This morning I saw a woman in her 70s with flowers face painted on her face. I overheard that she had a face-painting birthday party for her grandchild on the weekend, and decided to keep the flowers since they were so cheerful. It felt daring and of course I loved it. It also reminded me of the many beige and brown outfits I saw during my travels, something considered elegant and flattering and “feminine”, when really few people can pull it off. Mostly it just makes you somewhat invisible (look at the cover photo….). I so often think about Hannah Arendt donning her lover Heidegger’s favorite brown dress during a reunion after the war. Brown? The color of hamsters and Nazis? Having kept it in the first place?

Paula Becker Modersohn – Old Woman – in her museum in Bremen – the first ever museum built for a female painter!

During a conversation later in the morning a friend and I mused about why women always take themselves back, rather than making themselves visible. in a less literal way as well. Or shall we say “in the linguistic way.” We often devalue ourselves in advance, using hesitating language.

Below is a link to a rather self-helpish, if that’s a word, tutorial, but one that nicely summarizes what psychologists have shown as typically female speech patterns. I copied the most important points for your perusal.

I thought this portrait at the Whitney by John Wilde of his wife Helen (1950) called Work Reconsiderd #1 nicely points the way:

1. Drop the “just:” “I’m just wondering …” “I just think …” “I just want to add …” “Just” demeans what you have to say. “Just” shrinks your power. It’s time to say goodbye to the justs.

2. While you are at it, drop the “actually.” “I actually have a question.” ” I actually want to add something.” “Actually” communicates a sense of surprise that you have something to say. Of course you want to add something. Of course you have questions. There’s nothing surprising about it.

3. Don’t tell us why what you are about to say is likely to be wrong. We are still starting sentences with, “I haven’t researched this much but …” “I’m just thinking off the top of my head but …” “You’ve clearly been studying this longer than I have, but …”

We do this for lots of reasons. We don’t want to appear arrogant. We aren’t totally sure about what we are saying. Or we fear being wrong, and so we buffer the sting of a critical response by saying up front, “I’m not totally standing behind what I’m about to say, but …” Then, no one has the chance to say back, “Well, I know you strongly believe this, but I entirely disagree.”

No matter what the reason, doing this takes away from the power of your voice. Time to change the habit.

4. Don’t tell us you are going to “just take a minute” to say something. Often, in presentations or meetings, I hear women say, “I’d like to ask you to take just a minute to consider this idea” or “Now, I’m going to take just a few minutes to tell you about our product.” Think about how much stronger it sounds to simply say, “I’d like to tell you about our product.”

Go ahead and only take a minute, if that’s appropriate, but skip using the phrase “just a minute” in a talk or presentation. It sounds apologetic and implies that you don’t think what you are about to say is worthy of time and attention.

5. Don’t make your sentences sound like questions. Women often raise the pitch of their voice at the end of a sentence, making it sound like a question. Listen to your own language and that of women around you, and you are likely to notice this everywhere. Unsurprisingly, speaking a statement like a question diminishes its power. Make statements sound like statements; drop the tone lower at the end.

6. Don’t substitute a question for a statement. You might think you are “suggesting” increasing the marketing budget by asking, “What about increasing the marketing budget?” in a meeting, but your colleagues aren’t likely to hear an opinion (and certainly not a well thought-out opinion) in your question. When you have something to say, don’t couch it in a question.

http://www.taramohr.com/8-ways-women-undermine-themselves-with-their-words/

Here’s to strong and colorful women – and those who love blue hats.

Guy Pene Du Bois, Woman with Cigarette (1929)  at the Whitney

If your resolutions list looks like mine, it is fossilized as well. Since they are always the same resolutions you don’t need to write them out every year – you just keep them in a folder – where they have been for the last centuries….. (photo is of art by Steve Tilden – thank you for letting me use it for a joke, comrade!)

Just in time comes yet another psychological tool kit that promises more success for this round.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpbCMzQqZAU

This is the scientist behind the program called WOOP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mobxikaYgU

WOOP stands for: Wish/Outcome/Obstacle/Plan.  The claim is that envisioning the positive alone is worse than anticipating obstacles for which to plan. Why not give it a try since everything else has failed? I’ll report back by the end of this year…..hah!

Here are some of my obstacles that no plan whatsoever overcomes:

Being a chicken   

being a chicken trying to differentiate between realistic fear and paranoia,

bing a chicken forever pursuing the lofty goal of abstract thinking while scared,   

and being a chicken who is hooked on c h o c o l a t e (or salty licorice, caramels, marshmallows, bonbons of all kinds except jelly beans….)

The link below is something to cheer us all up. Pinker is a smart cookie, if there ever was one. Cognitive psychologist at Harvard who always surprises with a new turn in his research topic choices. The Language Instinct” (1994) was one of his earlier books that was fun. These days he writes about aggression, The Better Angels of our Nature, (2011) and how the mind works in general. Books that can be understood and are certainly of value to a general audience.

