Poetry Friday

I was going to write a longer post on Du Fu and the China of the Tang Dynasty, but, alas I could not get the mojo going. I am off to school. We will leave that to another day, and instead post a poem and some great links.

Here is one of his most famous, Ballad of the Ancient Cypress, a poem recited by then poet laureate Robert Pinsky on the occasion of President Clinton's visit to China:

Before Kongming's shrine stands an ancient cypress,
Its branches are like green bronze, its roots just like stone.
The frosted bark, slippery with rain, is forty spans around,
Its blackness blends into the sky two thousand feet above.
Master and servant have each already reached their time's end,
The tree, however, still remains, receiving men's devotion.
Clouds come and bring the air of Wuxia gorge's vastness,
The moon comes out, along with the cold of snowy mountain whiteness.

I think back to the winding road, east of Brocade Pavilion,
Where the military master and his lord of old share a hidden temple.
Towering that trunk, those branches, on the ancient plain,
Hidden paintings, red and black, doors and windows empty.
Spreading wide, coiling down, though it holds the earth,
In the dim and distant heights are many violent winds.
That which gives it its support must be heaven's strength,
The reason for its uprightness, the creator's skill.

If a great hall should teeter, wanting rafters and beams,
Ten thousand oxen would turn their heads towards its mountain's weight.
Its potential unrevealed, the world's already amazed,
Nothing would stop it being felled, but what man could handle it?
Its bitter heart cannot avoid the entry of the ants,
Its fragrant leaves have always given shelter to the phoenix.
Ambitious scholars, reclusive hermits- neither needs to sigh;
Always it's the greatest timber that's hardest to put to use.

Here is a link to the poem in Chinese, in transliteration, and in another English translation.
Here is another poem.
And here is an interesting essay on some nuts and bolts of Chinese poetry.

Enjoy!

Is this really a surprise?

For years we've known that alcohol is neuro-toxic. Now a big, systematic review of the research literature suggests that pot smoking is not nearly as dangerous to brain development as drinking. Whatever one thinks of marijuana, the physical evidence of the dangers of youth drinking is clear: significant structural and cognitive effects are noted in subjects who consume as little as 20 drinks per month, "especially if 4-5 drinks are consumed on a single occasion", for a period of 1 to 2 years.

A kid who has 4-5 drinks on most Saturday nights is damaging his brain in perhaps lasting ways.

Wednesday Morning Contrarian

Here are few quick items that pick up on themes from the past few weeks:

Prison Reform is moving front and center. Senator Jim Webb is moving a comprehensive plan forward:

Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more.

"After two [Joint Economic Committee] hearings and my symposium at George Mason Law Center, people from across the political and philosophical spectrum began to contact my staff," Webb told the Huffington Post. "I heard from Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court, from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, and police on the street. All of them have told me that our system needs to be fixed, and that we need a holistic plan of how to solve it."

Nat Hentoff, whose years of writing in the Village Voice brought Jazz and the First Ammendment firmly into my orbit, is not happy with our new president. He dings Obama pretty good:

The "education president" remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.

Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.

Worth reading, definitely. Especially for Obama-fans. I read this in the Intelligencer yesterday, but the link is to the Cato Institute, the main think-tank for Libertarianism. Vouchers have interesting implications for TAS. I support them, but I don't think they would help us all that much.

Give Big Pharma a little love.

From the American Enterprise Institute, a little balance for this blog, and a little pushback to the Lancet:

...we find a piece summarizing what is now known about the genetic, molecular, and environmental drivers of rheumatoid arthritis and how this knowledge is translating into numerous beneficial therapies and revolutionizing clinical practice. It features a series of innovative drugs, introduced in the past decade, that have changed the face of this disease from one of inescapable disability to one with effective preventive and treatment strategies.

We should remember that modern life is might more dependent on modern drugs than any other single thing.

Connections, neural and interpersonal. Also, memory.

In his new book, "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness," Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous.

