Brain as Composter VII

Re: Brain as Composter VI:

Two more qualities of 'slow thinking' are poetic sensibility and mindfulness.

About poetic sensibility, Claxton says,

"poetic sensibility has the ability to reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways. By allowing ourselves to become absorbed in some present experience without any sense of seeking or grasping at all, we can be reminded of aspects of life that may have been eclipsed by more urgent business, and of ways of knowing and seeing that are, perhaps, more intimate and less egocentric (...) There is a kind of knowing which is essentially indirect, sideways, allusive and symbolic; which hints and evokes, touches and moves, in ways that resist explication. And it is accessed not through earnest manipulation of abstraction, but through leisurely contemplation of the particular.(...) For a person whose apprehension is under the spell of this attitude, the immediate context commands his interest so completely that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it (...) One slips away from self-concern and preoccupation into the sheer presence of the thing, the scene, the sound itself."

He quotes Kafka:

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

He quotes Rilke:

"If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost conciousness, wakefulness and knowing."

It's hard to get through life without visiting this sensibility. It restores one to oneself, to one's own "nature." You can bask in it - you can roll around at your own feet if you want, interpreting it physically and sensorially and personally. From it you can write your own poems and paint your own pictures and sing your own songs and play your own music and create your own dramas. All these expressions will bring you closer to your own selfness. It's all good. But I would add, do not inhibit the development of your own capacity for critical thinking either.

Claxton's fourth quality is mindfulness:

"The fourth manner of paying attention which I want to describe in this chapter is a way of seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions. It is called mindfulness. The extent to which the world-as-perceived is a mirror of our preconceptions and our preoccupations (...) is easy to underestimate. It takes an effort to see what is happening, because our beliefs are dissolved in the very organs we use to sense."

He follows with an example of tasting saliva that is in your mouth, noting its pleasant quality, then spitting some into a glass and retasting it, noting how one's perception of it immediately changes into something less positive.

"The spit hasn't changed, only the interpretation."

He goes on to talk about aging and mindfulness:

"Being 'old' is not just a biological phenomenon; how one goes about 'being old' depends on one's (largely unconscious) image of what it is like, what it means, to be old, and this in turn reflects a whole raft of both cultural assumptions and individual experiences. Ellen Langer and colleagues at Harvard U. have examined the effect on elderly people of their own vicarious experiences, as children, of ways of being old. They reasoned that children may unconsciously pick up images of old age from their own grandparents - which they might then recapitulate as they themselves get older. Specifically, they surmised that the younger their grandparents were when children first got to know them, the more 'youthful' would be the image of old age that the children would unconsciously absorb, and the more positively they would therefore approach their own ageing. (...) it was found that those elderly people who had lived with a grandparent when they themselves were toddlers were rated as more alert, more active and more independent than those whose first experience of living with a grandparent had not occurred till they were teenagers (...) it looks as if the ways in which different people age depends quite directly on the assumptions and beliefs they have picked up in their own childhoods about what it is to be old."

He talks about pain and mindfulness:

"The unconscious assumptions that people stir into their experience are often hard to alter, but sometimes they can be changed just by a suggestion, especially if it comes from some kind of an authority figure. The experience of pain, for instance, can be dramatically altered, in normal conscious subjects, simply by telling them to think of it differently. When a group of people who had volunteered to suffer some mild electric shocks were told to think of the shocks as "new physiological sensations," they were less anxious, and had lower pulse rates, than those who were not so instructed. In another study, hospital patients who were about to undergo major surgery were encouraged to realise how much the experience of pain depends on the way people interpret it. They were reminded, for example, that a bruise sustained during a football match, or a finger cut while preparing dinner for a large group of friends, would not hurt as much as similar injuries in less intense situations. And they were shown analogous ways of reinterpreting the experience of being in hospital so that it was less threatening. Patients who were given this training took fewer pain relievers and sedatives after their operations, and tended to be discharge sooner, than an equivalent group that was untrained.
These experiments demonstrate how other people may be able to rescue us from what Langer refers to as 'premature cognitive committments' - help us become aware of the assumptions that we had dissolved in perception, and contemplate alternative ways of construing the situation."

My bolds.

"Mindfulness involves observing one's own experience carefully enough to be able to spot any misconceptions that may inadvertently have crept in. There are a number of ways in which this quality of mindfulness towards the activity of our own minds can be cultivated, though all involve slowing down the onrush of mental activity, and trying to focus conscious awareness on the world of sensations, rather than jumping on the first interpretation that comes along and hurtling off in the direction of decision and action. Mindfulness can be taught directly, as a form of secular meditation, for example. (...) "The essence of the state is to 'be' fully in the present moment, without judging or evaluating it, without reflecting backwards on past memories, without looking forward to anticipate the future, as in anxious worry, and without attempting to 'problem-solve' or otherwise avoid any unplesant aspects of the immediate situation. In this state one is highly aware and focused on the reality of the present moment, 'as it is', accepting and acknowledging it is its full 'reality' without immediately engaging in discursive thought about it, without trying to work out how to change it, and without drifting off into a state of diffuse thinking focused on somewhere else or some other time.. The mindful state is associated with a lack of elaborative processing involving thoughts that are essentially about the currently experienced, its implications, further meanings, or the need for related action. Rather mindfulness involves direct and immediate experience of the present situation."(Jon Kabat-Zinn)"

......................................................

So, in summary, from Hemenway's article on permaculture we have the basic design principles combined into four pairs:

I. ECONOMY AND ELEGANCE:
1. "Do only what is necessary. Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them."
2. "Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions""

II. BALANCE
3. "Be redundant. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy."
4. "Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive."

III. RESILIENCE
5. "Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively."
6. "Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function."

IV. RECIPROCITY
7. "Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways."
8. "The gift must always move."

From Claxton's book we have the four slow ways of seeing:
1. Attentive Resonance
2. Focusing
3. Poetic Sensibility
4. Mindfulness

How they stacked up as being congruent with each other in my mind was as follows:

1. "Economy and Elegance" with poetic sensibility ("reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways");

2. "Balance" with focusing ("awareness" (like that in "attentive resonance", see below).."is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body" - this is a tough one to learn when everything in our culture has prompted/taught us to be externally directed);

3. "Resilience" with attentive resonance ("The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence" - another hard one when all exhortations are to keep an eye on "the Big Picture.");

4. "Reciprocity" with mindfulness ("seeing through one's own perceptual assumptions", not fall prey to "premature cognitive commitments" - in our culture, no one seems to care about this at all, except those who prefer to consider all things from a scientific perspective before unleashing them outward, as Burton reminds us in On Being Certain).

Next I want to highlight more from Claxton, his comparison/contrast of what he calls "D-mode" thinking ("D" is for deliberate) with slow, "undermind" thinking, the kind that is ongoing and one can peer into using his 4 "qualities." (I would call them "mind gardening tools.")

Brain as Composter VI

Building upon Brain as Composter V:

Time to turn our attention to Guy Claxton, who wrote a very elegant little book several years ago, called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (1997).

He's an educator, so I guess it's fair to say that he's worked with "nature" in the form of figuring out the best way to not just convey information into young minds, but to extract thinking from them. (It also does not surprise me to learn that he is apparently a practicing Buddhist.)

Chapter 11 is titled "Paying Attention"; in it he explores 4 different ways of 'slow seeing'.

1. Attentive Resonance:

"The habit of attending closely and patiently to the evidence, even - sometimes especially - to tiny, insignificant-looking shreds of evidence, is characteristic of skilled practitioners of a variety of arts, crafts and professions, prototypically the hunter. From a bent twig, a feather or a piece of excrement the expert hunter can recreate and animal, its age and state of health; and he does so in an apparently leisurely fashion in which these scraps of information are allowed to resonate, largely unconsciously, with his mental stock of lore and experience. You can't rush a tracker. Each detail, slowly attended to, is allowed to form a nucleus, an epicentre in the brain, around which associations and connotations gradually accrete and meld, if they will, into a rich, coherent picture of the animal and its passage. As Carlo Ginzburg, author of a fascinating essay on 'Clues', has surmised, the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the spoor of his quarry, may be engaged in the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race. Many other feats of vernacular connoisseurship - telling an ailing horse by the condition of its hocks, an impending storm by a change in the wind, a run of salmon by a scarcely perceptible ripple on the river, a hostile intent by a subtle narrowing of the eyes - are of the same kind. Each is an act of high intelligence, bringing to bear on the present a complex body of past knowledge, and accomplished by the eye, with little if any assistance from deliberate thought."

