Van Gogh's Letters

Very cool - wish I were in Amsterdam. From The First Post.

The publication of 800 letters written by or addressed to Vincent Van Gogh is an unprecented window into the artist's private life

By Robert Fox

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 7, 2009

At times in his life he could barely give away his paintings, let alone sell them. But today Vincent Van Gogh, long one of the world's most sought after and loved artists, conquers a new literary stage, with the publication of more than 800 of his letters.

Some 120 of the letters form a major exhibition at the museum named after him in Amsterdam. They are surrounded by some of his most celebrated paintings - the sunflowers, irises, the roasting sun at Arles, the stars whirling like Catherine wheels, the threatening cloud of crows above the wheatfield painted at Auvers sur Oise just days before he shot himself, never to recover.

The project to edit all the known correspondence - 819 of his own letters, and 93 of those to him from his brother Theo and painters including Gaugin - has taken 15 years. The glory of the letters is the matching of the words with sketches and diagrams. "They're really an extension of the paintings and pictures - a form of art in themselves, sketch-letters," says Leo Jansen, one of the designers of the project.

The idea that he was a madman slashing the canvas with paint in frenzy is rubbish

The letters portray Vincent's terrible suffering from epilepsy and breakdown, his loneliness when only his devoted brother Theo believed in his art and genius. Yet taken together the letters show how he developed into a fully fledged artist in less than ten years - and created a revolution in art in just under three years, from the time he left Paris in February 1888 and went to live in Arles.

In that time he voluntarily committed himself to the asylum in the cloister at St Remy. "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat," he wrote to Theo on Thursday, May 23, 1889, "where alone each morning I see the sun rise in glory."

St Remy was a welcome refuge from the world. For his fellow sufferers he had nothing but compassion: "Although there are some who howl and occasionally rave, there is much true friendship that they have for each other."

In the letters the method far outweighs the madness - and this is one of the great revelations of the show and the book. "The letters are one of the great correspondences of the century, comparable to the letters of Keats, Byron and Wilde in their energy," says Philip Watson, who has edited the letters in six volumes in English for Thames and Hudson.

"What emerges here is somebody deliberately planning a campaign in his art," says Hans Luijten, one of the editors of the Dutch edition and curator of the Amsterdam show. His colleague, Leon Jansen adds, "Every move was thought through - every brush stroke planned. The idea that he was a madman slashing the canvas with paint in frenzy is rubbish and these letters show this."

Some of the letters have been stitched together from sheets that were sold separately - and they'll have to be parted again after the Amsterdam exhibition closes in January. Some are too delicate, the ink too faded, to go on public display again. So the show will be different when it travels to the Royal Academy from Amsterdam - more pictures, but fewer letters.

It's worth seeing the letters now on display at the Van Gogh museum because it is one of the most sustained essays on art by any painter of any age. "They show he knew what he was doing and that he was so far ahead of his time - that's why they thought him mad," says Hans Luijten.

You can get all two million words and 2,000 images of this great project for a cool £325 for the six volumes - if you buy before the New Year, when the price rises to £395. If you can't run to that, you can read and view it all online.

As for the Amsterdam exhibition, it will open to the public after the visit this evening by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

The fact that she is there at all might raise a smile to the gaunt and grizzled features of Vincent himself, wherever he may be now. He was no court painter. Indeed he only ever painted one person of substance and status in his entire short but brilliant life - and no one is quite certain what became of the canvas.

'Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks' at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam runs from October 7 to January 3. It will transfer to the Royal Academy, London on January 27. 'Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters' is published by Thames and Hudson at £325.

Tags: Art, literature, Vincent Van Gogh, letters, Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, books, museums

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

Cool article from the New York Times - riffing on some research that came out last week.

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: October 5, 2009

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

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Alexander Hafemann

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

Tags: Psychology, mind, consciousness, surreal, nonsense, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect, New York Times, Benedict Carey, Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, meaning, coherence, absurd

Call for Papers - The Second Consciousness Online Conference

All you academic types might be interested in this.

The Second Consciousness Online Conference

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Richard Brown

Call for Papers:

CO2: The Second Online Consciousness Conference

February 2010

Please post and distribute widely; appologies for cross-posting

I am pleased to announce the call for papers for the second Consciousness Online conference. We have a very exciting conference planned for this year with some new features (e.g. podcasts and vodcasts of presentations) and two great invited sessions.

Special Session on Higher Order Consciousness (from the NYU workshop on perception, action and the self)

Hakwan Lau, Psychology, Columbia

Commentators:

Ned Block, Philosophy, NYU

David Rosenthal, Philosophy, CUNY

David Chalmers, Philosophy, NYU/ANU

Invited Colloquium on the State of the Art in Brain Decoding

Colin Clifford, Psychology, U Sydney

John-Dylan Haynes, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience -Berlin

Papers in any area of consciousness studies are welcome and should be roughly 3,000-4,000 words, suitable for blind review, and sent to consciousnessonline@gmail.com by January 5th 2010. Those interested in being referees or commentators should also contact me. Authors of accepted papers are urged to make, or have made, some kind of audio/visual presentation (e.g. narrated powerpoint or video of talk) though this is not required to present.

