The history of the Mind

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Physical attributes

An integral part of the DSM IV TR states that before you give a psychiatric diagnosis, the diagnostician rules out the possibility of alternate causes of psychiatric disorder. For example, a damaged thyroid gland may create mood instability. This doesn't mean the person can be diagnosed with a mood disorder, but rather the diagnosis should be some kind of thyroid related diagnosis.


Socioeconomics and lifestyle can lead to three common activities that lead toward behaviours that can be confused for psychiatric symptoms: Sleep deprivation, mal-nutrition and drugs misuse.


Sufficient sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations, low concentration, confused diet, micro-sleeps and many other symptoms. Sleep deprivation can be caused by many factors, some of which can be psychiatric disorder, some can be drug induced, some can be poor diet and there are a host of living situations, stress, and biological sources. However, if you find that sleep deprivation is a significant part of your current situation, consider what may be contributing to your sleep deprivation, rectify that and see if some of your more concerning symptoms clear up.


Mal-nutrition is far more common in the Western world than many people think. If your diet does not consistently contain a variety for fruit, vegetables, grains and occasional meat, then your diet may be significantly out of balance. Consider this analogy to understand why a varied, nutritious diet is important to mental health. If you consider that your body is a complex biological machine, made of many small machines (cells), which build and maintain your body. If important nutrients are not regularly supplied to your body, then your cells cannot maintain necessarily health. It's like the car repair shop running out of welding rods and not being able to weld new pieces of metal to your rusted out car door. It just doesn't work. Or another thing to consider is how well will your engine run if it runs out of oil and you don't add more? Your mind is a finely tuned engine which needs a variety of vitamins, nutrients and proteins to work properly.


Drugs change the functioning of how your cells work. Sometimes we want this change, such as when we are trying to help our white cells identify foreign inimical biology to kill. When the function is how you think, you want to be very careful about what changes in function you are introducing. Most illegal drugs create unwanted long term changes in cell functioning, leading to mental processes that are not what you had hoped for when you took the drug. Drugs that many don't consider seriously include nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. All three directly change your behaviour. For example, caffeine changes your mood, alters your concentration (increased to begin with, then decreased after a few hours for many hours).


Society does not help us to recognise when we are abusing these drugs. Nicotine is currently in the bad books, so most people believe any nicotine consumption is bad. On average, that is true, however for altering blood pressure and a few other conditions, nicotine is quite useful. I highly recommend that you check with a health professional rather than take my word for it, however. If you are drinking more than 4 cups of coffee a day, then you are probably abusing it. Similarly, if you drink more than 1 standard drink of alcohol a day, then you are probably abusing alcohol as well. I would suggest that the best way you can test yourself for drug addiction is to consider how much your current life would be inconvenienced if you were to stop right now and not use any of the substance for 30 days. If your response includes an expletive or serious consideration of how hard that is going to be, then you are probably addicted and abusing the substance.


Consider that 20% of the population of Australia who smoke cigarettes are people diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. Those 20% of the population consume almost half of the nicotine, which is a disproportionate amount. Again, people with a psychiatric diagnosis consumer approximately five times more caffeine than people without. One of the reasons considered for this is that both caffeine and nicotine have short term benefits to concentration, and nicotine has short term calmative effects, which can often combat the negative effects of medication or stress.


If you find that your life is out of control, by all means get some help as soon as possible, which may include a prescription of medication. Be wary of just ignoring medical advice, however feel free to question your practitioner. If your diagnostician does not consider physical causes to your experience, then perhaps remind them or consider controlling and compensating for these, or other, physical factors.

Therapeutic Focus

Once upon a time, I was speaking to a counselor. He uncovered that I would not take medication for cyclothymia, anxiety or anything else because I classed them as mind altering. As I pointed out to him, this is my issue, and it is a phobia. He seemed to have some significant issues accepting that I had this phobia since it was unusual. I suspect, although I am quite willing to be wrong, that he believed I was just being difficult. After all, the perfect solution for him was probably for me to take medication rather than work through the issues of discomfort that I was experiencing.


I asked him if he had any phobias and he said that his experiences were irrelevant to this conversation and that we should just focus on me. Strangely enough, I really didn't like him. The reason that I asked him was to point out to him, through his example, that phobia doesn't make sense. It just is and is something you either work through or around, but you don't just say "my goodness, this phobia makes no sense so now it is gone". He really didn't understand that.


Two issues were raised for me in this. The first is that the therapist didn't want to work on my discomforts in a way that was compatible to my beliefs. The other was to do with his cold inhuman clinical detachment.


