Celebrating Independence, American Style.
I looked up the annual tally. About 10-20 people die of fireworks each Fourth and there are about 10,000 hospitalizations. Launching fireworks is much more hazardous than, say, eating turkey.
Dr. Andrew Huberman is a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University. In this video conversation with Shane Parrish, he suggests an exercise for controlling your impulses and keeping yourself focused. He describes two directional pathways that are triggered off of circuitry in the basal ganglia. One is the "Go" or action-oriented pathways the includes thought and the other is "No-Go." As kids, we are forced to engage in a lot of "No-Go" behaviors, including sitting still and not interrupting.
Our phones and other aspects of our environment cause us to shift our attention repeatedly. We are no longer children, so we don't have parents telling us "no" "no" "no." We tend to be action-oriented, "Go-Oriented," and we need to exercise our ability to resist impulses (to NOT check our phones and emails, for instance) in order to do deep focus for periods of 90-minutes with "tunnel-vision," resisting all distractions to get up and get away from the target of your focus. Huberman suggests several ninety-minute tunnel-vision sessions each day for productivity. How do we get better at this?
Hubeman suggests practicing "No-Go" moments:
One thing that I've done over the years to try and reinforce these circuits in myself based on my understanding of how they work is every day I try and have somewhere between 20 and 30 No-Goes and the No-Goes can be trivial like i'm ready to pick up my phone --NO!--and I force myself to not pick it up. All i'm doing is trying to reinforce that circuit, because the thing to understand about neural circuitry is that it's generic. It's not designed so that you have a strong No-Go response--just to picking up your phone--it actually carries over to multiple other things. At any moment we can be back on our heels flat-footed or forward center of mass. That's the way I try and visualize the waking portions of my life.
Most of our life is Go Go Go, starting at the moment we wake up.
We rarely rehearse our No-Go functions. No-Go functions are simply about suppressing behavior. So if you have a meditative practice there's a little bit of that, where you think i don't want to do it but i'm going to force myself to sit still even though I want to get up. That's a no-go, but think about it: If you get better at meditating, you actually have less of an opportunity to get into this No-Go mode to trigger the circuitry. So what I try and do is introduce 20 or so No-Go's throughout the day that I deliberately impose on myself as I'm about to get into reflexive action. It could be delaying a bite of food for a couple of minutes. I realize it sounds almost like an eating disorder, people with eating disorders probably want to stay away from that one--but there are all sorts of ways that we can do this. We find ways that we are are short-circuiting this process. I think we need to keep these No-Go circuits trained up. I think nowadays there's so much opportunity and so much reward for Go that we don't train the No-Go pathways.
"Do the Next Right Thing" is a phrase that has often focused me. Where did this phrase originate? The Marginalian explains that on December 15, 1933, Carl Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on how to live. Jung wrote:
Dear Frau V.,Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung
2020 Report Card on some of the achievements and struggles of men compared to those of women.
Before a woman decides that men have it easier, she might want to consider this list. This is not a comprehensive list. Admittedly, women fare worse than men in many situations.
Are Tourette Symptoms a new form of social contagion? A new article from the Wall Street Journal intrigued me. The title: "Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor." Here are the opening paragraphs:
Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.
According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.
No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.
I'm intrigued for a couple reasons. Back in college I spent some timing hanging around with guy who was smart and funny. He was also a really good tennis player and he had an easy going confidence.I was a several years younger than he was and I was not feeling confident about who I was at age 17. He also had a tic. Occasionally, his head suddenly jerked while he talked. This happened every couple minutes. After a while, I noticed that I was starting to do that too. The fact that I started doing this seemed odd, because I didn't decide to do it. It just started happening. I consciously clamped down on that behavior and I stopped doing it a few after I noticed myself doing it.
I'm also interested in this article because of the social contagion angle related to the sudden spike in teenaged girls who claim they were born in the wrong bodies. I'm speaking of the transgender social contagion phenomenon discussed extensively by Abigail Shrier (and see here).