Family Gymnastics Traditions

My grandfather, Robert Wich, was an amateur gymnast. Below, you'll see a photo of him doing a routine with his gymnastics partner (I'm assuming that this photo was taken in the early 1920's My grandfather is the one in the air).



I am trying to respect this family tradition, but I find it easier to do impressive acrobatics in my own way at the Oto-phay Op-Shay Branch of the YMCA. Here I am performing the rarely seen finger-balancing routine with my gymnastics partner, Edie White. I'm also attaching a close-up so you can appreciate the critical placement of fingers.



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The Courage to be Seen As You Are

At her TED talk, "The Power of Vulnerability," Brené Brown points out that courage and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin. When I first heard this, it seemed oxymoronic, but then it made total sense. You need courage to be vulnerable to others and when you are vulnerable, you can have real relationships, which makes you strong, courageous. Here's an except from Brown's TED talk:

There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. . . . What they had in common was a sense of courage. . . . [T]he original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. . . . [T]hey were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection. The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating . . . They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first ... the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ... the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

. . . .

[W]hen we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough" ... then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. 

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Life’s Meaning and Friendship Connections

We are intensely social beings. This is a predicament because it takes a lot of work to maintain social connections and even the strongest of connections can sometimes fail. It’s worth the work and it’s worth the risks, though, because this social predicament offers us our only chance to live a meaningful life.

Many people who are shy or (like me) introverted might be tempted to think that a meaningful life can be sustained by passively observing the world around us. We might be tempted to think that we can retreat into some sort of safe place, somehow living a meaningful life while watching the crazy, beautiful and (sometimes) dangerous social spectacles crisscrossing our space-time at a distance.

But a meaningful life is only possible when we work hard to forge deep vulnerable personal honest connections with others. Life can be meaningful only to the extent that we bravely reach out to others at the risk of failure and rejection.

Our journey is thus a non-stop crisis. The human condition compels us to keep approaching social intersections of danger and opportunity. There is no place to pull over to be neutral. There is no way to fully light up our potential by vicariously living the adventures of others, including the adventures of sports heroes or Hollywood characters. To the extent that we fail to take personal risks of connection, the meaningful life withers. If we had been given instruction manuals at the moment we were born, this would be Lesson One: Maintaining close personal connections with others is a necessity of life, as important as food, water and air. Chapter Two: A Life without close friendships is an emotionally impoverished life. Lesson Three: We will often fail in our attempts to connect with others and when this happen, it will hurt.

Lesson Four is that we can often get up, dust ourselves off and be better and stronger because of failures to connect with others. This “good” type of failure is only possible, however, if we can ridicule and silence voices that tell us to stop taking risks, whether these are voices of other people trying to “help” us or whether we are broadcasting these pernicious voices inside of our own heads.

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot recently. For the past year, I had been in a period of relatively blissful “normal” life, where everything seemed safe and steady, including an ongoing romance. But then a huge wave hit me from behind and everything was instantly upside down. It’s as if I were at a movie theater where the movie screen caught fire and I started thinking: “This incredible CGI makes it look like there is a real fire,” but then I realized it was a real fire. Then the announcer stated: “We’re taking a break from normal life. Good luck to you.”

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What To Do About Your Broken Heart

A broken heart can really hurt. It can physically hurt and it can be distracting, obsessive, depressing and unrelenting. The internet offers a lot of advice about what to do when your heart is broken, but this advice is anecdotal, hit and miss at best. That's why I then searched for articles based on science and I found one the offered an effective way to lessen the pain of a broken heart.

At Scientific American, Psychologist Guy Winch discusses a study that considered three strategies, to see which of these best helped heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.

In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.

According to Winch, although this unpleasantness might seem to be a big price to pay to reduce feelings of love, there are two ways to address this unpleasantness: 1) Remember that "when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship." When we force ourselves to remember the downsides of the relationship, we are correcting for these untrue idealized images that are causing the pain 2)  We shouldn't contemplate only the person to whom we were attracted. Instead, we should force ourselves to think of the dynamics  of the relationship itself.  That's where we can best see the problem, because quite often a relationship consists of two smart good-hearted people who merely lack the chemistry to be a pair.

