James Brody
February 22nd, 2005, 11:27 PM
"Never argue the content of a psychosis." My first psychiatric nurse, 1963.
----------
Malcolm Gladwell tells us that the more we reason about an event, the more likely we are to make mistakes: most of our decisions rise from "thin slices" of experience. We judge marriages, teacher competence, dating choices, combat strategies, criminal suspects, wine and foods, and even fine art works without telling a consistent story for why we make a particular choice. Judgments about a teacher in 2 seconds agree with those made after 3 months. Prospective dates announce one set of standards but fall in love with people who don't match them. Pentagon analyses of combat scenarios can be defeated by a gifted nonconformist commander.
Gladwell follows his insight and gives thin slices from research and from high-risk occupations. He also introduces us to a fascinating cast that includes Timothy Wilson (psychology of decisions), John Gottman (marital), Wendy Levinson (malpractice suits) , Bernard Berenson (art criticism), John Bargh (priming), Iyengar & Fishman (speed-dating), Paul Van Riper (military strategy), Lee Goldman (heart attack assessment), firefighters, and the police who shot Amadou Diallo are examined according to insights from two sons of evolution, Sylvan Tomkins, and Paul Ekman.
The disconnect between memory and action is an old story. In 1933 Penfield told us that when stimulating exposed neocortex in surgery, he elicited memories of events that never happened (Bloom, 2000). Students will remember details from a movie and be shocked when they see the film a second time and find that their memory does not match the film (Gladwell, 2005). According to David Cohen (1999), ABC television found many small children to confabulate "abuse" stories during the three weeks after a pediatric exam! Gazzaniga's research found the left cortex to lie about what the right did and to become angry when disbelieved. (Bloom, 2000; Gazzaniga, 1992). (Even that inspired narcissist, Sigmund Freud, noticed these things!) And Loftus and Ketcham (1994) debunked memories of early sexual abuse and suggested that memories reform according to suggestions from an interviewer. Our dreams appear when we watch the consolidation of memories from the prior day. Our pasts are as contrived, crafted, and imaginary as our futures and memories are perhaps changed most easily whenever they are retrieved. Relive an event and you change the record...
Our magnificent neocortex transforms into an agent of reversible construction: it makes Quonset huts and tents, not castles. Your most durable memories, fun, nonverbal, learned easily, and retrieved often, are usually those that match your genetic propensities. The neocortex is also an agent of shared environment: a layer of inhibition, arranged by culture and a buffer, an exploratory system, between instinct and environment. And it can feel good to get drunk and put the damned thing to sleep! We can also understand why the lobotomized will be less suicidal and why the mildly depressed more realistic (Bloom, 2000; Ratey & Johnson, 1998).
Did Sylvan Tomkins Have Aspergers?
Rachel Gur reported 15 years ago that males can't recognize when a woman is mildly upset; females can. I know guys fired by women, the guys "never saw it coming." Many little boys make the same complaint about their mothers and teachers; the little girls all see the attack build, the guys are stunned and scream "unfair!" Along these lines, Gladwell sees the cops who shot Amadou Diallo as becoming "too male" in a crisis, unable to respond to subtle emotional cues, and achieving a state of transient Aspergers.
Clever fellow, this Gladwell!
Aspergers Syndrome, a disorder that impairs socialization but sometimes delivers a gift for sorting and classifying, seems to be a male trait and perhaps associated with high levels of maternal testosterone. Estrogen, on the other hand, mediates learning, it also appears to mediate cooperation. According to Gladwell, Sylvan Tomkins was a classifier and a talker, sometimes for hours at parties, on the mosaic tiles of human facial expression and the classification of expressions. He was also a resource for Paul Ekman who eventually refuted anthropology's fantasy that culture dictated facial expression. Rearranging these possibilities suggests that Tomkins may, paradoxically, have had Aspergers! Was Tomkins really an awkward, energetic guy who labeled expressions but could not respond to them empathetically or a "warm-fuzzy" empathic guy who also classified facial movement? This dilemma might intrigue Baron-Cohen...
"blink" and Thorazine
My first state hospital was home to 3000 creatively confused souls who, like the spider who spun her web inside a matchbox, arranged new lives for themselves inside a country retreat of bricks, bars, locked doors, and white suits. It was a lost time before community mental health centers and a long time before lithium and a longer time before Prozac.
