Suicides....dogs and cats....hermits. Oh, my.

This one was really difficult to put together, so please struggle with it. I have let it ripen for a couple of weeks. That seems to help.

The number of suicides, in any country, is remarkably similar year-to-year. How can this possibly be??? If there are not enough suicides by December 15, is there a rush to the noose, or overdose, or Golden Gate Bridge? Suicide, in so many ways the ultimate act of self-centered individualism, turns out to be a form of social compliance. Who knew???

This is what Emile Durkheim, a 19th century French All-Star utility intellectual, called a "social fact". Alert Reader will have caught on already. But, surprise, I will somehow force myself to go on about it at great length.*

"Mind" is a social fact of the Durkheim sort. It exists outside the individual, just as suicide does. Mind-type stuff lives in language. We speak of people "making up their minds" about suicide. I just don't think it works this way. "Making up our minds" is a social fact, not an event located inside an individual. Someone may experience making a decision; however, like all mind-type facts, the net spreads far wider, and has to do with judgments by self and others, by the social reality of a person in a group. Removing oneself from the tribe is just that, and speaks to participating in the language of the group. Tricky stuff; we are not used to locating such things in a broad context.

Or, how about this: I don't rob banks. But, I have never decided not to rob a bank. Bank robbing is not part of my life, or my talk. Neither is suicide. And, if someone asked me why I don't rob banks, I would just shrug. I would probably say something about bank robbery being wrong. But, really,I don't know why I don't rob banks. Non-bank-robbery, for me is a social fact, not individual decision. Same way I don't kill myself. Social fact. I also never lived in a setting in which bank robber was discussed. But I have seen, as we all have, how something becomes a fad, even a dreadful fad. iPods were a benevolent fad. Drug overdoses, in some places, a malevolent fad. You can bet, though, that both iPods and drug overdoses started with one act, and the next step was talk. And so on.

There are certainly "group values" which live independent of any individual. In the US, typically we think of the first amendment rights as group values. Any particular person might disagree about any particular instance, but, this is what Durkheim would call social fact. I am always charmed by atomic individualists who apparently think that all social values begin and end with them...that there is no group life independent of each individual life. Just silly, but very American.

Where do social facts live? In my head? Nope -- if I am dead and gone, the social facts still exist.

Once again, we bump into a fundamental problem in thinking about "mind". We still want "mind" to be inside us, not part of social facts. I continue to think that social fact, and "my" mind, are located in our group utterances. I don't want to limit myself; any communication between entities is language. But let's limit ourselves to humans.

The minute we speak a language, say ma-ma or da-da, or, before that, howl or coo, we are declaring that we are a part of social fact. Language is where to find social fact; it exists only between people, in the same way that the first amendment does. And, so it is with mind.

But, let's backtrack. I'm thinking a lot about the suicide rate of dogs and cats. Suicide is apparently not part of the language between cats and dogs, not the way it is for us. Even terribly depressed dogs don't sit in the corner trying to decide whether to end it all. But, as any dog owner will attest, dogs often sit in the corner planning how to get the next meal. The meal is part of the language of the dog, then. Dog "minds" are severely limited; dog language, too. Odd coincidence.

I remember sitting at dinner with a group of friends. For some silly reason, I said that I would like the conversation to consist only of facts -- no judgments or opinions allowed. There was silence until someone told me to stuff it, and then the conversation went on, blissfully fact-free. They were right, I was wrong. And now, finally, I get it: people talk to hear and express judgments, not facts. They talk to place themselves in the tribe, in some place or other. When I requested a judgment free discussion, I was suggesting we dissolve the tribe. Not a good thing to do at a dinner party. I could have jumped up, denounced all their beliefs -- fine, I was just placing myself in a particular place in the tribe.

Not so easy to go out in the desert for 40 days.

Now, all we have to do is figure out how social fact relates to individual fact.

