And then I'd also started to pen an article for it. For two weeks I collected a lot of thoughts, quotes, resources. Next, I ordered them and started to string the whole thing into a narrative. I sat the whole of Sunday in front of my computer. I had tried to write this 'witty' article about all I knew about depression. But I made a mistake. I thought I could take myself out of it, write about my experiences objectively, from a bird's eye's view. It didn't work, and I felt very disillusioned and frustrated.

Instead I am publishing the below for Geek Mental Help Week. I wrote it about a year ago, and while I put it on my blog, I never tweeted about it.

Perhaps this is my way of saying "Here I am, and this is what I've struggled with and sometimes still do. If it is similar for you, you are not the only one."

I think for me, and many others, the web has always been about connecting, too. You can reach out to others in a way that was not previously possible. For me, this week has been about exactly that in the end. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, can easily make us forget that we can communicate in 'long form', too, and how liberating and comforting that can be.

I also felt reminded of a post I had read during the summer holidays, Everyone I know is broken-hearted by Josh Ellis. I found the last three paragraphs quite moving. "I don't believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark." Perhaps initiatives like this can be a step towards that.

Here is my post from a year ago:
(- I felt tempted to edit this and move things around, it might be a bit clunky; but after this week's difficulties with writing I am just leaving it as I wrote it back then)

About loneliness and becoming an apprentice bodhisattva

(from 24 November 2013)

Quite recently, I started re-reading parts of a book by Kamalamani. The book is called "Meditating with Character" but is about much more than meditation! Yesterday I hit on a few pages that I felt the strong urge to photograph and tweet, just because I find them so relevant to the current state of (world) affairs. I am posting them here instead.

Then today I saw a link to an article called "Life of solitude: A loneliness crisis is looming". This article is very strongly related to the message about connectedness in what I read yesterday. Furthermore, it is about a topic that is very close to my heart: Loneliness, and in a wider context, something I would call "social pain".

Social pain is something I have been thinking about quite a lot in recent years. Partly, because of the role it has played in my own life. But also because I increasingly realise how much it (or fear of it) shapes the way we live, the structure of groups, organisations and so on. And last but not least, because of its seeming prevalence in today's 'connected' age.

I think the main insight for me is that social pain can be just as excruciating - and actually has a strong physical component - as what we call physical pain. I have sometimes had this thought: The pain of pushing two children into this world without pain relief, and smashing both bones in my lower leg (on a separate occasion!), have not come near the social pain I have felt in my life. But then that comparison is flawed. Because that physical pain was limited to brief periods of time, of course. So really you would have to ask, would living with constant pain be preferable to social isolation? That isn't a good comparison either, as constant pain in itself has great potential to make you depressed. A recurring pain, cancer with chance of survival, loss of a limb? - It is difficult to answer. I do think anyhow that social isolation ranks pretty high on the list of undesirable and painful things.

As Brené Brown puts it, "We are hard-wired for connectedness". In other ages, we were born into structures that provided that connection (but had of course all sorts of other problems we don't have these days). Now, it is not so clear cut. Often we have to create our communities ourselves, and in many cases we might feel a stronger connection with people in those groups than those we were born into. But we have to find or create them first, and the way there can be full of anxiety and provide some pain in itself. Yet I believe it is always worth to persist in this.

I have below written down something about my own experiences of isolation and rejection. I did not do this to get your sympathy. It is rather to illustrate what effects an experience like that can have. Perhaps mostly, to say: Look after your children. And I could add: Look after yourself and each other, because we really are all interconnected.

As far as I am concerned, I am actually genuinely happy with where I am now, so in a way, I can now see what happened to me as a necessary step to this point. - And then of course I am grateful for all the good things that have happened, and the people I've met. And for the plasticity of the brain.. - Still, I would never wish upon my children the isolation I felt. I could not bear knowing them in a situation like that. (I think my mother was simply not aware of it. Moreover she has had more trauma in her past than I've ever had.)

Now I just feel I want to move on from all that, and instead become an apprentice bodhisattva as described in the pages below.

So, I leave you with this excerpt from Kamalamani's book, and below that, the thing I wrote about my early years (but really, don't feel compelled to read that!)