Here is a quote from the interview below:

“I’ve never been “optimistic” in the sense of just seeing the glass as half-full — only in the sense of looking at trend lines rather than headlines. It’s irrational both to ignore good developments and to put a happy face on bad ones. 

As it happens, most global, long-term trends have been positive. As for the future, I like the distinction drawn by the economist Paul Romer between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. I am not complacently optimistic about the future; I am conditionally optimistic.”

http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/22/14042506/steven-pinker-optimistic-future-2016

So folk, let’s congregate to figure out how to build the equivalent of a treehouse starting 1/20/2017.

Maybe these are still ahead, after all.

As I have described before, my mother used to climb over fences. Sometimes in order to take short cuts. Often times in order to snip off some seed pods that she would later propagate in her greenhouse. Frequently just for the defiance inherent to the act of trespassing.

It put the fear of God into me as a child and made for a huge dilemma. Obedience to rules and regulations was a large part of upbringing in the 1950s. So which rule scored: the one to obey your parent who with a huge grin encourages you to struggle up and over that fence, or the one that is focussed on property rights? And why did we never get caught?

I do climb over fences myself, nowadays, occasionally. It still puts a frisson into me, but also a loving memory of a woman who was caught in her age and time but willing to rebel at the tiniest occasions that opened up for her.

Fences are probably an overused photographic motif, but I figured a few of my favorites can join the fray.As can a perfect version of the appropriate song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLr3FzgpOY

Since the blog tackles forms of passages this week, I thought the article below might be of interest.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/03/mental-illness-the-identity-thief.html

Written by a bright, but young and very earnest philosopher, it tries to provide answers to the question of identity during and after severe illness. Clearly you are not the same body after amputation or other impactful physical losses. Are you also not the same mind during and after bouts of serious mental illness, be it depression, bipolar disease or other such ailments? Grace Boey approaches the question with a premise that there is an authentic self, that can be stolen, harmed, delayed, or prevented from development.

Even if I shared the assumption of the existence of a “real” self – which I don’t, given that I subscribe to Marx’ analysis of how the existing (and always changing) surround continually shapes our consciousness – her answers are muddled. I am only posting the article since it was an interesting thought exercise for me to figure out what to make of the question. As someone who has both seen physical and psychological change writ large in her life, I have never felt that irretrievable and missing parts affected a sense of who I am. Change happens, whether through illness or other factors, and you just add the experience to the self-portrait, like slapping on another layer of paint, or varnishing it, even if those new layers usurp others. The question of lack of control over personality traits vanishing or being subdued is one shared by all humanity, healthy and ill alike, so why waste worry on it? Just as we no longer speak of schizophrenics, but instead of people suffering from schizophrenia, to make clear that the disease is not the person, we should not equate traits with self. There is a whole emerging literature on the self in both cognitive and social psychology that provides some insights (for the curious: check out Hazel Marcus’ research, who teaches at Stanford.) I will write about it in a future post.

So I figure we’re just passing through different states and stages, all of our lives, and they will shape us and enrich us if we don’t cling to the “what was” or the “could have beens.” Most of us have the choice to look at the bright side. I don’t mean this in a flippant way, I know the toll that depression can take; but I truly believe we are just better off if we accept change as a constant, and self as a growing entity.

Today the door opens to a New Year, at least in the Jewish calendar. I decided to devote this week’s blog to passages, transitions, an odd assortment of things being in flux, rather than stuck! Speaking of being stuck (no longer): it looks like the notification for the daily post is working again, miracle of miracles…… welcome back!

Today’s passage story comes from no other than Michael Chabon, he of Cavalier&Clay and the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, among other prize winning books. His story is about his youngest son, whom he took to the Paris fashion week as a Bar Mitzvah present  (it helps if your Dad writes articles for sponsor GQ…). The young man is in the process of defining himself and trying to find his own tribe – and a knowledge about and love for design play an essential role. (Photo from the article.)

http://www.gq.com/story/my-son-the-prince-of-fashion

I react to accounts of parents writing about their children in great detail  with ambivalence, as I do looking at revealing portraits of children taken by their parents. There is a fascination and intimacy rarely matched, but would I like to be the later adult with so much of me made public?  I was thinking of that again when I read about the suicide of Sally Mann’s oldest son, Emmett, this June, after struggling with schizophrenia in his adulthood.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/arts/design/sally-mann-cy-twombly-remembered-light.html?_r=0

But back to passages into a realm of your own: just as a youth discovers fashion, so can we old ones discover style. My model here, in both meanings of the word, is Bridget Sojourner, 78 year old great grand mother who I am all ready to emulate (alas, I don’t have that hair….)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/bridget-sojourner–78-year-old-great-grandmother-turned-style-ic/

  Time to reinvent my closet in 5777….

What difference does it make if you are good at visual imagery, or, reversely, at spatial imagery?

For one it might influence your career choice, with visualizers being advantaged in the arts, and spatially gifted people advantaged in the sciences or engineering. As mentioned before, it also might have an impact on autobiographical memory, with visualizers more apt to be able to relive their experiences, including a lot of sensory detail.

