Wait, wait....

"Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!!" is a weekly radio show, humor barely disguised as quiz. I love to listen to it while I'm driving. Occasionally, I am particularly delighted by a guest when I pull into the driveway, and dash into the house to find the program on the inside radio and listen.

And never do. Never. It is impossible for me to listen to WWDTM while not driving. Driving provides the perfect setting for listening to light, amusing radio.

Why? I can watch light, amusing TV at home, usually while reading a book at the same time. I can listen to serious radio at home, with some effort not to get distracted. But light amusing radio is best heard in the context of particular split concentration. I can listen while paying enough attention to the road, but the content can't stand up to exclusivity -- for me. My guess is that different folks have different places on the concentration scale where WWDTM fits. But for me, WWDTM requires neither too much nor too little attention to coexist with driving.

And, when I do arrive home, I can't remember any of the great funny lines from WWDTM I've just heard minutes before, probably casualties of that same split concentration.

What is going on? Nothing very dramatic. We have always had split consciousness. The Neanderthals had an eye out for predators while looking for their own meals. So does my cat. Pretty trivial.

This all came to be important while I was supervising a beginning counselor. We were talking about a certain client. The counselor had enthusiastically signed on to help the client "follow his dream". I was disturbed on plenty of levels. Counselors are usually expected to work with a client to make sense of the client's emotional world, not to promote a fantasy as the solution to all the client's problems. In this case, in particular, the "dream" was enormously self-destructive to the client.

But, the counselor said, when I attempted to intervene, it's the client's DREAM! He repeated this over and over, as if I just had lost my hearing. Even when I directly instructed him to change his approach, he just said, again and again, "It's his DREAM!". I discussed with him his own dream, of being a counselor, trying to do with him what I wanted him to do with the client. Failure ensued. He is no longer a counselor.

We pay a lot of attention to "dreams"; I know some folks who dream of being baseball players, or great lawyers, or, as above, heroic rescuers of terribly impaired people. The dream is in some little drawer somewhere. It has energy, and it pushes on the drawer to try to get out. We talk of motivation and goals, but they are watered-down versions of "DREAMS".

This dream stuff is about mind, and subject to the same language structure I've been talking about before. Alert Reader will notice that "dreams" are invariably of positive achievements -- they may be silly, but they are not malevolent. We don't talk of "dreams" of being animal torturers, or of working on an assembly line, or of being bored to distraction adding up columns of numbers. "Mind" things -- now to be known as "mind-type" things -- are always prescribed in the language of social norms. Mind-type things traverse, even ignore, the boundaries of self and world. Brain-type things do not.

Lots of mind-type things can exist at the same time. And how could it be otherwise? Mind-type is part of a social context. We can't expect social context to be simple. My "dream" is about my desired place in the world, in a thousand different ways. Some folks are described as more "single-minded" than others. We talk of them with ambivalence, In the end, mind-type is never simple, and we don't really warm up to the people who pretend it is.

What about WWDTM and split concentration? Not "mind" stuff at all. "Brain" stuff. Some day, possibly pretty soon, we will be able to have good brain-type explanations of concentration. The explanations will be descriptions of biological events going on in the physical entity of a person.

All this stuff comes together in social pathology and brain pathology. At the current state of psychiatry, we are trying to deal with social pathology -- mind pathology -- chemically. Stupid, and destructive. Somebody who is "mad", in the 19th century way, maybe catatonic, maybe hallucinating -- sure, give them a chemical. But in the 21st century, we simply put the mind type, social pathology, into the brain-type, physical pathology. The Soviets did the very same thing in mid-to-late 20th century; political dissent, mind-type, was defined as brain-type, and treated as such.

I know this sounds obvious to Alert Reader, even trivial. From the perspective of the brain-damaged, though, not so much, or, I suppose, so little. I know that my brain-type pathology slides into social pathology, mind-type; I can see it on the faces of the people I deal with. When TLE invades my life, whether in excessive talk, shifting emotional states or odd impulses, suddenly I have moved from brain-type to mind-type, and, as I said before, I feel the humiliation that is so characteristic of the loss of control of the body. I can see the shift from interested talk to the judgments about my social deficiencies. I want to say to people, hey, don't give up on me, I'll get control of this somehow, and pretty soon.

But, not quite yet. Hypergraphia, remember, is part of TLE.

This entry has been pretty strange, first saying how different the types are, then talking about where they interact. But, latter-day Descartes that I am, I think I have found the magical locus.

Bateson: "Mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker."

And then he went off into evolution. But, just a shout away, shout away.

Mind again

William James, the greatest psychologist, looked at mental phenomena through the lens of conscious states; different states were associated with different cognitive...styles, I suppose, or processes, or something like that. He was quite clear: how you think depends on how you feel.

