Dreams have been covered here, and I really don't have much more to say about them. They can be fascinating, but I am not of the school that makes them a royal road to the unconscious. I am not sure the idea of an unconscious mind is very useful. In the current set of metaphors, I prefer the notion of reptilian brain functions to the unconscious mind. Most dream discussions are beastly dull.
One observation which seems trivial is relation between dream experience and waking mood. A pleasant dream experience is flying. Sometimes it is chaotic, tangled in high wires or crashes on landings; sometimes it is perfect, free and controlled and with beautiful vistas. In my experience, perfectly controlled beautiful vista flying dreams are strongly correlated with elevated mood for the following few hours of waking consciousness.
Another experience, again trivial, is love objects in dreams. Jung coined the term anima to describe an inner personality of the opposite sex; I prefer to describe the anima as a love-object type of woman. The attractive women who I do not recognize in my dreams are all of one physical type. My shorthand for this is: anima-woman. The real world equivalent to this would be that all of the public relationship figures for some prominent men seem to be of one physical type--all the Bill Clinton women (except for his wife) have the big salon hair and heavy makeup; all the Tiger Woods women have long straight blond hair, &c.
One time I participated in a Jungian T group where the group leader was nearly a perfect instance of my own anima-woman. Fortunately I had the sense not to mention this to her. I am fairly sure (probability~.7) she has heard that enough to be sick and tired of it, and more sure (probability~.9) that her response to such a comment would be akin to: "Ack! Stay away from me you creep."
This can be a little disturbing when a real-life person of little importance sneaks into my dream world in the anima-woman role. This happened to me recently. The woman is not unattractive, but I have not had any personal interaction with her. When she showed up in my dream the attraction was intense. This was not disturbing at all; to the contrary it was a pleasant dream. The disturbance came into the waking world when it took some effort to banish the anima-woman from repeatedly creeping into my conscious thought.
The kicker was the hypnopompic material that came right after, the stuff that came into my half-world and mostly conscious mind. I conceived what I thought to be a novel theory of clinical depression and treatment and a conversation with my doctor where I explained it all and enlightened him. It is simple enough to explain in a paragraph or two.
Human mood varies--we have good days and bad days. For the sake of discussion, evaluate all of human mood with one number, scale 1 to 10.
10: the first time you fell in love, winning the World Series, sex with a nine-thousand-dollar prostitute.
1: what would be the most painless and sure-fire way to commit suicide?
Natural fluctuation is between 3 and 8. If your mood is at 3 for too long an interval and too often, you complain to the doctor and he prescribes a Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, which solves the problem for a lot of people.
Here is where my hypnopompic theory and imagined discussion with my doctor comes in. I told him what the SSRI does is not just block off the lower state, but compresses the range from 4 to 7 and blocks out the potential for high states as well, which may not be a desired outcome at all. I used diagrams in my explanation, with graphs of mood versus time which resembled Neumann Functions. In my hynopompic state, this all made perfect sense and my diagrams were beautiful. When I got up I immediately made notes and drew graphs and it all made a lot less sense to me than it did in my hypnopompic state.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
13 April 2011
24 March 2011
How To Treat Stage Fright
Prior to experiencing my "miracle" cure for my stage fright, I suffered a severe case of it for many years. Stage fright is a common phobia, and some surveys place public speaking up with snakes and spiders as amongst the most common fears anybody suffers. In the course of my struggles I looked in many places for the answer. I diligently studied what appears to remain the authoritative book covering the topic. In this post I am going to summarize the conventional prescriptions, and offer a novel treatment which I learned about while attending a T group.
The wikipedia page on stage fright as it looks on the 24th of March 2011 looks good to me. The experts say prepare and rehearse. This is so trivial it may be of no help. It seems obvious if you are standing up in front of a group of people unprepared you should be fearful.
The jumping jacks and the deep breathing they suggest are good enough I suppose for mild cases that are going to pass anyway and these are activities which can accelerate eventuality coming to be. I actually tried all this stuff and found it to be useless.
They have a pill for it! I had read this in the New York Times a few years ago, but I was surprised to see all the documentation. Beta blockers will suppress the symptoms of social phobia so you can take the pill before you go on stage and it will all be a little easier. Apparently the drugs they were doing in the Last Waltz are just about the worst thing you can take for stage fright.
The trick I learned in my T group is this: shiver. Just relax your shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and give yourself a good long shiver. This is our most natural physical response to the emotional sense of fear and resisting it apparently makes it worse. If you give into the impulse and let yourself shiver as much as you feel like or even force yourself to shiver a little bit more than you feel like, this will disempower the hold your fear holds over you. The T group leader offered it as part of a litany:
"if you are sad, cry; if you are angry, shout; if you are happy, laugh; if you are afraid, shiver."
Sounds a little bit Zen and I would advise counting to ten before shouting when angry, but otherwise I think it works pretty good. My own experience with shivering before going onstage is that this is the only remedy I have ever found helpful for my own (previously) severe stage fright.
The wikipedia page on stage fright as it looks on the 24th of March 2011 looks good to me. The experts say prepare and rehearse. This is so trivial it may be of no help. It seems obvious if you are standing up in front of a group of people unprepared you should be fearful.
The jumping jacks and the deep breathing they suggest are good enough I suppose for mild cases that are going to pass anyway and these are activities which can accelerate eventuality coming to be. I actually tried all this stuff and found it to be useless.
They have a pill for it! I had read this in the New York Times a few years ago, but I was surprised to see all the documentation. Beta blockers will suppress the symptoms of social phobia so you can take the pill before you go on stage and it will all be a little easier. Apparently the drugs they were doing in the Last Waltz are just about the worst thing you can take for stage fright.
The trick I learned in my T group is this: shiver. Just relax your shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and give yourself a good long shiver. This is our most natural physical response to the emotional sense of fear and resisting it apparently makes it worse. If you give into the impulse and let yourself shiver as much as you feel like or even force yourself to shiver a little bit more than you feel like, this will disempower the hold your fear holds over you. The T group leader offered it as part of a litany:
"if you are sad, cry; if you are angry, shout; if you are happy, laugh; if you are afraid, shiver."
Sounds a little bit Zen and I would advise counting to ten before shouting when angry, but otherwise I think it works pretty good. My own experience with shivering before going onstage is that this is the only remedy I have ever found helpful for my own (previously) severe stage fright.
04 March 2011
The Kitchen Table
The kitchen table is an exercise which I learned from a woman who is the most skilled hypnotist I have ever seen close up. It is simple and takes very little time, but it does require a dedicated group of people. It is from the Gestalt Psychotherapy field, and very similar in dynamics to the Two Chair Exercise, which I previously went over. The working premise for its effect is that stress and neurosis are often sourced in things which happened long ago when we were less resourceful, and that exploring these event origins with the full array of resources which we now possess will permit us to process them in a healthier manner.
In the kitchen table the subject of the exercise revisits a typical meal in the home of their youth. It is one variant of a role playing exercise, and the role the subject plays is their self, at home, when young. The exercise also requires other players to play the roles of the significant others in the youthful home of the subject--his parents, siblings, &c. The subject specifies the cast in the preparation for the exercise. The subject also specifies a line or two or three for each of the other characters. They can be mundane, but they need to be appropriate to the characters. For example:
"That dress looks pretty".
"I wanted that piece of chicken."
"Do we really have to go to Uncle Drew's?"
The lines do not need to be memorized or professionally acted or voiced. You can even fit a guy in for mom in a pinch. All that is required is that the various characters speak only their lines, and it hardly matters if they speak them especially well. Then the characters sit around a table, just like it is time for a meal long ago and far away in the subject's past. They start speaking slow, distinct, and one at a time. Gradually they speak louder, faster, and overlapping one another. The physiology of what happens can be very strange, but I believe there is an avalanche in the subject's audio processing system; there is just far too much information entering their ears for them to keep up with. Although as the exercise begins they are consciously attempting to follow it all, soon they are overwhelmed by the sound stimulus. The result is (almost invariably) a profound hypnotic trance state.
I once took a poetry workshop with my poet-mentor Dave Brinks in New Orleans, where we did something quite similar as a writing experiment. He had two portable stereos set up on opposite ends of the room. On one he had Coltraine jazz, and on the other he had Bach Brandenberg Concerto. The poets sat in the middle and wrote poetry. Gradually as we wrote, he cranked up the volume on both the Coltraine box and on the Bach box. After about forty minutes, we took turns reading our stuff and giving feedback to one another. That was a worthy writing exercise similar in process. The results could hardly be compared to the kitchen table in the Gestalt psychotherapy room, which are more like abracadabra, presto, and SHAZAM!
In the kitchen table the subject of the exercise revisits a typical meal in the home of their youth. It is one variant of a role playing exercise, and the role the subject plays is their self, at home, when young. The exercise also requires other players to play the roles of the significant others in the youthful home of the subject--his parents, siblings, &c. The subject specifies the cast in the preparation for the exercise. The subject also specifies a line or two or three for each of the other characters. They can be mundane, but they need to be appropriate to the characters. For example:
"That dress looks pretty".
"I wanted that piece of chicken."
"Do we really have to go to Uncle Drew's?"
The lines do not need to be memorized or professionally acted or voiced. You can even fit a guy in for mom in a pinch. All that is required is that the various characters speak only their lines, and it hardly matters if they speak them especially well. Then the characters sit around a table, just like it is time for a meal long ago and far away in the subject's past. They start speaking slow, distinct, and one at a time. Gradually they speak louder, faster, and overlapping one another. The physiology of what happens can be very strange, but I believe there is an avalanche in the subject's audio processing system; there is just far too much information entering their ears for them to keep up with. Although as the exercise begins they are consciously attempting to follow it all, soon they are overwhelmed by the sound stimulus. The result is (almost invariably) a profound hypnotic trance state.
I once took a poetry workshop with my poet-mentor Dave Brinks in New Orleans, where we did something quite similar as a writing experiment. He had two portable stereos set up on opposite ends of the room. On one he had Coltraine jazz, and on the other he had Bach Brandenberg Concerto. The poets sat in the middle and wrote poetry. Gradually as we wrote, he cranked up the volume on both the Coltraine box and on the Bach box. After about forty minutes, we took turns reading our stuff and giving feedback to one another. That was a worthy writing exercise similar in process. The results could hardly be compared to the kitchen table in the Gestalt psychotherapy room, which are more like abracadabra, presto, and SHAZAM!
12 February 2011
Mismeasures of psychometry
My title is modified from Stephen Jay Gould's. My post is going to be a lot shorter than his book. He wrote it to debunk the intelligence test industry, and then he revised it a few years later and re-published into the midst of the Bell Curve controversy. My topic is only remotely related: I am going to write about personality tests, not intelligence tests.
