I forgot what I can do

The comic pages are filled with people trying to figure out a whole new world of layoffs and depression. In Arlo and Janis this week, Arlo finds himself half his normal height and tries to remember being stronger and bigger once.

Depression has many types. Some is sad, some looks like fatigue, or inability to cope, or inability to get started on things, or inability to care much any more about your goals or your self or your dreams. In some types, you seem to feel just fine, but the world seems to have gone wrong.

Regardless, the view from inside a depressed frame of mind, looking out, is totally different than the view from outside, looking in. We become blind to our strengths. We shut out possibilities that are open to us and don't even try.

I've killed a lot of virtual trees posting on various kinds of perspective-based blindness, other ways that views differ that don't involve this strange thing "depression." What is weird about depression is that your view differs from your own view.

Maybe women, with hormonal cycles, are more used to "mood" swings where the very same life goes from one end of the spectrum to the other, and back, on a monthly basis, but this can be a new experience for men, and easy to misinterpret as the world changing, instead of oneself.

All observations of the world are a tangled mixture of observing oneself and the world, and this is important on a personal basis, not just a scientific basis.

"We" are really composite creatures in many ones, one of which is that the two halves of our brain handle different tasks, but are supposed to coordinate with each other and "act as one", which sometimes doesn't work, with the most surprising results.

The extreme case I saw in a course I took one in "Cognitive Neuropsychological Assessment" was a patient who had half his brain temporarily chemically drugged and shut off to locate which side of his brain was managing his speech. Doctors do this sometimes before surgery for severe epilepsy that can't be cured otherwise. If you shut off the side with the speech center, the patient is happily talking away and then abruptly the lights go out. Yep, that's it alright.

But in this video they shut down the other side, so the patient kept talking, but at about half speed, and somewhat slurred. That lasted about 5 minutes, then the drug wore off and the patient returned to normal. Shortly after that, the patient asked when the test was going to begin.

They had missed the fact that half their brain had been shut down. The doctors asked "Didn't you notice anything?" and the patient replied "Not really. Well, I did feel a little tired. "

I am reminded of this every time my daughter wants to drive somewhere at 2 AM and tells me not to worry so, because she's "just a little tired" and she'll be fine.

We are wired so that we can't see what we can't see. I guess the shock was too much, so our brain carefully fills in the gaps in our perceptions with realistic looking cardboard cutouts of reality, or the equivalent. Just like we don't notice that our eyes have a space, about the size of our outstretched hand, that is totally blind. They fill that in for us so we aren't bugged by it. It takes work to find it.

My dad was a stage magician and I used to do a few shows myself, and as a magician you use this blindness to do things, in plain sight, that people won't see. It's a remarkable kind of Ninja invisibility. Kids have very little of it and are very hard audiences, because they actually look at what's going on.

Adults think they are watching and paying attention, but in reality their minds are really overbooked and "multiplexing" or doing 200 things at once, so as soon as the picture around them looks stable, most of their brain goes asleep to that world and goes off, unnoticed, to work on some other anxiety or fantasize about sex or wonder if they remembered to shut off the gas before they left.

This trance-like state is perfect for magicians because, so long as you don't do anything startling, the audience only thinks it is watching you, and, like in the old Mission Impossible TV show, their internal cameras are just watching a life-size snapshot of the bank vault, not the actual bank vault. This effect is amplified tremendously in stage magic by the fact that people, like birds, learned to keep an eye out behind them by staying vaguely aware of whether the flock was happily finding bugs or whatever it is birds find, or startled and suddenly rising up as a group. We have this peripheral vision.

So, any given bird can stop trying to watch for predators and focus its little birdie brain on finding food so long as it lets the other birds around it pick up the load of surveillance, and so long as it sets a hair-trigger that, if the other birds start to fly, it should just go with them on faith.

For live audiences again, this is very powerful, and instead of watching what you are doing, people go into a trance state and simply keep an awareness of whether the people around them are reacting to something or not. If there's no change outside, they can go ahead and ignore the professor and continue dreaming about sex, or whatever. If the mood shifts, they have to snap back to "reality" and listen again, or, more likely, ask the person next to them what just happened. While they're busy fantasizing, their mind is watching the old snapshot, not the live video-feed, and doesn't realize it. It's very seamless, like in that Sandra Bullock movie "Speed", where they faked the video to fool the bad guy while they were actually getting off the bus.

Well, this is not always a good thing that our brains can fake us out so effortlessly. Especially when it starts happening when we are trying to be awake and alert.