Probably the best way is to think of languages, and how some languages are shared by very, very small groups, and some very large groups. And how, when someone dies, what remains of them is the conversations they had with others. Social facts. We may live on, but we are not eternal.

But more later.....


*Durkheim also talked a lot about being alienated from social life, and the resulting state, which he called "anomie". This word was widely popular in the intellectual circles in the US in the 50s and 60s. And, also led to a very good joke:

"Remember, the last part of 'autonomy' is "anomie". Works better if read out loud. Well, I think it's funny. Really. Philosophy joke. Another one next time. Much funnier.

Beggars can't be choosers....

Alert Reader knows that the energy behind the blog comes from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I have a minor case, subsequent to a minor stroke long ago. How do we know?

Several ways. I have a slightly unusual EEG. Most of all, though, I have the telltale "soft" signs: Hallucinated smells. Unexplainable and rapid shifts in mood. In my case, sudden and uncontrolled episodes of despair, which last maybe 15 minutes or so. Supposedly, and this is disputed by some neurologists, there are traits associated with TLE, which are constant between true seizure episodes: hyperrelgiosity, fainting, deja vu, jamais vu, pedantism (moi?), and, for me, pressure of speech. A lot of times, I just can't stop talking.

And, surprise, hypergraphia -- the need to write stuff, really a lot. Dostoevsky had TLE; yessir, me and Dosty, scribbling away.

TLE people turn up often as shamans. Perhaps a new career path for my later years.

Over the last months, I have become very suspicious of the sources of my own behavior. If I start yapping while having lunch with someone, I often look back later and say to myself: "You bozo. What was all that? Just shut up. Please!"

And, I am open to questions by others. If someone says to me, "Why did you talk so much?", I can say "Well, this TLE thing....". And at the same time, I think, "There is no other way to be". I understand the question. I am being asked "Why are you acting so goofy?" And, again, there is no other way to be.

If someone asks me "Why did you choose to talk so much?", I just have no possible response. None. I didn't choose to talk so much. I just did. In this situation, as in so much of neurology, there is the ambiguous space for doubt. Maybe I did choose. Maybe, going into the discussion, I thought "Well, it would be fun to just let it rip here and not let anybody else talk". In that case, if someone asked why I chose to yap, I might very well say "Nyeh, just wanted to see what it was like."

But I would not. I could not "just want to see what it was like". Not with the hovering TLE. The humiliation of being so out of control of my physical process is profound. I would never choose it, nor choose to imitate it. Neurology meets ordinary language. How about an analogy to confuse things?

Take a child who wets the bed. The child is desperately upset by the event; the surrounding adults jump between a benign attitude and a blaming attitude. The idea that the child would deliberately make such a choice is actually malevolent. And, yet, I've heard, "Oh, he just wants the attention", and "He's got us all running around all night". Uh oh. Blame.

I think that "choice" is inextricably bound to "blame". There can be no blame if there is not choice.

And we like to blame. Blame is second only to baseball as the national sport. We blame for everything. We blame people for being sick. We blame them for being stupid. We blame them for being tall, or short. We blame them for being gay. Our penchant for blame is well documented, going back hundreds of years. Slaves were blamed for being slaves. Natives were blamed for being, well, natives. We invaded countries, and then blamed them for it.

But I want to stay focused on sickness, and on neurological disease, as blame-makers. Is it somehow my fault for talking too much at lunch? Sure. I didn't have to go to lunch; I know very well that "lunchy" situations make me prone to yap a lot. So, it is my choice, and my fault, after all.

We can see where that all leads. Stay out of sight until you get it fixed. We'll talk to you then. Disappear. And I have felt some of that, in some conversations. I can think of all the times I've seen it happen to others: The inept player on a Little League team, the stumbling reader in class, the nervous speaker at a meeting, the drooling oldster in the wheelchair. We want them, basically, to just disappear. I am quite surprised to be on the wrong end of that transaction, though.

