story telling is pleasurable, he explains, because it extends our experience by giving us opportunities to think hypothetically about the world and its problems. It also a source of information. along with the size of human brain, language and storytelling enables us to model our world uniquely and to communicate those models to others. Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to recreate in our own brains the creative process - cognitive, emotional and empathic- through which the artist produced the work.
Art if an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every human brain - a process that leads to an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen into another person’s mind and that allows us to see the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.
Brains pleasure circuits are also activated (in addition to drugs et al) when we enjoy a work of art, when we experience a beautiful sunset, a good meal, or a satisfying sexual experience. In each case, the experience has dimension beyond the bottom-up release of dopamine.
The second bottom-up modulatory system reduces pain and turns up the volume on pleasure, including the joy we take from art, by releasing neurotransmitters known as endorphins. Strenuous exercise stimulates the release of endorphins, producing what athletes call an endorphin high. In fact athletes describe feelings lethargic and depressed when they do not exercise; this is because they are undergoing endorphin withdrawal.
The third modulatory system release oxytocin and vasopressin, neurotransmitters that are important for mating and parental behavior and more generally social behavior, social cognition and our ability to read the mind and intentions of others.
The forth modularity bottom-up releases norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that enhances alertness; high concentration of nor epinephrine, which are produced in reaction to stress, induce fear.
The fifth bottom-up modulating system, the serotonergic system, is perhaps the most ancient. These neurons are important in arousal, vigilance, and mood.
The sixth bottom-up modulating system is the cholinergic system, which releases acetylcholine and regulates the sleep-wake as well as aspects of cognitive performance, learning, attention and memory.
All of the senses serve analogous functions in acquiring knowledge of the world, but vision is by far the most efficient way to acquire new information about people, places, and objects. Moreover there are certain types of knowledge such as the expression of a face or the interaction of a social group that can only be acquired through vision. Since vision is above all an active process, art also encourages an active and creative exploration of the world.
Since art arouses emotion and emotion elicits both cognitive and physiological responses in the observer, art if capable of producing a whole-body response. Vilayanur Ramachandran argues that many forms of art are successful because they involve deliberate overstatement, exaggeration and distortion designed to pique our curiosity and produce a satisfying emotional response in our brains. In order to be effective, however art’s deviations from realistic depiction cannot be arbitrary. They must, succeed in capturing the innate brain mechanisms for emotional release, once again reminding us of the discovery by behavioral psychologists and ethnologists for the exploration of a simple sign stimulus that is capable of releasing a full-blown behavior and whose exaggeration produces an even stronger behavior.
Ramachandran identifies ten additional principles of art, derived in part from Gestalt insights that he thinks are universal: grouping, contrast, isolation, the solving of perceptual problems, symmetry, abhorrence of coincidence, repetition of rhythm orderliness, balance and metaphor.
Artists traditionally focused on the face, hands and erotic zones because of their importance in everyday human interactions. Essential prerequisites for creativity are technical competence and a willingness to work hard, according to Ernst Kris and Nancy Andreason. They divide the remaining aspects of the, creative process into four parts: 1)the types of personalities that are likely to be particularly creative 2) the period of preparation and incubation 3) the initial moments of creativity themselves 4) subsequent working through of the creative idea.
August 11, 2012
The hour between dog and wolf by John Coates
The hour between dog and wolf by John Coates
Risk taking, gut feelings and the biology of boom and bust.
It is enlightening to see our behavior as an elaborate mechanism designed to maintain homeostasis. However, before we go too far down the path of biological reductionism, I have to point out that hormones do not cause our behavior. They act like lobby group, recommending and pressuring us into certain types of activity. One group of hormones has particularly potent efforts on our behavior - steroid hormones. This group includes testosterone, estrogen and cortisol, the main hormone of the stress response. Steroids exert particularly wide spread effects because they have receptors in almost every cell in our body and brain.
McEwen’s research on steroids shows how brain works: the hypothalamus sends a message to a gland instructing it to produce a hormone; the hormone fans out across the body, having its physical effects, but it also returns to the brain, changing the very way we think and behave. Now, that is one potent chemical. Indeed, subsequent research by MceWen and other showed that a steroid hormone, because of its widespread receptors, can alter almost every function of our body (its growth, shape,metabolism, immune function) and of our brain, (its mood and memory and of our behavior).