The papers from last year, pending external review, are being published by The Journal of Consciousness Studies and if contributors are interested I would like to look into something like that for this year’s proceedings. Because of this contributions that are unpublished elsewhere are preferred, though exceptions can be made.

Tags: consciousness, conferences, Call for Papers, The Second Consciousness Online Conference, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, Richard Brown

TED Talks - Tribal leadership: David Logan

Interesting talk.

At TEDxUSC, David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form -- in schools, workplaces, even the driver's license bureau. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individuals. (Recorded at TEDxUSC, May 2009, Los Angeles, California. Duration: 16:40)

Tags: Psychology, sociology, anthropology, culture, TED Talks, Tribal leadership, David Logan

The Immanent Frame - Spiritual machines: an interview with John Lardas Modern

Interesting interview - I'm not a believer in "spiritual machines" - at best, they might someday acquire some form of self-awareness, but even that is highly speculative at this point. Be that as it may, good discussion.

Spiritual machines: an interview with John Lardas Modern

posted by Nathan Schneider

John Lardas Modern, an assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College, draws on the Beat poets, phrenologists, prison reformers, and Moby-Dick to show why taking technology seriously forces us to think differently about the boundaries of religion. His article “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan” appeared in the December 2008 issue of Church History. His book Haunted Modernity; or, the Metaphysics of Secularism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

NS: How did technology become such a central concern for you? Are you a tinkerer? Do you like gizmos, or fear them?

JLM: I definitely have deep, deep ambivalence—well, ambivalence is always deep. But I am a would-be tinkerer. Right now I’m trying to refurbish a pair of Epicure speakers from the seventies. I also subject myself to mass mediation as co-host of a local radio show. I’ve always been taken with gadgetry in a lot of ways, but at the same time I’m also afraid of my television set. My academic interest in technology stems from a personal love/hate relationship with technology in general. This has drawn me to writers and artists who are also interested in the relationship between technology and the way we practice our humanity: people like Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Pynchon, and Ralph Ellison. They each inquire into what constitutes agency. What is it? Is it possible? If one takes into account technology, it’s no longer quite as clear that there is a single human actor that is determining what is in front of him or her. This doesn’t negate agency, but it definitely makes things more complicated. In the process, we find that the distinctions between the religious and the secular, or science and theology, aren’t quite as definitive as we would like them to be.

NS: This approach leads to apparent contradictions. Evangelicals, for instance, are generally thought of as promoters of a religious social order rather than a secular one. What, then, do you mean when you write of “evangelical secularism”?

JLM: My work on secularism gets at discourse, in an old Foucauldian sense: that there is a field of statements afoot in our world that determine how the concept of religion is understood, how people live it and breathe it. Obviously, you would be hard-pressed not to call evangelicals religious. But at the same time, they are at the cutting edge, in the 19th century, of disseminating and advancing different aspects of what we understand as the secular—thinking in terms of the population, statistics, mechanical Utopias, and religion being an integral part of cognitive action and political access. More significantly, this takes place as part of a larger discourse. Their religiosity is related to the way in which religion is being defined beyond evangelicalism as well: within liberal circles, Catholic circles, emerging discourses of anthropology, and the penitentiary movement, we can see something emerging in the antebellum period which we now call secularism. In part because of technological advancement, religion was being coded in a particular way and for particular purposes. It happened across a wide variety of fields, such as conservative evangelicals and Unitarians, or phrenologists and prison reformers.

NS: How does the category of “religion” relate to that of “spirituality,” which is increasingly popular lately?

JLM: I’m actually writing now about the emergence of that term in liberal Protestant circles in the 19th century, among Unitarians, mental scientists, and moral philosophers. They were talking about spirituality much like it is often understood today—as a style of piety, a mode of being religious that is more true than religion itself. In phrenology, for example, the organ of spirituality was an invention of a man named Orson Fowler in the 1840s. He took templates that were operative among European phrenologists and replaced their faculty of Marvelousness with the faculty of Spirituality. His discovery was a matter of empirical science—inducing magnetic states among patients and then activating different mental organs. This is a wonderful, crazy example of my larger point. Not only is spirituality coming to exist as a word in the world, a purification of religion, but it’s also located on both sides at the very top of your head. As I say in my Immanent Frame piece, there are neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania doing much the same thing now, and without any irony.

NS: The way your rhetoric in that piece operates, the mere fact of a historical precedent casts suspicion on their whole enterprise.

JLM: In so many ways, spirituality, as a marker of one’s religiosity, contains within it the implicit denial of the effects of tradition, politics, the public, and the past. I stand back and am amazed that people could imagine themselves in that way. That’s something that was going on in the mid-19th century, but you see it very much going on today.

NS: A lot of these movements—contemporary evangelicalism and also the ideologies wrapped up in technology—rely on an appeal to novelty. Pointing out the historical ironies could appear like a threat.

JLM: I see the threatening nature of my work sometimes in my students. I’m sure many religious studies professors will say that. We are historicizing religion and that can pose a challenge to students about the newness or integrity of their own piety. But more often, I’m attempting to threaten existing scholarship in American religion about the ways we tell the grand narrative of the past two or three centuries. Evangelicalism, liberal Protestantism, Catholicism, and so forth, are often seen as threads of a larger picture, but threads that are nevertheless distinct. What I’m really interested in doing is asking whether they have more in common with one another than not.