He could be describing clinical thinking in this passage. In fact he does:

"It is interesting to observe.. the changing context to medical diagnosis over the course of the last two hundred years. The process of detection and identification of disease these days is often devoid of this leisurely resonance of attentive observation with the working knowledge of a person's lifetime's experience. The modern general practitioner makes a succession of snap decisions as to either the nature of the disorder with which she is confronted, or what further objective, 'scientific' tests to order. She is now so rushed, and so enchanted (as we all are) with technology, and technological ways of thinking, that she generally prefers to trust a read-out from a machine over a considered clinical judgement. An instrument gives us 'real knowledge' about the patient, whereas the poor doctor on her own can offer nothing more substantial than an 'opinion'. Reliance on informed intuition seems increasingly 'subjective', risky and old-fashioned.(...)

Yet through out the history of medicine, the doctor has functioned more like the tracker or the detective than a technician."

I (often, usually, nearly uninterruptedly) feel a bit sad that my profession has decided to let go of this. For the most part, to sit and look and think and evaluate and wait and touch/handle/noodle tissue around and wait some more, in silence, or else while quietly chatting with a patient about some observation or perception they have about what they are sensing.. two people quietly thinking together out loud, while observing "nature" in the form of a nervous system that is malfunctioning somehow... this precious time to build a therapeutic relationship upon which everything transformative may actually hinge, is considered useless, unproductive, a waste of taxpayer's money within a health care system struggling to survive. This is the art of PT that has become all but lost. It certainly is not explored or encouraged or passed on during clinical training, and all economic factors weigh in complete opposition to it.

The one (maybe the only) thing "nature" needs to do its job, is time. Good compost takes time. Natural processing takes time, and yes, it might seem like it would be a boring thing to pay attention to, but it also can be very relaxing and fascinating, depending on how you view it. And the act of observing closely, and in the process teaching one's patient how (especially for pain problems), can catalyze the process toward resolution somewhat, most of the time. This is, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of helping someone's conscious part of their nervous system improve a relationship they are having with the nonconscious parts of their nervous systems.

The next way of slow seeing Claxton describes is focusing.

2. Focusing:

"The second fruitful way of paying attention is similar, except awareness is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one's own body. The ability to "listen to the body" is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety of personal puzzles and predicaments. This ability has been dubbed focusing by the American psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. Back in the 1960's, Gendlin and colleagues at the University of Chicago were involved in large-scale research projects designed to discover why it was that some people undergoing psychotherapy made good progress while others did not, no matter who the therapist was or what she did. After analysing thousands of hours of tape-recorded sessions, Gendlin uncovered the magic ingredient, which could be picked up even in the first one or two sessions, and which could be used to predict whether the patient would make progress or not. It was not anything to do with the school or the technique of the therapist, nor, apparently, with the content of what was talked about. It was the client's spontaneous tendency to relate their experience in a certain way."

This is just like the situation we find ourselves in as manual therapists. We have people in pain, no really slick way to catalogue them or differentiate them; it barely matters what we do to them, what matters most is how they respond.

"The successful clients were those who spontaneously tended to stop talking from time to time; to cease deliberately thinking, analyzing, explaining and theorizing, and to sit quietly while, it seemed, they paid attention to an internal process that could not yet be clearly articulated. They were listening to something inside themselves that they did not yet have words for. They acted as if they were waiting for something rather nebulous to take form, and groping for exactly the right way to express it. Often this period of silent receptivity would last for around 30 seconds; sometimes much longer. And when they did speak, struggling to give voice to what it was they had dimly sensed, they spoke as though their dawning understanding was new, fresh, and tentative - quite different from the tired old recitation of grievance or guilt which frequently preceded it."

In my world, which is almost a perfect overlap but not quite (because I do not make any sort of regular practice out of exploring the emotional side of peoples' lives), the people who are able to change their pain output are those who learn to sense their bodies in new ways that are not painful; they manage to set aside their habitual responses to their stream of body angst/pain and look (deliberately, long, thoroughly, painstakingly) for something ELSE to sense instead.

"Gendlin called this hazy shadow which they were attending to and allowing slowly to come to fruition, a felt sense, and it was quite different both from a string of thoughts and from the experience of a particular emotion or feeling. It seemed to be the inner ground out of which thoughts, images and feelings would emerge if they were given time and unpremeditated attention. It appeared that many people lacked the ability, and perhaps the patience, to allow things to unfold in this way. Instead they would, in their haste for an answer, pre-empt this process of evolution, creating a depiction of the problem which told them nothing new, and which gave no sense of progress or relief."

What Claxton refers to as Gendlin's "hazy shadow", felt sense, inner ground etc., I've often sensed merely as a void, or maybe even "the" void. It requires a bit of courage to walk straight into at first, because to navigate it, one must give up completely to it, suspend every sense for a time, give up "certainty." It is like a dense cognitive fog; you can no longer see or sense the usual "ground." All ordinary cues vanish. New ones begin to appear shortly, however, for one who is determined and patient and trusts the process, which is to remove the brakes and let one's nervous system start over again while remaining completely conscious. (To link back to Burton's book, this is possibly the initial discomfort of uncertainty, a voluntary suspension of the "feeling of certainty" that one must learn to feel comfortable with if one is to become a true critical scientific thinker/checker/tester of ideas about what might or might not constitute "reality.")

Two of the finest tools there are for reducing physical pain are sensing and movement, (or moving and sensing, take your pick). Just be deliberate, fearless, kind, slow, adaptive and responsive to yourself. But determined. One must be consciously determined, no matter how long it seems to take. Yet, simultaneously, one must never convey determination or impatience to one's own non-conscious pain processing. It's quite the balancing act, but once learned it will pay off over a whole life-time. Everyone needs to learn to be able to access their tracker ability to get through physical existence with less rather than more of the attendant suffering that is inescapable from time to time, the price we pay for being embedded within physicality. It's in there for free - we evolved using it - we can dig it out again for use on occasion, maybe by meditating..

My profession should be one of the main ones out there, teaching this skill set to those we treat, but alas, in PT training most of us were never taught that it was important to begin with - like most things in life and learning however, it's never too late.

More to come from Claxton's book, and a tie-in with Burton's book, I promise, no matter how tangential this post may have become.

Brain as composter V

In reference to Brain as Composter IV:

The final pair of design principles that Hemenway set out in his article have to do with reciprocity:

7. Look both ways before crossing. Everything works both ways. If the bank gives you 30 years to pay for your home, you give the system (the bank) 30 years of your life in indentured servitude. If energy can come in through a window, it can fly out a window. If it takes a lot of heat and time to warm a mass, it can give off heat for a long time. Death of individual cells is necessary for the life of other cells. What goes up must come down. Got it?

8.The gift must always move. This is the universal law of gifts. To survive and be well and joyous, we must transform and give away all gifts which come to us. This is how species of an ecosystem coexist. I accept the gift of oxygen from the trees and other plants and return it as carbon dioxide. We violate this principle when we accept food from the earth and do not return our urine and feces, but instead use it to contaminate water. To return a gift without transforming it to your nature is to reject it - it is an affront to the love of the universe.

I don't have any direct comparisons (at least none that I can think of just now) with the nervous system for these two features, other than perhaps the relationship the CNS has with the PNS (usually) or the relationship neurons and glia have with one another, or the relationships various parts of the accretion we call the human brain has with all the creature parts it evolved through in its evolutionary history.. and still has intact and functional..

Some might think, what about the body? Doesn't the nervous system have a reciprocal relationship with the body? Well, yes it does: if you had a hypothetical human "body" that you could stand before you, and you could remove all but one tissue system with the click of a mouse, (as you can sort of do at www.visiblebody.com ), and you clicked away everything but the bones and meat, yeah.. you'd still have a "body"... but it wouldn't work without a nervous system to run it - it would quickly fall over, die and rot.

If you clicked away everything but the nervous system, you'd still be able to recognize the person, the person would still have height and breadth and shape, but that two percent that was left would seem pretty insubstantial and wouldn't work very well without an energy source or its mesodermal "overcoat" to help it preserve its temperature. With no living struts or bungee cords to hold it up, its "mayday" output would go nowhere and do nothing; it would collapse to the floor, all its 72 km of nerves in a heap of tangled threads and cords, under the weight of a brain that would fall down plop onto the top of the pile as the spinal cord collapsed with no spinal column to tether itself inside of or maintain in an upright position. With no oxygen or energy coming into it from lungs and metabolism, it would quickly go unconscious and die, turn into a puddle of goo.

