Maud Casey

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Jason Tougaw

I interviewed Maud Casey for my blog a few months ago. I thought you might be interested to read her take on her own novel–and on Hacking. You can read that here. Casey also wrote a short piece about Albert Dadas for my blog. You can read that here.

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Autobiographical Self in its State of Balance

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Berni Moestafa

Maud Casey’s novel contains plenty of pieces that, just like Elizabeth’s puzzle, shapes one’s identity into a whole. Among these pieces what strikes me as central, at least to the Doctor’s attempt in helping Albert regain his Self, is the importance of having a story. Casey encapsulates this point on page 127: “The problem is not that Albert’s story of his life is happy or unhappy; it is that it is invisible to him.” Albert evidently has a sense of Self but somewhat lacking in what Antionio Damasio calls an autobiographical self. He has no memory of how he wandered from place to another for so long and this deprived him of that autobiographical self. Thus the Doctor resorted to hypnotism to retrieve these memories and reconstruct his identity and find out what made him wander the first time.

Here the question is what led Albert to lose his memories. A quick read about disassociated fugue shows that sometimes stressful events or traumatic experiences can lead to this mental disorder. Dissociative Identity Disorder, in which people acquire two or more personalities, have similar causes. A traumatic experience may trigger the brain’s coping mechanism to protect the autobiographical self by separating it from that event. In one person this coping mechanism may lead to the creation of a separate personality or in the case of Albert an urge to flee (uproot from home and identity) and forget. The disorders may be simply manifestations of such coping mechanisms that vary across cultures or as Ian Hacking writes “are entirely socially conditioned.” The cure then is to allow the person to integrate the event with its autobiographical self.

There is this notion of the autobiographical self that can only exist in a state of harmony, which Damasio might call homeostasis. Like nature, the autobiographical self tends to seek a state of balance. A traumatic event may be momentarily disruptive but if such shocks can be integrated into the autobiographical self then the self returns to its balanced state. If the disruptive force is too big and integration does not occur, the imbalance may lead to mental disorder. So the story that one has of oneself and which creates this autobiographical self is always in a state of balance. This is not to say that it must have a pattern or routine, although it would certainly help, but that a person has, and this is just an example, a view of himself or herself that matches other people’s view of that person. There is wiggle room of course but in general the inner experience and the outer experience matches.

Another question is how does one’s autobiographical self attain a high tolerance for disruptive forces in order to retain its harmonious state or homeostasis? The answer may have a Zen-like approach to it as a certain level of detachment toward life seems necessary, that is the kind of detachment that brings oneself into harmony with life, a detachment that lets go of the apparent and attaches itself to the meaning behind the apparent.

Posted in Assignments, Autobiography, Ian Hacking, Maud Casey, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Mental health and homeostasis

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Jennifer MacDonald

My parents are both psychiatric nurses who worked their entire careers in state-run mental health facilities. In Casey, there is a line from the Director (on p. 151): “There is pleasure in a schedule…. It calms the mind.” This made me think of conversations I’ve had with my parents about the difference in the states of clients (which is the present term for people who’ve been admitted to state-run facilities) before and after admission/re-admission. It seems to me that in many cases, the pre-admission state, untreated, is the body’s current, tended-toward state (for various reasons… nature/nurture/both/other), and while admitted, clients are being treated to calm or control the pre-admission state, including its effects on the client’s actions and interactions; in facilities, clients are subdued, in a sense, by layers of predictability. During admission, having a schedule is emphasized, as well as taking care of the body and its environment at intervals throughout the day, including personal hygiene, maintaining orderly surroundings, taking medications, and doing both individual and group therapy work. The atmosphere of reliability and constancy is an attempt to engender a homeostasis so that volatility is less frequent, and individuals and groups are less disrupted psychologically than when left to their own previously tended-toward states/environments. Once discharged and returned to their pre-admission environments—which happens for a variety of reasons (family needs, funding, level of remission of symptoms)—many clients relapse for different volatilities, but also because medication and therapy schedules are not continued properly or are often abandoned entirely.

Thinking about travel in relation to the self via our readings this week was interesting in that change in environment can be change in perspective (separation, renewal, etc.). We touched on this notion in class discussion last week, when we discussed how someone might be A in B environment, but X in Y environment. The fugueur seems like an example of change in self via wandering, movement, and/or escape, whether conscious or not; that the fugueur’s travel is the self unanchoring from (at least one specific) place, as well detaching from homeostatic-rich things like (being able to work toward maintaining) a job, home, marriage/family, and/or planning a future. This made me think of Jill Bolte Taylor’s comment about schizophrenics and how their reality is not always linked to a shared/common reality of past, present, and future, or a plan within an overarching framework beyond their own (paraphrased). This idea that someone experiencing a mental illness might be less aware of the self in relation to a greater collection of selves, or that sometimes that experience is characterized by acting to escape homeostasis is interesting. Even when someone is free of the challenges of acute mental illness, certain levels of self-awareness and self-monitoring, as well as trying to adhere to relative homeostatic conditions day in and day out, can be difficult (and/or a struggle to maintain over time).