This first issue is fairly common in the therapeutic industry, but it is not universal. Professionals need to remember that people are not universally the same, but are unique and different to each other. If we humans were all the same, then we would not need professionals, we would only need technicians, ticking a box as we progress, working on all of us in the same way as we all respond exactly the same. Clearly we don't, so it is up to the professional to demonstrate the artistry behind their profession and adjust to the situation in front of them. Those who use professionals who will not budge should find those who are willing to compromise their rigidity and work with you instead of on you.


As for the second, it is important to be human when interacting with another person. Why on Earth would I trust a person who is clinically detached and perfect? How can they possibly understand or empathise with my life if they have only ever lived a book perfect life? Of course, very few have lived such a life, and even fewer choose to go into a professional health career. Or simply put, most people who go into health careers have lived interesting lives. By refusing to professionally and responsibly share your own experiences, you deny your humanness and the necessarily real element in a dialogue.


To accomplish this well, one must consider where the focus of the conversation is. It must be more towards the client than the professional, but it must not be divorced from the professional. Real interactions require genuine content. Another important consideration is why are you, the professional, telling the client this part of your life? If it is to frame an idea, to give context to a method of health, or to give an example that promotes empathy, then you are using your own stories well. If you find that you are processing your story for your own gain, or your story is becoming a one up man ship kind of contest, then this is definitely straying into inappropriate use of your experiences. Of course it is important to not out friends, family, phone numbers and addresses in your stories. I will usually tell my stories and refer to people indirectly, since the who is not as important as the what of the story.

A collision of differing worlds

I am going to use computers and the internet as an analogy for people and society. There is a certain irony here since the computing process has been inspired by the human thought process.


Basically, most people think and process information in mostly similar ways. We will refer to them as Microsoft Windows based machines. There are several different version which have somewhat different capabilities, but on the whole, they work mostly the same, have the same basic assumptions of how things are done and if you've used/met one, you've used/met most of them. The hardware statistics vary, but the way they process information doesn't vary that much. That is, some computers are faster, but they get the same result in the same way in the end.


Other computers are different, they are apple machines. Each version was mostly a re-write of the very fundamental ideas, but each handles processes in significantly different ways. As such, even though they have the same appearance, and have the same label, they operate quite differently and get valid results in different ways. Someone who is use to dealing in the Windows world will feel very out of place and not really know what is going on, yet the machine works and operates fine in isolation. Apple machines are a bit odd, in effect, kind of like a different culture. They all pretty much work the same way, but it is radically different to what you are use to.


Some computers are Unix based. These linux machines vary widely from each other, and each is built specifically for the machine it finds itself running on. While each Linux machine uses similar assumptions, each differing stream of Linux goes about using and interpreting those assumptions in wildly differing ways. From a Microsoft Windows perspective, Linux machines are much like people who have some kind of illness. Why on Earth would you do things that way, and why can't you just do it the way everyone else does?


Yet all these machines talk to each other quite nicely on the internet. The web, or you could see it as society, has a set of rules that all machines communicate to each other in. When you create an idea and package it for the internet, all machines can look at that idea and not know that the logic behind how it got there was radically different, or completely the same as, the logic behind the system looking now.


Computers that can not look at and interpret the internet have no reason to ever work in a similar way to others for the specific purpose of fitting in, so become very isolated and quite different in the way they work.


Now that the scene is set, let us see how this analogy works for us people. Most people in the world are Microsoft Windows people. In general you work fine, assume that files are stored and interpreted the same way. On average you have similar enough statistics and software. Some have really fast processes (high intellect), huge hard drives (great memories), awesome graphics cards (visual artistic ability), brilliant sound systems (musical ability) and so on. But they fundamentals behind how you tick is the same operating system - Microsoft Windows. Sometimes the operating system has a problem and we call a specialist to fix it, but mostly it just works. 


Then there are those who are consistent with each other but work on different base assumptions. These are other cultures (and if there were more standardised systems out their than Apple, I would have a better analogy here, but go with it). When we look at the logic of these systems, they are consistent with each other, so you wouldn't define a specific machine as 'wrong', but you may label the whole culture as 'different' and 'needing to improve and mainstream'. Similarly, the operating system just works and those who use it need to make very little adjustment to keep things going. Rarely is a specialist called to fix problems. (And I am aware that OS X.Y is basically Unix these days, but it is a neat standardised package).