I'm just not quite sure yet if we can blame me for for talking too much, or for having TLE, or for dreadful blogs. On the one hand, it makes sense, particularly in the context of loving to blame. Hey, nobody said he should do that damn blog. On the other, it makes no sense at all. I know it wasn't a choice. I know there is no blame waiting to catch up to me.

There is a lot more here, a lot more language to be explored. The neurological stuff sends me off course. But don't worry, I'll get to it. Hypergraphia will triumph!!!

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.

Tough questions

Way many years ago, I spent most of a year thinking about what happens when we ask questions about people's actions. It was, after all, my trade, and I noticed some things that I hadn't seen talked about much in the shrink lit.

Before the behavioral debacles of the 70s and 80s, fledgling shrink types were instructed in how to get clients to talk without asking many questions -- or, preferably, any questions. Somewhere around 1975, the pendulum swung, and now we are encouraged to do nothing but ask questions, fill out inventories, and so on. But I digress....

Inherent in our earlier dicta was the recognition that asking questions was a way of NOT learning much. The general principle was to leave as much space for a client to talk as possible; the client would then talk about whatever was most important -- to the client, not the therapist.

I found out that the philosophers and anthropologists had a more sophisticated idea. Much of language, and other behavior, is devoted to communicating norms. Beyond the purely descriptive parts of language -- "The giant mastadon is 30 feet to your right" -- most of what we do is bounce back and forth the ways to be a good member of the tribe. And, if folks are asking a lot of questions about your reasons for doing something, you are certainly not being a good member of the tribe. Good members just don't have questions asked about them. Take a look around and see; when we say to somebody "Sheesh. Why did he do THAT?", we aren't exactly expressing approval.

For example, we don't wonder if straight folks had a particular physical event or trauma or family pattern to account for their hetero-ness, but gay folks constantly endure these questions, and theories, and correctly, I think, see all the speculation as nothing but repeated statements that they are deviant. And if I am found having sex with a Fluffy the German Shepherd, questions would damn well be asked!! Suspects, are, after all, brought in for.....questioning. A hanging curve, that one.

I don't mean to say that question-asking is a primary mechanism for enforcing compliance, but it is one of many. Like music, like dancing, like overt reward and punishment, language both relies on the integrity of the tribe, and provides a mechanism for extending custom, knowledge and states of consciousness.

Talking about "mind" is just another language-trick to make us behave. I know, I know...repetitive from the last two posts. A generous Alert Reader gives me:

"It's all in his mind".

Wow!!! I'm right!!! Perfectly equivalent to "Good tribe members don't act that way". And with a delicious snarky quality!!

I come at all this as a person with a brain that has been dinged in a specific way (not badly, BTW) and I see some signs of that damage in my transactions with the world. I don't think I would say that I have a damaged mind, though. Were I to take up with Fluffy the German Shepherd, or start robbing banks or babbling endlessly about arcane topics, then I would say that something has happened to my mind and other folks would agree -- his mind isn't what it was, they might say. Or, he's out of his mind. They would not refer to my brain. Perhaps in reflection, at later thought, and so on, the connection to a damaged brain might be made. Technical types - the OTs, the neuro docs, the psychometricists would immediately skip the whole mind thing and go straight to brain, which is good by me. I want them thinking about the brain, where they can maybe be helpful.

Incidentally, I have never heard that anyone had a "damaged mind". I'm sure it has been said, but I haven't heard that specific phrase. Odd. Well, maybe not so odd; maybe we recognize more about how "mind" is used than we let on.

Like so many damaged others, I am determined to show that my damaged brain does not put me outside the tribe, and into the realm of "mind" talk. A lot of very interesting thought about the nature of "mind" is in autism and Asperger groups. Smart folks, VERY highly motivated to understand why all this talk of "mind" is just so damn nasty.

So, I really am OK, right??? Oh, oh. A question. Well, I guess I know where that leaves me.