The Velveteen Principles by Toni Raiten-D’Antonio

Raiten-D’Antonio, Toni.  The Velveteen Principles: A Guide to Becoming Real: Hidden Wisdom from a Children’s Classic.  Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 2004.

In The Velveteen Principles, counselor Toni Raiten-D’Antonio draws lessons for living from the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.  Raiten-D’Antonio found the lessons from this book to be helpful for her clients in living as real people rather than seeing themselves as objects.

The Velveteen Rabbit (you can skip this paragraph if you’ve read it) is the story of a cheap, stuffed bunny that wants to be real.  The rabbit has a rough time, especially when faced with comparisons to fancier toys that erode its confidence.  He is encouraged along the way by a toy horse that had already been made “real” by the love of a child.  The rabbit becomes a boy’s companion through a severe illness, and though it is a trial, the rabbit’s courage and love for the boy carries him through.  The boy loves him back and considers him real.  Even so, adults throw the rabbit out because they think it is riddled with disease.  A fairy rectifies the situation by make the rabbit a real, flesh-and-blood bunny.

Raiten-D’Antonio sees a parallel in the lives of people, who are encouraged by our culture to see themselves as objects.  Objects have manufactured perfection.  They are valued for how they fit an ideal.  Objectified people hide there flaws, obsessively follow fads, lose their uniqueness, become disconnected from themselves and others, and miss out on living.  It is easy to fall prey to objectification because our culture values and rewards its.

In contrast, real people are imperfect.  Their imperfections make them unique.  Reality isn’t simply a matter of accepting imperfections; it is about being perfectly yourself, a person with value because you are a person, with strengths and weakness, relationships, and a place in the world.  Reality is challenging.

A dozen principles of being real are described in the book.  Some are about the process of becoming real and some relate to what a real life is like.

The value carries through most of the principles is empathy.  We start with empathy for ourselves, acknowledging and accepting ourselves as we are rather than trying to become a perfect object.  This self-empathy isn’t about giving up or pretending everything is okay.  It’s about setting aside the illusions of the object-world and giving ourselves the grace and space to begin where we are.

Self-empathy gives us room of empathy for others.  Just as we stop trying to make ourselves into perfect objects, we show the same grace to others.  Love, honesty and ethics spring from empathy.

Real living has its own dangers and pains.  The truth can be uncomfortable, especially the truth about us, and letting go of object-ideals can be hard. However, the rewards or real living are a kind of contentment, peace, and inner wealth that can’t be achieved by having or being an object.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller

Wisdom from the Batcave by Cary A. Friedman

Google

The Power of Nice by Linda Kaplan Thaler & Robin Koval

Nice guys do not finish last. According to advertising executives Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, authors of The Power of Nice, kindness, generosity, empathy pay off even in the business world.

Kindness is a great way to make a positive impression, and those impressions can come back multiplied. In addition, you never know when the one you’re showing kindness to someone who has the will and means to extravagantly repay you, though you shouldn’t go around with a fake generosity hoping some of your supposed goodness will bind a jinni to your service. Be good because it is good, but don’t be surprised when the little people you help along the way become big people who want to help you.

Niceness should become automatic, a way you treat people all the time, whoever they are. You’ll know when you’re being genuine and when you’re being fake, and let the knowledge lead you to be genuinely kind. Extend it to cover even your rivals; if you can’t convert them, you’ll neutralize them to some degree.

Even if you don’t have much to give, be a giver. Even little gestures, smiles, and a helpful hand count. One of the seemingly most simple, but in practice difficult, things to give is your attention. Few things move a person as much as the sense that someone genuinely listened to them; and it is a great way to learn.

The skill at the heart of all this is empathy. I use the word skill because Kaplan Thaler and Koval write about how people can improve their empathy. First, listen to the emotion words; people are telling you how they feel if you will listen. Consider how what you say and do will affect others. Finally, don’t assume the actions of others are about you; they have other stuff going on.

This is a short book and full of anecdotes. If you’re looking for a quick read touching on the emotional side of business with practical advice, this will suit your needs.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Eat That Cookie! by Liz Jazwiec

It’s Not About Me by Max Lucado

The Velveteen Principles by Toni Raiten-D’Antonio

Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Kaplan Thaler, Linda, & Robin Koval. The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness. New York: Currency, 2006.

Dickhead Roboticists

It appears that the fields of computer science and robotics attract a lot of Dickheads.  By that I mean fans of science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  Psychology researcher David F. Dufty is acquainted with a few of these fans, academics, engineers, and artists, who undertook the strange challenge of building an android simulacrum of their hero.  He tells their story in How to Build an Android.

Dick is possibly the best choice for an author to imitate in robotic form.  He is well known for his story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was the basis of the movie Blade Runner.  The essence of the story is that robots have become so sophisticated, intelligent, and lifelike that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from real humans.  They blow away a Turing test, and the latest models can only be identified through a test that detects their carefully disguised lack of empathy; Dick thought empathy was an essentially human trait that may not be copied by computers.  The hero of Do Androids Dream must track down and destroy these nearly human machines.