NS: I hear the influence of Catherine Albanese in the effort to explore what is tying these separate threads together.

JLM: Well, I think I owe a great debt to Cathy. She not only got me thinking about spiritualism and metaphysical religions, but she also imparted her deep interest in historiography. She’s an ironist. And I think she got that from her mentor, Martin Marty. Cathy is somebody who recognizes that the promises of the past never worked out the way they were supposed to, and that it is the historian’s duty to go back and look at the counter-intuitive moments that made the difference. Not just to say, “Look what happened in 1850,” but rather, “Look at what happened in 1850, and does that not change who you are and how you think about yourself and your world right now?”

NS: Your interest in historiography certainly comes out in your Epoché article, which mentions Walter Benjamin’s reference to the historian as “midrashic interpreter.” That essay and your essays for The Immanent Frame are unusually playful and lyrical.

JLM: Writing and the process of representing ideas is something that I take very seriously. The style of an argument is, in a sense, part of the argument. Since this binary between the religious and the secular isn’t as definitive as we expect it to be, the way I write is meant to blur these boundaries. I think of my own writing as almost the opposite of a scientific article, with its 200-word abstract at the beginning. To have an abstract is to assume that there is a point, bereft of ulterior signification so that you can quarantine it. I find that disturbing. Cathy Albanese, I think, taught me this lesson about the false clarity one achieves with just a snapshot of a moment or an idea. It’s false. And we should call it false.

NS: I am also struck by how you write, in passing, of Mircea Eliade as a “theologian in denial,” which always seems like a latent aspiration in religious studies.

JLM: I’m definitely interested in the relationship between what constitutes theological inquiry and what constitutes academic inquiry. If you look at someone like Walter Benjamin—he is all things. He’s a wonderful case study of the fluidity between materialist Marxism and a theological sensibility. He gives the lie to that easy binary. In my own work, I’m very much interested in, at least at this point, evoking what have been considered theological modes of inquiry. In my Church History piece, I suggest that secularism, as a discourse, resembles what evangelicals and a lot of other people have called divinity. In the mode of someone like Marx, in order for us to talk about this and to discuss the power of certain ideas, we do necessarily have to evoke qualities that have been attributed to divinity by those within certain traditions.

NS: You write that you’re “committed to the indefensible and ridiculous proposition that the human is a malleable thing in the world,” that “neural activity is dependent,” in part, on words, ideas, and actions. To what extent is your view of the human continuous or not with technology? Are we technology? Or spirit?

JLM: I do not believe that technology is guiding human hands, making us over in its own image. At the same time, I don’t believe that humans are at the helm. My sense is that the human has a spirit of agency. It’s not the agency we’ve inherited from Descartes or Locke, or these Enlightenment cats who gave us a sense of the human as capable of knowing itself and knowing why it makes certain decisions. There is something in the middle there that, I think, advancements in technology bring out very clearly.

NS: We see it all around us today, don’t we?

JLM: One of the things that has recently brought out the ambiguous space of agency is the iPhone. In the last few months, I’ve noticed an uptick of stories about people getting into car crashes because of their iPhones, while checking their email or something like that. There is a moment of incorporation that happens to people when they’re on an iPhone. It literally becomes a part of them. It is the latest manifestation of something I always talk about: the Greek root of “technology,” τεχνολογία, which means systematic treatment. It is something that is designed to encompass you, so much that it blurs the line between itself and you. People know that they shouldn’t be looking at their email while they’re driving, but they can’t help themselves. A major influence on my recent work, the writer William Burroughs, described language as a virus and the human subject as an addict. On some level, we are addicted to technology. But it’s not a pathology; it’s not an errant situation. It is what it is.

NS: When you compare 19th-century technologies to their present-day counterparts, do you think of them as similar in kind, or are we in a totally different order now?

JLM: On one level, there are certainly many parallels and many things that resonate. There was an article a few months back on neuroenhancers in the New Yorker (”Brain Gain,” April 27, 2009). Pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs that are going to make us smarter or allow us to be more efficient with our time. They’re very popular among white-collar knowledge workers. You don’t see things like that, at least as clearly, in the mid-19th century. But it does remind me of these spiritualists in Massachusetts, during the 1850s, led by John Murray Spear and Sarah Newton, who were building a perpetual motion machine that was going to be run on spirit power. One of the rituals that they performed before initiating the machine was to literally ingest parts of it. They ground down the metal and ingested it in silk packets. I always remember that example when I think of people who are hopped-up on Ritalin and feverishly efficient. The placebo effect was probably pretty strong in 1854. If you think you’re a part of a spiritual machine, you might be able to physically perform at a very high level.

NS: Having studied the technology of 19th century evangelical publishing, what do you think current transformations in publishing are leading to?

