Life as Art

What a beautiful Christmas Tree! The lights twinkle and wink. I laugh with delight. The tree topper is as bright as the North Star. My heart is filled with Joy... "At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us"- Albert Schweitzer

-Such a gift you are! With the deepest gratitude - thanks!

Interesting comparison.

The Society to Save Endangered Species was formed by Fred Smilek and two of his colleagues; Charlie Mack & Jonathan Korny. Fred Smilek stays active in raising awareness for this cause. [www.fredjsmilek.com]

"Numerous studies suggest that highly creative individuals also employ a broadened rather than focused state of attention. This state of widened attention allows the individual to have disparate bits of information in mind at the same time."

This sounds like the ideal playground for the ADHD mind.

In my opinion, there is a definite relationship between ADHD and Schizotypy. My nervous system lit up like the Fourth of July over the Wikipedia term "Schizotypy."

Nicotine addiction runs strong in the schizophrenic and high in the ADHD afflicted.

Personally, I can't function without cigarettes. What does nicotine do for me?

I felt I was the most high functioning on Diet Mountain Dew until I overdosed. What is it about the bromide that attracts me like a cat to antifreeze? Why is it my poison of choice?

Ever since I switched to Lipton Tea, it's just not the same.

Quirk and Gehlert (2003) suggested that the amygdala plays an important role in the development of anxiety disorders and drug-seeking behaviors. Specifically, they hypothesized that the neuronal pathways that extend from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex are deficient in inhibitory tone (i.e. overactivity) and thus drugs targeting these pathways could prevent addiction relapse and anxiety disorders.

The Emotional Economy, Part 2
Excerpted from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
By Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.
(Page 2 of 3)

Brain scans taken while Patient X guessed the feelings revealed an alternative to the usual pathways for seeing that flow from the eyes to the thalamus, where all the senses first enter the brain, and then to the visual cortex. The second route sends information straight from the thalamus to the amygdala (the brain has a pair, right and left). The amygdala then extracts emotional meaning from the nonverbal message, whether it be a scowl, a sudden change of posture, or a shift in tone of voice-even microseconds before we yet know what we are looking at.

Though the amygdala has an exquisite sensitivity for such messages, its wiring provides no direct access to the centers for speech; in this sense the amygdala is, literally, speechless. When we register a feeling, signals from our brain circuits, instead of alerting the verbal areas, where words can express what we know, mimic that emotion in our own bodies. So Patient X was not seeing the emotions on the faces so much as feeling them, a condition called "affective blindsight."

In intact brains, the amygdala uses this same pathway to read the emotional aspect of whatever we perceive-elation in someone's tone of voice, a hint of anger around the eyes, a posture of glum defeat-and then processes that information subliminally, beneath the reach of conscious awareness. This reflexive, unconscious awareness signals that emotion by priming the same feeling (or a reaction to it, such as fear on seeing anger) in us-a key mechanism for "catching" a feeling from someone else.

The fact that we can trigger any emotion at all in someone else-or they in us-testifies to the powerful mechanism by which one person's feelings spread to another. Such contagions are the central transaction in the emotional economy, the give-and-take of feeling that accompanies every human encounter we have, no matter what the ostensible business at hand may be.

Take, for example, the cashier at a local supermarket whose upbeat patter infects each of his customers in turn. He's always getting people to laugh-even the most doleful folks leave smiling. People like that cashier act as the emotional equivalent of zeitgebers, those forces in nature that entrain our biological rhythms to their own pace.

Such a contagion can occur with many people at one time, as visibly as when an audience mists up at a tragic movie scene, or as subtly as the tone of a meeting turning a bit testy. Though we may perceive the visible consequences of this contagion, we are largely oblivious to exactly how emotions spread.

Emotional contagion exemplifies what can be called the brain's "low road" at work. The low road is circuitry that operates beneath our awareness, automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed. Most of what we do seems to be piloted by massive neural networks operating via the low road-particularly in our emotional life. When we are captivated by an attractive face, or sense the sarcasm in a remark, we have the low road to thank.

The "high road," in contrast, runs through neural systems that work more methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of the high road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which the low road denies us. As we ponder ways to approach that attractive person, or search for an artful riposte to sarcasm, we take the high road.

The low road can be seen as "wet," dripping with emotion, and the high road as relatively "dry," coolly rational. The low road traffics in raw feelings, the high in a considered understanding of what's going on. The low road lets us immediately feel with someone else; the high road can think about what we feel. Ordinarily they mesh seamlessly. Our social lives are governed by the interplay of these two modes [see Appendix A for details].

An emotion can pass from person to person silently, without anyone consciously noticing, because the circuitry for this contagion lies in the low road. To oversimplify, the low road uses neural circuitry that runs through the amygdala and similar automatic nodes, while the high road sends inputs to the prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive center, which contains our capacity for intentionality-we can think about what's happening to us.

The two roads register information at very different speeds. The low road is faster than it is accurate; the high road, while slower, can help us arrive at a more accurate view of what's going on. The low road is quick and dirty, the high slow but mindful. In the words of the twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey, one operates "slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwards," while the other is more "wary and observant."

The speed differential between these two systems-the instant emotional one is several times faster in brain time than the more rational one-allows us to make snap decisions that we might later regret or need to justify. By the time the low road has reacted, sometimes all the high road can do is make the best of things. As the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wryly noted, "Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one."