Redneck nurses, escaping their six kids and truck driver husbands, collected gossip from the aides and used it to guide their smiles, frowns, cigarettes and coffee. Medication adjustments were used for sustained control: do it once and change someone for months! Each nurse managed 60 patients, each psychiatrist about 700. One psychiatrist came to us from Cuba but spoke no English: the nursing supervisor wrote his orders. Another, a Cambodian, spoke less English than he understood and wanted a fence to separate the men from women so they would not breed. A third from the UK was blessed by all the staff for his warmth and hard work and no one asked how he got lost at the asylum. A fourth, a Greek, tut-tutted the staff and implied promises that were neither made nor kept. And the fifth, hyper and mildly irritable, tended his cases like a mother hen. The most effective administrator was a Turk.
And there was no data that any one of these characters less effective in the prescriptions that he wrote.
This odd network was perhaps stable for controversial reasons that Gladwell might appreciate: (1) A large overlap exists between medications and an equally large overlap between symptoms (systematic use of behavior therapy was nonexistent within that agency). Patients and staff were fundamentally the same but there was often too much or too little of an essential trait in a patient and we needed to adjust their volume. (2) No one, according to Gladwell, sues the physician that he likes. (The Cuban had a gracious smile. The Greek appeared to mediate, the Brit was loved. We hated only the unsmiling Cambodian...call the lawyers!)
Thus, clinical effectiveness cannot be assured by elaborate plans: it may, in fact, be compromised by them. If you're any good, intuition generates a few simple decisions that let the client once more arrange his world without annoying other people. At the same time, the client protects himself and his doctors: each partner is an exploratory system that repeats what works and avoids what does not. Our job, like that of a good parent, is to discover contexts wherein liabilities become assets and to nudge our collaborator toward them. We can attribute good outcomes to our patient's resilience, bad ones to his stubbornness, but they are the same. As a great pediatrician remarked 20 years ago: "I want to be the last doctor to see the patient before he gets well..."
Implications: Trashing the Wrap from Bloomingdales
Twelve years of public education chisel verbal information into butter that melts in summer heat: all is forgotten. The fun-to-do, easy-to-learn adaptive things such as kicking, hitting, kissing, and forming gangs appear on the school yard. No one has to pay a kid to throw rocks at a rabbit! No one takes away videogames if he doesn't practice throwing those rocks! Further, home-schooled kids do not show social impairments and they do better than the public kids on aptitude tests although their mothers do not have masters degrees, high salaries, or cushy benefits. (Public education is a spiteful cancer: it now wants mothers to file lesson plans!)
Psychotherapy is another instinctive, good thing cocooned in plans, assessments, 12-page social histories, defense mechanisms, early trauma, and insight. (In this case, however, quality review teams assure that the butterfly never escapes!) I suspect that hookers, nurses, and diner waitresses stabilize hyperactive males and frightened females: the data will remain uncollected. Words become a means to keep the client and healer sitting together while more important communications take place! And it may be that language and rules more often stabilize cultural practices than change them.
Whether in education or psychotherapy, or even in the fact that our neocortex looks so impressive, the wrappings are from Bloomies and the contents from WalMart. Some kid once made the same comment about a king's wardrobe...
Bottom Lines
"Couple of guys sittin' around drinkin'
"Down at the starlight bar
"One of 'em says, you know I've been thinking
"Other one says, that won't get you too far..." "The Secret of Life," sung by Faith Hill
----------
Buy Gladwell's new book even though Faith said it first...she said it best. He provides anecdotes without mechanisms but even with mechanisms such as those described by Barabasi (2002) or by Watts and Strogatz (1998), he would not convince rationalists, cursed with too much estrogen and serotonin and by attention surplus disorder (See Ratey and Johnson, 1998). Gladwell will sit on a pin or on a comma in a fly box or history, entombed under the blather that he debunks. The good news is that evolutionists and deists can be friends even if the first finds the second psychotic and the second finds the first damned. So long as they don't argue their reasons!
Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that we burned the library at Alexandria...
---------
References:
Barabasi, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. (Introduces emergent networks, organizational arrangements that occur widely and have the speed and scope to support Gladwell's collection.)
Bloom, H. (2000) Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. NY: Wiley.
Cohen, D. (1999) Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character? NY: Wiley.
Gazzaniga, M. (1992) Nature's Mind. NY: Basic Books.
Gladwell, M. (2005) blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. NY: Little, Brown.
Loftus, E & Ketcham, K. (1994) The Myth of Repressed Memory NY: St. Martin's Press.
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.
Ratey, J., & Johnson, C. (1998) Shadow Syndromes. NY: Bantam.
Watts, D. & Strogatz, S. (1998) Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature. 393: 440-442.