So yes, there is a basic survival relationship here. However, I think the relationship the nervous system has with the (mesodermal) body is only one of the large number of relationships it maintains within itself and its various levels of function, and I want to stay on track here - the post series is intended to be about the relationship or "reciprocity" between the unconscious brain and the conscious brain.

In the next post I'll start bringing material here based on Guy Claxton's book, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, and continue the composter metaphor.

Brain as composter IV

Here I am on post four already, still building the case for looking at the unconscious/non-conscious as metaphoric garden-building composter/compost. So, in reference to Brain as Composter III:

Hemenway says resilience is the main feature of the next pair of design features of permaculture. Here is his point 5:

"Work with edges. That is where the action is. Straight lines have far less edge than waves. You know this instinctively. People gravitate to the edges, like a beach, the forest edge, the side of the path, or the living room wall (where we put our furniture).
Nature amplifies edges, as in your lungs or kidneys, when it wants to amplify energy transfer; it reduces surface edges, as in a dewdrop or a turtle shell, when it wants to limit transactions. There appears to be no limit to the extent that knowledge and awareness of edge effects can improve on a design. Study of edges in nature willimprove our understanding and ability to use this principle."

Hemenway again:

"Encourage diversity. Diversity here is intended to be diversity of relations between things, and not just a bunch of different structures assembled. A garden with an assortment of different plants randomly arranged will not be nearly as productive as one in which the plants are arranged as co-productive companions.
Designed diversity is a concept I find difficult to discuss separately from its intimate relationship to redundancy and edge effects. Diversity of pathways is redundancy. Diversity allows both stacking and repeating of function."

This is Angevine:

"The human nervous system is a hierarchy, culminating in the brain, of 100 billion or more neurons of 10,000 types, 1-10 trillion neuroglial cells, 100 trillion chemical synapses, 160,000 kn of neuronal processes, thousands of neuronal clusters and fibers tracts, hundreds of functional regions, dozens of functional subsystems, 7 central regions, and 3 main divisions. All of these parts form a coherent, bodily pervasive, diversified, complex epithelium with interdependent connectivity of neurons, mostly neither sensory nor motor but anatomically and functionally intermediate."

So, here we have a single epithelium (or "edge") that has permeated throughout an entire organism (which it built with a earlier kind of cell offspring), and has diversified into 10,000 types of neuronal cells. From Six Crucial Properties of Nervous Tissue, we see this:

"The nervous system is an epithelium, with cells close by and little space between. Far more complex than other epithelia, with flattened cuboidal or columnar cells in single or stratified sheets covering surfaces or lining spaces, the nervous system is a supereptithelium: a huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with billions of pieces of varying size (1 to over 150 um) length (1 um to 1 meter) and, in some cases, an extraordinarily complex and beautiful configuration. Electron micrographs show that its pieces fit together, precisely and intimately, with little space left over, an evident benefit for cell communication."

Nature took this 'edge' and folded it into a roundish hemispheres.

More to come.

Brain as Composter III

In reference to Brain as Composter II:

In this post the comparison between design principles in permaculture and how nature built a nervous system continue.

The next pair of design principles for good permaculture as laid out by Hemenway are to do with balance.

"3. Be redundant. "Repeat function," Bill would say. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is how my grandmother put it. Look at any nutrient cycle or watershed. There is always a variety of pathways by which an ecosystem can proceed about its business. In nature, this is done so that each organism occupies a unique niche in an ecosystem; yet if any one species is removed, everything it does for the whole will be accomplished by other organisms. A system's capacity for storage and resilience stems from its redundancy. It is the understanding of this principle, for example, that reveals that growing our food in monocultures, where everything hinges on the success of one species, is stupid and self-destructive."

Here is Angevine:

5. The Purposefulness of Neural Components

Every part of the nervous system has at least one function, often many more. Small parts of the CNS may play crucial roles, as in the extensive distribution and profound influence of axons from inconspicuous brain centers. The locus ceruleus ("blue spot") on each side of the fourth ventricle contains about 12,000 large melanin-pigmented neurons. These synthesize norepinephrine and release it in the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and almost every other part of the CNS. Electrically, they are almost silent in sleep, hypoactive in wakefulness, and hyperactive in watchful or startling situations. They serve vigilance and attention to novel stimuli. They contribute, indirectly but no less crucially, to perceptual and cognitive functions. By contrast, immense structures make large but expensive contributions, as in the cognitive and motor abilities afforded us by the billions of neurons in our cerebral and cerebellar cortices.

Hemenway:

4. Check your scale. Design and act within an appropriate size frame. Or, as Granny said,"Don't bite off more than you can chew." This is why permaculture starts at the backyard and works out.. to keep on a scale commensurate with our understanding. We are only responsible for the next step in whatever we are doing, and that step is always right before us, within our reach.
Issues of scale are tricky and require continuous attention to the consequences of a chosen scale. Small may be beautiful, but smallest is not always optimal. Some things can be done well only on a large scale (e.g., manufacture of photographic film), whereas others rapidly deteriorate with increasing scale (e.g., food preparation). The only cultural tools our society provides for evaluating scale are economic; these often lead to the selection of scales that are counterproductive, inefficient, and destructive.

(The reference to photographic film shows how long ago this article was published.)

Angevine:

1. Ubiquity

With 100,000 miles of nerve fibers the nervous system rivals the vascular system. Both pervade the body and function in harmony. By nerve impulses or circulating red and white cells, glucose, hormones and immune principles, they integrate body activity, protect the body, enhance its performance to met stress or demand, promote its growth and nutrition, and maintain its tone and vigor. The trunk and branches of both systems reflect body form. If either system and no other part of a person were visible, he or she would be recognizable. Density of innervation varies as the value of parts to sensory discrimination or motor control. In well-innervated areas (lips, fingertips) stimuli are sharply discriminated as to modality, intensity, and location, but in sparsely innervated areas (flanks, legs) these are less defined. Similarly, muscles vary in the ratio of motor neurons to muscle fibres. The higher the ratio, the more precise the control of the muscle and the movement it serves (a motor neuron may excite 2000 muscle fibers in a limb muscle or as few as 5 in extrinsic ocular muscles.

More to come.

Brain as Composter II

In reference to Brain as Composter:

Here are the four "pairs" of eight principles of design mentioned by Dan Hemenway in his article over two decades ago. They were likely noodled around somewhat in order to present well, and in alignment with 'ancient philosophy' on harmoniousness, and so they do.

On economy: "

1. Do only what is necessary. This involves humility in realizing that our understanding is limited. It means a respect for the natural way in which things happen.
This is what the radical farmer Fukuoka means when he says that his is a "do-nothing" philosophy and why he always questions the reason for every task. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Conservation is always the first resource of "doing nothing." In its simplest terms, it is putting on a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat. As a state of mind, that's a fair beginning. In the deeper application, conservation means honoring the naural cycles, not breaking them apart which results in "waste."
Conservation involves passive restraint from change or disruption of natural systems and active participation within them."

I remember the basic organizing principle as written by Angevine in Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (here's a link), centralization, third one in:

"3. Centralization

The key feature of the nervous system is centralization. It offers few circuits for local interactions of body parts. The CNS is almost always involved even if the distance, as from thumb to index finger, is slight. Intercession of the brain and spinal cord ensures integrated and coordinated activity.

Exceptions are instructive. The local cutaneous response to irritating stimuli (raking a blunt probe over the skin) has three components: local reddening (vasodilation from injury), wheal formation (transient edema from tissue fluid extrusion), and ensuing vasodilation (flare) with lowered thresholds and increased sensitivity to pain (pinprick). The flare and hyperalgesia represent an axon reflex. Nociceptive (pain) nerve endings are activated by substances released by injured tissue cells, and nerve impulses are conducted a short way centrally along nociceptive axons and then distally over branches of these axons to nearby arterioles, causing them to dilate. Advanced or primitive (it is sluggish, starting in about 20 sec. and developing fully in around 3 min), this reflex involves local nerve fibers only, not the CNS.

