Stuck In A Mobile

If we can't change personality,
What can we change?

[Bob Dylan's] vignettes are rendered as subjective experiences bordering on hallucinatory, filled with ragmen, Shakespeare, a dead grandfather, a baffled preacher, and Ruthie, with a honky-tonk lagoon and a Panamanian moon.^[12][] This collage of verse spins in his head, above his head, a veritable mobile to be sure. It would be a stretch to call each verse a fable, a fictional story about a moment of insight. They are more like threats and denials - harmful stories, not useful.

“If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I, too, must come to know my own story. I must come to see in all its particulars the narrative of the self - the personal myth - that I have tacitly, even unconsciously, composed over the course of my years. It is a story I continue to revise, and tell myself (and some times to others) as I go on living.” - Dan P. McAdams^1,2

You are stuck. The genes you have and the biology of your brain determine so much about you. They determine a significant part your experience of life.

We all disagree with this assertion because we live with such ableness³ - we can do things, and in the doing we control things, and in the controlling, we shape the experience of our lives. It’s our creation.

A fish doesn’t notice water. We don’t notice air. Our consciousness cannot notice the functioning of the brain or the fixity of the genes. Those qualities underly all brain function, and we are conscious of only 2%⁴. A lot goes on in the air we don’t notice.

Even if we are conscious of 2% of our mental function (and perhaps 0.02% of all body function), we are aware of 100% of our consciousness, heavy drinking aside. Don’t events and circumstances mold our personality and set our temperment? We can change those things. No genes or biology there, right?

Wrong. Genes create a remarkable degree of stability in personality and temperament. They cause much of the normal change through life.⁵ For example, today’s face looks like yesterday’s. Change happens over periods of years, longer nose, bigger ears, loss of hair and less symmetry. The same is true for personality.

Even significant life crises - death of a loved one, loss of job, divorce - have only moderate impact on personality. After the window of roughly six months, personality returns to its pre-crisis state. Faces get wounded. Wounds heal, sometimes leaving scars. Some scars deface, others show character.

The personal history of life circumstances,⁶ such as traumas, family, school, job and so on matter some.⁷ Too much tanning causes leather face. Sunscreen preserves a youthful complexion. If your parents had a nasty divorce, you might be reluctant to marry.

Consistent use of psycho-pharmaceuticals are a potent way to tweak personality. The doctor-prescribed kind raise conscientiousness and extroversion and reduce anxiety.⁸ Perhaps this treatment is like botox for the face - most of the time wrinkles go away and the face looks younger, but sometimes you get botox-face.

Life circumstances have a greater impact on the degree a person is nervous, easily upset, troubled by guilt, feels mistreated, victimized by bad luck or is vindictive,⁹ or more simply said, the degree a person is dysphoric. With care, nicks to the chin fade, cuts to the face heal and even wounds clear up to modest scars. Well after the fact, plastic surgery can remove the scar, potentially boosting self-esteem in the process.¹⁰

Daniel Goleman, writing for the New York Times, picks up on this point: core traits remain stable, but the traits of alienation, morale and feelings of satisfaction are more maleable, a reflection of self-regard at a particular moment rather than basic personality. To Goleman, we can influence our self regard even if nature (genes) matters more. Nature has fixed us in ways we might not appreciate but surely should accept.

Many guides for self help, personal growth, and well-being focus on what is rigid by nature - personality and temperament. These misaimed self-help efforts are bound to be frustrating and ineffective. What happens?

Guidance is inspiring, like the infatuation of a new romance. Positive transference feels so good. We are told we can work on our rigid nature, then get frustrated and the crush is gone. But for a while, we felt so close. We want to try again: a new guide, another infatuation and the same ending. We no longer pursue reasonable means to enhance resilience and well-being, just a good read.

Resilience and well-being are not found in a medicine bottle or from a witch’s broomstick or in many ungrounded guide books. Yet the ache for resilience and a heightened sense of well-being seems universal. What to do? What if we feel far removed from feeling normal?

Our most significant tool for improving resilience and well-being is the brain itself. We can invoke its natural processes in valuable ways. The brain is an experience creating machine, rendering continuous procession of primal sentences - body-as-it-was, object, body-as-it-is - into a pervasive sense of self. It write out our experience in an endless stream of simple sentences.