In discovering Susan Boyle, I discovered how “affect-blinded” I am by my amygdala. The mismatch between Susan Boyle’s physical appearance and voice created a disturbing cognitive dissonance. I would call the resolution of the dissonance as “The death of the amygdala low road and the resurrection of the hippocampus high road.”

In her inspiring and profound performance I found a naked moment of truth. I am the "enemy" not Susan Boyle. My ego boundary dissolved and time stood still. Connectedness, wholeness and unity existed in that moment. For the duration of Susan Boyle’s performance, I found “Heaven on Earth.” I watched the performance at least twenty times on Youtube. I cheered and I cried.

I felt as duped as Simon Cowell. I was looking for the saber tooth “tiger” in Susan too. The tiger wasn’t in Susan Boyle. The tiger was in my amygdala. I might not be able to kill my amygdala but I can tame it.

Susan Boyle taught me about faith and hope. She woke me up from a nightmare and carried me into the dream of Martin Luther King. Perhaps it is time for me to give up my “drugs of choice” for “freedom of choice.”

… When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Animal I Have Become - Three Days Grace

I can't escape this hell
So many times I've tried
But I'm still caged inside
Somebody get me through this nightmare
I can't control myself

So what if you can see
The darkest side of me
No one will ever change this animal I have become
Help me believe it's not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal

I can't escape myself
So many times I've lied
But there's still rage inside
Somebody get me through this nightmare
I can't control myself

Some what if you can see
The darkest side of me
No one will ever change this animal I have become
Help me believe it's not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal I have become
Help me believe it's not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal

Somebody help me through this nightmare
I can't control myself
Somebody wake me from this nightmare
I can't escape this hell

This animal
This animal
This animal
This animal
This animal
This animal
This animal

So what if you can see
The darkest side of me
No one will ever change this animal I have become
Help me believe it's not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal I have become
Help me believe it's not the real me
Somebody help me tame this animal

This animal I have become...

This is what my call (unconscious desire towards disintegration) from the Daimonic sounded like:

"I didn’t have a choice when the self-esteem registers and social sociometers were passed out. According to Attachment Theory test results: I got the double negative. If social experiences can alter the epigenome and regulate gene expression then I can reverse the effect. I am not going back to the darkness and madness.

It is my mind and I can change it. My repetitive cycle stops now. I am going to burn down my faulty self-esteem register and social sociometer to the ground. The Phoenix will rise from the ashes a much better different. Although the gifts of creativity and insight brought slivers of light, joy, truth and hope, I won’t need them anymore because I’m not going back to the Pit of Despair.

While I still have the gifts to transform the negative into something positive, I’m going to break apart a Serendipity Magnet and re-create a Joy Antenna! Instead of searching for self, I am going to create it. I’m aiming for the double positive!"

People like that cashier act as the emotional equivalent of zeitgebers, those forces in nature that entrain our biological rhythms to their own pace. Now that I've tamed the saber tooth tiger, I will choose to be a zeitgeber.

From Wikipedia: Zeitgeber (from German for "time giver", synchronizer) is any exogenous (external) cue that entrains the endogenous (internal) time-keeping system of organisms. The strongest zeitgeber, for both plants and animals, is light. Other, non-photic, zeitgebers include temperature, social interactions, pharmacological manipulation and eating/drinking patterns.

As a 100% grouper I have been cursed with a Big Picture view. I have always been sensitive to the Big Lie, “that successful graduation from the various levels of school makes one educated.” I never bought into it. I always found myself stuck in pedagogical models of learning, which catered to stringers. As a 100% grouper I was left to struggle out in the cold. Getting the grade, memorizing facts, and bottom-up presentation were built for stringers. To stay warm, this cold and hungry wolf got smart and made a coat out of sheep’s clothing. I learned how to get the grade in spite of my ‘wolfness’. I posed as a sheep long enough to get the grade so that I could pursue my preferred style of self-learning. For me, active learning isn’t work it is my passion.

I read parts of Ronald Gross’s Peak Learning book with great interest. I highly suspect that the author’s reason for writing the book is that like me, he was also left to struggle out in the cold. On the back of the book we share Isaac Asimov as our acclaimed thinker. One of my favorite quotes from Gross’s book comes from my favorite author, Isaac Asimov. Mr. Asimov says, “ Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.” I very much agree with Isaac Asimov’s viewpoint. Then again, he has always been my role model. It seems that “birds of a feather” really do flock together.

Even though I believe most of Ronald Gross’s learning suggestions because I have lived them, I have great distrust for the author. He proposes to teach others the benefits of what I had to learn the hard way. I guess I shouldn’t be too angry. If more people adopt and live what he proposes, then there will be more interesting conversations and discussions in which to participate. There will also be more discoveries that will benefit humankind.

For this 100% grouper, true victory means experiencing and learning something cool, new, or unusual on the journey. I smiled really big, when I read what one of my teammate’s, Robert De Woody said when he obviously discovered my kind of learning enjoyment, “…And It might seem crazy but I don't care about my grade as much anymore. I(t’s) more important to me to have learned something. “ That is True Victory! This is the same view that I see every day in my self-learning pursuits.

My life goal is to “live well”. To always help me remember this goal, I adopted the following quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as my personal mission statement and creed:

To laugh often and much
to win the respect
of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation
of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty,
to find the best in others;
to leave the world
a bit better, whether
by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life
has breathed easier
because you have lived.
That is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson reminds me to relax, be human, and make a difference. Emerson would have approved of the little boy who threw the starfish back into the water. I hope to never lose sight of that.