JLM: Something is going change pretty radically in terms of how academics do their work and publish it. Buried in your question, there’s hope, but there’s also something a bit ominous about the whole prospect. In a wonderful interview by an Italian journalist in the ’70s, Don DeLillo is asked about the future of television. Cable was on the horizon. DeLillo says something to the effect that, pretty soon, everybody is going to have their own TV station. All the golfers will be able to go home watch the golf channel, and all the people who love cooking will be able to go home and watch the cooking channel. At the time, DeLillo was saying this with a nod to fascism, in an ominous way. But it sounds pretty quaint now. It’s really interesting to think about what constituted something ominous then and what constitutes a fearful scenario now.

NS: A friend, who works in academic publishing, recently told me that Google is the thing that makes her reluctant to bring a child into the world. It struck me as a particularly religious statement.

JLM: The promise of total information, total transparency, is embedded within the promise of secularism: everything will be transparent, open, and revealed. Google, obviously, is working toward that goal. It is a promise that has been deeply held by many, many people over the past few hundred years.

Tags: The Immanent Frame, Spiritual machines, interview, John Lardas Modern, Nathan Schneider, Religion, technology, Spirituality, secularism

All in the Mind - 'It takes a village': the evolution of human nature

Cool episode - as much as we like to think of ourselves as "rugged individualists" in this country, the reality is that we are socially embedded human beings, and if we weren't we wouldn't have evolved as far as we have.

'It takes a village': the evolution of human nature

Listen Now - 03102009 |Download Audio - 03102009 [Play]

What most distinguishes us from other apes? Our naked flesh? Language? Our empathic ways? Acclaimed anthropologist and sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has spent her long research career upending assumptions about sex, reproduction and the evolution of human nature. She joins Natasha Mitchell to discuss her new book Mothers and Others, and why it took a village to generate a big brained human child.

Show Transcript | Hide Transcript

Transcripts are published Wednesdays. Audio is published directly after broadcast on Saturdays.

Guests

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Professor Emerita
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
http://www.citrona.com/hrdy/index.html

Further Information

All in the Mind blog post for your comments and engagement
Posts to the All in the Mind blog are subject to ABC Online's Conditions of Use.

Charles Darwin Symposium, Charles Darwin University
September 2009. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a participant

Review of Mothers and Others by Natalie Angier, New York Times, 2009

Publications

Title: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN-10: 0674032993

Title: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How they Shape the Human Species
Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (September 5, 2000)
ISBN-10: 0345408934

Title: The Woman That Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates, Revised Edition
Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: Harvard University Press (December 20, 1999)
ISBN-10: 0674955390

Title: Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives
Author: Editors, G. Hausfater and S. Hrdy
Publisher: Aldine (July 1984)
ISBN-10: 0202020223

Title: The Langurs of Abu Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction
Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1978
ISBN 10: 0-674-51057-7

Title: Black-Man of Zinacantan: A Central American Legend
Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: University of Texas Press (1972)
ISBN-10: 0292707010

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Tags: All in the Mind, It takes a village, evolution, human nature, Psychology, anthropology, sociobiology, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others, Natasha Mitchell

Understanding the Anxious Mind

Interesting article from the New York Times - especially as someone who deals with social anxeity disorder. I tend to be a fan of Jerome Kagan, as well, so it's doubly good.

In my own case, however, I wasn't an anxious baby or child - it developed in adolescence, so in some ways I do not fit the mold Kagan was looking at here.

Understanding the Anxious Mind

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

Published: September 29, 2009

Jerome Kagan’s “Aha!” moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.

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Mickey Duzyj

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Mickey Duzyj

No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty — new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells — and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.

Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard’s William James Hall — a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as “a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach ... a sense of the insecurity of life.” Kagan is elfin and spry, balding and bespectacled. He neither looks nor acts his age, which is 80. He is one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the 20th century.

On the monitor, Baby 19 is a plain-looking teenager, hiding behind her long, dark hair. The interview, the same one given to all 15-year-olds in the longitudinal study, begins with questions about school. She has very few extracurricular activities, she says in a small voice, but she does like writing and playing the violin. She fidgets almost constantly as she speaks, twirling her hair, touching her ear, jiggling her knee. “This is the overflow of her high-reactive nature,” Kagan told me, standing near the monitor so he could fast-forward to the good parts.

Here was a good part: The interviewer asks Baby 19 what she worries about.

“I don’t know,” Baby 19 says after a long pause, twirling her hair faster, touching her face, her knee. She smiles a little, shrugs. Another pause. And then the list of troubles spills out: “When I don’t quite know what to do and it’s really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they’re doing. I’m always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way? ... I worry about things like getting projects done... I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? ... If I’m going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I’m going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say.” Baby 19 is wringing her hands now. “How I’m going to deal with the world when I’m grown. Or if I’m going to sort of do anything that really means anything.”

Her voice trails off. She wants to make a difference, she says, and worries about whether she will. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”

Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry. He went on to find many more such children, and would watch a big chunk of them run into trouble with anxiety or other problems as they grew up.

The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in — thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming — it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.

These psychologists have put the assumptions about innate temperament on firmer footing, and they have also demonstrated that some of us, like Baby 19, are born anxious — or, more accurately, born predisposed to be anxious. Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.

