Past: First Memories

My first memories come from that hazy time when I was two or three years old.  I can date those memories that much only because they happened in an apartment where I lived for the first three or so years of my life, before moving into the "foundation" that became the basement of the house I grew up in after that.

But why do I have these particular memories?  Why don't I have more?  And are they actually my memories?

Douwe Draaisma addresses these questions in his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older.  He does so (here and throughout this book) by recounting and synthesizing various studies done over the years, as well as comparing observations and conclusions with literary and historical sources.  All of this is fascinating reading, but here I'm mostly sticking to the answers.

What do we remember from these early years? It may depend on how old you are when asked what you remember: retention seems to decline over the years.  But the average age of the first memory is about three years old.

Why that memory?  It tends to be associated with strong emotions.  One study found is it usually fear, while another found that feelings of elation or surprise were more frequent.  My first memory combines elation and surprise, which must include a little fear: it is of arriving on the landing outside our third (and top) floor apartment, on my father's shoulders.

Like mine, it is usually a visual memory.  But that's a little deceptive.  For it seems that the reason we don't have more memories from these early years--where our minds are very active, and we're experiencing lots of things for the first time--has to do with language.

Researchers believe all memories still exist somewhere in the brain.  The problem is accessing them.  In order to make access possible, we sort memories into categories.  Though we don't necessarily do this consciously, it requires a level of language, and an ability to deal with abstractions (like categories) that we don't have in our earliest years.  In fact, memories may not form without the ability to describe them in language (even if that's the daily babble of toddlers in their beds or cribs, talking to themselves in their own terms about what they've recently experienced.)

But depositing memories into categories also works against remembering specific events if they are repeated.  The first trip to the zoo becomes conflated with the second and third trips until all specific memories of the zoo recede and seemingly disappear.

Another reason that we seldom have memories from the first year may be that we lack the consciousness of self--the "I"--to form autobiographical memories.  Forming the "I" implies the "you," and so first memories may also include recognition of a parent as someone not "I."  (Dr. D. notes first memories by writers Nabokov and Edith Wharton that supports this idea.)

But how real are those first memories?  Some first memories can be checked with others who were there, and it sometimes turns out they remember it differently.  And sometimes there is even objective evidence that shows it isn't quite true to what happened--it happened here when you remember it as there.

Or it didn't happen at all.  Maybe my father didn't ride me on his shoulders that time (it wasn't something he did a lot.) But it's still a memory.

This is where the relationship of memories and the language to describe them becomes more complicated and perhaps troublesome.  One person remembered an attempt to kidnap him out of his stroller, when it turned out that it had never happened--it was a story he was told, a lie by his nanny that she later admitted.  Yet he had pictured it happening.

A lot of memories--including first memories, and maybe especially those--turn out to be stories we've heard, perhaps combined with some incoherent impressions we seem to remember.  That may be what happened with another of my early "memories" that might even be the first: I remember playing quietly under the bed.

I focused on this memory--re-remembered it--when I heard the story, told by both my mother and her sister, though each told it to me separately, many years apart--of the afternoon when I was a baby that I disappeared from that same apartment.

They had been talking when one of them noticed they could no longer hear me and I wasn't in sight.  They called me and searched the apartment without finding me. My aunt noticed that a window was slightly open.  My mother told me she thought about Lindbergh baby kidnapping (though that had happened more than a decade earlier, it evidently made an impression.)  They were both frightened.

One of them soon found me asleep under the bed.  I had crawled under there, played awhile and fallen asleep.  Was my memory from that day? Or was it a perspective I dimly recall from several adventures under the bed?  I think the second alternative is more likely.

We may feel pieces of memories that get located by repetition (I seem to remember how my mother sang to me when I was a baby, but I also saw her sing to my younger sisters) or by familiar objects etc., as well as by stories.

For example, I don't remember the actual moment this photo was taken of me at 2 yrs. old, on the phone at my grandparents' house. But I remember the phone and the phone table and where they were because they were there for years.  And I seem to remember that sweater with the ducks, but do I?  I don't recall the colors (I want to guess blue-gray with yellow ducks.)  Maybe I just remember photographs like this one.

I wonder if these vague impressions plus stories we hear later account for both the richness and mystery of our childhood memories.  I see my curly blond locks that I don't recall, but I remember my mother's story of crying when they were cut off at the barber shop.

Of course once we tell the story of the first memory (or formulate it in our heads), what we basically remember is our story, as the actual memory recedes. That may account for the odd fact that we often see ourselves in the memory (as one researcher found), rather than seeing the scene from our point of view at the time. The story of the memory is what gets fixed in our heads.  It's called autobiographical memory, and autobiographies are stories, after all.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About the Future?

"Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow.”
C.G. Jung

"Send your love/into the future
Send you love/into the distant dawn"
Sting

The subject of the future begins with what you bring to it. Your curiosity is likely fueled by feelings of fear or hope. Often by both.

In confronting the future, cynicism won’t get you very far. But a sense of irony and appreciation of paradox are helpful, if not mandatory.

The concern of the young for their future may be most natural and most vivid. But even the old, without much of a future of their own, can care deeply about the future, as legacy, but also selflessly.

So what is it? What do we talk about when we talk about the future?

“There is no such thing as the future: what there is instead is an almost infinite range of possible futures.”
Frederic Pohl

The future is a very big place. It’s everything that hasn’t happened yet, to everybody who is alive and will ever live, and more. Because we don’t know what actually will happen, the future from our perspective is everything that could happen, from the next nanosecond to the end of time. Everywhere.

Most senses of “the future” we normally consider are narrower than this, but this expanse of possibilities is the true context that sooner or later insists on itself.