Copyright 2005, James Brody, all rights reserved.
----------
Malcolm Gladwell tells us that the more we reason about an event, the more likely we are to make mistakes: most of our decisions rise from "thin slices" of experience. We judge marriages, teacher competence, dating choices, combat strategies, criminal suspects, wine and foods, and even fine art works without telling a consistent story for why we make a particular choice. Judgments about a teacher in 2 seconds agree with those made after 3 months. Prospective dates announce one set of standards but fall in love with people who don't match them. Pentagon analyses of combat scenarios can be defeated by a gifted nonconformist commander.
Gladwell follows his insight and gives thin slices from research and from high-risk occupations. He also introduces us to a fascinating cast that includes Timothy Wilson (psychology of decisions), John Gottman (marital), Wendy Levinson (malpractice suits) , Bernard Berenson (art criticism), John Bargh (priming), Iyengar & Fishman (speed-dating), Paul Van Riper (military strategy), Lee Goldman (heart attack assessment), firefighters, and the police who shot Amadou Diallo are examined according to insights from two sons of evolution, Sylvan Tomkins, and Paul Ekman.
The disconnect between memory and action is an old story. In 1933 Penfield told us that when stimulating exposed neocortex in surgery, he elicited memories of events that never happened (Bloom, 2000). Students will remember details from a movie and be shocked when they see the film a second time and find that their memory does not match the film (Gladwell, 2005). According to David Cohen (1999), ABC television found many small children to confabulate "abuse" stories during the three weeks after a pediatric exam! Gazzaniga's research found the left cortex to lie about what the right did and to become angry when disbelieved. (Bloom, 2000; Gazzaniga, 1992). (Even that inspired narcissist, Sigmund Freud, noticed these things!) And Loftus and Ketcham (1994) debunked memories of early sexual abuse and suggested that memories reform according to suggestions from an interviewer. Our dreams appear when we watch the consolidation of memories from the prior day. Our pasts are as contrived, crafted, and imaginary as our futures and memories are perhaps changed most easily whenever they are retrieved. Relive an event and you change the record...
Our magnificent neocortex transforms into an agent of reversible construction: it makes Quonset huts and tents, not castles. Your most durable memories, fun, nonverbal, learned easily, and retrieved often, are usually those that match your genetic propensities. The neocortex is also an agent of shared environment: a layer of inhibition, arranged by culture and a buffer, an exploratory system, between instinct and environment. And it can feel good to get drunk and put the damned thing to sleep! We can also understand why the lobotomized will be less suicidal and why the mildly depressed more realistic (Bloom, 2000; Ratey & Johnson, 1998).
Did Sylvan Tomkins Have Aspergers?
Rachel Gur reported 15 years ago that males can't recognize when a woman is mildly upset; females can. I know guys fired by women, the guys "never saw it coming." Many little boys make the same complaint about their mothers and teachers; the little girls all see the attack build, the guys are stunned and scream "unfair!" Along these lines, Gladwell sees the cops who shot Amadou Diallo as becoming "too male" in a crisis, unable to respond to subtle emotional cues, and achieving a state of transient Aspergers.
Clever fellow, this Gladwell!
Aspergers Syndrome, a disorder that impairs socialization but sometimes delivers a gift for sorting and classifying, seems to be a male trait and perhaps associated with high levels of maternal testosterone. Estrogen, on the other hand, mediates learning, it also appears to mediate cooperation. According to Gladwell, Sylvan Tomkins was a classifier and a talker, sometimes for hours at parties, on the mosaic tiles of human facial expression and the classification of expressions. He was also a resource for Paul Ekman who eventually refuted anthropology's fantasy that culture dictated facial expression. Rearranging these possibilities suggests that Tomkins may, paradoxically, have had Aspergers! Was Tomkins really an awkward, energetic guy who labeled expressions but could not respond to them empathetically or a "warm-fuzzy" empathic guy who also classified facial movement? This dilemma might intrigue Baron-Cohen...
"blink" and Thorazine
My first state hospital was home to 3000 creatively confused souls who, like the spider who spun her web inside a matchbox, arranged new lives for themselves inside a country retreat of bricks, bars, locked doors, and white suits. It was a lost time before community mental health centers and a long time before lithium and a longer time before Prozac.