They have also shown that while temperament persists, the behavior associated with it doesn’t always. Kagan often talks about the three ways to identify an emotion: the physiological brain state, the way an individual describes the feeling and the behavior the feeling leads to. Not every brain state sparks the same subjective experience; one person might describe a hyperaroused brain in a negative way, as feeling anxious or tense, while another might enjoy the sensation and instead uses a positive word like “alert.” Nor does every brain state spark the same behavior: some might repress the bad feelings and act normally; others might withdraw. But while the behavior and the subjective experience associated with an emotion like anxiety might be in a person’s conscious control, physiology usually is not. This is what Kagan calls “the long shadow of temperament.” The oldest high-reactive subjects in Kagan’s and Fox’s studies, like Baby 19, are in their 20s now, and for many of them, no matter how much they manage to avoid looking anxious to an outsider, fears still rattle in their skulls at 3 o’clock in the morning. They remain anxious just below the surface, their subconscious brains still twitchy, still hypervigilant, still unable to shift attention away from perceived threats that aren’t really there.

ANXIETY IS NOT fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger. It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.

“I was flesh bereft of spirit,” wrote the journalist Patricia Pearson in “A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine),” in a pitch-perfect description of this emotional morass, “a friable self, grotesque... I got an AIDS test. I had my moles checked. I grew suspicious of pains in my back. If I was nauseous, I worried about cancer and started reading up obsessively on symptoms. I lay in bed whenever I could, trying to shut up the clamor of terror with sleep.”

When the “clamor of terror” starts to interfere with functioning, as it did for Pearson when she was a crime reporter in her early 30s, worrying turns into a clinical anxiety disorder, of which there are several forms: panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and a catch-all called generalized anxiety disorder. Taken together, they make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And that figure doesn’t even count the far greater swath who are garden-variety worriers, people who fret when a child is late, who worry when they hear a siren headed toward home, who are sure that a phone call in the middle of the night means someone is dead.

In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to overreactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight. But in people born with a particular brain circuitry, the kind seen in Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects, the amygdala is hyperreactive, prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain. Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.

But having all the earmarks of anxiety in the brain does not always translate into a subjective experience of anxiety. “The brain state does not make it a disorder,” Kagan told me. “The brain state exists, and the statement ‘I’m anxious,’ exists, and the correlation is imperfect.” Two people can experience the same level of anxiety, he said, but one who has interesting work to distract her from the jittery feelings might do fine, while another who has just lost his job spends all day at home fretting and might be quicker to reach a point where the thrum becomes overwhelming. It’s all in the context, the interpretation, the ability to divert your attention from the knot in your gut. These variations also happen when someone grows up from an anxious infant to someone either fretful or tranquil. One aim of Kagan’s and Fox’s longitudinal studies is to watch how the life stories of these high-strung babies unfold.

The quintessential longitudinal study, the one often mentioned because it set the standard, is the Framingham Heart Study, which enshrined the idea of risk factors. It was through Framingham, for instance, that scientists learned that high blood pressure was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, since it followed its subjects for long enough to detect that those who had high blood pressure in their 30s and 40s were more likely to have heart disease later in life.

But such studies draw conclusions about trends, not destinies. If someone with high blood pressure treats it early, the risk of heart disease can be reduced significantly. Similarly, if someone with an anxiety-prone temperament grows up in the right surroundings, he or she might never develop a full-blown anxiety disorder.

Kagan’s first exposure to longitudinal studies came shortly after he received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1954. He was working at the Fels Research Institute on the campus of Antioch College in Ohio, where a longitudinal study of middle-class children had been going on for nearly 30 years. He stumbled upon a gigantic room “loaded with prose summaries of what these children were like from the age of 1 month on,” he told me recently. He knew a treasure trove when he saw one.

This is a long article - read the rest here.

Tags: Psychology, anxiety, brain, mind, New York Times, Jerome Kagan, Robin Marantz Henig, Nathan Fox, Patricia Pearson, emotions, hypervigilance

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Wisdom of Not Knowing

Three great podcasts from Upaya Zen Center.

Wisdom of Not Knowing

Title: Wisdom of Not Knowing

Recorded: April 11, 2009
Posted on: June 1, 2009
Speaker: Sensei Beate Stolte
Show: 139

This is Sensei Beate’s first talk of the spring sesshin. Sensei encourages participants to practice together while having no expectations. She discusses the importance of mudra, mantra and posture on the cushion as deep practice. Our entire practice is an act of gratitude to the ancestors, and yet we must be our own teachers, as well.

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Wisdom of Not Knowing: On Pilgrimage

Speaker: Sensei Beate Genko Stolte

Our practice works through its own integrity. It is easiest to enter the practice of sesshin through each breath, like a poem asking the reader to enter through each word or phrase. It takes time and patience. And, like some well-loved poems do, the practice may begin to appear in our lives without our own effort. It can become natural. We can begin to come into our own true nature in each breath and each thing we do.

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Wisdom of Not Knowing: Acting Within the Mystery

Speaker: Sensei Beate Genko Stolte

Each of us is the center, actualizing time and space. Everything has such far-reaching and interdependent effects that we cannot possibly know all the aspects of a given situation. Moreover, our senses are limited in what they tell us; there is a lot happening “between” the senses. Not knowing means acting within the mystery of what is left out by our senses. Can we let the mind be guided by the grounded, initial mind – the non-thinking mind? If we can, we do not need a “self” because we simply rely on the natural process. Dogen says, “the mind that sees fully into the uncertain world of life and death is the thought of enlightenment.”

