When Less is More

Mies van der RoheTwo years ago, I began writing a post titled “When Less is More,” but never finished it.  I suppose I couldn’t figure out a way to get my point across in a short enough space for a blog post, failing miserably at making less more.

But last week I came across a post written by Greg McKeown of Stanford Business School.  Turns out he recently published a book called “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” which I will undoubtedly add to the queue of 35 books by the side of my bed.  In the meantime, in the spirit of “less is more,” here is a link to a short video summarizing his ideas:

http://youtu.be/T9x6D09AKBU

The point I was trying to make in my unpublished blog post two years back was that doing a little to help others often makes the biggest difference.  I told the story about a family therapist who recounted that in the early years of family therapy big changes in family structure were often wished for and expected, but it rarely turned out that way.   The irony was this: family members who experienced very small changes in their family’s functioning often perceived those changes as having huge consequences.  Less is more.

Behavior analysts working with children with autism or with any complex, daunting set of problems, systematically break complex challenges into their smallest teachable components.  Good flight instructors do the same. Perhaps one element of being a good instructor in any field is learning how not to let knowledge of complex phenomena get in the way of teaching the most fundamental, simplest elements.

Whether it is the journey of a thousand miles that begins with the single step, or losing 40 pounds a few ounces a day, or building a small house in which to fulfill big dreams, as Mies van der Rohe proclaimed many years ago, less is more.

 

 

Pilot in Command, or Directing the Dream

demonsI had a recurrent dream when I was a child that I was being chased by faceless, flying demons wearing black capes.  I frantically flew away (without benefit of airplane or wings, Superman-style) trying to escape them, and managed to wake up just before they destroyed me.  I woke up sweating in fear nearly every night of my childhood.

A psychoanalytic dream interpretation book I bought at a supermarket checkout stand diagnosed the dreams as symbolic of a sense of impotence, a helplessness and hopelessness to have an impact on the frightening world around me. And later, when I heard a late night talk show psychologist say that one could control one’s dreams just like a director directs movies, at about age 18, I turned around and faced the demons, daring them to expose their faces, and they all at once disappeared.  I never had that nightmare again.

We each fight our own unique demons throughout our lives, and learning to fly was for me a symbolic way to overcome a life rooted in fear.  I don’t know how many other pilots share that motivation, but I do know that nearly every pilot with whom I have ever spoken shares the quickening of the heartbeat and chill down the spine that comes the moment one loses the chains of gravity and launches into sky, leaving the earth and its accompanying worries below and behind.

Flying, like directing my teenage dreams of being chased, is one way some of us attempt to manage fear.   The term that every pilot learns immediately when taking flying lessons is that he or she is the “pilot in command,” a way of drilling deeply into one’s psyche that the ultimate responsibility for making the decisions and taking the actions that will keep you and your passengers alive is yours, and it is a responsibility that doesn’t cease until all occupants are safely off the airplane.

Being pilot in command means that you are in ultimate command even when a controller tells you what to do, that no matter what anomaly or distraction threatens you, you are where the buck always stops.   It means, ultimately, that no matter how frightening the demons are that are chasing you, you must turn toward them and face them.   And that is the only thing that will make them go away.

Dreaming appears to be a fairly ubiquitous phenomenon, shared by most animal species on earth.  (New book title: Do Plants Dream?)  Whether dreams are simply the “residues of the day,” whether dreaming is a form of catharsis or working through of conflicts, most dreams probably don’t need a conscious director.   To beg the aviation metaphors a bit, they probably do just fine on auto-pilot.   But when the content of our dreams become disturbing to us, whether those dreams occur during sleep or wakefulness, it is time to find the pilot in command within us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sleeping in Security, Waking in Happiness

images-2 With apologies to Coleridge, behavior analysts are capable of “all things great and small.”  You might recall the story of Skinner covertly conditioning a hand waving response in a Freudian nonbeliever at a meeting in the psychology department at Harvard.  In case you haven’t heard it, Skinner was attending a faculty meeting when a guest psychoanalyst was criticizing behaviorism. Skinner wrote a note to the colleague sitting next to him, saying something like, “watch while I condition a hand-waving response.”  Each time the analyst gesticulated with his hand, Skinner smiled at him.  Sure enough, after a while, the analyst was waving his hands wildly.

If behavior analysts have the skills to covertly condition a hand waving response, teach a child with autism to talk, teach me how to tie my shoes (I need a refresher on this one), and keep people awake at nuclear power plants, then certainly we have the skillset to contribute to making the world a kinder, more peaceful place.