I recently found out that our bodies do this too. I hadn't known that. Somewhere in the hazy past I acquired a weight bench and from time to time I had tried to "get in shape", but it never really seemed to "take". I had this bar that my son laughs at with a total weight of 20 pounds, and it always seemed "heavy" to me. Sigh. (He works out of course.)

Finally, a month or so ago, I actually read a book I'd had for a decade on weight training, and realized that this "warm up" thing the body does isn't just getting warm, but actually changes everything. I finally found out that if I did 20 reps of 20 pounds and waited a minute, I could add 5 pounds and then do 20 more lifts of 25 pounds. And if I waited a minute, I could to 20 more of 30 pounds, etc. All the way up to 75 pounds, (hey, don't laugh!) and then work my way back down to 20 pounds, which at that point felt like it was made of plastic or aluminum and I almost hurt myself because it was so easy to lift.

So, this same weight that intimidated me that was so hard to do could be trivial to do, if I had just "warmed up" correctly. Wow. That was news to me. It still surprises me.

It makes me wonder how much else in life that seems almost impossible to do is actually something I could do, if I just warmed up again, whatever that means.

In some ways this "depression" thingie seems to be an advanced version of that same kind of blindness, where almost everything seems "hard" to "impossible", even though, if you could punch through and get started and warmed up, it is actually easy.

Unfortunately, depression likes company, and so the entire audience can become depressed, or, more likely, an entire community, like Detroit, can become collectively clinically depressed. Then this side vision and audience awareness I talked about simply confirms to each person that life is too hard to cope with, so they don't need to actually test it for themselves, and can focus on their own local anxiety about something. It "latches" down, so that, once everyone sort of makes an unspoken decision to be depressed, that fact closes back on itself and forces even those who were optimistic to be depressed.

Then, 20 pounds becomes too much to lift. Life is hard, looks hard, feels hard, even in some cases where it isn't. Outside observers are surprised, then puzzled, then mistakenly write off this depression as "bad people" or "bad attitude", when it is actually a deeper problem with collective perception and feedback and the way humans are wired to observe the world but not observe themselves observing it.

There are outside forces, unfair choices, and other things going on, yes, but it is still important that, in this mix, the way we see the world becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution. We develop self-fulfilling perceptions that things aren't possible, stop trying, reject chances to do them, and our mental or psychological or physical muscles then deteriorate until that becomes true, which we triumphantly announce is what we said from the start.

What to do?

It is a challenge for drugs and therapy to lift an individual out of this state, when the world around them is helping, but there are amazing drugs that can break the spell, and then aren't needed any more.

It is a hundred times the task to do that when the person is surrounded with wet-blankets that drag them back down, quench sparks of enthusiasm or hope, and force them back into the social normal state of collective depression.

This group effect is huge. It affects any group of any race or culture or educational level. The national Institute of Medicine has finally figured out that it is almost impossible to change the behavior of an individual doctor if you don't, at the same time, change the behavior and expectations of their whole small group, or "microsystem", or the doctor will just revert to old ways as soon as you leave.

So it's not just Arlo that can forget what he could be or do, entire groups of people and cultures can get down and forget together what they used to be able to do, and could still do, if they weren't so convinced that they couldn't do it and couldn't rally a serious effort to try.

This doesn't go away by itself. Some cultures, like the Pima indians around Phoenix in Arizona, had their culture shaken by the arrival of the white man's culture, went into depression, and have never recovered. They've gone from the peak-performing, most-advanced, most peaceful native American nation to the far other end, now with the highest depression, suicide, diabetes, obesity, and homicide rates. They fell down and couldn't get back up.

All of us fall down, and sometimes an entire culture or nation falls down, and we need to get very systematic and methodical about the process we use to get back up again when that happens.

It doesn't look possible, so it's like trying to lift a huge limp cat, that seems to keep leaking out of your grasp.

But it is possible. The first thing to realize is that it is a "multi-level" problem, not an "individual" problem, and that it is all tied up in the way people perceive things together and then rearrange their lives to support that perception.

The same forces that hold things together when we're "up" can be the socially cohesive and self-fulfilling forces that hold things down when we're "down."

In the short run, if you can hang out with different people, it can change your life. I'm wondering if this effect is strong enough that hanging out in virtual reality, in something like "Second Life", can change this collective perception framework enough that an individual's own perceptions can get out from under the pile of bodies and rise back to it's own healthy state.

