When Time Stops

A sunset, before the night’s arrival, glistens over the gentle waters. Time seems to stop for the wonders of nature. Shadows beckon, but in this brief moment the silence grants serenity. 

The Glow of Dawn, Venice

The glow of dawn. The mystery of the darkness seeps into the stones, the canals, the lagoon. In windows, the first lights shine; looking forward to the promises of the day, but still—or already—longing for the night.

Fountains of Sparkling Light

On a hot July evening - the night of the Savior - Venetians drag their kitchen tables and chairs onto the shores of the lagoon and sit down to a meal that lasts into the night. 

Near midnight, the sky comes alive. Fireworks bathe the ancient city in fountains of sparkling light.

Venice Nights

A midnight walk on a summer night along twisting canals, over graceful bridges. Such silence. 

So good to be lost. To lose yourself to the darkness.

Recent photos of Venice which appear on this blog are from Ferenc Máté's upcoming work of photography, VENICE NIGHTS (coming out in 2014)

Dolomites

The Dolomite mountains are a dramatic break from Tuscany’s paradise. I love the ancient hamlets, flower laden pastures, and soaring pink-rocked mountains with snow-bridges and waterfalls. 

No other place makes me feel as vibrantly alive.

Tiny chapel

A tiny chapel in a green sea of Tuscan hills. Each time I pass, I stop and linger. Something about its simplicity lifts my heart and soothes my soul.

Tuscan Treat in June

June's warmth coupled with brief, pouring rain produce one famous Tuscan treat: mushrooms.

Tall, pale parasol-looking things called pupoli—so good rolled in flower and fried in oil - appear. Then of course porcini, great anyway you want it: grilled whole or chopped fine for sugo.

Last—and perhaps best—is Candace’s favorite: chanterelles. At dawn, she ventures out into the still-wet woods, and comes back flushed, her basket full of strangely shaped orange things that soon fill the house with their pungent perfume.

She stir fries them with garlic and serves them over Nunsi’s hand made fettucini. Nothing compares to the explosion of redolent earthy flavors in that first bite.

Colors of a Tuscan Spring

With the lush spring rains, nature in the Tuscan hills puts on her festive best.
The almond trees bloom first, then the ditches and roadsides burst thick with wild flowers.

Blinding green meadows of wheat, fields of rapeseed as yellow as buttercups.

In late afternoon, poppies with the sun behind them glow like flames. On warm days the air is thick and sweet; a deep breath of it is food for the soul.

Recent photos which appear on this blog are from Ferenc Máté's upcoming work of photography, The Seasons of Tuscany (coming out in 2014)

Spring in Bloom

We discovered an old stone cistern hidden behind the house. Cut into the hillside, it was covered by a dome of brambles that took two of us three long days to clear. Spring-fed and the size of a backyard pool, it had been built to gather water for pigs and cows and to irrigate the big orto—vegetable garden—beside the courtyard.

I had always admired Japanese gardens: their serenity, simplicity but especially their ponds, and thought our carrots, spuds and tomatoes wouldn't mind being watered from a cistern full of fish and water lilies, so I set to work. In February, I built two wooden planters for what the nurseryman swore would be dazzling pink and white water lilies but for the moment were slimy, wet roots. With incredulity, I watched the muddy planters sink to the bottom.

Next, I bought some fish. I imagined they’d be wonderful to gaze at, swimming gracefully among the flowers. I bought eight of them. Each the size of a child’s finger. They had looked golden and lively in the pet shop aquarium, and sparkled in the sun as we slipped them into the cistern. But then, instead of entertaining us with their grace, they vanished into the mud. Day after day, I scattered flakes of fish food but the only ones to show up were a frog and our cat, who watched for the fish with a gastronomical eye.

Then April arrived. Spindly green shoots sprang out of the mud, and the eight fish darting about had tripled in size—three of them with bellies like pregnant sows. By May, the shoots unfurled into lily pads with fat little buds that bloomed the next week. And the fish? Hundreds of them: tiny, gold and black, and pearl, swarming in schools among the lilies, racing to the surface when I came to feed them, then playing under the waterfall that tumbled from the spring.

Now, sitting on the wooden bench in the shade of the old oak and watching them—the lilies, the fish, the frog on the lily pad—you breathe deeply as you escape the day’s petty troubles.

On Sunday Afternoon

I set out on my favorite kind of trip this morning: a broad loop through the countryside on the back roads of Tuscany. It was to be a 40-mile journey—all open country—through two tiny villages, from the first hills beyond the Albegna River’s delta up to where it springs from the mountainside. After the village of Marsiliana, I turned off the narrow road onto a single lane that wasn't even on the map. I couldn't resist. The hand painted sign read Colle di Lupo. Hill of the Wolf.

Banks of wildflowers brushed against the car. With the top down, the sun and their fragrance whirled around me. I stopped here and there to photograph the scenery, bales of hay and a big white long-horned Chianina cow; to talk to a man with a sickle cutting erba medica for his rabbits; to a lady herding a big rooster across her yard; and for an orange cat lying in the middle of the road. The cat stared intently at a deep crack in the pavement; it wouldn't move. I shut off the motor and went to photograph some sheep.

I soon stumbled onto a hilltop of Etruscan ruins. From there, I had a bird’s eye view of southern Tuscany. It was almost the end of the day. 

Total distance covered: just over 3 miles.