Posted in Assignments, Ian Hacking, Maud Casey | 2 Comments

Discussion questions: Casey and Hacking

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Liz Foley

1.  What characteristics or elements, in your opinion, does a work need to display in order to be categorized as a novel? Does The Man Who Walked Away — a fictionalized characterization of two real-life historical figures whose plot is, by conventional definitions, slight and whose chief narrative conflict is between a man and his own condition rather than any external character or force — meet that definition? Are there other categories or descriptions (prose poem? imaginary history? therapeutic fantasy?) into which Casey’s book might fit at least as well as that of novel?

2.  We’ve now read two texts written by novelists: Hustvedt’s selective “history” (her own term) of medical and philosophical developments that might provide insight into her own condition, and a fiction by Casey about a different real-life sufferer that (in my view) sits a little uncomfortably in the category of novel. If we assume that Hustvedt and Casey’s texts share the goals of shedding light on particular body/mind conditions and of writing in a literary style, which text do you think is more successful in meeting those goals? Is the fact that the condition Hustvedt writes about is her own a freeing or limiting circumstance?

3.  Ian Hacking suggests that transient mental illnesses need to meet four conditions (or vectors, as Hacking calls them) in order to occupy “ecological niches” and thus establish themselves during a particular cultural moment: diagnosability/classifiability, cultural polarity (i.e., occupying a place between culturally approved and culturally reviled behaviors), observability, and the provision of “some release that is not available elsewhere in the culture in which it thrives.” Both Hacking and Casey attempt to give some idea of the personal losses and traumas from which Albert Dadas might have sought release through his compulsive traveling, but these factors are too individual to provide a general motivation for the many fugueurs who became medically visible in the wake of Dadas’ diagnosis. Hacking may provide an important clue about this larger group when he writes, “The fugueur was not from the middle classes. But he was urban or had a trade. There are almost no reports of peasant or farmer fugueurs.” What release might compulsive traveling have offered for this class of people at this moment in history?

4.  Both Hacking and Casey mention that Dadas fell out of a tree at age eight, and Hacking raises the possibility that Dadas sustained a head injury at that time that may have played a role in his compulsive traveling later. Beyond this, though, neither writer provides an answer to the question of whether Dadas’ condition (and that of fugueurs more generally) had any biological/neurological basis or was more purely a psychological/cultural condition. Based on what Damasio and Noë have written about the brain’s role in conscious experience and behavior, including its interactivity with its environment, how do you think they might begin to explain Dadas’ case and the larger phenomenon of late 19th-century fugueurs? Would they have considered the fugueurs ill in a biological sense?

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Buckle me

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Yael Rosenstock

Yesterday, while on the train, I mentioned this book and my friend immediately asked for the title. He was animated by the topic and asked me how I had enjoyed the book. My honest response was that I would never had chosen to read this book and while I don’t feel that it was a loss to have read it, it also would have not have been a loss to have never heard of it. While reading, I often felt that plot points could have been made more concisely and the narrative told more directly. I generally enjoy non-linear works but in the case of The Man Who Walked Away, I didn’t feel there was much added by the jumping style of narrative. One thing, however, that did strike me, and apparently my co-writers this week, was the beautiful language that Casey uses. I compiled just a few of my highlights below. Some I don’t really have commentary on but I share them because they seem, to me, to be pockets of pure wisdom and insight into the human mind, whether plagued with a disorder or disorder free. While this book is far from a favorite, there are many opportunities to write an analysis on the small but highly influential nuggets of insight therein contained. I don’t feel I gained much from the chapter in Mad Travelers but reading what Tissie wrote about Albert in Albert’s voice is interesting (end of the book).

Beautiful descriptions

Albert would say, “the song of his body walking was a silky mist” (4)

“wherever he walked, he was filled with a wonder so fierce it was as if he were being burned alive from its astonishing beauty” (5)

“He wants to play the way that man walked; even as he was walking, it was as if he had arrived” (79)

Insights or descriptions by and of patients at the asylum

The veteran – “he is a man like any other, thinking things he wishes he weren’t thinking” (86). I like this quotation because I agree that we are often thinking things we wish we weren’t thinking, plagued by our pasts, fears, prejudices, etc. I think what makes this habit pathological is what makes anything pathological, the fact that it hinders your ability to go about your normal life. In this case, that those thoughts become obsessions and don’t allow you to move past them.