During moments of risk taking, competition and triumph, of exuberance, there is one steroid in particular that makes its presence felt and guides our actions - testosterone. Testosterone-fueled behavior is life winner effect. Winner effect works this way: two males enter a fight for turf or a contest for a mate and in anticipation of the competition, experience a surge in testosterone, a chemical bracer that increases their blood’s capacity to carry oxygen and in time, their lean-muscle mass. Testosterone also effects the brain, where it increases the animal’s confidence and appetite for risk, After the battle has been decided the winner emerges with even higher levels of testosterone, the loser with lesser levels, The winner, if he proceeds to a next round of competition, does so with already elevated testosterone and this androgenic priming gives him an edge, helping him win yet again. As testosterone level rise, confidence and risk taking segue into overconfidence and reckless behavior.
Cortisol is the main hormone of the stress response, a body wide response to injury or threat, Coristol works in tandem with adrenaline, but while adrenaline is a fast-acting hormone, taking effect in seconds and having a half-life in the blood of only two or three minutes, cortisol kicks in to support us during long siege.
The research I encountered on steroid hormones thus suggested to me the following hypothesis: testosterone, as predicted by the winner effect is likely to rise in a bull market, increase risk talking and exaggerate the rally, morphing it into bubble. Cortisol, on the other hand, is likely to rise in a bear market, make traders dramatically and perhaps irrational risk averse and exaggerate the sell-off, morphing it into a crash. Steroid hormones building up in the bodies of trades and investors may this shift risk preferences systematically across the business cycle, destabilizing it.
We are so completely enthralled by information that one could, without exaggeration, say we are addicted to it. The addiction develops under the influence of another neuromodulator, this one called dopamine. Produced by a group of cells at the top of the brain stem, dopamine targets brain regions controlling reward and movement. When we receive some valuable piece of information, or perform some act that promotes our health and survival such as eating, drinking, having sex or making large amounts of money, dopamine is released along what are called the pleasure pathways f the brain, providing us with a rewarding even euphoric experience. In fact, our brain seems to value the dopamine more than food or drink or sex itself.
Unfortunately dopamine neurons are easily duped, and can be tricked into bestowing their rewards by drugs of abuse. Almost every recreational drug, be it alcohol, cocaine or amphetamines, achieves its additive effects by increasing the action of dopamine in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, located midway between brain stem and the cortex and specifically one part of it, is called the nucleus accumbens.
Food can raise an animal’s dopamine levels by 50%, sex by 100%, nicotine by 200%, cocaine by 400% and amphetamines by 1,000%. There are two types of rewards - the pleasure of consumption and the pleasure of anticipation. Some cues such as smell of our favorite restaurant, the exciting appearance off in the distance of ski slopes can involve dopamine effect. Many addicts actually come to lose the pleasure they once enjoyed from drugs, may even find the actual consumption distasteful but cannot stop. In order to kick a habit they now find unpleasant addicts often they have to separate themselves from drug taking cues by changing neighborhoods and avoiding old friends.
Hormone signaling process from hypothalamus to the production of steroids hormone, takes up to fifteen minutes just to get started. It takes even longer for steroids to take affect - hours or even days. The process may be slow, but the way steroids work in unique in the human body. They cross membranes, enter the cell nucleus and cause gene transcription. In other words, steroids cause proteins, the building blocks of the body to be manufactured. Steroids have receptors in almost every nucleated cell in the body. All these properties of steroids give you an inkling of their power. A single steroid like testosterone can cause a bewildering suite of physiological changes, building up bone density and lean-muscle mass, increasing hemoglobin and clotting agents in your blood, heightening mood, tormenting you with sexual fantasy and tilting behavior towards greater risk taking,. By doing so, testosterone orchestrates a focused and coordinated physical response to the competition and opportunity at hand.
It was in the year 1913 class of steroids was isolated by a German scientist named Adolf Butenandt who got Nobel prize with his team for chemistry in 1939 and when Nobel committee asked about testosterone, Butenandt exclaimed, “Dynamite, gentleman, it is pure dynamite”.
The Y chromosome of XY pair (male) has a gene called SRY which produce testosterone. X chromosome can swap material with another X chromosome, thus ensuring that each generation is fitted with new parts. But not so the isolated Y chromosome, which does not get new parts. This lone wolf has nothing it can swap with; so over time, it compounds the problem and accumulates damage until its genes, one by one, die off. Some animals, such as the kangaroo, now have only a few genes remaining on their Y chromosome. This slow death of Y chromosome is called Adam’s Curse by Geneticist Bryan Sykes who predicts that in five thousand generations men will be extinct.
