Primer on positive psychology by Martin Seligman

Tonight I viewed Martin Seligman's excellent 2004 TED lecture on positive psychology. Seligman introduced his talk by bemoaning the many decades during which psychology utilized only the "disease model," which he described as "Spot the loon." Some good things came of it, of course. Sullivan mentions that we can now treat many psychological illnesses (admitted only a small percentage all of them) and we can sometimes make miserable people less miserable. The disease model ignored normal people and high talent people, however. It also failed to help normal functioning people to become happier. Seligman carefully made the point that the skill set for avoiding dysfunction is dramatically different than the skills necessary for improving happiness. The concerns of positive psychology take over where the disease model left off. Positive psychology concerns both human strengths and human weaknesses. It includes building up the best things in life as well as preparing the worst. It includes helping to make the lives of normal people more fulfilling and nurturing talent (including genius). Positive psychology seeks to do all these things, to complement psychology's traditional aim of healing pathology. But what is happiness? Based on Seligman's research, happiness comes in three flavors (the following is from Seligman's website, Authentic Happiness, where you can take various self-tests at this site to determine your level of happiness):

First The Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible and having the skills to amplify the pleasures. This is, of course, the only true kind of happiness on the Hollywood view. Second, The Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life. Third, The Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.
For another basic outline of these approaches, see here. Traditionally, the first of these three forms of happiness, Pleasant Life (also called "pleasant emotion") was considered to be the entirety of happiness. Examples include social relationships, backrubs, a full stomach, orgasms, hobbies and entertainment. Pleasant Life activities invoke a form of happiness that consists of a "raw feeling" that is obvious--you know when it's happening. Pleasant Life feelings can be generated by spending time with others. Those who like to spend considerable time alone (I know one of them) have often been perceived as less happy. That characterization is not necessarily accurate, though, once we consider the two other basic forms of happiness. [More . . . ]

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Placebos and magic

At TED, magician/comedian Eric Mead discusses "The Magic of the Placebo." Based on the studies considering reports of patients, it turns out that needles injecting inert substances are more powerful than blue-colored pills containing inert substances, which are more powerful than white pills, which are more powerful than tablets. No active ingredient in any of these, yet we see predictable differences in the power of these "medicines." Belief is what makes placebos work. But YOU are not so naive as to be taken in by something with no active ingredient, right? If you're squeamish about needles, you'll find this talk extra-interesting. After viewing this video, I saw the story-telling power of Hollywood in a new light.

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Those death panels

At Salon, Joe Conason urges Democrats to push back when they are accused of creating "death panels" as part of health care reform:

The proper reply to "death panels" was that they already exist in the corporate bureaucracy of the insurance companies -- and in the lobbying firms where reform that would save tens of thousands of lives annually has been killed every time.

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Time to take a wide open look at U.S. policy regarding Israel

At Huffpo, David Bromwich has written a passionate piece highly critical of traditional U.S. policy regarding Israel. According to Bromwich, some U.S. journalists and politicians are finally starting to make some noise where it has long needed to be made:

[T]he door to an honest discussion of Israel and Palestine has been opened wide. Too wide for AIPAC, and all its journalistic outlets, to close with their usual dispatch. We are in possession now of the realistic knowledge that Israel's policies endanger American troops and American interests; that by creating new terrorists, those policies also threaten the security of the United States.

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My disorientation

I’m finding myself to be disoriented tonight. You see, it has occurred to me (as it sometimes does) that I’m actually an incredibly complex community of trillions of individual cells, no single one of which is capable of having any conscious thought, though I am easily able to think consciously as a complex adaptive system of cells. I'm also disoriented because it occurs to me tonight that this community of that is “me” is kept alive and conscious by an internal pulsing ocean of blood, its composition very much like the Earth’s oceans, which were apparently our ancestral home. Equally amazing, this internal ocean of blood is pumped through 60,000 mile of blood vessels by a heart that beats 100,000 each day, thanks to our incredibly reliable pacemaker cells. How can any of this possibly be true, except that it is true, because I am writing this post and you are reading it? It also occurs to me that there are far too many other parts of my human body that I almost always take for granted, such as my liver, which continuously performs hundreds of chemical processes without any conscious help from “me" (not that I could possibly be of assistance). Even more amazing, the liver can repair itself. How is any of this remotely possible? There are many other things on my mind tonight, all of which disorient me, because I'm trying to clear out my preconceptions and see these things as though I were seeing them for the first time. For instance, I seem to have evolved from viruses, which is mind-blowing. Actually, half of all human DNA originally came from viruses which embedded themselves into my ancestor’s gametes. Neurons - creative commons (image by UC Regents) But I'm not done describing my disorientation. I am also disoriented tonight because I've reminded myself that some of my ancestors were sponges. No, they didn’t just look like sponges; they were sponges. And once cells figured out how to thrive together in that primitive sponge-like way, things rapidly got far more interesting. This real-world story of human gills, paws and fur is more amazing than any fiction anyone could ever write. Tonight, I am also thinking about several people I know who are fighting for their lives against illness. I sometimes hear their friends and family asking how it could happen that the patients got so sick. But I’ve got a different take on human frailty, sickness and death. I wonder how something so complex as the human body works at all. Ever. Truly, how is it that I can even wiggle one of my fingers? But there’s yet more to my disorientation tonight. It also occurs to me that the community of cells that constitutes me is living on a huge rotating orb that revolves around a star so big that it makes the earth look like a speck. But there's more. It seems that the universe in which we find ourselves is expanding, but from what? How did it get here? I don't trust any answers that I've ever heard. I'm assuming that some type of universe or multi-verse has always been here in one form or another, and that's admittedly my bald speculative assumption. I don't even know enough to have a belief on the topic. It also disorients me that no one really knows why things exist in this way rather than in some other way or no way at all, although many people peddle simplistic answers--mere strings of words--in response to these basic questions. The biggest reason I’m disoriented tonight is that it appears that we don’t even know how to ask the biggest questions--we betray our naive ways even by the way we describe such questions as "big." Our “whys” and "hows" are pale and shallow—we appear to be condemned to forever dabble with our conceptual metaphors in our attempts to understand our complicated existence. We seem to be trapped in our finite understanding, unable to ever get around our own corner. That's the way it seems to be to me tonight, and every time these sorts of thought come to mind. I'm disoriented, but don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I am truly enjoying the ride. I never cease to be amazed.

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