“They spoke to one another the same way this woman and Walter did, confident the other wouldn’t disappear;” (93). There is a comfort in knowing that one can be themselves, flaws and all, around at least some people in their life. The patients are aware that they are in an asylum and are also aware of what the others around them are there for, including their fears and likes. While they may not always like one another or get along, it is an environment where they fear minimally, in comparison to the general world, to be themselves. The patients also understand the asylum as their home and expect that those who live there will remain there indefinitely. Any addition or change to the number of patients creates an imbalance that needs to be addressed.

“Entering into time is like squeezing through a too-small door” (94) – Fantastic way to describe Albert trying to accommodate to the life of a “normal” person.

“There had once been so much love. How could he have forgotten it for so long? It hadn’t disappeared; it had only gone into hiding” (109) Albert remembering his past relationship with father that his conscious mind hid.

Ponderings that stuck out to me

“What is the story of my invisible life” – describe scenario (69)

“Albert is astonished by how much more to the world there is than the house built to keep it out.” 225
The Doctor

Lastly, I really enjoy the way in which the doctor’s character views his role in the asylum and in his field. There is something gentle and poetic about his worldview in regard to his patients; “The same as with every new patient – inside, somewhere, waiting to be discovered: beautiful, intricate, mechanisms” (76). On page 70 the Doctor “feels once again the buoying optimism of the wind. His work doesn’t require of him that he make a perfect discovery…He needs to listen to the words.”

In thinking of Albert, the Doctor thinks, “If the man had lived then [Middle Ages], he might very well have been considered a spiritual pilgrim, but he didn’t, and so he is patient” (124). I always wonder how much doctors think about the development of pathologized conditions in history. I think it would require a sincere and thoughtful process to consider why a patient’s symptoms are considered problematic today but may have been/may be perfectly acceptable in other circumstances.

“Buckle me. That’s all anyone ever wants, really, the Doctor thinks…To be contained. To be given shape by the constraints of a narrative” (185). This idea is reoccurring in the book, not just in this language but also when Albert wishes to only be brought back when he walks away. I think it says a lot about the human nature of many of wanting to be part of something stable and predictable. A very good paper could be written about this that could even cite a toddler’s routine as an example of humans thriving within contained parameters.

The two quotations, “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family in unhappy in its own way” (126) and “It has more to do with the story the patient tells as a means of achieving peace. The problem is not that Albert’s story of his life is happy or unhappy; it is that it is invisible to him” (127) also speak to themes throughout the book. As usual, I have written too much so maybe someone who was interested in these themes could comment on them.

 

 

Posted in Art & Literature, Ian Hacking, Maud Casey, Social Relations | 3 Comments

Tweet at your risk

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Jeffrey Vreeland

I got distracted by an article in the NY Times about Tweeting  and started to think about it for another class and realized it had more to do with Psych then Media so I thought I would post it here:

Can Humans say “NO” to pushing the “SEND” button?

A NY Times article titled “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life”, published Feb.12, 2015 is about the horrors and damage of public shaming made possible by such technologies as Tweeter. The article tells us that, “In 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel.”
This was an obviously intelligent person and by her job description as a PR person should have been social adept and aware of political correctness. Yet how did she send such emotionally self-damming comments over a public medium that ended up turning on her? One of the answers to this question might be in an aside made by the reporter. “She chuckled to herself as she pressed the send button,” after the last of three tweets: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” ‘Chuckled’ is a body reaction to a feeling- a physiological unconscious feeling response to a conscious emotion according to Alberto Damasio. It is not a thought from the cerebral areas of her brain like, “Is this a political correct thing to say?”

The term cultural lag is used in a number of sociological theories trying to explain and theorize society’s involvement with new technologies (Osburn 1922). However is it possible that the science of sociology might need a new term to explain some of the physiological short comings of human beings to consciously censor very short typed messages and images, sent at the speed of light via public mediums such as Twitter? Is it possible that the appeal of Public-Whispering-Media is that it happens primarily at an unconscious emotional level of our brains, out of awareness of our conscious rational minds, and possibly well below the radar of the social sciences?

We would content that interactions of human beings which rely solely on typed short cryptic electronic exchanges involve mind processes and habitual behaviors imprinted on the core consciousness or proto core consciousness of our brains (Damasio 2014) which are outside of our conscious awareness where rational decisions are made. Let us for the sake of discussion call this phenomena the Physiological Consciousness Lag, PCL for short.