It appears to me that the gold standard on the world wide web is Myers-Briggs. It has been awhile since I have read that wikipedia article on Myers-Briggs and it has grown enormously since the last time. It now is roughly one-fifth as long as the most popular book on the topic, Please Understand Me by David Keirsey. My two biggest criticisms of the test are covered in the article as it currently stands: 1.) some of the measures are unrepeatable, in that subjects will score as different particular personality types on subsequent tests; and 2.) it is completely self-reporting, with the inevitable distortion that causes. In the words of the current wikipedia article, "If respondents fear they have something to lose, they may answer as they assume they should." I have taken a number of versions of the test, variously scoring as INTP, INTJ, ISTP, ISTJ. I will give them the "I" and the "T", but my own opinion is the N-S and P-J axes are not universal, and personally meaningless.
My freshman psychology textbook is Gleitman. I have the fifth edition from 2000. Myers-Briggs is not in it. They have 75 pages devoted to the topic of personality, and several pages devoted to the topic of personality testing. The preferred instrument is the five factor scale, pioneered by W. T. Norman (Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, V. 66, pp 574-583). Since three of their factors are explicitly social--agreeableness, conscientiousness, and (absence of) neuroticism--this test is even more subject to the distortions of incentives to erroneous or deceptive answers in the test subject's self-report. One of the most profound mysteries may be how Myers-Briggs seems to rule the web and Gleitman, et al. do not see fit to even mention it.
The issue there may be that Myers-Briggs originates in Jungian psychology, and the great doctor Carl Jung is conspicuously and totally absent from the Gleitman textbook. Carl Jung was not exactly a real scientist you see, having been seduced by the Black Tide of Occultism.
The oddest personality test I ever experienced was in a company training class on "Creative Problem Solving". This was a one-week class where I and twenty of my peers were exposed to such company-sanctioned activities as "brainstorming". Part of the class was a personality assessment test. The testers claimed they could sort for: right-brain versus left-brain, and top-brain (cortex) versus bottom-brain (limbic). They had a composite display of the whole class on one plot. I suffered the ghastly embarrassment of the teacher telling all my classmates that I was the only right-brained person in the room. The other thing I remember from that test is my perfect career match was supposedly physician or metal sculptor. There is absolutely no way that a statistically significant number of well-adjusted metal sculptors have ever taken their test.
My favorite personality tests are the ones on the OKCupid web site. My results indicated such arcane features of my testing self as:
I am an INTP (d'oh!)
I am an Enneagram type 5.
I am partial to Cognitive Behavior Therapy.
My philosophy is akin to William James.
The Looney Tune character I most resemble is Wile E. Coyote.
The Romantic poet I most resemble is William Blake.
The major arcana I most resemble is the Hermit.
The Shakespeare character I most resemble is Richard III.
OK I am going to stop with that one because it is way off. Prospero, maybe; no way Richard III. Murdering my two young nephews to legitimize my kingly succession is just not me. As much fun as the OKCupid tests were, I only took about twenty of them. I know one woman (she is a World of Warcraft player) who has taken like three hundred OKCupid tests. Alright, one last one:
The Arthurian character I most resemble is the Lady of the Lake. This dear readers is scientific proof that there are worse personality testing instruments than Myers-Briggs.
It appears to me that the gold standard on the world wide web is Myers-Briggs. It has been awhile since I have read that wikipedia article on Myers-Briggs and it has grown enormously since the last time. It now is roughly one-fifth as long as the most popular book on the topic, Please Understand Me by David Keirsey. My two biggest criticisms of the test are covered in the article as it currently stands: 1.) some of the measures are unrepeatable, in that subjects will score as different particular personality types on subsequent tests; and 2.) it is completely self-reporting, with the inevitable distortion that causes. In the words of the current wikipedia article, "If respondents fear they have something to lose, they may answer as they assume they should." I have taken a number of versions of the test, variously scoring as INTP, INTJ, ISTP, ISTJ. I will give them the "I" and the "T", but my own opinion is the N-S and P-J axes are not universal, and personally meaningless.
My freshman psychology textbook is Gleitman. I have the fifth edition from 2000. Myers-Briggs is not in it. They have 75 pages devoted to the topic of personality, and several pages devoted to the topic of personality testing. The preferred instrument is the five factor scale, pioneered by W. T. Norman (Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, V. 66, pp 574-583). Since three of their factors are explicitly social--agreeableness, conscientiousness, and (absence of) neuroticism--this test is even more subject to the distortions of incentives to erroneous or deceptive answers in the test subject's self-report. One of the most profound mysteries may be how Myers-Briggs seems to rule the web and Gleitman, et al. do not see fit to even mention it.
The issue there may be that Myers-Briggs originates in Jungian psychology, and the great doctor Carl Jung is conspicuously and totally absent from the Gleitman textbook. Carl Jung was not exactly a real scientist you see, having been seduced by the Black Tide of Occultism.
The oddest personality test I ever experienced was in a company training class on "Creative Problem Solving". This was a one-week class where I and twenty of my peers were exposed to such company-sanctioned activities as "brainstorming". Part of the class was a personality assessment test. The testers claimed they could sort for: right-brain versus left-brain, and top-brain (cortex) versus bottom-brain (limbic). They had a composite display of the whole class on one plot. I suffered the ghastly embarrassment of the teacher telling all my classmates that I was the only right-brained person in the room. The other thing I remember from that test is my perfect career match was supposedly physician or metal sculptor. There is absolutely no way that a statistically significant number of well-adjusted metal sculptors have ever taken their test.
My favorite personality tests are the ones on the OKCupid web site. My results indicated such arcane features of my testing self as:
I am an INTP (d'oh!)
I am an Enneagram type 5.
I am partial to Cognitive Behavior Therapy.
My philosophy is akin to William James.
The Looney Tune character I most resemble is Wile E. Coyote.
The Romantic poet I most resemble is William Blake.
The major arcana I most resemble is the Hermit.
The Shakespeare character I most resemble is Richard III.
OK I am going to stop with that one because it is way off. Prospero, maybe; no way Richard III. Murdering my two young nephews to legitimize my kingly succession is just not me. As much fun as the OKCupid tests were, I only took about twenty of them. I know one woman (she is a World of Warcraft player) who has taken like three hundred OKCupid tests. Alright, one last one:
The Arthurian character I most resemble is the Lady of the Lake. This dear readers is scientific proof that there are worse personality testing instruments than Myers-Briggs.
23 January 2011
The Gloria tapes
In 1965 a patient ("Gloria") participated in a teaching film with three world-renowned psychotherapists: Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. She was a young divorced mother and volunteered her problems with parenting and dating to the scrutiny of these three fellows and their three psychotherapy techniques: Client-centered Therapy, Rational Emotive Therapy, and Gestalt Therapy. The film Three Approaches to Psychotherapy has been shown to thousands of psychology students. I don't know what the copyright status is, but last week I watched all three of the thirty minute experiments on youtube.
The lesson is intended at the most superficial level, as nobody expects anything transformational to be possible in one thirty-minute session. Nevertheless, the film is informative. I have all of these fellows in my library and have studied them off and on for many years. This was the first time I had seen any of them in action and it was really great to have them working with one common patient.
Rogers is the one who I have had the least regard for. He is best known for a method of working with patients, not for any specific ideology of mental function or malfunction. He said the most important factor in a successful patient outcome is the nature of the relationship formed between patient and therapist. An oft-quoted quip is that it is "the relationship that heals." And his recipe for the therapist to form this healing relationship is to treat the patient with unconditional positive regard. The patient may suffer from guilt; the patient may judge their self harshly, but for the therapy to work the therapist would best consider their task to defuse all guilt and all negative self-judgment present in the patient's thought and action.
Considering where psychotherapy as an art was when Rogers began his work in the middle of the twentieth century, I can sort of see how this could have been a refreshing and useful tack. In 2011 this looks to be less useful to me. This is an attitude which may have been a big component in the self-esteem fashion that was so prevalent in the generation after Rogers. Optimism and Up With People and all that certainly has a place, but if the patient is so great, then what are they hiring a psychotherapist for? Rogers' method has a logical contradiction at its heart. These are ideas I had before watching the Gloria tapes, and there was nothing in Rogers' interview with Gloria which changed my mind.
Ellis is really the star of these tapes, and mainstream psychotherapy today in the United States really is the product of Ellis (on the psychology side) and his peer Aaron Beck (on the psychiatry side). Beck used almost exactly the same ideas, and he referred to his technique as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I am sure the doctors of Psychology and Psychiatry have all their arcane small differences, but in my limited understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational Emotive Therapy are identical. If I woke up with a mental health problem tomorrow requiring professional help, I would look for one of these guys.
In the Gloria tape Ellis does his straight Rational Emotive Therapy schtick, but it looks to me like it is a little much for her. He is trying to ram a lot of information into his thirty minute allotment, and he is talking fast, and I had a hard time following it all. Since I have read his books and knew all this stuff, I can only imagine what it must have been like for the poor patient trying to keep up with the guy. At a couple of points in the tape, it is obvious that he is a little stressed at why this seems to be taking so long; that is poor practical psychotherapy despite the sound theoretical underpinnings. In the session summary after, Ellis states that he was sorry that he tried to do so much and that it probably would have been more helpful to Gloria if he had tried to do less.
This is exactly the dimension in which Perls managed to work effectively in spite of the thirty minute limitation and in spite of his having an inferior therapy theory. Although Gestalt Psychotherapy was once one of the most promising techniques, it has largely fallen into disfavor amongst professionals. I do not know why that is, because my experiences with it have included a number of important personal discoveries for myself about myself. (See here for example.) One distinct disadvantage it has is the quality of the written source material. Beck and Ellis wrote fabulous books, and I have yet to find one excellent book on Gestalt therapy.
(The best Beck book. The best Ellis book.)
With Gloria, Perls sticks to very simple questions and observations. The only thing which I can distinctly recall from all three of the tapes is an observation that Perls makes. Gloria says she is afraid, and Fritz says to her: "you say you feel afraid, and yet you are smiling. Do you know why that is? People who are afraid usually do not smile."
Yet it just so happens to be true that people who are afraid (especially women who are afraid) often do smile. Do you know why that is? I would love to know why that is. I am pretty sure Fritz was aware that women who are afraid often do, inexplicably, smile. If Gloria left her interview with Fritz and thought long and hard about that excellent question, I would bet she got a great deal out of that thirty minute interview.
The lesson is intended at the most superficial level, as nobody expects anything transformational to be possible in one thirty-minute session. Nevertheless, the film is informative. I have all of these fellows in my library and have studied them off and on for many years. This was the first time I had seen any of them in action and it was really great to have them working with one common patient.
Rogers is the one who I have had the least regard for. He is best known for a method of working with patients, not for any specific ideology of mental function or malfunction. He said the most important factor in a successful patient outcome is the nature of the relationship formed between patient and therapist. An oft-quoted quip is that it is "the relationship that heals." And his recipe for the therapist to form this healing relationship is to treat the patient with unconditional positive regard. The patient may suffer from guilt; the patient may judge their self harshly, but for the therapy to work the therapist would best consider their task to defuse all guilt and all negative self-judgment present in the patient's thought and action.