So what do we talk about when we talk about the future? The future extends forward in time, and it expands outward from our individual selves.

There is the personal future, the one we think and dream about and plan for in our youth. Then there are the personal futures of partners, children and grandchildren.

Naturally these futures occur in a context: job markets, education options, culture and society, national and international economic conditions, war and peace, and so on. If at 20 years old we consider our personal future until retirement, we’re looking perhaps 50 years out. What will the future be like on the way to a half century ahead? The time span for children and grandchildren is longer—say 70 or 80 years from birth.

For a couple of centuries now, our society has experienced historically rapid change, including in all these areas that directly affect personal futures. For example, the specific occupations of both my grandfathers no longer exist, at least in the same way. My father started out selling and servicing sewing machines, out of a retail store that was part of a national chain specializing in them.  All that faded away before he was 45. One might even say that my working life as a freelance writer has largely disappeared, at least in its specifics. I was also an editor for alternative weekly newspapers, mostly new when I started in the 1970s, and vanishing fast in the early 21st century.

Many such changes were and are driven in large part by technology, but the past has proven that technologies can have immense and widespread social, cultural, economic and environmental effects. So as technologies continue to develop, we naturally wonder, what will the future be in a century or two? This is “the future” that intrigues, fascinates and frightens.

So the sense of “the future” in common parlance is somewhat open-ended but probably starts 50 years ahead and may extend for several centuries. I’m guessing that this is “the future” most people are curious about enough to read this far.

There are ways we narrow down the possibilities of those futures. In fact we have an accepted if unspoken standard for how the future comes to be. We’ll examine this key criterion a little later.

But even with limitations, there are lots of possible futures. Sometimes people are keenly interested in the future, even to the point that it’s real to them. And sometimes, they seem to ignore it.

As the 21st century speeds towards its third decade, it’s said that people don’t talk about the future because it’s already here or soon will be: the Internet, smartphones, social media, drones, robots, Virtual Reality, 3-D printing, the Internet of Things, as well as the technologies of medicine (including genetic manipulation and cloning) and so on.

Some argue that today’s information technologies and their effects— social networks, constant information, shrinking attention spans—have created such an overwhelming and ever-changing present that the future even as an idea is disappearing, if not entirely obsolete.

Or it’s said that people don’t talk about the future because there isn’t likely to be one worth talking about, or contemplating at all. Or because there’s no way to predict it, so why bother? Or because all prior talk of the future turned out to be nonsense. Where are the flying cars?

It’s even been suggested that thinking about the future is unnatural for humans, who care mostly if not only about the present.

But now as in all times, people do think, feel and talk about the future. The future is basic to how humans think, and may be in large measure why we think.

Clark's Nutcracker hides up to 30.000 seeds for
the winter, and locates them months later, even
under snow.  Photo by jrtrimble via Birdshare.

We know of animals that act in the present to create better conditions for their future survival, from ants to apes, and certain birds that hide seeds in summer to be retrieved and eaten in winter.

 Though it’s always perilous to speculate on early humans, it’s reasonable to assume that they observed the means of their survival (habits of prey, location of plants in particular seasons, etc.) and planned ahead based on those observations, and on the accumulated memories of their group. They thought about the future all the time.

Late 19th century philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley thought so.“Life being a process of decay and of continual repair and a struggle throughout against dangers," he wrote, "our thoughts, if we are to live, must mainly go the way of anticipation.”

“We register our perceptions and experiences with an eye to our future actions,” adds contemporary historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma in interpreting Bradley. “What happened in the past only matters inasmuch as it enables us to anticipate what lies in store for us.”

Being able to anticipate consciously, and to communicate information and ideas that helped people to anticipate better, were major advantage for humans, and may well have driven the development of language and culture as well as the development of the human brain.

The future early humans contemplated was likely limited in time and space, and probably dealt with anticipating seasonal and cyclical changes, signs of a changing environment as well as where prey animals and needed plants were most likely to be. But thinking about the future, far from being some exotic exercise of a few, may well be the most natural kind of thinking we do.

first in a series

Shepard for the Day.17

Shepard explains that this kind of childhood development evolved in the first eons of human existence as an adaptation to those environments: "small-group, leisured, foraging life-ways with natural surroundings.  For us now, that world no longer exists."

But how we so differently adapt to our world runs counter to our biological evolution, "as it works much too slowly to make adjustments in our species in these ten millennia since the archaic foraging cultures began to be destroyed by their hostile, aggressive, better-organized, civilized neighbors."

"Programmed [in those earlier times] for the slow development toward a special kind of sagacity, we live in a world where that humility and tender sense of human limitation is no longer rewarded.  Yet we suffer for the want of that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp.14-15

Shepard for the Day.16

Final description of a child's life in primordial hunter-gatherer times, when we became human..

Wiyot sisters participating in the
Flower Dance, a coming of age
ceremony recently revived

"At the end of  childhood he comes to some of the most thrilling days of his life.  The transition he faces will be experienced by body and ritual in concert.  The childhood of journeying in a known world, scrutinizing and mimicking natural forms, and always listening has prepared him for a whole new octave in his being. The clock of his body permits it to be done, and the elders of his life will see that he is initiated.  It is a commencement into a world foreshadowed by childhood: home, good, unimaginably rich, sometimes painful with reason, scrutable with care."

Shepard for the Day.15

continuing: child's life in primordial hunter-gatherer times, when we became human..

