Gabriele Oettingen: Rethinking Positive Thinking (2014)

Gabriele Oettingen's Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (New York: Current, 2014) alchemizes New Thought into New Science. Using the scientific method, Oettingen examines and refines ideas that have been around for quite a while, albeit in more mystical terms. Consider Florence Scovel Shinn (1871-1940), for example: "As one door shuts another door opens" -  in both "Intuition or Guidance," The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925) and "Success," Your Word is Your Wand (1928). 

Oettingen (with various assistants and collaborators) has conducted numerous studies that consider how effectively -- or ineffectively -- positive thinking works.

One of her conclusions seems to suggest a continuum spectrum, with positive thinking not-followed-up-by-action (dreaming only/"indulging") at one end, and negative thinking (nightmaring only/"dwelling") at the other. Indulging results in inaction, while dwelling results in paralysis. With indulging, one imagines great accomplishments to the point of not wanting to actually work toward the reality of such accomplishments; with dwelling, one is paralyzed with inaction because of perceived obstacles or excessive worries that may block one from achieving anything.

Oettingen brings up psychological contexts and possible origins (name checking William James and Sigmund Freud, for example) for our personal outlook and action styles, but that's not necessary to understand (or agree with) in order to deploy her suggested plan of action. Her suggestion? Utilize positive thinking but energize it with a technique she calls WOOP: 

Wish (what is your wish?) + Outcome (a good outcome if your wish were to become reality) - Obstacle (what's blocking your wish fulfillment?) = Plan (Outflank obstacle: If/then . . .). 

Using WOOP helps you focus on just about anything, for it is, as Oettingen states, "content neutral." 

Simple example. Suzy wishes to meet Sarah for brunch downtown. Ideal Outcome: they rendezvous, enjoy brunch and conversation and it's not too expensive. Obstacle: possible traffic issues, parking, eatery could be crowded, it's too pricey. Plan: do some research ahead of time about all of the above. If Highway 5 is closed, go via Route 23; if parking is full or the eatery is too crowded, go to a pre-considered backup place. In other words, have some kind of pragmatic plan, with alternative backup plans in reserve. 

WOOP can help one refine more grandiose wishes, too. Buddy may wish to make a billion dollars in one year, but there's a major obstacle to this wish's fulfillment: reality. Once he sees reality as a serious obstacle, he may determine on a more realistic wish: maybe save $1,000 in "x" amount of time. A personal obstacle Bobby has toward saving any $ is, perhaps, "impulse control." So, Bobby works with a partner on an if/then plan that will result in his actually saving $ toward his goal.

I've tried the WOOP technique now for a couple of weeks. So far, it's simple, direct, and works for just about anything.  I've already tweaked several either/or if/then decisions -- big and small -- simply by mind-mapping with WOOP. It's fun, it works, and it even lets you play "the game of life" with a little more cohesion.

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

Maphead I

One of the cool Christmas gifts my sister Vickie gave me was Ken Jennings' Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (Scribner, 2011). I'm now about a third of the way through. 

For now, two things. First, studying maps and geography is a good way to enrich your brain (and mind). Literally. Jennings points out that the hippocampus (part of the cerebral cortex) expands when map-reading is added to a person's mental activities (page 17). 

Secondly, there's this about maps:

There's a tension in them. Almost every map, whether of a shopping mall, a city, or a continent, will show us two kinds of places: places where we've been and places we've never been. The nearby and the faraway exist together in the same frame, our world undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We can understand, at a glance, our place in the universe, our potential to go and see new things, and the way to get home afterwards. . . (page 29).

Today's Rune: Signals.  

     

Facial Recognition

People can recognize faces, shapes, forms and movements from afar -- often, if not always. Sometimes perceptions can be thrown off by internal mood, illness, atmospheric conditions, or time of day; or by the occasional look-alike, decoy dummy, Doppelgänger, Vardøgr, daydream, hallucination or apparition. Seen any of these lately?

New and recent field studies suggest that birds are quite capable of refined facial recognition accuracy, in addition to their having effective long-range navigational systems. Makes sense as far as survival goes. As does their adaptability to human settlement patterns, which also plays a role in their decision-making: should I stay or I should I go? Backyard haven or backyard danger zone? Shall we try a wait-and-see attitude?  On some level, birds must be computing these calculations, via evolving and instinctive response capabilities. 

Interacted visually with any birds or people lately?

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Emotion, Leashed and Unleashed

In Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003; originally published as Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, 2001), the author posits that, because they apparently have no emotions, Mr. Spock and the Vulcans would not have been able to survive for very long. There's a backstory, though, and the Vulcans of Star Trek do have emotions -- they just suppress them like those on-duty guards in full dress uniform marching around Buckingham Palace in London, rarely cracking a smile. Culturally, Vulcans tend to keep their emotions under wrap, even to themselves when possible, as if they're always on self guard duty. But sometimes it's not possible, such as during the seven-year "Pan-farr" mating cycle, going "deep in the Plak-tau." The Vulcans present a good, albeit fictional, case study of ritualized cultural response in keeping instinctive emotions from running amok most of the time.