Grilled prawns

On Tuesday and Friday mornings a family of fisherman come to our town from the coast. They set up a stand in a former cellar under Piazza Padella and we line up to buy freshly caught dentice, spigola and delicate calamari, mussels from Sardegna and vongole from Orbetello.

The best are the prawns, that we skewer, douse with fresh olive oil, chopped parsley and garlic, then roast over the coals of our kitchen fire. 

Heaven.  If life has a meaning, the taste of those prawns paired with a bottle of Ansonica from the Island of Giglio, might just be it. 

"Children should be allowed to get bored..." from BBC news

When our son Buster was 5 years old we decided to spend the summer sailing aboard a boat we had built and lived aboard for years. Our destination was the wild and empty archipelogos and mountainous fjords, of the British Cloumbia coast. We provisioned for two months: supplies, spare parts, food, wine and clothes for heat, wind and rain. What we completely forgot were Buster’s toys.

In his pocket he had one little car and that was that. By the time we realized this, we’d been a whole day at sea, far from civilization. We felt horrible thinking he’d be forever bored.

But Buster didn’t care. The boat and everything on it became his toys. He wanted—and learned instantly—to steer, set the sails, follow a compass course, locate us on the charts and, mostly, how to row our little wooden dinghy once we anchored.a

And there was the rope. A three-foot piece of rope became his best friend, his toy, and his pet that he took for walks. He also learned to tie it into ten different knots. He took it with him when he went to greet each and every sailboat that came into the quiet anchorages we found along the way. He got to know everyone, was loved by all, invited aboard by most.

Late that summer a former attaché to the United Nations rowed over to tell us he was sure that Buster, with his love for and interest in people, would one day be the UN’s Secretary General.

All because we forgot his toys at home.

Children should be allowed to get bored, expert says

By Hannah Richardson, BBC News education reporter

Children should be allowed to get bored so they can develop their innate ability to be creative, an education expert says.

Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should be constantly active could hamper the development of their imagination.

She quizzed author Meera Syal and artist Grayson Perry about how boredom had aided their creativity as children.

Syal said boredom made her write, while Perry said it was a "creative state".

The senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's School of Education and Lifelong Learning interviewed a number of authors, artists and scientists in her exploration of the effects of boredom.

She heard Syal's memories of the small mining village, with few distractions, where she grew up.

Dr Belton said: "Lack of things to do spurred her to talk to people she would not  otherwise have engaged with and to try activities she would not, under other circumstances, have experienced, such as talking to elderly neighbours and learning to bake cakes.

"Boredom is often associated with solitude and Syal spent hours of her early life staring out of the window across fields and woods, watching the changing weather and seasons.

"But importantly boredom made her write. She kept a diary from a young age, filling it with observations, short stories, poems, and diatribe. And she attributes these early beginnings to becoming a writer late in life."

'Reflection'

The comedienne turned writer said: "Enforced solitude alone with a blank page is a wonderful spur."

While Perry said boredom was also beneficial for adults: "As I get older, I appreciate reflection and boredom. Boredom is a very creative state."

And neuroscientist and expert on brain deterioration Prof Susan Greenfield, who also spoke to the academic, recalled a childhood in a family with little money and no siblings until she was 13.

"She happily entertained herself with making up stories, drawing pictures of her stories and going to the library."

Dr Belton, who is an expert in the impact of emotions on behaviour and learning, said boredom could be an "uncomfortable feeling" and that society had "developed an expectation of being constantly occupied and constantly stimulated".

But she warned that being creative "involves being able to develop internal stimulus".

"Nature abhors a vacuum and we try to fill it," she said. "Some young people who do not have the interior resources or the responses to deal with that boredom creatively then sometimes end up smashing up bus shelters or taking cars out for a joyride."

'Short circuit'

The academic, who has previously studied the impact of television and videos on children's writing, said: "When children have nothing to do now, they immediately switch on the TV, the computer, the phone or some kind of screen. The time they spend on these things has increased.

"But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them."

It is this sort of thing that stimulates the imagination, she said, while the screen "tends to short circuit that process and the development of creative capacity".

Syal adds: "You begin to write because there is nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing else to do.

"It's very freeing being creative for no other reason other than you freewheel and fill time."

Dr Belton concluded: "For the sake of creativity perhaps we need to slow down and stay offline from time to time."

"You Phone vs. Your Heart" by Barbara Fredrickson

Friends, here's an important article from today's NY Times by Barbara Fredrickson. 

Another reason to connect face to face instead of phone to phone. 

Your Phone vs. Your Heart

By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSON

CAN you remember the last time you were in a public space in America and didn’t notice that half the people around you were bent over a digital screen, thumbing a connection to somewhere else?

Most of us are well aware of the convenience that instant electronic access provides. Less has been said about the costs. Research that my colleagues and I have just completed, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, suggests that one measurable toll may be on our biological capacity to connect with other people.

Our ingrained habits change us. Neurons that fire together, wire together, neuroscientists like to say, reflecting the increasing evidence that experiences leave imprints on our neural pathways, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Any habit molds the very structure of your brain in ways that strengthen your proclivity for that habit.

Plasticity, the propensity to be shaped by experience, isn’t limited to the brain. You already know that when you lead a sedentary life, your muscles atrophy to diminish your physical strength. What you may not know is that your habits of social connection also leave their own physical imprint on you.

How much time do you typically spend with others? And when you do, how connected and attuned to them do you feel? Your answers to these simple questions may well reveal your biological capacity to connect.