The "triple response" illustrates three concepts. Pain receptors sense chemical, as well as mechanical and thermal stimuli. Their sensitivity is increased by substances accumulating in the damaged area. Their response includes a neuroeffector component. They release substances (peptides) that initiate further events, providing further protection and favoring local tissue repair.

Studies in invertebrate neural systems show extensive local control of visceral function. Exceptions to central control are also found in the mammalian ANS. Near-normal interaction of bowel segments persists in the absence of CNS innervation. Sensory fibers from the gut exert feedback in intramural autonomic ganglia on visceral motor neurons regulating smooth muscle in the intestinal wall. The nervous system has pattern generators, both central and peripheral: systems with cellular, synaptic, and network properties (cyclic firing rhythms, reciprocal inhibition of cell pairs, leader and follower cells) that provide automated mechanisms for generating rhythmic movements (breathing, walking) or periodic activities (sleeping, waking). Regulated by neural (sensory feedback, volitional override) or neuroendocrine influences, pattern generators are pithy examples of neural endogenous activity." Do more with less would seem to be the message here."

Back to Hemenway, on elegance:

"2. Multiply purposes. Never do anything for only one reason. "Stack functions" is the way Bill Mollison expresses it.
In nature, all design is elegant. My hand is clearly designed for grasping. But it also serves as a heat radiator for my body, a weapon (fist), a signal device, a bodily support surface (as in pushups), a sensory organ, a carrier of affection (caresses), and an implement of communication (fingers in sand).
If we perceive several functions of an object of decision, then many more will be present. If we perceive only one function, then fear, greed, or our egos are in the way."

This property reminds me of Angevine's 8th principle, chemical message coding:

"8. Chemical Message Coding

The basic function of the nervous system, from which all others derive, is communication, performed (with unsung neuroglial support) by neurons. It depends on special electrical, structural,and chemical properties of these diversified cells with their long processes, on their exploitation and refinement of two basic protoplasmic properties, irritability and conductivity, on their external and internal neuronal morphology featuring multipolar shape and integrative design, almost infinite modes of dendritic and axonal branching, widespread, diversified connections, and specialized organelles, and on their use of chemical substances to encode, deliver and decipher messages of their own and other neurons.

Neural circuits are chemically coded. Neuroanatomy encompasses interneuronal connections and also chemical mediators and transmitters. Neuroactive substances comprise neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and neurohormones. Their definition in contexts other than site of action, postsynaptic neuronal activity, and corelease of one or more additional neuroactive substances can be misleading. Neurotransmitters are small molecules acting swiftly, locally, and briefly on target cells. Neuromodulators are very small (peptides), regulating but not effecting transmission, and neurohormones are also small, with intrinsic activity mediated by neuronal and other cells, exerting slow, widespread, and enduring influence via the extracellular fluid or bloodstream.

Neurons releasing hormones are quasi-endocrine cells, liberating secretory products from axonal endings into the perivascular space to be conveyed to blood vessels and thence to target organs. The provincial concerns of neurophysiology and endocrinology have fused into neuroendocrinology, as psychoneuroimmunology has united psychobiology, molecular neurobiology, and immunology."

More to come.

Brain as composter

In reference to "On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD:

Now I remember where I first had this brain/compost idea, which is a recurring one... here is a link to an old thread on SomaSimple, Permaculture/Natural Brain Systems: "Eight Principles for Designing Natural Systems."

In this thread, which went on for several days (during a seasonal affective disorder episode in December 3 years ago, a good time to think about composting perhaps...) I compared an article I'd saved for a long time about permaculture called "Four Pairs: Eight Principles for Designing Natural Systems" by Dan Hemenway, and a book I was reading at the time called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.

The writing in both is so evocative I could easily see the parallels, or maybe I was just easily evoked in that state, but whatever, the two seemed to me to be a perfect fit. (Still do actually, even though it's summer.) Underlining all of this paralleling is the fact that what I work with, every day of my life, is the human being and human body; no matter how fancy he or she may have become, or separated from his or her physicality intellectually, a human being is and will always remain a bit of nature, comprised of 100 trillion or so cells.

What the heck. I'm going to bring the principles here, as a series of blog posts. No.. I'll do better, I'll bring the whole article here. Here is Dan Hemenway, from an article published in 1985 in a publication called Whole Earth Review, with excerpts from the introduction:

"I owe a special debt to my friend and teacher, Bill Mollison, whose coined word, "permaculture" I use to describe much of my own work. Bill's emphasis on human participation in the design process of nature fitted together for me the pieces I was gathering.

Working with these guidelines, I found that the patterns I observed fit within eight principles of design. None of these four pairs is likely to surprise anyone familiar with the wisdom within the various grounded religions and philosophies our species has articulated."

I think he's referring to yin and yang and all that.

"...we, especially those of us who are North Americans, rather routinely fail to observe them in our daily lives. I find their articulation helpful in evaluating my own lifestyle and seeking to correct my course.

While each of the principles is familiar in sense, if not practice, there is value in stating them together as part of a whole. That is perhaps the ninth principle: Everything is part of the whole."

I wouldn't disagree with that.

"Problems which occur together often have common solutions. Ecologies are efficient and durable when all parts support capture, transformation, and storage of energy by the whole... There is a sense, then, in which each principle is an aspect of the others. The appearance of the connections between them is a function of our vantage point, where we stand at the moment... conservation goes further, and restores broken cycles. That is our real work: to design many pathways for this renewal, based on a design that connects us in our diversity of resource and perspective."

He's discussing farming, of course..

I'll be bringing large chunks of the thread here probably, including the thoughts about Guy Claxton's book on his way of thinking about the unconscious and conscious. It will be a long blog series I'm afraid... A lot of it will no doubt seem kind of round-about, but the first thing to realize is that nothing is more roundabout than nature is. If we want to develop a good new metaphor for what is "human" about thinking, one that includes biology, we can't very well leave out nature.

Next up, the first pair of principles from Dan's article.

ADDITIONAL READING:
1. Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison (who is mentioned by Dan Hemenway in the intro)
2. Dan Hemenway's webpage

"On Being Certain": Ginger Campbell interviews the author, Robert Burton MD

I help out Ginger Campbell sometimes by transcribing some of her podcasts for her, just the ones I decide are so interesting I want to spend time with the podcast and might as well be doing something useful at the same time that might help out other listeners, i.e., typing. The typing helps me too - makes me listen more slowly, makes me repeat parts to make sure I heard them right.

Here is a link to my transcription of her BrainSciencePodcast interview #43, an interview with author Robert Burton MD, about his book, On Being Certain: Believing you're Right Even When You're Not. (I wrote a post based on this book, and the previous BrainSciencePodcast #42, here.)

In the interview, toward the end, Burton compares perception of mind to perception of pain:

"I don't know if I can articulate this because it's still sort of seeping around in there is that most of us feel that we are what our conscious mind tells us we are. That question you asked about the free will and about someone said what your unconscious is doing is not part of 'you' - I think that we sense only what we sense. We sense ourselves as starting an idea, having a thought, making plans, etc etc. and we really don't see that that facility arises out of the same cognitive stew that causes all these perceptual illusions in general. And somehow, if you were to take a look at sort of western thought, it really is all about the mind-body thing. All the major questions arise out of the conception that the mind is somehow a separate entity. I mean there's a book by John Searle the philosopher - he has a whole book called The Mind, and he covers all the various kinds of theories, but none of them make any sense if you think about it. Because way down deep the mind is simply a higher level function that we can't conceptualize, just the same way as you said it's more than the sum of its parts I think you said.. this whole idea of emergence is really impossible to visually see - in other words you realize that if you take a chocolate chip and you take a piece of flour and take water, there is no embedded cake in there.. there's nothing - there's just chocolate and flour but we know you can make a cake. Well the cake is material. You can still see it. But in this case the problem is, the problem is what the brain generates is immaterial, that we can't see, yet does exist. I mean exists in the same way that pain exists. Pain isn't anywhere. The brain doesn't experience pain in the neurons I'm suffering. When you stub your toe there's no neuron that goes ouch. It occurs at a higher level. The problem I haven't figured out yet which I think might be the next project is, there needs to be a metaphor for understanding higher level function when seen from a lower level that will allow people to get rid of this distinction and argument about the mind and free will and causation. I think these are all problems of language that arise out of misconceptions what the mind is. Which is sort of what I think might be the next project."