In my experience, it might take some work to see the downside to a relationship, especially when one is the dumpee rather than the dumper. But it's not always difficult.  There might be low-hanging fruit, things like addictions or rampant dishonesty, things that would have been absolute deal-breakers on Day One.  If only your lover had revealed these things at the very beginning of your relationship.  Imagine a Match.com profile indicating: "I will tell you the opposite of what I'm really feeling when we discuss important issues."  Or "I will become annoyed when you come over to spend time with me because I'd rather spend time with my other friends, who like to get drink heavily."  For most of us, dysfunctions like these, if revealed up front, would destroy the possibility of ever having a first date.  Once a romance has been going on for months, the confirmation bias encourages us to overlook any evidence pointing to major problems like these.  Once the relationship fractures apart, major issues like these often become obvious, sad and embarrassing memories.  But once the relationship is over, stark bad memories like these are also the best medicine to lessen the pain of your broken heart.  The better the hurt, the better the cure.

Even in the absence of major issues, there are doubtless various reasons why any particular relationship failed.  There had to be friction and frustration, even if nothing "major," and even if the cause is ineffable. Even where one doesn't understand why the relationship was not smooth sailing, one certainly experienced that it was not smooth sailing.

Winch suggests the following as the best salve for a broken heart, whether the issues were major or minor:

If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and keep that list on your phone. Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memories, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.

I have tried this approach to the letter and I highly recommend it.  Reviewing your own long list of real grievances turns a wonderful movie about you and your ex-lover into a sad and frustrating movie that makes you want to throw popcorn at the screen and walk out.  Once you see your ex-lover as they were, not merely as you crave them, it's much easier to turn the page to a new chapter of your life.

What follows is Winch's TED talk on this same topic:

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Donald Hoffman’s version of the Matrix: Things might be Extremely Different than they Seem

I enthusiastically recommend this podcast featuring Donald Hoffman. Sam Harris and (his wife) Annaka sound, in equal parts, skeptical and intrigued, which makes for some deeply engaging conversation. Hoffman's thesis might challenge almost everything you think.  Hoffman argues that evolution has not honed us to have veridical perception (seeing things as they really are). Rather, natural selection has privileged evolutionary fitness to prevail over veridicality. This topic dovetails nicely with Andy Clark's theory of predictive processing, in which Andy portrays perception as a "controlled hallucination."

The first hour is free for non-subscribers. Here's the promo for the podcast:

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”


This teaser for this podcast is not mere hype.



An obvious example for illustrating Hoffman's thesis is color. We don't perceive wavelengths, much less the quantum physics even deeper down. To perceive these things would be too expensive (in terms of bandwidth) for rough and ready biological processors like human brains and bodies, and we don't need to fully understand the physics of the process in order to make use of color (or sounds or pain or shapes). For most of us, most of the time, we are trapped in the Matrix.

It is critical to note that there is NO COLOR in the objects "out there." Wavelengths of light are not colored. Color is something that is created only by the interaction between whatever is out there and our ability to engage with the world because it increases biological fitness. Here's the kicker . . . for Hoffman, everything is like color.  We don't need to understand the electronics and physics of the "objects" on our computer desktops in order to make excellent use off them.  Similarly, we often make excellent use of the things that we seem to encounter in the world, but it is entirely consistent with this observation that we don't deeply understand these things or we barely understand them.  A similar concern provoked Immanual Kant to divide the world into phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves).

The bottom line is that things might be incredibly useful to us as creatures trying to survive day-to-day, even when our understanding of these things is extremely lacking or even false. Useful trumps veridically-true to those of us who are often merely trying to survive to the next day. We human animals are happy to satisfice, even though we often conflate our hacked-up understandings of things with veridical truth.

In Paragraph 121 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche also pointed out that things that are untrue can often be useful:

Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live--by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error

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