The weirdo's are the Unix based machines. Linux is the most common example of Unix, but even Linux has many different streams (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gnome etc). Those who know how to tweak the system often spend large amounts of time doing so to make it work. Those who don't know how to tweak it live in a state of repeated frustration as they try to do the same things they hear everyone else does easily. When people create documents on Linux and try to share it, they find that their file is either not compatible or often misinterpreted by the other peoples systems. The easiest way to communicate is to simplify, which often reduces the sophistication of the system and it's possibilities down to a frustrating common interface. Then the non Linux Unix systems are even odder and harder to function with.


People who are a not so much of a different specific culture, but work quite different internally to the main stream may sympathise quite well with the Unix computers. We do what we do well, we do it differently and get very interesting and equally right results, but often those who are mainstream think that we are very odd and should just do it their way. Often they blindly try to fix us without understanding that what they are doing is wrong for our system and may cause a nasty system crash. Good professionals learn our individual quirks and work with us in our way so that we can function well enough to provide a good internet interface.


The internet solves a whole bunch of communication issues. The information presented via web pages is universal (mostly), so pretty much any computer system has no idea who is presenting the information, but each person looking at this interface, this society, can understand what is meant by the other. The rules of society must be adhered to, but the logic behind how to create the content is up to the individual computer's operating system.


Often people think that the operating system is the problem, yet each computer in isolation works fine the way it is on the problems you present it. Each has a good method of displaying information, processing information and interfacing with the user, so long as the user know how to use it. It is when you try to get these systems to try to talk directly to each other that you have difficulties, or when the user doesn't know how to use the system they are on.


The operating system is not the problem. It is how the operating systems talk to each other that is the issue. If the computer/person, can not communicate effectively to other computers/people, then that computer/person finds themselves in isolation and a great deal of frustration. It can also be the operator/conscious mind trying to assume that the system they are working with is the same as other systems that they can directly see.


For example, try to eject a CD on a windows system. You press the eject button, or in a window/music program, you press the File menu option and then Eject. Simple. Move over to an Apple machine and you either drag the CD icon to the trash can, or you Option Click the CD and choose eject. Both make sense internally, but if you watched one person do it on their machine and tried to emulate it on your different machine, you would be in for a world of woe.


The take home message here is, learn your own system and accept that it works perfectly well for you in the things you want to do. You can learn new things (load new software) that helps you achieve what you want, but the way you learn it (the particular software) needs to be for your system - your way of doing things. Don't try to emulate how you do things based on what you see and assume others are doing. Yet you must interface and communicate effectively with others. So, learn the rules of the internet/society and use them to present your ideas.


After all, the web is only full of results, not the process used to get there. See their results, show yours.

The Thriving Framework

Thriving

How does thriving feel to you? Or, how should it feel?

Defining the Thriving Framework

The Thriving Framework is a heuristics for achieving a State of Thriving. It takes advantage of person centred planning, personal empowerment, the right for people to choose their own destinies and methods of achieving these destinies.  It does not require people to admit to some ill, being faulty, broken or helpless.

Achieving a State of Thriving is the end goal which is defined by individual people as their destination at the end of their progress through the framework.While the emotional experience of most people who have reached this stage is similar (safe, satisfied, confident, content, empowered, capable etc), the specific context will vary widely and the string of goals needed to achieve this state will be individualised such that the journey through the framework will be the individual persons, not anyone else's.

Defining the State of Thriving
Thriving is a state of doing well, being well and succeeding at all of the important things in your life. If life were a game, it may defined as winning. Thriving does not mean that your life is over, only that you now have abundant resources to do what you want, how you want and as you want. People who are thriving are generally happy, are not struggling often, have most of what they want, have all of what they need and are generally fully integrated into society in such a way that they feel both wanted by and useful to society.


The State of Thriving is made up of two components. The Feeling of Thriving and the Context of Thriving.


Separating the Feeling and the Context
The State of Thriving is defined as the context you would fine yourself in to achieve the feeling of doing well and having "made it". Core to thriving is feeling like you are thriving. Their is no point to living prosperously if you are miserable.


The Context of Thriving allows you to define the most likely situation that you are going to find yourself thriving in and the components of this context act as the elements of your goals. The goals create a flexible path for you to journey over from where you are now to where you wish to be such that you are thriving.


An emotion that I may identify as being part of my thriving might be safety. To understand why this is important I need to look at how safety plays a part in my current and past experience. For this example, it is because I have moved houses many times and could not rely on my home being home. To achieve the feeling of safety does not mean bars on the window, or a security force, or that I think I am being followed. To achieve a feeling of safety I want my own home, which can't be taken I can not loose. In this example, the feeling is safety and the context in which I will feel safe is security in housing. If I do not recognise both components to this sub goal, then I may very well attempt to achieve the wrong thing and find myself escorted by safety professionals who do not actually address my feelings of fear at loosing my home.