We can use the brain to recreate or modify the distress of unclear, unresolved events in our life. We can use it to explore for resolution and meaning. We continuously revise the stories we tell ourselves. With some practice and skill, we can change the stories our brain writes. We objectify and let the body work the object - a topic for an upcoming essay.

One of the best writers on life stories is Dan McAdams. He makes a forceful point: our stories are myth with introjected characters not archetypal ones. Such stories search for psychosocial truths, rather than factual truth per se. When we find meaning, the insights feel fundamental, primal and create the sensations and feelings of epiphany.

Our myths create significant emotional responses, story-object, body-response. This reaction signals the brain to catalog, make sense and find significance. We put our brain to work to create order and understanding even if it has to confabulate, to lie.

Ultimately, the point isn’t to actually write out a different personal myth (though such effort can be highly therapeutic). The point isn’t to know you can tell a different story. The point is to have an implicit belief that your story is simply a story. Otherwise, your stories might own you. Those are strange, addled fables indeed.

The Bob Dylan song, “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” shows what happens when addled fables own the story-maker. In the song, Dylan puts us in the position to hear his protagonist review, unsettling vignette after vignette, slim pieces of apprehension:

The protagonist knows he can’t escape. He cannot connect with Shakespeare - the source of modern personality.¹¹ His eyelids have been ripped off, burned and snuffed out so he can no longer shut out the train of life experience, and so on. My favorite is the line,

An' she says, "Your debutante just knows what you need but I know what you want."

The protagonist lives an overwhelmed life denied all but the basics of satisfied needs.

His vignettes are rendered as subjective experiences bordering on hallucinatory, filled with ragmen, Shakespeare, a dead grandfather, a baffled preacher, and Ruthie, with a honky-tonk lagoon and a Panamanian moon.¹² This collage of verse spins in his head, above his head, a veritable mobile to be sure. It would be a stretch to call each verse a fable, a fictional story about a moment of insight. They are more like threats and denials - harmful stories, not useful.

No doubt the protagonist is in an altered state of consciousness, a gateway to creativity and where conscious experience itself can be attended. He should be able to close his eyes, imagine a new story, reframe a troubling experience, tame the wildness out of his personal mythology.

Dylan gives the listener perspective the protagonist lacks,¹³ a sense of just how images from the protagonist’s hallucinations conflate into aspects of mythology. These aspects are not god-like figures, they are a procession viewed through the haze of Texas medicine and railroad gin, his neon madmen. Without eyelids, he has too much sight, no refuge, no chance for reason. With little apprehension, with much apprehension,¹⁴ the protagonist is defined by his madmen.

He cannot close his eyes and cannot change the vignettes or even stop them. The madmen seek the perspective of height, possess the story teller and even change him to suit their purpose. In a way, the fabled neon madmen are more conscious than the protagonist.

Dylan depicts the process of stringing together narrative in the quest for sense, for a significant psychosocial truth, a moment of insight, a piece of self-definition. The song itself is more than seven minutes long and has nine verses. Its run-on quality suggests Dylan could have written on indefinitely.

Mythology has this open-ended quality - figures with stories, different figures who react to the stories and the story-tellers, new stories created by the figurative acting out these internal dramas, and so on - verse within verse on top of verse. The combinatorial process continues on indefinitely until its creator - the protagonist in the song - tires and choses to inject the end conditions.

Dylan might have written more, but his perspective started to lose focus, and risked merging with the protagonist. The album cover suggests that even the songwriter, the creator himself, could not maintain pin-sharp perspective and had become fuzzy, mildly out of focus. Even so, the ending would not have changed. In the prefigured final verse, the end condition for this recursive experience, Dylan answers the question of the song with mystery then bluntness.

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street Where the neon madmen climb.

The protagonist does not wander some figurative life path set in the ill-defined ether of the future-possible. He sees each verse laid out as brick, a stretch of pavement no longer than a street block, and not as stepping stones set in virgin, fertile earth, leading into the hopeful unknown.

He remains on Grand Street stuck in one location, not wandering. On this street, the characters of the protagonist’s mythology arise. Grand neon madmen climb out of and away from the brick, seeking height, perspective, understanding. Unlike the protagonist, his facets try to leave. They are stuck because he is and vice versa.

They all fall there so perfectly, It all seems so well timed.

What about the brick? The protagonist does not create them or lay them down. They are the water of his life circumstances mixed with the clay of a body (and the genes that created it). These bricks fall in the common time of life, one damn thing after another as my biology teacher would say, a cruel providence.

