Rants from the Silver Fox

Welcome to the sporadic rants of the Silver Fox.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Why Men this and Women that

Despite the publication of the results of a 25 year study in development, concluding among other things that the way the nervous system of a human being is hard-wired depends on the amount of testosterone in the womb at a certain point of embryo development, people still insist on saying 'men this' and 'women that'.

It ain't that simple.

First, you have to consider a continuum between the high testosterone leves at that time and the low levels. A continuum. Not either/or.

So what if male gender humans tend to be more to one end and female gender humans tend to be more at the other. That's just a correlation that is not high enough to draw all the Woman's Day conclusions that people bandy about.

Better, perhaps, to classify people as High-T and Low-T. Or maybe remove possible pejorative evaluations and call them T and N.

What is more, you can now do a normalised test to see where on the continuum your own nervous system sits. Wow.

I am about 60% T and 40% N.

No. That does not mean I am a big girl. It means I can read maps without turning them around and I don't lose my keys as often.

The T nervous system allows its owner to unthinkingly, naturally and without thought or effort make maps of reality and respond to those.

When the T puts his or her keys down, it is recorded in the map. If someone else moves them, that person, male or female, will not be able to easily find them. This is because they are working with the map they made, not the reality in front of them.

The N puts something down, again male or female, and makes no map. That step is not there. They see the reality directly. So if someone moves it, no problem.

I reckon there is a great opportunity here for researchers - redo ALL the research that has compared gender males with gender females. Do it on the basis of T - N, after testing the participants.

This will separate out the differences that are actually based on physical gender and those that are based on T-N nervous system differences. Across a continuum.

Research grants anyone?

Anyone got money to fund this?

It might not look important but the results could be staggering if we find much higher correlation N-T than we do M-F.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

ADD?

ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder.

Neither a deficit nor a disorder.

ADD covers a lot though. So I will deal with a subset. This is made up of those who have the following characteristics:

Capable of broad wide-ranging all-inclusive attention AND pin-point exclusive attention.

It is like there are people who have just these two modes and nothing 'in-between'.

Between the ages of 10 and 14 I read extensively and all the time I could find. My mum used to say that when I had my nose in a book, the house could burn down around me and I would not notice.

I guess in this mode, it looks very like a deficit of attention.

In my workplace, the day came when 'open plan' became popular. So I would be sitting at my desk doing my work and someone at the opposite end of the floor would ask a question. Not of me you understand. Just to someone nearby. But I found myself answering without missing a beat in what I was doing.

This is the other mode.

I hear that Alan Watts was at a symposium and for some of the time he was apparently talking with the person next to him. At the end, for 'any questions', he posed his question.

The presenter scathingly remarked that had he been paying attention he would have heard it covered at such-and-such a point.

So Alan repeated what the presenter had said at that point word-for-word and asked where in that was the answer he was seeking. Of course, it wasn't there.

I like this unverified story.

If you prefer verified, I was learning Welsh in a class, laughing sotto voce in a semi-flirting set of asides with another student. This was triggered when we were introduced in passing to the word for a frog and at the same moment, noticed only by me and my friend, the frogs in the pond outside starting their 'broga, broga' song. Both she and I had heard everything the persenter had said, every nuance and tut-tut from one or two class-mates, every 'broga', the velvet feel of the outside summer evening, the layout of the classroom, and so on.

This is the other mode.

Even this mode is deemed 'deficient' because the self-important person decides "He/she is not paying attention to me'. Get over it. You are right and you are wrong.

So as this type of ADD person I had to learn strategies.

Full awareness - my strategy became withhold response. Can't prevent being aware.
Pin-point awareness - teach other strategies to deal with it and with me in that state.

I repeat - it is not a deficit.

And disorder? I don't think so.

There was a particular paper published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology some time during the '70s. Sorry. Don't have my copies with me at the moment, or even in the same country as me! Otherwise I would give the reference.

But the discussion was on 2 styles of meditation, which for here I will term Atman and an-Atman. Some schools favour one, some another. I think I recall that the sound of a bell was used as a stimulus with some long-time practitioners of each method.

But I will gloss and say that the an-Atman, non-self, approach will produce the full attention mode, eventually as a normal state of being.

The Atman, purified/perfected self method will produce the intense zero-point centred mode.

Some at least diagnosed as ADD have access to both of these.

It is not a disorder. From their point of view, not being able to do those things is a disorder. Not being able to understand and appreciate those modes is benighted.

Note: I am not saying that it is not difficult while these type of ADD are growing up. I guess it would be nice if they could be guided in that by peers or those who at least understand. When in one mode they are processing everything in their awareness. Please do not say they are 'easily distracted'. In the other mode they have excluded all from attention except the one thing of focus. Please don't say they are 'ignoring' you, 'refusing to pay attention'.

Please...

Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Prejudice Hormone

'A chemical [Oxytocin] well known for encouraging bonding may also underlie bias' - Scientific American Mind, May/June 2011, p8.