It could be said that one of the first experimental demonstrations of PCL was developed in the early 1980s,by Benjamin Libet. “By using electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain activity of volunteers who had been told to make a spontaneous movement. With the help of a precise timer that the volunteers were asked to read at the moment they became aware of the urge to act, Libet found there was, on an average, a 200 millisecond delay, between the urge to lift the finger and the movement itself. But the EEG recordings also revealed a signal that appeared in the brain even earlier – 550 milliseconds, on average – before the action.”
The signal was called the readiness potential which is the signature of the brain planning and preparing our body to do something like push a button. This happens out of our conscious awareness. So it is possible that even before we consciously hit the send button on our phones our brains are unconsciously preparing us to undertake a habitual unconscious behaviorism, generated by repetitive texting on phones, which includes pushing the send button.

Another study related to the PCL was done by the Israeli neuroscientist Rafi Malach who presented subjects with pictures and asked them to judge their own emotional reactions as positive, negative or neutral — a self-oriented, introspective task. Different subjects were present the same pictures but were asked to very quickly categorize the pictures as, for example, animals or not. These subjects were seeing the pictures consciously, but Malach found that “the brain circuits involved in scrutinizing self-reactions (as indicated by the emotional reaction task) were inhibited in the fast categorization task. Subjects also rated their self-awareness as high in the emotional reaction task and low in the fast categorization task.” Malach concluded that the results comport with “the strong intuitive sense we have of ‘losing our selves’ in a highly engaging sensory-motor act.”(Ned Block 2010)

What is important about these two studies is the possibility that they demonstrate that the Physiological Consciousness Lag, PCL of our brains do not allow for a quick enough rational evaluation of typed very short impulsive messages motivated by our emotions.

At best the self-awareness of a, typed emotionally generated feeling message sent or quickly replied to only allows the conscious brain less than 1/5 th of second to say yes or no. In the real world a 1/5th of second is not a lot of time compared to sending a tweet that will potential live in history as long as the internet does. In a real conversation with real people, an off the cuff comment can be corrected if we sense through the facial expression or questioning looks that our words might have been misconstrued. Not so with electronic public whispering. But is this the fault of the technology or is it a problem PCL?

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The man who walked away: a novel by Maud Casey.

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Jeffrey Vreeland

The man who walked away: a novel by Maud Casey.
This novel seemed to urge me to pay attention to its details, while another part of me kept saying, “Come on get on with the story.” Yet I read on, as Casey keeps merging one sentence into another without any sense of direction like Albert as he wonders in his fugue state. For example “Although, these sounds will create a new sound. Albert will listen to the new sound as the nurse leads him down a long hall…and this will become part of the music too.” Casey seems to use words and language to create the interplay between transference and counter transference between patient and doctor, or Albert and those who come in contact with him. Somehow the misery of Albert’s illness, or the hysterical patient under the probing of the Great doctor often gets lost in the beauty of her language…the soft turning of phrase.
In my impatient to want to get on with the plot it was not until about a quarter of way into the book that I started to get her very subtle descriptions of Albert’s public displays and playing with his “Oh! Oh! My beautiful instrument!” Casey never seems to want to go straight at something like calling a spade a spade when she can approach it sideways.

Her description of insane asylums is a little too idealistic from what I have learned about such places at the end of the 19th century, and to quote one NY Times article “Many of private home for the mentally ill in New York have devolved into places of misery and neglect, just like the psychiatric institutions before them.”
I’ve read the novel first so I’m commenting on that. And will read the other assignment before class so I cannot comment on that.

Posted in Maud Casey | 2 Comments

Alva Noe found an impartial review

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Jeffrey Vreeland

After yesterday discussion about writing review I came across this impartial review in Scientific America

MIND Reviews: Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë

Recommendations from Scientific American MIND
Mar 25, 2009 |By Jascha Hoffman
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009

Your brain is a three-pound hunk of grayish jelly. Your mind hosts a stream of thoughts and sensations. Despite recent advances in neuroscience, we don’t know how to get from one to the other: we still can’t explain the mind in terms of the brain. Some believe that if we keep studying the brain with the tools we have, we will eventually work up to the conscious mind. Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, is not so optimistic. In Out of Our Heads, his first book for a popular audience, he argues that we have been looking for consciousness in the wrong place.

“Consciousness does not happen in the brain,” Noë claims. But his position is not as extreme as it sounds. The point is not that neural states are irrelevant to our experience but that if we are ever to understand the nature of conscious awareness we will have to consider more than just our “wet, sticky, meat-slab brains.” The sense of consciousness, according to Noë, is the ongoing product of a wide-ranging interaction between the body of a living creature and the world it inhabits. The brain is only part of this story.