"Amok Time" (1967) is the main episode of Star Trek referenced here. Thanks to Charles Gramlich for inspiring today's post header, derived from a comment he made on yesterday's: "Emotion is a hard dog to control once it gets hold of the leash."         










As for the evolution of the character of Mr. Spock, in the original pilot (The Cage, 1965), he is an excitable Martian, not an emotionally restrained Vulcan!

Interesting twist, considering how things turned out. 

Before Spock's reconception as a Vulcan, the character on Star Trek who displayed no emotional affect was Number One (shown here). A lot of science fiction stories play around with this idea, with characters ranging from gynoids to Invaders to Stepford Wives. 

Today's Rune: Strength.   

This Melody Haunts My Reverie

A little bit more from Dylan Evans' Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003; originally published as Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, 2001). Evans' work argues that feelings, emotions, moods and moral sentiment are necessary and desirable in social settings more often than not.

As far as moral sentiments go, Evans' approach seems exactly the opposite of someone like Herman Cain, one of several wealthy and outspoken Republican candidates spinning out of control in the US presidential election cycle of 2011-2012. Last month, Cain was widely quoted as saying this in response to Occupy Wall Street, the gathering protest movement that questions, among other things, growing economic disparities in the USA: “Don’t be jealous, don’t be envious . . . I don’t have much patience for someone who does not want to achieve their American dream the old-fashioned way.”

Evans has a response apparently ready-made for Cain's recent quips, even though Evans' words were first published a decade ago:

"A classic example of . . . perverse reasoning was provided by a Conservative politican a few years ago in England. In an attempt to discredit the Opposition, which aimed at redistributing wealth more equitably maong all levels of society, he accused his opponents of preaching the 'politics of envy.'" But "[i]n fact, it [envy] may prove to be crucial for our sense of justice and for motivating us to build a fairer society . . ." Furthermore, "envy is a part of human nature" and we had better "decide how we express it; either through policies of wealth distribution, or through violence and theft. Did the Conservative politican think the latter was preferable?" (Evans, page 45).  

On the one hand, murderous mobs and fascist groups are fueled by nasty "regressive" emotion; on the other, reform impulses for civil rights and social justice are fueled by "progressive" moral sentiment. What changes historically (usually through conflict) all depends on which emotions and which sentiments prevail, occasionally refined by rational thinking. Let's remember from Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA (1966): "There's no changing them! The Right because it's so cruel and brainless, the Left because it's sentimental."  And there we have perhaps the key difference between today's avatars of "Right" and "Left."

Today's Rune: Warrior.

Mood, Emotion and Choice

The strong link between memory and emotion evoked in earlier posts led me to Dylan Evans' Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), a mad dash through evolution and culture, observing various clues and passing furry fellow creatures, computers and robots along the way. 

If emotion "colors" memory, actual colors radiate influence on emotions, moods and choices. As does food intake -- the full range, from coffee and alcohol to spices, chocolate, sugar, hallucinogens and everything in between.

Among humans, moods and emotions transcend specific cultures, groups and societies, though culture may inform how we respond to them, or display/hide them.

Basic emotions include joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise and disgust (Evans, page 5) and later evolutionary additions: love, guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, envy and jealousy (Ditto, page 21). Evans contends with each, considering why they may have developed. 

From the strength of his examples and from my own observations, I concur with nearly all of Evans' take on things. Some things remain open-ended, though, persisting as mysteries.

One conclusion is this: In our existential decision-making, our choosing what to do next, it's clear that emotional calibration is as key a component as logical calculation. The main thing is to be aware of emotional state, mood, and context -- if there's time to be aware. In some situations, snap decisions must be made: fight or flight in the blink of an eye, or by "instinct."

A typical writing prompt: Write about a time when you found yourself in a profoundly altered mood or emotional state. How did it feel?

Today's Rune: Partnership.         

Adventures Among Ants

Mark W. Moffett's Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions (2010) addresses everything you always wanted to know about ants but were afraid to ask. Are some ant colonies Maoist?  Is the Queen Mother really a queen? What does "drone" mean to you?  How do ants communicate? How about organized agriculture and mass warfare among their own kind?  Do older ants make good sentinels?  How do ants adapt to change? How do ants compare to humans and possibly alien species? Pick up a copy and wonder!