Now finally, the protagonist tells us what he wants.

An' here I sit so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going through all these things twice.

Because the protagonist is overwhelmed, he does not want to know Why? For what purpose? To what end? Just the price. He wants to pay so his madman may sit and he may walk, therapy in lieu of problem solving. He cannot be apart from himself and cannot get what he wants - no Ruthie or Panamanian moon for him.

The prospect of going through it all again, of continuing with rumination and conflation, only to experience the wildness of his neon-lit archetypes is the nature of his blues.

Oh, Mama, is this really the end, To be stuck inside of Mobile With the Memphis blues again.

He is stuck inside his mobile of hallucinatory vignettes, unable to make sense. They spin and he is spun. No doubt his next song will be crazier still.¹⁵

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1. MacAdams, D. P. (1997) 11. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. The Guilford Press. ↩

2. The essay title is from Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, from Blonde On Blonde. This essay leans heavily on Haidt, J. (2006), chapter 7, and 142-3 specifically. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books. Haidt’s book is an inspiring read and strives to connect the discoveries of modern psychology and neuroscience to the topics of happiness. ↩

3. In psych-speak, agency is the term for ableness. ↩

4. Most books on psychology or neuroscience eventually make the point that we are conscious only a faction of the mental function of our brain. The usual estimate is 2%. I have seen it as high as 5%. No need to cite conventional wisdom. A genuine citation for this point would be nice, however. ↩

5. McCrae, R. R., & Jr., P. T. (2005). Personality in Adulthood, Second Edition: A Five-Factor Theory Perspective. The Guilford Press. The book puts forth a significant argument for genetic determination of personality. Its citations are numerous and comprehensive. ↩

6. In psych-speak, environmental issues. ↩

7. Srivastava, S., John, O. P., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2003). Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Set like plaster or persistent change? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The tone of this study somewhat contradicts the idea that personalities are fixed over time. ↩

8. Harkness, K. L., Michael Bagby, R., Joffe, R. T., & Levitt, A. (2002). Major depression, chronic minor depression, and the five-factor model of personality. European Journal of Personality, 16(4), 271-281. ↩

9. McGue, M., Hirsch, B., & Lykken, D. T. (1993). Age and the self-perception of ability: A twin study analysis. Psychology and Aging, 8(1), 72-80. ↩

10. Haidt (2006) 93:

    People who undergo plastic surgery report (on average) high level of satisfaction with the process, and they even report increases in the qualities of their lives and decreases in psychiatric symptoms (such as depression and anxiety) in the years after the operation. The biggest gains were reported for breast surgery, both enlargement and reduction. ↩

11. Bloom, H. (1999). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Page 4:

    Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater of what might be called the colors of the spirit.  ↩

12. We’d all like to waltz under her Panamanian moon, for free or otherwise, no doubt. ↩

13. In this respect, Michael Gazzaniga is like Dylan, a story for a different day. ↩

14. Apprehension is another of my favorite words. It suggests both ‘to understand something about’ and ‘to be scared of.’ In the subjective world of our inner experiences, I believe we pretend to comprehend to avoid apprehension, the sense we should know more and are scared of what we cannot know. We create understanding where it doesn’t exist. We confabulate or deceive or lie. This tendency, necessary perhaps to give a false sense of agency over the external work, is likely innate, just like self-serving bias. ↩

15. If someone told me this song was about Dylan, torn between acoustic and rock music, suing his agent and record label, and scared he’d remain stuck in that untenable position, I could believe that too. It’d just trash my buzz. ↩

Cortex: Listening To Your Pulse

Any post so eloquent in a turn of phrase, “metaphysical feelings have a very carnal source,” deserves recognition. The Frontal Cortex cites a new study¹ and elaborates on Damasio’s Iowa Gambling Task experiments, a study which shows unconscious problem solving occurs well before conscious awareness of the solution.² My favorite part:

As William James hypothesized back in 1882, every emotion begins as a series of physiological changes in the body; our metaphysical feelings have a very carnal source. "What kind of an emotion of fear," James wondered, "would be left [after seeing a bear in the woods] if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?" James' answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear. We need the body in order to feel.

Complex problem solving generates significant survival benefit. Are these types of complex problems solved by conscious thought or unconsciously? If unconsciously, then how? These studies point to emotion. Damasio has written on this subject with wit and skill.³

One of his main points is emotions are events in the body. Feelings are subjective experience of emotions. This sequence offers a significant connection from neuroscience to psychology. It fascinates me.