The Spectrum of Thriving
Thriving is the end point on a spectrum of well being. In this case I define well being as how well my being is. My spectrum looks like this:


Death - Existing -  Surviving - Coping - Achieving - Thriving


The size of the steps between each of these increases exponentially. 


Death is the end of life, it is clinical death.


Existing is moving through life without feeling, without thought or personal power. It is close to death in that you can not or will not act and life just passes you by. Some people may wish to put this in a separate spectrum, but I feel it is the state of being just passed death. It can be placed alongside Surviving. People who  are Existing do not feel a future that is different is possible and often have no motivation to change. People in this stage may feel that they are not worth goodness or positivity. Self esteem is the main challenge, followed by motivation.


Surviving is that state of managing minute by minute, or hour by hour, or day by day the meager resources you have so that you have control over your destiny. This is the point where you can act to prolong the event horizon (the point where you can no longer influence) of your destiny. People who find themselves in this state are generally worried about personal safety, housing, food, paying the next bill and just making it through the day.


Coping is easy to mistake as Surviving, however it generally means you are managing to succeed at Surviving and are further away from slipping down to Existing or Death. Often people who are coping have a plan for a week or two and the resources to influence that. The focus is less on the immediate now and more on goals for the future. A person who is Coping can actually make plans for more than today because, on the one hand, they can see a future is possible, and on the other hand, they have command of enough resources that they can start to make future plans. This shift in controlling resources is the primary distinction between surviving and coping.


This is the beginning point of where discussing the Thriving Framework makes sense. Before this, it is too vague to make sense since it does not answer the immediate needs.


Achieving is the making progress in plans made towards Thriving. Often people feel capable and accomplished during this part of the journey. It is easy to feel that this is the whole point to life and just to stay in this aspect of the Thriving Framework. It is particularly appealing to those who have spent some time Existing, Surviving or Coping. Some people may become disillusioned with Achieving if they spend their whole lives Achieving and never quite accomplishing Thriving. Generally people who are Achieving have very few supports as they are managing this stage on their own.


Thriving is the end goal of the Thriving Framework. It means having achieved the majority of the Context Goals and feeling like you are Thriving. If you have achieved the Context Goals and do not have a feeling of Thriving, then it is important to go back and look at what you want to feel and what you may need to change to achieve this.


If the stage of Thriving can never be achieved, why aim for it? It must be achievable. This does not mean that the early Thriving Goal should be practical or achievable. When first working with your own or someone else's goals, allow for unrealistic goals. This helps you to determine the governing emotions behind the unrealistic goals. From their you can work out how else to achieve these goals that is practical. The person on the journey through the Thriving Framework must choose and own these goals and this journey, otherwise you achieve nothing.

Depression and Catatonia

Sometimes we are reluctant to act because we are no longer certain what is right to do and we fear the consequences of doing wrong, so we focus on the little that must be right. Sometimes we have no energy to act so we focus our energy on what must be done. Sometimes the hurt of peering out from beyond our walls of safety is too much so we only venture out to do the minimum. This is often called depression. Our actions are depressed and we look like we are achieving very little.


Sometimes we can no longer be certain that anything is right, or have so little energy it is a struggle to breath, or the pain is so much that we do not venture beyond our walls. This can be described as psychotic catatonia.


In general there is a turmoil behind your eyes, in your mind, that is taking up a lot of thinking and feeling space. Something has change your tolerances so that wrong is more important, or sensory/emotional input is too high, and it saps our energy. Sometimes we forget to eat, or we eat all of the wrong things and run out of nutrients. 


Memory plays a key part to recovering from this. We can look to our past and compare it to our present to discover what the external source is for our changed tolerance and try to do something about that. We can look at what we are eating and get back to what we remember was good and return to that diet. We can remember that this state of affairs began at some point, that it wasn't always like this, and so it won't always be like this because every beginning has an end. Thus, even when we can't act against whatever it is that has prompted this, we can wait until it stops affecting us.


Catatonia is harder. Generally this is just a waiting game because your inability to act negates your ability to change the situation and yourself. Instead of physical actions, the change must be internal. Find out what about you is negating your ability to physically act. Work on changing this.There will most likely be a great fear regarding the consequences of what this change will do to you and you may fear death of body or persona. I'm sorry, but if you have hit catatonia, you are already dying. It is better to change than to lose everything. Consider how much you will keep by making this change and hold on to that as a good reason to make the change.