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature

Hey, it's my Mom's 75th birthday! One of her favorite quips inspired by Gregory Bateson is -- "Despite all the ugliness in the world, beauty persists." Picked up the copy of Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979) I've been carrying around for years and started through it for only the second time since it came out. It's an added treat now because my mother's underlinings are in it, and it didn't take long to find this, highlighted:

". . . and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists" (page 6).













Am once more thoroughly enjoying Bateson's ideas -- they're right down my alley. Everything from Darwin to sacraments, cybernetics to optical illusions. What's not to love?  And let's not forget his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).  As my Mom pointed out on the phone today, Bateson (1904-1980) was for a long time married to Margaret Mead (1901-1978). How cool is that? 

Today's Rune: Fertility.  Happy Birthday to Barbara Marie Shaffer France!  The beautiful persists.

In Orbit -- Right Now

Taikonauts, astronauts, cosmonauts: people are going back to the Moon, and on to Mars. Just today, the OV-105 Endeavor linked up with the International Space Station, which now has a baker's dozen on board.

I can't even imagine volunteering for a Mars flight that could take five years round trip, if everything goes according to plan. Can you?

Meanwhile, the USA needs to get back into the NASA program in a big way. We need another Julian W. Scheer in the PR department, man! The USA only has three space shuttles in service, with retirement right over the horizon: besides Endeavor, there are still also Atlantis and Discovery. We don't do it, we'll get passed right on by like the horseman, by Brazil, India, Japan, Russia, China, and private corporations (Dr. No anyone?).

Competition is supposed to get the blood flowing, not ebbing. Get to it, Americans, or become the Final Frontier's once-rocked, now barely nods off into dreamyland country.



Skylab -- 1970s! Soyuz. What détente can do, comrades. And if you're ever in Grand Rapids, Michigan, check out the Gerald R. Ford Museum -- it's very cool. Check out the 70s room in particular, after the Watergate display. It's really worth a visit. Last of the mod Republican presidents, after Ike Eisenhower.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Not to See the Sun

Earth Day. I remember as a kid in the early 1970s, how important environmentalism became in that particular rush of enthusiasm, including the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Looks like we're belatedly coming back to the subject.

On the other hand, today I saw two people dressed up like roosters flailing their "wings" and have no idea what message that entailed. God help us all.

Today's Rune: Warrior. (Image courtesy of NASA).

Lincoln, Darwin, Poe; Plus Peanuts

Lincoln, Darwin, Poe: Leadership, Science, Art.

Also at 200, add the following: Louis Braille; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Felix Mendelssohn; Cyrus Hall McCormick; Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol; Alfred Tennyson; Fanny Kemble. No great religious leader, no great public sports figure born in 1809 that I can find (I guess the great sports celebrities didn't really come into their own until the 20th century, come to think of it).

Lincoln Award goes to President Obama. Unofficial Darwin award goes to the present-day US Republican Party, especially its many half-witted members including Palinists, Huckabites, and Haggardists. Let them keep blathering: like keeping an eye on pet pigs, it's good to know what they're up to at all times. Poe awards go to Milk and The Wrestler so far. Books, too soon to tell.



















Hopefully, some sort of justice will come to those members of the Peanut Corporation of America who knowingly sent out poisoned peanut products from Georgia, Virginia, and Texas, including its CEO, 54-year old Stewart Parnell of Lynchburg, Virginia. This greaseball apparently (i.e. he's innocent until proven guilty) thought the public health was too costly to worry about, even while serving (thanks to the banally imbecilic W. Bush administration) on the US Department of Agriculture's Peanut Standards Board -- until dismissed by the Obama administration. He managed such alleged crimes while flying his airplane, enjoying a first home near Lynchburg, and a second home in Nags Head, North Carolina, and a membership in Oakwood Country Club, where he played tennis and probably laughed a lot at poor people. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy today, Friday the 13th.

Imagine if ten or twenty mass-order crooks like Parnell and Bernie Madoff had their heads put on spikes, would the masses be satisfied? I doubt it. Still, these guys need to be prosecuted and also held accountable for their actions without being allowed to wriggle out of it. Seppuku / harakiri might be an honor-saving alternative.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Attributed to Darwin

A little while back, I wondered whether Charles Darwin really said or wrote something now buzzing around the internet, graduation speeches, and various staff workshops:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

I still don't have a definitive answer, but for the record, today I received this gracious message from the UK:

Department of Manuscripts, University Library, Cambridge, 2007 July 04

Dear Dr. France,

Thank you for your e-mail of Friday June 22, to which I am replying as I have curatorial responsibility for the scientific manuscripts collections of the University Library, naturally including the papers of Charles Darwin.

I do not know of the quotation you give that is attributed to Charles Darwin though it does not in tone differ greatly to parts of the final section, "Recapitulation", of On the origin of species, 1859. I have not been able to track the quotation down, though. It could well be a 20th century 'adaptation' (to coin a phrase) as you suspect. Or could it be Thomas Henry Huxley? Just a thought.

