So many things. But to manage my ADHD: Raworth's new Planetary Boundaries model, Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals, and Telomeres.
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New Planetary Boundaries Graphic – Doughnut Economics
I don’t fully understand this yet but it looks really promising for answering my questions about Socio-Ecological Systems Theory, Planetary Boundaries, and Tragedy of the Commons issues. I just read Monbiot’s review of Raworth’s new book and immediately bought it on Amazon: Doughnut Economics. Also, look up Raworth: (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/)

Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals

I visited Clemson’s Botanical Garden Earth Day event yesterday and found the Bob Campbell Geology Museum. In that museum is a bunch of fun stuff but two things in particular caught my eye: a cave bear skull and glowing rocks. First, the cave bear. I am familiar with myths and stories of cave bears (Jean Auel!) and have been completely infatuated with their distant cousins – the North American Short-Faced Bears – but have never seen a cave bear skull. It’s huge. Like, huge huge. Easily twice as big as a modern grizzly but it looks like it was forged from steel and granite. Ursus spelaeus was a monster that died out about 24k years ago (the Short-Faced Bear, 10k years ago) and the depictions and renderings of it are the thing of nightmares.
 
Second, did you know that rocks can glow? I didn’t. I’ve been to Natural History Museums in every city I’ve travelled to on the globe and have never seen anything like this craziness. A smallish completely dark room with a bunch of rocks and minerals behind glass, lit up by a UV light. And then the rocks started glowing all kinds of crazy colors. It’s an acid trip. As a naturalist, I’ve had problems connecting with constellations, lakes, and geology. There’s something about them that doesn’t click and I don’t know why. But I took another step along the path to geology seeing this exhibit yesterday. According to geology.com/articles/fluorescent-minerals/: “Some minerals have an interesting physical property known as "fluorescence." These minerals have the ability to temporarily absorb a small amount of light and an instant later release a small amount of light of a different wavelength. This change in wavelength causes a temporary color change of the mineral in the eye of a human observer. The color change of fluorescent minerals is most spectacular when they are illuminated in darkness by ultraviolet light (which is not visible to humans) and they release visible light.”

Telomeres
I’m reading this self-helpy/sciency book about how to stay healthy and happy: The Telomere Effect.  Like several other books I’ve read it has its base in something scientific (like self-help books using neurochemicals or quantum physics to explain why and how you can be better…) explaining how to live a more fulfilling life. The science on this one is based on telomeres. I didn’t know what they were before this but it sounded interesting - so why not pick up the book? Getting into it and it reads like a bad self-help book but differently somehow – like they’re trying to be a bad self-help book. You can tell they’re trying to make things anecdotal and related to “real-life” stories. It occurred to me that this is either the lamest book ever or there is something really cool here and they are trying to make it make sense to the general public. I looked into the authors and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel for her discovery of telomeres and was chastised by the Bush administration for her advocacy of stem cells in modern medicine. These people are geniuses and have found something super important for humanity and are trying to get discovery out of the weird realm of scientific articles and into the hands of everyday folk. I’m halfway through the book but quick synopsis so far:

• To the best of my understanding, telomeres are the shoestring ends hanging off of DNA that can be short or long
• The story of how they work and what they’re for is fascinating – look it up
• Long telomeres are good, short telomeres speed up cell death
• Don’t buy any telomere enhancing products – at best they’re a waste of money, at worse they work too well and can cause cancers
• There are all kinds of things correlated with longer telomeres: decreased stress, decreased chronic depression, processed food, alcohol, tobacco, sleep, etc
• Telomere length: part of it is causal (due to behaviors), part of it is environmental, part of it is genetic
• “Genetics loads the gun, environment fires it”
• Telomeres can be changed through behavior

Instead of the normal 3 Things I learned, I've come across a whole bunch of lists this week for some reason. These lists are random and some come from researching things for school and others come from odd FB posts. They are:

• Eric Fromm's 6 rules of Listening
• Christopher Hitchens 10 Commandments
• Why We Tell Stories
• Why Denmark is the Happiest Country
• 4 Ways to Cheer up
• 5 Ways to Increase Testosterone
• Wynton Marsalis’s 12 Lessons on how to practice
• 6 Reasons we Self-Sabotage
  

Eric Fromm’s 6 rules of Listening:
(https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/05/erich-fromm-the-art-of-listening/)
 

1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4. He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
6. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

 
Christopher Hitchens 10 Commandments (http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/christopher-hitchens-revises-the-10-commandments-for-the-21st-century.html)
I: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
II: Do not ever use people as private property.
III: Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
IV: Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
V: Do not condemn people for their inborn nature.
VI: Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
VII: Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
VIII: Turn off that fucking cell phone.
IX: Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
X: Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.
 