Ginger says:

"You pointed out in your book that we don't think pain is something mystical or magical just because it can't be localized - it's emergent - yet somehow it seems natural to look at our mind and feel that it has to be somehow different."

His next comment is:

"Right. And I haven't been able to think of it because maybe I'm too dense, but there must be some analogy or metaphoric analogy where you can say, well just as pain exists but is undetectable, the mind exists, but it exists arising out of stuff that we cannot control so even though it feels like it's separate and also feels like it's in control in some sense it also feels like it's you, and feels like a self - these are all phenomena that are undetectable but necessary - I don't want to use the word illusion because illusion implies it doesn't exist - but on the other hand it is an illusion if you mean by illusion you can't see or taste or smell or touch it. It's an illusion without being an illusion."

I'm working on an analogy/metaphor for him - it has to do with brain as compost bin, thoughts generated by the unconscious or fed into the unconscious as compost itself. What occurs in the bin is unconscious thinking; conscious thinking or ruminating on something would be analogous to deliberately turning the compost, aerating it, waiting until it is aged to perfection.

Developing a systematic thought process, for example a scientific approach to thinking, or a scientific process to test an idea to make sure everyone can feel "certain" about it, would be analogous to using the compost to grow something with. But the thoughts that end up as conscious tested thoughts, although they may have sprung forth with the help and support and nutrition provided by the compost, are no longer compost - they become living and growing ideas that belong out in the culture, seeding new thoughts.

OK, it needs work, but I think it's a start.

Microglia and Pain: A Manual Therapy Perspective

I am posting here just to put in a link to a series I have made on the topic by the same name over at the Neurotonics blog.

Brain Science Podcast #42: "On Being Certain"

In reference to Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime:

Ginger Campbell's latest podcast is about the book, "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not ", by neurologist Robert A. Burton, MD.

About half way through it, she says;

"Earlier on I asked the question, "What would be the possible benefits of "a feeling of knowing" that is actually false?" This brings us to a consideration of our brain's reward systems, and how they interact and influence our thoughts.

We know that there are extensive connections between the pleasure rewards systems, emotions, and the opioid peptides in the brain. We have talked about in the past the mesolimbic-dopamine system, which is a key component of the brain reward circuitry that originates in the upper brainstem. It, not surprisingly, seems to use dopamine as its key neurotransmitter. This mesolimbic dopamine system connects to the parts of the brain that are involved in emotion and cognition, including parts of the frontal lobes, and the nucleus accumbens which is thought to be involved in addiction. It's been shown that brain mediated rewards cause behaviours to persist, including addictions.

So you have to wonder, how is this related to the feeling of knowing? Dr. Burton gives an example in the book, of a person faced with a charging lion, who climbs up in a tree and survives. After the person escapes he has the feeling that he has learned something. And if you make these sorts of decisions repeatedly, you will probably have a positive feeling of "correctness" that becomes linked to that behaviour.

Dr. Burton argues that the feeling of knowing and feelings of familiarity are integral to learning."

Fine, so why am I bringing this forward? Because my human primate social grooming brain thinks humans are learning machines who:
1. can learn all sorts of crazy things
2. learn all sorts of physical actions
3. make up all sorts of bizarre and sometimes dangerous rituals

.... that often fall into the category of "stupid human tricks."

Among these, I would definitely put neck manipulation of the high velocity sort.

I can't prove it, but have always suspected that both doing it and having it done to one's own person likely belong in the category of "addictive behaviours" as well as "stupid human tricks", but this is the first time I've heard a (potentially associated) brain pathway actually spelled out.

No one in the greater HPSG sub-troop acts more "certain" of themselves, on the whole, than those practitioners who favor this approach. Except possibly the patients who've been on the receiving end of it, convinced that it "helps" them, even when they still "need" it monthly for 10 years, etc. (See Keith's observations/comments in "Alberta woman" link.) I'd put that in the category of "false knowledge"; the feeling of being certain outweighs the obviousness that it doesn't really help much of anything at all, except a reward pathway (temporarily) and furthermore only reinforces a behaviour peculiar to humans, reinforces a pathway that goes nowhere and does nothing permanent, does not give the brain a chance to learn a new behaviour toward self-sufficiency.


Further reading:

1. Harriet Hall's review of the same book.
2. Is certainty a dopameme?


August 8/08

I'm back into this post to drop a link to Ginger Campbell's Podcast #43, an interview with the author. It really rips along - give it a listen! Thumbs-up.

Glia from a manual therapy perspective

I've been neglecting the blogs in favor of immersing myself in learning all about glia - two books arrived, and I confess I've become captivated by these little critters.

The books are Glial Neurobiology (2007, Verkhratsky and Butt) and Neuroglia (2005, Kettenmann).

In particular, microglia are involved in pain production, it seems. I'll be delving into more about this on the Neurotonics blog soon.

Antidote for ordinary 'sturm und drang'?

Eric Matheson at Feel Better...move well blog recently posted a couple youtube videos on meditation, Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation. His post contains a Jon Kabat-Zinn Google presentation which I already posted about earlier this year, plus a new one I hadn't seen before, another google talk by Philippe Goldin.

I've watched about 20 minutes of it so far, and so far I'm captivated. He makes the point that meditation is moving out of the domain of faith-based activity, is becoming a scientific curiosity instead. A wide range of applications are developing out of earlier work done by Kabat-Zinn's work with stress reduction.

Maybe someday there will even be simple, straight-forward, pre-packaged, no-need-for-any-belief-system, non-pharmaceutical, evidence-based mental exercises to manage ordinary human angst, the 'sturm und drang' of ordinary existence, life in an achingly vulnerable human brain that evolved so fast that it learns too much about too many things too soon, and must spend far too much time growing its own buffers somehow; buffers, which if they are merely defense mechanisms, can sometimes do more harm than good.

Moving back into this body

In reference to Car-free at last:

Lately I've surfaced, after about 8 years of being at the computer every day for hours, to notice the effects that have accumulated. For one thing my environmental standards (i.e., housekeeping levels) have slipped some. Too-much-sitting has definitely moved me away from my own physicality. Selling the car was a ritual move, a symbol of intent, a sacrifice made to impress upon my own brain how seriously I am inclined to view any threatened parting of me from my aging (nearly 60), softening, and too heavy body, and its lack of stamina, increased sense of windedness. I walk to work and back a couple times a day, always have, a total distance of not quite 4 km. The work itself is physical. This however, is definitely no longer enough to counter the entropy I feel in this body. It just doesn't feel like a happy body anymore. I do not have overt pain, just a feeling of stiffness when I first stand up and a feeling of inner resistance or friction, lack of space inside.

It's noticeable enough that I actually joined and am going to go to a gym today.

I will have to suck up the displeasure I feel at descending a staircase into a basement affair, with the smell of rubber and steel and sweat, and the anxiety of feeling physically incompetent before the gaze and possible judgment of who knows how many hard-bodies who've already been there working out for years. I paid my $ and I have the right to be there, using equipment and adding CO2 to the cloud already in the room. The payoff will not be a lovely athletic body, because I lack such genes - instead my payoff will be a stronger humanantigravitysuit that fits better, hopefully feels better and may actually manage to dump some of its excess ballast.

I'm going to keep a food diary too - I hear it's a good CBT way to handle weight loss. For sure, if ideomotor (nonconscious) eating was adequate to sustain normal weight, I'd be normal weight instead of overweight. So, it's high time for a new strategy.

Later:
I'm back from the initial foray to the gym. It didn't smell bad at all. There is even fresh smelling air pumped in from somewhere, somehow. Everything was spanking clean; even though the equipment has seen better days in terms of its paint job and shininess, it was clean, and this is huge. The place is in a basement, with the ubiquitous row of treadmills facing a row of TV sets with the sound turned down, but the music was not clanging or too loud, and I have to say, I've never been on a smoother more well-appointed treadmill in my life, or a nicer smoother workout bike.

A bit of treadmill, a bit of bike, pushing a few machines around a bit (noting where my shoulders feel a tad stiff meanwhile), all in all about 45 minutes worth, and I walked out with quads that felt like cotton candy and a definite sense of being back in contact with my abs. Well, with what I have that supposedly are abs.. Plus, feeling way less stiff.

I found this today: Protein coingestion stimulates muscle protein synthesis during resistance-type exercise. Hmm. Maybe this is why I've been craving red meat lately - red meat which I almost never eat. I'm about to eat it two days in a row. I thought it was just me succumbing to magical thinking, that eating meat would help me build some of my own, but maybe there's actually something scientific to it.