From Kamalamani's book "Meditating with Character" - Chapter 4 - Why embodiment matters

My story (part of it, by far not all)

One line that struck me in the article about loneliness was: "Inside every lonely adult is a kid eating lunch by herself on a bench." I am not a lonely adult anymore, but I was that kid. When I was 5 my family moved to Paris, and I was sent to a nursery there for a year. It's a commonly accepted notion that children pick up a new language quite naturally at that age, but I didn't. I can't really explain the reasons, I guess I was just quite shy. I was also - probably still am - quite sensitive and an introvert.

It did not take long for the French children to move from initial strong interest in the newcomer, to finding it really odd that I could not understand them. They also bullied me on occasion - stepping on my toes, putting sand in my mouth *. But I also remember a girl who held my hand and was friendly to me, and how immensely comforting that was. Still, the overwhelming feeling of those days was that of isolation. An extreme isolation. I could not put a name to it then of course, but it was definitely painful. I ended up developing a survival strategy. That strategy consisted in completely retreating into myself, to "live in my head". I also completely stopped talking for the hours I was in the nursery. (I did not have the right language to talk with!)

When people have psychological problems, often it is partly because of survival strategies that are not helpful anymore. Those strategies have started to get in the way of a healthier behaviour and attitude. It took me an incredibly long time to realise that in a situation where I ended up feeling excluded, it was often me who took the first step towards that exclusion. It was my old survival strategy of shutting everything and everybody out that made me appear "weird". The shutting out happened as a reaction to the slightest sign of rejection or sometimes just apparent lack of interest. - The thing is I had never learned very well to read my "peers'" attitude towards me, because I was so isolated and did not interact with them very much. I did have my siblings, but those were people I already new!

Back in Germany, I was able to develop friendships, but often had difficulties with groups of people - to become integrated in a group. Then in my teenage years, a further difficulty presented itself. My beloved mum, at roughly the age I am now, was struggling with mental health. As one consequence, she often seemed to despise me. Any criticism was never put into words, but rather delivered as a turning away from me, of not paying attention and not talking. That way it was difficult to understand what was actually wrong with me. But from some strong reactions (silent disapproving glares in my direction mainly), I gathered: I must not appear clever. I must not praise myself, not say anything that could even be construed as self-praise. I must not be selfish and self-absorbed (the latter is pretty difficult, I can tell you, if you keep trying to find out what the heck is wrong with you!). Oh, and I must not talk so much! That was also difficult to achieve, because I was still very quiet at school, but then bursting to tell things at home. In fact, any kind of enthusiasm seemed to be kind of repulsive. While as a result of this episode I pretty much lost the ability to feel pride in the things I do, I am glad to say I never lost the ability to be enthusiastic **.

Possible 'costs' of all this: Many periods of depression from teenage years on, some prolonged and heavy. Various antidepressants over the course of a year - that is now 15 years ago, thankfully, and I've not needed them since, though often craved to go back. Two to three years of therapy - some in Germany, some here. The final year of therapy was really helpful by the way. Low confidence. For a long time, the belief that I was actually a bad and selfish person. - To be fair, the self-absorption is still pretty pronounced, although I might get better at that, too. It sometimes makes me sad to think how much better I could have used all that time and energy I lost. And yet, on the other side, I think it helps me to understand other people better, and that could be helpful in some way.


* Oddly, I quite liked the boy who put sand in my mouth before and after the event. When my parents were looking for a baby name, I suggested "Stéphane" because I still 'fancied' that boy. I did get a brother a bit later, and he was called Stefan.

** My mother is a lovely person, and I have far more to be grateful for than to complain about. She was very stressed and ill.

Thoughts that come at night

Journalists can give you the creeps (think "phone-hacking"), corporate data-hunger can give you the creeps, but governments (not only one, but a string of them!) starting to behave in the same and possibly worse ways… I can't even find a word for that. It becomes all the more perplexing, because we are all just so comfortable. What do I have to complain about? Maybe nothing yet, personally, but it does already affect others personally, and by the looks of it, will affect more and more people until there might be hardly anybody left who isn't affected.

I say "by the looks of it". Is it the media exaggerating, manipulating? One's own mind painting things more bleakly than they actually are? Do we know all the relevant facts? If there are things that resonate with what you know about the Stasi, Fascism, Nazism, is that a red herring? At least here the press can still report, right? What about all the despotic regimes, the atrocities you hear about. Are they not worthier of your outrage? But this is no excuse, and the reporting is already not totally free anymore.