Why we tell stories:
(http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/how-stories-configure-human-nature?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1489768155)
 
1. It is in our nature to need stories. We arrive “biologically prepared” for them. They were evolutionarily crucial. We feel and think in story-logic (story-causality configures our reaction-biology).
2. Like our language instinct, a story drive—inborn hunger to hear and make stories—emerges untutored (=“biologically prepared”).
3. “Every culture bathes its children in stories" (to explain how the world works, to educate their emotions).
4. Story patterns are like another layer of grammar—language patterning the character types, plots, and norms important in our culture.
5. Stories free us from the limits of direct experience, delivering feelings we don’t have to “pay for” (~like simulated people-physics experiments).
6. “Stories the world over are almost always about people... with problems.” Story = character(s) + predicament(s) + struggles(s).
7. Story patterns transmit, often tacitly, social rules and norms (e.g., what constitutes violation, or what reactions are expected/approved).
8. The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” We can use logic inside stories better—consider Wason’s Test, ~10% solve it as a logic puzzle, but 70-90% do when it’s presented as a story, involving social-rule cheating.
9. Social-rule monitoring was evolutionarily crucial (“other people are the most important part of our environment”).
10. Social acceptance shaped ancestral survival. Violating social rules could mean exile or exclusion from group benefits (protection, big-game, etc).
11. Darwin saw how biologically active the stories in our social environments are—“Many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by [consuming] unclean food.” But if eaten unknowingly, it wouldn’t cause that reaction.
12. The story of the food, not the food itself, causes “soul shaking.” Story-causality triggers our emotional biology (our physiology can interact with stories like they’re real threats).
13. Stories configure the emotional/physiological triggers and reactions expected in our culture (patterns that are like an “emotional grammar”).
14. Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that ignores how important stories are in shaping what and how we think and feel is false.
15. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social (and self-deficient). Hence to care deeply about character and plot.  
 
How Denmark is the Happiest country:
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/7-reasons-denmark-is-the-happiest-country-in-the-world-a7331146.html)
1. You’re not to think you are anything special.
2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
4. You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.
6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.
8. You’re not to laugh at us.
9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
 
4 Ways to Cheer up:
(http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/4-things-you-can-do-to-cheer-up-according-to-neuroscience )

1. Get your brain’s attention – attention (mindfulness) dissipates the anxiety
2. Use a few words to describe the specific emotions you’re feeling
3. Make a decision – a good decision but it doesn’t matter if it is perfect – just make the decision
4. Touch from someone

5 Ways to Increase Testosterone
(https://www.onnit.com/academy/testosterone-levels-need-know/)
1. Sleep and stress
2. Too much endogenous or exogenous estrogen
3. Take care of blood sugar, insulin, and body fat
4. Inflammatory or immune challenges
5. Nutrient deficiency or inadequacy
 
Wynton Marsalis’s 12 Lessons on how to practice:
(http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/wynton-marsalis-gives-12-tips-on-how-to-practice-for-musicians-athletes-or-anyone-who-wants-to-learn-something-new.html)

1. Seek out instruction: A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.
2. Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later.
3. Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress…. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesnʼt have to be painful to achieve results.
4. Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working…. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.
5. Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; donʼt rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.
6. Practice hard things longer: Donʼt be afraid of confronting your inadequacies; spend more time practicing what you canʼt do…. Successful practice means coming face to face with your shortcomings. Donʼt be discouraged; youʼll get it eventually.
7. Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude…. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.
8. Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but donʼt be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, itʼs not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going….
9. Donʼt show off: Itʼs hard to resist showing off when you can do something well…. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, thatʼs all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, youʼre just cheating yourself and your audience.
10. Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so donʼt become a robot…. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment.
11. Be optimistic: Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.
12. Look for connections: If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do…. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities

 
6 Reasons we Self-Sabotage
(http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health-fitness/mental-health/6-reasons-why-we-self-sabotage?page=1&utm_source=sciam&utm_campaign=sciam)
 
Reason #1: Worth. You feel like you don’t deserve to be successful. Ironically, many strivers work hard and aim high because they’re trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy. But when their hard work and high standards lead to good things—material reward, status, or power—they shoot themselves in the foot. Why?
 