Behavior analysts, and psychologists in general, have often tried to extend their reach and apply their knowledge not only to the lives of one human at a time but to humanity as a whole.

Montrose Wolf, one of the pioneers and creators of the term “applied behavior analysis,” moved to Kansas primarily because it was there that he was given the opportunity to create solutions for problems of segregation and poverty.  Skinner, whose shoulders Wolf and other behavior analysts stood on, wrote “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (and perhaps “Walden Two”) in order to address societal ills, and psychologists from nearly all disciplines have typically expanded their focus from the individual to society at large, often toward the waning years of their careers.

Not long ago, a conference entitled “Behavior Change for a Sustainable World” took place in Ohio; behavior analysts from around the world met to discuss how they could use their skills and knowledge to combat climate change and other threats to a sustainable world.

Most behavior analysts I know are overwhelmed with the challenges of helping even just a handful of children, as the rest of us are often bogged down daily with the tasks of caring for our families and ourselves.   So it is only for the purpose of inspiration that I present to you these thoughts:

22 years ago, while under house arrest, Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize she could not claim until just a year and a half ago.  When she finally appeared before the peace prize committee, she gave one of her typically extraordinary speeches.  (You can read it in its entirety here.)

When referring to the international plight of refugees, Suu Kyi said the following:

“Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless, a world in which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace.  Every thought, every word, and every action that adds to the positive and the wholesome is a contribution to peace… Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.  Let us join our hands to try to create a peaceful world where we can sleep in security and wake in happiness.

Aung San Suu Kyi

What makes good teachers great?

OldTeacherIntro-2

PJ O’Rourke once wrote that corporal punishment should be reintroduced into schools, but used on teachers. I might agree, but for the fact that I have had some incredibly good teachers over the years.

I once heard that you can teach a good teacher to be a better teacher, but you can’t teach a bad teacher to be a good teacher. From supervising and consulting with special education teachers to working alongside them, to having been a student of teachers and a teacher of students myself, I have come to believe that what makes teachers good is that they start off with simply being a good human being. That is to say, they are kind, receptive, curious, not terribly judgmental or jaded, and enthusiastic. I don’t believe that good teachers need to be very smart, or even that emotionally stable, although that latter quality certainly helps. I also don’t believe that being a good human being necessarily makes one a good teacher– only that it is the source from which all else springs.

Good teachers, I believe, have in common the ability to listen, and active listening, as it is so often called among psychologists, is quite a skill. It is the sine qua non of understanding, and understanding is the foundation of intimacy. Intimacy may seem an odd word when it comes to teaching, because it implies a two-way street, and that aspect of learning isn’t always clear. In an age in which much learning takes place while passively watching online videos, it is hard to say that there is much intimacy going on. But there is even a sort of intimacy that can be created digitally, or as we used to say, over the airwaves.

Vin Scully has said that when he broadcasts he imagines that he is talking to one person. Listening to Vin Scully broadcast Dodgers games feels as though you are engaging a warm, charming friend. The best online video experiences, in which my attention is most riveted, occurs when I feel as though the presenter somehow knows me, is somehow interested in me. That is perhaps one reason why the phrase “death by PowerPoint” has become so popular among presenters. Bullet points on a screen may as well be bullets pointed at the audience.

But when I look back at the teachers from whom I learned the most, one of them in particular stood in front of his statistics students and practically read from his lecture notes. The fact that Charlie Moore was a sweet, kind and unpretentious man peeked through his dry monotone and that was what made you want to listen and learn what he had to say. And after class, any student could stop him in the hallway and he would give you his full attention, making you feel as if he truly cared about what you had to say. That kind of kindness, that kind of intimacy, is what makes a good teacher great.

 

 

 

 

Richard Margoluis and Doing Good Things

There is a story that the American academic Maurice Friedman tells about Martin Buber, the great Austrian existential psychologist/philosopher.  Friedman was officiating a debate between Buber and the iconic humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, when someone in the audience asked them both whether people were “basically good or evil.”  Predictably, Rogers responded that he thought that people were basically good, but Buber, also predictably, said that people were “basically good and evil, or not good and evil.”

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It is always disturbing when we discover that our heroes, people who we think of as essentially good, do evil things.   Equally disturbing, or perhaps more puzzling, is to discover how people we categorize as evil do good things.   The classic example is the Nazi commanders who spent daytime hours sending people into gas chambers then went home, greeted their wives lovingly and read bedtime stories to their adoring and adored children.   We want to simplify evil, make it less banal, and attribute it to someone else.