Considering where psychotherapy as an art was when Rogers began his work in the middle of the twentieth century, I can sort of see how this could have been a refreshing and useful tack. In 2011 this looks to be less useful to me. This is an attitude which may have been a big component in the self-esteem fashion that was so prevalent in the generation after Rogers. Optimism and Up With People and all that certainly has a place, but if the patient is so great, then what are they hiring a psychotherapist for? Rogers' method has a logical contradiction at its heart. These are ideas I had before watching the Gloria tapes, and there was nothing in Rogers' interview with Gloria which changed my mind.
Ellis is really the star of these tapes, and mainstream psychotherapy today in the United States really is the product of Ellis (on the psychology side) and his peer Aaron Beck (on the psychiatry side). Beck used almost exactly the same ideas, and he referred to his technique as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I am sure the doctors of Psychology and Psychiatry have all their arcane small differences, but in my limited understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational Emotive Therapy are identical. If I woke up with a mental health problem tomorrow requiring professional help, I would look for one of these guys.
In the Gloria tape Ellis does his straight Rational Emotive Therapy schtick, but it looks to me like it is a little much for her. He is trying to ram a lot of information into his thirty minute allotment, and he is talking fast, and I had a hard time following it all. Since I have read his books and knew all this stuff, I can only imagine what it must have been like for the poor patient trying to keep up with the guy. At a couple of points in the tape, it is obvious that he is a little stressed at why this seems to be taking so long; that is poor practical psychotherapy despite the sound theoretical underpinnings. In the session summary after, Ellis states that he was sorry that he tried to do so much and that it probably would have been more helpful to Gloria if he had tried to do less.
This is exactly the dimension in which Perls managed to work effectively in spite of the thirty minute limitation and in spite of his having an inferior therapy theory. Although Gestalt Psychotherapy was once one of the most promising techniques, it has largely fallen into disfavor amongst professionals. I do not know why that is, because my experiences with it have included a number of important personal discoveries for myself about myself. (See here for example.) One distinct disadvantage it has is the quality of the written source material. Beck and Ellis wrote fabulous books, and I have yet to find one excellent book on Gestalt therapy.
(The best Beck book. The best Ellis book.)
With Gloria, Perls sticks to very simple questions and observations. The only thing which I can distinctly recall from all three of the tapes is an observation that Perls makes. Gloria says she is afraid, and Fritz says to her: "you say you feel afraid, and yet you are smiling. Do you know why that is? People who are afraid usually do not smile."
Yet it just so happens to be true that people who are afraid (especially women who are afraid) often do smile. Do you know why that is? I would love to know why that is. I am pretty sure Fritz was aware that women who are afraid often do, inexplicably, smile. If Gloria left her interview with Fritz and thought long and hard about that excellent question, I would bet she got a great deal out of that thirty minute interview.
03 January 2011
Dream works
My experience with using dreams for psychotherapy is lengthy and inefficient with a couple of bright spots. The idea is that we have a subconscious mind in the first place (a hypothetical and unproven premise); and that secondly the material presented to us in our dreaming state of consciousness, which we happen to retain upon waking, provides us with a glimpse into the dynamics of processes ongoing in our subconscious mind. This second idea is hypothetical, unproven, and even dubious. Nevertheless from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung to many modern practitioners dream analysis has had a huge appeal.
I once participated in a two day workshop with this lady, which was unforgettable. She was in her eighties at the time and filled the entire room (about twenty of us) with a buzz of her energy. One thing which she told us, which I may never forget as long as I live: it is always some one thing.
By "it" she meant an originating trauma for an ongoing neurosis, and she meant that it was always one from a very short list:
Someone was killed.
Someone was a killer.
Someone was raped.
Someone was a rapist.
Someone was a drunk or a gambler and squandered all the family's money.
&c.
This is a truism to some but not all workers. She may be overly influenced by her own experience as a Frenchwoman who lived through the German occupation. There was a bizarre tone to her voice when she described the experience of some French women and some German soldiers.
After all of the anxious people with trauma had taken their turn on the hot seat, she invited lighter topics. She inquired about dreams. I was not doing any intense dream work at the time, but I did happen to recall what I was dreaming just before waking that morning. I volunteered my dream. It was a low-gravity, spiderman, jungle gym thing. Typical for me, and even mundane, but it survived into my waking consciousness, so I offered it up. We talked for about thirty minutes. She asked about my family. She speculated, and suggested hypothetical connections between my dream content and my real world psychological life. It was entertaining (ultimately my main motivation for attending T groups is that I find them endlessly entertaining), but as far as insightful psychology goes, it seemed useless.
Then the workshop was over with (or so I thought) a little bit later, and that was it. Very interesting, but merely a diversion to spice up my otherwise dull weekend. A couple of days later I once again had the nightmare. Many people have these. One particular scenario which haunts too many of our nights which involves a tortuous inescapable problem which seems to go on forever and can even wreck a night's sleep. Running after something you cannot ever catch; trapped by a hideous monster or frightful animal--snakes, spiders, whatnot; falling; being shot or stabbed. We could make a very long list.
Mine is packing. Trying to get everything into a suitcase or a backpack. I have had this nightmare my entire life, and it once had the power to ruin me for an entire following day. I would sometimes wake up not rested, aching, nauseous, or dizzy. This time was different, though. I woke up from the nightmare, and I suddenly had an insight to the moment when that nightmare image entered my life. That was an Aha! And Eureka! moment for me. The nightmare has not gone away, and it remains as disturbing in the moment as it ever was. It does not make me physically ill any longer; it has lost that power over me I had previously given to it. My attitude now is more like "oh yeah, there is that one again."
This may be entirely coincidental, but I attributed my resourcefulness in resolving my nightmare to my attendance in the workshop. I thought I had acquired some dream interpretation power by attention to the French lady, or perhaps through psychic osmosis from being in her presence for the two days. Our discussion of my low gravity spiderman jungle gym dream seemed nonsensical at the time, but I may have gotten just a little tiny something from that discussion to empower me to resolve the nightmare. Or, perhaps the timing was merely a coincidence. It is an oddly pleasant puzzle I expect to never solve.
I have another one. This is not as bad as the packing one, but it is a close second in both power and in frequency. Lost in a labyrinth. I know exactly where I want to go, but each of the innumerable paths I choose to take is just a tiny bit off. A few months after meeting the French lady, she was back off to France, but I took another workshop with one of her students. I told her about the work with the French lady, and the resolution of the packing nightmare. This pleased the student greatly. I asked her if she wanted to have a go at the labyrinth nightmare. Oh yes.
We worked on that sucker for about two hours. The group leader was engaged heavy, and everybody in the workshop was enthralled. It was the most energy I ever put into a hot seat spot in my life. The outcome was empty. I felt I learned nothing. I learned nothing about the labyrinth. And the nightmare continued to bug the hell out of me for several years after.
Then after several intervening years I read Carl Jung's dream Seminar. This is a formidable work. Jung's writing is very detailed and poorly organized and it is definitely not for everybody. Most of the book seems like utter crap, but there were a couple noteworthy details. The first is that Packing is one of the first dreams and Labyrinth comes right after it. The second is what seems to be an offhand comment by Jung: patients often experience their parents' nightmares. I read that comment, and immediately my labyrinth was unveiled: packing is actually my Mom's, and the labyrinth is actually my Dad's.
One of these days I suppose I will discover my own.
I once participated in a two day workshop with this lady, which was unforgettable. She was in her eighties at the time and filled the entire room (about twenty of us) with a buzz of her energy. One thing which she told us, which I may never forget as long as I live: it is always some one thing.
By "it" she meant an originating trauma for an ongoing neurosis, and she meant that it was always one from a very short list:
Someone was killed.
Someone was a killer.
Someone was raped.
Someone was a rapist.
Someone was a drunk or a gambler and squandered all the family's money.
&c.
This is a truism to some but not all workers. She may be overly influenced by her own experience as a Frenchwoman who lived through the German occupation. There was a bizarre tone to her voice when she described the experience of some French women and some German soldiers.
After all of the anxious people with trauma had taken their turn on the hot seat, she invited lighter topics. She inquired about dreams. I was not doing any intense dream work at the time, but I did happen to recall what I was dreaming just before waking that morning. I volunteered my dream. It was a low-gravity, spiderman, jungle gym thing. Typical for me, and even mundane, but it survived into my waking consciousness, so I offered it up. We talked for about thirty minutes. She asked about my family. She speculated, and suggested hypothetical connections between my dream content and my real world psychological life. It was entertaining (ultimately my main motivation for attending T groups is that I find them endlessly entertaining), but as far as insightful psychology goes, it seemed useless.
Then the workshop was over with (or so I thought) a little bit later, and that was it. Very interesting, but merely a diversion to spice up my otherwise dull weekend. A couple of days later I once again had the nightmare. Many people have these. One particular scenario which haunts too many of our nights which involves a tortuous inescapable problem which seems to go on forever and can even wreck a night's sleep. Running after something you cannot ever catch; trapped by a hideous monster or frightful animal--snakes, spiders, whatnot; falling; being shot or stabbed. We could make a very long list.
Mine is packing. Trying to get everything into a suitcase or a backpack. I have had this nightmare my entire life, and it once had the power to ruin me for an entire following day. I would sometimes wake up not rested, aching, nauseous, or dizzy. This time was different, though. I woke up from the nightmare, and I suddenly had an insight to the moment when that nightmare image entered my life. That was an Aha! And Eureka! moment for me. The nightmare has not gone away, and it remains as disturbing in the moment as it ever was. It does not make me physically ill any longer; it has lost that power over me I had previously given to it. My attitude now is more like "oh yeah, there is that one again."
This may be entirely coincidental, but I attributed my resourcefulness in resolving my nightmare to my attendance in the workshop. I thought I had acquired some dream interpretation power by attention to the French lady, or perhaps through psychic osmosis from being in her presence for the two days. Our discussion of my low gravity spiderman jungle gym dream seemed nonsensical at the time, but I may have gotten just a little tiny something from that discussion to empower me to resolve the nightmare. Or, perhaps the timing was merely a coincidence. It is an oddly pleasant puzzle I expect to never solve.
I have another one. This is not as bad as the packing one, but it is a close second in both power and in frequency. Lost in a labyrinth. I know exactly where I want to go, but each of the innumerable paths I choose to take is just a tiny bit off. A few months after meeting the French lady, she was back off to France, but I took another workshop with one of her students. I told her about the work with the French lady, and the resolution of the packing nightmare. This pleased the student greatly. I asked her if she wanted to have a go at the labyrinth nightmare. Oh yes.
