Hard to write when it’s hot, the weekend is looming, and vacation is not quite around the corner but beckoning from the recesses of my mind…..

My mind starts to wander, engaging in pleasant fantasies about what I’ll encounter in August, what adventures I might have and what new sights wait to be photographed. Will the future unravel from mysterious heaps like this?

Which tells you right there that your daily essayist is a happy(ish) person, since mind wandering into the future is associated with a positive outlook on life, while mind wandering into the past is more often encountered with people who are unhappy.

By rough estimates we spend about 25% of our waking day with wandering thoughts, that state where we are meant to focus on one thing, but find ourselves all of a sudden thinking about something altogether different. Not in any goal directed fashion either, but just drifting about. The strange thing is that for some time you are not aware that your thoughts have taken a path of their own, but when you realize it you are perfectly able to pinpoint what you have been thinking about.

Slovenia, hah! Balkan anti-fascist memorials hunt. International Graffiti Festival. Viennese Apple Strudel. Pack rain coat yes or no?  All while really trying to focus on the blog.

Mind wandering can be consequential and not just for lost time on the job – car accidents happen during that state just as often as with drunk driving. I wouldn’t want the flight traffic controller to engage in mental time travel either. So not an entirely good preoccupation. There is, however some reason to believe that mind wandering enhances creativity; you can stumble, researchers speculate, on previously unlinked ideas that pave the path for novel insights. It certainly does relieve boredom, which is another basically good thing.

So how do you keep yourself on task? Active engagement with whatever you are doing seems to be helpful. (Not just passive reading but re-wording concepts and structuring them for my YDP then should do the trick for me…) Training in mindfulness, whether through brief breathing exercises or longer concentrated practice also improves your ability to stay focused.

If you want to read in great detail about it, go here (before your mind wanders….): https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/middle_way.pdf

Happy 4th of July – where you will be bombarded with messages about the state of our nation. Let’s look at a different kind of message, though: You have probably heard periodic reports  of “secret messages” contained within pop music – often messages that can be revealed only by playing the music backwards. The messages are claimed to have content that is upsetting or offensive to many people – messages about Satan (thus today’s photographs of hellish creatures), or drug use, or sexual activity. If you take the time to do the quick exercise below exposing you to this music, you will be truly astonished (and laugh!). At least I was/did when I tried it out.

Visit this website: It lets you hear something that might or might not contain a hidden message.

http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking/stairway-to-heaven-backwards.html

First, select  the sound clips and play it forwards. Try at that point to guess what the hidden message is.

Then play the clip backwards. Now can you guess what the hidden message is?

Then, as the crucial step, click on the button to reveal the lyrics that are supposedly hidden in the backwards clip, and play the clip again. Now can you hear the hidden message?

So: Is the message really there, because you can hear it? Probably not.  You can only hear it when someone explicitly suggests to you what the message is which provides a powerful demonstration that your perception can be guided by expectations and knowledge – so that you can hear things with that guidance that you can’t hear at all otherwise.

Perception, then, is not just a relatively passive process where you are simply exposed to sounds, and they flow into your ears and you hear. Perception is much more active than that. You interpret. You fill in. You add. Of course, the ‘balance’ between the input and your activity shifts. The clearer the input, the more you rely on it. The LESS clear the input, the more you supplement. Likewise, the stronger your expectations and assumptions, the more you rely on them. The WEAKER your expectations and assumptions, the less you rely on them.

The bottom line, though, is NOT that perception is hopelessly and inevitably subjective. When the input is clear, you rely on the input! But, when the input isn’t clear, you do need to be alert to how much your expectations can bias what you see and hear.

# Stay Special

I listed some psychological research yesterday for claims that child/ parent separation has lasting, harmful effects. We might as well continue with psychology for the rest of the week, offering what I hope are a few interesting psychological tidbits.

My sister and I have an ongoing joke between us that refers to my childhood desire to be a famous Hollywood star rather than holding any number of other potentially interesting roles in life. Man, did I miss the bus. That aside, what is it about that longing to be famous? My best speculation has to do with my lifelong preoccupation with mortality, a preoccupation I have surely earned, given the frequent encounters with that crap starting at an early age. That, or a deep streak of narcissism….

If mortality concerns you, you want to have something that lasts beyond your mere existence, I guess. Fame, in other words. And so, any time I get a photo into an exhibit, my beloved sister exclaims:”NOW you are famous! You can rest!”

As a scientist, and a person living in an environment where science is under daily assault, one might want to remember how you put a claim to a test. Is it factually true? Is the evidence weak and ambiguous or indisputable? How precisely must a hypothesis be worded, to make it testable? All matter if we want to be able to trust findings.

My father died 16 years ago in June. I have been thinking about him a lot lately because I coincidentally came across articles or TED talks that featured amputees who publicly discussed the choices they made in life after the assaults on their bodies. They also publicly display their protheses, which are streamlined, light, robotic looking extensions that allow for a lot of movement.

In 1942 when my father lost both of his legs in the war, just turning 20 years old, it was a different story. There was shame attached to having the protheses visible; equally important, the artificial limbs were made first of wood, then some heavy plastic, all of which needed to be carried and tied on with a heavy leather cone with multiple belt buckles, that was hellishly hot and air tight. The things made noise, too, squeaking and grinding, increasing the embarassment. Amputees were often shunned in a country that tried to forget about its history and the war, for which they were visible reminders.

Standing all day at a lab bench early in his career as a chemist was in itself an athletic feat, one for which he paid dearly with nightly blisters on the parts of his legs that attached to the protheses. But he would not be stopped. He had been in a major league handball team before the war. Physical activity had to be continued – and so he figured out what he could do. I learned to play table tennis from my father. I saw him horseback riding, and later, when we would spend winters skiing in Switzerland, he would actually go curling. A SPORT WHERE YOU HAVE TO WALK/RUN/CROUCH ON ICE.  In summers in Holland he would go before dawn to the North Sea and swim, before anyone could see him putting the wooden legs off and on. And he rode his bike. Determined. Unstoppable.

Nowadays there are at least possibilities for those who went through these traumas to receive help, or find and work with those who share the experience. If a team like the one described below had existed in the 1950s my father would have probably joined.

This All-Amputee Softball Team is Changing the Way We Think About Treating Trauma

The physical consequences of the amputations and the decades of pain meds needed to be able to function on a daily basis made his last years particularly difficult, independent of the PTSD. I wish he had had someone at his side like the palliative care physician featured in the TED talk below. It would have made a difference, I believe.

It is only with hindsight that I am able to understand the full extent of courage it took to lead the life he led without ever becoming hard. I try to remember that every time I become upset over some little chickenshit, as they say in polite company….

Photographs are bikes in Alkmaar and Bergen aan Zee, NL.

You might think I am referring to this in our last entry to a week of colors:

Which would not be a bad guess in general, but today the color RED is brought to you by LOVE.  My love for humanity in general

and my love for one human being in particular who was born just this week 30 years ago.

He introduced me to Zbigniew Herbert and one of my favorite poems of his expresses the idea of moral necessity as perfectly as the concept is embraced by my incredible 30-year-old.  Happy almost Birthday, mein Süssen!!!! Keep the spark alive.

Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter, from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.