Kananginak_Pootoogook-Ninngaumajuq
_Cape_Dorset_"Angry Bear" inuitcom

"The child is free.  He is not asked to work.  At first he can climb and splash and dig and explore the infinite riches about him.  In time he increasingly wants to make things and to understand that which he cannot touch or change, to wonder about that which is unseen.  His world is full of stories told, hearing of a recent hunt, tales of renowned events, and epics with layers of meaning.

Voices last only for their moments of sound, but they originate in life.  The child learns that all life tells something and that all sound---from the frog calling to the sea surf--issues from a being kindred and significant to himself, telling some tale, giving some clue, mimicking some rhythm that he should know.  There is no end to what is to be learned."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp.10-11

R.I.P. Ursula LeGuin

I'm not entirely sure why I take the death of Ursula LeGuin in such a personal way. I have no right to--I attended a reading she gave at a Portland bookstore some 20 years ago, but other than that, I didn't know her.

I haven't even read many of her books, though I remain enormously impressed with one of them, Always Coming Home.  It's so unique I can't get past it to her other created worlds.  It's not one of her best known, though it is singled out in the emotional tribute by writer John Scalzi that appeared in the LA Times.  He notes the immediate and heartfelt response of so many in the literary world and especially the science fiction and fantasy universe who did know her:

"On and on and on goes this immediate and real-time outpouring of grief and remembrance of a woman who gave us Earthsea, "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," which is as much a parable for our time as anything that anyone has written, or likely will.

She was a supporting column of the genre, on equal footing and bearing equal weight to Verne or Wells or Heinlein or Bradbury. Losing her is like losing one of the great sequoias. As the unceasing flow of testimonials gives witness, nearly every lover and creator of science fiction and fantasy can give you a story of how Le Guin, through her words or presence, has illuminated their lives."

I responded so strongly to Always Coming Home as a vision of a far future that is a complex return to a humanity living in close relationship to the Earth, with a strong relationship to Indigenous and particularly Native American culture.  As well as being a woman writer in an historically and predominantly male sci-fi culture, what distinguishes her is a background in anthropology.  This goes back to her father, Alfred Kroeber, who wrote several works on California Indians, and her mother Theodora Quinn Kroeber, who wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, a classic about the last member of his tribe.  This is a crucial perspective for the future.  I probably also felt an aspirational kinship because she was from California, at a time when I was making it my home.

Probably the personal quality of my response is also due to large extent because I've been reading her latest book, No Time To Spare, which is a collection of short pieces she wrote as blog posts.  Though she applies her keen intelligence to literary and political matters, much of the book is personal, about her life and her attitudes toward life, specifically her thoughts on aging.  In that way it is intimate, and in some ways it's like I've been in conversation with her, off and on, since I bought the book at a bookstore in Menlo Park on Christmas Eve.  A Christmas gift for myself.

The title essay took to task a familiar sounding questionnaire from her alma mater of Harvard for her sixtieth reunion.  They wanted to know what she did in her spare time. Something she shares with another great woman when she was in her 80s, Jane Jacobs, is that she won't let a stupid question or sloppy statement just go by.  She found this one pointless.  "What do retired people have but 'spare time'?"

It's all spare time--except that none of it is: "I still don't know what spare time is because all my time is occupied.  It always has been and it is now.  It's occupied by living."

Maybe that's also part of it.  She was so vibrantly alive.  Selfishly, she was a source of hope.

I've read some of her other nonfiction--her essays collected in The Language of the Night (1979), the essays and speeches collected in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989.)  There have been other collections and nonfiction books since, in addition to a wealth of fiction and poetry.

Her now famous National Book Awards six minute speech in 2014 accepting a lifetime achievement award (which I posted here) was a two-part poem.  The second part warned against trends in publishing that shifted autonomy and power from writers and editors to the sales department.  By accepting this, writers are giving away their most precious asset--their freedom.

The first part was acknowledging that writers in fantasy and science fiction are finally being accepted in the literary world, which I hope is true.  Back in the 1970s she was already making the case for why this is necessary, also in a speech accepting a National Book Award (in childrens lit): "Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art.  At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence."

I suppose I wasn't completely unprepared for news of her death.  Her blog was ongoing but when I checked it online, she hadn't posted in months.  She was 88, my mother's generation (or anyway, the generation of her younger brother, my uncle.)

But it was a blow I'm not over.  After all, I'm still reading her book.  I had intended to start a series of quotes from it here.  Maybe I'll start with this one, from a piece about a holiday visit that involved young children.

"What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day--from where the horses live to the origin of the stars.  How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn.  Billionaires, all of us."

May she rest in peace.  Her work lives on, and on and on.

Shepard for the Day.14

"The child goes out from camp with adults to forage and with playmates to imitate foraging.  The adults show no anxiety in their hunting, only patience; one waits and watches and listens.

Sometimes the best is not to be found, but there is always something.  The world is all clues.  There is no end to the subtlety and delicacy of the clues.  The signs that reveal are always there. One has only to learn the art of reading them."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p 10

The Two Memories

Um, on this memory series I forgot something, that comes before "first memories."  It's the two memories in psychology.

As Draaisma tells the tale, in 1879 or so a 57 year old man of science called Francis Galton took a walk through the Pall Mall in London, an area of fashionable shops and men's clubs.  He noticed that whatever he observed there seemed to inspire specific memories from his past.  He began to note what these associations were.

Eventually he designed and carried out an experiment: Galton wrote down a number of common words ("carriage," "abbey," "afternoon") and then read them one by one, noting what memories came from them.  He did this systematically, a number of times.  In the end he had a list of associated memories--many of them repeated--and noted from which parts of his life they came, and where.  (A disproportionate number were from childhood, and most from his native England, although Galton was well traveled.)

