Nature, Nurture, Torture.

Having had parents, been one and now in semi retirement, parenting being a kind of Hotel California situation where success and leaving don’t appear on the menu, here are some pointers for new recruits. 

Kids: Make allowances, they only think they’re Gods gift to maturity. They are, as they wipe your bottom and send you off to school, in fact struggling just as much as you are. Dinner party failures, unexpected bills and even talking to each other will get them down, but the code of parenting decrees one must never show weakness in front of the children. They are nicer to other people, not because they don’t love you, but because they do. They’re simply more afraid of them than they are of you. Generally don’t listen to them when they go all wise on you, best to smile benevolently and carry on. The only exception is they tend to know about personal safety. Then again instant death is not caused by running about in the playground, pushing small objects up your nose or even throwing a javelin at your mate, though our PE teacher didn’t see it that way.

Parents: They WILL do what you do. They won’t do what you say because they’re not listening. They’re like the most aggravating mirror of all the faults you don’t even realise you’ve got. When you shout, which of course you’re not doing because you don’t shout, they will shout back. When you fake anything, like the smile of the parent you would like to be, they will simply recognise it as your inability to cope and exploit it against you. Just as you hope they don’t know the inner workings of your pathetic excuse for a life you don’t know the inner workings of theirs. If you love them never believe you do. There is far greater power in curiosity than assumption, so ask. Offering your skills and experiences is fine but giving them your insights into wisdom only makes them precocious and instils all the hang-ups you wish you didn’t have yourself. Their lessons will be all the harder for believing they understand what they haven’t experienced. There’s only one positive to draw from all this. No one is a perfect parent. The best you can hope for is to make enough mistakes for them to all cancel each other out.

Marshal Management.

I am now an officially trained I.O.M. TT marshal, which allows me to marshal at motorcycle race meetings on the island and in the UK; a very small cog in the best management structure I’ve ever experienced over forty years in industry. It requires over five hundred people, mostly unpaid volunteers, spread out over 37 miles of track to respond instantly to any incident. Race Control goes to Chief Sector Marshals, to Section Marshals and their teams, six Travelling Marshals, two Coarse Cars and two Airmed helicopters, all connected by a network of over a hundred Tetra radios. The result is an injured rider can be in hospital in less than 20 minutes from the moment he or she falls. I am so impressed with the clarity of purpose of the whole thing. No inter-departmental rivalry or buck passing, no vying for promotion, no levels of self-importance other than the importance of one’s role. Everyone is friendly but intensely focused on doing his or her best. Industry would do well to study its example. It appears this very high level of effectiveness is largely due to there being no profit involved, just the saving of lives. Profit, differentials of salary, differentials of power and the resulting competitive hierarchy all seem to militate against effectiveness. Maybe when we can be promoted to the place of our best contribution rather than our level of incompetence we can unleash our true human capabilities. And maybe the happiness from making that contribution is a better form of wealth than salary, and in the case of the city, bonuses.

Don't Believe the Pilot.

In the South Korean F1 race today the BBC coverage had David Coultard reporting from the Maclaren factory ‘Mission Control’ here in the UK as well as Martin Brundle on the grid at the track. Martin, keen to keep viewers abreast of the very latest developments, relayed as it unfolded that there would be a ten minute delay. David in the UK said, “we knew that two minutes ago”, which was strange seeing as Martin was present in real life and David was half way round the world on a satellite link; a perfect illustration of a recent finding that somewhere unbeknown to you your brain makes decisions around a second before ‘you’ make them. In fact some things are being put into place up to seven seconds before you’re consciously aware of them. So like Martin your conscious awareness is the last to know what’s actually going on. Of course it is you making the decisions but not the part of you you’re conscious of. Ever burnt yourself? Isn’t your finger out of there before you’ve even thought about it? The evolutionary parts of your brain governing your body and your emotions do all the preliminary work before the results get passed on to your conscious frontal cortex. And when, a bit later, the frontal cortex gets the messages it makes the best sense it can of them. Having played little part in forming them it rationalises them after the event. Talk about the cart before the horse. Yes ‘you’ are just a post justification of yourself. But then we all to some extent perceive people who’re drowning in after-the-event rationalisations. They actually believe their conscious mind is the pilot, unaware it’s the cabin staff in control of the aircraft. This creates a tricky situation. The pilot does after all have all the knobs and dials, the stick and the vital view out of the front window, where as the crew are in the galley stuffing a microwave with breakfasts. This seems absurd. But wait. Consider a three-week flight to the moon. What use would perfect navigation and a finely executed landing be if the passengers had all already died of hunger? Or rioted because their supply of duty free spirit was unavailable? So on a trip of three score years and ten there’s a lot more to be aware of than to think about. Leave it to the pilot and he’ll get you there but without spirit and sustenance and a big smile from the stewardess it’s likely to be a fruitless journey.