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Tags: Buddhism, wisdom, Upaya Zen Center, Dharma Podcasts, Wisdom of Not Knowing, Sensei Beate Stolte, Acting Within the Mystery, On Pilgrimage

Newsweek - PTSD: New War on An Old Foe

There seems to be a change in the approach to treating PTSD in American veterans. It's about time. I've heard they are also looking at new treatments as well, including Internal Family Systems therapy.

PTSD: New War on An Old Foe

Big changes underway at the VA could mean better treatment for thousands of vets. A bureaucracy in transition.

By Jamie Reno | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Oct 1, 2009

They are the invisible wounds of war, the battered minds and bruised spirits we have come to recognize as posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. By one estimate, more than 300,000 of the nearly 2 million U.S. servicemen and -women deployed since 9/11 suffer from the often-debilitating condition, with symptoms that include flashbacks and nightmares, emotional numbness, relationship problems, trouble sleeping, sudden anger, and drug and alcohol abuse. The number of cases is expected to climb as the war in Afghanistan continues, and could ultimately exceed 500,000, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University. Mental-health experts say PTSD is the primary reason suicides in the military are at an all-time high; 256 soldiers took their own lives in 2008, the highest number since that data was first tracked, in 1980.

As NEWSWEEK and others have reported, the Department of Veterans Affairs has struggled to address this mental-health crisis, and thousands of veterans have suffered as a result. Now, thanks to new leadership and a new openness to collaboration, things appear to be changing at the VA, if slowly. Veterans still often face insufferably long waits for treatment and steep bureaucratic hurdles when filing disability claims. But there is a new sense of urgency under Eric Shinseki, the retired four-star Army general appointed to head the agency by President Obama, to change the culture within the 77-year-old VA. Shinseki has made PTSD a priority, with efforts underway to address concerns from the way claims are processed to the development of new, more effective treatments. "Brain injuries and the psychological consequences of battle are not new to combat," Shinseki tells NEWSWEEK. "We know from past wars that with early diagnosis and treatment, people can get better."

The agency has already trained more than 2,000 mental-health clinicians to administer PTSD treatment using new, evidence-based treatments. Among the most surprising steps the VA has taken is to reach out to mental-health professionals in the private sector, something that never happened under past regimes. Just last month the agency launched a joint venture with the Boston Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital to treat potentially tens of thousands of PTSD sufferers and their families in the Boston area. The VA also recently began what press secretary Katie Roberts called a "collaborative relationship" with Give an Hour, a national nonprofit network of some 4,500 therapists that provides free counseling to returning troops and their families. Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist who founded Give an Hour four years ago, says that when she contacted the VA in the past she was turned away. "The VA finally gets that PTSD is a public-health crisis," Van Dahlen says. "They still haven't taken full advantage of the fact that we have 4,500 therapists eager to help, there isn't really a collaborative relationship yet, but the new leadership is showing sincere interest. That's a start."

Shinseki, a wounded vet (he lost part of a foot in Vietnam) who clashed with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war in Iraq, spelled out the VA's new approach in a July speech to a medical symposium. "We have looked at ourselves closely and have decided to make advocacy—yes, advocacy—on behalf of veterans both our culture and overarching philosophy ... It will involve a long-term process in reorienting our workforce and our work habits toward this philosophy. Culture change will take longer."

One practical application of the new philosophy: the VA has launched its first-ever nationwide search for veterans in rural areas who suffer from PTSD but are unable or unwilling to travel long distances to a VA office. Given the fact that 38 percent of veterans live outside big cities, which the VA acknowledges, this rural outreach seems especially overdue. Dr. Harold Kudler, a VA psychiatrist since 1984 and associate director of the agency's Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Centers, heads a program in North Carolina that will partner with rural health centers and National Guard armories to find and treat veterans in outlying areas, using specially equipped vans for house calls. "We should be up and running in three months," says Kudler, adding that similar programs are being developed around the country. "The VA is no longer going to wait for veterans to come to us—we have to go to them."

Finding veterans with PTSD is one problem; persuading them to be treated is another. As many as seven in 10 veterans refuse mental-health treatment even when it is offered, according to a 2008 study by the RAND Corporation. Further complicating matters is the fact that there is no universally accepted ideal treatment for PTSD. But Dr. Matthew Friedman, who runs the VA's National Center for PTSD, says extensive research by the agency has concluded that two approaches appear to be the most effective. One, called cognitive-processing therapy, seeks to help the sufferer by identifying and changing dysfunctional thinking, behavior, and emotional responses. The other, prolonged-exposure therapy, consists of reliving and confronting the trauma and learning to think differently about it. In an innovative effort to reach the younger generation of veterans, the VA is studying a variation of prolonged-exposure therapy that uses technology similar to a videogame to re-create as realistically as possible the original traumatic events. "Younger, tech-savvy veterans have shown a real willingness to participate in this 3-D approach to PTSD treatment," explains Dr. Anne Sadler, an associate director at the Iowa City VA who is heading the study. "Virtual-reality therapy is a way for a generation comfortable with joysticks and videogames to deal with their horrific experiences."

