Category: bill
- Labels: bill, cannabis, economy, government
âSo Bill, what are you doing for your thesis ..?â
âStudying how people can be easily misinformed ..like deceptive advertising, that sort of thing.â
âOh, so you can devise better methods of propaganda ..â
âNo, so we can teach better methods of detecting it ..â
- Labels: bill, ignorance, philosophy
- Labels: bill, perspective, pollution
âThe natural progression
Is the coming of your age
But they cover it with shame
And turn it into rageâ
- Labels: bill, preconceptions
I wouldnât ordinarily be writing about the situation in Afghanistan, but since I am familiar with one of their chief exports, hashish ..I have been following the war kind of closely. I think thereâs a story here. Or some half-baked ideas. I can never tell. But I was wondering, since when is it the role of army generals to build stable communities when all theyâve been trained to do throughout history is knock them down. So now weâve put them in charge of âsocial engineeringâ ..a practice we abhor in the west ..and rightly so. It doesnât lead to âparticipatoryâ government. Instead, it contributes to feelings of helplessness by replacing traditional customs with circumstances that the local population had no hand in creating ..and over which they have no control.
It wasnât long ago that psychologists considered memory to be a single-thread of stimulus-response associations; strengthened by repetition. What happened between the time information was entered and retrieved was terra incognito. Memory was commonly thought to be a passive record of events. Once information was stored, it became a reliable part of memory. It was always there; forgetting was blamed on a failure of retrieval. These principles of memory no longer apply. They fail to explain clinical reports of patients with aphasia or Alzheimerâs. Aphasia patients, for instance, can usually remember current events, but they forget long-term information such as the meaning of words or the names of familiar objects. On the other hand, Alzheimerâs patients can usually remember long-term information, such as the meaning of words, but they forget recent events such as a visit by a relative or their arrival at the clinic. These observations suggest different types of memory at work. Some temporarily hold events in our immediate surroundings while others preserve them on a more lasting basis.
Memory is now considered to be like a multi-level interchange. It has many locations, and each location has itâs own shelf-life. Instead of being a passive record of events, memory is more like an active participant constructing events. When listening to someone speak, for instance, sound enters sensory storage, which has finite capacity for registering immediate impressions, but decays within milliseconds ..allowing just enough time for the sound to be parsed into phonemes. Phonemes are transferred to short-term memory where sentences are constructed and their meaning identified. Meaning is then encoded and transferred to long-term memory based on its perceived informative-value (feelings, relevance, consequences, etc). Although long-term memory is what we traditionally think of as durable memory; it is not as reliable as once thought. Instead of being a passive record of things past, it is more like an active construction-site, integrating and revising things past, present and future (predicted). Dr. Elizabeth Loftus offers compelling evidence for this when she writes about the effect of interrogation and publicity on eyewitness testimony. Sheâs a good read on the state-of-the arts, if youâre interested.
Presented at a seminar in ~> Cognitive science
Stephen Hawkings recently said that any space aliens we are likely to encounter would be nomadic in nature. They will be traveling through interstellar space, going from one galactic replenishment opportunity to the next. He says itâs best we avoid contact with them. Extraterrestrials, arriving on Earth, would lead to a scenario not unlike Christopher Columbus landing in the new world. As I recall, it did not go well for the indigenous people of the new world. Apparently Dr. Hawking believes that self-preserving behaviour is selected for by evolution throughout the universe, as it is here on Earth. I, on the other hand, do not have a clue.
Los Angeles, CA
An immigration rally began peacefully. The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. When police in riot gear arrived and attempted to deny people that right, some took a stand to protect their rights. Then it turned less peaceful ..giving police the authority to forcefully disperse people.