UPDATE: There is a bug in my code and it's driving me crazy.

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1. Werner, N. S., Jung, K., Duschek, S., & Schandry, R. (2009). Enhanced cardiac perception is associated with benefits in decision-making. Psychophysiology. ↩

2. Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science (New York, N.Y.), 275(5304), 1293-5. ↩

3. Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain ↩

Grohol: Holy War!

John Grohol, on his World Of Psychology blog, takes great issue with a Holy War fueled by recent articles from Newsweek and Perspectives on Psychological Science.¹ First he offers healthy perspective - psychology is not like medicine and the mind is not like the body. Two obvious statements, yet important distinctions:

The crux of the argument hinges on whether it’s a fair comparison — is psychology like medicine? If so, then perhaps there’s some merit in looking at the medical model for its training. If not, then looking at how medicine trains doctors — while an interesting intellectual exercise — is engaging in a logical fallacy.

Grohol then seeks to frame the Baker et al. article as strongly influenced by the promotion of of the PCSAS organization:

Their entire article [Baker et al. (2009)] centers around how to make graduate school programs more elite, in order to grant them yet another new credential (to add to the existing credential soup that already confuses most consumers and even many professionals).

Indeed, when you see the article for what it is — a sales pitch for the brand-new PCSAS accreditation process — you understand why the argument was crafted in the manner it was. This isn’t about training psychologists to become better psychotherapists, it’s about offering a new credential to training programs that train psychologists to meet the authors’ definition of what makes a good clinician.

Left out of the article (or at least the version I have) was any conflict of interest statement. Two of the three researchers work for the PCSAS organization, and the person who wrote the accompanying editorial praising the study (Walter Mischel) is on the PCSAS advisory board. Is it any wonder that the article finds that the solution to the “problem” is an organization two of the three authors work for?

So herein lies his Holy War.

I took a view yesterday about the Newsweek article. My point is neurscience is a grounding force for the nurture art that is psychology. Begley implies that aspects of psychology lack the grounding typically found in medicine in general (and in her books specifically, though this point is only implied). Interestingly enough, many neuroscientists argue against her point about the plasticity of the brain.²

Scientific study of the brain and mind helps us understand what our subjective experience is. But how do we live with this experience? That is art. Artists are rarely ‘naturals.’ Instead, they grow from mentorship, study, practice and a long sequence of trial and error. Artists need nurturing.

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1. Baker, T.B., McFall, R.M. & Shoham, V. (2009). Current Status and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology Toward a Scientifically Principled Approach to Mental and Behavioral Health Care. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(2). ↩

2. Gazzaniga is very lucid in his argument against plasticity and neural constructivism. See p 13-16 and p 42-54 from Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000).The Mind's Past. University of California Press.

   To Begley's credit, she has the Dalai Lama on her side. See the forward from Begley, S. (2009). The Plastic Mind: New science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves. Constable.

   It's been determined: Gazzaniga is always lucid. ↩

Newsweek: Psychologists Reject Science

Sharon Begley¹ at Newsweek wrote a fascinating article whose main point is - practicing psychologists reject science. Citing an upcoming analysis she writes:

In a two-years-in-the-making analysis to be published in November in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists led by Timothy B. Baker of the University of Wisconsin charge that many clinicians fail to "use the interventions for which there is the strongest evidence of efficacy" and "give more weight to their personal experiences than to science." As a result, patients have no assurance that their "treatment will be informed by science." Walter Mischel of Columbia University, who wrote an accompanying editorial, is even more scathing. "The disconnect between what clinicians do and what science has discovered is an unconscionable embarrassment," he told me, and there is a "widening gulf between clinical practice and science."

She continues:

The problem [of doctors hating science] is even worse in psychology. For one thing, says Baker, clinical psychologists are "deeply ambivalent about the role of science" and "lack solid science training"—a result of science-lite curricula, especially in Psy.D. programs.

One of my main themes is science, specifically neuroscience, is a grounding force in the study of as resilience and well-being. This work is routinely ignored by the nurture arts² whose starting point can be some ‘theory of self,’ or even more vague ‘theory of the universe.’

So much wisdom comes from centuries of practice in the nurturing arts. Neuroscience identifies and enhances the truly valuable stories of wisdom, and directly challenges and diminishes the elements that are flighty.

