In gratitude to Beck, @new_toon who makes people smile and asks nothing in return...

Beck (@new_toon) was kind enough to render one of my tweets into cartoon form, which made me mighty happy.

 In response I've put him into a short story:

President Obama leaned toward the screen. "Is this thing on, Charlie? I can't see a damn thing."

Charlie "Buddy" Bolden didn't know. He hated these times, when he was expected to "know stuff". He did know stuff, just not this stuff. If the President gave him a cornet, King Bolden would happily blow the shoes and socks off of his presidential feet with the best New Orleans ragtime ever heard anywhere, but the President was not now or ever going to hand him a cornet. The President must never find out that Charlie even played the cornet. The other thing the president must never find out was that he had absolutely no idea how to be head of NASA, which was the position in which, through no fault of his own, he found himself. Luckily, most aspects of the organisation seemed to run themselves, so all he had to do was agree to stuff, even when he had no hope of understanding it. Charlie had grown accustomed to pretending to know what was going on, but occasionally he would find himself in situations like this where he was expected to know how this damned technology worked and the pressure was unbearable.

"Just hold on a second Mr. President," he ventured, "maybe it'll straighten itself out." Charlie started to sweat. Just then the screen lit up and was filled with a face.

"Shit!" shouted the President, jumping back in his seat.

"Oh God almighty, thank you!" thought Charlie, raising his eyes.

"Well Hello Mister Beck!" said the President, smiling. The face did not smile back.

"Beck." it said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Beck, Mr. President. It's just Beck. No 'mister'"

"Okay, uh, Beck, I just wanted to stop by and say hello personally. It's important work you're doing up there, and the nation, if not the world is not ungrateful."

The face was impassive, the steady gaze if anything, a little unsettling. "With the greatest respect, the nation and the world don't know I'm here, sir." The eyes didn't flicker or blink.

Obama wasn't president for nothing. He widened his smile: "That's so, Beck, but I am here as their representative, and I'm pretty sure I speak with the voice they would use themselves if they were here in my seat." His brow furrowed slightly, "What's that you're doing there, Beck?"

Beck was looking down at something not visible on the screen.

"Doodling, Mr. President, just doodling." He looked up again. The illusion of sudden eye contact made the President avert his gaze, momentarily. It was slight, but noticeable.

"Say Beck, can I ask you something? Something personal?"

"Of course Mr. President, anything you like. Is that Charlie behind you? Hi Charlie!"

Charlie's brow darkened slightly, but he waved, "Hey Beck!"

"So is it still cool to be head of Nasa, with all the rockets and stuff?"

Charlie shifted stance and glanced at the back of the President's head.

"Sure Beck, it's still cool." He looked back at the screen: "A little stressful sometimes."

Beck caught the subtle emphasis and smiled; his first expression of emotion.

"You'll be fine, you're used to dealing with brass." Charlie smiled a little, despite himself. The President coughed politely.

"I'm so sorry Mr. President," said Beck, "You wanted to ask something?"

"Yes I did Beck. Something I was thinking about on the journey over here. Is there much downtime, or do they keep you pretty busy? I mean is it ever boring up there?"

Beck looked down again.

"Oh, I'm never bored, Mr. President. I just drive around up here, point the cameras where they tell me. There's not much to it, but I keep myself occupied."

"That's good, Beck. That's very good." President Obama glanced at his watch. "Say Beck, I'd better sign off, I've got a million things to do, and I definitely shouldn't keep you from your work. It's been good talking to you."

Beck's features were impassive, "It's been good talking to you too, Mr. President. You must stop by again."

"I'll do that Beck, I will. Keep up the good work, and you have a good day!"

"You too Mr. President. Bye Charlie!"

Charlie waved, but the screen had already gone dark.

Beck leaned back in his seat and adjusted his harness slightly, his back was stiff. Another light was flashing on his screen. He reached out and tapped it. A face was just about visible through the background static.

"Hi Charlie!"

Charles Frank Bolden was an agitated man, Beck could tell, even through the snow. 

"What's up Charlie?"

"It's Charles!" hissed Charles, "and I'm in an insane asylum!" the figure checked behind itself, furtively.