We worked on that sucker for about two hours. The group leader was engaged heavy, and everybody in the workshop was enthralled. It was the most energy I ever put into a hot seat spot in my life. The outcome was empty. I felt I learned nothing. I learned nothing about the labyrinth. And the nightmare continued to bug the hell out of me for several years after.
Then after several intervening years I read Carl Jung's dream Seminar. This is a formidable work. Jung's writing is very detailed and poorly organized and it is definitely not for everybody. Most of the book seems like utter crap, but there were a couple noteworthy details. The first is that Packing is one of the first dreams and Labyrinth comes right after it. The second is what seems to be an offhand comment by Jung: patients often experience their parents' nightmares. I read that comment, and immediately my labyrinth was unveiled: packing is actually my Mom's, and the labyrinth is actually my Dad's.
One of these days I suppose I will discover my own.
14 December 2010
The two chair exercise
I found out when I went googling for source material that this also is known as the empty chair exercise.
This is an excellent psychotherapy technique which does not require any supervision. It can be as short as fifteen minutes and requires very little--a quiet space and two chairs. The purpose is to clarify one's autobiography and troubling personal relations. Place two chairs opposite each other three to eight feet apart. Sit down in one chair. Speak in the first person for a few minutes, as the other person in the memory you are seeking some insight or clarity on.
You don't need to be precisely accurate or explicit about the troubling issue at this point. Just a couple items such as one would say in a social introduction: "I am so-and-so; from where about; do such-and-such for a living; married to whosit's, &c."
Switch chairs. Try and visualize the person of your inquiry sitting in the other chair. Make small talk, such as one would say in a social introduction, addressed to the subject of the exercise. Meditate for a couple of minutes on the situation. Try and imagine it as real as you possible can. Then, after a couple of minutes of the meditation, speak to the other chair calm and sincere about the issue which troubles you. If the issue troubles you greatly, go slowly.
Switch chairs again. Try and imagine how the other person would respond to your conversation if they were there. Speak the words as you imagine they would speak them, while imagining that you are there in the second chair, attending to them. Switch back and forth between the two viewpoints and the two chairs until the exercise naturally runs out of new things to imagine and to say. Practice empathy, and assume goodwill in the imagined presence and they are practicing empathy too, even if your real-life experience with the real person was that they had generally poor empathy skills.
That is all there is to it. My knowledge of the history of this technique is consistent with the information in the Psychology Today article I linked to above. It was invented by the therapist Fredrich (Fritz) Perls, who became a psychotherapist after a first career as a theater director. I have a couple of Acting texts which use a number of Perls' therapy techniques as drama exercises for aspiring and even professional actors, an example of cross disciplinary synergy for the textbooks.
I have a short document of applying this technique in my recent experience in this post. I briefly looked at the other nine of the Psychology Today's ten cool interventions and this is the only one that I can heartily endorse.
This is an excellent psychotherapy technique which does not require any supervision. It can be as short as fifteen minutes and requires very little--a quiet space and two chairs. The purpose is to clarify one's autobiography and troubling personal relations. Place two chairs opposite each other three to eight feet apart. Sit down in one chair. Speak in the first person for a few minutes, as the other person in the memory you are seeking some insight or clarity on.
You don't need to be precisely accurate or explicit about the troubling issue at this point. Just a couple items such as one would say in a social introduction: "I am so-and-so; from where about; do such-and-such for a living; married to whosit's, &c."
Switch chairs. Try and visualize the person of your inquiry sitting in the other chair. Make small talk, such as one would say in a social introduction, addressed to the subject of the exercise. Meditate for a couple of minutes on the situation. Try and imagine it as real as you possible can. Then, after a couple of minutes of the meditation, speak to the other chair calm and sincere about the issue which troubles you. If the issue troubles you greatly, go slowly.
Switch chairs again. Try and imagine how the other person would respond to your conversation if they were there. Speak the words as you imagine they would speak them, while imagining that you are there in the second chair, attending to them. Switch back and forth between the two viewpoints and the two chairs until the exercise naturally runs out of new things to imagine and to say. Practice empathy, and assume goodwill in the imagined presence and they are practicing empathy too, even if your real-life experience with the real person was that they had generally poor empathy skills.
That is all there is to it. My knowledge of the history of this technique is consistent with the information in the Psychology Today article I linked to above. It was invented by the therapist Fredrich (Fritz) Perls, who became a psychotherapist after a first career as a theater director. I have a couple of Acting texts which use a number of Perls' therapy techniques as drama exercises for aspiring and even professional actors, an example of cross disciplinary synergy for the textbooks.
I have a short document of applying this technique in my recent experience in this post. I briefly looked at the other nine of the Psychology Today's ten cool interventions and this is the only one that I can heartily endorse.
24 November 2010
From the Human Potential Movement Trick Bag
Suppose you have a room filled with people who do not know each other and you are going to teach them some material which requires close cooperation and clear communication. How do you begin? How do you spark a connection between these people?
An exercise that I have seen used a few times is simple and takes only a few minutes. First, pair them off; have them introduce their self to the person sitting in the next chair if they have not already done so. Second, have them write a very short autobiography--no less than six and no more than ten high and low points in their life story, focused upon the question of what events were influential in development of the person they are today. Third, partners share one high point and one low point. This can all be done in as little as ten minutes.
If the worst thing that ever happened to you was confinement and torture as a war prisoner, this might be excessively traumatic to relive with a complete stranger. You probably do not want to go overboard. You do not have to share the lowest (or highest) points in the autobiography, but it is necessary to share something. It is like a scientific fact that the process of connecting with other people requires the sharing of some intimate fact.
This group exercise was popularized by the folks involved in the Human Potential Movement, from that society of creativity and anarchy that was California in the 1960's. You can find out more details about this and many similar exercises in the short book by Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey. This exercise is on page 69 of that book. The book is short, but if you do all the exercises in the book you can easily use up a month of free time. Sam Keen is practically the poster boy for the Human Potential Movement, having been an editor for Psychology Today magazine for many years.
I have performed my own variation on this theme, and achieved a result that was surprising to me. The first step was a construction of four idealized selves: Craig the poet, Craig the philosopher, Craig the psychologist, and Craig the theologian. (An example of this construction may be seen in the recent items that I have written on my blog here, which have alternating labels of literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics.) These are hobbies. The closest thing I have to any formal training in these fields is some college course work. I have never received a paycheck for any of my activities.
After making a few notes mixing fact and fantasy, I examined my factual autobiography and extracted five high points and five low points--events in my real life which were influential in the development of the four idealized individuals. This is a good bit of data, and it took more than a couple of hours to get it all down on paper. Four selves and forty events. There was a very small amount of overlap where one event might have shown up on two or even three of the time lines. Now, here is the surprise. I went back and compared it to my real one time line autobiography, and almost none of these forty events are on there. The best thing that ever happened to me? Gone. The worst thing that ever happened to me? Vanished. For the more than the couple of hours it took me to do this exercise, those events did not even exist for all practical purposes.
An exercise that I have seen used a few times is simple and takes only a few minutes. First, pair them off; have them introduce their self to the person sitting in the next chair if they have not already done so. Second, have them write a very short autobiography--no less than six and no more than ten high and low points in their life story, focused upon the question of what events were influential in development of the person they are today. Third, partners share one high point and one low point. This can all be done in as little as ten minutes.
If the worst thing that ever happened to you was confinement and torture as a war prisoner, this might be excessively traumatic to relive with a complete stranger. You probably do not want to go overboard. You do not have to share the lowest (or highest) points in the autobiography, but it is necessary to share something. It is like a scientific fact that the process of connecting with other people requires the sharing of some intimate fact.
This group exercise was popularized by the folks involved in the Human Potential Movement, from that society of creativity and anarchy that was California in the 1960's. You can find out more details about this and many similar exercises in the short book by Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey. This exercise is on page 69 of that book. The book is short, but if you do all the exercises in the book you can easily use up a month of free time. Sam Keen is practically the poster boy for the Human Potential Movement, having been an editor for Psychology Today magazine for many years.
I have performed my own variation on this theme, and achieved a result that was surprising to me. The first step was a construction of four idealized selves: Craig the poet, Craig the philosopher, Craig the psychologist, and Craig the theologian. (An example of this construction may be seen in the recent items that I have written on my blog here, which have alternating labels of literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics.) These are hobbies. The closest thing I have to any formal training in these fields is some college course work. I have never received a paycheck for any of my activities.
After making a few notes mixing fact and fantasy, I examined my factual autobiography and extracted five high points and five low points--events in my real life which were influential in the development of the four idealized individuals. This is a good bit of data, and it took more than a couple of hours to get it all down on paper. Four selves and forty events. There was a very small amount of overlap where one event might have shown up on two or even three of the time lines. Now, here is the surprise. I went back and compared it to my real one time line autobiography, and almost none of these forty events are on there. The best thing that ever happened to me? Gone. The worst thing that ever happened to me? Vanished. For the more than the couple of hours it took me to do this exercise, those events did not even exist for all practical purposes.
04 November 2010
Group psychotherapy at a WalMart price-point
On the 28th of August I had the opportunity to attend a conference at the University of Saint Thomas, "Religion, Mental Health, and the Search for Meaning: Bridging the Gaps". I already made one (metaphysics) post out of my notes on the conference. This was much easier than making a psychology post. I am reminded of an Irish proverb about a guy who is asked if he would like some water in his whiskey and replies, "When I drinks water, I drinks water, and when I drinks whiskey, I drinks whiskey."
Psychology is formally atheistic, you see. They have professional standards and practice boards and ethics norms and there is no evidence for God so what could any psychology committee conceivably do with such an idea? So there is a category error and logic fallacy for the psychologists involved in making such a conference. There were a couple interesting comments sprinkled through the psychology part of the conference, but mostly it was futile struggle.
The single most interesting point in this regard to me was in a conversation during a break with a stranger. We were discussing one of the points which the theology professor discussed in the morning presentation: Joel Osteen's Lakeview Church. The wikipedia page says this is the largest church in the country. Their current facility used to be the sports arena that the Houston Rockets basketball team played in before the new and improved and larger Toyota Center. Osteen is also a television star with his own shows and is an author of best-selling books.
The theology professor sees all this as a point of ridicule. Osteen's religion could be described as Christianity stripped of all theological complications. If Catholocism is a fancy French pastry, Osteen's religion is a Hostess twinkie. Osteen does not go into the twisted labyrinths of original sin, the trinity, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Job, the Parable of ten talents, gnashing of teeth, nothing that would require years of detailed study and careful contemplation to get to the bottom of it. The theology professor sees a religion devoid of content. Joel Osteen sees himself as promoting a religion devoid of confusing and unnecessary detail. God is good. The world is beautiful. Do not trouble yourself and be grateful and be happy.