Precisely. Later on the in Salon interview the interviewer quotes a conservationist as saying "the California Condor is 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment". This would not be a bad way to describe what we do at TAS. Why is it that most of our students become more happy and more confident? Why is is that they develop deep interests and a wide range of knowledge? Why do most of them stay so connected to us, when more than a few of them had fallen apart everywhere else? Its not the meditation and its not the academics. I believe those things do contribute materially. But the main thing are the relationships. TAS was established on that principle, that the single most important factor in a young person's life is the quality of his or her relationships.

But what is this quality? At school every day, over and over again- if you listen carefully- we shape a conscious, reflective experience of relationships. Perhaps you read the Dan Siegel interview I posted yesterday. If you didn't, and haven't read his other books, here's the nub: the way that people heal psychologically is a process of going from implicit memory to explicit memory.

What this means is that when an individual is traumatized, there is a period in which the experience is thoroughly sensory. Siegel calls it "perceptually rich, reflexively poor". It is a predominantly right brain experience, a "holistic" kind of memory, where the sensory input is suggested again and again. It is not reflected upon. The material, as it were, is waiting to be analyzed. I'm going to extend this idea logically for a moment. I'm sure Siegel has already done this; I just haven't heard him talk about this yet.

In a relatively healthy person the sensory, right brain coding of the experience- for instance, the sudden death of a close friend- slowly gets shifted over to the left brain for analysis. Different features of the event- time, facial expressions, smells, light, memories of the person, and so on- get sorted out and eventually arranged in such a way that becomes part of the person's "stable, adaptive, and flexible" narrative. A healthy person moves on, eventually.

But someone who has been repeatedly traumatized, or traumatized early in life, or who never formed healthy attachments early in life (due to illness, neglect, war), does not have the connectivity that is the basis for this shift in processing from right brain to left, from the implicit to the explicit. The implicit memories are the intrusive and flooding memories of the trauma associated with emotional dysfunction. In therapy, these are slowly made explicit, graspable, subject to analysis, and finally, a person is able to integrated it into her own story.

Interestingly, the single most powerful predictor of a person's later emotional health is their parent's narrative coherence. If you can relate your life as a relatively "stable, adaptive, and flexible" story, this is evidence of much of the important connection work functioning well on the biological level. And this correlates strongly with one's children growing up emotionally in tune with themselves.

Wonderfully, though, the brain is so adaptive, these connections can be restored throughout life. The brain is always ready to change. But it takes work, and certain conditions need to be in place.

This is what we do best at TAS. High school aged kids are neurologically primed for social connections. Most everybody knows that. Now there is a strong research pointing to why. Adolescence is when a person truly becomes conscious and reflective upon themselves and their relationships. A great deal of trouble can be overcome; the brain is always ready for change.

Good Morning, Monday

For today, we have Daniel Siegel. I had the good fortune to meet him at couple of conferences (a Harvard Medical School one on mindfulness approaches, and another at the Garrison Institute on contemplative education). Both times he was remarkable- easy going, ready with data, and a coherent hypothesis for what the mind is and how reductionism just won't cut it. Fascinating.

It is people like Siegel who are guiding psychiatry and neurology into its next phase, and leaving psychopharmaceutical nostrums far behind. I really do believe that in ten years or so the "15 minutes appointment/take a pill" approach to mental distress will be seen for what it is: a simple minded, corrupt, but probably inevitable excess on the way to an integrated conception of the human mind.

That does seem opimistic, doesn't it? Let's say 20 years, then, since some giant institutions will likely resist.
Read the interview- it is an easy read. Here's a teaser:

I think the fact that we don't live in a vacuum really speaks to not just the subjective experiences that relationships are important to us emotionally or subjectively, but that when you look at the structure of the brain, it is hard-wired to be connected to other brains. This finding isn't just some phenomenon of modern life; it's an evolutionary fact about our brains that they are structured to connect to one another.

Human brains have evolved to connect to one another. "Mind" arises from the interaction, over time, of multiple persons. That is why the "source" of the mind will never be found in a particular brain. Or in a single android, for that matter.

Now, it might evolve someday as an extension of us and the Web, but for now my worries about a cybernetic super-robot are put to rest. I always like to start the week on a hopeful note.