At about the same time in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus was an unemployed philosopher looking for a thesis topic.  He designed an experiment: he prepared a set of randomly assembled syllables by inserting a vowel between two consonants (bif, nol) and wrote each down on a card.  He then read the cards quickly until he had memorized the contents.  Then he waited--for 20 minutes, a day, a month--and repeated the process, noting how much time it took for him to re-learn the cards.

His major conclusion was that: the longer the interval between the learning and re-learning sessions, the longer it took to relearn the material.  In other words, he discovered cramming.

Both experiments were breakthroughs in the study of memory, but after awhile, only one of them was remembered.  And for the next century, the Ebbinghaus experiment was the basis for the approach to memory taken by psychology.  Galton's was forgotten.

The reasons have to do with what happened to psychology.  Psychologists, a philosophy teacher once told me, have a bad case of physics envy.  In order to be a science like physics, psychology became obsessed with measurement and laboratory experiment.

The Ebbinghaus experiment didn't depend on somebody's memory of their past.  It could be replicated by anyone, and it was, for many years.  Special instruments were invented for it, and eventually it involved two technicians working the apparatus and a test subject.

It probably also helped that Ebbinghaus had a catchy and, well, memorable name for the result of his memory statistics.  When plotted on a graph they became "the forgetting curve."  Who could forget that?

The fate of these two experiments was the fate of psychology, which became the study of stuff that can be measured under laboratory conditions.  Besides making the study of the human mind mind-bogglingly boring, it was deceptively limited.  It fell in love with its toys, but as Dr. D. points out, "any craftsman will tell you that your tools largely determine the use to which you can put them." (p.9.)  It also created the temptation of making claims larger than your evidence warranted, and psychology still loses out to that temptation a lot of the time.

But the major distinction between the experiments is that Ebbinghaus' was essentially about the mechanics of memory, useful for research into learning.  But Galton's was about actual memories--aspects of the past that may be many years old, and weren't deliberately "memorized," but re-surface in some form.

These are now called "autobiographical memories," and it took until the 1970s before this subject--much more fascinating and potentially revealing for people not in the position of laboratory mice--got some attention in more or less mainstream psychology.

The content of memories themselves was of interest to psychoanalysis and the psychology of Freud and Jung, all of which contemporary psychology would like to forget.  But the study of autobiographical memory itself is about what we remember, why we remember it (and what we forget) and when and how we remember it.

In discussing neuroscience and Buddhist meditation here recently, I noted this tension between the objective and the subjective: westerners have studied the mind objectively (most recently, with brain scans) while Buddhists have centuries of carefully observing the workings of their minds and creating systems to explain their findings.  So the West considered the Buddhists quaint, primitive and unscientific.  That's changed among some--but not for everyone.

Something of the same conflict has blocked the study of autobiographical memory. There is a necessary subjective element (one's memories are unique), and yet that's a source of their fascination.  Do you remember what I remember?  Why do I remember this and forget that?  And so on.

Autobiographical memory is the subject of Draaisma's books.  And so next time (really) we begin with first memories in childhood.

But before that, two related notes not in the Draaisma book.  The first recorded experiment in autobiographical memory was hardly Sir Francis Galton's only claim to fame.  He was basically a statistician but applied his skills to many areas.  He was the model of the Victorian polymath--an inventor and tropical explorer, a geographer as well as contributing to statistics (he developed 'regression to the mean'), psychology, sociology and anthropology. Among his claims to fame were the first weather map and other contributions to what became the science of meteorology.

He was also Charles Darwin's half-cousin who came up with the phrase "nature versus nurture."  And unfortunately he was an early advocate of eugenics, another word he coined.

As for the Pall Mall, it also involves the coining of words.  In Galton's time it had been a urban space for more than a century, but in the 17th century it was an open green where a popular game was played.  The game was also called pall mall, described as a combination of golf (the fairways) and croquet, as it was played with a mall-et.

The mallet was also called a 'maul,' which remains the name of a kind of hammer, a meaning that predates the verb sense of tearing up as well as pounding.

The word 'mall' as in shopping mall comes from the Pall Mall and other green open spaces, often shaded by trees.  So the actual mall in a shopping mall is not the shops but the open area they surround, where people walk.

The title of my book The Malling of America (still available from your online bookseller, like this one) suggests a pun: the mauling of America.  Both meanings of mall and maul come from the same place and the same game of pall mall.  I claim bonus points.

Why Not Norway?

Instead of those shithole (or perhaps shithouse) countries, why isn't the US getting more immigrants from Norway? asked the anti-president.  Enquiring minds want to know.

Well, here's a couple of tip-offs.  Norway recently announced its goal of making all of the country's short haul airplane flights on all-electric non-greenhouse gas polluting aircraft by 2040.  Air travel is one of the largest such polluters.  Norway is one of the world's leaders in addressing the climate crisis with such transportation technologies.

So naturally, Norwegians would regard a country that officially doubts the reality of the climate crisis as perhaps a primitive place to visit, but why would you want to live there.  Or even stay very long.

Though inspired by the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Norway's democracy and justice system are acknowledged to be superior.  It pays particular attention to preventing and prosecuting corruption.

Norway is in first place on the UN Human Development Index, for superior levels of education, health and standard of living.  The US is tenth.  Norway has one of the highest levels of productivity in the world, and low unemployment.  It has a superior banking system and bounced back from the global Great Recession faster than anyone else.  It welcomes immigration.

The government pension fund is the largest such fund in the world, and bans investments for ethical reasons, such as nuclear weapons. Norway is the first country to ban cutting of trees to preserve its remaining forests.

It was the first country in the world to support LGBT rights by law.  It has a beautiful natural environment with spectacular features, vibrant film and television and strong literary and musical cultures.

