howling

Electric Dissonance

toastman — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 03:14:14 GMT

chuteslide through the lightning pipe haironend earcrackling mindstorm blankets the horizon can you feel it?

inside out

toastman — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:00:02 GMT

I was reading my Franklin planner last week, as I do every M-F, and one of the quotations of the day struck a chord with me: "You must dare to disassociate yourself from those who would delay your journey...Leave, depart, if not physically, then mentally. Go your own way, quietly, undramatically, and venture toward trueness at last." -Vernon Howard I'm not sure what it was that captured me, especially now that it is memory, or why. But reading it triggered something in me. I think this is the journey I have been on. Yet I don't exactly agree. Maybe I just don't work the same way Vernon Howard does. But to me, the journey is a walk towards the person I want to be, the person I will be. I don't believe in trueness, I don't believe in disassociation. I believe in me. I believe in seeing my path and taking the walk, enjoying every step of it. And anything that does not come along with you on that walk is not a part of your path anymore. There is no departure, there is no arrival, there is only the journey to you. Speaking of which, it's been interesting journey to now. I'm not running anymore. After a few conversations between a Dutch Ozzie Kiwi and myself, we determined I've been going about things the wrong way. No more frequent runs and muscle isolation. I miss the cardio, but I think I was burning way too many calories and focusing on only a very small area of myself. So now I'm on this core workout, which is foreign to me. Now I'm concerned with working entire chains and building a solid core. My back has never felt better. It's been a fun challenge, but I've come to realize I had no balance. So my current adventure is to find my balance and strengthen my core. I can feel myself growing from the inside out.

the desert spring

toastman — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:43:56 GMT

so i've been more than a little reluctant to write in here for a while. completely understandable, you say. no worries, think nothing of the matter. right. well, a professional gambler would tell you when you're on a streak, ride it out, there'll be time to stop and think about it later. I don't think now is the time to stop and think about it. but i have been getting the urge to write something lately and it's taken me weeks to simply get a few minutes to let myself sit here and just type with no aim. I wonder what it is about 2006. something is in the air. i don't understand it but can you feel it? The world's foundations are shaking. Electric dissonance is pouring from every outlet and hanging from every streetlight. The universe is writhing alive with struggle. And here I am in the eye of it, energy crackling in my ears and standing my hair. Gone while I was here and finally here when i left. Shooting through the cracks between government and resources. Learning the newness of what is already known. Taking a leap without moving. I don't know what the end result of all of the quantum collisions occurring will be. hell, I don't want to know. But I want my temporal and ethereal body to remember the current of now. Can you feel it?

the universe as a hologram

toastman — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 06:03:54 GMT

oldish, but still goodish The Universe as a Hologram by Michael Talbot Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm? In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations. University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists. Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism. Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology. In particular, Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate. Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations. In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study. Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange. The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality". Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry. Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality". Bruce Lee

press your luck

toastman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:02:27 GMT

I've been feeling this strange energy since NYE. It doesn't seem to make much sense, honestly. It's winter, which is definitely not my time of year. The holidays have always put this real serious drain on me. And I should be feeling like utter crap with the amount of celebrating I've been doing lately. Yet here I am energized and envigorated with focus and motivation. I'm stumped. Last week I managed to get the application I've been working on for a while now up and running and even got a head start on the new resume. Speaking of which, I've been putting the damned thing off so long, I was surprised to find, after the initial formatting nightmare, that writing my qualifications down was not only not morbidly depressing, but actually kind of ego boosting. Also: runonsentanceboosting. Seriously though, this is a bit out of character for me. I'm trying my hardest to not write anything that will come back and bite me right now. I've been thinking this would be the year for about 3 years in a row to no avail, so no reason to jinx it. But this inner supercharge can't be denied. no whammy, 2006.

majik in the aire

toastman — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:40:32 GMT

props to my sister for getting me the Half-Blood Prince. she really does rock even though she liked the first first two books best. Just finished reading it a few minutes ago. Not as good as the last book, but still managed to elicit some emotion from me at the end. the part in the hospital wing at the end. It's too bad I can rarely find a writer I enjoy anymore, I'm still stuck on two books I started last summer that I haven't slogged through yet. And then I get a book by a writer I really enjoy and read it in two days. I guess it's the same with everyone though. I guess I need to start reading more again, I've been reading nothing but technical documents for too long now. hmm, maybe I should read a Tom Robbins novel. it's been a while since I've picked him up and I still have a few of his books left to read. eh, moot point now that I think about it, I'm not buying any books right now. I'll have to finish up the Murakami I guess, it's not that painful, after all. side note: NYE was great! way better than I could have hoped for. Perfect way to bring in the new year. Between my bday and nye, I'm starting to have high hopes for 06. Probably not a good idea, we know where expectation gets me.