My research team and I conducted a longitudinal field experiment on the effects of learning skills for cultivating warmer interpersonal connections in daily life. Half the participants, chosen at random, attended a six-week workshop on an ancient mind-training practice known as metta, or “lovingkindness,” that teaches participants to develop more warmth and tenderness toward themselves and others.

We discovered that the meditators not only felt more upbeat and socially connected; but they also altered a key part of their cardiovascular system called vagal tone. Scientists used to think vagal tone was largely stable, like your height in adulthood. Our data show that this part of you is plastic, too, and altered by your social habits.

To appreciate why this matters, here’s a quick anatomy lesson. Your brain is tied to your heart by your vagus nerve. Subtle variations in your heart rate reveal the strength of this brain-heart connection, and as such, heart-rate variability provides an index of your vagal tone.

By and large, the higher your vagal tone the better. It means your body is better able to regulate the internal systems that keep you healthy, like your cardiovascular, glucose and immune responses.

Beyond these health effects, the behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges has shown that vagal tone is central to things like facial expressivity and the ability to tune in to the frequency of the human voice. By increasing people’s vagal tone, we increase their capacity for connection, friendship and empathy.

In short, the more attuned to others you become, the healthier you become, and vice versa. This mutual influence also explains how a lack of positive social contact diminishes people. Your heart’s capacity for friendship also obeys the biological law of “use it or lose it.” If you don’t regularly exercise your ability to connect face to face, you’ll eventually find yourself lacking some of the basic biological capacity to do so.

The human body — and thereby our human potential — is far more plastic or amenable to change than most of us realize. The new field of social genomics, made possible by the sequencing of the human genome, tells us that the ways our and our children’s genes are expressed at the cellular level is plastic, too, responsive to habitual experiences and actions.

Work in social genomics reveals that our personal histories of social connection or loneliness, for instance, alter how our genes are expressed within the cells of our immune system. New parents may need to worry less about genetic testing and more about how their own actions — like texting while breast-feeding or otherwise paying more attention to their phone than their child — leave life-limiting fingerprints on their and their children’s gene expression.

When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health.

If you don’t regularly exercise this capacity, it withers. Lucky for us, connecting with others does good and feels good, and opportunities to do so abound.

So the next time you see a friend, or a child, spending too much of their day facing a screen, extend a hand and invite him back to the world of real social encounters. You’ll not only build up his health and empathic skills, but yours as well. Friends don’t let friends lose their capacity for humanity.

Barbara L. Fredrickson is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become.”

Strangers in the Night (and Day) (excerpt from A REAL LIFE)

Strangers in the Night (and Day)

The universal adman’s image of human closeness is two lovers on a promontory, backs to us, entwined, sun going down, golden light bursting, and mood music effusing. What we don’t see or hear are their cell phones vibrating, their fingers twitching over text messages and the cords of their MP3 players hanging from their ears.

As if our social exile wasn’t quite complete by dividing us into marketable age groups, sticking us into isolating houses, and isolating jobs, we are driven apart even more by attention-demanding electronic gadgets. I’ll give but two short examples of how it all began.

We lived in Paris in 1982. Parisians love to talk—their whole economy is based on it; bars, bistros, and restaurants survive only because people get together for an espresso or un verre or meal, but mostly for intense conversation: personal, philosophical and invariably probing. Hence most encounters between friends end up being memorable, exhaustive events.

A dear friend was driving me to a soirée and, as always, she talked about, what else: lovers, sex, lies, loss, and new lovers. We were having a good talk, open and honest; we were confidants, just she and I in that little Citroen, and all of Paris a backdrop. Then all of a sudden—for the first time in my life—a brand new device, her car phone rang. She answered and chatted. She might as well have pushed me from the moving car. Our intimacy, solemnity, the deep trust of the moment was no more. A distant had come between us; suddenly there was someone else with us in the car.

I hope you don’t think me melodramatic but the shock of that moment is still with me today.

Of course now our cell phones ring any place, any hour, whether we’re dining, or driving, in bed or on the moon—and we almost feel like social outcasts if it doesn’t. So we say we are now used to our social moments being interrupted, we say it’s all part of life, we adapt, we go on. But do we? The next time you’re having a special moment with a lover or a friend and his or her phone rings, close your eyes. Don’t listen to their conversation but listen to yourself—how does that make you feel. Happy? Joyful? Or ignored? Even betrayed? Just see if your heart sinks, and your spirit sags as the preciousness of that moment is lost.

The second electronic blow to social intimacy came a year later. We were living in New York in an old loft in Soho at a time when Soho was still nothing but boarded-up storefronts and garment sweatshops. Candace and I shared the loft with her best friend at art school, Giovanna. New York went through hard times then, the Lower Eastside was a near war-zone, the subway stops were reeking dungeons, many a subway car without lights or with doors that wouldn’t shut, the only reliable thing inside and out was graffiti.

But there were also truly good times, outrageous, spontaneous art, an explosion of impromptu galleries and eateries all over the East Village, late nights in bars, great blues music, deafening sounds in discos, wide open rowdy parties, and vivacious street life at all hours among the gutted buildings.