Update July 16/08:
The diary thing is a good idea. So is the protein idea. I've eaten three sirloin steaks, two chicken breasts and two large slabs of salmon. Not much else, because I don't feel very hungry after such a large amount of protein... not until the next day. (But it is fruit season and I do love fruit... so a bowl of fruit with some non fat yogurt is a treat most days.) An unexpected side benefit is deeper, better, longer sleep. In the past week, I've been to the gym twice, have exercised at home with weights twice, have lost 5 pounds and 4 inches. I feel better, and am more sure now that I can reclaim this physicality for at least a few more decades.

Update July 26/08
So far so good. Weightloss has slowed way down, of course, as my body fights to retain itself and resources shift around, but the high protein thing seems to be working for me in terms of keeping my appetite reduced and me from being at the mercy of it. I'm rarely "hungry"- by "hungry" I mean, "can't think about anything but food and trying to find something to put into the mouth." One night I got "hungry," did succumb to eating a piece of cheese, which switched it off. I wrote it down in the food diary of course.
So, so far: weightloss: 6.5 lbs., no change in BMI, inches lost: 5. Trips to gym, still only 2. But I did jog about a third of a km. That's rare.

Update Aug 7/08
Sticking with the plan, keeping the diary, not exercising much, lost a bit more (8 pounds so far total).

Update Aug 11/08
I'm looking forward to the day, way off in the mists of future time, when I won't be all jazzed about having lost another half pound. But I did. And I'm jazzed. Eight point five.

I'm also jazzed because I finally figured out a way to get vegetables into myself without gagging on them - I hate the way they taste, most of them. It's not their fault, it's just the way it is between me and vegetables. They get stuck between my teeth, and they taste bitter, and they don't feel good in my system. Usually.

Well, I discovered that throwing broccoli or celery or whatever, into a heavy-duty blender, with some low-fat milk, and whizzing them to death first, makes them go down a lot easier. It's instant "cream of whatever" soup. The veges are still quite raw. Heating the "soup" up in a big latte cup, in the microwave for a couple minutes, makes the whole experience (of eating veggies, for me) a lot less nauseating. Then I can "drink" it - it even gets a sort of nice foam on top.

It's best to make this fresh each time. I tried storing some "cream de broccoli soup" in the fridge overnight, and the next day the taste had gone bitter.

August 21/08 Update
A total of ten pounds are off as of today. Ten pounds, fifty days.
That works out to one pound every 5 days. A fifth of a pound per day. Sixteen ounces in a pound. Three point two ounces per day. Not a lot of effort. Actually, less effort than I should have been making probably. Most of that was in the first week however, so... there will be a slower rate. But it barely matters. I've got the rest of my life, so I'm not especially worried how slow it goes.

What I really am struck by is how I have "learned" not to care about eating so much/as much, by writing each item down. I'm eating more vegetables (as cream soup) and liking them more. As long as I rotate the protein so it's not the same two days in a row, I'm cool with that too. I've had a dish or ice cream and a slice of that fudge sold at the local fair (and enjoyed them). They did not seem to slow the process appreciably. My metabolism must therefore be improving a bit. These food indiscretions seemed not to awaken any sleeping appetite dragons.

Sept 12/08 Update
Down two and a half more pounds. I'm sticking with the flesh- 1 or 2% milk - veg- and/or - fruit-smoothie diet quite easily. As long as weight keeps peeling off, I don't care how long it takes, really. I'm not tired of the food and I'm not hungry. It's very paleolithic + dairy, except that I have a good blender and access to food shops, unlike my human primate ancestors. The big change is the food diary idea. It's a really good tool - seems to be precisely what I needed for getting out of the nonconscious maze.

October 4/08
Down by 15 pounds as of today. Have been at this weight before but never so mindfully, never by calculatedly descending the metaphoric mountain, usually just by falling off it somewhere at some point, and bouncing back up. The food diary helps a lot. I do not skimp on portions. I merely eat one meal a day (involving fish, fowl or meat), and a snack (fruit smoothie) for dinner. Yes, it's slow. I realize that. But I also am not especially willing to resort to (artificially added) exercise yet. I walk everywhere (total about 40 minutes/day), physically carrying everything I need to move from A to B, and am actively moving about at work and using upper body strength all day. I think it's enough. I'm trying to learn to eat less. That's what this is really about. As Harriet Hall says in her review of Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto,

Eat a variety of food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I will start to shift to mostly plants a bit later perhaps. Pollan suggests mostly leaves, not seeds. I suppose by being a fructi-carnivore, I'm not eating properly. But I do feel satisfied for now, and so far this is working for me.

November 22/08
Down by 20 lbs. from start in June. Feel better. Definitely.
I've noticed I always gain a pound or so for a few days after socializing. I attribute this to having stress - I'm an introvert and socializing is always (no matter if I enjoyed myself or not) stressful. And I do not indulge calorically when I socialize, so I suspect it's from my cortisol level having gone up a little, for a little while.

Car-free at last

In reference to Divorcing the car:

Five minutes ago I walked inside $1800 richer (in twenties bound into 4 lots with rubber bands, in my packet, a thick wad to take to the bank later when it opens), and way more than just a ton lighter.

My car has just been affectionately transferred to a new owner, and all I had to officially keep were the plates. Oh, and the little bag of trash I filled from inside glove box and drink console. I can put the remote for the garage door away now. [big smile]I don't need it anymore[/big smile].

I feel good, really pleased with how relatively effortless this transition was.

Divorcing the car

Over a lifetime I've had a changing relationship to car ownership. When I was a teen I desperately wanted to learn how to drive, as I'm sure all teens still do. But it was the early 60's, the Canadian prairies, and I was a girl in a farm family which had yet to become egalitarian in how it treated its son (my brother) and me (the oldest but a mere female). My mother did not acquire a driver's license until well into her thirties.

A memory snippet from around the age of ten: I remember her practicing with the family car (a powder-blue 2-door '53 Ford Meteor), steering it carefully around the yard with her glasses (cat's eye shape, framed in reddish brown across the top, little sparkles in the corners) perched on her nose, looking very focused, very aware of her responsibility for the control of hundreds of horse power. She thought there was no need for me to learn to drive or get a license. My brother however was encouraged to get a license and a car as soon as possible. Not fair.

At the age of twenty five, long after graduating from physiotherapy school and feeling very definitely like an adult, I took driving lessons. At age 28 I bought my first beater, a green '74 Chevy Nova. My anger at my mother's mean sexism finally could abate. I felt like I had the world by its tail. Wheels at last. Driving victory was mine.

I loved driving. Took long trips. Explored. A couple Toyotas after that, a Ford hatchback, and this last car (which I will say goodbye to tomorrow), an Olds, the one and only car I've ever had that had air conditioning. All have been second hand.

It is thirty years later and the honeymoon is long over. I'm fed up with owning a car. My car sat idle, mostly, for the past year, as I learned and practiced how to be carless again. This decision to finally let go was not taken in haste - I remember vividly how much I used to love being a car owner/operator, how much I once associated it with independence - but... the thrill is definitely gone.

I'm tired of getting the car fixed, putting in gas, washing it, checking the tires.. all the stuff one does with a car. Actively loving and caring for it. I'm tired of paying for insurance on a big hunk of metal that just mostly sits there. And I'm really annoyed that the battery died because of letting it sit and not burning up gas. Thanks a bunch. Here I was being good to the planet and the battery dies from not being used. Time to kiss car ownership goodbye.

I'm looking forward to joining a car co-op - I'll be able to drive when and if I need to, but I won't have any responsibility for upkeep. I'll save a small fortune in insurance. Nothing will be in my parking spot but empty space. Decluttered.

With the money I get for the car I will be able to afford a new laptop, something I'll really get a lot more use from. The deal happens tomorrow, for cash. By Sunday evening I'll be carless and will feel much less encumbered by life.

Monday Jun 30:
Well, I'm still a car owner today... "the best laid schemes 'o mice and (wo)men gang aft agley" and all that. The car was inspected by the prospective new owner this morning (instead of yesterday) and he likes it. But he wants to bring cash (fine by me), and can't until Saturday July 5. Our new time is 8AM Saturday morning. I'm still very much looking forward to being a carless person.

