My Reading Habit

Someone asked me some questions about my reading habits yesterday. I surely have thought about them now and then, but at the same time, I tend not to think about what I am reading and why (even as that cuts against good grad student practice). Rather, I follow my interests. 

But in order to answer the questions asked of me, I assembled every book that I am currently reading, where "currently reading" means that sometime in the last month I have been reading it and that I have not given up and consigned it to the shelves as something that I might get back to. It also means (this may be obvious) that I have not finished reading it (as with Schwartz & Begley's book that i posted about yesterday). There are eight titles here...

Richard Totman's THE THIRD SEX

This is pretty good but only if I forget about how fabulously interesting Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes by Don Kulick was. I stalled when some other book looked more immediately engaging, but chances are I'll finish this one before another month goes by. 

Mark Solms' and Oliver Turnbull's THE BRAIN AND THE INNER WORLD

I just started this two days ago. This is neuroscience + psychoanalysis, or neuropsychoanalysis. I am curious to see how this plays out, but also have my skeptical glasses on.

Jean-Michel Quinodoz's READING FREUD; A CHRONOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF FREUD'S WRITINGS

This is a handy book. I'd love to have been able to take Quinodoz's three year course on the entire Standard Edition, but he isn't at GSU and no one would let him teach that here. This is nearly a textbook and does not cover everything in the SE, but it is interesting to see what he highlights are the most important milestones and while I now and again do not entirely agree with his opinions about certain matters, the man obviously knows his stuff very well. 

Bhante Gunaratana's MINDFULNESS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

I already know Vipassana meditation, I practiced it for some time back in my 20s. But as I am trying to get back into the practice again, I thought I'd get this book as a refresher. It's a quick read and I am almost done with it now. [On a side note, the idea that I would ever utter a phrase like "I'm trying to become more mindful" makes me want to hit myself, hard, repeatedly - feel free to apply that rule to me should I ever say something so full-of-shit sounding]

Levi Bryant's THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS

I read through several chapters (with one out of order, for a reason, but still, that sometimes throws me off) and will get back to it, I got sidetracked when I went to NC a few weeks back. What I read was pretty great though.

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine's TOTAL NUTRITION: THE ONLY GUIDE YOU'LL EVER NEED

At 800 pages or so, I'll likely never read this entire book. But, the opening three chapters "The Basics of Healthy Eating" was more interesting than I had expected and I read the chapter on "Dietary Fiber" which was also useful to me. Chances are I will never crack the chapters on nutrition for blood disorders or kidney disease, but it still seems like a useful book to have around. Did you know that Vitamin C tablets include only half of the balanced Vitamin C you get from an orange or grapefruit? They have only ascorbic acid and that isn't enough, ergo you piss it out later. & did you know that studies of the health of those who eat well and take no vitamins or supplements vs those who eat well and take them religiously indicates that the health impact of supplement is zero? 

Gerd Gigerenzer's GUT FEELINGS, THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

This is an odd book. I am not done yet and I could imagine setting it aside and forgetting about it. Though the author uses words like "unconscious" and even "superego" there is nothing psychoanalytic about this at all. His real topic is "gut feelings" or "intuitions", particularly those which strike you quickly and those things which we know how to do but cannot explain how know how we do. 

An edited collection of poetry by René Char, FUROR AND MYSTERY & OTHER WRITINGS

Super great! I am savoring, with both a bookmark that moves steadily forward and the option to browse around and reread or look ahead. At this rate I may spend another few months on this book.

Markos Zafiropoulos' LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS, OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951-1957)

Not sure why I started this and I may shelve it (or rather close it, as I have this electronically) but before I do my comps the chances are that I will read this just to help flesh out early Lacan's debts to Levi-Strauss and structuralist thought.

So, there you have my reading habit - if that is, I exclude stuff I read online, as news, on blogs or in magazines and journals - and I am bracketing the poetry that I read every Wednesday night at the weekly APG meet.

The Mind & The Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

The authors of this book are Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, the former an M.D. and neuropsychiatrist and the latter a science journalist. I'll refer to Schwartz as a rule just to make things easier, and as it feels like his narrative rather than hers. 

This book is about a lot of different things, but a quick listing of the primary topics of discussion would include Neuropasticity (and the associated neuroscience to explain what that is to the uninitiated), Mindfulness meditation, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Quantum Mechanics. Of course it is also about a bunch of other stuff, or at least other narratives, concerning the Silver Springs Monkeys and the birth of P.E.T.A., the "Quantum Zeno Effect", V. S. Ramachandran's research on phantom limbs, morality vs determinism, causal closure (or the possible lack thereof), William James' psychology, volition, and much else still. The distinctions possible to make between Mind and Brain figure largely throughout the text.

My intension is only to bring out a few things that I found interesting, but I do endorse the book itself as worth a read, if such things interest you. Or, somewhat more strongly, give it a try and if you don't find yourself hooked after a few chapters, I'll be surprised.

Ok, enough fluff. 

Schwartz works with patients that have OCD. He chose that disorder to study and work with because its sufferers are what is called 'ego-dystonic'. What that means is that if I am the one suffering from OCD and I am stricken time and again with a powerful feeling of dread, this overwhelming feeling that something is very very wrong and that the only solution is for me to wash my hands because they're filthy, infected, germ-ridden, etc… while I am thinking that "I must wash my hands!" I am also aware, in a quiet and less panicked part of my thoughts that they cannot possibly be unclean as I washed them vigorously a mere 20 minutes ago and have not touched anything at all since then. So this split in my self-awareness is what makes this disorder 'ego-dystonic'. 