My shock came one Saturday afternoon. My head was throbbing with a hangover and my jaw sore from an altercation with a drunken yuppie who had insulted a painter friend. Giovanna decided we needed a quiet getaway on a boat that circumnavigated Manhattan. It was a beautiful spring day and the sights were fine. We laughed a lot, which made my sore jaw sorer, but it was fun traveling with two rowdy, pretty women. During a lull in conversation, Giovanna pulled out her newly acquired pride and joy, a Walkman. She put on her headphones and turned it on. To us she might as well have jumped over the side. She was gone. She no longer talked to us or heard us, or saw what we saw, or felt what we felt. It was as if she had slammed a door in our faces.

Twenty years later, these invisible doors are slamming in our faces dozens of times a day. When the cell phone rings, we tell ourselves that we’re tough and stoic, we can withstand these small rejections, but it’s these minuscule letdowns which strung end to end make up our lives and form us.

Whether we verbalize it or not—they affect us, harden us; bit by bit, they close us. And as they close us from each other, we drift apart, our conversations become more shallow, our laughter more mechanical, our sympathy more feigned.

If we can become thus distanced from our friends, just imagine how distant we are with perfect strangers. Not only do we no longer know or love our neighbor but, quite frankly my dear, we don’t give a damn. And if we don’t give a damn, why would the banker, who is about to foreclose on our house? Why would he even blink before he kicked us into the street? The banker sees his position clearly in the world: he’s all alone doing his job, looking out for Number One.Many would object, saying that these small isolations, the weakening of social bonds, have no great effect on the world, that more important things affect our daily lives. Think again. Take what happened to politics for instance. As a vast majority of Americans agreed in the 2010 midterm elections, Congress and Senate were doing a dismal job. The Democrats and Republicans had developed so much animosity that dialogue was almost impossible: everyone ranted, no one listened. This intransigent partisanship was not a condition that developed overnight; it snuck up over the years, like global warming, like the rabid financial system, like our dying neighborhoods.

Retiring Senator Dodd, who joined the senate thirty-six years ago, lamented that over the past two decades there has been a “stripping of the socialization, which is always what made this place function.”

He remembers the late hours in the members’ dining room, where senators mingled, where he sat enthralled listening to the old bulls. “As a new member, you just sat there and absorbed it as they would rib each other and sometimes have a heated debate about a subject,” he says. “It was as good an education as you could get about the place.”

Today, “there’s no one in that room.”

While some gadgets drive us apart, others keep us from ever coming together. The best example is that true marvel, the GPS. You just tell the little lady in the box where you want to go and she will get you there; all you have to do is turn on your ignition and turn off your mind.

The reassuring female voice tells you to slow here, turn there; it’s like directing an old cart horse but with electronic reins.

I admit, there is a relaxing brainlessness to the process, and most often the thing will get you safely where you were heading, aside from a few notable exceptions like the lady in Canada who, obeying her GPS, drove miles into a bog; and another in England, who drove into a river. On a daily basis, more than half the people coming to our house from Florence or Siena using GPS get lost; the last family so much so, that at one point their GPS fell into a coma.

For most of us, the GPS can turn travel into a disorienting void. A friend drove from London to his house in Tuscany using a GPS and said at journey’s end that half the time he had no clue where he was, and, upon arrival, felt as if he hadn’t been anywhere at all.

Others complain of going numb, with no thought and no reasoning; just sitting, waiting for the next command. One friend did notice that his GPS cut down marital fights; instead of shouting at his wife, he now shouts at the lady in the box. And she, instead of responding by crumpling up the map, just murmurs sweetly, “Turn left at the next right.”

A GPS, aside from shutting down your brain, keeping it from attentive observation, from doing basic arithmetic and simple problem solving, also tends to set your trip in stone. Once you key in your destination, you tend not to improvise, to veer off and take some small road on a whim, or head off toward some intriguing hillside town on an isolated coast.

But apart from that, there is a social sacrifice: the human contact you miss out on when you’re undecided or lost. I have traveled worldwide on author tours or just for the pure love of it, and have learned to rely on a simple electronic/voice device: I push a button, the car window goes down, and I yell out, “Where am I?”

It works every time—invariably someone, eventually, responds.

Some very fond memories are from encounters of the lost kind. I’ll never forget the dapper young Italian who stepped from his car into the pouring rain to explain the complex streets of the historic center of Ravenna to me, only to end up laughing at his own confusing instructions, jumping back in his car and shouting, “Follow me.”

In Guatemala, Candace and I were taken under wing by three brothers and, not only given directions, but also ushered into their mother’s house for lunch, then taken on a guided tour around a magnificent lake. Or the time in Sicily, when undecided between two roads, one along the coast and one inland, both marked green, meaning cenic, we stopped in a small town to ask local advice. Candace got out of the car and asked a local lady. The lady considered, looked at the map and gave longwinded directions. A gentleman passing by stopped and waved his arms. “That road there?’ he exclaimed, “I wouldn’t send my in-laws on that mule-trail.” The crowd grew. Soon there were six of them explaining, cajoling, countering, “Yes, but this has the view . . . but that one has the lake . . . but on this you can stop at Luigi’s for pranzo.”

Last Sunday we drove out to the sea to visit some Etruscan ruins near the town of Follonica. We arrived just before lunch and looked for the place a friend had suggested for excellent seafood. We got lost so we stopped at a small car repair place. Not only was the old mechanic happy to help, but also began advising on the best dishes on the menu. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a sign marked “Closed for holidays.” Back to the garage. The mechanic began to scratch his head then his eyes lit up. “Va bene,” he chimed. “I have it. Great food and romance,” and he described a place on piling jutting into the sea. He yelled after us, “And tell them to treat you right because Mimo sent you!”

