Ageless in Spirit: Discussions and interests for our times

 September 21, 2020 Yesterday Rebecca and I waited on line to get our extra strength flu shot in the drive through at Castle Medical Center. This morning I woke up very tired, mostly sitting on comfortable chairs or lying down. I napped periodically throughout the day feeling more myself in the later afternoon.  So who is this that I call myself? I'm drawn to the subject of personality and our current understanding of this term. My training has been in psychiatry so I'm more familiar with the DSM V a book of diagnoses and definitions published by the American Psychiatric Association. The personality disorders are grouped into three clusters where cognition defined as ways of perceiving and interpreting the self, others, and events, affectivity defined as the range, intensity, lability, and appropriateness of emotional responses, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control are enduring patterns over time impairing social, occupational, and other important areas of functionin...

 September 20, 2020 Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the beginning fall high holy days holidays bring back memories from my childhood to today. My sister and I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Lawrence, New York on Long Island' south shore. My first nine years we lived in an apartment building on the fourth floor then we moved to Lawrence in a single family house then moving around the corner to a shared home which we changed again during high school to another shared home. My parents were not religious but they wanted me to have a Jewish education so I went on Sundays to Hebrew School. The Jewish holidays were celebrated mostly during my life through relatives visits on Passover to the Zetikoffs in Queen's (mother's uncle) at their apartment for Passover and then when in Hebrew School I went to the orthodox services at Temple Emanual in Far Rockaway. In this synagogue the men were separated from the women who watched modestly upstairs. I learned the prayers and songs by rote l...

 September 19, 2019 Jonathan Haidt Ph.D. has written a number of books two of which are worth reading The Happiness Hypothesis may be my go to self help book and The Righteous Mind is more controversial but worth digesting. Hugh Freitas has drawn a very creative and helpful cartoon to discuss some of the issues that polarize our ability to have dialogue between conservative and liberal groups (http://www.hugofreitas.com/2016/03/howtomakeaconservative.html). This link is worth studying.  Haidt discusses disgust as an emotion that is more  unconscious and immediate leading us to think and behave almost automatically so that discussion and reasoning about one's conclusions are very difficult. Writers in this vein suggest that our disgust sensitivity may be ingrained, innate, and influenced by hereditary and therefore a characteristic of our personality less influenced by learning. Social intuitionism is an intuitive process in which we have moral judgments that then we ratio...

  September 18, 2020 Last evening Rebecca and I watched "Hacking your Mind Living on Autopilot" on PBS ( https://www.pbs.org/show/hacking-your-mind/ ). Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were colleagues and then good friends and collaborators researching on how we make decisions, how we come to conclusions, how we feel affinity to our group,  how we act on our illusions and prejudices, etc (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-who-changed-how-we-think-about-how-we-think). Kahneman's popular book "Thinking Fast and Slow" describes many of their research and results ( https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html  and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow ).  We evolved from the bush and savannah of Africa living in small hunter gatherer groups foraging and hunting. Danger was ever present with wild animal predetators, poisonous plants and starvation  to name a...

  September 16, 2020 Apocalyptic " describing or prophesying the complete destruction of the world... resembling the end of the world; momentous or catastrophic".  I am drawn to reading at times science fiction stories such as three books by Liu Cixin the first book The Three Body Problem  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel),  The Expanse written by the duo James Corey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series),  and The Broken Earth series starting with the Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Season_(novel). These are the last three I read. These writers present dystopian world with unusual conflict, very polarized factions of people greatly distrusting each other, terrible threats to life, the planets, and any semblance of civilized life, conflicts seemingly to be resolved but then off the rails again due to unforeseen catastrophes, lying,stealing, cheating, dissembling, ex...

 September 15, 2020 I've been thinking about conscious lying, prevarication, cheating, organized thievery, fake news, fiction espoused as fact, legal forensic subterfuge in court, through documents, and even associated with our recent impeachment trial, etc.  Lying involves deliberate untruthful behavior and speech. Recent psychological research on toddlers, adolescents, and adults reveal that lying is prevalent and that we are easily subject to deception. Toddlers told not to look at a toy  while the researcher leaves the room for a short period of time often look. When asked if they did they lie. The smarter they are on some testing the more they lie. When asked to give their word that they would tell the truth more told the truth. A teenager packs his bed with cloths to appear like he is there sleeping leaves for a party then returns early next morning claiming he just returned from jogging.The parent acknowledges that he is lying, tells him that he is grounded for a t...

 September 14, 2020 Saturday past Richard Rovin, Simin Jalil, Nancy Rawlins, and Chau Sachs went on a wonderful walk along the ridges and dry stream crossings to the picnic table in the clearing overlooking the Koolau mountains (Waimano trail). Lush and green with trees, scrubs, ground cover in thickets we passed boulders tumbled from the mountain ridge by our side now growing octopus plants with fecund roots embracing the rock now seemingly coming to life. Nancy heard the Sharman thrush https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrsGXT3upFI Very loud distinct chirping captured our attention letting me make a story that this bird was singing to us. There were many wonderful moments along the way. The Conservation  Corp in the 1930's was responsible for a great part of the trail with the irrigation channels and tunnels now dry along a great part of the hike. We started at about 10:30 AM and finished 4:30PM spending our time just visiting with others at the picnic table and stopping a...