My own shrink work got a lot better (I think) one day when I heard a client talking about "having" feelings. No, no, I thought; you don't have feelings. You are feelings. When I am raging, every cell is raging. When I am despairing, every cell is despairing. I don't "have" rage, or despair.

And, too, when I am raging, my thought are "rage" thoughts -- not just of the object of my rage. I have a particular type of fantasy, for example, that I just don't have at other times. Usually, rage state thoughts are very clear, and very directed. The internal forces that control our rage are not usually conscious, but still are cranking away, working at preventing disaster.

We know a lot about coping with rage in others. As with most states of consciousness, we have remedies that are usually effective. With rage, the remedy is often distraction, and a weird sort of temporizing in which the raging person is simply given time to repeat internal process until the emotional fuel is exhausted. Not much sophisticated cognition goes on during rage episodes. Trying to talk someone out of a rage state is not a really useful approach.

In despair, "rational" thinking is a primary tool in maintaining the state. The despairing person thinks that life, now, is horrible and worthless. And, even better, that life has always been horrible and worthless, and always will be horrible and worthless. Engaging a despairing person in discussion -- even debate -- about all this is often helpful, and hence we have cognitive-behavioral therapy, which I have always thought consisted of nagging our clients into giving up their most despairing thoughts.

In terror states, thinking becomes concrete; ordinarily sensible, bright people become abjectly stupid, and do things that astonish us.

I (and everybody else) can go on. So what?

This, again: There is no thinking independent of mood state. None. The whole idea is silly.

So, now back to me, and isn't that always the case. Since the onset of temporal lobe epilepsy, I have had wildly changing moods, conscious states, in which I can quite easily, afterward, look at the thought patterns and cognitive structures that are characteristic of each state. Alert Reader will here pick up the earlier theme, and say, Whoa, Big Fella. You talking mind or brain?

When I look back over the episodes, I see them as "mind" material; I think "Not so good", or try to come up with new creative controls. But normative, all normative. I become preoccupied about whether my behavior was unusual or distressing to others or embarrassing to me. Mind stuff. Not brain stuff.

Then I take the meds to stabilize the brain. I'm desperate for the day I don't have to go back over every interaction, every word, and try to made sense of where it came from, and what the emotional content was. All mind stuff.

Back to William James:

William James: "If sleep were not so familiar, it would be the most dreaded of diseases". My point exactly. Except he did it in one sentence. Show off.

My bad....

To all who have posted here:

I am the bozo. I mistook "Comment Moderation" setting of "Yes" to mean that comments were automatically posted, and then complained bitterly when I didn't see them.

Sorry......

In the name of......

I'm reading several stories of the Spanish invasion of America. At each new point of invasion, a very odd event occurred.

It was called the "requerimiento". The Spanish flag would be raised, and the invaders gathered around while a lengthy document was read -- in Spanish -- announcing to the inhabitants that Spain was taking over, that they were required to submit, become Christians, and work for the Spanish. The alternative was torture and execution. Gritty talk, from a feckless enemy. The inhabitants, who were typically lurking in the forest, would look at each other, no doubt, and shrug.

And then the killing started. But...it was ok, since the requerimiento had been read.

Talk about performative utterances. Certainly in the Hall of Fame of performatives, and maybe the #1 all time, given the consequences. The English and French had no such attachment to ceremony, and began the stealing and killing more casually.

But, a footnote:

I've always been enchanted with the phrase "In the name of....", followed by God, or the king, or Christ, or Miles the Cat, or whatever. Usually, it is a notification that something bad is about to happen to the listener. Occasionally, it is something good: "In the name of the Queen, I award you this prize...".

But, what is the point? Why not just give the prize, or shoot the gun, or bless the ship? If it just evokes the power of the king, or Miles the Cat, why not just say "The King awards you this prize..."? What's up with the "name of" stuff?

Turns out, there is not much speculation on the internet, at least. I turn to Alert Reader to send either Reader's own thoughts, or anything that pertains. Strange language. Great performative material.

I did find this in the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms:

in the name of phrases / idioms

1. By the authority of, as in Open up, in the name of the law! [Late 1300s]
2. On behalf of, as in She made a donation in her daughter's name. [Late 1300s]
3. in God's or heaven's name; in the name of God or heaven. With appeal to, as in In the name of God, stop that noise! or What in heaven's name are you doing? [c. a.d. 900]
4. Under the designation of, as in They burned witches at the stake in the name of piety. [Late 1300s]
5. Under the possession or ownership of, as in The certificate of ownership was rightfully in my name. [Mid-1900s]
6. in one's own name. On one's own behalf, as in Mary signed the check for John in her own name. [Late 1800s]

The distinctions seem kind of sketchy, and the usage is not really explored. Maybe the OED has something.

More later.