Redneck nurses, escaping their six kids and truck driver husbands, collected gossip from the aides and used it to guide their smiles, frowns, cigarettes and coffee. Medication adjustments were used for sustained control: do it once and change someone for months! Each nurse managed 60 patients, each psychiatrist about 700. One psychiatrist came to us from Cuba but spoke no English: the nursing supervisor wrote his orders. Another, a Cambodian, spoke less English than he understood and wanted a fence to separate the men from women so they would not breed. A third from the UK was blessed by all the staff for his warmth and hard work and no one asked how he got lost at the asylum. A fourth, a Greek, tut-tutted the staff and implied promises that were neither made nor kept. And the fifth, hyper and mildly irritable, tended his cases like a mother hen. The most effective administrator was a Turk.
And there was no data that any one of these characters less effective in the prescriptions that he wrote.
This odd network was perhaps stable for controversial reasons that Gladwell might appreciate: (1) A large overlap exists between medications and an equally large overlap between symptoms (systematic use of behavior therapy was nonexistent within that agency). Patients and staff were fundamentally the same but there was often too much or too little of an essential trait in a patient and we needed to adjust their volume. (2) No one, according to Gladwell, sues the physician that he likes. (The Cuban had a gracious smile. The Greek appeared to mediate, the Brit was loved. We hated only the unsmiling Cambodian...call the lawyers!)
Thus, clinical effectiveness cannot be assured by elaborate plans: it may, in fact, be compromised by them. If you're any good, intuition generates a few simple decisions that let the client once more arrange his world without annoying other people. At the same time, the client protects himself and his doctors: each partner is an exploratory system that repeats what works and avoids what does not. Our job, like that of a good parent, is to discover contexts wherein liabilities become assets and to nudge our collaborator toward them. We can attribute good outcomes to our patient's resilience, bad ones to his stubbornness, but they are the same. As a great pediatrician remarked 20 years ago: "I want to be the last doctor to see the patient before he gets well..."
Implications: Trashing the Wrap from Bloomingdales
Twelve years of public education chisel verbal information into butter that melts in summer heat: all is forgotten. The fun-to-do, easy-to-learn adaptive things such as kicking, hitting, kissing, and forming gangs appear on the school yard. No one has to pay a kid to throw rocks at a rabbit! No one takes away videogames if he doesn't practice throwing those rocks! Further, home-schooled kids do not show social impairments and they do better than the public kids on aptitude tests although their mothers do not have masters degrees, high salaries, or cushy benefits. (Public education is a spiteful cancer: it now wants mothers to file lesson plans!)
Psychotherapy is another instinctive, good thing cocooned in plans, assessments, 12-page social histories, defense mechanisms, early trauma, and insight. (In this case, however, quality review teams assure that the butterfly never escapes!) I suspect that hookers, nurses, and diner waitresses stabilize hyperactive males and frightened females: the data will remain uncollected. Words become a means to keep the client and healer sitting together while more important communications take place! And it may be that language and rules more often stabilize cultural practices than change them.
Whether in education or psychotherapy, or even in the fact that our neocortex looks so impressive, the wrappings are from Bloomies and the contents from WalMart. Some kid once made the same comment about a king's wardrobe...
Bottom Lines
"Couple of guys sittin' around drinkin'
"Down at the starlight bar
"One of 'em says, you know I've been thinking
"Other one says, that won't get you too far..." "The Secret of Life," sung by Faith Hill
----------
Buy Gladwell's new book even though Faith said it first...she said it best. He provides anecdotes without mechanisms but even with mechanisms such as those described by Barabasi (2002) or by Watts and Strogatz (1998), he would not convince rationalists, cursed with too much estrogen and serotonin and by attention surplus disorder (See Ratey and Johnson, 1998). Gladwell will sit on a pin or on a comma in a fly box or history, entombed under the blather that he debunks. The good news is that evolutionists and deists can be friends even if the first finds the second psychotic and the second finds the first damned. So long as they don't argue their reasons!
Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that we burned the library at Alexandria...
---------
References:
Barabasi, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. (Introduces emergent networks, organizational arrangements that occur widely and have the speed and scope to support Gladwell's collection.)
Bloom, H. (2000) Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. NY: Wiley.
Cohen, D. (1999) Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character? NY: Wiley.
Gazzaniga, M. (1992) Nature's Mind. NY: Basic Books.
Gladwell, M. (2005) blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. NY: Little, Brown.
Loftus, E & Ketcham, K. (1994) The Myth of Repressed Memory NY: St. Martin's Press.
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.
Ratey, J., & Johnson, C. (1998) Shadow Syndromes. NY: Bantam.
Watts, D. & Strogatz, S. (1998) Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature. 393: 440-442.
Copyright 2005, James Brody, all rights reserved.