Healthcare is free.  Public education is virtually free.  Among the Nordic countries, Norway's people have the most confidence in "their country's pension system, equal availability of welfare services for everyone, public health care, and unemployment support."

So pronounced are these differences that last year Norway was named the world's happiest country:
"It surged from fourth place in last year’s UN assessment all the way to the top spot, according to the World Happiness Report 2017. Other top countries on the list included Nordic neighbours Denmark and Iceland, as well as nearby Switzerland.

“All of the top four countries rank highly on all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance,” the summary explained.

Rounding out the top 10 were Finland, in fifth place, the Netherlands (6), Canada (7), New Zealand (8), and Australia and Sweden tied for 9th.

The UN report noted: The USA is a story of reduced happiness. In 2007 the USA ranked 3rd among the OECD countries; in 2016 it came 19th. The reasons are declining social support and increased corruption (see Chapter 7) and it is these same factors that explain why the Nordic countries do so much better."

Okay, forget Norway--what about neighboring Denmark, with all their pale faces?

Probably not.  Denmark also "is not far behind or tied in most categories" in citizen confidence in their social system. The BBC finds that "Denmark inches out its neighbours (and blows away the rest of the world) with near-perfect scores on the ‘Basic Human Needs’ ranking in the 2017 Social Progress Index, which includes meeting the nutritional and medical needs of its citizens and giving access to basic knowledge and communication."

"These benefits are offered to more than just native-born residents. 'The general health and social system is well-developed and accessible to anyone living in Denmark, and as a student you can get financial assistance and free language classes.'"

Levels of satisfaction suggest that citizens accept that high taxes support a well-run government and a better society. So yeah, maybe the weather isn't to everybody's liking, and there are problems to deal with, but why leave a pretty sweet society for this trainwreck of a country?

Answer: Mostly they don't.

Shepard for the Day.13

continuing: child's life in primordial hunter-gatherer times, when we became human..

"Now the child goes to the fringes of the camp to play at foraging.  Play is an imitation, starting with simple fleeing and catching, going on to mimic joyfully the important animals, being them for a moment, and then not being them, feeling as this one must feel and then that one, all tried on the self.

The child sees the adults dancing the animal movements and does it too.  Music itself has been there all the time, from his mother's song to the melodies of birds and the howls of wolves.  The child already feels the mystery of kinship: likeness but difference."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p10

Memory Series, an Introduction

Douwe Draaisma is a professor of the history of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has written a number of books on memory, four of which have been translated into English. The two I've read have been fascinating, and I'm looking forward to reading a third.

I'm going to write about these books here, probably chapter by chapter. But first I want to say a little about why I surmise I like these books, and more importantly, trust what he says.

They are well-written, and that is usually the first impression that builds confidence. I mistrust quite a lot of contemporary psychology and psychological writing, though not only because most of it is badly written. It tends to over-promise and overreach its evidence. I don't think Draaisma does, but then he is not exactly a psychologist. He has a degree in psychology and philosophy. So there is more depth, more distance from clinical experiments, more perspective and evaluation.

Further, he specializes in the history of psychology, which counters the present-centeredness of so much psychology, in which each new study is announced as if it is the first ever, or because it is the latest, it's the definitive last word. Indeed, his books refer back to earlier psychologists and studies, even to the 19th century. He is able to evaluate methodologies that are no longer fashionable but valuable nevertheless.

He also applies relevant insights from literature and the other arts. So much contemporary psychology (like so much economics) either breathlessly announces findings that have been dealt with in literature for centuries, or findings that literature has long ago disproven.  They act as if literature didn't exist, or maybe just shouldn't.

He isn't just making cute literary references. As we'll see, he notes that every treatise on the psychology of smell refers to Proust and the famous pastries dipped in tea that set off a flood of memories in his narrator. He also notes that they usually get it wrong, because they haven't actually read it. He does read it, and finds it much richer and revelatory.

All of this is probably because he is European, and specifically not American. A broader cultural education seems more natural there. So much in American academia and associated professions is narrowly specialized, and arrogant about it as well.

Memory is a subject of general interest, but of course, of more specific and greater interest as we get older. Memory changes--often childhood memories become more vivid, while other memories seem to slip away. Access to certain kinds of memories is harder (like names) and of course there are the fears of losing the function of memory.

James Hillman (a psychologist I respect, perhaps above all others since Jung) used to suggest that perhaps we have our experiences in order to have things to remember. (That's psyche as soul right there.)

 It does seem to me that the active process of remembering adds richness and maybe even meaning (or meanings) to the experiences. There's such an emphasis on seniors having new experiences, traveling the world to fulfill their bucket lists, as well taking up new interest and hobbies to keep their brains working. Maybe. Active remembering uses the brain, too, as well as the heart and soul. Finding depth in past experiences seems at least as worthy as trying to have often superficial new ones, and it's a lot less expensive and exhausting.

Anyway, notes begin here soon on Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older:How Memory Shapes Our Past. First up: first memories.

Shepard for the Day.12

continuing: child's life in primordial hunter-gatherer times, when we became human...

Vigilant Owl by Kenojuak Ashevak  Cape
Dorset

"There is a constancy of people, yet it is a world bathed in nonhuman forms, a myriad of figures, evoking an intense sense of their differences and similarities, the beckoning challenge of a lifetime.  Speech is about that likeness and unlikeness, the coin of thought.

It is a world of travel and stop.  At first the child fears being let and is bound by fear to the proximity of his mother and others.  This interrupted movement sets the pace of his life, telling him gently that he is a traveler or visitor in the world.