A police helicopter hovers above ..a voice over the loudspeaker gives the order to âdisperse or be arrestedâ. Police in riot gear charge ..unarmed citizens flee ..some are trampled and beaten ..a peaceful assembly turns into chaos ..bullets fly. This was the scene at Macarthur Park in Los Angeles May 1st 2009 ..but my mind is also receiving images from 1969 ~ Peopleâs Park, Berkeley ..and they donât look much different. Furthermore, Iâm experiencing the same feelings of revulsion that I felt then ..and I’m not the only one ..those early images were burned into the psyche of nearly all the school-age children of my generation. It occurs to me that the âclass of 2010 is graduating next month ..after attending all four years of high school ..during wartime. Experiencing a culture at war, at this age ..is something you never forget. It becomes part of you ..like the Vietnam War is part of me. I have a built-in mistrust of government ..ongoing problems with authority ..and an uncertain career in âconspiracy theoryâ. History repeats itself, not only when government leaders ignore it ..but also when their minds become so scripted by it ..they canât do anything different.
TREE SHREW
It is interesting for me to learn how much the tree shrew can tell us about human nature. They were one of the first primates on the evolutionary branch leading to humans. Neuro-anatomical studies reveal that they were also the first primate to evolve a highly elaborate and differentiated visual system. Psychological tests show that this development gave rise to the ability to perform two tasks with equal skill: 1) focusing attention on interesting features (while filtering out irrelevant information) and 2) swiftly shifting attention to other interesting (or alarming) features in the environment.
We take these contributions for granted now, but both abilities were not equally present in mammals before the tree shrew. It is an adaptation that had survival value, allowing them to track prey without losing sight of their predators â a trick of nature that makes them equally suited to act as hunters, as well as survive being hunted as prey. We appreciate these contributions when something goes wrong, resulting in one form of attention deficit or another. I think we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these little beings. They mark the beginning of neocortical evolution in man.
âThe meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence which is perceived is rapidly forgotten and the memory is then for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.â ~ J. Sachs, 1967.
In the 1960âs, psychologists broke away from the long-standing traditions of behaviorism, and the field of cognitive psychology emerged. This act of secession was inspired by advances in fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics and linguistics. In the area of language development, psychologists adopted linguistic principles, introduced by Noam Chomsky, as a method for measuring verbal learning and behavior. These principles were more consistent with natural observations of language development. Chomskyâs model recognizes that language is expressed on at least two different levels ~ a âsurface structureâ, representing the audible/visible properties of a sentence (i.e. morphemes and syntax) ~ and a âdeep structureâ, representing the underlying semantic relationships conveyed by a sentence.
What they found is that the deep structure of a sentence is what people retain. Surface-structure is purged within milliseconds and no longer available for recall. The resulting memory is not a literal transcript of written or spoken language. It is more like a coded network of related concepts and ideas derived from the original sentence, as well as from the past experience of the listener. What we come away with is a feeling of resonance and familiarity, based largely on beliefs and experience ..and not necessarily the meaning intended by the speaker.
- Labels: bill, cognition, communication, language, psychology
Presented at seminar in language learning
- Labels: bill, language, psychology
Chomsky’s review of Skinnerâs Verbal Behavior has been hailed as the most influential document in the history of psychology. This is especially true in the field of language development.
Presented at seminar in language learning
- Labels: bill, language, psychology
âBecause a dairy cow has an unequaled digestive process which is enhanced by cosmic life-giving forces in her hooves and horns that enable the nitrogen in her manure to rekindle life within the earth.â
âWhen vintners dig up the horns six months later, they find the manure transformed into a dark, rich, moist substance that smells surprisingly sweet and earthy. Then they mix it with water and spray it over the crops like regular fertilizer.â
- Labels: agriculture, agro industry, bill
âThe triumph of man was due entirely to the female of our species.â ~ Harold Klawans MD
âAnxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.â Arthur Somers Roche
Anxiety is a feeling of dread or apprehension that occurs for no apparent reason. It is distinguished from fear because it occurs in situations where there are no outward signs of eminent danger. It becomes debilitating when it grows out-of-proportion to ordinary events in life. Anxiety is deceptive. First it focuses attention, and then it clamps the brain into rigidity by obsessively replaying past traumas
The arousal/suppression cycle is a clinical model for anxiety. It says anxiety is a case of âgeneralized punishment conditioningâ, where the effects are felt in a wide range of circumstances. Feelings of arousal are adaptive in situations that present a challenge or adventure. Arousal ceases to be adaptive when it becomes a source of punishment in response to a challenge or adventure. According to the model, anxiety is a learned response. It is conditioned by the traumatic outcomes of past actions. It becomes debilitating when the feelings of trauma become overgeneralized and pervasive. Its effect is to suppress and inhibit a wider range of activity than what lead to the trauma in the first place.