The view was stunning, the owner friendly and gossipy, just the way we like it. The tagliatelle di mare and the pinci with clams in pesto sauce were to die for, the mixed seafood grill fresh as the sea, the bottle of Vernaccia was superb and the bill came discounted nearly 20 percent.

I’ll never forget Mimo’s smiling face, or the setting, or the meal. Not something the lady in the black box could have arranged.

These are admittedly small, fleeting events. None of the people became lifelong friends, or lovers, or sent us birthday greetings, but the memory of those meetings—brief human encounters, that come when you need them most, when you’re the most lost, forlorn or hungry—are encounters that restore your faith in human warmth, in simple generosity, in unremunerated caring.

Then there’s the pride thing. Candace and I have sailed many coasts and open waters, starting decades ago when all we had was a sextant and a compass. Nowadays, especially offshore, or off an unknown coastline, Candace, who navigates, wouldn’t be without her beloved GPS. I, on the other hand, never learned how to use it. Twice I had to sail big boats without her, solo.

Once was on a borrowed boat, sailing from the island of Raiatea to Bora Bora—about twenty miles. A storm had come through the previous night and big seas still ran in the morning, so from the trough of swells, all I saw was sky. The wind stayed high throughout the day and the sloop ran with all her might. From the top of the swells, I could spot the mountains of Bora Bora, but I couldn’t for the life of me see the only entrance to its lagoon: a narrow cut in the reef now covered by breaking waves. The trip, with a lot of gybing to avoid running wing and wing, took me seven hours. I made three runs at the reef to find the opening, twice I had to turn just boat-lengths from the coral, but, when I finally made it, I felt as proud as if had just circled the globe alone.

In a life as regimented and “safe” as most of ours tend to be; where we are seldom challenged, or called upon to think afresh, invent or improvise, I’ll happily take some chances, even risks, get lost, make mistakes, try again, just so that at day’s end I can have that incomparable sensation of having made it on my own; of having used all my senses, and been completely “alive.”

Then there are the games and apps our children appear to be attached to night and day, whether in cars, in their rooms, or at the dinner table. Exactly what positive contribution parents think they are making when buying them this stuff, I have no clue.

Parents rave about how new apps keep their children from getting bored on drives. Hello? What ever happened to gazing out the window, looking at the scenery? And even if the scenery isn’t always majestic, even if it’s a ghetto or industrial slum, is it not a good idea that they see it and think about it, so when they grow up and run the world they can remember how awful those places tend to be?

Even at the dinner table, game apps and iPads seem to be the norm. I saw a Russian family in Verona, sporting all the right jeans and longed-for shopping bags, sitting down in a good restaurant with their two children of around ten years old. They had barely pulled in their chairs when one child whipped out his iPad and the two of them started watching a movie. Not only did they not interact with their parents or each other, or barely notice the food they were shoveling into their faces, but the volume of the movie disturbed adjoining tables. Did the parents mull it over before Christmas to come up with the best package for teaching their children social isolation, culinary ignorance, absolute disregard of others, and how to be the most obnoxious children in the room?

Is it any wonder that some of our children grow up self-centered, uncaring, bored, and socially inept? How could they be anything else when parents put such antisocial weapons in their hands?

So what’s the solution? Turn the gadget off. Or, better still, don’t buy it in the first place. Brett Arends, a financial columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a paper about as conservative and technology-admiring as there is, wrote recently “I dumped my iPod Touch . . . The scarcest resource in life isn’t money, land, fresh water or gold. For singles under 25, the scarcest resource is sex, and for the rest of us it’s time.”

A REAL LIFE: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Happiness is available through 

W. W. Norton and Amazon.com or wherever books and ebooks are sold. 

For more about the author, please visit www.ferencmate.com.

Financial Obesity (excerpt from A REAL LIFE)

Financial Obesity

The 1970s were still an age of moderation, exemplified by the fact that for New York lawyers and teachers, starting salaries were about the same. In those days, the number of overweight or obese in the populace hovered around 10 percent. But by 2010, the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services classified 66 percent of adults in the United States as overweight or obese. That same year, the starting salaries for NYC lawyers had ballooned to four times that of the city’s teachers. The DHHS goes on to point out the dangers of physical obesity as, “increased risk for chronic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, and some forms of cancer.”

The explosion of body mass has been blamed on everything from constant snacking, to junk food, to consumption of huge portions, and, more and more, on emotional disorders. At last, the question is being asked, “Why are we compulsively snacking? Why do we binge on junk food? And why do we eat such huge portions?”

Overeating has been associated with depression, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, frustration, stress, problems with interpersonal relationships and poor self-esteem.

The cause and effect is illuminated in an article from Britain’s National Health Service. It starts with an insightful quotation. “I have just finished with my boyfriend and now I’m eating chocolate. I know it’s not chocolate that I want. I want a kiss and a cuddle. I want him. So why am I trying to find solace within that sheet of silver foil?”

According to Professor Andrew Hill, a psychologist at Leeds University, that is precisely the question we should be asking if we want to understand overeating. To him the simpleminded approach to curbing obesity—by counting how many calories we consume and how many we burn—is guaranteed to fail. “There’s energy in and there’s energy out but there’s a person in-between,” he says. “You need to understand the emotional reasons for eating if you are ever going to change behavior.”