Start with small physical actions - move a toe, move a finger, consciously blink or move your eye. The more you do, the easier it gets. When you are ready, speak. Speak about what needs to change in your environment to help you survive. This may be uncovering a secret, or asking for something selfish, or pushing someone or something away. The faster those around you know, the faster your environment can support the change you have made, the faster you can get back to living.


Feel free to contribute further ideas to how to escape from depression and catatonia below. Feel free to add other types of these conditions.

Myth-conceptions of science

So I've been watching this YouTube video of Tim Minchin's science rant titled "Storm", which got me to think about some of my rants about science. I believe there are several common mistakes made by those who reference science and some pretty big misunderstandings of those who criticise science.


Firstly, let's define science.


Science is a philosophy. It has several basic principles.

1. The Principle of Universal Nature (PUN) - that is, what is fact here is also fact over there
2. Induction - that is, what is fact now will be fact later
3. Science can only ever disprove a statement, never prove it - that is, a scientific theory must be fallible. Proving the fallibility disproves the theory, but failing to do so does not prove the theory.
4. The more the theory diverges from mainstream thought, the more impressive the "evidence" for it must be for the scientific evidence to be credible.
5. The greater the sample size, the better the test.
6. Scientific knowledge and theory must adapt to evidence.

There are greater levels of complexity than these, but this gives you a start. To use an example of swans is fairly popular. First we make a statement - all swans are white (in Europe, they pretty much are). The fallible aspect of the statement is that if we can find a swan that is not white, then the statement is false. This is where the statement "it is the exception that proves the rule" came in. If I can not find an exception - something about the statement which if found proves it wrong, then it is not a rule, but an all encompassing infallible statement. An example of such a thing is "God is that which there is nothing greater". There can be no exception to this, for if you do, that thing which you found was greater then becomes "God".

Now PUN (principle of universal nature) states that swans are swans everywhere in the universe, and the statement that all swans are white must be true everywhere. If you find one non-white swan anywhere in the universe, then the statement that all swans are white is false, therefore scientific philosophy has dis-proven the statement. 

This doesn't stop a non-white swan being found on Jupiter in 2000 years. We didn't think to look their, then, so we can not state that the statement is true, we can only state that in the samples we looked at, we did not find a contradiction. Until we find a contradiction, we can assume the statement is true enough, but that does not make it true.

If I only look at 5 swans, then the strength of my evidence is fairly weak. If I look at hundreds, my statement of evidence is stronger. If I look at thousands, my statement is stronger again.

A common mistake is to state that if you find something that looks like a swan in all ways but colour, then that is not a swan because it does not meet the definition. This undoes the fallible point of the statement, so does not agree with the scientific philosophy.

Here are the common mistakes people make when citing science:

1. "I have scientific proof/evidence of the validity of my theory" - science only disproves, it never proves. Thus the statement should be, "My theory has been scientifically tested". Again, this does not mean your theory is right, but is has greater strength because the theory has not been dis-proven yet, but has been tested. An untested theory is not necessarily wrong either, nor is it right. It is just untested.
2. "Science tells us why". It doesn't. It only tests for facts, it doesn't explain why. It can test all of the parts of an explanation of why, but that assumes a causal chain which can not be proven. The why is not part of science, only that a relationship between two events has not been discredited. For example, when I push the button by the side of the door the light turns on. Science doesn't tell me why this happens, it just tells me that every time this has been done in this particular way (wires, electricity and a working switch and light globe - that is the induction, or repeatability of the experiment) it has worked. When it doesn't work, we first look to see if a difference in the parameters of the experiment exist before stating that the correlation between the two events is no longer linked. The explanation for why is something that people come up with to help create fallible prediction to test the statement. A successful test for a statement to prove why does not prove the statement of why to be true, it only indicates that the statement of facts you created from your why has not been dis-proven.
3. The nature of the universe is universal. It isn't. First of all, Cartesian geometry points out that each point in the universe has four components, X, Y Z and time. No two can be the same, so there is no universality about it - however the idea is that the principles of the universe are consistent for all these points. No two points have exactly the same gravity and it is accepted that gravity changes space and time. Therefore no two points have the same properties as the nature of space and time are different for each Cartesian point. However the difference are so subtle that other than at very high speeds or on very small scales, the principle of universal nature is good enough.
4. Induction is real. I can do the same test in the same way for millions of iterations. It doesn't mean that the next time it will be the same. However it is a fair assumption given our experience of the universe to assume that this principle is true enough. After all, our experience of the universe suggests that it is pretty consistent, and if we assume that everything we know now is based on principles that may not be true for the shear sake of randomness rather than our faulty comprehension of the nature of the universe, then why are we even bothering? So while we can't prove induction, it is a fair assumption.
5. There is no magic and science has dis-proven it. Tim Minchin quite rightly points out that Alternative Medicine is defined as methods that have either not been proven by science to work, or methods proven by science not to work. All of the methods 'proven' by science to work are given a new name - medicine. (I'm misquoting, but you get the point). Magic is an ambiguous term and is sometimes defined as "how things work that are not scientific or not provable", which means that when science figures it out it stops being magical. Personally I think this definition is faulty. I would prefer it to mean "Magic is the amazing way that things work, whether we understand it or not". Thus when science investigates and figures out what actually does work and what doesn't, it doesn't stop being amazing just because it become scientific. We understand pretty well the systems in place for human reproduction. This understanding doesn't make child birth any less miraculous and amazing. We made new life from old life. Wow. Scientifically understood (for the most part), still magic.
6. If science has not investigated it then it is crap - Science has not investigated everything and it has not proven everything. If it has, then there would be just a huge tomb of "what is" and no scientists. Scientists keep investigating this thing we call the universe to test for new statements of fact, re-investigate evidence to find new things about the universe and keep testing old ideas to see if our new methods still agree with old statements. There is so much that we just do not know and have not tested. A lack of scientific investigation does not mean it is false. By the same token, it does not mean it is true either. It just means it is untested.
7. A correlation that occurs without a provable scientific test is just coincidence. This is not necessarily true, since we do not know everything. By the same token, it is not necessarily false either. This mostly come back under point 6 - if the correlation (that is, the seeming link) keeps happening and we have not yet worked out if there is or is not a link, then there may or may not be one. A lack of investigation or evidence does not make a fact one way or the other.

Hopefully this clears up my position a little. Of course this is my understanding and I am quite willing to adjust to better logic.

Memories of snow

Memory is an interesting thing. We are so certain that what we remember is true, and yet often it is not. Memory is important because out decision making is based heavily in our memory. Yet memory of the past is twofold - the events we know and the story we tell. Often the events we recall are distorted and the story is faulty.

Enough of my preamble.

My earliest 'memory' is of snow. My father, brother and I were travelling in a car for a long time. The car seemed to go around and around in circles. Eventually we stopped and got out and there was snow on the ground. I remember that it was about 2-7 cm deep, mostly about 5 cm. It was white, cold and crunchy. Every foot fall was a rubbing crunchy feeling. There was not really enough snow to have a proper snow ball fight. I'm not even sure that I knew what that was. I knew that snow was rare, so this was important.

We were not wearing adequate clothing and my brother and I got very cold. There was no snow on the road where the cars drove, only on the edge of the road and between the tacks of cars. We all got back into the car and went home.

At home, I remember standing in the bathroom with my brother, watching the bath fill up with water. It was an old fashioned stand alone tub, which was in the centre of the room, the head up against the wall. My father had filled the bath tub in the adult fashion, that is, the hot water goes on first, the cold water gets added later.

I think we were supposed to tell Dad when the water was high enough to add cold.

I knew the water was very hot. Dangerously hot, in fact. I remember glancing at my brother and clearly thinking to myself "this will get him back for all those things he did to me" and pushing him in.

I don't remember the next bit. What I know now is that he got burns all the way up his arm. They mostly healed but he still has a scar on his thumb.

I have tracked these memories down to 2 years of age (that is, I was 2, not the memories).

From this story the most likely thoughts you are thinking are

1) That Joshua guy is pretty cold hearted to do that to his brother - and he was 2!

2) What on earth did his brother do to him that this seemed like a good idea?

Of course, I allow or you to have tons of other thoughts. Mostly this is my fear of how people will judge me.

Let's look at the events though. I remember driving in circles and it seemed to take a long time. For a long time I thought this memory was me leaving Melbourne and going to Perth, away from my father. It was only in the last few years that I more accurately placed it with going up the mountain to see snow, since travelling in circles to go from Melbourne to Perth is illogical. Is this where the memory really resides?

Another thing is, I have never got verification of the details of what the bathroom looked like. I have asked my brother, but he won't talk about it (this is a quite frequent occurrence and I don't blame him for turning his back on the past and making a new future). Thus I don't actually know if my memories of the room are correct.