âO.K.
Just a little pinprick.
There’ll be no more aaaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick.
Can you stand up?
I do believe it’s working, good.
That’ll keep you going through the show
Come on it’s time to goâ
- Labels: bill, fear, psychology
- Labels: bill, capitalism, economy, education, enlightenment
October 14, 2007
Iâm sitting in the hot springs, having another late night discussion with Gregg, a psychiatrist from Ann Arbor (U of M). Heâs doing research for a book heâs writing that claims that we humans are not the most intelligent species on earth. At best, we come in a distant third .. whales and dolphins are much smarter. In fact, he says jokingly, whales evolved wireless Internet millions of years before Al Gore .. they communicate with each other by sending âsonar messagesâ that can be heard by other whales in any ocean on the planet. Back at the cabin, he shows me 8 by 10 glossy photos of a whaleâs brain. Pretty impressive I say (once he explains what Iâm looking at). They have a much larger, and more convoluted, cerebral cortex than we do. I ask him if thatâs because they have much more body area to control. He says no, very little of it is âmotor cortexâ .. those functions were distributed to areas outside the whaleâs brain a long long time ago. Now humans, he believes, operate from a much lower part of the brain .. whatâs known as the âreptilian brainâ .. and thatâs what drives ourâ rational brainâ .. not the other way around .. as we would like to think. He goes on to tell me that these lower brain areas assign âaddressesâ that link âpowerful emotionsâ to information entering memory. Thatâs why we remember what other people tell us much better than what we read in books. I sit fascinated by all of this. Afterwards, he gives me a book called âUp from Dragonsâ by Dorion Sagan, the son of the late Carl Sagan. I remember reading âDragons of Edenâ in college and was fascinated then too. Gregg has been one of the most interesting parts of this trip. I tell him so the next morning, and we hug before he disappears down highway one. I must remember to send him a copy of âDefending the Cavewomanâ when I get home.
Overhead, crows are shouting ..and drowning out the music on my deck. I look up and see them clustered in the trees and scenes from the Hitchcock movie âThe Birdsâ flash by and I feel a twinge of âcan that happen hereâ. Something tells me no so I howl back at them. Thereâs a momentary pause as they lift off .. cluster in another group of trees ..and crank up the volume. Crows are not my bird of choice to take with me if I ever had to live on a deserted island. I start reading an article in the news about future space colonies on the moon ..and mistake the term âreconnaissance orbiterâ for ârenaissance orbiterâ. For some reason, I think the word renaissance is more fitting. Then a movie scene from early-childhood comes to mind (from before we walked on the moon) .. where one of the astronauts goes crazy ..breaks away from the pack ..crosses over to the âsunny sideâ and immediately disintegrates and turns into a skeleton. I cringe when I think about packing the kids and the dog and moving there. Now I’m worried that everything I know comes from either the movies or television shows.