And then, in some ways I do actually feel personally affected, because a government that orders the "symbolic" destruction of hard-drives to flex there muscle has for me lost every credibility and trustworthiness and I don't feel at all they represent the people they are meant to serve. I feel outrage about how it will affect many people on a subconscious level and that again most likely includes me. And quite a few journalists. You can say what you want, this is an intimidating act, it has zero to do with assuring security, but all with creating a shock effect.

Can we do anything to stop a gradual erosion of our freedom? Can I do anything? I have to say I don't know. I have never felt a very political person. But a lot of people will say that of themselves, and that is exactly why it is difficult. We have just been so comfortable and we are conditioned to worry so much more about status, about the things we have and we think we need. Maybe it is just what humans are like anyway. And we, in the Western world, just happen to have come to this point in our history where things start to go awry. Or maybe they have for a long time already. That's the thing, where do you draw the line? What does freedom actually mean?

Man Machines

Here is something I really wanted to write about. Two books I have read recently, quite different books, but both, in a wider sense, about how the mind works. Both, in my view, with some implications for individuals and society. I wonder whether I will be able to write much about the first one, as I finished reading it a few weeks ago.

It is called "The Emotion Machine", written by Marvin Minsky in 2006. It is kind of a sequel to "Society of mind" from 1986, about which I have written in another blog post. And like last time, I stumbled across it in my parents' house. So, let me see what I can retrieve.. Ha, this is actually a topic in the book! How do we retrieve memories. Anyway, these are a few things that bubble up. Some of this might be a bit inaccurate, but it is about ideas (that is how the mind works…):

• The mind is organised in layers, each of which employs different "resources" (in the 1986 book those where called "agents"). High-level resources draw on subsets of other resources which themselves draw on others. There can be conflicts between different resources. If one system uses different subsets from another, we can do things in parallel (like walking and talking at the same time). But most things we have do to serially to do them well.
• The self as a constant unchangeable agent is an illusion. There is no such thing as a self that makes decisions. It is always several parts of our mind working together.
• Moreover, we cannot directly command the mind at our will. We cannot tell it to ignore certain needs. That would be detrimental in fact, for if we could decide to put off eating or sleeping forever that would do us harm. But not only that, things might demand our attention even if we would like to ignore them, and depending on what state of mind we are in different resources get precedence.
• To decide what behaviour wil eventually be deployed, there are different layers of our mind exerting their influence. "Censors" are at work that stem from previous experiences, and they can stop things even reaching our consciousness. Minsky references Freud here. What is sometimes experienced in meditation as state of total peace (enlightenment?) is possibly the temporary absence of censors.
• In our language we have a lot of "suitcase" words, that can mean slightly different things in different contexts. For example "to give" can mean physically giving something to somebody else, transfer ownership, lend… This can also make it difficult to give accurate definitions of things. How do you define "consciousness"? But far from this being a weakness of our language, it is actually a strength. You can make more connections between things if there isn't one exclusive definition.
• When you see a familiar object, there is massive input from regions of your brain that store memories, not just from the visual cortex. So what you have learned in the past about that type of object probably contributes more to the picture than what you actually see.

This is a random list. There is much more to the book. And it gives a fascinating insight into how the brain might work. It is humbling and awe-inspiring at the same time. We are such intricate, ingenious machines! We are just not able to command them very well (or not at all?). Especially not always to our own benefit. Perhaps this is a result of my age, but I feel more and more that we are really a product, of our genetics plus all our experiences plus society plus the people we are close to plus individual circumstances and so on, rather than these largely unchangeable beings that have a personality. But of course you still move and live "as if", it is what we have learned to do, and it is our frame of reference. So while it is fascinating to follow Minsky along, in the end you cannot keep looking at things this way. Unless you worked at a "Thinking machines" lab I guess, then you would probably switch into this mode for several hours each day! In any case, we need to use the "I" as a model in our everyday lives.