New blog - Eric Matheson PT: Feel Better, Move Well

The PT blogosphere is growing all the time. Eric Matheson has just launched a new blog called Live Better, Move well (and a new website, Matheson Physiotherapy. If you live in Nanaimo and need some help, Eric is your guy.)

Eric's latest blogpost is entitled Itch, and I must confess I read his post on SomaSimple and got the idea for my own blogpost, Itchy and Scratchy from it.

I like the line he drew out:

"This understanding of sensation points to an entire new array of potential treatments - based not on drugs or surgery but, instead, on the careful manipulation of our perceptions."

So true - for pain also.

Eric, I like your post better than mine.

Itchy and Scratchy

The New York Times has a great article by Atul Gawande about itch, and how sensors can go wrong. It's not the same as persistent pain, but it sounds awfully similar in behavior. Here is a link to The Itch. Here is a link to an audio interview about it.

Here is Jonah Lehrer's blogpost about it in his Frontal Cortex blog.

Here is a link to Atul Gawande's website.

Alberta woman with chiropractic stroke sues bigtime

A class action lawsuit has been filed against chiropractic in Alberta. A woman was turned into a quadriplegic by a chiropractor.

More of these cases are coming to light all the time. Rather than writhing in shame the way a profession should if lives are ruined at constant spaced intervals by its own "rock star" type of human primate social grooming, chiropractic shrugs and moves on, lets the individual chiropractor take the hit and acts like it's not the profession's fault.

This is an unconscionable attitude to take. I've always thought so and I always will.

In this case, (as I understand it) the woman and her husband are hoping to take the profession itself, and the provincial government which subsidizes it to court instead.

Nobody "needs" this kind of high-neck manipulative intervention on a regular basis to maintain their "health." Never let ANYONE tell you otherwise, no matter how charming they seem. It's a lie. It's a crock. Don't let anyone twist your neck for any reason. It's dangerous.

Watch the video, Kinsinger Report on Chiropractic.

Here is more information:
1. Chirotalk thread on the topic (Chirotalk is a board run by sane ex-chiropractors which means it's anti-chiropractic)
2. Old blog post, How I really feel about chiro
3. Please sign this petition against neck manipulation. Seriously, folks, this is a malevolent and thoroughly unnecessary human behavior that should be extinguished completely. Analysis of all the hidden symbolic dominance-submission ritual content it contains can wait until after it's been de-legalized.
4. Paralyzed woman sues chiropractic for half billion
5. Alberta woman launches massive chiropractic lawsuit
6. Sandy Nette's website
7. Action for Victims of Chiropractic (UK)
8. Video (short) Is a Headache Worth Dying For?
9. Chiropractic Lawsuit, blogpost by Steven Novella at Neurologica Blog
10. Adverse effects of spinal manipulation: a systematic review (JRSM 2007)
11. A Deadly Twist (story of another survivor of chiropractic stroke)
12. Chiropractic and Stroke (blogpost by Harriet Hall, MD and skeptic)
13. Another survivor, Graham Maynard's site
14. Stroke after chiropractic (CNN)(short video of a news clip)
15. Fact sheet on the class action (7-page pdf)
16. Doctor Who? Deception by chiropractors, by David Colquhoun
17. Chiropractors resort to legal intimidation, by David Colquhoun

Here are videos from the Nette couple's website, sandynette.com:

1. Sandy Nette's Story (about 8 minutes. Sandy speaks through a message board)
2. David Nette's Story: Part 1 (about 10 minutes. David talks about what happened at the hospital initially.)
3. David Nette's story: Part II (about 10 minutes. David talks about how he adjusted to the new situation he found himself in with his wife.)
4. David Nette's story: Part III (about 9 minutes. David talks of their shared resolve to prevent this ever happening to any other person, by launching the class action lawsuit.)

These videos are very revealing, very, very real and raw. They are a must-see.
........................................


June 20/08:

Since I put this blogpost up I've received a couple comments from one or two readers, both named "anonymous." I did not allow their comments to appear. They are glaringly pro-neck-manipulation, and I think the pro-neck-manipulators have already had far too much leeway in the realm of swaying public opinion to give them any sort of platform, however buried, obscure and humble this blog may be.

It's because of:
1. chiro training in a rationalized (as opposed to rational), deliberately propagated, bizarre belief system, combined with
2. a cultivated and honed persuasive attitude,
3. which appears aimed at propagating reckless enactment of a type of human physical social grooming (high-neck-manipulation) which is irrelevant and unnecessary in the first place,
4. against all common sense AND scientific investigation,
5. for the sole purpose of making $,

... that this woman became tetraplegic.

I have too much respect for the human nervous system to ever condone manipulation of its high-neck housing; therefore, "anonymous," I consider my prevention of your promotion of it on my blog, a positive choice - an action (however tiny) against letting myself and this blog be a vector for further perpetuation of your particular memeplex. And I happen to think it's an accumulation of tiny actions that count in life.

July 6/08:
Back in with this blog thread from Science-Based Medicine on this case.

July 17/'08
Back in with another Science-Based Medicine blog thread which deconstructs a chiro article which suggests patient visits to chiros and patient visits to medicos result in the same numbers of strokes overall.

Sept.28/08
Calgary Herald article by John William Kinsinger MD, Jun 21/08: Cracking necks destroys lives

Nov.16/08
Last night CTV's news program, W-FIVE, examined Sandy Nette's lawsuit. The program provides a glimpse into her life - it looks like she is able to use her left hand a little bit now. The viewer is introduced to a few of the others (people who had strokes shortly after chiro manipulation, some of whom recovered and others who didn't) who also are part of the class action suit.
The clip from W-FIVE

Jan.6/09
SPARC : Stroke Prevention & Atherosclerosis Research Center
Strokes From Neck Injury

Blogpost on bilateral internal carotid artery dissection from chiropractic neck manipulation.

Jan.7/09
Paciaroni M, Bogousslavsky J; Cerebrovascular Complications of Neck Manipulation.
European Neurology 2009;61:112-118 DOI: 10.1159/000180314
(If that link doesn't work, go here and click on full text or pdf.)

Feb 10/09
Harriet Hall, Chiropractic’s Pathetic Response to Stroke Concerns

August 4/09
Beware the Spinal Trap Simon Singh
“We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine” Ben Goldacre, Bad Science blog

Pain Science Division is not only official, but the news is now out

In reference to Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Science Division:

This morning I sat for a few minutes and read the "e-blast" from CPA, a report on our last National Congress, with this list of topics:

Tremendously Successful and Incredible Congress!
New CEO of CPA Officially Installed at Congress
New Pain Science Division Launched
Best and Brightest Recognized
Congress Receives Positive Media Coverage
Cost of Business Survey - Only 4 Weeks Left!
CPA Teleconference Program - Last 2 Sessions!
Obesity Survey - What Should Physical Therapists Do
Physiotherapy Foundation of Canada - New Board of Governors

The item I bolded above states:

New Pain Science Division Launched

It was a very successful Congress for those behind the three-year-old effort to have a Pain Sciences Division of CPA. The Board of Directors voted unanimously to approve the Division launch this past weekend. The purpose of the Pain Sciences Division is to disseminate current scientific information to Canadian physiotherapists, foster collaborative efforts between academic researchers and clinicians involved in pain management, and to promote physiotherapists as leaders in non-pharmacological pain management both nationally and internationally.

The first annual general meeting of the new Pain Science Division will be held in 2009. CPA members can join the new Division in the fall of 2008 when they renew membership.

Neil Pearson, a physiotherapist member from Penticton, BC, and a pain management specialist, is the new Chair of the Division. He says those who were behind the scenes did a lot of work to get it off the ground and are very excited now that it has been approved.

You may recall that a survey about creating a Pain Division was sent out to members in January, and there was overwhelming support for it.

For information on CPA Divisions, contact Tracy Blyth in the national office (email deleted)

The excitement was particularly sharp the day of the vote, two weeks ago. Although decreased in amplitude this excitement has not diminished in frequency or endurance. I feel it the way I can feel my own blood coursing around, a feeling that's right there whenever I care to tune into it.

That which sustains our humanantigravitysuits II

In reference to That which sustains our human antigravity suits:

This is hilarious. May the Farm be With You, a short video (under 10 minutes I think) with a loosely borrowed StarWars theme. Meet young Cuke and Obe Wan Canoli who fight the Forces of Darkness and rescue Princess Lettuce. You won't want to miss Ham Solo and ChewBrocoli.