In New York, some urban churches are providing a different world of a different life that can make this transition happen. Organized religion with intensive interactions and fellowship can break this cycle of depression, and in some areas may be the only available option.

Whether it's Detroit or the suburbs of Paris or hospital board-rooms, people are way more captive to the group around them than they realize. But we are all able to downplay almost any factor or person and pay attention to others, so we get to choose, in some senses, who the group "around us" is. If we identify with some world-wide religion, that can become "us". If we are members of a professional society, that can become "us". The Army could become "us". The gang at 121-st street could become "us".

What is important is that the "us" you pick matters. A lot. That may be the only room your "free-will" has to operate, and after that everything else follows.

With world-wide phone service, we can even cherry-pick an "us" of ten people, one per country, around the globe, and interact with that "us" so much every day that it comes to dominate our perceptions of who "we" are, and therefore frames and liberates and answers who "I" am.

But we can't do it "alone." Humans are built to be flock animals, and the effects of that are far too great to ignore. If we pick whatever is on TV or in movies or music as what we surround ourselves with, that becomes our "flock" and those beliefs and attitudes invisibly change what it is even possible for us to see in the world around us - blinding us to some things while magnifying others.

Hint for better living -- try shutting off the TV entirely for a month and see what changes.

Why? Consider what TV does. You are a flock animal. You are very sensitive, in ways you cannot imagine, to what the rest of the flock or herd is doing. If you spend time watching TV, or, worse, watching a big-screen life-size TV, the people on the TV are treated by your brain as being your flock, because, frankly, this part of the brain is not very smart. Fantasy goes in the same place as reality, it doesn't care.

So watching TV gives you a sensation of belonging to a group of people who, at best, completely ignore your existence. You are like the youngest child of a dozen, not chased out of the room, but not paid any attention to whatsoever. Every minute you "watch" TV, you are reinforcing that social "fact" to yourself that you don't matter to these people, they act as if you're not in the room. It's another day's reinforcement of passive helpless hopelessness.

That's not even considering the content of what's on. This is just considering the fact that what's on doesn't reflect your existence, and goes on whether you yell or stand up or sit down or walk out of the room. It's a constant message that you don't exist, and if you did exist, you don't matter. We don't need that message. It is not helping.

Worse than that, it is a downward trapping spiral, another danger we are not built to recognize. The more you watch TV, the less you interact in the world. The less you interact, the more depressed you get. The more depressed you get, the more you stay home and watch TV. For people trapped in this loop or addition, this isn't "entertainment" - it's slow suffocation and the pathway to death from lack of social oxygen.

Maybe the advertisers or networks find that entertaining, but I don't. The proper word would be "entrainment" not "entertainment." ( tr.v. en·trained, en·train·ing, en·trains

1. To pull or draw along after itself. )

This is not directly visible, like the conversation going on in the "other channel" in an audience of a magic show, but it is very real. While the conscious you is busy watching some "action" show with "excitement", the flock-you is watching a different channel, simulcast, that says that absolutely nothing is going on and that you do not matter, they have shunned you, they have turned their backs on you, they are not even noticing you, you are nothing, and they'd be happier if you'd leave or just die or something and free up the chair. The more you care about the people on channel A, the more painful is the silence on channel B. You watch more and more looking and hoping for a human touch, but it never comes.

It's a fascinating analogy to the Ancient Romans, who were killing themselves off with the newly discovered lead pipes they were using to pipe water directly into their homes, that seems like such a good idea at the time. The water was obvious, the lead poisoning was silent and insidious. The delivery mechanism that no one thought much about was toxic.

If you think of people as individuals, there is almost no room for this effect in the model. If you realize as researchers now are doing, that humans have very advanced forms of non-verbal social communication with each other, and are flock or herd animals at heart, then you can see where this impact can occur.

I wonder if we had some kind of electronic wave from space that made all televisions fail to operate for a month what would change. I bet, a lot more than we realize.

It's all in the wrist

Most of us aren't Einstein. People aren't born fluent in reasoning.

There are holes, gaps, blind-spots in our reasoning and perception. Magicians, con-artists, and some advertisers make good use of those to fool us.

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required.)

This makes it hard for us to make good decisions, especially social decisions.

Here is a made up example that illustrates a common problem that doesn't even have a name-- at least I don't know what it's called.