Its motion is like his own growth: as he gets older and as the cycle of group migrations is repeated, he sees places he has seen before, and those places seem less big and strange.  The life of movement and rest is one of returning, and the places are the same and yet always more."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp.9-10

Shepard for the Day.11

More detail about growing up in a primordial hunter-gatherer culture...

"For the infant there is a joyful comfort in being handled and fondled often, fed and cleaned as the body demands.  From the start it is a world of variation on rhythms, the refreshment of hot and cold, wind like a breath in the face, the smell and feel of rain and snow, earth in hand and underfoot.

The world is a soft sound-surround of gentle voices, human, cricket, and bird music. It is a pungent and inviting place with just enough bite that it says, 'Come out, wake up, look, taste, and smell; now cuddle and sleep'!"

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p9

Is "Health Insurance Fraud" an Oxymoron?

‘As the US demonstrates, when the profit motive is introduced into a health delivery system, ways of gaming the system and outright fraud schemes are easier to devise, and they are a far more profitable business to engage in than treating patients.’
David Lindorff

This article in the London Review of Books details conventional fraud, but the fraud behind the system is the system itself: healthcare for profit.

Obamacare was a necessary set of innovations to protect more Americans, and its reliance on private insurance was politically inevitable.  But the system is still a massive fraud.

Or maybe I'm just a little ticked as I survey my past year's expenses and look forward to the next.

For example, for 2018 Social Security granted a 2% cost of living adjustment, after several years of pretending that the real cost of actually living as a senior hadn't gone up at all, gosh, weren't we lucky.  All the price rises on food, clothing etc. must have been senior moment delusions.

Unfortunately also for 2018 Medicare Part B increased its rates to those same seniors (including me), cutting the adjustment roughly in half.  It's a common assumption that Medicare is free.  Well, it ain't.

Only Medicare Part A, which covers hospital costs (though of course not all of them) doesn't charge a monthly premium.  Medicare B (doctors costs, but not all of them, oh no) is deducted from the Social Security check.  Not to mention Medicare C and D plans (if you can afford them) which cover other stuff, and are run by private insurance companies.

Then there are the so-called Medigap private insurance plans that cover what Medicare A and B don't cover.  Though still not all, oh no.  My AARP plan told me my premium for them is also going up in 2018, so forget the cost of living increase.  The cost of living increased beyond it, before I got out of the insurance category.

(AARP also told me that the monthly premium I'm paying is not the actual monthly premium, oh no, it includes a discount.  "Discount" is not a word I've heard from them before.  But apparently this is going to keep going up every year.)

In the past year, the AARP plan paid for--what a surprise--virtually nothing.  It just paid their executives, lobbyists and their fraud insurance.  So here's my 2017: practically all medical goods (prescriptions) and services (including dentist and eye doctor) I paid for entirely out of pocket, plus some doctor bills Medicare and AARP wouldn't pay for, plus copays.

 Meanwhile I paid thousands of dollars in the semi-private Medicare Part B insurance and the private Medigap insurance, for which I got pretty much nothing but pieces of paper telling me why I was getting nothing.

Fraud may be more profitable than treating patients.  But insurance must certainly be.

Shepard for the Day.10

"The quests and tests that mark his passage in adolescent initiation are not intended to reveal to him that his love of the natural world was an illusion or that, having seemed only what it was, it in some ways failed him.  He will not graduate from that world but into its significance.

So, with the end of childhood, he begins a lifelong study, a reciprocity with the natural world in which its depths are as endless as his own creative thought.

He will not study it in order to transform its liveliness into mere objects that represent his ego, but as a poem, numinous and analogical, of human society."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p.9

Shepard for the Day.9

"Grandfather Storyteller" by Helen Cordero
(Cochiti Pueblo)

[continuing his description of childhood and relationship to nature in ancestral hunter-gatherer cultures of humanity's first thousands of years...]

"But the child does not yet philosophize on this; for him the world is simply what it seems; he is shielded from speculation and abstraction by his own psyche.

He is not given the worst of the menial tasks.  He is free, much as the creatures around him--that is, delicately watchful, not only of animals but of people, among whom life is not ranked subordination to authority.  Conformity for him will be to social pressure and custom, not to force.

All this is augured in the nonhuman world, not because he never see dominant and subordinate animals, creatures killing others, or trees whose shade suppresses the growth of other plants, but because, reaching puberty, he is on the brink of a miracle of interpretation that will transform those things.

He will learn that his childhood experiences, though a comfort and a joy, were a special language.  Through myth and its ritual enactments, he is once again presented with that which he expects.

Thenceforth natural things are not only themselves but a speaking.  He will not put his delight in the sky and the earth behind him as a childish and irrelevant thing."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p8-9

Please Kill This Fad Before It Catches On

I've seen this suggestion before, but not at the length of this long article in the New York Times online: suggesting the year of 1968 and this year of 2018 are similar.

I recognize the temptation.  It's a nice even, symmetrical 50 years.  It's a provocative premise.  It's a nice article assignment.  It's clickbait.

And it's bullshit.  Please resist the temptation.  Though this particular article has its merits, its premise is fundamentally unsound.

There is no useful comparison between 1968 and 2018.  They are different in all but the most superficial ways.  The "division" in this country is almost completely different.  If you stick to what the two years have in common, you lose what was most important in each year, especially 1968.

I don't suppose we can avoid a flood of 1968 stories, at least for a month or so.  But let's honor the integrity of that year and extract its true significance rather than trivialize both this year and that year with invidious comparisons.

Or not.  It won't last long anyway.

