The Power of Positive Thinking

A story called "Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression" aired this morning on National Public Radio. The story opens with an adult man talking about how he's lived with negative self-talk his whole life. After years of cognitive behavioral therapy, he finally replaced the self-flagellation with talk of, "I'll be able to do it better next time."

The interviewer moves to a class full of 10-year-old kids, where the teacher is trying to teach them emotional resilience skills so that they don't spend a lifetime telling themselves they're not good enough. Good enough for what? For whom? Why do we kill the joy in children so early? Programs like Smart-Girl try to mitigate the effects of this social training, but how much permanent change can we effect when the problem is so big? Why, as a society, are we stuck in this endless loop of unfulfilled unhappiness?

Sometimes (and I wish there were more of those times), I feel so connected to the universal consciousness that I float free, blissfully unshackled from the tape in my head. In those moments, I see and know and feel everything and am at peace with it all. The moments don't last long, but I know from conversations with others that I'm lucky to have them at all. Oh, to capture the complex path of neural connections that happens in those moments and be able to repeat them, on command. Maybe scientists should focus on THAT task instead of curing all of the diseases we develop because of stress and constant worry.

But I do my part by being involved with Smart-Girl, curtailing my own recording, and demonstrating for my mentee Consuelo that setbacks are temporary and not to be taken personally. We shall overcome.

Books that Make You Think

Nonfiction that makes you think is rare compared to the number of volumes in print. One in a hundred, maybe? But I found a cool one by looking at the award-winning books on the Denver Public Library site. The Echo Maker is two stories, one about a woman whose brother suffers brain injury in a car crash and subsequently goes through all kinds of strange delusions and machinations that keep him from feeling like a normal part of the world. The other story is about a neuroscientist who studies people with brain injury and writes about them in a way that a lay person can understand.

What I find most fascinating about this novel is the premise that this "abnormal" brain function is actually normal and is just a tiny, tiny part of what our brains are capable of. People with color synesthesia see a color when they see, think, or hear a particular number or word (one is blue, Wednesday is yellow, etc.). Some people experience very pleasant sensations in feet they no longer have. People who suffer from Capgras syndrome think that their loved ones are actually robots or "imposters." In the book, you start to see how the hallucination could seem real. Bizarre stuff. But to some, just an indication of what the brain can really do, perhaps even precursors to the next stage of evolution.