winter

"Winter – Fifth Avenue" (1893), Alfred Stieglitz

Por sugestão de Not in the Heavens

Dan Gilbert on hapiness

joyful, playful and optimistic

"Lori and Reba Schappell may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorder an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking anda rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital anda wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other and finishing each other's sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori's forehead is attached to one side of Reba's, and they have spend every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy - not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic. Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often not who doesn't? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation Reba speaks for both of them: 'Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You'd be ruining two lives in the process'.

So here's the question: if this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, 'Joyful, playful and optimistic,' then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is 'Despodent, desperate and depressed'. Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circunstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. (...) And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about  the situation, they tell us that they  wouldn't have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, [a proeminent] medical historian found 'the desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal'. Something is terribly wrong here. But what?

There seem to be just to possibilities. Someone - either Lori and reba, or everyone else in the world - is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about hapiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins' claim to hapiness with offhand rejoinders such as 'Oh, they're just sayoing that' or 'They may think they're happy, but they're not' or the even popular 'They don't know what hapiness really is' (ussually spoken as if we do).

( Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Hapiness, Harper Perennial, 2006, pp.29-30. Há tradução portuguesa)

daqui

natural-born cyborgs

Bach-y-Rita (1934-2006)

"But Bach-y-Rita, by showing that our brains are more flexible than localizationism admits, has helped to invent a more accurate view of the brain that allows for such changes. Before he did this work, it was acceptable to say, as most neuroscientists do, that we have a "visual cortex" in our occipital lobe that processes vision, and an "auditory cortex" in our temporal lobe that processes hearing. From Bach-y-Rita we have learned that the matter is more complicated and that these areas of the brain are plastic processors, connected to each other and capable of processing an unexpected variety of input. Cheryl has not been the only one to benefit from Bach-y-Rita's strange hat. The team has since used the device to train fifty more patients to improve their balance and walking. Some had the same damage Cheryl had; others have had brain trauma, stroke, or Parkinson's disease. Paul Bach-y-Rita's importance lies in his being the first of his generation of neuroscientists both to understand that the brain is plastic and to apply this knowledge in a practical way to ease human suffering. Implicit in all his work is the idea that we are all born with a far more adaptable, all-purpose, opportunistic brain than we have understood. When Cheryl's brain developed a renewed vestibular sense—or blind subjects' brains developed new paths as they learned to recognize objects, perspective, or movement—these changes were not the mysterious exception to the rule but the rule: the sensory cortex is plastic and adaptable, When Cheryl's brain learned to respond to the artificial receptor that replaced her damaged one, it was not doing anything out of the ordinary. Recently Bach-y-Rita's work has inspired cognitive scientist Andy Clark to wittily argue that we are "natural-born cyborgs," meaning that brain plasticity allows us to attach ourselves to machines, such as computers and electronic tools, quite naturally. But our brains also restructure themselves in response to input from the simplest tools too, such as a blind man's cane. Plasticity has been, after all, a property inherent in the brain since prehistoric times. The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself."

Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Penguin Books, 2007, p.25.

Felicidade

 (222)

"Um estudo acompanhou crianças com sete anos cujos pais ainda viviam juntos. Se depois os pais se separavam, a criança tinha o dobro das hipóteses, quando comparada com crianças cujos pais permaneceram juntos, de se tornar uma adulto com depressão. A idade da criança aquando da separação não era relevante. Mas o principal problema é o conflito entre os pais - se o conflito é mau o suficiente, a separação poderá ser o melhor (61).

Richard Layard, Happiness, penguin books.

Louis Armstrong and the All Stars - St James Infirmary

Via Um pouco mais de terra

Glenn Gould's Toronto - (1979)