Pound sign Nightmares.

OK I’ve got a degree in maths but as soon as there’s a pound sign in front of a number I become a worrier. Maybe in my long forgotten youth I was castigated for forgetting my dinner-money. Millimetres, kilograms, torque and acceleration in imperial or metric and I’m fine, but currency…. my brain freezes over. Brrrr. In the last few days of having to make some important financial decisions I’ve tried to look at how it affects me. I sense that my conscious brain can’t get hold of the nebulous value of money; nebulous not only because it’s actual value is negotiable but because everyone has their own ethic of valuation. Though my conscious does its best to make sense of all these imponderables its efforts lead to a continuum of failure. I have an unanswerable anxiety, a sword of Damocles twitching above my left eyeball. This only reinforces my conscious focus on its aforesaid failure. I find myself yearning to measure a piece of wood with a ruler. I find myself cut off from my energetic encounter with life by a foggy wall of unease. OK I accept I’m a hopeless case, each to his own and all that, and some bankers might have trouble weighing out half a pound of mince, but even with some finance guys I’ve met, who’re totally comfortable with pound signs, I sense that same lack of energetic encounter with the life. They’re enthusiastic, ebullient, intelligent and skilled but lacking in some quality I find in plumbers and midwives. When one’s hand and eye grapple daily with the quirks of reality, the grain of wood, the gurgling air of a central heating system, the blood of birth, one is in touch with the basic rationality of the physical world. It is ponderable, and a centimetre will always be a centimetre. Today I heard someone comment, “Leave the Fed in charge of the Sahara and in six months there’d be a shortage of sand.” Someone give me a piece of wood to measure. 

Stiffmouse University.

Lets say I start a university. Small scale to start with, just one subject. Two lecturers on £40k and a room big enough for twenty students. On a 40 hour week, for easy maths, and contact time of 10 hours there can be 80 students. (4x20) My two lecturers would have 20 hours contact time and 20 hours prep, marking etc. With a room cost of say £10,000pa and a total yearly outlay of £100k fees would be £1,250 plus my cut, so lets say £1,750pa. I could undercut Cambridge by 80% and still walk away with £40k pa and endless holidays for just thinking up this wizzo idea. I’m going to sell it to Carphone Warehouse as every prospective undergraduate will have been a frequent visitor since the age of ten. ‘You’ve got the phone, now get the degree.’ No, no, no, no, no. What am I thinking! Students could text in their work to a call centre in Mumbai. Further calculator work. £5k for staff and a hundred rupees for the sweatshop and fees could be £62.50, plus my cut of say £1,687.50 and you guessed it, £1,750. If they’re a bit strapped for cash I could do loans at 200%APR and still be the cheapest uni in Britain. Ah but they’re going to need beer. OK, five containers of Kingfisher lager and advertise, “Free beer for the duration of your course!” Irresistible! 100% mark up and lump it in with the fees so they don’t realise they’re paying for it. Isn’t capitalism wonderful! 

Three Brain Therapy.

Recent neuroscience is finding that the brain is particularly adapted for movement. Much goes on in our, for want of a better word, autonomic brain/body connection that, though we constantly use it, we are unaware of. Vision and our other senses provoke general conscious plans for movement and then leave the actual movement to this autonomic connection. Only when sensory feedback indicates something is not going to plan do they begin to play a part again. One can look to pick up a cup and then continue talking while the action ‘automatically’ happens. Pick up a cup from your own hand and your hand won’t move, but get someone else to pick it up and your hand move upwards because the other person is not part of your autonomic system. This in many ways should be expected because the older parts of our brain that pre-date and precede our human conscious were predicated on movement for survival. When our survival depended on our agility the brain will have evolved to provide the sophistication required. Monkeys are amazingly agile but can’t do sums. Sports men and women ‘in the zone’ are probably subduing their conscious brain almost entirely so that it doesn’t interfere with this far more direct interplay of brain/body/senses. Professors on the other hand are renowned for their inability to dance. Where Deep Blue can beat a grand master at chess it would be childlike in terms of agile movement.