Suppose I walk into 10 rooms and shoot a person in each room, killing them. That would clearly be homicide.
Suppose instead I lock each of them in their room, seal all the doors and windows and cracks, and they die of suffocation. It's still homicide, but getting fuzzier and harder to see.
Now suppose instead of those methods, I release 1000 mosquitoes into each room, and let's say that 900 is sufficient to kill someone by each drinking one drop of their blood. The numbers may be off but you get the idea. At the end of the day, the poeple are all dead, due to my actions, and it is still homicide, but with a bioweaopon, I guess you'd call it.

Now suppose instead that I and 9 buddies each release 100 mosquitoes into each of 10 rooms, so the total is still 1000 per room. The people in the rooms still end up dying, but now no one person has released enough harm to any one person that it was fatal.

In this case, is anyone "guilty" of anything? Under American law, I suspect they are guilty only if someone can prove conspiracy.

Now suppose 10 people who don't know each other and never talk each release 100 mosquitos into each room for different reasons. All ten people in the rooms die.

Suddenly, now, no "crime" remains on the table. The "criminal action" has "gone away", and yet, the victims are all still dead at the end of the day.

Finally, suppose that 1000 mosquitoes are only enough to kill one in 10 people, if that one is unusually sensitive. Most people, 9 out of 10, can easily handle 1000 mosquito bites, say.

So, the 10 perpetrators each release 1000 mosquitos , 100 per room, and only 1 person, predictably, always dies, but we don't know in advance which one of the ten it will be. And let's say that happens every day for a year, so at the end of the year 365 people are dead.

Is anyone guilty of anything?

Here's the problem. On a collective scale, if you stand way back, there is a clear causal relationship between the mosquito release and the deaths. If you get up close, the relationship seems to go away - at least its now become so fuzzy that no jury would convict any individual mosquito-breeder for releasing a sub-lethal dose of 100 mosquitoes that demonstrably, in zero cases, by itself, would ever be fatal.

This becomes like the picture of, uh, Einstein (if you stand close) and Marilyn Monroe (if you stand far away) that I posted at the top and repost here:


If you back up 20 feed (7 meters) and look at that picture, it's the actress Marilyn Monroe.
If you sit at your computer, it's a picture of Alfred Einstein, the scientist.

Anyway, the problem described is an analogy to many of the problems Public Health has to deal with, and problems that large cities or nations have to deal with on a regular basis.

There is a hole, a gap, a blind-spot in our reasoning and perception, for this kind of distributed action that "goes away" when seen close up, but is clearly there when seen from "far away."

Or, in the case of the poor people who are stuck in urban ghettos, this kind of problem is very real when they are the ones dying, and the frustration is very real when they can't figure out how to make their case that the killing should stop.

Worse, it's not just the jury that won't convict anyone - it's that the perpetrators may individually each feel sincerely that they are not doing any significant harm and they can't figure out what the fuss is about. Sadly, the dim perception of a possible problem to a possible hypothetical victim has far less weight than the very clear perception of very clear profit from some enterprise such as selling cigarettes, or liquor, or guns, or predatory check-cashing, or predatory home-mortgages, etc.

In the suburbs, these don't add up to a lethal concentration, and the reported problems from the slums are interpreted as "something wrong with the people who chose to live there."

From the slums, the question is "Why do they keep doing this to us?"

Outrage, violence, or riots are ineffective at making the case. They generate a lot of attention, but then no one (from outside) can see what everyone (inside) is so excitedly pointing at.

On an international scale, I have to wonder how much of the violent resistance to the US and perception of the US as "the great Satan" is similar -- a protest over policies and actions that arrive diffusely but are experienced in concentrated form by the victims.

We need, as a planet, as humanity, better tools and better words for this sort of thing, so we can discuss it intelligently. This is one kind of "system effect" with profound implications and "unintended consequences" of the worst kind.

It is not unknowable. The problem is very clear, mathematically. It is easy to simulate it and show the effect, and, like the Einstein/Monroe picture, show how different it looks from each viewing location (inside and outside, in that case.)

After studying this, I think this effect is remarkably widespread, because it evades our perception. It causes management and labor to battle. It causes commerce and the poor to be in conflict. It causes the US and poor nations to be in conflict.

It seems like we should make a priority funding project to get researchers in such things to figure out how to make this visible, tangible, perceivable to everyone so we can resolve the abuse/oppression/exploitation cases that are accidental and inadvertent and unintentional.

Intentional abuse is a different story, but Systems Thinking shows that many problems are actually unintentional and completely unrealized and effectively impossible to view in the direct sense we normally see things. So, let's lower the conflict temperature by resolving the unintentional ones first, that we may all agree on if we all could simply see.