New Year Revolution

toastman — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:40:40 GMT

so this is supposed to be a time for reflecting on the previous year and assessing the damage I've heard. what a weird year. I never thought I could accomplish so much and so little simultaneously. Just looking back at the things I thought and wrote a year ago makes me wonder what it is that occurred this year. I really don't know. I don't recall anything happaneen. But something obviously did. I always felt I had a particularly early saturn return. Maybe I was only half right and it's been a particularly long one. That inner calm I was striving for last spring still isn't there. I don't know if it ever will, but maybe I've started to not worry about pursuing it anymore. That first year was a cocoon. The next was the struggle to peel away all the dead layers. And I think this year was a time to try out my new body and see what it looks like in the mirror. Learning to like what I see again. Letting my new eyes come into focus. It feels like I'm returning. In the same sense that saturn returns, yet never really can. Our galaxy is constantly moving through space and time. viewed in that light, saturn can never truly return to its previous location. but it can rotate and revolve and spiral through the universe until its time comes. Resolution is for the monitors that NASA uses to observe it. I don't know what the coming year holds for the universe, but to know who and where one is opens a view of our celestial path the most knowledgeable scientist could not compute.

a hundred days off

toastman — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 01:46:19 GMT

I'm so relieved December is almost over. What a complete crap time of year. gotta pay to be loved though, right? At least now everyone's off on their "vacations" or back to the way things are the other 265 days of the year and I'm not forced to pretend that I'm into their ritual so as not to offend. Enki's the best. He loves me equally every day. Yesterday he acted like the bratcat he always is and curled up with me and purred like he always does. Unconditional. Real. every moment is a holiday. things we've forgotten

once in a lifetime

toastman — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 03:36:10 GMT

well, freewill always seems to have a grasp on the slippery beast. Working on the film festival was a blast, though a lot of work. The free booze, cigarettes, and food was a nice little bonus, as well. Wish I could have worked on the movie shoot last week and editing this week, but my computer decided to take a dump as soon as the festival ended and I was once again consumed back into the steely netherregions of computing. Thankfully it wasn't too bad and I'm back up and running with an even faster, cleaner system now. In retrospect, working on the movie probably would have been a big diversion from all I'm trying to accomplish, so it becomes fairly obvious that the universe was once again pushing me in the right direction through misfortune. Still, it was nice to find out that indeed I am competant enough with A/V to be able to run a venue for a major film festival singlehandedly. The realization that I could spend a lifetime in image and sound is rather liberating. It's strange, a lot of people I know seem to be having relationship issues right now. I wonder if it's this time of year that causes people to start behaving badly or if it's just one of those times in one's life when coincidence commands perception and all the world's your stage. I wish the best for all of them, I wish I could ease their suffering somehow, but I get the distinct impression there's nothing I could do that would make anything better. Being a considerate, albeit unrepentfully nightowlish, host/friend is the best I can muster right now. One nice corollary of all this wave motion inside has been a musical rebirth of sorts. For years I was uncomfortable playing in front of people. It had to be in my or a close friend's house, my gear, and the right crowd. And for years after that, I just didn't feel confident in my own abilities nor was I able to call forth the focus and motivation to make music. Whatever it is that's happened to me has completely changed that. Over the past few months I've played in front of quite a few crowds with not only no performance crushing mental anxiety and anguish, but with actual received complements. I can't quite put my finger on what it is that's changed, but hey, gift horse, right? The next step in this would be to either start buying records again or get a couple of nice CD decks. a guy can dream The headway I'm making teaching myself a completely new and razor's edge area of programming has been fairly satisfying, I suppose. But it's never fast enough, it's never far enough, and it's never good enough. I can't really see a company wanting to hire someone because he managed to build a cute little Web 2.0 web service application on his own. Still, it beats the string of mind numbing website development I've been doing for 4 years now. And certainly whatever kind of bland number crunching I was doing before that. I know what I'm doing for myself is going to pay off in the long run. I may not see the results anytime soon, but with all the other instant gratification in my life it should be enough to know that I'm paving my path to enjoyment. Just as long as the span's not unreachable.