Throughout this story and others, Dick explored identity and the shrinking difference between human and machine.  People suspect themselves to be androids, androids are programmed to believe they are human, and both have false memories that they cannot distinguish from reality.  A realistic android that interacted with people in conversation seemed like a natural fit with Dick.

Of course, the project had practical implications.  It required a lifelike interface.  Artist and robot maker David Hanson believes the face is a natural way for people to interact with each other and potentially with technology.  He has made a succession of realistic robotic heads that can imitate human expression.  The PKD robot was backed by artificial intelligence developed by researchers at the University of Memphis, particularly Andrew Olney, that allowed it to understand speech and construct responses based on things Dick had said and written in life.

To top it off, something happened in the brief life of the android that would have been well suited for one of Dick’s stories.  They lost Dick’s head.  Presumably it is still out there.  It may be in some airline warehouse.  It may be on the mantle of some thief, or some flummoxed buyer of a lot of abandoned baggage.  If someone has it, they haven’t been talking about it.

The big question of the book is how do we interact with technology?  What will it look like in the future?  We will be increasingly able to make machines that at least seem intelligent and look human.  Hanson thinks that is the way to go.  The Memphis scientists and engineers, and many other like them, continue to work on interfaces capable of increasingly sophisticated and seamless interactions with people.  Are we on a trajectory from Siri to Jacosta to C-3PO to R. Daneel Olivaw?  Are androids just what we need to make technology what we need or are they too creepy?

Dufty doesn’t pass judgment.  The PKD was an interesting piece of technology with and interesting history that raises a lot of questions about what machines can be.  Even as advance and capable as the PKD android was, it had a lot of limitations.  It could carry on a conversation, in a quiet room with a patient partner, but it did little else and its responses varied from the seemingly real thing to nonsense.

Personally, I don’t think we need, nor do I want, computers with faces.  I would be pleased if I could get my Windows 8 tiles to work.  I do think the way we interact with technology is important, especially that we are able to get feedback and other information from technology in ways that helps us understand what is going on and respond intelligently.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Dufty, David F.  How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection.  New York: Henry Holt, 2012.

Google

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

Depression and anxiety are growing problems in the West. The model of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is breaking down, and antidepressants are ineffective. (I’m not suggesting you should stop taking antidepressants. Even if they are not working out for you, discuss it with your physician first.) Where do we turn to find relief?

 Johann Hari considers this problem in his book Lost Connections. Hari was a long-time sufferer of depression and taker of ever-increasing doses of antidepressants. He was happy with the model that depression was a chemical imbalance that was beyond his control and a pill could fix it. The problem was that a pill didn’t fix it; he was still depressed.

 First, it isn’t all in your head—or even in your chemistry. Though there is a physiological, and even hereditary, aspect to depression that can make some more susceptible, depression is triggered by our experience and social environments. Depression is a symptom of problems in your life. To Hari, depression is essentially a social disease and it requires social treatments.

 Though Hari does not claim to have completely uncovered the causes of depression, he outlines several that are supported by research. He describes them all as types of disconnection.

 For example, many are disconnected from meaningful work. They have no sense of control over their work. There is no connection between effort and reward, and the work can be humiliating drudgery. In addition, work has become much less secure; many have no idea if they’ll have work next week or even tomorrow.

 Related to this is disconnection from status. Research of primates suggests that depression is an expression of low status intended to protect apes from the abuse of their neighbors. In highly stratified cultures, like the United States, stress is higher than in cultures with more status equality. Low status people are under constant stress, and high status people experience extreme stress when their status is challenged.

 Most of all, we are disconnected from other people. We are less likely than ever to belong to a church, club, civic group, professional organization, sports league or similar structure of getting together with other face-to-face, bonding over common interests and building relationships. Neighborhoods are no longer communities; they’re just clusters of homes.

 Though it is more challenging than taking a pill, the solution to depression is to reconnect in those areas where we have become disconnected. It is especially important to reconnect to other people. If you want to feel better, do something to make someone else’s life better.

 The difficulty is that it is hard to get better on your own. Fortunately, if you’re willing to take a step, there are things you can do. On the bigger scale, we need cultural reform that supports personal relationships, meaningful values, meaningful work, empathy, hope and time in natural settings. There is no money to be made in prescribing a community garden, a book club or a job where one is treated with respect, so the money will probably continue to pour into drugs (whether they work or not), until we demand—and start to create for ourselves—something better.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

 Hari, Johan. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

The Instinct to Heal by David Servan-Schreiber

Depression and anxiety seem to be the new defining diseases of our age, especially in the West. These disorders, and even severe stress, can affect our health as much as smoking or obesity.