If the room isn't correct, is my thought? The event that is known, independently, is that my brother got burnt in a bathtub, went to hospital and was very sore. My father was in charge since we were staying with him for a bit. No one ever accused me of pushing him. It was always labelled "an accident". So, did I actually push him, or am I making that bit up to complete the story? If I am completing the story, did I really think "this will get him back"?

Another aspect is the memory itself. Do I remember the memory of when I was two, or do I remember the image that I recalled, and distorted, a few years ago, which was a recollection of an image, distorted more, from a few years before, and so on all the way back to my childhood? I am fairly confident that I no longer look at the memory raw - I only look at my adults understanding and perception of that memory.

How does this flavour my life? I have defined my earliest memory as vengeance on my brother. I could see this as I am a victim, I could see this as I am a warrior, or I could see myself as a martyr, trying to take the blame for an act that I was innocent of.

Very few of the facts are known and much of the story is uncertain. Perhaps I should make a new story to explain the facts.

When I was two, my father took my brother and I to see the snow. I remember that snow was rare in Australia. It was a cold but fun time. When we got back home, my father, who cared for us, was filling up the bath with hot water so we could get warm. Unfortunately my brother got burned by the hot water, but no real damage was done and he is fine now.

All the verifiable facts are present, and I like this story.

Doing to find the being

Often when we don't know who we are, we flail around trying to do lots of things, hoping that one of them will feel right and define us. The problem is that most of the things we do feel wrong, so we mistakenly think that we are wrong. We forget that the flailing around is an experiment to help us discover what we are, and thus what we aren't.The ones that feel wrong should be celebrated as yet another step towards discovering who we are.


Another tactic is to step back and ponder who we would like to be. Sometimes this can help us work out who we are, since who we are isn't going to want to be something completely abstract from who we are. I appreciate that this idea seems a bit odd, but lets go with it a bit further. I am not suggesting that you carry out your hypothetical, but rather that you use the hypothetical to explore yourself. Someone who wants to be a mass murderer, as an extreme, can learn something about themselves from this desire. Why do you wish to create carnage and mayhem? Do you wish to murder specific people or random people? Why? What do these urges tell you about yourself? Often we seek to do violence because we feel helpless about something, and the violence is like a pressure relief valve to save ourselves or put of inevitable doom. Or there may be hatred involved, in which case who do we really hate and what can we do about it? If these people were 'gone', how would this change your world? What does this change tell you about you and where you are now?


Another thing we may wish to be is a benefactor of mankind. Why do we wish to be a benefactor? What does this change? What form of benefactor do you wish to be and how would you feel if you were to achieve this? Does this feeling tell you anything about how you are feeling or wanting to feel now? Are there other ways to feel this?


Perhaps a far less extreme becoming would also help. Perhaps you will identify that you would like to get a nice job. What is it about the job that you want? What does the job provide for you that you don't currently have? How are you defining nice? What would stop the job from being nice? What change does having a job provide you compared to now? Things that you may get from having a nice job is: money, social contact, structure, an excuse to get away from home, a feeling of purpose, ontological security, completion of a definition of self as a worker, your parents of your back and so on. If we don't look at why we want the job, how do we know what we need the job to do to feel success? Of, for example, we get a job that doesn't pay enough and is in a field we don't like that our parents don't support, we may feel that we have failed in getting a nice job, which we may then transfer as a feeling of us being the failure.


Three major things to take away from this:
1) Doing things to discover who we are often lead to us discovering who we are not, and that is success
2) Pausing to consider what we want can help uncover who we are
3) Once we know what we want and why, we can begin to choose to do things because of who we are

Seeing is believing - or is it?

We all perceive things that others don't, simply because much of what we perceive of the worlds is within our minds, not in the world itself. It matters not what we each perceive, but how what we perceive forms our assumptions about the world, which inform our actions. Consider that 3 in 100 people regularly perceive hearing voices and seeing being that 97 in 100 people do not regularly see. 1 in 3 of these people are not at all bothered by the additional perception, 1 in 3spend a lot of time in and out of health institutions and the other 1 in three suffers in silence. The point here is that 2 in 3 people who hear voices and see beings do not use the health services to continue living their lives. If seeing and hearing these beings was the problem, then 3 out of 3 would be using health services. It is those who have not found ways of working their perceptions for their own gain that have the troubles.


Many of our reactions to the world are based on how we perceive the world. Perception is the interpretation of the sensory information that we are given to create a landscape of what the world around us is. Part of that perception is pattern recognition which helps us to predict what is coming next. We have many senses, the most common of these is sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell (there are more, such as motion, temperature and so on - about 15 all up).