One thing I took from this book for myself is that really, if we want to make any changes to our habits or ways of thinking, we have to do it in a very indirect way. This probably varies for different people, but my mind pretty much has "a mind of its own", I find it nearly impossible to order it to do anything. Any plan I make seems doomed to fail, unless there is an outside pressure, like I have an appointment with somebody. I also was reminded how powerful meditation can be, and I would so much like to do more of it again. But ironically, this is one of the things I find impossible to tell my mind to do. As is writing for that matter, and I cannot tell you what a massive relief it is to find myself writing now. Massive, massive, massive.

As I said, I feel there are implications for society, too. It might be difficult to put this into words. Basically, I guess at the level of society you find the same patterns repeated as in our mind. And in fact, Minsky's 1986 book was called "Society of Mind", it works in the other direction as well. Our mind is a society of resources that work together. Likewise, our society generates an Übermind which goes in the direction that the most powerful resources (or agents, I think that might be a better term actually) determine it to go. And sadly, you have a mixture of "bully-in-the-playground" and "old boys club" phenomena here, in our current society. The ones who shout the loudest and punch the hardest, get the attention. And decisions get made by the ruling classes, and a shocking number of times in secret it seems. It is an interesting question now, how we can make the more thoughtful and sensible parts of that Übermind be heard more. Giving them a voice should be engrained in the structure of our societies, and that is what constitutions and the law are meant to do. Yet it looks like the power of those agents that keep things in check, aber being eroded, and that is scary, I can't help saying that again.

Also, those in power employ certain tactics to manipulate the public. I just hope - and believe - that they, too, often get things wrong in that respect. Whatever psychological knowledge they might have, they will not be able to steer the collective of our minds, as much as they would like to.

Are you ready to be Wholehearted?

On to the second book. I actually stumbled over that, too! In a motorway service station, in the over-priced WHSmith shop, of all places. The book is called "Daring Greatly", subtitle "How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead". Quite a mouthful, and I have to confess that I normally have an aversion to titles like that and the books they normally adorn. But there are exceptions. And the exception here is that it is written by Brené Brown who has given one of my all-time favourite TED talks, and that upon brief inspection of the contents, I just really wanted to have this book.

I read the book in a single day. My most concise description of it would be: It is telling the truth. The truth that lies at the heart of our experience of being human. This is the other side of Minsky, this is the "illusion" that the mind creates, which is, for us, the truth we live in. It is telling this truth in very pragmatic terms, with only passing references to such things as mindfulness (her therapist tells her: "Less thinking. More feeling." Something I can fully subscribe to). Based on qualitative research. Not quantitative, thankfully! One of my pet peaves in TED talks, is the total straightness of curves and absence of standard deviations in the "statistics" they show there. So, what is this truth. In short: To be able to live life to the full, we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be seen. We also need to be prepared for some (sometimes immense) discomfort and pain. And we need to build up something Brené Brown calls "shame resilience". As a good summary of her conclusions, just watch the TED talk.

It is not at all an easy feat. In fact, BB herself says that she has created a roadmap with her research, but is not necessarily a good traveller along that map. At the start of her journey, she states, she was "2 for 10" and is still not always able to embrace the hallmarks of "Wholeheartedness", a term she has coined for the ability to live life to the full and with authenticity.

In any case, the themes of this book are really important to me. Shame is something I have felt a lot, especially in my earlier life. And it has this tendency to self-perpetuate, and to operate in silent. So, kudos to Brené Brown for dragging it out in the open like that and give it a good "beating". I say, it is important to me, but it should be to everybody really, including a lot of people who are not even aware of how shame, fear of failure, illusions of scarcity, shape their lives. I wish this idea does in fact spread and enter the collective unconscious, without ever becoming too dogmatic, that is always the danger.

To conclude, one quote from the section on parenting. That chapter had a bit of an eye-opening effect with some thoughts I had not previously come across or forgotten. One thing worth noting is that your actions and the way you present yourself to the world, has a much greater influence than anything you say to your child. This is again something I believe to be absolutely true. And this. It seems an important message in our safety-obsessed times of helicopter-parenting:

"I no longer see rescuing and intervening as unhelpful, I now think about it as dangerous. Don't get me wrong — I still struggle and I still step in when I shouldn't, but I now think twice before I let my discomfort dictate my behaviours. Here's why: Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle. And let me tell you, next to love and belonging, I'm not sure I want anything more for my kids than a deep sense of hopefulness."