That Other Shithole Country

Almost as disheartening as the anti-president himself is his success in corrupting the Republicans in Washington.  It has suddenly struck two of them that he didn't say "shithole countries" at all (describing the homelands of Haitian and African immigrants) and it was a horrible distortion for anyone to say so.  For according to the conservative National Review, he might actually have said "shithouse."

No, you can't make this shit up.  Andy Borowitz, get your shit together.

But as Martin Luther King Day passes, we can at least try to see as clearly as he did.  In this time it is that a lot of Republicans, particularly the antipresident's "base", thoroughly agree with the antipresident's characterization.  Moreover, they are most upset about another shithouse (or shithole) country he didn't name.

That country is the United States of America.  They cannot face that it is rapidly becoming multiracial and more equal.  They would rather side with the avaricious rich out to loot the country including them, as long as they feed their fears of this country.  They have lost more jobs to foreigners who stay in their own countries than they ever will to immigrants, but they don't see them.  

Nothing else matters but that it's not their America anymore.  I imagine some of them are saying this out loud, and many others would agree: This is what happens when you let people from shithole countries in, even if a bunch of them are descendants of unwilling immigrants dragged over as slaves.  Give them equality and what do you get?  A shithole country of your own.

Perhaps President Obama is correct and Fox News covers a different planet, but certainly it covers a different country.  All actual news about the United States as well as the world is fake news because it's not about the country that does not exist that they want to believe they live in.  When you live in a fake country, news about the real country is always fake.

Nobody likes to feel invaded, or powerless, or a victim of injustice.  But beyond empathy, we're looking at a segment of the electorate that hates their own country. Together with those who made deluded or just plain stupid decisions, they voted for the antipresident, and they're more than fine with his reflexive racism and racist vulgarity.

So this is what Republicans are counting on, as they ever more corruptly cozy up to the antipresident, and incidentally, make a dismal authoritarianism more likely: the support of voters who like those in power in the federal government, but hate the shithole country that government is supposed to govern.

Shepard for the Day.8

Cahuilla basket bowl, south central California

"In such a world there is no wildness, as there is no tameness.  Human power over nature is largely the exercise of handcraft.  Insofar as the natural world poetically signifies human society, it signals that there is no great power over other men except as the skills of leadership are hewn by example and persuasion.

The otherness of nature takes fabulous forms of incorporation, influence, conciliation, and compromise. When the juvenile goes out with adults to seek a hidden root or to stalk an antelope he sees the unlimited possibilities of affiliation, for success is understood to depend on the readiness of the prey or tuber as much as the skill of the forager."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p8

Shepard for the Day.7

"The play space--trees, shrubs, paths, hidings, climbings--is a visible, structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold.  It is the primordial terrain in which games of imitating adults lay another groundwork for a dependable world. 

 They prefigure a household, so that, for these children of mobile hunter-gatherers, no house is necessary to structure and symbolize social status.  Individual trees and rocks that were also known to parents and grandparents are enduring counterplayers having transcendent meaning later in life."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p. 8

Shepard for the Day.6

"The child begins to babble and then to speak according to his own timing, with the cooperation of adults who are themselves acting upon the deep wisdom of a stage of life.  At first it is a matter of rote and imitation, a naming of things whose distinctive differences are unambiguous.  Nature is a lexicon where, at first, words have the solid reality of things.

In this bright new world there are as yet few mythical beasts, but real creatures to watch and to mimic in play.  Animals have a magnetic affinity for the child, for each in its way seems to embody some impulse, reaction, or movement that is "like me."

In the playful, controlled enactment of them comes a gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships.  In stories told, their forms spring to life in the mind, re-presented in consciousness, training the capacity to imagine."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p.7

Shepard for the Day.5

Note: ontogeny is "the whole of growth through the first twenty years (including physical growth.")

from Mendota Dakota Community

"The seed of normal ontogeny is present in all of us.  It triggers vague expectations that parents and society will respond to our hunger.  The newborn infant, for example, needs almost continuous association with one particular mother who sings and talks to it, breast-feeds it, holds and massages it, wants and enjoys it.  For the infant as person-to-be, the shape of all otherness grows out of that maternal relationship.

Yet, the setting of that relationship was, in the evolution of humankind, a surround of living plants, rich in texture, smell and motion.  The unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and water, the calls of animals and insects as well as human voices--all these are not vague and pleasant amenities for the infant, but the stuff out of which  its second grounding, even while in its mother's arms, has begun.

The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of that fetal landscape which is not so constant as once supposed.  The surroundings are also that-which-will-be-swallowed, internalized, incorporated as the self."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp. 6-7

A Start in the Right Direction to Address the Climate Crisis

How can we address the causes of the climate crisis?  Which basically means, how do we reduce greenhouse gases?  The conversation about this tends to be abstract, political (a carbon tax etc.) or piecemeal, often pitting one method against another.

But a small group in Sausalito organizing mostly young researchers from 22 countries has made what seems like the first systematic effort to figure out what really can draw down CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the next 30 years.  This has resulted in a book (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by the project's founder, environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken),  a website and an ongoing project that seeks partners and participation.

So far Project Drawdown has identified and ranked 100 ways.  But it's more than a wish list by folks brainstorming in an editorial meeting.  They've tested existing methods against cost and potential benefit in greenhouse gases reduction and in monetary saving.  They carefully vetted both data and conclusions with an array of experts.

Also notable is their global reach, including solutions for third world countries, and looking to indigenous peoples as land managers to be part of the solution.

Some of the ways to best address greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are not surprising (wind power, various forms and applications of solar, more forest) while others perhaps are (refrigeration techniques, food waste, educating girls.) There are some fascinating cutting edge combinations of nature and relatively low tech or no-tech, like Silvopasture and other methods of reducing the unnaturally large carbon footprints of cattle.