It turns out the stranger I met and spoke with during the conference break was a member of the Lakewood Church. We had a short but animated discussion of the theology professor's ridicule and my opinion on the matter. The stranger was a psychotherapist. (The conference organizers provided Texas Continuing Education credit which the state licensing board requires therapists to accrue to maintain their practice license--almost everybody at the conference was a professional therapist.) I used a metaphor which my psychotherapist partner liked greatly. I said, "if they sold group psychotherapy in a carton in the pharmacy section at WalMart, it would bear a strong resemblence to what goes on at Joel Osteen's Lakeview Church".
I did not explain, but I feel fairly certain he knew exactly what I was talking about. What would go into this hypothetical carton of group psychotherapy they might sell in the pharmacy section of WalMart?
1.) Your psycho quality of life and your mental health hygeine are mainly influenced by the quality of your relationships.
2.) Be thankful for your friends and relatives and express this to them.
3.) Be generous to your friends and relatives.
4.) Ask your friends and relatives for help when you need it--they will usually be glad to help you and sorry when they cannot.
5.) That is about it. If you have more energy for mental health hygeine maintenence you can fill in with Golden Rule and Ten Commandments and meditation (or prayer).
$19.95 at WalMart or the Lakeview Church and totally free here on my blog!
Psychology is formally atheistic, you see. They have professional standards and practice boards and ethics norms and there is no evidence for God so what could any psychology committee conceivably do with such an idea? So there is a category error and logic fallacy for the psychologists involved in making such a conference. There were a couple interesting comments sprinkled through the psychology part of the conference, but mostly it was futile struggle.
The single most interesting point in this regard to me was in a conversation during a break with a stranger. We were discussing one of the points which the theology professor discussed in the morning presentation: Joel Osteen's Lakeview Church. The wikipedia page says this is the largest church in the country. Their current facility used to be the sports arena that the Houston Rockets basketball team played in before the new and improved and larger Toyota Center. Osteen is also a television star with his own shows and is an author of best-selling books.
The theology professor sees all this as a point of ridicule. Osteen's religion could be described as Christianity stripped of all theological complications. If Catholocism is a fancy French pastry, Osteen's religion is a Hostess twinkie. Osteen does not go into the twisted labyrinths of original sin, the trinity, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Job, the Parable of ten talents, gnashing of teeth, nothing that would require years of detailed study and careful contemplation to get to the bottom of it. The theology professor sees a religion devoid of content. Joel Osteen sees himself as promoting a religion devoid of confusing and unnecessary detail. God is good. The world is beautiful. Do not trouble yourself and be grateful and be happy.
It turns out the stranger I met and spoke with during the conference break was a member of the Lakewood Church. We had a short but animated discussion of the theology professor's ridicule and my opinion on the matter. The stranger was a psychotherapist. (The conference organizers provided Texas Continuing Education credit which the state licensing board requires therapists to accrue to maintain their practice license--almost everybody at the conference was a professional therapist.) I used a metaphor which my psychotherapist partner liked greatly. I said, "if they sold group psychotherapy in a carton in the pharmacy section at WalMart, it would bear a strong resemblence to what goes on at Joel Osteen's Lakeview Church".
I did not explain, but I feel fairly certain he knew exactly what I was talking about. What would go into this hypothetical carton of group psychotherapy they might sell in the pharmacy section of WalMart?
1.) Your psycho quality of life and your mental health hygeine are mainly influenced by the quality of your relationships.
2.) Be thankful for your friends and relatives and express this to them.
3.) Be generous to your friends and relatives.
4.) Ask your friends and relatives for help when you need it--they will usually be glad to help you and sorry when they cannot.
5.) That is about it. If you have more energy for mental health hygeine maintenence you can fill in with Golden Rule and Ten Commandments and meditation (or prayer).
$19.95 at WalMart or the Lakeview Church and totally free here on my blog!
15 October 2010
Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics III
(Part 3 of 3. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.)
Distribution of performance across the sample and the replacement-level player
The second biggest fallacy among baseball personnel managers, according to Bill James, is they do not understand how ability is distributed amongst professional baseball players. He defines the concept of replacement level player, and insists the vast majority of the fellows working in the Major Leagues are easily, quickly, replaceable. His reasoning is simple.
If you have a random selection of humans and measure nearly any measurable trait--height, weight, speed, strength, reflex time--the frequency plot will be the familiar bell shape Gaussian curve. People playing baseball professionally are an extreme non-random sample. 98% of the left-hand portion of the curve is gone, because none of those people have the physical requirements to get employment playing baseball. The resulting distribution is a truncated Gaussian distribution, with few at the highest levels, and the vast majority of participants of nearly indistinguishable quality. When performance is creamed at stage after stage after stage, little league to high school to college to minor leagues to the majors, almost all the remaining players are excellent and interchangeable.
If you are managing a corporation and you only hire candidates with golden resumes you have a truncated Gaussian distribution of talent. If in your evaluation process you shove those people into a Gaussian distribution, Bill James says you are doing it totally wrong. Another common mistake is that managers think there is something magical about "major league" talent, that some guys have it (as Thomas Wolfe referred to the "right stuff") and some do not, and they mislabel players who could help them win baseball games as not having it, due to the circumstantial variations of where the players have found themselves employed up until now. Organizations that hire top talent and pay high salaries have far more options than they generally presume. Nearly every single person working for your company is easily replaceable.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about Benoit Mandelbrot and his early preoccupation with financial market data. His questioner thought finance was a fuzzy science and hard scientific data really ought to be much more attractive to his scientific temperament. Mandelbrot explained that the great feature of studying financial data was that there was so much of it, and it was thus endlessly fascinating. Many statisticians have a similar fondness for baseball statistics. It is reliably recorded, unambiguous in definition, and there is so much of it. Many subtle statistics results are best explained in the context of baseball statistics, and there may be unknown statistical theorems sitting in the archives waiting to be extracted by clever statisticians. The wikipedia page on Stein's paradox (first published by Charles Stein in 1956) has a reference to a well-known (well-known to baseball statisticians, anyway) article from the May 1977 issue of Scientific American using baseball statistics to illustrate Stein's paradox.
After my article was nearly finished, I stumbled upon this "news" in the New York Times Sports section:
Sniffing .300, Hitters Hunker Down on Last Chances. (Here they are presenting research from a couple of economists from U. Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. The academic publication is here.)
The preceding should be of interest to anybody who is interested in the subjects of human achievement, psychometry and baseball statistics. My own interest is narrower and the lesson I personally draw is a hybrid from the sequence of lessons here. I have an ambitious scope for the company I am building. Ten thousand hours is close to the limit I am choosing for myself as the point when I will write off these lessons and losses (if they be) and go back to rejoin the American corporation employment market.
Distribution of performance across the sample and the replacement-level player
The second biggest fallacy among baseball personnel managers, according to Bill James, is they do not understand how ability is distributed amongst professional baseball players. He defines the concept of replacement level player, and insists the vast majority of the fellows working in the Major Leagues are easily, quickly, replaceable. His reasoning is simple.
If you have a random selection of humans and measure nearly any measurable trait--height, weight, speed, strength, reflex time--the frequency plot will be the familiar bell shape Gaussian curve. People playing baseball professionally are an extreme non-random sample. 98% of the left-hand portion of the curve is gone, because none of those people have the physical requirements to get employment playing baseball. The resulting distribution is a truncated Gaussian distribution, with few at the highest levels, and the vast majority of participants of nearly indistinguishable quality. When performance is creamed at stage after stage after stage, little league to high school to college to minor leagues to the majors, almost all the remaining players are excellent and interchangeable.
If you are managing a corporation and you only hire candidates with golden resumes you have a truncated Gaussian distribution of talent. If in your evaluation process you shove those people into a Gaussian distribution, Bill James says you are doing it totally wrong. Another common mistake is that managers think there is something magical about "major league" talent, that some guys have it (as Thomas Wolfe referred to the "right stuff") and some do not, and they mislabel players who could help them win baseball games as not having it, due to the circumstantial variations of where the players have found themselves employed up until now. Organizations that hire top talent and pay high salaries have far more options than they generally presume. Nearly every single person working for your company is easily replaceable.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about Benoit Mandelbrot and his early preoccupation with financial market data. His questioner thought finance was a fuzzy science and hard scientific data really ought to be much more attractive to his scientific temperament. Mandelbrot explained that the great feature of studying financial data was that there was so much of it, and it was thus endlessly fascinating. Many statisticians have a similar fondness for baseball statistics. It is reliably recorded, unambiguous in definition, and there is so much of it. Many subtle statistics results are best explained in the context of baseball statistics, and there may be unknown statistical theorems sitting in the archives waiting to be extracted by clever statisticians. The wikipedia page on Stein's paradox (first published by Charles Stein in 1956) has a reference to a well-known (well-known to baseball statisticians, anyway) article from the May 1977 issue of Scientific American using baseball statistics to illustrate Stein's paradox.
After my article was nearly finished, I stumbled upon this "news" in the New York Times Sports section:
Sniffing .300, Hitters Hunker Down on Last Chances. (Here they are presenting research from a couple of economists from U. Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. The academic publication is here.)
The preceding should be of interest to anybody who is interested in the subjects of human achievement, psychometry and baseball statistics. My own interest is narrower and the lesson I personally draw is a hybrid from the sequence of lessons here. I have an ambitious scope for the company I am building. Ten thousand hours is close to the limit I am choosing for myself as the point when I will write off these lessons and losses (if they be) and go back to rejoin the American corporation employment market.
25 September 2010
Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics II
(This is part 2 of 3. Part 1 is here. Part 3 to follow.)
Today we examine learning curves and estimated time for mastery. To continue with the Lisp example, assuming you want to master Lisp, how much of your time should you plan to allocate for the task? K. Anders Ericson is the author of the relevant research findings. At a crude level of approximation, something like that takes ten thousand hours. This is a result I was first exposed to many years ago in the context of Buddhist meditation, in an Esalen conference presented by Helen Palmer (mostly known for her work on the Eneagram). She reported that to become skilled at Zen meditation requires ten thousand hours of practice. In the University of Wisconsin brain imaging meditation study , the subjects were Tibetan monks who had all logged a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice. The ten thousand hours of practice requirement was also reported popularly by Malcom Gladwell in his best-selling book Outliers. Another take on this: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Ten thousand hours of 40-hour-weeks is five years, not ten; the number is imprecise, but the idea is consistent that ambitious projects take a daunting amount of time.
One of my dance teachers was fond of reminding me that practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice can make you perfect. For most of us even that is an exaggeration. I think we can reliably predict that ten thousand hours of very good practice will make you very good if you first possess an average amount of raw aptitude.
Baseball players display the 10 000 hour rule, or something very close to it, in their development. This is quantified in their statistics, and codified in the language of "rookie mistake". When you are the new guy, that is nearly always an acceptable excuse for the errors we all inevitably make in the beginning. One of the more popular verses in the I Ching is hexagram three "Difficulty at the beginning".