In these earlier times of our brain’s development survival will have evolved mechanisms of flight, fight or freeze and our drives to feel safe, eat and breath. These, like movement, will be part of this autonomic brain/ body response.

We often talk of ‘the unconscious’ as a part of the conscious mind below our awareness; that they are a continuum of a similar cognitive substance, but what if they are in a sense mechanistically different or belong to different layers of overall consciousness? ???? describes these layers in terms of the reptilian, mammalian and human brain each contributing in that order to our reactions. Simplistically the reptilian brain is the source of our emotional responses, the mammalian of our physical responses and the human our conscious responses. Recent experiments where respondents were asked to indicate their answer by both a physical movement and verbally found the two answers were often not the same; a raised finger might indicate yes where the voice said no. Might these two answers have been generated by different parts of the brain, the finger from the autonomic mammalian part and the voice from the human conscious brain? Might mirroring and anchors used in therapy be ways of connecting with a person on an autonomic level? Might the UPR and empathy of Rogers be ways of connecting on the reptilian level where the basic motivations of fight, flight, safety and food are the driving consciousness?

I begin to see these three layers providing their functions independently of each other.

The conscious brain of the sportsman is incapable of awareness of how he can play so well, the musician of what are the means of her appreciation. We all experience the results of all these layers yet insist on straining everything through the sieve of our human consciousness brain as in, ‘I think therefore I am.’

I wonder if we might, in experiencing another person, consider them and ourselves as having three independent brains each contributing their own particular aspect of consciousness and response. In this model a therapeutic relationship would wish to in some way directly address each on its own terms. Talking ‘about problems’ addresses the conscious human brain but not the other two. Talking as part of physically ‘being with’ a client can contribute to the mammalian consciousness in the same way as touch, mirroring and grooming. (observe a women’s hairdressers) It may also contribute to the feeling of safety required for the reptilian consciousness, but mostly how one ‘is with’ a client must address how one makes connections with each of these three different forms of consciousness. None of the different therapeutic approaches contain this view explicitly. Person centred approaches it in terms of Unconditional Positive Regard and empathy, NLP in terms of physical awareness of ‘state’, relaxation and hypnosis, while CBT considers the human consciousness to be a portal to the other two through controlled experiential feedback. Every therapist is though aware of how a comfortable and calm quiet room, of a mellifluous tone of voice and even smell contribute to effectiveness. I’m suggesting here that these aren’t simply niceties or ‘the norm’ but that they are ways of allowing communication with these deeper, different forms of consciousness. Further I’m suggesting that we might consider structuring our awareness in terms of these three different forms of consciousness. How might one metaphorically ‘talk’ to each of them explicitly and directly?

Trust the Force Luke.

Last evening we had a shamanic evening lead by a therapist and good friend. Two young women, interested but sceptical, my motorcycle buddy and me. Towards the end of the evening one of the young women asked if Therapistmouse could cut her ties to an old boyfriend. The theory is we are all connected to each other by ‘chords’ of energy coming from our naval. In a simple ceremony she lay on the floor and thought about her old boyfriend. Therapistmouse felt a thin chord and symbolically ‘cut’ it with a knife a couple of inches above her naval. Now who’s to know whether it did anything more than make her feel a bit better? I hatched a plan. Knowing I have a strong connection with Mothermouse, I said OK I’ll think of Mothermouse and see if the rest of us can feel it. So, I lay on the floor and conjured her up while they all had a go. Therapistmouse felt a thumb sized chord. The two young women were then sent into giggles of amazement as they also felt it, and even my motorcycle buddy felt ‘something.’ To be honest I felt a bit peeved I couldn’t prove it for myself but it convinced everyone else. So? Who knows? Therapistmouse said he cut a woman’s chord to her ex husband once and two hours later, he being on the other end of it, appeared at her front door with a bunch of flowers. Probably garage but still. He also said Don’t do this yourself or let anyone else unless they know what they’re doing. In a group test a while back we tried in pairs to ‘guess’ whether the other person was thinking happily or angrily about someone. I found I could do it with my eyes closed, in silence, just my hand an inch above their hand. But I couldn’t tell you how.