"Really?" said Beck, "that surprises me. It does, it really surprises me. Can I ask you something?"

"Ask me something? For Christ's sake Beck, there's only two percent battery left on this thing!"

"I'll be quick, Charles, I will. It's just something that's been bothering me about why I'm here."

"Why you're there?" Charles looked incredulous.

"Well you told people you'd sent robots, Charles. You said you'd built robots, so why didn't you just build the robots?

Charles stared in silence for a second.

"Well robots to do that sort of thing are..."

"Expensive?"

"Complex. Very complex. Beck, are you understanding me? I'm in an insane asylum!" 

"I'm sorry to hear that Charles," said Beck, his expression unchanged, "you really should try to assimilate more, keep yourself busy. Would it have killed you to learn the cornet?"

"I tried to learn the f-!" The screen went dead. Beck sat quietly for a few seconds.

"Well, that was Charles, then." said Beck to himself. "An insane asylum!" He chuckled. "I kept telling him him to keep himself busy."

Beck tapped his screen again, then scrolled through the display. He stopped at an entry and smiled, broadly. He picked up his pen, thought for a moment and began to draw.

N.B. Links :    Charles Frank Bolden Jr.

                    Charles "Buddy" Bolden

                                                                                                 AA

Some Thoughts On Returning From West Africa

The following is not exhaustive, nor is it brimming with detail and description of direct personal experience, that may be for the future. It is however opinion distilled from personal experience and is thus a sort of truth. My truth. Yours may be different, feel free to disagree. Quietly.

Sunrise from the Laboratory window.

Time, as we are often informed, is a valuable commodity. In societies where we began slicing it up with the hands of clocks a few hundred years ago, we are told all through our lives not to waste it, to use it more efficiently and effectively, like water in a desert. Countries which live less by the clock, especially hot ones, seem to have more time. People are less punctual, the simplest things take longer, or sometimes never happen at all. This sort of thing annoys “efficient” people. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the irresistible urge Europeans seem to have had for interfering in the affairs of others and encouraging them to “be more like us”.

Sierra Leone is a country that historically, could have done with a little less interference and now perhaps, a little more guidance. The people are energetic, the land fertile and minerals plentiful. The sun shines and its beaches are among the most beautiful places in the world. It should have everything going for it (with the possible exception of the large wildlife that would draw the safari crowds) and yet every time it gets up from the canvas, something happens to punch it back down for another count.

European involvement began in the late 18th century with the establishment by the British St. George’s Bay company (later The Sierra Leone Company) of Granville town and subsequently

Freetown, a haven for freed slaves (initially those that had been loyal to Britain in the American Revolutionary War) and an astonishing social experiment, given the flavour of the times. Less surprisingly, the British remained as a colonial power and imposed European style administration with characteristically scant regard for indigenous sensibilities and local systems of government that had grown organically, holding the tribes in a complex sort of balance. The corruption and mismanagement through the 19th century of the subsequent politics between Freetown and what became known as “The Protectorate” i.e. the taxed but ungoverned indigenous rest of the country cemented divisions and prejudices that would last through the 20th century until they exploded into the devastating orgy of violence that was the civil war of the 1990s, a time so horrific and confusing that afterward not even the people involved knew what they had been fighting about.

Guns were banned after the war ended and - buoyed by aid money and foreign mining licenses granted to European companies and the ever mineral hungry Chinese - the country remained stable and although still poor (with the largest proportion of the populace engaged in subsistence agriculture) exhibited an optimistic rate of economic growth. If your town is between a foreign mine and the ships needed to export the mineral wealth extracted therefrom, you will benefit from an excellent highway and some decent infrastructure, at least while the mine is paying out.

Then at the end of 2013, Ebola hit and hit hard. Usually confined to relatively small outbreaks in

more central regions of Africa, around the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, the West African Outbreak was unexpected and quickly grew out of hand, growing to frightening proportions, especially when it reached the larger towns and cities, striking people down “like lightning”. I’m not a religious man, but if I was I’d find Ebola hard to explain. A devastating viral disease with - as it stands - no cure or vaccine, it has a mortality rate of between 50 and 90 per cent. Its symptoms are torture and it hits the innocent hardest. Healthworkers go first (few have the training or resources to deal with a disease that turns even the tears of the afflicted into a deadly weapon). Then children, those least likely to understand or adhere to the public health precautions that are their only protection. The disease reserves a particular cruelty for infants and few survive.