Chomsky's 3 deepest semantic structures underlie more than most people think. They are fundamental to so much of how we think.

They map onto the three fundamental structures with which we can specify any algorithm, be it a computer program, a recipe in cooking, a circuit diagram. The three specification units are (using my words):

Sequence - this then this then this
Divergence - if this then that otherwise something else
Repetition - do this until/while such and such is the case

[OK, there is also a fourth unit required - "here's one I made earlier", (subroutine, sauce, etc) - but it is a meta unit and this pre-made unit slots in as one of the sequence units]

Now the repetition unit creates a loop and a loop has a boundary. Boundary conditions are fundamental to our behaviour and understandings.

So when the French searched for a fundamental rally-cry that would encapsulated all they chose Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite.

These three map onto the three deep semantic structures. Fraternite relates to the boundary, loop or membership condition.

So it should come as no surprise that a chemical that operates in us in relationship to membership should also signal non-membership as well.

A boundary defines an inside and also defines an outside.

It's deeply within our semantics, regardless of culture or language, because it is in our human nervous system.

To have a concept of inclusion or membership or fraternity or commonality and so on automatically defines exclusion, non-membership and just simple 'other', 'etrange', 'fremd'.

Nothing laws or recommendations of the PC people can do about this.

[In case you are interested, Sequence = Egalite and Divergence (or choice) = Liberte]

Thursday, June 23, 2011

The Wave

In a wave in the ocean, that water does not move along. Successive sections of the water just move up and down.

Some buddhists practice a meditation where you become aware of how thoughts arise out of nothing and pass away, continually. This is to start the experience of how what we call reality arises and passes away continually from the ocean of being behind that outer reality illusion.

So as the wave peak pops above a certain level, that is our reality illusion arising. The water molecules of the prior position are not related to those of the current or future positions. All of the ones at the current position are related to each other much more strongly than to those 'before' or 'after'.

This is a challenge for causality. It is a challenge for discussions on free will and determinism.

But what if you were in that water on something buoyant. You would just bob up and then down as the wave 'passed'. So let's say you started your floatation device travelling to keep at the weak of teh wave. The molecules of water 'ahead' are there before they rise under you. So that is pre-determined.

But you can place yourself 'here' on the wave, or 'there, or more to the left, and so on.

That would mean that both free will and determinism are operating in the same scenario.

But a more interesting consequence of the whole of existence passing away and arising constantly is that in this moment, everything is related. All parts of that arising form one complete coherent group.

I heard that Idries Shah once won the spanish lottery. He described it as easy. Oh, yeah, they said. Yeah. And the next week he took a ticket and won again.

My friend and I were talking about all sorts of things in the sportsbar. We had been talking navy and seafaring stuff because he had been in the merchant navy and was reminiscing a bit.

At a brief pause in the conversation, we looked at the TAB screens. We both spotted 'Mister Hornblower' in the list. He took a $4 each-way bet. He collected $192.

If you can be in this moment, then your are in touch with all that is also in the same moment.

(The Idries Shah story is unverified. Never bet more than you can afford to lose.)

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Gambling for Fun and Profit

There are people who gamble.

I put them in three groups - Profit, fun and In-the-moment.

The gamblers for profit play the machines or the TAB and their external intent is to win. They seriously believe that they can win more than they invest in this game. OK. There may be the odd one or two who can make money on this game, especially where they have more information, such as betting on horse.

I worked with a guy who made more money from the trots than he did at work. I often "rode shotgun" for him when he went to collect his winnings from the TAB. He only bet on the trots, he knew every horse and driver backwards, he spent all his leave time from work watching the trials. He made money.

But this is rare and it is highly dedicated research, due diligence and flair that got him his profits.

Not so the usual gambler.

Now the gambler addict might be thought of as someone who is driven by winning. Not so. Winning is not the pay-off for this person. Losing is. Only that justifies the continued chasing of the lost dollars.

Then we have the funsters.

These guys, alone or often in a group, have a pre-decided kitty from which they have their flutter. They have a laugh together and they may or may not end up with a profit. Usually not. But that was the stake, they had their fun, and when it is gone it is gone. That was the more or less agreed cost of the fun.

Now the in-the-moment mob are quite different and partly mystical.

There will be 1 - 4 of them and they will drink in the sports pub and laugh and bullshit with each other. They loo kat the names of the horses or dogs and some name leaps out, relevant to what they have been joshing about. Right. $1 win/ $3 place on that one. All agreed. Amazing how often it pays.

I arrived in the pub dressed, unusually, in collarless shirt and suit. It was a Sunday. They asked, have you come from church, or how are you father.

The next race had a horse called Bless Us All, running in Hong Kong. Me and my two mates did the one on 3. It was long odds but is won. Kerchink.

I should really call it I Ching betting - it is a feature of the idea that in this moment everything in that moment is related.

Or, like any gambler, we could be fooling ourselves.

But we have a heap of fun at controlled money amounts.

Ex nihil nihil sunt

Amazing. Nothing got me on the soapbox this week.

Yet.