Today we examine learning curves and estimated time for mastery. To continue with the Lisp example, assuming you want to master Lisp, how much of your time should you plan to allocate for the task? K. Anders Ericson is the author of the relevant research findings. At a crude level of approximation, something like that takes ten thousand hours. This is a result I was first exposed to many years ago in the context of Buddhist meditation, in an Esalen conference presented by Helen Palmer (mostly known for her work on the Eneagram). She reported that to become skilled at Zen meditation requires ten thousand hours of practice. In the University of Wisconsin brain imaging meditation study , the subjects were Tibetan monks who had all logged a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice. The ten thousand hours of practice requirement was also reported popularly by Malcom Gladwell in his best-selling book Outliers. Another take on this: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Ten thousand hours of 40-hour-weeks is five years, not ten; the number is imprecise, but the idea is consistent that ambitious projects take a daunting amount of time.
One of my dance teachers was fond of reminding me that practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice can make you perfect. For most of us even that is an exaggeration. I think we can reliably predict that ten thousand hours of very good practice will make you very good if you first possess an average amount of raw aptitude.
Baseball players display the 10 000 hour rule, or something very close to it, in their development. This is quantified in their statistics, and codified in the language of "rookie mistake". When you are the new guy, that is nearly always an acceptable excuse for the errors we all inevitably make in the beginning. One of the more popular verses in the I Ching is hexagram three "Difficulty at the beginning".
05 September 2010
Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics I
This is the first in a series of three posts on the topic of human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics. In the process of writing, it outgrew single-post size.
Human ambition for achievement in modest measure gives meaning to our lives, unless one is an existentialist pessimist like Schopenhauer who taught that life with all its suffering and cruelty simply should not be. Psychologists study our achievements under a number of different descriptions--testing for IQ, motivation, creativity, others. As part of my current career transition, I have been examining my own goals closely, and have recently read a fair amount on these topics which are variable in their evidence.
A useful collection of numerical data on the subject of human performance is the collection of Major League Baseball player performance statistics--the batting averages, number home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage--of the many thousands of participants in the hundred years since detailed statistical records have been kept and studied by the players, journalists, and fans of the sport. The advantage of examining issues like these from the angle of Major League Baseball player performance statistics is the enormous sample size of accurately measured and archived data.
The current senior authority in this field is Bill James, who now works for the Boston Red Sox; for the first twenty-five years of his activity as a baseball statistician James was not employed by any of the teams. It took him a long time to find a hearing for his views on the inside of the industry, although the fans started buying his books as soon as he began writing them.
In one of the early editions of his Baseball Abstract, James discussed the biggest fallacies that managers and executives held regarding the achievements of baseball players. He was adamant about the most obvious misunderstood fact of player performance: it is sharply peaked at age 27 and decreases rapidly, so rapidly that only the very best players were still useful at the age of 35. He was able to observe only one executive that seemed to intuit this--a man whose sole management strategy was to trade everybody over the age of 30 for the best available player under the age of 30 he could acquire.
There is a fair amount of more formal academic research on this issue. It is described in the literature as the field of Age and Achievement. The dean of the psychologists studying Age and Achievement is Dean Simonton. A decent overview of their findings is here. This is a meta-study of hundreds of individual studies. Many fields and many metrics are sampled. There is one repeated finding. Performance starts low at a young age and steadily increases along a curve which bears a resemblance to a Gaussian bell-shaped curve, peaks, and then declines. The decline is not as rapid as the rise (it is not a symmetric bell shape; it is steeply inclining from the left to the peak and gently declining form the peak to the right), but it is inevitably seen everywhere. The age of peak achievement varies, depending on the field. Baseball players peak at 27 (the curves from the psychology publications look exactly like the curve published by Bill James in his Abstract), business executives peak at 60, and physicists peak at age 35. Shakespearian actors peak late and rock stars peak early. These are statistical results and individual outliers abound. You, the individual physicist, may not be over the hill at 40, but this is the way to bet.
My hometown major league baseball franchise, the Houston Astros, recently had this empirical law verified for themselves in real time, and the hard way. They invested the bulk of their payroll budget on three players: Miguel Tejada, Carlos Lee, and Lance Berkman. All three were over the age of 30, i.e., definitely into their decline phase. When their performance declined more rapidly than expected, the team lost many more games than they were planning for. They had a contending team's payroll and big plans, but now Tejada and Berkman are gone and they are rebuilding. In an attempt to cut losses, they traded their (prime-age) star pitcher for young players.
A recent post on Hacker News, Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age, generated 120 comments of heated discussion about institutional age discrimination and the unappreciated value of experience. The consensus view expressed there is young programmers have to advance into management or become unemployable near age 50.
It could perhaps be viewed as a biological ecosystem. We are in an ecosystem. The ecosystem selects for fitness. What is sometimes misunderstood is the ecosystem does not select for absolute fitness, but for fitness specific to a niche. If the available niches in this "ecosystem" are for 40 years-old brains, and there aren't any niches for 50 years-old brains, then some fully fit brains (in an absolute sense) are going to be out of employment opportunities. Faced with a system like this, the job seeker may have to be clever at finding ever narrower niches to squeeze into.
One of the moderators at Hacker News, Paul Graham, is a software venture capitalist. He is accused in the thread of unconcealed age discrimination--that he will not invest in entrepreneurs over 38, and claiming that nobody over 25 will ever learn Lisp. If you are a forty-year-old physicist and you want to learn Lisp and get venture capital funding for your business plan--well, good luck with that!
Human ambition for achievement in modest measure gives meaning to our lives, unless one is an existentialist pessimist like Schopenhauer who taught that life with all its suffering and cruelty simply should not be. Psychologists study our achievements under a number of different descriptions--testing for IQ, motivation, creativity, others. As part of my current career transition, I have been examining my own goals closely, and have recently read a fair amount on these topics which are variable in their evidence.
A useful collection of numerical data on the subject of human performance is the collection of Major League Baseball player performance statistics--the batting averages, number home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage--of the many thousands of participants in the hundred years since detailed statistical records have been kept and studied by the players, journalists, and fans of the sport. The advantage of examining issues like these from the angle of Major League Baseball player performance statistics is the enormous sample size of accurately measured and archived data.
The current senior authority in this field is Bill James, who now works for the Boston Red Sox; for the first twenty-five years of his activity as a baseball statistician James was not employed by any of the teams. It took him a long time to find a hearing for his views on the inside of the industry, although the fans started buying his books as soon as he began writing them.
In one of the early editions of his Baseball Abstract, James discussed the biggest fallacies that managers and executives held regarding the achievements of baseball players. He was adamant about the most obvious misunderstood fact of player performance: it is sharply peaked at age 27 and decreases rapidly, so rapidly that only the very best players were still useful at the age of 35. He was able to observe only one executive that seemed to intuit this--a man whose sole management strategy was to trade everybody over the age of 30 for the best available player under the age of 30 he could acquire.
There is a fair amount of more formal academic research on this issue. It is described in the literature as the field of Age and Achievement. The dean of the psychologists studying Age and Achievement is Dean Simonton. A decent overview of their findings is here. This is a meta-study of hundreds of individual studies. Many fields and many metrics are sampled. There is one repeated finding. Performance starts low at a young age and steadily increases along a curve which bears a resemblance to a Gaussian bell-shaped curve, peaks, and then declines. The decline is not as rapid as the rise (it is not a symmetric bell shape; it is steeply inclining from the left to the peak and gently declining form the peak to the right), but it is inevitably seen everywhere. The age of peak achievement varies, depending on the field. Baseball players peak at 27 (the curves from the psychology publications look exactly like the curve published by Bill James in his Abstract), business executives peak at 60, and physicists peak at age 35. Shakespearian actors peak late and rock stars peak early. These are statistical results and individual outliers abound. You, the individual physicist, may not be over the hill at 40, but this is the way to bet.
My hometown major league baseball franchise, the Houston Astros, recently had this empirical law verified for themselves in real time, and the hard way. They invested the bulk of their payroll budget on three players: Miguel Tejada, Carlos Lee, and Lance Berkman. All three were over the age of 30, i.e., definitely into their decline phase. When their performance declined more rapidly than expected, the team lost many more games than they were planning for. They had a contending team's payroll and big plans, but now Tejada and Berkman are gone and they are rebuilding. In an attempt to cut losses, they traded their (prime-age) star pitcher for young players.
A recent post on Hacker News, Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age, generated 120 comments of heated discussion about institutional age discrimination and the unappreciated value of experience. The consensus view expressed there is young programmers have to advance into management or become unemployable near age 50.
It could perhaps be viewed as a biological ecosystem. We are in an ecosystem. The ecosystem selects for fitness. What is sometimes misunderstood is the ecosystem does not select for absolute fitness, but for fitness specific to a niche. If the available niches in this "ecosystem" are for 40 years-old brains, and there aren't any niches for 50 years-old brains, then some fully fit brains (in an absolute sense) are going to be out of employment opportunities. Faced with a system like this, the job seeker may have to be clever at finding ever narrower niches to squeeze into.
One of the moderators at Hacker News, Paul Graham, is a software venture capitalist. He is accused in the thread of unconcealed age discrimination--that he will not invest in entrepreneurs over 38, and claiming that nobody over 25 will ever learn Lisp. If you are a forty-year-old physicist and you want to learn Lisp and get venture capital funding for your business plan--well, good luck with that!
16 August 2010
Visualizing the Golden Age of Neurolinguistic Programming
On a group weblog where I participate, several people have expressed an interest in Neurolinguistic Programming. This is a subject in which I have done enough work that I feel I can provide a useful introduction and reference list for the beginner or novice. I am not certified as a Master Practitioner, but I have read all the basic texts and taken several seminars; I have taken a number of seminars from people who have personally studied under Richard Bandler and John Grinder, including two seminars led by Steve Andreas, who edited the books where I would recommend anybody begin. These are transcripts of Bandler Grinder seminars:
Frogs into Princes
Trance-formation
Reframing
Using your Brain for a Change.
A more systematic and comprehensive treatment, suitable for beginners is the following:
NLP The new technology of achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.
If you want to get technical and theoretical, the books to read are:
Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder, Delozier, and Bandler.
The structure of magic; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder and Bandler.
The oldest of these books were published in 1975; the newest of the Bandler Grinder books was published in 1985. As near as I can determine, the field has been stale since 1985 and the innovators have stopped innovating. It is a mystery to me how and why this came about; I have some idea about it, but shall leave that for another post.
In addition to the above listed books, in the past week I have spent around three hours reading the Wikipedia artiles on Neurolinguistic Programming topics. The Wikipedia is uneven; if you want plot synopses for Star Trek episodes, the Wikipedia is superb. If you want information about the BP Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, the Wikipedia is useless. For Neurolinguistic Programming, the Wikipedia is quite good. It is better than the average book on the subject you can find today in your local bookstore. Some of those books are lousy. The worst shortcoming I saw (I did not read every single entry) in the Wikipedia collection is the article on Rapport; the rapport techniques are some of the most important results of the original Neurolingustic Programming work.