Shinseki is also working to improve the agency's strained relationships with veterans' services organizations. "The culture at the VA is changing," says Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the largest nonprofit, nonpartisan group for veterans of the current war. "They've reached out to us, and they're saying the right things and bringing in good people." But Rieckhoff, an Army first lieutenant who served in Iraq, warns that implementing these changes will be a "massive challenge" and that the VA still needs to adopt more of an open-door policy. "The VA has to accept that they're just one component of a comprehensive solution to the veterans' mental-health problems that must also include the Department of Defense, veterans' organizations, and the public."

With the national dialogue focused on civilian health care and the economy, Shinseki's efforts to transform the VA have flown mostly under the radar. But people have begun to take notice, and even some of the agency's harshest critics are guardedly optimistic. Paul Sullivan, a veteran of the Gulf war who worked at the VA as a project manager until 2006, is executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, which, with another veterans' organization, sued the VA over its slow response to veterans' disability claims. Despite the lawsuit, which is still in the courts, Sullivan calls Shinseki "a breath of fresh air at VA. But VA isn't out of the woods yet; it remains in crisis due to decades of chronic underfunding, unresponsive leaders, and overly complex policies that often result in unfair delays and denials for health care and benefits. There's still a long way to go." The huge agency, with more than 200,000 employees, continues to be plagued by inefficiency and corruption. In August it was revealed by the VA's inspector-general that in 2007 and 2008, while veterans waited for their delayed disability checks, managers at the VA's technology office awarded $24 million in bonuses to thousands of employees.

Most veterans interviewed for this story agree with Sullivan that the VA has a long way to go. Despite Shinseki's good intentions, veterans aren't necessarily feeling the love, at least not yet. Dorman Branch, a Marine sergeant from Clinton, La., who saw heavy combat in Afghanistan, was diagnosed with severe PTSD and degenerative disc disease and is on 80 percent disability. He says that to see a doctor he has to drive 130 miles to New Orleans. There is no rural outreach program yet in Branch's neck of the woods. "I don't see any real positive changes" in the VA, says Branch, who has trouble sleeping, hearing loss, memory loss, severe headaches, and anger issues. "All they do is give me Wellbutrin [medication] for my depression and ask me why I think I'm raging. Then it's 'see you in six months.' I can't work. My wife is in school. I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease five years ago and just got surgery recently. I have a great caseworker, but she's the only one who's really helped us."

To date, the VA has diagnosed 111,239 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD, but has treated only a small percentage of those. Of course, studies from RAND and many others suggest that the number of veterans with PTSD is far greater. But to date the agency is aware only of the veterans who actually contact it seeking treatment; its efforts to proactively identify other sufferers are just getting underway. Meanwhile, the lives of far too many veterans with untreated PTSD and unprocessed disability claims tragically deteriorate. And the problem will likely get worse before it gets better: up to 1 million new veteran patients are expected to flood the VA by the end of 2013, including an unprecedented number of women (11 percent of the total troops deployed since 9/11 are women). Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognizes the importance of the VA getting a handle on this crisis. At a defense forum last month, recalling a meeting he had last year with a group of homeless veterans from past wars, Mullen said he worries that if efforts don't improve quickly, the nation could see another generation of down-and-out former soldiers on the streets. "Shame on us if we don't figure it out this time around to make sure that doesn't happen," Mullen said.

Tags: Psychology, therapy, war, government, PTSD, Newsweek, PTSD: New War on An Old Foe, Jamie Reno, Veterans Administration, posttraumatic stress disorder, Iraq, Afghanistan

Integral Coaching from Integral Life

Nice resources - and a great introduction to integral coaching.

Resources

Integral Dialogue: Orientations

In the first installation of this dialogue, Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine, and Ken Wilber discuss the advent of Integral Coaching, whose services will be made available to the Integral community in the coming months. They share some of the unique contributions the Integral approach offers to coaches and clients alike, providing the most comprehensive map of growth and human development available today.

To further explore the ideas and techniques behind Integral Coaching, we invite you to check out the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice

Integral Dialogue: Communicating Across Worlds

Have you ever had a conversation with someone, but left feeling frustrated and unheard, as if the other person was in a completely different world? Well, there is a good chance that they were—at least in the ways they perceive and interpret what's important to them. In the second installment of this dialogue, Joanne Hunt and Laura Divine further explore the concept of "Native Perspectives," noting the four very different approaches to reality that influence our relationship with the world, with each other, and with ourselves.

Integral Dialogue: The Many Ways We Grow

In the third installation of the Integral Coaching dialogue, Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine, and Ken Wilber discuss the many ways human beings grow and develop in their lives. There are many different aspects of human experience (often referred to as "multiple intelligences" or "lines of development") that all grow at different velocities through different levels of proficiency and sophistication. Without taking these different aspects of psychological maturity into account, many schools of coaching end up working with two-dimensional caricatures of their clients—unable to fully appreciate the knotted elegance of human potential, and therefore unable to locate the very real leverage points of growth and development.