It’s a fair point, if not one that will be entirely surprising to biologists. As Noë showed convincingly in a previous book—Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004)—we do not passively absorb data from our eyes and ears, as a camera or a microphone would, but rather scan and probe our environments so we can act on them. It is a long way, however, from this view of perception to a coherent theory of consciousness.

Noë has a gift for condensing the literature on how we perceive and interact with the world. Yet he seems unable to build from these studies a convincing account of what consciousness is. Rather the book is an exercise in skepticism and criticism, much of it warranted. The problem is that where Noë clears away stale ideas, he offers little of substance to replace them. One comes away from the book without a definitive example of a conscious state that would require more than a brain.

Despite these problems, Noë’s main point holds: if we want to understand the conscious mind, we will need to take a wider view of the whole organism interacting with its environment. One could imagine many researchers nodding their heads. The crucial issue, not emphasized by Noë, is that it is exceptionally hard to tease out how our surroundings and our own actions shape the way we perceive the world. That challenge, rather than a lack of curiosity or imagination, could be why there has been so little work on the subject. 

This article was originally published with the title “Reviews and Recommendations.”

Posted in Noë, The Writing Process | 1 Comment

Unpacking the money analogy

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Yael Rosenstock

I watched the video before reading Noe’s explanation of his dollar bill analogy so I didn’t get a chance to question the analogy for myself before hearing the interviewer’s criticism of it not being comparable. How do others feel about the below passage? Do you think that Noe’s example is valid as a possible argument for consciousness being something behind the biological?

I have my own qualms (although, if you are going to respond, respond first before reading mine so you can stick to your initial thoughts) with the idea of consciousness depending upon one’s history and interactions. One’s past and present realities influence our consciousness but there must be something at play already for us to be able to create ideas influenced by our environment. I would like to hear what others think.

 

Consciousness Is Like Money

Stop and notice that you can believe in consciousness—appreciate the fact that we feel and think and that the world shows up for us—without believing that there is a place, or a moment in time, when and where consciousness happens or comes to be inside of us. As a comparison, consider that there’s nothing about this piece of paper in my hand, taken in isolation, that makes it one dollar. It would be ludicrous to search for the physical or molecular correlates of its monetary value. The monetary value, after all, is not intrinsic to the piece of paper itself, but depends on the existence of practices and conventions and institutions. The marks or francs or pesos or lire in your wallet didn’t change physically when, from one day to the next, they ceased to be legal tender. The change was as real as it gets, but it wasn’t a physical change in the money.

Maybe consciousness is like money. Here’s a possibility: my consciousness now—with all its particular quality for me now— depends not only on what is happening in my brain but also on my history and my current position in and interaction with the wider world. It is striking that the majority of scientists working on consciousness don’t even notice there is an overlooked theoretical possibility here. They tend to think that consciousness, whatever its ultimate explanation, must be something that happens somewhere and sometime in the human brain, just as digestion must take place in the stomach.

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Discussion Questions for Alva Noe

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Justin Wenhan Luo

According to Noe, consciousness is not constructed by our brains and thus happens inside our heads or skins, which is an ungrounded assumption that has been taken for granted by most scientists nowadays (including Damasio) addressing the problem of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body and world, which means our conscious experience requires the joint operation of brain, body and world and is in this sense something beyond our brain and something we do in the world.

One interesting thing I noticed is that Noe seems to think that scientists approach the problem of consciousness wrong not only because they are taking the unargued assumption, but also (more fundamentally) because they are adopting the “detached perspective” of science. Consciousness is something we would properly approach in the more “engaged and intimate perspective”, or using Noe’ preferred phrase, in the “biological perspective”. So my first question is:

  1. What is the relationship between the “detached perspective” and the “engaged perspective”? In what sense can we say that the “engaged perspective” is superior to the “detached perspective” in approaching the problem of consciousness?

On the other hand, Noe in many places draws on a bunch of psychological phenomena and scientific experiments (e.g. Sur’s ferrets, tactile-visual substitution, phantom limb, rubber-hand) to provide evidence for his main thesis. Then my second question is:

  1. How do you think of Noe’s interpretations of those phenomena and experiments? Is it not true that now and in the future neuroscientists can, presumably, give plausible accounts of those phenomena and experiments based on the traditional working assumption that conscious happens in the brain?

My last methodology question is very related to the foregoing question:

  1. (Methodology Question) How do you compare the use of evidence by Noe and Damasio? (As I feel Noe’s use of evidence is more “artistic”, and Damasio more “scientific”)

 

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