If you think things would be different here then think harder. A handful of Westerners (I use the term loosely, Freetown is in the same time zone as London) have been treated, in the main successfully, in specialist units with trained staff, experimental drugs and tailored blood products: the kind of resources that can be devoted when cases are in single figures. What if they were in the hundreds? The thousands? Tens of thousands? How are the resources and high risk training at your local hospital?

Hopefully we will never need to know. The threat of a bogeyman jumping from the realms of science fiction thriller into reality has been enough of a shove to give a decent momentum to the development of rapid tests, drugs and hopefully a vaccine. These were going on anyway but regrettably in the world in which we find ourselves, the profit motive driving the development of drugs and vaccines is not a strong incentive when it comes to diseases mainly affecting those who cannot afford to buy them. This is a gravely erroneous state of affairs and not just with the kind of virus where one plane ride can quickly turn “them” into “us”. (A third of the world is infected with tuberculosis, but because it wasn’t our third we put little effort into developing the drugs needed to combat it when it did come knocking, which it now is, but in more of a slow-burning kind of way).

Thus future outbreaks of Ebola will not, hopefully be on this scale, by then the weapons will be available to keep a lid on it early on (even if our root motive is only to protect ourselves rather than help others, the effect will be the same).

I recently returned from a stint working in a laboratory in an Ebola treatment centre, where the organisations and charities involved have been and are doing an outstanding job. Quite a few people people both there and here have thanked me heartily, which is always moving (I work in a National Health Service Laboratory and am more used to opening newspapers to read what a terrible job we’re all apparently doing, slaughtering our way through the populace) and yes I did my

bit, which was a lot less than others, I can tell you, (the real heroes are the red zone workers) but the people who deserve most thanks are the people of West Africa. The people of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are the ones who, on a huge scale, have changed the way they live, ceased shaking hands and touching, closed their schools and institutions for over a year and changed the way they buried their dead. Above all we should thank them for having the courage to stay put. Even when one of the terrors of the Earth was among them they stayed in their towns and communities and very few fled to start outbreaks elsewhere. Would you have courage enough not to get in your car or onto a train if people were dying in your street? I’m not sure I would.

When I hear the small minded speak in their primitive, tribal way of “wasted” overseas aid and “problems closer to home” I think not only of how much more difficult it would be to contain an outbreak such as this if the affected countries were the forgotten failed states they might have been, but also of the debt of gratitude we owe them. What the people of West Africa bought us over the last couple of years is time, and for that we should bow down in thanks forever because they may have saved most of our lives, and by Christ they’ve paid dearly for it.

AA

How to be happier: What mid 20th Century German Ontology has to say about the effect of decision making on wellbeing.

Heidegger, presumably acting authentically.

You are lazy:

The brain is a lazy organ. It lies all the time, cuts corners, takes shortcuts and then tells us a lot of horseshit that it’s doing a stand up job. Which we believe. I’ll give you an example: Let’s say you’re stuck for a babysitter and I tell you I know two people at the kindergarten I use who do childminding in the evening who might be able help. One of them is Barry who drives a lorry and the other is Sarah who’s a librarian. Which would you be more drawn to before you asked for more information?  Be honest, it’s just in your head. What assumptions are you making about lorry driving and librarian stereotypes that you’re unfairly applying to these individuals? What about people called Barry? What if Barry was the librarian and Sarah the lorry driver? Would you even bother asking for more information or would you just rely on the lovely satisfying feeling that the stereotypes were probably accurate? We all do this sort of thing all the time, it’s how we get by, otherwise we’d have to make pro-con lists about everything. It’s the brain clicking the top of the Google list and saying “yeah, that’ll do, whatever”. The error isn’t that it does it, a lot of the time it’s a useful shortcut, the error is when we don’t think to ask more questions in situations when we should probably find out more.