He points out that from infancy, food is directly linked to emotions: the breast not only feeds, but comforts; favorite foods are used to calm and reward. Sweets forever remind us of the sweetness of mother’s milk. This changes little as we grow older. “What does a man give a woman when he is wooing her? Chocolates. What do you give your family for a special occasion? You take them out for a meal or you make a special meal.”

It is then safe to say that overeating is not about filling empty stomachs, it’s about “a kiss and a cuddle”—it’s about filling empty arms.

The real problem is not what we are doing, but what we are not doing, while we’re doing what we do. While food becomes a fleeting substitute for someone’s loving arms, it unfortunately gets us no closer to what we really need. On the contrary. Overeating sets a vicious cycle in motion: the more weight we gain, the more self-conscious we become, and the more reluctant to go out and meet someone to love. So we become even more lonely, anxious, frustrated and depressed. And, to feel better, we eat even more.

While our society is understandably focused on the unhealthy effects of plain to the naked eye physical obesity, few have questioned a less obvious, but more disturbing disorder affecting not only those suffering from it, but demoralizing and dehumanizing us all. Significantly enough, this disease began to go viral at about the same time as did physical obesity, and quickly became a pandemic infecting the whole world. Its symptoms are similar—swelling and ballooning—but instead of hips and thighs, it’s of bank accounts. This disorder could be termed, without malice, “financial obesity.”

While overeating can be understood, it is less clear what voids over-earners try to fill. In other words, what drives someone to accumulate wealth beyond any possible use or need? What motivates millionaires and billionaires to work nearly night and day, with no concern for friends, family or society, focusing on some menial endeavor that most often involves nothing more mentally challenging than buying and selling with the single-minded purpose of accumulating more? Were this kind of behavior exhibited by another species—like our dog, say we found it running endlessly around the neighborhood pilfering a dog biscuit here, another there, then piling them sky high in quantities that he couldn’t eat were he to live to be a hundred—would we not be alarmed?

When looking for the “why” of over-earning, I think we have to dismiss comparison to eating disorder motivations—of trying to relive the sweetness of mother’s milk and her comforting breast, for few people I know were brought up snuggling Rolex watches or sucking hundred dollar bills.

While physical obesity results in damage to our arteries, liver and heart, it is more difficult to measure financial obesity’s damage to the organ it affects most: our brain. It’s fair to say that the vital neurological paths—those formed by frequent use, as we’ll examine in chapter 14—would be of the most limited kind, made up primarily of basic arithmetic: figuring gain and loss. Most other vital paths—curiosity, imagination, warmth, kindness and empathy—had they ever developed, would have all atrophied, from disuse, long ago. I think we can assume that, as every other human, the financially obese need “a kiss and a cuddle.” Lacking the qualities which are normally inviting—warmth, kindness, imagination—they continue to substitute with an inanimate satisfaction, one they can count, and count on: money.

The point of this discussion is a simple one: Since the explosion of financial obesity corresponds in time to the explosion of physical obesity, there must be some aberration in our recent culture that has caused them both. In other words, we can assume that the emotional problems—depression, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, frustration, stress, problems with interpersonal relationships and poor self-esteem—that lie behind over-gorging are the same whether the over-gorging out is of the physical or financial kind.

What, you may ask, has this to do with real life? Well, since most cases of obesity are caused by emotional disorders which we feel obligated to address and treat to save the patient, then are we not equally if not more obligated to identify and treat the emotional problems of the financially obese? Not just out of fairness but out of self-preservation. Decades of obsessive hoarding and unbridled greed have led directly to a near economic collapse; hence the emotional disorders of the financially obese affect not only them but have severe repercussions on the welfare of us all.

The first step is obvious: to recognize financial obesity for what it is—a runaway pandemic. Second, instead of admiring it and refusing to see its danger, treat it like any other emotional problem or mental disease: with attentive understanding and care.

And make sure we “kiss and cuddle” a hell of a lot more.

A REAL LIFE: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Happiness is available through 

W. W. Norton and Amazon.com or wherever books and ebooks are sold. 

The Shallowing of Our Minds (excerpt from A REAL LIFE)

The Shallowing of Our Minds

Recently my best friend ruined my weekend. He grabbed from his shelf a book published last year and said it might fit in with what I was writing. It was titled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

            I had never read a non-fiction book in two sittings, but Nicholas Carr’s book I just could not put down.

            He starts off with anecdotal evidence by Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School, who notes that since the switch from reading printed material in the form of books to reading books on to the Net a decade ago, he and many of his friends and associates have noticed a marked lack of ability to concentrate. Losing the thread of their thoughts, they are unable to handle not only attention demanding novels like War and Peace, but have even “lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article.”

            Surfing, skimming along the surface of things, taking “information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” some of them worry that they have become scatterbrains.

            Carr himself notes that, “the Net seems to be chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” And he goes on to lament the trend of the “calm, focused, undistracted, linear mind being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”

            He describes the typical new mind as that of a former student body president at Florida State University, a Rhodes scholar, who unabashedly states, “I don’t read books . . . it’s not a good use of my time . . . I can go to Google and absorb relevant information quickly.” And that from a philosophy major.

            The enormous difference between the two types of reading, Carr describes as follows: “To read a book silently required the ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to lose oneself in the pages . . . In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply . . . Quiet, solitary research became a prerequisite for intellectual achievement. Originality of thought and creativity of expression became the hallmarks of the model mind . . . For the last five centuries . . . the linear, literary mind has been the center of art, science and society.”