So what he does, broadly speaking, is first to educate his patients about the neuro side of things, doing brain imaging on his patients, showing them how a part of their brain is rather overactive as compared to those who do not suffer compulsions, how the motive urgency of their feelings is due to phylogenetically older parts of the brain getting in on the act, such that the compulsion to wash my hands has an impact on me that ranks up there with fight or flight, making it extremely hard to just shrug off. Armed with this reconceptualization of their illness, they are then given a 4 step CBT strategy for dealing with these compulsions. I'll not go through these steps one by one, but again, in broad stroke, the patient is taught to immediately recognize the compulsion as a compulsion and part of their illness, they develop a variety of alternative responses, such that, rather than hand-washing, I might train myself instead to do deep breathing exercises for a few minutes or waters the flowers in the yard, or whatever. The issue being that the new activity is one that is not harmful to me or my surroundings. With an intensive therapy schedule and continual practice outside of therapy, Schwartz's patients are able to strengthen the effect, or perhaps resolve, of that other voice, the one that knows there is no reason for yet another hot soapy hand-washing to take place today.

If you know much about Vipassana meditation, or what you may have only ever heard of as Mindfulness meditation, you may have a hunch already about how it could be pertinent to the therapy discussed above. In this form of meditation, the goal is not so much concentration as awareness and centering one's awareness in the present moment. The basic introductory version of it asks that you focus on your breath. Thoughts will arise, but rather than becoming the active agent of their development, one tries to simply watch them arise and then fall again, without losing the focus on the breath. It seems that it would be simple enough but of course it is actually quite difficult. 

On a side note not unrelated to the topic at hand, I've been trying to get back into meditation this very week (I was a daily meditator off and on for several years when I was an undergrad) and it is every bit as difficult as I recall it being. When I was meditating daily in college I noticed a few things being very different for me. The 1st was that I rarely had to study very hard. Sounds a bit odd perhaps, but I paid attention in class and read the assigned stuff (usually in the morning right after meditating) and I tended to remember it all without any difficulty, so that for a time I never reviewed anything or studied beyond this at all while acing al my exams. The 2nd thing was that I slept better, falling asleep almost instantly and waking up as if a switch had been flipped rather than the sense that I have so often now of drifting closer and then further away from consciousness for quite some time before waking. 

So, getting back to the OCD stuff. By combining Mindfulness meditation, with neuroscience and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Schwartz has developed a very successful treatment for people with OCD which uses no psychopharmacological treatment, has a high success rate and low recidivism rate (and even when suffers do fall back into old compulsions, they tend not to fall all the way back to square one again). 

Why then does this treatment work? The answer to that, per Schwartz, depends upon neuroplasticity and quantum mechanics. To begin with, neuroplasticity refers to the potential for the brain to "re-wire" or "re-zone" itself. That is to say, in a situation where a patient has had a stroke and some portion of their cortex has "gone dark" and no longer functions, for the work that this now defunct portion of cortex had heretofore had sole change of doing, might be taken over by another portion of the cortex. We have long known that the infant's brain exhibited neuroplasticity, but it has only been in the last decades that another serious burst of neuroplasticity was recognized in adolescence and that beyond this, and apparently in Schwartz's telling, much against the orthodox beliefs about the matter in the scientific community, that the brain retains the potential for neuroplasticity throughout our lives. The way that Schwartz's therapy for OCD patients taps into this is through attention, a.k.a. Mindfulness and this leads us to quantum mechanics because when one is talking about processes at the scale of neurotransmitter ions emerging from the axons of neurons, we are speaking of particles on the quantum scale and not the familiar billiard balls of classical Newtonian thought experiments. 

So, what does everyone know about quantum mechanics even if they know nothing about quantum mechanics? Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle whereby it is not until an observation is made that the wave function of a quantum particle can be pinned to any location, until that point there are only probabilities. But let's add a note about the Quantum Zeno Effect as well. This really deserves a fuller quotation, but I'm not in the mood to transcribe the book's discussion of this so here I go… So, if we start with Heisenberg's principle and recognize that our observation of a particle has an effect on it, Quantum Zeno basically shows that repeated observation has the effect of 'fixing' a particle in a particular state. Now this finding, which has been replicated many times in physics, nonetheless really fucked with some physicists' heads. They expected that observed once, the wave function would collapse and a particle would be found in a place - that they were used to already. But they assumed that when some time had passed that where it would be found next would again be up for grabs, one option out of a range of probabilities, but it wasn't. Instead the particle was exactly where the initial observation had "pinned" it. The more it is re-observed, the more is stays put and the more that violates the probabilities. 

You can probably guess how this relates to the OCD situation already. By increasing mindfulness on the part of the sufferer about their compulsions and by helping them to develop a new set of responses to the compulsion, it is in effect their very own attention (volition) which gives them a degree of control, much as the observer pins the particle to a location and via quantum Zeno repeating it "fixes" it there, Schwartz's therapy allows the patients to "rezone" a part of their own cortex in response to their repeated and mindful volition. & here again, I think of something I mentioned in a previous post - how John Cage, who had been a very heavy smoker for many years, quit somehow with an image, every time he thought of smoking he would laugh instead. 

Anyway, this is all I will say about this book, though it has a great many other things to offer and is well worth reading in my estimation.

I quit

Somewhere in Cage's many writings he talks about when he stopped smoking. He says something about how when the thought of having a cigarette would occur to him he would start laughing at the thought of smoking again. 

I am, as I post this, smoking my last cigarette. Taking long hard drags. Feeling the smoke fill my lungs, holding it a bit longer than I usually do. Thinking about how it tastes, how it makes me lips feel, my chest, me head. 

(...)    [ minutes pass ]

I ground it out at 2:20.