Testosterone levels fluctuate over a course of man’s life. Spikes just after birth and then subside until puberty. Later, beginning in his early 30s, a man’s testosterone levels begins to fall and continue to do so over the rest of his life. Having high level of testosterone brings high energy level, high risk taking mentality, & high sex drive (common during teen / youth days). In trading desk, routine testosterone steroid injection helps the trader to take risky bets that they otherwise wouldn't bet.
(Some people has high testosterone levels by birth – if your ring finger is longer than your point finger, then you are a macho man :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDEuRSOFDwU)
Risk taking, gut feelings and the biology of boom and bust.
It is enlightening to see our behavior as an elaborate mechanism designed to maintain homeostasis. However, before we go too far down the path of biological reductionism, I have to point out that hormones do not cause our behavior. They act like lobby group, recommending and pressuring us into certain types of activity. One group of hormones has particularly potent efforts on our behavior - steroid hormones. This group includes testosterone, estrogen and cortisol, the main hormone of the stress response. Steroids exert particularly wide spread effects because they have receptors in almost every cell in our body and brain.
McEwen’s research on steroids shows how brain works: the hypothalamus sends a message to a gland instructing it to produce a hormone; the hormone fans out across the body, having its physical effects, but it also returns to the brain, changing the very way we think and behave. Now, that is one potent chemical. Indeed, subsequent research by MceWen and other showed that a steroid hormone, because of its widespread receptors, can alter almost every function of our body (its growth, shape,metabolism, immune function) and of our brain, (its mood and memory and of our behavior).
During moments of risk taking, competition and triumph, of exuberance, there is one steroid in particular that makes its presence felt and guides our actions - testosterone. Testosterone-fueled behavior is life winner effect. Winner effect works this way: two males enter a fight for turf or a contest for a mate and in anticipation of the competition, experience a surge in testosterone, a chemical bracer that increases their blood’s capacity to carry oxygen and in time, their lean-muscle mass. Testosterone also effects the brain, where it increases the animal’s confidence and appetite for risk, After the battle has been decided the winner emerges with even higher levels of testosterone, the loser with lesser levels, The winner, if he proceeds to a next round of competition, does so with already elevated testosterone and this androgenic priming gives him an edge, helping him win yet again. As testosterone level rise, confidence and risk taking segue into overconfidence and reckless behavior.
Cortisol is the main hormone of the stress response, a body wide response to injury or threat, Coristol works in tandem with adrenaline, but while adrenaline is a fast-acting hormone, taking effect in seconds and having a half-life in the blood of only two or three minutes, cortisol kicks in to support us during long siege.
The research I encountered on steroid hormones thus suggested to me the following hypothesis: testosterone, as predicted by the winner effect is likely to rise in a bull market, increase risk talking and exaggerate the rally, morphing it into bubble. Cortisol, on the other hand, is likely to rise in a bear market, make traders dramatically and perhaps irrational risk averse and exaggerate the sell-off, morphing it into a crash. Steroid hormones building up in the bodies of trades and investors may this shift risk preferences systematically across the business cycle, destabilizing it.
We are so completely enthralled by information that one could, without exaggeration, say we are addicted to it. The addiction develops under the influence of another neuromodulator, this one called dopamine. Produced by a group of cells at the top of the brain stem, dopamine targets brain regions controlling reward and movement. When we receive some valuable piece of information, or perform some act that promotes our health and survival such as eating, drinking, having sex or making large amounts of money, dopamine is released along what are called the pleasure pathways f the brain, providing us with a rewarding even euphoric experience. In fact, our brain seems to value the dopamine more than food or drink or sex itself.
Unfortunately dopamine neurons are easily duped, and can be tricked into bestowing their rewards by drugs of abuse. Almost every recreational drug, be it alcohol, cocaine or amphetamines, achieves its additive effects by increasing the action of dopamine in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, located midway between brain stem and the cortex and specifically one part of it, is called the nucleus accumbens.