Free Willy

toastman — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 04:25:19 GMT

Leo (July 23-August 22) Psychotherapists talk about how each of us has a false self and an authentic self. When we're in the grip of the false one, we don't love ourselves unless other people love us. We're addicted to status and other superficial standards of success, and we chase after all sorts of meaningless desires that can't possibly bring any lasting gratification. When we're anchored in our authentic self, on the other hand, our motivations are rooted in a love of life. We pursue our dreams because they're interesting and exciting, not in order to impress anyone. The coming weeks will bring a showdown between your false self and authentic self, Leo. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the authentic one.

sign of the times

toastman — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 08:59:44 GMT

so in the past week I've read that 1) even though the cost of oil has hit an all time high, that oil companies have made record breaking profits in the last year and 2) that Donald Rumsfeld has major stakes in a company that produces the vaccine for bird flu and probably benefitted greatly from the vaccine shortage last winter. I guess these are the times we live in, a world in which public welfare and even health are sacrificed in order for certain industries the members of our government have invested in to make even more money than they already do. My disgust grows with each passing day, with each new example I find of people hurting others with their own incompassionate self interest. We live in an age where selfishness is lauded and rewarded with lavish sums of money. It's official folks, humanism is dead. Better grab what you can for yourself and build your walls high because personal ethics have disintigrated into empty words and the vultures are circling. The best we can hope for is the asteroid to finally hit and bring to an end the lies and games people perpetuate in the name of their own success.

what's a modern guy to do?

toastman — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 21:45:29 GMT

cool follow-up to an article that was more frustrating than enlightening: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69476,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 this girl seems to be getting a lot of publicity lately. funny, this is the first nytimes article i've read in years and a week after i read it, it's the talk of the country. here's a Salon follow-up: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/11/08/dowd/

tomorrow never knows

toastman — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:52:42 GMT

I have to say, ever since I let go of MySpace, things have started feeling much more natural. There's something to it, MySpace really is like cocaine. And cocaine is one hell of a drug. so sayeth the dead guy. Actually, I've never liked coke one bit. It leaves you wanting more and more of it 20 minutes later with nothing to show for itself in the first place. Since letting go of MySpace, I've been so much more productive and positive in the focus of my time. Still hasn't stopped me from being Charlie Brown, but at some point you just have to accept an unwavering fact of nature into your heart. Regardless, some minor headway is finally being made in this silent silicone pipedream. Fact is, I'm still on MySpace. After putting so much into it, I would never banish it from my life. But now my interaction is more as it should be. I'm on it to read and write messages, not to fritter away the hours of my life until I'm so numb that now seems more important than it was 20 minutes ago. Tribe doesn't feel like that. Tribe is hard to describe. Slow and smooth, like molasses. Spiritual and deep as a well. You can just climb right down into it and meditate. I find myself saying far less yet being far more engaged. quality. sometimes the universe demands you sacrifice the dug up dirt in your clenched fists to feel the river flow between your fingertips. feel the blood wash away from your palms. john lennon once wrote: turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. what will it show you when you let your eyelids sink into it?

for you Dark Tower fans

toastman — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:01:26 GMT

http://www.marvel.com/publishing/stories/showstory.htm?id=51 this makes me happy. Firstly, as a visualization of the story that kept me waiting on the edge of my seat for 20 years. Secondly, I loved Jae Lee's penciling as a teenager. It'll be interesting seeing what he's up to these days and how he interprets such an epic tale with so much room to be creative. I'll probably make this the first comic i've bought in almost 15 years. may this do ya fine

frosen emotion

toastman — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:58:05 GMT

cool credit to the MIT Strobe Project Laboratory for this one, though the title is mine. I had to add it to my photos. Once again proof that art and science are the same stuff if the heart and mind are in tune.