The hottest Neurolinguistic Programming specialists in the United States in 2010 are the speed-seduction (pickup artist) people. They seem mostly a misapplication of NLP; that is going by what I have seen which is not much of a large group. Surely somebody in that crowd knows what they are doing but I have no idea who it would be. If that seems a little harsh, take a look at that Amazon page linked above and see what else the people who buy that NLP Technology of Achievement book link to.
A difficulty with Neurolinguistic Programming as presented in the Bandler and Grinder seminar transcripts is concentration on visualization. The phobia cure, the reframing technique, the swish pattern, and the rapport tools all work well for visually oriented people. Almost all of the examples in their seminars are dependent on visualization. This is a skill with a large variance and I am not good at it. Or perhaps I am not good at it in the context of communicating with people. Visualizing a geological structure from reflection seismic images or visualizing art work or architectural drawings are visual tasks which seem natural for me, but observing the visual details of humans I am talking to and trying to get along with is not a skill which I have used successfully more than one time in about a hundred hours of practicing.
The one time I did use it successfully was in a T group on hypnosis and the seminar leader and the person I was working with and several of the other participants all applauded my great expertise. It may have been mostly luck, because every subsequent attempt I have made since then was a failure.
The largest benefit I have gotten from my NLP studies is using the Milton model and the Meta model to frame my objective experiences in a subjective fashion to benefit my peace of mind. The Milton model goes from specific and local to general and global. The Meta model goes from general and global to specific and local. The Meta model can be used in an extremely similar manner to the Albert Ellis Rational Emotional Therapy technique where you identify and challenge irrational beliefs. An example of an irrational belief would be something you tell yourself like: "I always get screwed when they calculate the salary raises."
We all have unpleasant experiences that are part of our lives. Lovers reject us. We break bones. People dent our cars when they are not watchful of how they are moving. I could make a long list here. What Albert Ellis invented, and what Bandler and Grinder productively use their Meta model for, is that your own description in your mind of these events can influence wide areas of your life experience. (Ellis invented this as an approach to psychotherapy. The idea goes back to the ancients. It is one of the foundational concepts in Stoicism and Buddhism. It is in the very first verse of the Dhammapada.)
To illustrate this with a personal example, I got laid off on 31 March 2010. This does not mean that I am a loser, unless of course it might, if I repeat to myself in the ensuing four months a few hundred times that I am a loser. Applying the Meta model to this calamitous event means that I describe it to myself with a set of exact specific details. It was near the equinox. The camellias had bloomed but the azaleas had not yet bloomed. There was one man who decided I had not done enough for him lately. There was a small group of people who communicated true friendship and camaraderie to me during their farewells. I got a nice severance package. Suddenly all my time is free time and I get to learn the definition of personal responsibility. And so forth. My layoff is this set of extremely specific facts tied to one point in the four dimensional time and space continuum that we are all traveling through. The Stoics and the Buddhists and Albert Ellis and the Neurolinguistic Programming Meta modelers prescribe to glue it on that one specific point and do not allow it to diffuse to any other elements of my life experience and this enables me to have more peace of mind.
The Milton model is the inverse process, specific to general. Another personal example: yesterday I had a terrific workout. I did 2000 jump ropes, 800 squats, 550 abs, and 250 arms in 102 minutes. At the end of the workout I was completely spent. This delightful happenstance also had specific time and space bounds of narrow limit. Milton Erickson would say spread it around. When I cook my dinner, write this blog post, perform the research for the business I am creating--really any waking moment of the day--I can do any task with energy and determination and tenacity because it is purely subjective and pleasurable to view myself as an energetic and determined and tenacious man. I have one objective data point here to support this view; it is a trivial matter to extrapolate it to hell and back as some are fond of saying in the earth science businesses. This is a formula for bliss consciousness technique. You can use it to go about in the world and radiate loving kindness to every human you encounter. Win friends and influence people!
These are not things you need to study Neurolinguistic Programming specifically in order to learn, but you can find them well presented in those books and seminars. The material they have, which is unique, is the rapport material. This involves careful observation of others: their respiration, skin condition, level of arousal, postures, where their eyes focus, blinking rate, pupil dilation, and many other characteristics of their organism. The seminar transcripts are filled with data such as these and the use to be made of them. In seminar rooms I have seen others use these type observations powerfully for rapid psychotherapy and change work. I myself have had little success using these tools, and sometimes I feel intrusive or creepy or stalky when experimenting with them. I think it would be fascinating to perform a Rupert Sheldrake sense-of-being-stared-at experiment where the staring experimental subject is an expert NLP creep.
Sheldrake's research is controversial. There are more mainstream fields of Psychology research which could also benefit greatly by incorporating the NLP rapport tools. One example is the Paul Ekman micro-expression work which has received much positive attention of late. As far as I know, Ekman and his co-workers look almost solely at facial expressions. The Neurolinguistic Programmers in their rapport examples look at a wide variety of similar phenomena.
I conclude with a quotation from James J. Gibson, late emeritus Psychology researcher:
"I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!"
This post was written in collaboration with my friend Zhanar Suleimenova, who learned her NLP in Novosibirsk with books which have not yet been translated into English.
Frogs into Princes
Trance-formation
Reframing
Using your Brain for a Change.
A more systematic and comprehensive treatment, suitable for beginners is the following:
NLP The new technology of achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.
If you want to get technical and theoretical, the books to read are:
Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder, Delozier, and Bandler.
The structure of magic; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder and Bandler.
The oldest of these books were published in 1975; the newest of the Bandler Grinder books was published in 1985. As near as I can determine, the field has been stale since 1985 and the innovators have stopped innovating. It is a mystery to me how and why this came about; I have some idea about it, but shall leave that for another post.
In addition to the above listed books, in the past week I have spent around three hours reading the Wikipedia artiles on Neurolinguistic Programming topics. The Wikipedia is uneven; if you want plot synopses for Star Trek episodes, the Wikipedia is superb. If you want information about the BP Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, the Wikipedia is useless. For Neurolinguistic Programming, the Wikipedia is quite good. It is better than the average book on the subject you can find today in your local bookstore. Some of those books are lousy. The worst shortcoming I saw (I did not read every single entry) in the Wikipedia collection is the article on Rapport; the rapport techniques are some of the most important results of the original Neurolingustic Programming work.
The hottest Neurolinguistic Programming specialists in the United States in 2010 are the speed-seduction (pickup artist) people. They seem mostly a misapplication of NLP; that is going by what I have seen which is not much of a large group. Surely somebody in that crowd knows what they are doing but I have no idea who it would be. If that seems a little harsh, take a look at that Amazon page linked above and see what else the people who buy that NLP Technology of Achievement book link to.
A difficulty with Neurolinguistic Programming as presented in the Bandler and Grinder seminar transcripts is concentration on visualization. The phobia cure, the reframing technique, the swish pattern, and the rapport tools all work well for visually oriented people. Almost all of the examples in their seminars are dependent on visualization. This is a skill with a large variance and I am not good at it. Or perhaps I am not good at it in the context of communicating with people. Visualizing a geological structure from reflection seismic images or visualizing art work or architectural drawings are visual tasks which seem natural for me, but observing the visual details of humans I am talking to and trying to get along with is not a skill which I have used successfully more than one time in about a hundred hours of practicing.
The one time I did use it successfully was in a T group on hypnosis and the seminar leader and the person I was working with and several of the other participants all applauded my great expertise. It may have been mostly luck, because every subsequent attempt I have made since then was a failure.
The largest benefit I have gotten from my NLP studies is using the Milton model and the Meta model to frame my objective experiences in a subjective fashion to benefit my peace of mind. The Milton model goes from specific and local to general and global. The Meta model goes from general and global to specific and local. The Meta model can be used in an extremely similar manner to the Albert Ellis Rational Emotional Therapy technique where you identify and challenge irrational beliefs. An example of an irrational belief would be something you tell yourself like: "I always get screwed when they calculate the salary raises."
We all have unpleasant experiences that are part of our lives. Lovers reject us. We break bones. People dent our cars when they are not watchful of how they are moving. I could make a long list here. What Albert Ellis invented, and what Bandler and Grinder productively use their Meta model for, is that your own description in your mind of these events can influence wide areas of your life experience. (Ellis invented this as an approach to psychotherapy. The idea goes back to the ancients. It is one of the foundational concepts in Stoicism and Buddhism. It is in the very first verse of the Dhammapada.)
To illustrate this with a personal example, I got laid off on 31 March 2010. This does not mean that I am a loser, unless of course it might, if I repeat to myself in the ensuing four months a few hundred times that I am a loser. Applying the Meta model to this calamitous event means that I describe it to myself with a set of exact specific details. It was near the equinox. The camellias had bloomed but the azaleas had not yet bloomed. There was one man who decided I had not done enough for him lately. There was a small group of people who communicated true friendship and camaraderie to me during their farewells. I got a nice severance package. Suddenly all my time is free time and I get to learn the definition of personal responsibility. And so forth. My layoff is this set of extremely specific facts tied to one point in the four dimensional time and space continuum that we are all traveling through. The Stoics and the Buddhists and Albert Ellis and the Neurolinguistic Programming Meta modelers prescribe to glue it on that one specific point and do not allow it to diffuse to any other elements of my life experience and this enables me to have more peace of mind.
The Milton model is the inverse process, specific to general. Another personal example: yesterday I had a terrific workout. I did 2000 jump ropes, 800 squats, 550 abs, and 250 arms in 102 minutes. At the end of the workout I was completely spent. This delightful happenstance also had specific time and space bounds of narrow limit. Milton Erickson would say spread it around. When I cook my dinner, write this blog post, perform the research for the business I am creating--really any waking moment of the day--I can do any task with energy and determination and tenacity because it is purely subjective and pleasurable to view myself as an energetic and determined and tenacious man. I have one objective data point here to support this view; it is a trivial matter to extrapolate it to hell and back as some are fond of saying in the earth science businesses. This is a formula for bliss consciousness technique. You can use it to go about in the world and radiate loving kindness to every human you encounter. Win friends and influence people!
These are not things you need to study Neurolinguistic Programming specifically in order to learn, but you can find them well presented in those books and seminars. The material they have, which is unique, is the rapport material. This involves careful observation of others: their respiration, skin condition, level of arousal, postures, where their eyes focus, blinking rate, pupil dilation, and many other characteristics of their organism. The seminar transcripts are filled with data such as these and the use to be made of them. In seminar rooms I have seen others use these type observations powerfully for rapid psychotherapy and change work. I myself have had little success using these tools, and sometimes I feel intrusive or creepy or stalky when experimenting with them. I think it would be fascinating to perform a Rupert Sheldrake sense-of-being-stared-at experiment where the staring experimental subject is an expert NLP creep.