The literature on just what makes people choose to do good deeds is vast, and given the breadth of the topic it is of course extremely complex, especially because altruism (as it is often pointed out in the literature) runs counter to evolution.  One small piece of the puzzle probably has to do with the people with whom we associate.   One of the reasons I enjoyed my years as a psychologist and behavior analyst had to do with the fact that I spent most of my time being around people whose lives were devoted to helping others.   Being around people who struggle to do good serves as ballast in a world in which there is so much pain.

One of those people is Richard Margoluis, who I met last year along with his wife and beautiful children while stopped at a hardware store on the way to the village of Paxixil in Guatemala.   Richard was the founder of PAVA, an acronym for Programa de Ayuda a los Vecinos del Altiplano, which began over 25 years ago as a relief mission for those impacted by the horrible civil war here.   Richard, who is originally from Miami, now lives with his family in Costa Rica, where he runs another non-profit and his wife, who has a doctorate in biology, runs a school she started in a remote area.

There is a quality that I sensed in Richard that I believe is shared with others who devote most of their lives to helping others.   It is a fundamental humility, born I suspect of the knowledge of one’s self, how the enemy (to quote the great American philosopher Charles Schulz) is within ourselves.

I do not believe that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the saying goes.   I do believe that those in positions of power by definition are capable of doing great good and great harm, and that both good and evil intention reside closely in all of us.     Knowing ourselves may not prevent us from making the destructive choice, but making the dialogue between the good and evil intentions within us as conscious as possible is certainly one important link in the chain that leads us to taking the road to righteousness.   The alternative is to believe that somehow we are only capable of good or evil, and that kind of blindness increases the likelihood of finding ourselves on a regrettable path.

 

 

Terry Barrett, The Mind-Body Problem, Genetics and Pipes in Dark Places

In my first semester in graduate school, I had an advanced general  psychology course taught by a young professor named Terry Barrett. Dr. Barrett  was an experimental psychologist and ex-wrestler, and the first assignment he gave us was to write a 3-page paper on the “mind-body problem.”

When my paper came back graded, I received my first and only “F” in  graduate school. The big “F” on the first page was followed by the two words reserved for students who professors either had a bone to pick or wanted to sleep with: “See me.” Knowing it wasn’t going to be the latter, I was worried (I would have worried either way, come to think of it), but I promptly went to his office, whereupon I not only got a loud lecture, but at one point Dr. Barrett grabbed the front of my shirt, lifted me off the ground with one hand, shoved me up against the  bookcase, and told me never, ever to do what I had done in that paper. The crime I had committed, he told me, was to think for myself. He wasn’t interested at all in what I had to say, but only whether or not I was capable of regurgitating (his word)  what he told us in lecture. I smoked a pipe in those days (almost everyone was  smoking something), and he added, with my slight 110 pound frame suspended from his fist: “Take your pipe and shove it up your  ass.”

I was not particularly upset by all of this. Growing up in my family, I was  accustomed to dramatic displays. Besides, I had gone through an undergraduate  program with so much thinking for myself that I don’t think I came away having  learned much. While I didn’t welcome regurgitation, I did like the idea of actually  learning something, which is what Barrett was trying to get across. So, 35 years later, thanks Terry, because the end result was that in two years at Murray State I learned more than in the following three years in my doctoral program and in my previous four years of undergraduate training.

What made me think of this story was the post I wrote in my last blog last about my view that genetic research is where we are most likely going to find a cure for autism.  Critics of that view point out that although billions have been spent so far on genetic research, most studies fail to produce anything significant, and that only genes with very minor effects have been uncovered. They see genetic research as “grasping at straws” and believe that environmental influences such as lifestyle and chemical exposures provide “plentiful evidence” for the causation of disease.

The debate between genetics and environment is an old one, and most  believe that diseases are typically caused by a combination of the two. The problem is one of both causality and duality. Are the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave reality? The fact is that the shadows would not exist without the sun and the figures blocking the sun, so as many philosophers have pointed out, they cannot be meaningfully separated. If you accept that somehow environment and heredity are indeed separate, then it is not necessarily the case that one thing causes the other, but instead causality may well be a two-way street. It is the interplay between the two that creates the end result.

From this perspective, all the research we do, whether on genetic contributions or environmental ones, is important, in that when put together we will most likely find the ways that all of these factors interact leading us down the road to diseases such as autism.

While I no longer smoke a pipe, I did save my first graduate school paper.  I even re-used it a few years later in my doctoral program, where perhaps ill-advisedly one was permitted to think, and expanded it to about 20 pages. I got an  A+ on that one.