thinny

toastman — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 17:12:57 GMT

here i sit another sunken night listening for the chime of the melatone i'm sure you've heard it already but i'm tone deaf when cradled by the void will it be enough oh will it be enough will it be enough when all motion has slowed to a dull groan i'm most l'usine when i'm alone analogue impulses firing me without notice the morning will never come the morning will never come and if it does what will it reveal eyes slit wolverine hair panbreath a monster or a victim and if neither damned to purgatory somewhere between thought and sleep

we all knew it, didn't we

toastman — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:09:02 GMT

don't deny it after last night's post, it almost seems apropos that I'd find this article this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4320586.stm

an oldie but a goodie

toastman — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 07:04:47 GMT

so this one's definitely old, but I just got back to it and it's still great. It's funny b/c it's true. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/presaddress.html

hang on to your ego

toastman — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 21:56:50 GMT

I know so many people who think they can do it alone They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones But what can you tell them? What can you say that wont make them defensive? So... Hang on to your ego Hang on but I know that you’re gonna lose the fight They come on like they're peaceful But inside they're so uptight They trip through the day And waste all their thoughts at night But how can I say it? How can I come on when I know I’m guilty? Hang on to your ego Hang on, but I know that you're gonna lose the fight Now how can I say it And how can I come on When I know I'm guilty So hang on to your ego Hang on, but I know that you're gonna lose the fight

slipping through the cracks

toastman — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 09:42:05 GMT

today our esteemed president, in his first press conference in four months, announced the he should have the authority to send the military into civilian areas to deal with natural disasters, terrorist activity, or disease. This is essentially martial law. I'm sure all the focus of the news has been on his Supreme Court nominee with no judging experience, so I thought I'd just make mention of it here. Keep yourself informed and ready