I am in this rather pensive mood, and also feeling a bit melancholy, about time passing, and passing so quickly. 2013! How unbelievable; this was a date in the far future, how can it be here now? How amazing, too. Twelve years after 2001, and only six years away from 2019, the year Blade Runner is set in.

The Society of Mind

So, yes, this post is random. I am sitting here in my mum's living room, my daughter lying on one of the sofas, and the dog Marvin on the other, both asleep and snoring. And I will just write about the things that have been on my mind in these holidays, things I thought I could put in a blog post or posts.

I wanted to write about Marvin. Not Marvin the dog, but the person the dog was named after. Marvin Minsky. More precisely, I wanted to write about a book he wrote, called Society of Mind. I read this book in just a few days, whenever I found the time, and till late at night; I somehow felt compelled to read it, after I had rediscovered it, lying on a shelf. My late father who was a big admirer of Minsky's had bought it once. The book was published in 1986, so you could argue whether it is not a bit dated. I don't know anything about the current state of Artificial Intelligence so I couldn't say. Yet I think the ideas in this book can stand on their own. Also, the way the book is written and layed out is interesting in itself. It is written in the form of essays that each span up to one page, in the edition I was reading. And the layout and typography look quite modern too. But these are just factors that support the content.

Easy is the hardest thing

So what is it about? Luckily there is a good wikipedia entry about the Society of Mind theory, so I don't have to explain it all. I like this description of the book: "It is a collection of ideas about how the mind and thinking work on the conceptual level". Yes, there are lots of theories and models, there are no proofs about how things work in reality. And yet these ideas don't seem far-fetched, actually many seem very plausible (although I don't believe at all in his explanation of foreign accents! - he suggests you lose the ability to learn the precise phonetics of a language at puberty, so there's no risk of you picking up the phonetics of your child's baby language. Hmm) The reason why they are quite plausible is that they stem from attempts to build machines that have some abilities of the human mind, starting with just very "basic" ones, things that children learn. One fascinating conclusion in the book is that it is actually much more difficult to make a machine do something we regard as basic, than things that require higher mathematics and logic. It is easier to build a chess computer than a robot that carries out actions that we learn as little children. We think of things as basic because we were not conscious of learning them, and always had them available by the time we had learned to think. Minsky is disecting the processes that it takes to, for example, build a tower from building blocks. It really is quite complicated if you think about it.

What brains do

The book touches on theories of child development, psychology, and of course programming in its aim to explain how thinking and perceiving might work, and how consciousnes might arise. Minsky at one point sums up his findings with "Minds are simply what brains do". There is no "hidden ingredient", not what we think of as a soul. This also means there isn't really a free will. Everything that happens in our mind, every decision we take, is a consequence of what we have learnt plus random events. This is not what we like to hear, and in fact we need the illusion that there is a "me", an individuum that is "in control", constant and immutable. We need it for our mind to function properly. For my part, I find this all makes sense, and it echoes things I have read about, or thought before. Not that I'd ask myself these things all that often.

I wouldn't even say I am generally that interested in theories of consciousness, I used to be a lot more. But I have returned to this interest for a few days and it was a fascinating excursion. And I think a lot of the ideas from that book will stick in my mind, just mostly unconscious, but some of them might pop up here and there.

As one last thought, of course another consequence of these ideas, if they were right, would be that we could in fact build thinking machines, given we find out enough about how the subprocesses work that together make up the work of our minds..

I would have liked to write even more about some implications of the book's ideas, it is all coming back to me now, but I have to leave it here. I did not think I'd write so much anyway.

It is all good, as probably my most important short/medium-term goal for now is to write more. And it doesn't matter for the moment what it is about. It doesn't matter that the start of this post has no apparent connection to the rest of it (indirectly it has because it's somewhat about the mind too, I guess). I have a feeling there might be a number of random posts on here, about things that just pass through my mind - actually that's what a lot of blogs do, isn't it. It's a good exercise for getting things from your unconscious before your very eyes, and doing it "publicly" provides some perhaps necessary cohesion and format. And I don't need to feel guilty about writing it, as I am not urging anybody to read it. In fact not many will read it, but some might, and that will be just the right people.