UPDATE: a more detailed elaboration of the Newsweek article from Michael Anestis's fine blog. His money quote:

There are countless other reasons why this situation exists. Ultimately, however, I believe it is a battle of information. Until science makes its voice heard through the resources that people actually use and relate to, people will continue to listen to the voices of misinformation that populate television, radio, the internet, and sadly, many of our classrooms.

UPDATE 2: for the want of a markdown tag.

UPDATE 3: Science Daily on the source article for Newsweek.

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1. She wrote two well know books: Begley, S. (2009). The Plastic Mind: New science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves. Constable. Also, Begley, S. (2007). Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. Ballantine Books. ↩

2. I use the term ‘nurturing’ arts to include the practice of psychology and the wisdom traditions from school of thought and spiritual practice such as philosophy, mythology, mysticism and so on. ↩

NYTimes: After Death, The Pain That Doesn't Go Away

Grief sometimes does not go away. It consumes. From the New York Times article:

For some people, however — an estimated 15 percent of the bereaved population, or more than a million people a year — grieving becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function. “It takes a person away from humanity,” she said of their suffering, “and has no redemptive value.”

For me, helping someone with this type of crisis emphasizes what caring is all about:

The person in grief wants to feel felt, a support so often denied to them by the ones who have moved passed, or say they have moved past the death. It is as if the person in grief believes only the absent loved-one truly understands his grief, is the only one left who can care.

“And I couldn’t talk to my friends about it, because after a while they didn’t want to hear about it. ‘Stephanie, you need to get your life back,’ they’d say. But how could I? On birthdays, I’d shut the door and take the phone off the hook. Eric couldn’t have any more birthdays; why should I?”

For all the resources psychology or neuroscience or whatever can offer, care is needed well before those other things can matter. Care provides a foundation so the recounting can proceed.

PsyBlog: Are You A Liar?

PsyBlog in a recent blogpost asks the primal question associated with Lie To Me, and to a lesser extent House:

Do people really lie 3 times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new?

This article reviews the studies and provides entertaining commentary. This discussion also gives detail to the subtext of my blog post, Lie To Me.

Nature, Compassion and Strange Conclusions

Jonah Lehrer over at The Frontal Cortex discusses a recent study that suggests exposure to wildlife increases compassion. He then makes a rather pointed comment about the study's conclusion:

The question, of course, is why a mere glimpse of nature could lead to behavioral changes. The authors concoct a variety of clever hypotheses, including the possibility that nature "helps connect people to their authentic selves"[and the] primal traits of hunter-gather society, in which we depended on each other for survival. I'm not entirely convinced, as I generally avoid explanations that cobble together existentialism and untestable evolutionary psychology.

I share Johan’s conclusion.

To me, it seems nature itself would invoke a sense of perspective,¹ particularly its more contemplative aspects. Wildlife might trigger empathy and “theory-of-mind” responses (that is, imagining what that animal’s current experience would be like). (It’s unclear how much wildlife was part of the experiment.)

It would be reasonable to think the engagement of perspective, empathy and “theory-of-mind” responses would prime a person to have greater sensitivity to social emotions. One of the most prominent social emotions is compassion. So when a participant in the study goes from nature to the opportunity to show compassion, is it any wonder he shows more compassion than somehow who was first exposed to an urban setting?

The conclusion I sketch out could be more grounded, more in touch with the biology of the brain, than speculative notions such as the authentic self. One of the main values of neurosciences is its groundedness.

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1. In the way Damasio would use it, as one of the attribute of consciousness - perspective, ownership and agency. ↩

Mind Hacks On Placebo Side Effects

From the Mind Hacks blog:

…the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on anticonvulsant drugs closely resemble side-effects you get from anticonvulsants and are different from the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on pain killers, which more closely resemble pain killer side-effects.

It has been long recognized that placebos can have side effects just as they might relieve distress.¹ The point to the cited study is that the placebo side effects mirror the indicated side effects for the actual drug. Amazing.

The discussion of the placebo effect can be lengthy. In general, placebos are used in settings that rouse hope, are filled with healers - doctors, therapists, etc. - and diminish apprehension and other dysphoric states. A patient no doubt experiences many positive emotions in such a setting and is likely to recall the experience many times, repeating a sequence of hopeful emotions. There would be a direct link to improved feelings and moods. Like placebo studies, there are many others that link the success of treatment to quality of a patient’s mood.

