August 10, 2021

Do you have physical boundaries to yourself? A curious question I know since the contextual descriptors are missing. Let's try this. Do you feel uncomfortable when someone is too close to you, maybe touches you purposely or not, gives you  some feelings of fear or even loathing? Now there we're more in the meat of the matter. What if their touching your car steering wheel or your door knob of your house? How about if they have their fingers on your toothbrush or just used your toilet to urinate standing up with some possible splash residue? Creepy feelings inside can be aroused with adjectives of fear or disgust being there almost immediately. Our boundaries of our physical space may be defined by our past experiences including violations in which someone has crossed into our body spaces without permission. We feel creepy, fearful, maybe disgusted and we behave like we're violated with these emotions and sometimes anger. Boundary violations of our physical selves may have occurred early in our lives but repression and amnesia followed to create as adults various maladies that the Victorian psychoanalysts and practitioners puzzled over. This field of study led Freud to hypothesized child sexual abuse as the cause for the emotional reactions and body dysfunctions ( he called hysteria) which when unrepressed and analyzed could free up the suffer. Of course, this sensational theory in a Victorian society led to criticisms which may have been related to Freud's later changing his theory so that the sufferer now had repressed his incestuaous or forbidden desires and wishes so the parents or adults of the past are now off the hook. There continues controversy over these matters with some practitioners convinced of their righteous indignation accusing very innocent people of horrific abuses. Day care providers in the 1980s and 90s were accused of these abuses with media fanfare. Children were interrogated and providers hounded while the accusations were proven false in the end.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

Boundary issues may inhibit intimacy among partners unless they are open to dialogue, patience, and trust building. If you have doubts about trusting your partner due to life circumstances then allowing intimacy with shared touching and pleasure seeking behaviors may be problematic. Yet our human behaviors do lead to infidelity, private onanisms, ponography viewing, and dominatrix vs submissive behaviors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominatrix). Well, we are animals with appetites not different from our pets that sometime cavort with displays of sexual boundary breaking behaviors.  We sometimes tell the truth and we sometimes lie. Can we be trusted?

Now, on the other hands, I have just finished an interesting book by Annie Murphy Paul The Extended Mind. She has given us a gift of describing some very interesting research into how we humans have evolved so that we use our bodies and sensations including proprioception, our personal spaces including our work space environments, external tools such as paper and note taking, picture drawing, and recording of our thoughts and observations, each other in our group interrelations to better conceive and produce inventions and products that now characterize our modern era. For example, when studying mathematics, biology, or physics students taught to use their bodies in communication and describing the concepts they are attempting to understand use their fingers, arms, and hands in their classroom exercises and learn much more. In another example, a radiologist who decided to have a walking treadmill while he worked over the many hundreds of images a day he needed to report on found that his walking while working markedly improved his accuracy. Other examples of this show that being in nature, taking a break walking in the mountains and forests enhanced outputs and creativity.  Students in classrooms that study together, teach each other and come together sharing complex information now parceled out to different groups learn so much more. Scientists now rarely cloister themselves solely pursuing their studies but interact, argue, copy and imitate each other so that new discoveries are possible. This author is suggesting that our educational system has too much emphasized that we should learn through individual study solitary learning. She describes a number of school programs and corporation cultures now encouraging sharing, arguing, group discussions and group assignments for aspects of the project, mimicry and copying of ideas and techniques, etc. She has interesting examples of how work spaces can be an extensions of our bodies with benefits to the work but if spaces are too open and sterile work suffers. We're not cogs in the machine. 

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is my hero for today. This New York Times video article tells it all (https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007768850/the-silent-pulse-of-the-universe.html). I strongly urge my readers to view this video. She highlights the roadblocks and problems that she faced as a young Ph. D. candidate as she pursued her research in radio astronomy.  A woman facing many hurdles in a field dominated by men her description of how she persisted in calling attention to the data she found to her supervisor who initially discounted her discoveries but then published the seminal articles without her name on the paper that led to his winning the Nobel prize is heartbreaking to me but her character is pure and now she is acknowledged as one of the great scientists of her time PULSAR! 

Leonard