 French psychiatrist David Servan-Schreiber notes that drugs and talk therapy are not especially effective, though the side-effects can be serious. The operating theory behind antidepressant drugs may simply be wrong.

 Dr. Servan-Schreiber suggests we look elsewhere for solutions to depression. The roots of depression are in the emotional brain, rather than the thinking brain, the body and the interaction between them.

 Our brain is layered, an as you go deeper inward, you get to older structures similar to other life forms: first those similar to other primates, then to mammals and finally to reptiles. The wordy, analytical, thinking part of the brain is the newest outer layer, the neocortex. Anxiety and depression are more strongly linked to the inner parts of the brain, which is emotional, image-oriented and much more closely linked to the operations of the body.

 One aspect of the brain-body connection is the heart. The heart has a bundle of nerves associated with it that are practically a simple brain itself, and this heart-brain has a direct connection to the emotional brain in the head. Our emotional and physical states are closely tied this way. Servan-Schreiber discusses techniques related to heart coherence, the variation of heart rate in a regular patter, that can be calming to the heart and brain and put is in a relaxed, restorative mode. His book includes instructions on a type of meditation for increasing heart coherence.

 He also talks about a technique that uses eye movements similar to those that occur while we dream to help the emotional brain process trauma, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). This therapy will require a trip to a psychiatrist or psychologist, but for the right patients it can provide quick results.

 There is the suggestion that some cases of depression can be a symptom of disease or other issues in the body, especially inflammation. One of the things one can do deal with this type of depression is to get more Omega-3 fatty acids. These can help improve the function of the brain by improving the coating on brain cells. Depression seems to be more prevalent in countries where the typical diet is lower in Omega-3. Exercise can also improve depression and anxiety, especially when it is done regularly; three times a week for 20 minutes is enough to see a benefit.

 In addition, relationships and community are important to mental health and a sense of wellbeing. The quality of ones relationships can have a great impact on physical and mental health. Over the last few decades, people have come to have fewer and shallower relationships and less connections to community and purpose. Servan-Schreiber’s advice on this particularly focuses on ways to communicate that resolve conflicts and build empathy.

 Depression and anxiety are complex. Servan-Schreiber provides a suite of options for treating it. One of these may be helpful along, and some may need to use various ones in combination. In any case, there are things you can do, especially with the aid of a physician or psychologist, to make things better.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindal Segal & Joh Kabat-Zinn

Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman & Elizabeth M. Karle

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

 Servan-Schreiber, David. The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy. New York: Rodale, 2003.

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

When people complain about math being too hard or impractical, one might expect a college math professor to take up a defense, which Jordan Ellenberg does in How Not to Be Wrong. He manages to make is his argument without resorting to equations, and with very few numbers.

Math is not all about equations and numbers (though these are important objects in math). Ordinary people do math frequently in the form of thinking with a little more depth, rigor and structure than usual. This is the power of math to help us make better decisions. Though Ellenberg covers a lot of ground in math, science and history, the notion of better decision making through math runs through each chapter.

Along the way, he debunks some common uses of math, even those that are prevalently used among math-minded scientists. For instance, he takes on the notion of statistical significance, which sometimes bothers me, too. Statistical significance by itself is not an arbiter of the truth of something. It has a lot more to do with a particular way of framing arguments and the sensitivity of an experiment. If you have a large enough sample, you’re likely to have statistically significant results, even if those results are insignificantly small. You can “prove” ridiculous, plainly wrong things using an argument from statistical significance because improbable things happen sometimes (actually a lot).

Ellenberg discusses the related subject of probability, which any book like this should. Human beings are pretty bad at grasping probability; it requires deeper, rigorous, structured thinking that sometimes runs counter to our intuition.

Though math is sometimes misused or misunderstood, Ellenberg is bullish on the power of math to help us make better decisions and understand the world more deeply. Math itself is a pretty deep world, and mathematicians have discovered connections between things that seem to be unrelated. That is part of the power of math. Solutions in one are often lead to applications in many others.

Of course, math won’t eliminate uncertainty, though it can help you understand uncertainties better. I’ve spent most of my career in and around government and Ellenberg expresses some empathy for decision makers in the realm of policy, writing, “Maker of public policy do not have the luxury of uncertainty that scientist do. They have to for their best guesses and make decisions on the basis thereof.” This guesswork can be done with humility and honesty, as is fitting in a republic.

While Ellenberg eschews the pile of symbols many people think of as math, he does not avoid deep, challenging questions. It’s not the math you’ll find in journals, but it’s not fluff. He doesn’t call people to join the ranks of academic mathematicians (though don’t give up on the idea just because it seems hard at first), but he argues that people in all manner of professions could benefit from education in math. If you’re interested in becoming such person, How Not to Be Wrong is a good introduction to how mathematicians think about the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance by Paul Robert Walker

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Rock Breaks Scissors by William Poundstone

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Ellenberg, Jordan. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. New York: Penguin, 2014.