Could it be that modern drug advertisements with there recitations of a lengthy catalog of side effects, create unfavorable expectations? Might people now hold an unconscious litany of possible disasters? If the possibility of taking medication (real or placebo) triggers anxiety then couldn’t the placebo effect work in reverse?

To me, the discussion of placebos points directly to the force of the stories we live by.

UPDATE: Science Daily posted a more traditional write up of the placebo effect:

When used "off-label," the antidepressant amitriptyline works just as well as placebo in treating pain-predominant gastrointestinal disorders in children, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

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1. Wolf S., Pinsky RH. Effects of placebo administration and occurrence of toxic reactions. J Am Med Assoc. 1954 May 22;155(4):339–341. A citation I found in Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1993). Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ↩

LIE TO ME

As a matter of habit, I don’t watch TV shows (although I do watch a lot of NFL). Last year, apparently brain washed by the commercials run between important football plays (they are all important), I was compelled to watch a first show of a new TV series. I have not watched the first show of a new TV series since The Six Million Dollar Man. Watching the NFL is like watch contests between dozens of six-million dollar mans, so how can I not watch? Apparently, I acquired this disposition at a young age.

The new show: Lie To Me.¹ I love the show. It’s awesome. I watch it and all the stinking commercials during its first run. I watch the TiVo version. And then I buy it from iTunes. I had a party when Fox recently started the second season.

What fascinates me is the way the show tries to work from grounded neuroscience to the TV-drama world of everyday events - serial murders, terrorism, government conspiracies - you know, usual everyday stuff. The first episode of the current season focused on a character with Dissociative Identity Disorder - multiple personalities - a very controversial diagnosis, in other words, perfect material.

The neuroscience is based on Dr. Paul Ekman’s groundbreaking work on micro-expressions.² He showed how facial expressions are caused by primary emotions - anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, and joy - and many social emotions - sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation and contempt (YouTube videos: long and medium)

His work highlights, in such a TV-worthy manner, the conclusions of many studies: emotional reactions play out in the physical stage of face and body.³ Our instantaneous reaction to an event betrays our true emotion, however skillful we might be at masking emotions. We have to recognize an emotion before we can repress its expression, and awareness takes time.⁴

Emotions are actions and changes to the physical body in response to something emotionally significant. If a snake fell out of a tree three feet in front of you, your face would first show surprise then fear. These emotions unfold throughout the body. You might lean back then step away. Your heart would race, blood would flow to your legs as you prepare to flee. Adrenaline would spike, and so on.

Many of these changes are external and observable. Others are autonomic, like changes to blood chemistry or brain activity, measurable and observable even if not visible to the naked eye. Emotions change your body, not your mental state. (The brain’s representations of body changes are what change mental states, much more on this later.)

Emotions are the dramatic force in a very simple sequence - your body as it was, the appearance of an emotionally significant object, your body as it is. The object acted on the body. Your body acted out an emotion. Two different perspectives even if we usually experience our body as the subject. This sequence is a sentence - subject, object, change: I jumped away from the snake - the primal first sentence of our being.

These sentences are a language in a sense,⁵ the start of our selves and the start of our experience of the experiences of our lives. These qualities emerge from the integration of one primal sentence after another, from the story told by the procession of sentences. As the story lengthens to seconds and minutes, the mental stage emerges, filled with feelings, consciousness and persistent self awareness.

The purpose of emotions is to enhance survival, or expressed in a more subjective form, to seek well-being. The quality of an emotional response might range from useful to harmful. The body persists with useful (emotions) or changes if the initial emotional acts were harmful (and caused additional negative emotions - fear, anger, or disgust for example). This body-based process continues until the object is no longer emotionally significant, creating a string of primal sentences - a story of the body as it attempted to produce a useful response.

Useful is not truthful. Our primal sentence is not a statement of truth, it is an act in the body. Our experience of the unfolding of these tiny dramas is not truth. In all great likelihood, any story we might tell of an event will express more usefulness than truthfulness.⁶ Perhaps it is a stretch to say we have evolved in such a manner to care about truth only so long as it is useful.

Extrapolating from hypothesis to belief, I would say the life stories you find easy to tell are about lessons of “useful,” self-advice in a way. The other stories, the ones that provoke labored feelings, the ones that are hard to think about or talk about, these stories are about “harmful,” a warning, no doubt. These stories are built on the qualities of useful / harmful, not on “actual truth.” And if the story is a hard one, expressing “harmful,” I speculate that story is less able to shepherd truth along with use.