            All the above stands in stark contrast to a completely different neuro-involvement, in that, “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning.” Not to mention superficial thought.

            Carr gives no example so I will illustrate his statements with an obvious comparison. The op-ed pages of the print version of The New York Times contained, until recently, almost no advertising. You could read without visual distractions about complex often crucial issues like the Start treaty, global warming, and the Rwandan genocide, assimilating the articles with what you already knew, filling in spaces with your own opinions, reinforced by sympathy, or even empathy, at the end creating in your mind a brand new and exhaustive bank of knowledge on the topic, a new “complex concept or ‘schema’.”

            No more.

            A few days ago I read an op-ed piece on the web-version of The Times. The topic was the plight of homeless Haitian children following the earthquake. The piece was not alone on the page. While reading about human suffering, I was invited by a colorful, page-top streamer of smiling faces to “Vote for my Favorite Under 25 Movie Star,” while being simultaneously coaxed by a fluorescent blue ad for “A full-body waxing for only $99.95,” all the while, a video in a little box ran a trailer for the film 127 Hours in which someone stuck in a hole decides to saw-off, or chew-off, or nail-file off his own arm.

            Was I confused? Not on your life. I recall every detail of how for only $99.95, the Haitian under 25 movie stars got to chew off their own arms last summer at Wax Camp.

            Now that is what I call power-multitasking.

            As for the Haitian children, if they really want my attention, they’ll just have to get their own page-top magenta streamer.

The trend away from linear reading to the visuals of the electronic screen is truly jaw dropping. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2008 found young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, while putting in 8.5 hrs of screen-time, read only an average of 7 minutes a day. To put it bluntly at the risk of over simplifying, that’s 510 minutes a day of shallow thinking vs. 7 minutes of linear, potentially deep, thought.

            Some may shrug and say, So what? Well, as Carr reminded us, the linear, patient mind, ”as supple as it is subtle, has been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”

            That prospect frightens me for a truly selfish reason. As you may recall, our childhoods were filled with parents, teachers and elders, advising us to slow down, take our time, think things through, sleep on it, come up with the best all-round solution. I must confess that in my case that had no effect but I’m sure that some of my very favorite people took it to heart. I met two, both doctors, both the directors of their respective departments at Cornell Medical School at New York hospital, one of whom was the “father of sonograms,” the other, the world’s best in his field. My experience with them after a freak accident ten years ago left me with a complete re-evaluation of the medical profession and taught me an unforgettable lesson about life.

            One doctor was in his forties, the other in his early sixties, and both had something nearly unearthly about them that in New York City stood out even more: an infinite calm. They translated that into patience and thoroughness, repeating the same procedure, double-checking, triple-checking, rethinking, reconsidering, until they were absolutely satisfied that not a flicker of doubt remained in their minds. They were determined to do the best job with a minimum of interference. Their aim in fact was to avoid any interference at all. And they did. The simplest thing would have been to perform surgery, but they resisted. They reflected. Thought “deeply, linearly, subtly.” Thoroughly.

            Will the Rhodes Scholar philosophy major, who has no patience for books, bother to do so? Or worse: would he, without the experience of reading and thinking profoundly,

even have developed the ability?

            Piling information atop information, without the wherewithal to have a broad overview; without the ability to consider all sides and all possibilities, without the experience for the kind of thinking we unconsciously develop while reading non-fiction or novels about complicated lives of complex people with often convoluted motivations, without that capacity for “concentration and contemplation,” will, I truly believe, lead to a plethora of knee-jerk responses from shallow thinkers, who are conditioned to only superficially “skim” their brains.

            It might just result in a society where thoughtless, often senseless outbursts will be the norm because our brains will have been physically transformed.

            If I understand neuro-physics, it all works something like this.

            Our brain cells—neurons—are separated from each other by barriers called synapses. The neurons communicate with one another through tentacle-like appendages called axons and dendrites. When a neuron is activated, a pulse releases chemicals called neurotransmitters, which allow the flow of an electric pulse from its axon to the dendrite of the next nearby neuron setting off a new impulse in that cell which is then, in turn, transmitted to others forming a whole circuit of paths. “Thoughts, memories, emotions,” Carr states, “all emerge from the electrochemical interactions of neurons . . . The average

neuron makes about a thousand synaptic connections, and some neurons can make a hundred times that number.” This varied and unique “mesh of circuits . . . gives rise to what we think, what we feel, who we are.

            “As the same experience is repeated, the synaptic links between the neurons grow stronger and more plentiful through both physiological changes, such as the release of higher concentrations of neurotransmitters, and anatomical ones.” Either through generation of new neurons, or new terminals on the axons and dendrites, we form

“chains of new neurons . . . our mind’s true ‘vital paths.’”

            He quotes the British biologist J. Z. Young, “The cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy and waste away with disuse.”

            In a brilliantly simplified experiment, biologist Eric Kandel who eventually won the Nobel Prize, tested the brain cells of sea slugs and found that with very little training of only forty impulses, motor neuron connections can be reduced from ninety percent to ten percent. So, Kandel wrote, “synapses can undergo large and enduring changes.”

            Well now. If forty delicate impulses can lead to abandonment of eighty percent of connections between neurons, imagine what the eight-and-a-half daily hours of constant screen watching do to our neuron connections that were once in frequent use with deep reading and deep thought, that allowed people to concentrate, to make “their own associations, draw their own inferences and analogies, foster their own ideas”? What has the deluge of staccato bits of unconnected information done to our “originality of thought and creativity of expression . . . the hallmarks of the model mind . . . the center of art,

science and society”?

