YouTube: Logicomix: the making of, Part 1 of 3:
YouTube: Logicomix: the making of, Part 2 of 3:
YouTube: Logicomix: the making of, Part 3 of 3:
Tag Archives: health
Comic books dealing with mental illness
Darryl Cunningham is a comic book creator, blogger, sculptor and more. He also spent time working in a psychiatric ward.
He is chronicling his experience working in a psychiatric ward in a new graphic novel titled “Psychiatric Tales”. He’s been posting draft chapters of of the book on his blog over the past year.
Every chapter has been speaking to me on one level or another, but I want to call out two for now: “It Could Be You” and “People With Mental Illness Enhance Our Lives”
Along a similar vein is “LOGICOMIX”, a graphic novel documenting the experience of some of the largest names in mathematics, and what they sacrificed to make their contributions, including, sometimes, their mental health.
Links on thinking, parenting, teaching, creating for October 4th, 2009
Boston.com: Inside the Baby Mind:
One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults – this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia – that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”
Boston.com: Thinking literally: The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world:
Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.
NYTimes: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? :
In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”
NurtureShock: Are Time-outs for Tots Conditional Love? :
The real problem with Kohn’s articles is that, already, there is a lot of confusion about when to praise, and his pieces just add to it. They give the impression that parents must make a choice between unconditional love on the one side, and praise and punishment on the other. And that’s just not true.
Most research finds that kids need rules and structure – not as a form of prison, but a scaffold of autonomy they can build on.
Oberlin College professor Nancy Darling has surveyed thousands of adolescents, in the US, the Philippines, and Chile. She’s found that when parents set no rules, or when parents fail to enforce rules they’ve set, it sends a message that parents simply don’t care about their kids’ well-being or the kids’ actions. The adolescents think the parents just can’t be bothered by their transgressions.
While combining praise with a statement of love is problematic. For example, “You’re such a smart girl, and I love you,” sends a child a message that if she’s no longer is smart, the love will stop. But there’s nothing in the research that says parents should stop saying, “I love you.” It just that they should stop combining displays of love and affection and praise for achievement. Keep them separate. Once again, this isn’t an either or situation.
Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s perspective on praise is that – when we praise or punish – we need to make it clear that we are responding to what a child does, not who they are. We shouldn’t say “Bad Boy!” when the kid breaks a vase, and we shouldn’t say “Boy Genius!” when he made a vase in art class. Both “Bad Boy” and “Boy Genius” are wild overstatements of what we really think.
Instead, we can simply say, “You know you shouldn’t play ball in the house,” and “You worked really hard on that vase, didn’t you?” those are fine.
Beyond the moment, they teach children that we pay attention to what they are doing, and that we can be trusted to give them a fair and accurate response when they need it. Lessons we want them to remember when they’re 17, and they have a broken heart or just had a fender-bender.
As I said earlier, we just don’t have to make a choice between praise, punishment and unconditional love. That’s just a false choice.
“Connect with yourself, connect with others, connect with the world, connect with the Infinite”
Read – “The Freak Revolution Manifesto” (via Susie Madrak)
There’s a lot in the piece that resonates, but the parts that cheer you on to opt-out of various things, well they stand in opposition to connection, to “coming off the mountaintop” as the paper puts it. So it is a piece that is at odds with itself.
Still, its worth a good read.
Some supporting science – BioEd Online: Conformists may kill civilizations
And from Bruce Eckel comes some related thoughts after reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?”:
I’m reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?” which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it’s the anti-self-help book; it’s just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.
And it’s dense, by which I mean not fluffy but packed with insight. He spent years researching and developing this book, and his own struggle is woven into it. Indeed, it’s not about formulas and answers, but about the struggle itself.
One observation set me back. There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.
But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.
Healthcare, wealthcare, death due to lack of care
Think Progress: Uninsured 22-Year-Old Boehner Constituent Dies From Swine Flu
Update: Report: Miami U. Grad Did Not Have H1N1 – Kimi Young Died Of Viral Pneumonia
The New Republic: WealthCare
The Atlantic: How American Healthcare Killed My Father
One death every 12 seconds due to lack of coverage
Why are we happy?
TED.com: Dan Gillbert asks, Why are we happy?:
…When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we’re prudent, we’re cautious, we’re thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we’re reckless, and we’re cowardly.
The lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997 (and maybe higher than in the last 50 years?)
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997:
David Johnson, a senior statistician with the Census Bureau, says the increase is clearly linked to jobs.