There are a number of videos on YouTube about the Project.  A nice 11 minute one is here,  and there's a longer presentation with visuals by Katharine Wilkinson of Project Drawdown to Google. (Note: viewers over 50 may find the parade of cliches grating but they do seem effective shorthand and images for her audience.)

The findings so far are billed as "the most comprehensive plan" so far, and the word "comprehensive" is very important, especially in setting priorities.  In terms of addressing the problem, there's been a lot of hot air about how changes in the obvious sectors (energy, transportation) can or can't be adequate to slow emissions enough, and especially if there's even the will to try.

But that debate lacks the information on how much other solutions can contribute to the necessary drawdown, so those other solutions are usually just ignored.  This project attempts to not only bring them into the conversation, but to assess their possible contribution with numbers.

The idea of planning for the future by developing comprehensive pictures of problems and solutions has been a dream since H.G. Wells and Buckminster Fuller.  When the idea caught fire in the 1970s that computers could help examine the world as a system, with all the factors and interactions and feedbacks, there was a huge boom in Future Studies, futuristics etc.  By 1980 it had died out, partly I assume because computers in those days, let alone people, weren't quite up to the task.

With a single goal of drawing down greenhouse gases, Project Drawdown has a chance, but as it has already learned, there are all kinds of other effects, interactions, synergies and feedbacks involved in the changes they suggest.  Most are positive however, which reminds me of this cartoon:

Yet Project Drawdown is just a start in the comprehensivity game, as suggested in an interview Paul Hawken did with the editor of Green America.  Hawken calls nuclear energy a "regret solution" because he doesn't support it, but the numbers say it will help, so it is included in the list.  In an editorial note, Green America maintains that once the energy used in mining and enriching uranium plus plant construction etc. is all figured in, more greenhouse gas pollution is created and needs to be part of the assessment.  So maybe this needs to be more comprehensive.  The Project should continue refining its data and conclusions.

But a huge advantage of the project's list is that progress can be made in adopting these changes by business sectors, businesses, state and local governments, communities (all perhaps in partnership with universities), and by families and individuals.  (And because it's global, by the governments of other countries where the problem is a given.)

In particular, as Wilkinson and others point out, there is such variety in effective methods that one or another is bound to appeal strongly to many individuals. These are projects for young people to get excited about, and to act on--perhaps as career paths.  Though priorities are evident in the ranking, all of the solutions contribute, so selecting any one of them is a positive.

In publicizing Project Drawdown, Hawken and others feel it necessary to denigrate the "doom and gloom" surrounding the subject of the climate crisis.  Maybe an attitude adjustment is needed, but I think they have a simpler solution: just refer to the science on the effects of the climate crisis as "the problem statement," (which they do) and go right into the solutions.  That's their important contribution, and what is likely to get people excited, especially young people.

And it really is unnecessary for Hawken to make his case for paying attention to the project by going off into dubious areas.  For instance (in his Green America interview), he asserts that "The human brain isn't wired to respond to future-existential threats.  The people who did that are not in the gene pool."

He may have some half-assed neuroscience to back him up, but what he says is patent nonsense.  Humans are all about imagining and assessing future dangers and opportunities (though denial often gets in the way), and the relationship of evolution to the brain is a very tricky area.  Especially since individual human brains "evolve" in meaningful ways over a lifetime.  People do come together because they care about the future, especially when they find something they can do well that can contribute to a better future.

 People who think about the future are pretty obviously in the gene pool.  They'd better be.

Shepard for the Day.4

"The passage of human development is surprisingly long and complicated.  The whole of growth through the first twenty years (including physical growth) is our ontogenesis, our 'coming into being,' or ontogeny...

Among those relict tribal peoples who seem to live at peace with their world, who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters, the ontogeny of the individual has some characteristic features.  

Gene Thomas (Onandoga)
"Eagle and Dreamer"

I conjecture that their ontogeny is more normal than ours (for which I will be seen as sentimental and romantic) and that it may be considered to be a standard from which we have deviated.

Theirs is the way of life to which our ontogeny was fitted by natural selection, fostering a calendar of mental growth, cooperation, leadership, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation in the first creation."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p6

Shepard for the Day.3

From the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet:
the "monster from the id" reimagined.

"To invoke psychopathology is to address infancy, as most mental problems have their roots in our first years of life and their symptoms are defined in terms of immaturity. 

 The mentally ill typically have infantile motives and act on perceptions and states of mind that caricature those of early life.  Among their symptoms are destructive behaviors that are the means by which the individual comes to terms with private demons that would otherwise overwhelm him.  To argue with the logic with which he defends his behavior is to threaten those very acts of defense that stand between him and a frightful chasm.

Most of us fail to become as mature as we might.  In that respect there is a continuum from simple deprivations to traumatic shocks, many of which are fears and fantasies of a kind that normally haunt anxious infants and then diminish.

Such primary fantasies and impulses are the stuff of the unconscious of us all.  They typically remain submerged or their energy is transmuted, checked, sublimated, or subordinated to reality.

Not all are terrifying: there are chimeras of power and unity and erotic satisfaction as well as shadows that plague us at abyssal levels with disorder and fear, all sending their images and symbols into dreams and, in the troubled soul, into consciousness. 

 It is not clear whether they all play some constructive part in the long trail toward sane maturity or whether they are just flickering specters lurking beside the path, waiting for our wits to stumble.  Either way, the correlation between mental unhealth and regression to particular stages of early mental life has been confirmed thousands of times over."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp5-6