Despite your expectations, perceiving the world accurately, on average, is not vital to your survival. You are making many assumptions all of the time about what you think is there and these assumptions are often wrong. 


I will focus mainly on sight for this article, since it is commonly regarded that sight is the dominant sensory input and the most immutable. Sure we see the world for what it is? Consider the phrase "seeing is believing", which is made up of the idea that to see something is to know it is real.


Take a gander at the video clip here.



In this video, you see what looks like an ordinary room. The girls are the same height, but when one goes to the right she seems to grow and as she goes left she shrinks. I appreciate that this room is artificially created to fool you, however it illustrates a point, which is that what you perceive is not necessarily what you perceive. After all, the girl does not actually change size at all, the room shrinks. Your memory of how rooms work tells you that rooms are square, thus objects in what looks like a square room must be the same size, therefore the girl must be growing and shrinking. In essence your expectations have fooled your mind.

In this perceptual illusion the dancer seems to be spinning. When you watch it, you will see that the dancer appears to spin in a particular direction. If you watch carefully, you can change the direction that the dancer spins. This is done via changing your expectations (I found staring at the shadow the dancer casts as a good way to switch directions). You haven't changed the video image, but you have changed your interpretation of the images.

Of course vision is not the only perceptual sense that can be fooled. listen to this video clip. Play it twice to hear what I refer to. It is the same video the second time around, but you will perceive it to be a higher pitch rather than starting from where you first thought it should start. All the senses can be fooled by stimuli, or rather our perception of all of our senses can be fooled. Try sitting in the bus and sitting behind the driver. Look at the road passing in the reflection of the glass blocking you from the driver (if your bus is designed that way). After a while you will probably begin to perceive motion in reverse.

Moving back to sight, consider colour. Most of us have colour vision, yet half of the human species is partially colour blind. I can't currently find a reference for this (sigh), but it is mostly manifest in the differentiation of blue and green. When does a colour stop being blue and start being green? Well, ask a sampling of men and women whether this colour is blue or green:

Yes, you have to pick one. Most women will call this colour green, while most men will call this blue (computer screens may cast this colour improperly and muck up this experiment, but drag someone to the fabric or paint store and see where they have a range of colour and argue about the different representations of teal and aqua). Part of this is a cultural definition but most of it is genetic. The part of the genes that corrects for colour blindness is on the second x chromosome that men don't have. While this can influence fashion sense, it generally does not significantly affect survival. The point of this bit of the article is to point out that what you are expecting to see i the world is not actually what you probably are seeing in the world, but id isn't harming you.

Much of what we perceive of the world is not really the world at all, it is merely expectations, what we expect to see, and thus our mind fills in the blanks. Consider the most efficient use of brain space - interpreting masses of information given to our brain from our eyes, or to assume much of the information from our memories of what is probably there. Try this exercise - pick an object and stare at it. Try really hard not to move your eyes or blink. Now notice that your peripheral vision shrinks, except for any moving object - don't look away! If you manage to stay still enough, you may notice that your eyes are wiggling... see if you can still this too. If you succeed, and few do, you will notice that your vision fades. This is because we only see the bits that change. To see stationary objects, our eyes wiggle back and forth, helping as define different objects. Yet if we fix our attention on one thing much of the rest of our visual perception becomes simplified with only gross changes being picked up as relevant.


Hopefully we have established that much of what you perceive is not actually what you sense, it is informed by what you sense, but filled in with memory and expectation. Here is a good trick to do with babies. Put a ball on the table, place a cup on the ball. Lift the cup and the child sees the ball again. Now put the cup on the ball, move it to the side of the table and let the ball drop into your hand without shifting the height of the cup. Now lift the cup and see the look of surprise in the babies face. This illusion is called object permanence. We expect things to be where they were, whether we see them or not, and are surprised when they aren't. This is the primary tool of the stage magician - distract you and mess with your object permanence.


We humans tend to apply the laws of motions physics to people in an attempt at something close to object permanence. That is, we assume that people continue doing whatever it is we have seen them do before, even when we don't see them directly or at all. This can make it hard for us to see when people are not doing as they have always done as we shortcut seeing what people are actually doing and assume that they are continuing as they always have. This can be quite devastating to those of us who wish to change, by the same token, we can expect that people will and have changed, when they haven't, creating the reverse of the perceptual illusion with equally potentially devastating results. While we can save ourselves troubles by seeing what is really there, often this is not actually easy or possible, so we need to keep an open mind about what may truly be. This takes more effort and more resources, and in times of stress we don't always have these.