Food can raise an animal’s dopamine levels by 50%, sex by 100%, nicotine by 200%, cocaine by 400% and amphetamines by 1,000%. There are two types of rewards - the pleasure of consumption and the pleasure of anticipation. Some cues such as smell of our favorite restaurant, the exciting appearance off in the distance of ski slopes can involve dopamine effect. Many addicts actually come to lose the pleasure they once enjoyed from drugs, may even find the actual consumption distasteful but cannot stop. In order to kick a habit they now find unpleasant addicts often they have to separate themselves from drug taking cues by changing neighborhoods and avoiding old friends.
Hormone signaling process from hypothalamus to the production of steroids hormone, takes up to fifteen minutes just to get started. It takes even longer for steroids to take affect - hours or even days. The process may be slow, but the way steroids work in unique in the human body. They cross membranes, enter the cell nucleus and cause gene transcription. In other words, steroids cause proteins, the building blocks of the body to be manufactured. Steroids have receptors in almost every nucleated cell in the body. All these properties of steroids give you an inkling of their power. A single steroid like testosterone can cause a bewildering suite of physiological changes, building up bone density and lean-muscle mass, increasing hemoglobin and clotting agents in your blood, heightening mood, tormenting you with sexual fantasy and tilting behavior towards greater risk taking,. By doing so, testosterone orchestrates a focused and coordinated physical response to the competition and opportunity at hand.
It was in the year 1913 class of steroids was isolated by a German scientist named Adolf Butenandt who got Nobel prize with his team for chemistry in 1939 and when Nobel committee asked about testosterone, Butenandt exclaimed, “Dynamite, gentleman, it is pure dynamite”.
The Y chromosome of XY pair (male) has a gene called SRY which produce testosterone. X chromosome can swap material with another X chromosome, thus ensuring that each generation is fitted with new parts. But not so the isolated Y chromosome, which does not get new parts. This lone wolf has nothing it can swap with; so over time, it compounds the problem and accumulates damage until its genes, one by one, die off. Some animals, such as the kangaroo, now have only a few genes remaining on their Y chromosome. This slow death of Y chromosome is called Adam’s Curse by Geneticist Bryan Sykes who predicts that in five thousand generations men will be extinct.
Testosterone levels fluctuate over a course of man’s life. Spikes just after birth and then subside until puberty. Later, beginning in his early 30s, a man’s testosterone levels begins to fall and continue to do so over the rest of his life. Having high level of testosterone brings high energy level, high risk taking mentality, & high sex drive (common during teen / youth days). In trading desk, routine testosterone steroid injection helps the trader to take risky bets that they otherwise wouldn't bet.
(Some people has high testosterone levels by birth – if your ring finger is longer than your point finger, then you are a macho man :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDEuRSOFDwU)
August 10, 2012
The passionate Muse by Keith Oatley
The passionate Muse by Keith Oatley
Exploring emotion in stories.
We can only fully understand and accept our emotions, says Scheff, when they occur at about the right distance. According to Scheff, the function of literary art as well as practices such as religious rituals is to enable significant emotions to occur at the right aesthetic distance, a distance at which they can be experienced and assimilated.
In the west, the foundational text on how fiction works was Aristotle’s Poetics. The equivalent version in India was the Natyasatra by Bharata Muni, who lived perhaps 200 years after Aristotle. The central idea about how fiction works for Aristotle and his followers was mimesis, the relation of literary art to the world, usually translated as representation or imitation. In Indian poetics the fundamental issues were different. The principal Sanskrit terms were dhavni (meaning suggestion) and rasa (meaning literary emotion).
Dhavani was thought to be the soul of poetry. The functional of poetry, drama and other kinds of fiction is to suggest within the context of a rasa, an emotion that can be recognized widely in the minds of readers or audience members. Rasa are like emotions of everyday life and rasa theorists argued that there are nine fundamental emotions in ordinary life, called bhavas, There is a corresponding rasa for each bhavas.
Bava / Rasa (in that order)
sexual delight / the amorous or erotic
laughter / the comic
sorrow / the pitiable or tragic
anger / the furious
perseverance / the heroic
fear / the terrible
disgust or disillusion / the odious or loathsome
wonder / the marvelous
serenity / the peaceful
Noel Carroll has written that ‘emotions are the cement that keeps audience connected to.... narrative fictions’.