the holy grail

toastman — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 08:51:12 GMT

So what do you have to do to find happiness? Are we wired up to be cheerful, or are some of us destined to languish in abject misery? Dorothy Wade reports on the new science of feeling good Behind the neoclassical facade of the Royal Institution, in London's Mayfair, the latest in a 200-year series of lectures was taking place in a hushed amphitheatre this summer. Standing on the shoulders of scientific giants such as Faraday and Dewar were three academics debating "Happiness, the science behind your smile". Purists might imagine the founding geniuses of the Royal Institution turning in their graves. What does science have to tell us about such a frivolous subject? And how do you define happiness, let alone study it? But happiness has finally burst out of the academic closet. Several weighty volumes on the subject have been published this year. And on the same night as the RI event, the economist Lord Layard and the psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud were debating the Politics of Happiness at the London School of Economics just a mile away. Perversely, happiness has a negative image in our culture. Influenced by a sceptical European philosophical outlook, we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus. Isn't it selfish to try to increase our happiness, while much of the world faces suffering and premature death? Great writers from Freud — "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation" — to Philip Larkin — "man hands on misery to man" — have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive. These are the conclusions of a burgeoning happiness industry that has published 3,000 papers, set up a Journal of Happiness Studies and created a World Database of Happiness in the last few years. Can scientists tell us what happiness is? Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state. Public surveys measure what makes us happy. Marriage does, pets do, but children don't seem to (despite what we think). Youth and old age are the happiest times. Money does not add much to happiness; in Britain, incomes have trebled since 1950, but happiness has not increased at all. The happiness of lottery winners returns to former levels within a year. People disabled in an accident are likely to become almost as happy again. For happiness levels are probably genetic: identical twins are usually equally bubbly or grumpy. One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong. America has pursued the chimera of happiness vigorously, not least through the insatiable consumption of self-help literature such as Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: 9 Tips for Daily Happiness! So it is no surprise that it's an American who is making happiness a subject of scientific study. At first glance, Martin Seligman's bestselling book Authentic Happiness, with its sunshine-yellow title on a sky-blue cover, blends with other manuals on the pop-psychology shelves. But America's latest guru of feeling good is not a stage hypnotist, an evangelical preacher or even a business visionary. Seligman is an eminent professor of psychology with a string of degrees. One of the chief architects of the prevailing model of depression, his work has helped to found modern "cognitive" therapies. The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul". Feeling out of place as a chubby 13-year-old Jewish kid at a wealthy college, he hit on the role of therapist as a route to the hearts of unattainable girls. "What a brilliant stroke! I'll bet no other guy ever listened to them ruminate about their insecurities, nightmares and bleakest fantasies." As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour. Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch." Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength — social intelligence — in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them. "What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself — and now he's made it his mission to find out. Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait. A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He wanted to revolutionise psychology, but his weapon would be tough science. Clinical psychology was the science of how to get from minus five to zero. This would be the science of getting from zero to plus five. Seligman wanted experiments, he wanted statistics, he wanted proof. He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form "pods" to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science. Their holy grail is the classification of strengths and virtues. After a solemn consultation of great works such as the samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita and the writings of Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas, Seligman's happiness scouts discovered six core virtues recognised in all cultures: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. They have subdivided these into 24 strengths, including humour and honesty. But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as "the power of positive thinking". His plan to stop the new science floating "on the waves of self- improvement fashions" is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below. And this takes us back to our evolutionary past. Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals. Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: "Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world." Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe. Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.) According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us "something bad has happened" and suggest a different course of action. Fear tells us danger is near, so run away. Anger prompts us to deter aggressors. Sadness warns us to be cautious and save energy, while disgust urges us to avoid contamination. Joy, according to Nettle, simply tells us, "something good has happened, don't change anything". The evolutionary role of pleasure was to encourage activity that was good for survival, such as eating and having sex. But unlike negative emotions, which are often persistent, joy tends to be short-lived. We soon get sick of cream cakes or blas? about our pay rise. What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images — a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing — the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain. The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain's evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history. Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has scanned brains in different emotional states. When he wired up a Buddhist monk entering a state of bliss through meditation, he found electrical activity shooting up the frontal lobe of the monk's brain on the left side. Observing toddlers at play, he picked some who were exuberant and uninhibited, behaviour linked to higher levels of positive emotion, and others who were quiet and shy. Tested later, the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided. Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive. This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It makes sense that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive to be best. Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions — the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens — that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the "wanting" parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure. At the Royal Institution, Nettle explained how brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly — having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out." Liking involves different brain chemicals from wanting. Real pleasure is associated with opioids. They are released in the rat brain by sweet tastes. When they are blocked in humans, food tastes less delicious. They also dampen down pain so that pleasure is unadulterated. Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving. In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness. Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives. Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects." The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked. Cognitive therapy places less emphasis on the past. It works by challenging a person's thinking about the present and setting goals for the future. Another newcomer, brief solution-focused therapy, discourages talk about "problems" and helps clients identify strengths and resources to make positive changes in their lives. The focus of most psychotherapy is on decreasing negative emotion. The aim of Seligman's therapy is to increase positive emotion (positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites and can co-exist: women have more of both than men). From the time of Buddha to the self-improvement industry of today, more than 100 "interventions" have been tried in the attempt to build happiness. Forty of these are being tested in randomised placebo-controlled trials by Seligman and his colleagues. In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person. Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it. So it's a relief to hear that it doesn't work particularly well. It has strong, but only brief, effects. Seligman speculates that doing more exercises for longer would bring greater benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered with his website www.reflectivehappiness.com — where, for $10 a month, they are given a happiness programme including instruction in a package of positive exercises. Sylvia Perkins, a 73-year-old retired librarian from south Michigan tried the "Savour a Beautiful Day" task. Her husband died of lung cancer four years ago, and after a recent mild stroke she moved into an assisted living community. "The move has been very difficult for me and I've been trying to fight off the feeling that I've just come here to die. When I heard about this exercise, I decided to give it a try, because it seemed like a hopeful thing to do." She spent her "beautiful" day going through photos and mementoes and making scrapbooks for each of her children. She also wrote them letters about her most precious memories of them and stuck them in the albums. "This exercise helped me feel reconnected to my children. I have felt more hopeful about my situation. I realise that my health prognosis is really quite good and I am confident that I will have many more years to share with my family." Positive psychology has a schmaltzy American feel that might not translate well into a British setting. Dr Nick Baylis of Cambridge University is working with colleagues to "tweak" positive psychology for "British ears". He calls his research the "study of wellbeing" rather than the science of happiness. As a forensic psychologist, he worked with young offenders at Feltham and decided that studying what went wrong in damaged lives was not productive. "I had looked at broken lives. Now I wanted to look at lives that go well." He founded the charity Trailblazers to give young offenders positive role models. In his Young Lives research project, he interviewed hundreds of accomplished people from Kate Adie to Jamie Oliver about their strategies for making the most of life. Their advice and ideas can be found in www.YoungLivesUK.com and in the book Wonderful Lives. When Baylis went to Cambridge as Britain's first lecturer in positive psychology, he was treated as a "neo-Nazi", he says. The study of happiness was a "taboo subject". He sent an e-mail to colleagues who might have an interest in wellbeing, and received a reply from only one, Professor Felicia Huppert. She studies the secrets of a happy, productive old age, and theirs is now a fruitful collaboration. The British approach to wellbeing also emphasises good physical health and diet, proper sleep, relaxation and exercise, and spending time in the natural environment. Given its famously bad health and diet, Glasgow is a city in need of positive medicine. It's become a live laboratory for the new science. Last month, Professor Seligman paid his second visit to Glasgow's Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing, to spread the happiness gospel to Scottish teachers, coaches and businessmen as part of the Vanguard programme, backed by the Scottish Executive. The sceptical Scots seem to welcome Seligman's empirical approach. Dr Carol Craig, who runs the centre, is passionate about curing Scotland's epidemic of pessimism and low self-esteem. She points to many indicators of malaise: the Scottish suicide rate is double the English one, and antidepressant prescribing is 40% higher. A new UN report says that Scotland is the most violent country in the developed world. Scottish children are among the least confident anywhere, according to the World Health Organization. Craig believes that the dark, forbidding nature of Calvinist religion is responsible for the dour Scottish psyche. "We're a culture that encourages feelings of lack of self-worth. We're a culture that goes out of its way to make sure people don't feel good about themselves," says Craig. From a young age, Scots are taught humility, modesty and conformity. Scottish humour often pokes fun at those who "get above their station". Craig speculates that the high rate of emigration from Scotland has denuded the country of optimists and left too many pessimists behind. Could any of this be linked to the fact that men in one part of Glasgow, Shettleston, have a life expectancy of 64? (Scottish men, on average, live to 73.) And that west Scotland is the unhealthiest region in Europe, with high rates of heart disease, cancer and strokes? Has anyone found a causal link between happiness and health? Nuns may hold the answer. Nuns make a great natural experiment, because they lead the same routine lives with similar diets and activities. None have married or had children. Yet there is huge variation in their health and longevity. In 1932, 180 novices in Milwaukee wrote short sketches of their lives. One wrote: "God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value. The past year has been a very happy one." She lived to 98 in wonderful health. Another wrote a joyless and neutral sketch, ending: "With God's grace, I intend to do my best for our Order." She died after a stroke at the age of 59. Researchers who quantified positive feeling in all 180 sketches discovered that nearly all (90%) of the happiest quarter were still alive at 85. But of the least cheerful quarter, only a third survived to that age. Another piece of the jigsaw fitted this year when a team from University College London tested the happiness levels of 216 middle-aged civil servants in a study of risk factors for coronary heart disease. People who had the most happy moments per day had the lowest rates of cortisol, a hormone that can be harmful if produced excessively, and of the chemical plasma fibrinogen, a predictor of heart disease. The happiest men (but not women) also had the lowest heart rates. Angela Clow, professor of psychophysiology at Westminster University, is a world authority on the biochemistry of stress. "There is clear evidence that stress makes you susceptible to illness, but I wanted to turn this around and discover how happiness makes you healthier. There's not a lot of happiness research in the UK, because if you do it, people think you're trivial," says Clow. In one experiment, she and colleagues blindfolded participants and wafted smells of chocolate, water and rotten meat under their noses. Then they measured levels of secretory IgA, an antibody that protects the body against invading cells, in their saliva. Chocolate sent the antibody levels soaring up; rotten meat brought them down. Clow found that pleasant music also boosted the immune system, as did stimulating the left side of the brain with magnetism. Comparing patients in a day-surgery waiting room with music and art on the walls against one with no music and plain white walls, Clow found that the art and music patients had lower heart-rates, blood pressure and cortisol, and needed less sedation before their surgery. "But why should happiness have such an effect on the immune system?" asks Clow. She speculates that there is an evolutionary mechanism. Our happiest ancestors were bold creatures who socialised and ventured out to explore. This brought them into contact with infection, so they needed higher levels of antibodies in a stronger immune system. But repeated stress weakens us. The stress response temporarily increases the level of cortisol, a vital hormone that regulates the whole immune system. This is a healthy response, designed to produce fight or flight only in cases of real danger. Unfortunately, the daily hassles of modern life induce repeated stress in some of us, subjecting our bodies to frequent pulses of cortisol. This unbalances the immune system and makes us ill. Laughter and humour are also being studied for their effects on health. Research methods include using a tickle machine, and probing with electrodes to find the funny parts of the brain. Laughter, like stress, increases blood pressure and heart rate and changes breathing. But unlike stress, it reduces levels of chemicals circulating in the body. In one study, people's cortisol and adrenaline were reduced after watching a favourite comedy video for 60 minutes. It's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours. You'd better start writing that gratitude letter now. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN Men often complain about their wives' volatility. Now research confirms that women really are both happier and sadder. Positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites — you can have both in your life. Women experience more of all emotions except anger. First it was found that women experience twice as much depression as men. Next, researchers found that women report more positive emotion than men, more frequently and more intensely. It all points to men and women having a different emotional make-up. Cognitive psychologists say that men and women have different skills related to sending and receiving emotion. Women are expressive; men conceal or control their emotions. Women convey emotion through facial expression and communication; men express emotion through aggressive or distracting behaviour. Does the difference lie in biology, social roles or just women's willingness to report emotion? That's up for debate.