Mid 20th century German ontology is hard but might be relevant:

I am a lazy man. This fact and the ones in the paragraph above contributed to me not putting more effort into Martin Heidegger when I first came across him. And possibly the Nazi thing, but I won’t go into that here. Heidegger was a mid 20th century German philosopher who spent a lot of his (and everyone else’s) time talking about ontology, the study of the nature of being; what it means to exist and what can be said to exist. The main reason I didn’t put more effort in was that his stuff is almost completely impenetrable and so, using a brief mental shortcut, I assumed he must be either a massive bullshitter or completely mad, with anyone professing to have made sense of him being liars or charlatans (feel free to judge me at the end). Many years later however, I find myself returning to his version of the concept of “The dasein” which I think is worth a revisit given the advances in neuropsychology over the last two or three decades, especially where the areas of study of wellbeing and decision making are concerned.

Emotions are essential for quick decisions:

There’s a huge emotional component in how we make decisions. People with lesions to the area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (at the front, behind the nose) lose this component. Although they remain intellectually unchanged, they find themselves greatly impaired when it comes to making the simplest choices, having to rationally weigh up lists of pros and cons each time. The nature of this change makes sense if you consider that this is the sort of thing that emotions are actually for. Before we could think rationally and have what we think of as a “self”, we were creatures of instinct and it was emotion that the brain used to communicate the benefit of judgement and memory, of past experience to the body. It still does, of course, but now we have our rational brain to convince us that that is the important bit. That noiseless, wordless scream you hear in the middle of your head just as you make the decision to lock your keys in the boot of your car is this older part of your brain trying to give the rational you a bit of parental guidance. In all probability, this development of “self” or “consciousness” went hand in hand with the development of language; while we were learning to talk to others, we were also learning to talk to ourselves.

Making decisions makes you happier:

How we make decisions and equally importantly, our perception of how we make decisions has a bearing on our wellbeing and happiness. Apart from the obvious in that it is our decision making that guides us through the world, it is also vital in what sort of perception we have of that world and also our place within it. When we act proactively within the world it makes us feel more engaged, more part of everything and this, for reasons which remain a mystery, makes us feel more positive. Can you smell something? I think it might be ontology. I think we are the sum of our decisions and how happy we are (whatever that means) is dependent on our perception of their process and outcome. In a little while, you will as well.

I warned you:

Before Heidegger, the dasein (literally there being, or being there) was just used to denote human existence. Heidegger’s version probably followed from the concept of “being in the world-ness” or das-in-der-welt-sein of the (confusingly) Japanese philosopher Okakura Kazuko in his Book of Tea (the philosophy, not the drink, be careful with that one). Heidegger defined his dasein as “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue”. Don’t worry about this, he goes on and on in this vein and it takes some wading through. For our purposes we just need to think about what he means when he starts talking about an “authentic” and “inauthentic” dasein. Again, don’t worry too much, as I’ll explain it in person language as I pull all this together (which I will) but as far as Heidegger defines it when I am, as a dasein, authentic, in the sense of my being, I can choose and win myself, and conversely when I am inauthentic, I can lose and never win myself. This only makes sense when you already know what it means, which you will in a bit.

In case you didn’t believe me that making decisions makes you happier:

That’s enough of that. It’s enough to say that that an authentic dasein is engaged and acting in the world, and an inauthentic dasein is merely reacting to it. Now, modern neuropsychology has told us that if there’s one thing you definitely need in order to ensure a sense of wellbeing, it’s a feeling that you have some sort of control over your environment. American POWs in the Vietnam war who survived much more psychologically intact than previous conflicts had a degree of control over an aspect of their lives. Debriefing made clear the importance of communication. In the words of now Senator, then Lieutenant Commander John McCain who was a prisoner from 1967-1973:

“The most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it’s only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up, it makes all the difference.”

A 1997 nursing home experiment (Rodin & Langer) demonstrated a significant improvement in health, activity, happiness and longevity in a group of residents who were given a greater degree of choice over movie night and cleaning day and the gift of a plant which was their responsibility to look after.

These are just brief examples, there are many more and they add up to a body of evidence supporting the view that emotion and the making of decisions are linked, and the relationship is symmetrical. There is a vital emotional component in the making of decisions, without which we have to grind through and rationalise every single choice, and in the other direction, so to speak, the making of even simple decisions gives us a feeling of control and engagement and makes us happier and healthier.