            Maybe we should hurry up and tweet someone to find out.

But the bad news gets worse. It seems that we have two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term. Envision short-term memory as a revolving door letting things in and spewing them out. Long-term is more like a vault, where memory is kept for years or even life. The problem is that changing a short-term memory into a long-term one is no simple task. One essential element is repetition—“the neurons grow entirely new synaptic terminals” hence causing an anatomical change. And as Kandel states, “The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist.”

            The formation of long-term memory, or what he calls  “complex memory,” requires “system consolidation” or “conversations” between entirely different areas of the brain. This “memory consolidation” requires not only time—some scientists say hours, others days—but also attentiveness, “strong mental concentration,” in other words “intense intellectual or emotional involvement.”

            Kandel now writes his most important conclusion, “For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already established in memory.”

            The final element needed to create long-term memories is quiet time.

            With the continuous and intense surfing of the web, distracted by hypertexts, streamers, pop-ups, and videos, our minds are constantly bombarded by stimuli; our memory is on overdrive. There is no down time, no reflection, no chance for the mind to even begin consolidating, or forming “schemas.” And there is certainly no time for new neurons to be formed even if our poor brains could decide where to form them.

            So this is where our Rhodes Scholar who has cast away books goes wrong when he believes that instead of slow and considered reading, he can go on the web and “absorb relevant information quickly.” He may be surfing quickly, browsing quickly, even stopping to look at facts quickly but, for his long-term memory, for his complex memory he’s absorbing little or, nothing at all.

Aside from assimilating little, the active parts of the brain develop, while those parts left unused, wilt and atrophy. So let us go to an extreme. Let us say one browses the web all day, sends abbreviated e-mails, tweets, and texts, then goes home and plays a few video games; then, to “relax,” watches his obligatory five hours of TV. The only rest his mind gets, the only quiet time for complex memory to form, is while he’s brushing his teeth.

            The above, I fear, is much closer to the norm than to the exception. It is thus conceivable that one’s complex memory, the seat of one’s self, the source of thoughtful judgment and wisdom, is almost never engaged. Little by little, what small part had developed through the years, namely the complex part of our brain, shrivels. Of course, I suppose it could be slowly rebuilt, regenerated with use, but exactly when would this new, unaccustomed use occur? What would trigger it? And in a world made up of multiple screens and sound bites, who would even bother triggering it at all?

One final observation. Carr cites the work and comments of Antonio Damasio, the Director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio and his colleagues have found in experiments that the higher, more noble human emotions such as compassion and

empathy, are slow to form in a situation; it takes time to comprehend and feel the “Psychological and moral dimensions of a situation . . . If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.”

            Let us go back to the question I posed chapters ago; what happened to Wall Street? How could some of the world’s brightest minds bring the world to the edge of financial chasm? How could they be so stupid? What were they thinking?

            I believe the answer lies in neurons. First, the financiers of Wall Street were not stupid; they were brilliant. They were brilliant at browsing and surfing, at skimming information, at buying and selling at the blink of an eye, at reacting to blips on a screen, to two-word news flashes, to pop-ups and to flags. They were even superb at reducing the world to numbers where the only thing that counted, the only single goal was—at the end of the day—to have a larger number showing on the bottom of the screen. True reality, the rest of the world, countries, people, mothers, fathers, grandfathers and children, sad or laughing, suffering or happy, never entered what we can call, without malice, their “equation.”

            In other words, the working memories of our financiers were frantically and permanently “otherwise engaged.” Meanwhile, their complex, long-term memories, their wisdom, empathy and compassion shriveled day by day.

            Think of this new generation that grew up with remote controls, and video games, Web surfing and tweeting, constantly distracted, and often overloaded, when did it have time to form complex memories? When did it have time to rest, think deeply, reflect? And when did it have time to feel compassion, sympathy, not to mention empathy?

            Unfortunately a new study by the University of Michigan shockingly finds “almost never.” Analyzing the personality tests of 13,737 college students over a 30 year period, between 1979 and 2009, the researchers found a 48 percent decrease in empathy and a 34 percent decrease in perspective-taking—considering someone else’s point of view.

            The authors of the study note that the biggest changes have occurred since the year 2000, with the inundation of callous reality TV shows, and the explosion of social networks and texting, which allow people to disengage from others at the click of a key. They blame these “physically distant online environments” for encouraging people to “lionize their own lives” and “functionally create a buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or even at times, inflict pain upon others.”

            Mary Gordon, the founder and president of Roots of Empathy, also cites a “poverty of time” in families. “You have to experience empathy to continue to develop it. If children don’t have enough opportunity and parents don’t have enough time to be with their children, it’s really difficult.”

            As our lives accelerate, as our attention span is shredded, will there be any of us with a complex memory left? Will any of us have that unique set of schemas, the brain’s vital paths, whose infinite array of combined experiences—physical, intellectual and emotional—made each of us so miraculously unpredictable, volatile, spontaneous; unique? Without empathy and deep emotions, when we are only indistinguishable flickers of keys and gleaners of information, then how close do each of us come to being clones?

A REAL LIFE: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Happiness is available through 

W. W. Norton and Amazon.com or wherever books and ebooks are sold. 

For more about the author, please visit www.ferencmate.com.