Darwin’s texts are machine searchable at a site called The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. Go to http://darwin-online.org.uk/ .

Dr. John van Wyhe, the Project Director for The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online is at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, United Kingdom; e-mail jmv21@cam.ac.uk, telephone +44 1223 760475, facsimile +44 1223 765276.

I trust this helps. With my best wishes,

Adam J. Perkins,
Curator of Scientific Manuscripts,
Department of Manuscripts and University Archives,
University Library, West Road,
Cambridge CB3 9DR, United Kingdom.

Haunted by Visions

Graduation speakers are notorious for quoting other people, sometimes out of context and sometimes, I suspect, without any verification whatsoever. For example, there's a supposed bit from Charles Darwin that goes like this: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” I've heard or seen this a dozen times in the past six months or so, most recently at a graduation ceremony. Corporations sometimes use it as a mantra for laying people off, or so it would seem. Simple question: did Darwin really ever write this, or did a modern copywriter toss it off "in the spirit of Darwin"? So far, I cannot verify the authenticity of authorship, Darwin or otherwise. But more will be revealed, I suspect.

It's Jean-Paul Sartre's birthday, so here's a supposed quip from him: "If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company." He may have written this or said it (presumably in French): I don't know. But the following simple statement can be traced to Sartre's play, Le Diable et le bon Dieu / The Devil and the Good Lord (1951): "When the rich wage war it is the poor who die." Certainly true in Iraq.

It's also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's birthday, the man lampooned by Voltaire via Professor Pangloss (Candide, or Optimism) for his jaunty assertion that we live in "the best of all possible worlds."


Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Birthdays: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mary McCarthy, Jane Russell, Maureen Stapleton, Abdel Halim Hafez (Isma'el Shabana), Françoise Sagan (Quoirez), Ray Davies, Shirin Ebadi, Ian McEwan, Vasilis Papakonstantinou, Müjde Ar (b. Kamile Suat Ebrem), Marcella Detroit (Levy), Kathy Mattea, Pierre Omidyar, Juliette Lewis.

Happy Trails! Summer's here . . . . .

The Filet of the Neighborhood

The Squid and the Whale (Part II -- continued from yesterday's post). The movie centers on a family in crisis and a power shift from Bernard (Jeff Daniels) to Joan Berkman (Laura Linney). Once separated after seventeen years of marriage, they fight over equal custody issues in an epic (if not atypical) struggle over every little thing down to visiting hours, books, the family cat, and the last dollar.

The viewer cringes in understanding – this is dark comedy as well as drama. To some extent everyone is wounded, especially the confused sons, Walt and Frank, who take sides and act out in different ways. Joan, though, is resilient and energized by the changes wrought.

Bernard, essentially the villain, is fun to watch because his character is so well articulated by the script and by Jeff Daniels’ nuanced performance. He is a bitter man, petty, bullying, self-pitying, cheap, unreflective, a sore loser, and yet sometimes hilarious and even sympathetic. He wears shabby professorial clothes and sports a gnarly, unkempt beard. A writer with a huge ego, he is a baseless snob and mostly self-defeating.

Still, it’s entertaining to hear his one bad idea after another, his one silly pronouncement after another. To him, unless something is “very dense and very interesting,” it’s “not serious.” He’s pretentious. Trying to impress Lili (Anna Paquin), one of his undergraduate students, he tells her: “You’d like Kafka. One of my predecessors. . . ” He has rules everyone must follow, hates “pressure,” and often chides everyone else whenever he feels frustrated, which is most of the time: “don’t be difficult.” Yet he can never achieve enough critical distance to see himself as he is or how he might change for the better.

Bernard is cheap, which rarely fails to cause me to wince. He lets Sophie, his older son Walt’s sweet and precocious girlfriend, split the bill for a dinner on which he’s ungraciously tagged along. He refers to his seedy new home as “the filet of the neighborhood,” even though it’s clearly more like leftovers.

But Bernard has a brief reprieve in his student Lili right out of Wonder Boys: “She was a junkie for the printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.” (Grady Tripp, Bernard’s Doppelgänger, about his own student friend, Hannah). She needs a room, he’s “got an extra” and they quickly begin a brief fling until she realizes, even at twenty, what a jerk he is, especially his “rules.”


One of the more poignant scenes shows Bernard opening a letter from a prospective agent, only to discover it's a rejection note. He lies to cover this defeat, but the distraught look on Jeff Daniels' face looks excruciatingly real. The humane viewer can't help but feel some sympathy.

The Squid and the Whale provides a good case study in character development, conflict, plot, tone, and setting.

Today's Rune: Journey.

Today's Birthdays: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Judy Blume.