This essay started with watching a TV drama and an acknowledgement of facts and neuroscientifically grounded conclusions. It then ran through a sequence of assumption, belief and advice to reach the conclusion that our life stories emphasize useful over truthful, and are in a sense, fiction. Apparently, I have a lot of explaining to do, but trust me on the fiction part.⁷

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1. If watching The Six Million Dollar Man lead to my NFL infatuation, what will Lie To Me do? Create a compulsion to watch Divorce Court? Fox News? CNN? Probably not Divorce Court. ↩

2. Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6(3). Psychology Press. 169-200. For a rather accessible book, see Ekman, P. (2004). Emotions Revealed : Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. ↩

3. Antonio Damasio books are the most comprehensive survey of the neuroscience of emotion, siting a large number of studies, experiments and articles conducted by many prominent neuroscientists, psychologists, etc. His own work is featured prominently in this area. A comprehensive discussion of emotions can be found in Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ↩

4. Dr. Benjamin Libet’s noteworthy work showed that under most circumstances, it takes about 0.5 seconds to become aware of a physical sensation. Emotions are events that occur in the body and can be very powerful physical sensations, but still would be subject to 0.5 second delay from occurrence to awareness. Our brains have the capacity to anticipate the event expected to generate the emotion, and such anticipation would likely shorten the time it takes to suppress the emotion. Still, it is highly likely the emotion must occur before it can be suppressed. See Libet, B. (2005). Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience). Harvard University Press.< ↩

5. The primal first sentence might well be a significant part of the foundation for our capacity to know the language we speak and to think in the language we know. ↩

6. If these events generate both implicit and explicit memories, the implicit memories are the likely the dominant ones and are the unconscious embodiments of “useful.” ↩

7. Baz Luhrmann, using text from he text of an article by columnist Mary Schmich, has already expressed the direction of my work far better than I have. From "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)":

   Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen…”

   From the album Something for Everybody (1997). ↩

About Fable

The Triumph of Fables¹

We want to thrive, to have a persistent sense of well-being, to be resilient to our transient crises. An essential step towards this desire is to cultivate the belief we live that way.

Belief comes from ability. Consciousness² provides three gifts - perspective, ownership and agency - gifts which make us incredibly able. From consciousness comes FABLEs - Fictional Autobiography aBout Life Experiences, stories by their nature and ours, we know too well and doubt too little.

Our beliefs shape our fables and our fables change our beliefs. This process is largely automatic unless we develop perspective, claim ownership and take charge, unless we are conscious of our fables. Explained another way, one robust avenue to better well-being is to objectify these stories. Can we see how fables affect us, see ourselves outside our fables, see these stories as useful fiction rather than truthful documentaries? Can we recognize they exist in our memory, formed from the stew of subjective experience, making them uniquely ours? Don’t we already write, rewrite, edit and significantly change them?

“Fable” is not some mystical concept. It is well grounded in the details and conjectures of modern neuroscience. In fact, both “Fable” and modern neuroscience undermine many new-agey, mystical prescriptions for how to be resilient and cultivate a sense of well-being. The brain is the way it is because it got that way.³ To know ‘the way it is’ is grounding and freeing. Brain activity explains a lot, mystical aspirations rather little. As with fables, there is much value in objectifying the brain.

With stories, the ending matters. Fables comprise our own providence. Shelter, care and guidance for our selves exists nowhere else but within these archetypal morality plays. Accept that you are the author. Reveal the deep, soul-satisfying sensation of triumph found in even your darkest stories.

If you have the capacity for triumph, you have already done so. After all, explanation is offered before it is sought.

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1. I love the sound of the word ‘confabulate.’ I love its meaning. I love the way it implicates me as a habitual fable maker. I chose Fable as the title for my work with malice aforethought and with the feeling of impish glee. ↩

2. Damasio, A. R. (2000). The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness: p 145-149. I am greatly indebted to Antonio Damasio, a highly acclaimed, oft sited, neuroscientist, for any sensible thought I might have on the topic. It would not be unreasonable if I sited him at the end of every sentence about consciousness. ↩

3. More accurately, the brain is the way it is because the body got that way. Mental experience is the consequence of body events, so says modern neuroscience. ↩