The anxiety that creates the suspense of a story is a form of excitement. The greater it is, the larger is the relief and satisfaction when it’s resolved. You can see this kind of excited anxiety by going to an amusement park that has roller coasters and the like. Watch how people are whirled into the air by elaborate machines. The excitement of being flung about is followed by relief as people get off the ride and talk to their friends. Excitement is on sale in Western society
To fall in love is to extend one’s self to enclose another person. Love stories are fascinating because of the questions of how we might know whom we might join in this all-engaging way. Fantasy is a strong component both of falling in love and the stories to which this state gives rise.
Abhiavagupta (an important rasa theorist 1000 years ago) gives the following example of a verse from a play, a young woman’s husband is away and a traveler arrives at her house and she invites him to stay. Here is what the young woman says to the traveler.
Mother-in-law sleeps here, I there
Look, traveler, while it is light.
For night when you cannot see
You must not fall into my bed”
The verse works by dhavani - suggestion. An intuition of love has passed between the young woman and the traveler. Abhinavagupta discusses how in it, the young woman speaks openly in the presence of her mother-in-law and by means of a prohibition; she makes the traveler an invitation. If he does not understand it, he misses an opportunity.
Freud writes, “We laymen have always been intensely curious to know... from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable’.
The answer, says Freud, is that the stories that arouse such emotions are expressions of wishes. That is to say, they are like dreams, the meanings of which - according to Freud- are also expressions of wishes.
Play is the very emblem of enjoyment, of doing something for its own sake. The processes that underlie it are also the psychological bases of art. The center of art is the creation of a ‘that’ from a ‘this’.
Stories of anger involve an expectation that has been breached, in which a person’s status and selfhood are demeaned. Anger signals a wrong that demands to be righted, a readjustment that needs to be made in relationship. Readers can easily feel angry on behalf of a protagonist who has been victimized who may follow an urge to exact retribution.
The experience of being able to read and feel and think into a piece of fiction, although it may sometimes be sad, can also be profoundly joyful. It can be joyful, I think, it enables understanding of ourselves to grow and expand, in the way that - as Proist puts it - love can be do. This happens, not so much because of the imitation of life by art, but as we build a world in which we are closely involved. It happens when we allow the literary muse of passion to enable our own selves to bring meaning to life in relation to literary selves.
Exploring emotion in stories.
We can only fully understand and accept our emotions, says Scheff, when they occur at about the right distance. According to Scheff, the function of literary art as well as practices such as religious rituals is to enable significant emotions to occur at the right aesthetic distance, a distance at which they can be experienced and assimilated.
In the west, the foundational text on how fiction works was Aristotle’s Poetics. The equivalent version in India was the Natyasatra by Bharata Muni, who lived perhaps 200 years after Aristotle. The central idea about how fiction works for Aristotle and his followers was mimesis, the relation of literary art to the world, usually translated as representation or imitation. In Indian poetics the fundamental issues were different. The principal Sanskrit terms were dhavni (meaning suggestion) and rasa (meaning literary emotion).
Dhavani was thought to be the soul of poetry. The functional of poetry, drama and other kinds of fiction is to suggest within the context of a rasa, an emotion that can be recognized widely in the minds of readers or audience members. Rasa are like emotions of everyday life and rasa theorists argued that there are nine fundamental emotions in ordinary life, called bhavas, There is a corresponding rasa for each bhavas.
Bava / Rasa (in that order)
sexual delight / the amorous or erotic
laughter / the comic
sorrow / the pitiable or tragic
anger / the furious
perseverance / the heroic
fear / the terrible
disgust or disillusion / the odious or loathsome
wonder / the marvelous
serenity / the peaceful
Noel Carroll has written that ‘emotions are the cement that keeps audience connected to.... narrative fictions’.
The anxiety that creates the suspense of a story is a form of excitement. The greater it is, the larger is the relief and satisfaction when it’s resolved. You can see this kind of excited anxiety by going to an amusement park that has roller coasters and the like. Watch how people are whirled into the air by elaborate machines. The excitement of being flung about is followed by relief as people get off the ride and talk to their friends. Excitement is on sale in Western society
To fall in love is to extend one’s self to enclose another person. Love stories are fascinating because of the questions of how we might know whom we might join in this all-engaging way. Fantasy is a strong component both of falling in love and the stories to which this state gives rise.
Abhiavagupta (an important rasa theorist 1000 years ago) gives the following example of a verse from a play, a young woman’s husband is away and a traveler arrives at her house and she invites him to stay. Here is what the young woman says to the traveler.
Mother-in-law sleeps here, I there
Look, traveler, while it is light.