Integral Dialogue: The Flavors of Presence

In the final installment of Joanne, Laura, and Ken's dialogue, they discuss the last two ‘lenses’ comprising the AQAL Constellation in the Integral Coaching method: states of consciousness and typologies. Their discussion includes not only understanding how these two lenses are used in supporting client development, but also how they help define practices engaged in by the coaches themsleves as a way to cultivate and deepen their own process of waking up and growing up.

Integral Coaching Canada

Coaching and development resources are also available in the Resources section of Integral Coaching Canada’s web site. Integral Coaching Canada is our global coaching partner. The resources on their web site were developed for coaches and also include articles, perspectives and a relevant booklist for people interested in integral application and human development.

Tags: Integral, coaching, Philosophy, personal growth, Integral Coaching, Integral Life, Integral Coaching Canada

Psychology Today - Tripping at Horizons Psychedelic Conference

Very cool. It's about time that research in psychedelics be taken seriously again and allowed to proceed. MAPS has been a leader in this regard, with ceaseless lobbying to allow new studies to begin. The potential benefits are huge.

Tripping at Horizons Psychedelic Conference

Is there a good side to psychedelics?

By Guest Blogger

From the audience, a middle aged woman raised her hand and shared that she had recently come out of the "psychedelic closet" to her twenty something children. They had told her about their experiences with Ecstasy, so she was curious to try the drug herself. At 51 years old, she had experienced her first "trip."

This was just one example of the unorthodox stories told at Horizons' third annual conference on psychedelics, which took place September 26-27, 2009 in New York City. Hosted by Judson Memorial Church, a venue that has long advocated social justice, free speech, and progressive politics, Horizons was founded by Kevin Balktick in New York City to share fresh perspectives on the role of psychedelics in medicine, culture, history, spirituality, and art. The conference invites experts, researchers, and scholars who all share an intimate knowledge of psychedelic drug use to discuss developments in research, debunk myths, and ultimately educate the public about this esoteric sub culture.

Over the two-day event, speakers lectured on topics ranging from "Making Sense of Mushrooms" to "Psychedelic Harm Reduction--Rethinking the 'Bad Trip.'" Speaking on behalf of psilocybin, Andy Letcher, a writer, academic lecturer, and musician from Oxford, discussed his personal experiences while under the influence of "magic mushrooms" as well as explaining mushrooms' significance in the context of shamanism and mysticism over the last hundred years.

Similarly, Valerie Mojeiko, from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit pharmaceutical company and educational organization which conducts clinical trials under the US FDA with psychedelic medicines like MDMA (Ecstasy), LSD, and psilocybin, shared her experiences with Ecstasy as a teenager, which inspired her present career choice. Mojeiko discussed being a guinea pig herself for certain drug trials, and advocated the beneficial uses of certain drugs, noting successful treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with MDMA as an example.

Earth and Fire Erowid, co-creators of Erowid.org, a non commercial website that collects data and publishes original research on visionary plants and drugs, humorously discussed copy-cat legal drugs mostly available in Europe that mimic the effects of their illegal counterparts. One of the more notable copy-cats is "Spice," which was developed in 2006 in Germany and ostensibly emulated the effects of cannabis. The Erowids revealed that "Spice" was, in fact, produced by pharmaceutical drug company Pfizer, and was recently outlawed once researchers discovered its ingredients (particularly CP 47, 497) were more potent than cannabis, itself. Their website, which garners over one million hits monthly, is devoted to providing fair, honest, and current information about drug research.

Part hippy-commune, part academic lecture, Horizons offered a weird but informative look into today's pervasive yet uncommercial drug culture. One that Letcher describes as the most available and accessible in history, thanks to technology and the Internet. Audience members were also encouraged to speak about their own psychedelic experiences and engage in thoughtful panel discussions with guests. Star speakers came from such venerable institutions like NYU and UCLA, where they actively work with FDA-approved psychedelic medical research programs.

The general theme of the conference was to advocate an open mindedness to psychedelic drug usage. Speakers frequently referenced Native Americans and other cultures that safely used drugs as part of sacred rituals and cited examples where psychedelics successfully treated health problems. For instance, educational pamphlets available at the conference boasted LSD as curing founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill Wilson of alcoholism and described Psychologist Gary Fisher's success in treating childhood autism with LSD.

In such a positive environment, it was difficult to see the downers of psychedelics, but Mojeiko's presentation did focus on how to deal with a "bad trip" and turn it into a good one. Furthermore, other speakers discussed general warnings, risks, and hazards regarding improper drug use. Perhaps the most surprising fact was learning that fatalites attributed to psychedelics are exceptionally rare. In fact, Balktick shares that there has been only one recorded LSD fatality, attributed to injecting 3,000 doses.

Horizons definitely raised new insight and legitimacy to this otherwise notoriously vilified drug culture.

Jen Kim is a PT intern.

Tags: Psychology, therapy, hallucinogens, psychedelics, LSD, MDMA, Tripping at Horizons Psychedelic Conference, Psychology Today, MAPS, psilocybin, PTSD, autism, Horizons