“Children in nonworking families, children in female-headed households, children in families that receive food stamps, their poverty rate didn’t change much,” Johnson says. “Whereas children in earner households, the poverty was affected a lot. So you see a lot of it tied to the earnings change in 2007, 2008.”
That makes a lot of people nervous. If things were so bad last year, what about now?
“These numbers are grim — grimmer than we expected,” says Robert Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He notes that joblessness continues to rise.
“This creates a very serious concern, that if we already were at just under 40 million Americans in poverty in 2008 — before the biggest increases in unemployment — poverty is going to go much higher than that in 2009 and 2010,” Greenstein says.
In fact, he predicts that it could go higher than it’s been in 50 years.
Thank you Les Paul (and Les Paul’s mom)
Les Paul passed away last week, and I just wanted to post this little piece of thanks and to share something about his story that I had heard before, but seems extra relevant to my personal exploration into education and how we learn – his childhood music teacher told his mom, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” (NYTimes).
Yep. You read that right.
It sounds like his mom enabled him to keep at it. Read the entire NYTimes story. Not only did she enable him to continue to pursue music, it sounds like she empowered him to look at his entire house as a creative pallet. And he did. Minnesota Public Radio’s blog, “Trial Balloon” went so far as to say that “Les Paul’s Mom Invented Rock & Roll”. It’s hard to argue that.
Beyond empowering him, enabling him to continue when some indicated he had no talent was huge. Perseverance clearly became a core part of his story going forward, dealing with a car crash that would have eliminated his capability to play (he had his arm fused in position to be able to still do so), dealing with painful arthritis in his hands (he adjusted his playing style). He would cope with a myriad of life’s ups and downs and in doing so left so many gifts for the world.
Think about it. And think about how the world was changed because Les Paul believed in trying and trying again.
Psychology Today, “Les Paul, Skills, and Abilities”.
NPR: Guitar Legend And Innovator Les Paul Dies
NYTimes: “Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94”
The Wrap: Obit: Guitar Hero Les Paul.
Gibson: The World Has Lost a Remarkable Innovator and Musician: Les Paul Passes Away at 94
There are two kinds of people in the world – yes there really are
People believe either one of two things about intelligence and talent – either they are fixed traits – “it’s just the way someone is” – “God or genetics blessed or cursed them” – or they are something that is malleable and can be developed over time – with play, practice, and effort.
Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychologist, has been studying these beliefs and their effects for a major part of her career. She’s the author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” and her work has influenced that of David Shenk, Malcolm Gladwell and others.
To determine your mindset, when you look at someone who has accomplished something, do you immediately attribute it entirely to something innate like talent, or do you admire the work and play (CNN Money) they put into it to make it happen?
Where you stand determines much. It effects everything from dealing with grades (NPR) to our children’s drive to try and try again (New York Magazine) to our capability to face our weaknesses head on with honesty (Malcolm Gladwell: “The Talent Myth”) or to deny we have any fiat over them.
Don’t think that those with high self esteem or low self esteem automatically fall into one mindset or the other. It’s not that simple (New York Magazine) or intuitive. Far from it (ScienceBlogs: Jonah Lehrer: Self-Esteem). .
I’m preaching to the choir in regards to many who read this blog, in particular musicians or programmers. We *exist* within a culture of learning and trumpet hard work to each other.
Observers of musicians or programmers however, routinely attribute what we do to innate ‘talent’ or ‘intelligence’ – when we know otherwise.
I’ve long had the following Calvin Coolidge quote on a page here:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
And lately, with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 program’s success, I reflected a bit on it.
It was Apollo 11. Not Apollo 1, that made it to the Moon. Not to dismiss the intelligence and resources of those assembled to make it happen, but Apollo 11 rested on the shoulders of at least 10 iterations of the Apollo program and the prior NASA program as a whole. Along the way there were lessons learned *while doing*. *While practicing*. While experimenting. These lessons did not come whole cloth out of the minds of those involved. In fact there was great tragedy and sacrifice along the way. Lives were lost.
Starting points do count of course. Context does count. The resources behind NASA were those of the country. The politics at the time were favorable. We can go on and on about that. And like persistence and grit, they are factors that get swept under the rug in a culture that likes to emphasize ‘great people’. But that’s a post for another day.
We were left inspired. And sometimes I think we fail to grasp what we should have been inspired of.
After all, for sure we can’t really control the cards we are dealt – but we can how we play them.