That which sustains our human antigravity suits

In light of recent news reports about a global food shortage, I'd like to bring a series of you-tube videos here, highlighting the obnoxious corporate behavior of a certain company, Monsanto, that would do anything/is doing everything to take over anything/everything to do with global food supply, simply
a) to make itself money and power, and
b) because it can, and no one stops it.

(Behavior in this category is considered psychopathic when identified in ordinary mortals. See this film, The Corporation.)

Judge for yourself if any trails might lead to this company as a major contributor to this alleged food shortage.

Part I: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part II: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part III: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part IV: Monsanto Patent for a Pig
Part V: Monsanto Patent for a Pig

I grew up on a farm. As I watched this set of videos, my blood alternated between curdling and boiling. It's enough to turn a peaceful person into a political activist.

Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Science Division

We made it!
The group a few of us started in Canada in 2005 is now officially a division.

I've blogged about our little group, the CPPSG, a few times before, specifically Nov 2006, about a year after we were denied divisionhood after our first application.

We decided to keep going anyway, representing the profession as mirrored in a new way, a brand new way to most of the members that comprise it. We kept plugging along, developing a public profile. Neil Pearson engineered a magnificent set of webcasts on pain. We produced a series of newsletters of pretty good calibre, free to the public and to members of the profession worldwide. Each of our (total of six) members remained fully engaged in life, practice, and keeping our little flame lit.

It paid off, because at the end of May, just a week ago, the decision to include our group as the Pain Science Division of CPA was unanimously approved by all the official leaders in the Canadian branch of the profession.

Now the REALLY hard work starts. Yours truly will take on getting a new website together, which will be a major learning curve. Already there are lots of knocks on the door re: a series of teleconferences for fall. We're going to have our hands full, and we'll be keeping skype very busy.

We are aiming to improve the general overall level of knowledge in the profession regarding pain and how to treat it, when to not try to treat it manually, how to understand it, what to tell patients about it. There has never been an official physiotherapy division in Canada that coalesced around a ubiquitous symptom before, or around delving into what pain means. Instead, physiotherapy divisions have usually coalesced around a type of treatment or a specific patient population or a segment of human anatomy. We are the first division to have taken on tackling the essence of why physiotherapy exists in the first place - to help people overcome their pain and suffering, and try to help us all get better at it as a profession at the same time; understanding pain much better, by studying, learning and teaching a deeper model, also as a profession.

Wish us well.

One little drawback is that we won't be able to produce public newsletters anymore, for awhile. We have to become inner-focused, membership-focused, to get our work done within the Canadian branch of the profession. But we still have a commitment to the public and to physiotherapists worldwide, so I envision a day coming when we will start to produce publically available newsletters again.

"The pain is gone"

To me, an old-fashioned human primate social groomer who has always leaned harder toward the "therapist" side of treatment rather than the "physical", but who uses manual therapy as my main intervention, the advantage of deep science-based pain models like my favorite, the pain neuromatrix model, is that one can remain connected to one's patient (i.e., in good therapeutic contact) while explaining to them what their experience of pain, or in this case radical pain relief, might mean, regardless of how strange it may seem to me or may have seemed to them.

Here is a diagram, famous by now I'm sure, of Melzack's neuromatrix model. Click on it to make it bigger, so you can read the detail.

I often haul out this little diagram and sit down with a patient, because a lot of times, simple handling isn't quite enough - they need answers.

Case in point: last week I saw a young woman for the first time. She had been sent to me by her massage therapist (who I've known for years) who had worked with her for many months. Let's called the patient Rosie (not her real name).

Rosie had had a prior history of low back pain for ten years, for which she had gone to a chiropractor semi-regularly. She had worked as a fund raiser for some outfit, until about two years ago; while nursing a sprained ankle (and on crutches) she was in a car accident. Now she had back pain, sprained ankle, and neck and shoulder pain. She was unable to do her fundraising job anymore and had had to quit.

She had endured persistent neck and shoulder pain for two years in spite of seeing 36 of the finest manual therapists, both conventional and alternative, that Canada has to offer, in two different provinces, and having attended a modern pain clinic.

Then, to her surprise, during a meditation retreat in December last year, her pain vanished. All of it. Gone.

Emboldened, she began a vigorous yoga program, and inadvertently overstretched something. Bam. She had felt instant leg pain and a lot of weakness in the quads. This had persisted beyond the massage therapist's expertise, and was why she had been sent to see me.

I learned that after she had given up fundraising after the MVA, she had become involved in an experiential psych counselling training program, where they let her learn from a physical position of comfort, i.e., horizontal.

At visit #1 I had taken her history and provided some manual treatment, some very rudimentary pain education, and showed her a neural glide to do for the leg. She'd been happy for something to do - anything.

Yesterday at visit #2, I was ready with a neuromatrix diagram and was planning more in depth pain ed.

She arrived.
I asked how she was doing, and she said, "Fine, I'm all better."

(I was thinking,... huh? Did she go on another retreat?)

I asked how she had managed it this time, and she replied that the evening prior she had invited two shamans in to work on her, and they had, with burning herbs and drumming, and lots of touching. Before they left, they had pronounced her cured.

And sure enough, she felt that way. No pain.

She really did seem better, could walk better, move better, sit comfortably, breathe better.. Wow, I thought. "Good for you," I said.

"Well," she said, "I still feel some stuff..."
"..It looks like the stuff you might still feel doesn't bother you anymore - is that how it feels?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, "I still feel some stuff but it doesn't bother me at all. I didn't need to come today, but it was too late to cancel my appointment."

We had an hour to spend, so I decided to stick with the plan; I asked her if she was interested in learning some things about pain. She said yes, so I invited her to go through the neuromatrix diagram with me. We sat down and I began explaining how the center circle with circular arrows represented the entire nervous system, how it was always processing even at night during sleep, how it was more of a verb, therefore, than it was a noun, how the diagram depicted the movement of this neuromatrix through time... how it had three main inputs on a spectrum that ranged from mental (cognitive evaluative) to physical (sensory-discriminative) to physiological (motivational-affective) and three main outputs, one of which just so happened to be pain, which could be influenced by any of the three inputs and which in turn influenced the three main inputs plus the other two outputs...

As we wandered through the diagram, I plugged in pieces of info she'd given me, she asked questions, we talked about treatment crucibles, safe containers and catalysts, symbolism and shamanism, meditation and movement forward. During her shamanic experience she had had a great deal of novel sensory-discriminative input, through all her senses, not just kinesthetically. I told her it sounded like it had been enough to get her neuromatrix off the square it had been stuck on. I pointed out, based on the prior meditation/pain relief experience, how much more her particular pain matrix seemed to respond to shift of cognitive input than it did to sensory-discriminative input. I mentioned that for most people, sensory-discriminative input of the physical kind was often sufficient, but that she'd burned through 37 manual practitioners of various kinds, including me, without much help, and she nodded..

She told me this was all making more sense to her now.. that she was someone who just didn't "get" things through only her body, the way most people can if some reasonable sensory-discriminative input of a novel sort is provided... Instead things had to make sense to her through her emotions/mind.

Apparently long ago some other PT had loaned her the book "Explain Pain", for a few months, and she had diligently made notes and some photocopies, but it had never quite sunk in or gelled. Now it was finally starting to make sense. She said, "I wish I could read that book again. It was really good, as I recall." I replied that she could buy her own copy if she wanted.

We discussed rehab, and I told her about some options, but that wherever she went, to stay in complete control, not let anyone rush her, and to use "graded exposure" and "pacing", concepts she already knew about.

I showed her two chapters from Pain: A Textbook for Therapists and she took copies. She said this would help her learn the neurobiology for when she herself would be a therapist, counselling pain patients. I mentioned she would be able to buy this book online as well - that buying these two books for herself would be much cheaper in the long run than seeing a bunch of expensive therapists for sensory-discriminative input that her particular brain seemed to not be wired to be able to easily accept. She agreed.

I worked with her leg for a little while, and unlike the first time, this time she remarked on feeling heat and movement in the thigh, and non-painful sensation connected to the leg in other parts of her body. I asked her if she could do an active straight leg raise after, and to her surprise, she could.

She left very pleased with all the progress she had made in one week, by her own efforts. I didn't need to see her again in my opinion; her downregulation was well and truly hooked back up. She's away to her next adventure, all in one piece again finally.

Way to go, Rosie. Way to go.