A little concept called cognitive dissonance gives us the answer. Basically, people like to be consistent. Usually, our actions line up with our beliefs and values. But when they don’t, we get uncomfortable and try to line them up again. That’s why if we start to stack up some achievements, but think we’re worthless, incapable, or fill-in-the-blank deficient, we pull the plug to get rid of the dissonance. It feels bad to fail, but not as bad as it does to succeed.
 
Reason #2: Control. It feels better to control your own failure than to let it blindside you. When the possibility of failure is too hot to handle, you take matters into your own hands. Self-sabotage isn’t pretty, but it’s a dignified alternative to spinning out of control. At least when you’re at the helm, going down in flames feels more like a well-controlled burn.
 
Reason #3: Perceived fraudulence. As the stakes get higher and higher—you ascend to ever more rarified levels of education, take on more responsibility at work, or do something that raises your public profile—you feel you only have farther to fall. You think if you call attention to yourself by being successful, it’ll be more likely that you’re called out as a fraud. This is otherwise known as good old impostor syndrome.
 
How does this manifest? You may do as little as possible and hope no one notices. Or you may push hard and go big, but worry you’ll be revealed at any moment. Either way, feeling like a fake is a one-way ticket to procrastination and getting distracted—if you’re faced with a task that makes you feel like a big fat fraud, it’s a lot more appealing to check Twitter, research zucchini spiralizers online, or realize you’ve never made banana bread from scratch and, by gosh, seize the day and do that right now.
 
Reason #4: Familiarity. Again, people like to be consistent. Time and time again, we even choose consistency over happiness. If you’re used to being neglected, abused, ignored, or exploited, it’s oddly comforting to keep putting yourself in that position. You’ve probably been there your whole life, and while you’re not happy, the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don’t.
 
Reason #5: For a handy scapegoat. If things don’t work out (or when they don’t work out, because that’s the only option, right?) we can blame the sabotage instead of ourselves. Of course he left me—we argued all the time. Of course I failed the class—I didn’t start my term paper until the night before. These reasons, while true, are more superficial, and therefore easier to swallow than the deeper reasons we only believe to be true: Of course he left me—the real me is unlovable. Of course I failed the class—I’m incapable of understanding this stuff.
 
Reason #6: Sheer boredom. Once in awhile, we self-sabotage simply to push buttons. We pick a fight, incite drama, get a rush. Of course, this isn’t random--we do all things for a reason. Here, sabotage re-creates a familiar feeling of instability and chaos, plus, if we’re stuck at the bottom, we might as well wield some power while we’re there, right?

This week, I learned about Place Bonding, Positive Disintegration, and some Ashi Waza (and they hurt).

Place Bonding
We read an article this week about Place Bonding by Hammitt, Backlund, and Bixler. Everything below is from their article but I didn’t cite it appropriately. The idea they write about is rather intuitive and the reason they wrote it was actually an empirical study seeing whether you could identify place bonding statistically through fishermen at a specific river (you can and they did). But the idea is more interesting to me. Imagine a special place to you, a place that has meaning and a place you continue to go back to or think about if you haven’t been there in a while (Viento y Agua, Morro Bay on the central coast of California, and the southern California art museums are where I’m place bonded to).
So, I wrote an outline of the article and I figure it’s easier to just list bullet points as I have here to explain Place Bonding:

• Place bonding is a common phenomenon in many recreation areas where people develop an affective and cognitive based attachment to special resource settings
• The pervasive view in environmental psychology: certain places and landscapes matter to people and that a personal bond commonly develops between people and places – over repeated exposures with particular places and through social-psychological processes of people-place interactions that these places take on an identity of their own
• People develop an affective-memory and memory-achievement familiarity; sense of belonging, identity, dependence, and even possessiveness towards places
• Place bonding: the person-place bond that evolves from specifiable conditions of place and characteristics of people – it also implies strong emotional ties, temporary or long lasting, between a person and a particular physical location
• Attachment to place also contains elements of functionality, compatibility and affordances that may lead to varying degrees of psychological dependence on a particular place
• Place familiarity: pleasant memories, achievement memories, cognitions, and environmental images from acquaintances and remembrances associated with recreation places, and which serve as the initial stages of the human-to-place coupling process
• Place belongingness: Affiliation to place or place belongingess expresses a more social bonding than familiarity  - they are connected and hold membership with an environment
• Place Identity: a combination of attitudes, values, thoughts, beliefs, meanings, and behavior tendencies reaching beyond emotional attachment and belonging to a particular place
• Place dependence: an occupant’s perceived strength of association between him or herself.
• Place rootedness: a very strong and focused bon that in its essence means being completely at home

 
Positive Disintegration
I’m reading this wild and crazy book right now that could be classified as a self-help book. One of the theories to psychological development that they present is Positive Disintegration – the idea that negative and challenging stimuli are not only opportunities for growth but the only meaningful way for an individual to develop. Similar to place bonding (and all these ideas) this makes sense intuitively but developing a framework around the idea turns it into a tool that can be used to do critical work. In this case the tool is used to do the work of psychotherapy and the gift that it brings is a vocabulary and an affirmation that viewing psychological tension is positive. In fact, it says that if you don’t go through the chaos and anxiety of the challenge you will remain in that same state of what is called Primary Integration. I’ve learned in my classes that we are creatures of habit, seeking out the things that make us safe, remind us of the normal and acceptable, and -while we seek novelty- we want that novelty to be in an appropriate paradigm. The Theory of Positive Disintegration, developed by Kasimierz Dabrowski, says that our personalities must be created (as opposed to given to us), we must have appropriate response to stimuli, anxiety and depression precipitate disintegration, our initial personality must disintegrate, development of personal values and emotional reactions is necessary for developing your personality, emotional reactions guide the person toward personality development, it is critical that the person make existential choices based on what they feel are more in line with their autonomously developed values, and (like an autodidact) autopsychotherapy is necessary. This is huge! Think about how affirming this is if you’ve ever dealt with the darkness of existential challenges.

The term disintegration is an interesting one for this usage. When I think of disintegrating I think of falling apart and dissipating. And, in actuality, that is what is happening but it’s not the person that is disintegrating; instead, the prior personality (the behaviors, the emotional strategies that worked for ‘lower’ personality, the personality that was ‘given’ to you) disintegrates. Dabrowski says that most people don’t get out of primary integration because it’s too challenging – we just don’t want to push ourselves out of what’s comfortable.

Lastly, for this blog anyway, Dabrowski says that 3 things contribute to a person’s Positive Disintegration: overexcitability (increased neuronal sensitivities), specific abilities and talents, and a strong drive toward autonomous growth. Holy shit! This makes so much sense for so may things. I’m thinking of how this explains Victor Frankl’s and Elie Wiesel’s explanation of how some people could survive the horrors of the holocaust and how others couldn’t. I’m also thinking about the folklore of the mentally disturbed artist: the person that creates new and magnificent ways of seeing the world can only do so because of their highly sensitive personality. The other thing I’m thinking about is how you just meet those people who have more ‘grit’ (this is Angela Duckworth’s term and I highly recommend looking this up too). They are driven by Dabrowski’s third factor of the drive toward individual growth and autonomy.
                I love this theory.
 
Ashi Waza and a neck crank
The last couple weeks in Judo we’ve been learning sweeps. I blew my shoulder out so I’ve been focusing on rolling more but the sweeps are powerful. Specifically, we’ve been learning Kouchi Gari and Ouchi Gari (the small inner reap and the big inner reap) and I got to watch my first legit Judo sparring (they call it Randori) on Friday. It was great watching a bunch of black belts going full throttle like angry water buffaloes. Check out this awesome website: http://judoinfo.com/foot-techniques-ashi-waza/

​Instead of working throws, I just rolled with someone super close to my size (a rarity). We ran tried to kill each other for a couple rounds and I mostly lost but I lost better than I had before. On one of my last moves before the final buzzer, I was trying to get a choke that I couldn’t get. So, I took what I learned from Oregon Elite Training and transitioned to a sick neck crank that got me the tap. In life I struggle with spontaneity and adaptation and the same is true in fighting. This neck crank was the exception and I suppose that’s called learning.