I haven’t been a very happy ‘blogger of late.

But no way am I apologizing.

My new hero: Terrifica!

Really great article on television: The Zen TV Experiment, over at Adbusters.

You know how when you get a cut on your finger, you put a band-aid on it, and you try not to get it wet, and you make extra sure to keep it out of the way while slicing lemons, and so forth?

For a little while you forget, and you end up re-opening the wound, or you end up pacing around the kitchen saying “Shit that hurts…” over and over.

Then, over time, you somehow develop a kind of behavioral dance with this source of potential pain. You unconsciously lift the finger out of the way to avoid getting the bandage wet, and you ask someone else to cut the lemons.

Eventually the wound heals and you take off the band-aid, but the habits remain to some degree. Eventually they fade, however.

I’m thinking about the things that hurt in my life. Not in the sense of failed relationships or shattered dreams, though those things can provide endless sources of amusement.

No, I’m thinking about the things that are just plain unbearable and must be endured. Like a cut on the finger.

Humans are like trees in that they grow around barriers. You see two trees growing around each other, literally in mortal combat, but also in a state of mutual dependence. They combine with the barrier (in this case, another tree) to be stronger than they could be alone. Reacting to the cut on the finger works the same way, except the barrier eventually goes away; unless you’re a hemophiliac, the wound will heal.

But imagine if the wound healed, but before it did, you restructured your whole entire life around protecting the wound. You’re like the tree twisting around its barrier, only there’s no more barrier. You build up supports to prop up your now-meaningless twists and contours. Remove the props and the twists and contours would be liabilities in and of themselves.

In other words, you’ve created another set of barriers while protecting yourself from the first set.

That’s how I feel right now. I can see so much of my life as reaction and so little of it as action. I’m utterly out of my depth. I don’t really know what to do.

This is bad, because, well, it’s kinda freaky. But it’s good, because it means I can redesign the twists and contours however I want to. The pressures of life, however, demand immediacy, and I can’t sit around and gaze at my navel waiting for answers.

Asperger’s Sydrome has been called the ‘little professor syndrome.’ I certainly fit that category. AS folk tend to be pedantic and literal, and to have a very definite perspective. Guilty as charged. However, this works less and less for me as time goes on (if it really ever worked at all), and certainly this moment in my life is a brilliant example of that.

And really, up there where I say ‘if it really ever worked at all’ shouldn’t be in parentheses. It’s not parenthetical in the least. That’s the big deal worry. Maybe I’m not even informed enough to understand how completely I should regret my life up to this point.

Yes, I hear you groaning, ‘But Homer… Why are you so hard on yourself?’ However, you don’t ask that question of a tree that’s sick because the other tree it grew around died.

I’m not sad. I’m just trying to make sense of this crap. And I’m not talking about psychological stuff here. I have a fundamental hardship dealing with certain kinds of stimuli, and my being has evolved into something that guards against this problem. Now I have to take it apart and put it back together so it works better.

Heavy beleaguered sigh.

Theory Of Mind

Theory of Mind and the Origins of Divergent Thinking

‘Theory of mind’ can best be defined in the negative: If you lack a theory of mind, you don’t realize that others might not believe or understand something you do.

That is, say someone comes into a room where you are, and sets something on a table and then leaves. And after they leave you put the thing in a drawer somewhere. You know the object is in the drawer, but they still think it’s on the table. If they come back to the room, they won’t know where the object is. And if you can understand why they don’t know where it is, then you have the capacity for ‘theory of mind.’

The reason I bring this up is because it’s said that many autistic people lack theory of mind. It’s also said that folks with Asperger’s Syndrome have less of a problem with this, especially in ‘higher-functioning’ cases.

I find this interesting, for a couple of reasons. The first is that I first read about ‘theory of mind’ in a discussion of the skandhas in a buddhist text by Chogyam Trungpa. Until his death in the 80s, he was one of the high-up muckety mucks of a tradition of Tibetan buddhism that’s really, really old.

The buddhists say (ok, some buddhists say) that we have the normal five senses, plus the imagination. Essentially, the imagination is as much a sense organ as the eyes and ears and nose and so forth. Plus, these senses ‘filter’ through the skandhas. The skandhas are ‘aggregates’ of experience or phenomena. The wisdom is that you’re not mislead by your senses, you’re mislead by your skandhas, or alternately, you can be led towards enlightenment by them. They are your theory of mind for your own mind, as well as the minds of others.

And of course all of these parts can misinform (or hide an unthinkable truth from) the rest of the parts. This process of misinformation or omission is part of dukkha, one of the four noble truths: the truth that you’ll suffer in your own ignorance.