Sheldrake's research is controversial. There are more mainstream fields of Psychology research which could also benefit greatly by incorporating the NLP rapport tools. One example is the Paul Ekman micro-expression work which has received much positive attention of late. As far as I know, Ekman and his co-workers look almost solely at facial expressions. The Neurolinguistic Programmers in their rapport examples look at a wide variety of similar phenomena.
I conclude with a quotation from James J. Gibson, late emeritus Psychology researcher:
"I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!"
This post was written in collaboration with my friend Zhanar Suleimenova, who learned her NLP in Novosibirsk with books which have not yet been translated into English.
27 July 2010
What do you want to be when you grow up?
On 29 August 2006 I spent two days at the Johnson O'Connor foundation doing a full aptitude test suite. One of these was invaluable. Almost all of them were interesting. Altogether it was useful, although some of them seemed a little pointless. One of the ones which seemed the most pointless was the area in which I scored the best.
Psychometry is a quicksand swamp of muck. We may have all experienced our eyes glazing over at all the arguments regarding IQ, G factor, The Bell Curve, &c which seems like it was only a short while ago. The Bell Curve was published in 1994. Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye. I am not going to get into that at all, except I will say I am grateful that in my life so far I have had no practical application for this concept of IQ. My high school did a test which I saw the score on, but I do not believe they did anything with the information except collect it. One time a few years back when I was into joining things like the Audobon Society and the Green Party I visited with the Mensa folks. I met with them one time and neither they nor I were interested in more.
Anyway, my aptitude test experience was two days, twenty-seven tests, and an hour to ninety minutes to review the results with a Johnson O'Connor consultant. The most valuable result was the vocabulary test. It was like an SAT or GRE vocabulary test; they give you one word and four alternative closest synonyms and you pick one. As I recall there were fifty words. If you count every one of the four alternatives it was 250 possible words. When I sat down and took that test I was confident that I knew every single one of those 250 words with lexicographic mastery. Apparently I did not because I did not get the top score on that vocabulary test. I got a good score. You might think it a very good score. When I handed the answer sheet to the test supervisor I thought the score was going to come back 99 out of a possible 99 and I was disappointed when I saw the score I did get the next day.
I did not tell them this. But I listened very closely when they were talking to me about vocabulary. The fellow who founded their foundation, O'Connor, was keen on the importance of vocabulary and how critical it is for our success in life. The consultant who I talked to about my test told me that the highest vocabulary scores that they measure are top corporate executives. I have no idea how they classify a person as a top corporate executive. He made it sound like the one common feature of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that all those guys have killer vocabularies. In any event I have spent some time since August of 2006 working on my vocabulary and I consider that part of the test to have been useful, the most useful result of my test experience, and so useful that it alone was worth the time and expense of taking the tests.
One of their memory tests I completely bombed. It was like a "Where's Waldo?" game board with twenty or so images totally unrelated with no context and they gave you two minutes to try and memorize what all was there; then they showed you a bunch of pictures one after the other with one of the images missing and you were supposed to tell them what was missing. All the other memory tests were normal to above normal, but that one was almost my worst result of all the 27 tests.
The test I did the best on was called Foresight. Here is how they tested us for foresight on the day that I took the test. I am seated at a desk with a stack of blank, unlined printer paper, 8.5 X 11 inches, and six sharpened number two pencils. The tester says: "write anything that comes to mind for a few minutes and I will come back and tell you to stop".
I was told I scored the highest anybody ever got on that test in the current archived records of Johnson O'Connor . (The score was the number of words written in the fixed (15 minute?) time frame.) Now see, if I was truly foresighted I would have known that test was of dubious value and I would have conserved energy to display aptitude on something that could make me some money like vocabulary. The thing which I would like to know and forgot to ask is whether they tested me for vocabulary, then foresight; or if they tested me for foresight, then vocabulary. I know for sure the mental energy I was using on the foresight test was higher than on the vocabulary test. When I was taking the vocabulary test I was coasting. I was sure that I knew all that stuff. When I was filling those blank sheets of paper my brain was turning over at Formula One race car revolutions per minute.
I scored one other 99 and it was described as Ideaphoria, lumped together with Foresight in a Category (the twenty seven tests were lumped into twelve categories) labeled "Divergent Thinking". Like the foresight test, I really cannot make the connection of what psychometric protocol could be going on here. This was kind of like the Where's Waldo? memory puzzle, except they laid out playing card size pictures, 8 or 10 or 12 at a time, and I had to sort them into pairs of what is most closely related to what else. I would call this construction of abstract connection, not ideaphoria; and like whatever aptitude I supposedly demonstrated on the foresight test, I don't see see any clear connection to practical application of this clever aptitude I supposedly possess.
Another thing I found useful is they measured color vision, rhythmic sensibility, pitch perception, handedness, footedness, eyedness, and the only thing I knew before taking their tests from this set was that I was right-handed and not color-blind. There is a difference between not being color-blind and having high visual color acuity. This is the old Wittgentstein grue game although it goes back to Heraclitus and before. My blue is your green and your yellow might be my orange. If you do not see crap designs all over the place on the web your visual color acuity might not be too hot. Some of those are painful to look at. The other day I wanted to read a story on the Rolling Stone web site, but I could not bear to look at the page it was so badly done.
Lastly I have some information which might be useful to people who are interested, but not interested enough to pay the Johnson O'Connor fee. Part of the service they provided was a set of booklets called Self-directed search, from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. This is not a measurement of aptitude. It is a measurement of interest; what you would enjoy as opposed to what you would excel at. A few months before I went to Johnson O'Connor, I went to the Houston Community College counseling center and they provided this exact same material for free. And they had a career counselor there who showed me what vocational certificate programs they had available which might interest me--network communications engineer, &c.
Psychometry is a quicksand swamp of muck. We may have all experienced our eyes glazing over at all the arguments regarding IQ, G factor, The Bell Curve, &c which seems like it was only a short while ago. The Bell Curve was published in 1994. Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye. I am not going to get into that at all, except I will say I am grateful that in my life so far I have had no practical application for this concept of IQ. My high school did a test which I saw the score on, but I do not believe they did anything with the information except collect it. One time a few years back when I was into joining things like the Audobon Society and the Green Party I visited with the Mensa folks. I met with them one time and neither they nor I were interested in more.
Anyway, my aptitude test experience was two days, twenty-seven tests, and an hour to ninety minutes to review the results with a Johnson O'Connor consultant. The most valuable result was the vocabulary test. It was like an SAT or GRE vocabulary test; they give you one word and four alternative closest synonyms and you pick one. As I recall there were fifty words. If you count every one of the four alternatives it was 250 possible words. When I sat down and took that test I was confident that I knew every single one of those 250 words with lexicographic mastery. Apparently I did not because I did not get the top score on that vocabulary test. I got a good score. You might think it a very good score. When I handed the answer sheet to the test supervisor I thought the score was going to come back 99 out of a possible 99 and I was disappointed when I saw the score I did get the next day.
I did not tell them this. But I listened very closely when they were talking to me about vocabulary. The fellow who founded their foundation, O'Connor, was keen on the importance of vocabulary and how critical it is for our success in life. The consultant who I talked to about my test told me that the highest vocabulary scores that they measure are top corporate executives. I have no idea how they classify a person as a top corporate executive. He made it sound like the one common feature of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that all those guys have killer vocabularies. In any event I have spent some time since August of 2006 working on my vocabulary and I consider that part of the test to have been useful, the most useful result of my test experience, and so useful that it alone was worth the time and expense of taking the tests.
One of their memory tests I completely bombed. It was like a "Where's Waldo?" game board with twenty or so images totally unrelated with no context and they gave you two minutes to try and memorize what all was there; then they showed you a bunch of pictures one after the other with one of the images missing and you were supposed to tell them what was missing. All the other memory tests were normal to above normal, but that one was almost my worst result of all the 27 tests.
The test I did the best on was called Foresight. Here is how they tested us for foresight on the day that I took the test. I am seated at a desk with a stack of blank, unlined printer paper, 8.5 X 11 inches, and six sharpened number two pencils. The tester says: "write anything that comes to mind for a few minutes and I will come back and tell you to stop".
I was told I scored the highest anybody ever got on that test in the current archived records of Johnson O'Connor . (The score was the number of words written in the fixed (15 minute?) time frame.) Now see, if I was truly foresighted I would have known that test was of dubious value and I would have conserved energy to display aptitude on something that could make me some money like vocabulary. The thing which I would like to know and forgot to ask is whether they tested me for vocabulary, then foresight; or if they tested me for foresight, then vocabulary. I know for sure the mental energy I was using on the foresight test was higher than on the vocabulary test. When I was taking the vocabulary test I was coasting. I was sure that I knew all that stuff. When I was filling those blank sheets of paper my brain was turning over at Formula One race car revolutions per minute.
I scored one other 99 and it was described as Ideaphoria, lumped together with Foresight in a Category (the twenty seven tests were lumped into twelve categories) labeled "Divergent Thinking". Like the foresight test, I really cannot make the connection of what psychometric protocol could be going on here. This was kind of like the Where's Waldo? memory puzzle, except they laid out playing card size pictures, 8 or 10 or 12 at a time, and I had to sort them into pairs of what is most closely related to what else. I would call this construction of abstract connection, not ideaphoria; and like whatever aptitude I supposedly demonstrated on the foresight test, I don't see see any clear connection to practical application of this clever aptitude I supposedly possess.
Another thing I found useful is they measured color vision, rhythmic sensibility, pitch perception, handedness, footedness, eyedness, and the only thing I knew before taking their tests from this set was that I was right-handed and not color-blind. There is a difference between not being color-blind and having high visual color acuity. This is the old Wittgentstein grue game although it goes back to Heraclitus and before. My blue is your green and your yellow might be my orange. If you do not see crap designs all over the place on the web your visual color acuity might not be too hot. Some of those are painful to look at. The other day I wanted to read a story on the Rolling Stone web site, but I could not bear to look at the page it was so badly done.
Lastly I have some information which might be useful to people who are interested, but not interested enough to pay the Johnson O'Connor fee. Part of the service they provided was a set of booklets called Self-directed search, from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. This is not a measurement of aptitude. It is a measurement of interest; what you would enjoy as opposed to what you would excel at. A few months before I went to Johnson O'Connor, I went to the Houston Community College counseling center and they provided this exact same material for free. And they had a career counselor there who showed me what vocational certificate programs they had available which might interest me--network communications engineer, &c.
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About Craig
- Craig
- Houston, Texas, United States
- I have been living in the lovely neighborhood of Spring Branch in the great city of Houston since late in 2005. I started out with the idea of making this blog about my life in this neighborhood. That did not last long. Right now I am posting every five days on the alternating topics of literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. This project has been ongoing since July 27, 2010 and I believe it will continue for at least a few more months.