- Labels: bill, moon, perspective, superstition
Admittedly, Pluto is a fringe dweller. It orbits at the outer-most edge of the solar system. Lately, however ..itâs been seen passing in and out of mainstream consciousness .. like the punks and the freaks we see in high school. Now, we may dissâ Pluto, and even question itâs right to exist as a planet ..but we canât deny its presence. Itâs there ..way out there ..twisted and possibly trans-gender .. but definitely there. And itâs not alone. It travels with a swarming pack of fellow Plutinos and other planetoids we still havenât been able to identify. We know one of its peers is Neptune ..or what the early Vedic Seers called Varuna ..the goddess of the oceans. Another companion is Tau ..or what the local tribesmen call Quaoar .. a formless, genderless force that brought into existence some of the cosmic beings we know as Father Sky, Mother Earth and Grandfather Sun. Iâd say Pluto lives in a pretty respectable neighborhood. I wouldnât dismiss it as a backwater space entity any longer.
- Labels: bill, cosmos, humour, paradigm shift, perspective
The ice age is melting and the Arctic is turning into water. On some days temperatures can hover around 70 degrees fahrenheit ..turning ice shelves into tropical zones. For me, this conjures up images of smooth sailing, sunbathing on sandy beaches and swimming in emerald lagoons. But Iâm a fucking dreamer who needs to see things the way they are. What this really means is greater opportunity for fortune-seekers looking for trade routes to China. What is now home to Eskimos, who still hunt whales and live in igloos ..is about to become an international trade zone ..occupied by oil barons ..land developers ..and casino operators. I have the feeling we are looking at the next wild frontier. Now I picture myself sailing through the North West Passage like it was California during the gold rush ..shooting polar bears instead of buffaloes.
- Labels: bill, Culture, earth, ecology, environment, extinction, world
A model for the fabric of the mind has been tentatively settled-on. Itâs one that characterizes whatâs inside my head as a 3-dimensional network of delicately connected instances of prior experience and feeling. Under ordinary circumstances, incoming sensory and verbal events produce ripples that spread out over this fabric, like stones on a pond, activating network-connections until a clear mental representation is formed. However, when something goes wrong, and thereâs a disturbance in the fabric, activation may become ampâd, unfettered and diffuse ..compounding insubstantial phenomena until, what may have started out as a gentle hummingbird, for example .. becomes a ferocious beast. Sometimes I think itâs only a matter of degree between clarity and delusion ..especially when I consider how many times I mistook a perfectly innocent remark as hostility.
- Labels: bill, cognition, mental health, neuro, psychology
I wake up with badly congested information-channels ~ I see shifting patterns of different colors entering an open window ~ and watch the walls dissolve into orange dots before they reach the ceiling. I sit up and swing my feet over the edge of a pillowy sensation I comfortably rely on as my bed ~ but now the floor has dropped out of sight. I count the number of times this has happened and figure the odds of landing with both feet on the floor are in my favor. I decide to play it safe ~ take one step at a time ~ stopping frequently to make sure I am where Iâm accustomed to be, and not where I appear to be, because I know my senses are deceiving me. Downstairs, scattered waves of light travel in every direction ~ except through the channels of my visual receptors. I find something likely to be my CD player and punch it in the vicinity of the on/off switch. A punk rock CD, left in there from the night before, starts to blare. The light waves begin bouncing to the rhythm, and, like little drops of colored water ~ they enter into the proper channels and float down streams of sensory-energy ~ until they fall into pools of stored-memory ~ and form the image of what Iâm supposed to see. Like adjusting the focus of a camera lens ~ it all becomes clear. I drop to my knees and pay homage to the deities of music ~ then crank up the volume and go in the kitchen to prepare myself a thermos of coffee. Looks like itâs going to be a good day.
- Labels: bill, music, neuro, psychology
High above
on a switch back trail.
Drinking ice cold glacier ale.
Thereâs a half frozen lake
at twelve thousand feet
with smooth boulders to sit on
in a cathedral of jagged peaks.
The sky falls into shape
Water rises up
to fill the space
and lap the shore
rising and falling
always full
always finding
a level of itâs own.
In a place so simple and pure
shards of bitter memory
form on my tongue
I spit them out and think
Those are what make things taste
so complicated and unclean.
- Labels: bill, nature, poetry, psychology