hanging moments

toastman — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 22:22:51 GMT

chilescent on my fingers lingers rich thick earthy a breeze bangs my blinds dark skies heralding darker times an apple snaps to morning time cooling to slow as aspens aspire to nakedness thoughts hang ripe on the bough waiting to fall and rot in the cold washed light

static

toastman — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:57:20 GMT

I'm bordering on a beck obsession here but the guy seems to be on a vaguely similar plane of the multiverse as I It's so easy to laugh at yourself When all those jokes have already been written Seems like another vain attempt To let yourself fall out of the oven Holy mountains They look so tired And it's a perfect day to lock yourself inside Who're you fooling if the fools are right It's the same thing but it's almost as different Hard to tell when it pacifies your mind Leaves you stranded with a broken engine Lazy desert looks so mangled Let me drown in a convalescent bliss Get up from your bed of rest It's been a long time since you've lived But the static in your mind Leaves you hollow and unkind With a shock electric wave Turns you on You've been flunked out of the devil's house Delinquent hygienes are so abrasive And some distortion that's never been known On the treadmill, you'll be running forever Holy mountains They look so tired And it's a perfect day to lock yourself inside

dead melodies

toastman — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:28:05 GMT

where will you go when this day is over a gambler's purse lays on the road straight to your door snakes have gone crazy tonight winding their way out of sight a laugh, a joke a sentiment wasted seasons of strangers they've come and gone doldrums are pounding, cheapskates are clowning this town who could disown themselves now engineer, slow down this old train cinders and chaff laugh at the moon night birds will cackle rotting like apples on trees sending their dead melodies... to me

sitting at the crossroads

toastman — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 07:32:54 GMT

waiting for the man in red to show. how did Robert Johnson get his business card anyway? don't call me, we'll call you. did he just tell him which road to take? I'm assuming he even wanted to take a road in the first place. So what's a guy to do when all the roads look the same? I wonder if he could give me new eyes. or show me kingdoms I can't see. be the tin man to my lion. maybe i could start shitting yellow bricks as opposed to my usual. change my gears from parked to Parker. or at least just offer my brain to the crows to devour in cacawphonic bliss. too bad he's working overtime in accounts receivable lately, I'm still here sitting in darkness watching you walk past