Your brain can’t be bothered thinking about most of your life:

When a complicated decision presents itself, but the brain perceives the stakes involved to be low, it can’t be bothered expending time and energy working through it, so takes another shortcut. It picks an easier question to think about where the answer feels sort of relevant and then lies and tells you: “There you go fella, job done.” As the consequences aren’t great one way or the other, most of the time you won’t notice.

To elaborate: some things are just great. There’s no two ways about it. Falling in love is great, winning money is great, the birth of a child is great. Conversely, some things are irretrievably sad. Falling out of love, the death of a loved one, losing money, all are a sad business. These emotional certainties however, tend to be relatively rare in life, they are nearer the tails of the curve. Most of what goes on in life is pretty ambiguous, emotionally speaking, events that we could feel either way about, depending on the context or the mood. Spilling a glass of water over the front of one’s trousers might be hilarious one day, annoying the next. The brain, being the lazy organ that it is, when asked the question “how do I feel about this?” about one of these 50/50 situations will not spend time assessing and weighing all the variables, what’s the point, the stakes are low, why expend the energy? What it does as a shortcut is substitutes an easier question, in this case: “how am I feeling now?” and uses whatever prevailing emotion that happens to be washing over you at the time as an answer to the first question (without telling you, of course). This substitution of an easier, vaguely related question for a hard one without telling you is something else your brain does all the time. Daniel Kahneman the godfather of the study of decision making gives the example of the question “How much money should you contribute to save an endangered species?” being replaced with the much easier question of “How much do I like dolphins?”. To answer the former question you would have to consider a cost-benefit analysis to the world of all endangered species and then think about what would have to be done (and the associated monetary cost) to improve their respective lots. The second question is much easier, but after cooking up a bodge to this you remain convinced you’ve answered the first.

The trouble with asking the inner you is the inner you is always grumpy:

There is a danger associated with doing this. We can have two experiences at the same time, the “real one” that is us relating to the outside world and also the one that is us relating to our inner landscape. We don’t, however, have two sets of emotions to deal with these separate worlds, emotions are a chemical thing going on in the brain and there’s only so much room. The danger comes from something the brain does which is actually quite clever. It uses its downtime to run daydream scenarios of potentially sticky situations which are likely to be on the horizon in order to evaluate options and try to predict the best course of action, in order to speed things up should one of these situations actually occur. The situations it picks to work on will tend to be negative in flavour. Being able to work out what to do in advance in negative situations will have more of a survival benefit than in positive ones. Thus, this mechanism is extremely useful for flipping through options as to what to do should you consider yourself likely to encounter a tiger/falling rocks/capsizing boat sort of situation. It’s still relevant to our modern lives and we will often catch ourselves daydreaming about what we might do or say if so and so says whatever awful thing our inner lawyer predicts they might  in an upcoming meeting, or when we get home. Thus, the prevailing emotional tone tends to default toward the negative when our foot is off the accelerator and the brain is on tickover. What this means to our present discussion is that left to its own devices the brain, when presented with an emotionally ambiguous low stakes situation and wondering what to feel about it will lazily check the prevailing tonal feeling and say “yeah, that’ll do”, even though this is probably a response to whatever completely unrelated (but most likely negative) scenario it was running in your internal landscape while on tickover.

The above is a  modern view, of how the brain works but it might also be considered to be a fair description of the thought patterns of an inauthentic dasein of Heidegger fame. I told you I’d pull all this together.

Be more authentic

It doesn’t have to be like this of course, you do have a choice. Letting these automated systems make the decisions about how you feel, while you make the often erroneous assumption that they probably know what they’re doing is like letting a grumpy butler answer your emails. There’s nothing stopping you pausing for a moment, turning off the autopilot and deciding things for yourself. It’s worth remembering that most events are pretty neutral so what you’re actually deciding is what you want to feel, and how strongly.