For night when you cannot see
You must not fall into my bed”
The verse works by dhavani - suggestion. An intuition of love has passed between the young woman and the traveler. Abhinavagupta discusses how in it, the young woman speaks openly in the presence of her mother-in-law and by means of a prohibition; she makes the traveler an invitation. If he does not understand it, he misses an opportunity.
Freud writes, “We laymen have always been intensely curious to know... from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable’.
The answer, says Freud, is that the stories that arouse such emotions are expressions of wishes. That is to say, they are like dreams, the meanings of which - according to Freud- are also expressions of wishes.
Play is the very emblem of enjoyment, of doing something for its own sake. The processes that underlie it are also the psychological bases of art. The center of art is the creation of a ‘that’ from a ‘this’.
Stories of anger involve an expectation that has been breached, in which a person’s status and selfhood are demeaned. Anger signals a wrong that demands to be righted, a readjustment that needs to be made in relationship. Readers can easily feel angry on behalf of a protagonist who has been victimized who may follow an urge to exact retribution.
The experience of being able to read and feel and think into a piece of fiction, although it may sometimes be sad, can also be profoundly joyful. It can be joyful, I think, it enables understanding of ourselves to grow and expand, in the way that - as Proist puts it - love can be do. This happens, not so much because of the imitation of life by art, but as we build a world in which we are closely involved. It happens when we allow the literary muse of passion to enable our own selves to bring meaning to life in relation to literary selves.
June 17, 2012
What got you here won’t get you there by Marshall Goldsmith.
What got you here won’t get you there by Marshall Goldsmith.
[Wonderful personal development tips to help in anyone’s life]
Most of us in our workplace delude ourselves about our achievements, our status and out contributions. We,
- Overestimate our contribution to a project;
- Take credit, partial or complete, for success that truly
belong to others
- Have an elevated opinion of our professional skills and
standing among our peers;
- Conveniently ignore the costly failures and
time-consuming dead-ends we have created.
- Exaggerate our project’s impact on profitability by
discounting real and hidden costs.
Four
key beliefs help us to become successful and they are
- Past
performance
- their
ability to influence their success (rather than just being lucky)
- their
optimistic belief that their success will continue in the future
- their
sense of control over their own destiny (as opposed to being controlled by
external forces)
Each can make it tough for us to change and that is the paradox of success. This makes us superstitious.
20 habits that hold you back from the top
- Winning
too much
- Adding
too much value
- Passing
judgments
- Starting
with ‘no’ but’ or ‘however’
- Telling
the world how smart we are
- Speaking
when angry
- Negativity
or ‘let me explain why that won’t work’
- Withholding
information
- Failing
to give proper recognition
- Claiming
credit that we don’t deserve
- Making
excuses
- Clinging
to the past
- Playing
favorites
- Refusing
to express regret
- Not
listening
- Failing
to express gratitude
- Punishing
the messenger
- Passing
the buck
- An
excessive need to be ‘me’.
The higher we go, the more your problems are behavioral.
At the higher levels of organizational life, all the leading players are technically skilled and they are smart. All other things are equal, your people skills (or lacks of them) become more pronounced the higher you go.
How can we change for the better?
The four commitments:
- Let
go of the past
- Tell
the truth
- Be
supportive and helpful - not cynical or negative
- Pick
something to improve yourself - so everyone is focused more on ‘improving’
than judging.
The skills that separate the near-great from the great.
- Listen
- Don’t
interrupt
- Don’t
finish the other’s sentence
- Don’t
say ‘I knew that’
- Don’t
even agree with the other person
- Don’t
use the words, ‘non’ but' & 'however'
- Don’t
be distracted. Don’t let your eyes or attention wander elsewhere while the
other person is talking
- Maintain
your end of the dialogue by asking intelligent questions that a) show you
are paying attention, b) more the conversation forward, and c) require the
other person to talk (while you listen)
- Eliminate
any striving to impress the other person with how smart of funny you are.
Your only aim is to the other person feel that he or she is accomplishing
that.
Eight step method for changing our interpersonal relationship and making these changes permanent.
- You
might not have a disease that behavioral change can cure
- Pick
the right thing to change
- Don’t
delude yourself about what you really must change
- Don’t
hide from the truth you need to hear
- There
is no ideal behavior
- If
you can measure it, you can achieve it
- Monetize
the result, create a solution
- The
best time to change is now
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