That can come with a price, though. There might be a linkage between vivid visual imagery and some aspects of mental illness and this point may in turn suggest new forms of treatment for some illnesses. For example, a prominent symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder is the experience of “flashbacks” – immensely vivid and often-intrusive images of a traumatic experience. Both schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease can involve involuntary (but highly vivid) hallucinations. Some people diagnosed with phobias experience troubling images (e.g., images of snakes for someone with ophidiophobia [fear of snakes], images of spiders for someone with arachnophobia [fear of spiders], and so on). It seems plausible that therapies will need to embrace these findings, seeking either to disrupt these troubling images or, in some cases, to ‘re-script’ the imagined event.

And then there are the people with “super” skills, so-called eidetikers. The memories of these people have a photographic quality. This form of imagery is sometimes found in people who have been diagnosed as autistic: These individuals can briefly glance at a complex scene and then draw incredibly detailed reproductions of the scene, as though they really had taken a “photograph” of the scene when first viewing it. But similar capacities can be documented with no link to autism. Research described a woman who could recall poetry written in a language she did not understand, even years after she’d seen the poem; she was also able to recall complicated random dot patterns after viewing them only briefly. Similarly, a 10-year-old eidetiker saw a complex picture for just 30 seconds. After the picture was taken away, the boy was unexpectedly asked detail questions: How many stripes were there on the cat’s back? How many leaves on the front flower? The child was able to give completely accurate answers, as though his memory had perfectly preserved the picture’s content. For more detail see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/quasi-perceptual.html

Let it be clear, though: we know very little about this phenomenon, how frequently it exists and what the underlying mechanisms are. More often seen in the movies than in real life!

So far this week I introduced the notion that most people can see with their “mind’s eye”, but some cannot. That does not depend on whether you are congenitally blind or not – there are forms of imagery that are spatial, rather than visual, and people without visual imagery can make use of that.  I also claimed that imagery has a lot to do with perception, since the brain areas involved in perception get activated through visual imagery as well.

How far do those parallels go? In some ways mental images are like pictures.

• Chronometric studies indicate that the pattern of what information is more available and what is less available in an image closely matches the pattern of what is available in an actual picture. Likewise, the times needed to scan across an image, to zoom in on an image to examine detail, or to imagine the form rotating, all correspond closely to the times needed for these operations with actual pictures.
• In many settings, visual imagery seems to involve mechanisms that overlap with those used for visual perception. This is reflected in the fact that imaging one thing can make it difficult to perceive something else, or that imaging the appropriate target can prime a subsequent perception. In other words, if I ask you to image something it makes it harder to perceive a weak visual stimulus at the same time. And if I ask you to to image something that resembles a visual stimulus you are faster to see it when it pops up on a screen. Further evidence comes from neuroimaging and studies of brain damage; this evidence confirms the considerable overlap between the biological basis for imagery and that for perception.
• Even when imagery is visual, mental images are picture-like—they are not actually pictures. Unlike pictures, mental images seem to be accompanied by a perceptual reference frame that guides the interpretation of the image and also influences what can be discovered about the image. For example if I ask you to image a simple ambiguous picture like the one below, you are not able to reverse it to its alternative interpretation, something that is very easy to do when you look at the actual picture.Duck/rabbitOld woman /young woman

We often talk about the “visual arts”. But it is interesting to ask how visual the visual arts really are. One path forward is to ask both, how people who are blind since birth appreciate art and also create art.

This is a fascinating issue on its own but also can give us intriguing hints about why art is as it is. Certainly some aspect of art are just a matter of convention – just look at ancient Egypt where the convention was to show fee viewed from the side, bodies viewed head on and faces almost always in profile.  But some aspect of art may come from the way our brains (and that is ALL brains) are wired.

Some of the fabulous evidence comes from Canadian psychologist John Kennedy who has done various studies asking the blind to draw specific scenes, he finds, for example, that blind people with no art training spontaneously use many of the “visual” metaphors that the seeing use. As just one example, they draw lines streaking out behind someone  to indicate fast motion.

http://www.artbeyondsight.org/teach/how-blind-draw.shtml

Kennedy has also explored how people perceive line drawing including people in cultures with no history of representational art (e.g. Amazon tribes.) He showed people line drawings of parrots, with lines indicating changes in hue (which looks really strange to American or European eyes because we rarely use lines to indicate color boundaries. ) Turns out they also look strange to the indigenous people of the Amazon who looked at these drawing and wanted to know why the parrot was chopped up into pieces.

Here is an abstract of a recommendable book for those interested in the topic: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/948

Apparently then at least some of the rules of art are essentially universal, even in people with neither training nor any history of vision, and other rules clearly are nothing but conventions.

PS: Why flamingos? How would you possible describe the colors, shapes, movements of these birds to someone who cannot see? The richness in our visual environment is just beyond belief – and something I am deeply grateful for.