So what science and philosophy are saying to us in the context of the theory of mind, we could have learned long ago if only we’d been able to hear.

Another reason this interests me is a common argument I’m seeing from higher-functioning autistics: If you, as a doctor, are normal, and have a healthy theory of mind, why can’t you understand what’s going on in the mind of an autistic person? The ‘me normal, you broken’ dichotomy seems especially prevalent when you start talking about this stuff.

And it’s interesting to me because so much medical literature assumes normal-ness. That is, it says, “We know how to test for the absence of theory of mind,” and this assumes that you have theory of mind to begin with. Or it says, “Autistics don’t have feelings,” (this theory was prevalent until very recently) which totally ignores the ‘episodes’ many autistics go through. Perhaps it’s that autistics experience and express emotions differently from your heavily-socialized understanding and expression, such that you can’t understand it. Which goes back to the first point above: Who are you to be an authority on theory of mind?

My main point is this: Dukkha, the First Noble Truth, is universal. No one escapes it except buddhas, and I don’t see many buddhas around. That includes both doctor and patient. You will cause yourself and others to suffer by virtue of the fact that all humans are fundamentally flailing around in the dark at all times. Theory of mind can help, and theory of mind can hinder; thinking you understand someone’s mental state is actually more dangerous than not knowing.

Which is another interesting thing to me: It seems that understanding yourself (having a theory of mind about yourself) is a good first step towards escaping dukkha.

Hmm. I must be going buddhist again.

Just got through watching two movies. It was a marathon, and it’s 4am.

Death To Smoochy: About 30 minutes too long. Too much mob, not enough of Smoochy’s dark past and subsequent transformation to goody-goody. Don’t worry if you missed it in theaters.

To The Devil A Daughter: Just in time to miss Halloween! Not a bad movie, really. An American occult novelist ends up protecting a young woman from a buncha Satanists. You know the drill.

It’s obvious that little to no money was spent making this movie, and I like that. Sort of guerilla film production. Accomplishing more with less, that sort of thing. The movie relies on long drawn-out moments of expectation. At one point in particular, I realized that the film was set up such that anything at all could happen when the guy reaches in the box to get the amulet. Usually these things are so predictable. The hand-puppet monster fetus has to go, though.

Part of what’s fun about this movie is that you can imagine some drunken Brits going to the movies on a Saturday night in 1976, wanting to see someone get dismembered or something. They end up throwing beer bottles at the screen during the many long and slow parts, screaming “Bloody hell.. when’s this movie gonna pick up!?”

It never ceases to amaze me that during the 70s there were all these occult horror flicks that weren’t so much about shocking horror, as they were miniature how-to black magic instructional videos for your local schizophrenic. ‘To The Devil..’ is no exception, and is, in fact, pretty blatant about it, especially at the climax. The day is saved (sort of) through a bit of demonic lawyer-ism that would make Johnny Cochran proud.

Interesting web site:

Medical Humanities

It’s a database of literature and art, cross-referenced by medical topics. For instance, the entry for Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis‘ has the following keywords: Disability, Disease and Health, Family Relationships, Illness and the Family, Individuality, Mental Illness, Patient Experience, Psychosomatic Medicine, Suffering. How happy.

Click on the ‘Disability‘ keyword, and you end up at a list of art and literature dealing with disability.

On that list, we find, for example, the Kids In The Hall film ‘Brain Candy.’

This leads us to the ‘Humor And Illness‘ section.

Fun.

I feel like having a music du jour today, so I shall.

It’s by a band you’ve never heard, called Stick People, and is, itself, called Water. This was recorded back in the late 80s.

Now, when I originally thought of what I might write about Stick People as a way of enticing readers to go ahead and download and listen, I thought I’d go for the Malford Milligan angle. He’s the singer, and, if you listen, you’ll realize that he’s not just a singer, he’s a kick ass singer.

But then I was searching around the web for more Stick People related stuff, and it turns out that the bass/cello player, Mark Williams (Gum B.), is in a band called Mastica with none other than Pat Mastelotto. Pat, who’s on some of my favorite records of all time (I even liked Mr. Mister), and who now brings me within three verifiable degrees of separation from both David Sylvian and Andy Partridge, since I’ve actually had conversations with Mark Williams.

So in addition to the Stick People song above you can listen to Mastica, too, since they have some free music. Go and start listening to ‘Hush.’

I just discovered a new sport.

If there’s some small insect on your computer monitor, you can chase it around with the mouse pointer. This works best if there are large white spaces for contrast against the black arrow.

I was looking up a new word (‘echopraxia‘), and found a cool article:
Uncovering Clues To The Neurobiologic Basis Of Emotion And Consciousness