Picture this:

Let’s have an example. Imagine you’re walking; a fairly hypnotic activity, your brain is off the hook, when a mother in a hurry pushes a baby buggy into your path from a shop doorway. Now, while your brain was ticking over with nothing much to do beyond avoiding lampposts, what it was actually doing, without consulting you was running through a few scenarios. Specifically, in this case, your inner lawyer was testing the various approaches you might take should your spouse hate their birthday present: how hurt you should appear, what best strategy to employ to get across how much effort you’d put in and how unreasonable they’re being. 99 times out of a hundred, this situation won’t occur anyway, but just occasionally the birthday shit will hit the fan and pow! You’ve got just the right face ready without an instant’s thought: noble with quiet pain just under the surface, pitched perfectly. That’s what this mechanism is for. Actually it isn’t, it’s more for the “should I find myself fleeing from a bear would it be best to jump in a river or climb a tree” sort of thing, but the brain does its best in the world in which it finds itself.

Anyway, the pushchair is pushed out, you reflexively stop in your tracks, a trip is avoided. You then need to decide on a reaction to the event. You have any amount of options, ranging from picking up the buggy and beating the woman to death for this transgression to hugging her and telling her she’s the most special person you’ll meet today. Your choice will depend on your emotional response. If the situation was more extreme, things would be different. If she had been a lion or a giant spider there would be less ambiguity, but as it stands this is a grey area where there’s a choice to be made and the stakes are pretty low as regards any potential harm or reward which might be coming in your direction. If you leave your brain on automatic at this point, it will take the easiest route, it will check in memory for any similar situations and examine how these turned out. Some of these would have actually happened to you, some you might have been told about or seen happening to others, most, in this day and age you will have seen on television (this mechanism evolved before there was such a thing as making stuff up so it considers fiction as true experience. You might want to think about this while you’re sucking up horror films). Your decision in how to physically act however, will be strongly informed by your emotional response. Your brain, being left to its devices will take the laziest option. It will glance over its newspaper, grab what’s nearest and easiest from the shelf, which happens to be what’s washing around already: all that background negativity about your spouse hating their present. It’s a completely unrelated issue which doesn’t even exist, but if you act without taking the trouble to question your reasoning, those are the emotions which will drive your response, which will probably be along the lines of an angry “Watch where you’re going!” followed by half an hour brooding on the terrible woman and her awful child.

This is the response of someone not bothering to engage properly, blown on the winds of irrelevant emotional noise and programmed responses, essentially an automaton, someone who is not the true “author” of their response. As a decision making entity they are hardly even present, merely an algorithm with a voice. This I think, is what Heidegger meant by an inauthentic dasein.

Act like the person you like to think you are:

However, in the same situation, rather than letting your grumpy butler act for you, if you engage properly with the world about you, make the effort to come out of neutral and take a moment to assess and judge - as the person you like to think you are - how much or how little effect the buggy situation is really going to have on your day and how much hurt the mother really intended to do you, then you can make a more conscious decision about what you should be feeling and how strongly. This will give you a basis to formulate a more measured response. The person you like to think you are would probably just smile and say “Oops, no harm done” and probably even get a smile in reply (and everyone loves a smile).

You thus acted as the person you choose to be. You authored a response according to your values and judgement. It mattered that you were there and not someone else. Congratulations, you were an authentic dasein.

Be happier:

How does this make you happier? In two ways. First, you were acting and not just reacting and that aspect of control makes people feel more positive and less anxious. It’s the difference between having things just happen to you and feeling that you yourself had an effect. Even if sometimes it’s just a difference in perception, the difference will allow you to view an event more positively. Secondly, an experience happens in two ways. There is the actual event, which may just be a moment, and there is your remembered experience of it which may last the rest of your life. Thus if you’re acting authentically, you can have a more positive view of the event as it happens (and probably a more positive outcome) and lay down a much better memory of the experience as “something I did” rather than “something which happened to me”. Perception isn’t everything, but it’s what you look through to see everything.

It’s an effort to engage. A small one, but still an effort. It’s why we don’t think to do it most of the time, we just let our brains do their thing and don’t really notice that their thing may not be good enough and in any case makes most experiences more negative than they need to be. If you do make the effort, it’s very rewarding over time. It becomes a habit and eventually you become the sort of person who thinks like this. As the stoic Marcus Aurelius put it, with an admirably prescient grasp of recent discoveries concerning brain plasticity:

“Imbuitur enim cogitationibus animus”

And he was king of the world.

AA