It's Reading Week Again, Time for Some Silence!

View of the not-so-silent ocean from Alila Villas Soori, my wonderful hosts for reading week.

Reading week is supposed to be a week off from class so students can study for mid-terms afterwards. But of course, professors have their own ideas. I had mid-terms for Emotion and Psychopathology as well as a journal critique on the connection between working memory and depression for Emotion due in the first couple days of reading week. Fortunately, I still had time to go to Bali for the rest of it.

I've spent the past 5 days at Alila Villas Soori, and it just so happened to coincide with Nyepi, Bali's day of silence to mark their new year. Everyone is supposed to stay at home for a day of self-reflection and fasting. Even resort guests are not allowed outside the resorts and the airport is shut for the day. Gotta love Bali! I think the whole world can use a silent day.

What have I been reading? The first three chapters of Smith & Kosslyn's Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain, Emotional Awareness: A Conversation Between The Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman on Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion and Ekman's Emotions Revealed. I'm reading these books by Ekman even though I'm only on waitlist for his and Dr. B. Alan Wallace's upcoming 5-week Cultivating Emotional Balance Teacher Training in Phuket. Keeping my fingers crossed.

All this reading has left a few words bouncing around in my head: perception, attention, control, choice and compassion. Here are just a few ponderings to connect the dots:

1. What I perceive of my external reality is incomplete and subject to distortion -- "Our interpretations of the world around us are determined by the interaction of two things: (1) the biological structure of our brains and (2) experience, which modifies that structure." (Smith & Kosslyn, p. 56) and "The two problems of perception in relation to the sensory world, then are 'not enough' and 'too much'. In both cases, cognitive mechanisms are necessary to provide the means to interpret and understand the material our senses bring to us." (Smith & Kosslyn, p. 52)

2. What I can attend to is only a small fraction of what's going on at any given point of time. The more I try to attend to, the less complete my knowledge of each -- "Attention involves selecting some information for further processing and inhibiting other information from receiving further processing." (Smith & Kosslyn, p. 104) "Understanding attention is as much about information that is not selected as well as information that is selected." (Smith & Kosslyn, p. 105). Check out this classic test.

3. Due to problems of perception and attention, how much control do I really have of my comprehension of "reality"? Add to this, Ekman's point (Emotions Revealed, p. 39): "Emotions change how we see the world and how we interpret the actions of others. We do not seek to challenge why we are feeling a particular emotion; instead, we seek to confirm it."

4. But I can choose whether or not to question my comprehension of "reality" or take for granted what arises in my mind as truth. This sounds like an easy choice, but for many reasons, it's not so simple. Even if one consciously chooses the former, it's much harder in practice. It requires honing our ability to use, what Ekman calls, reflective appraising rather than automatic appraising of emotion. And how does what I choose to accept as reality, in turn, affect my perception and attention? Does it alleviate my problems or does it perpetuate failures in perception and attention? As N, one of my yoga teachers, mentioned, the Bhagavad Gita teaches us to "default to our highest". The trick, of course, is knowing what is our highest and then resetting our brain processing to change default settings. The paradox, though, is that our brains are wired for survival and the avoidance of whatever we perceive to be a threat. So it's back to a more complete comprehension of "reality".

5. Compassion is an action taken towards alleviating another's suffering, arising from a feeling of empathy, feeling another's suffering. I don't act compassionately, because I don't feel empathetic. I don't feel empathetic, because I'm afraid to acknowledge the existence of my own suffering, am afraid to feel suffering or afraid of what feeling empathy might compel me to do.

With all the lecturing and journal articles (we even read a few studies on how meditation increases gray matter volume and attentional performace) on the brain and cognitive-based explanations for depression and other mood and anxiety disorders, here was an enlightening take from the Dalai Lama:

"Reflection on suffering needs to be tempered with an appreciation of its opposite: what it must feel like not to have it, or freedom from suffering. What is important is to have a basic attitude based on a recognition of the destructive consequences of certain emotions and also some understanding that there are ways in which you can actually help yourself to avoid these situations." (Dalai Lama & Ekman, p. 204-205)

So perhaps one way to look at depression is to see it as a side-effect of empathy that has not been followed through with acts of compassion that result in an alleviation of suffering, leading to prolonged and internalized feelings despair and hopelessness. Call it frustrated empathy, if you will. This takes us back to the topic of the Dalai Lama and Ekman's conversation: How do we overcome the obstacles to compassion? The first, probably, is a sincere belief in the necessity of compassion, not just as a luxury but as the real key to our evolution for survival.

Who Would You Give Your Heart To?

I was in the copy room at PolyU's Hospitality & Tourism School and found this lying on the copier (I'm curious to find out which class this was for):

Heart Donor Game
Imagine your group is an Executive Committee in a hospital. Now your committee has to make a decision on deciding on setting the priority for who should get the heart that has been donated. The following 5 people are on the recipient waiting list:

1. Mr Tycoon, age 65, male with 6 sons and daughters, rich and famous. He has agreed to donate $1 million to the hospital if the hospital does the operation for him.
2. Ms Movie star, age 35, female, beautiful and influential with many young fans. She has donated $500,000 to build a shelter for the homeless.
3. Ms Housewife, age 40, widow, female with 3 children below the age of 7. No money, poor, relies on government social service to take care of her children.
4. Mr Young, age 20, male, 2nd year student in university. Only son in the family, hardworking youngster, works part-time to support the family, wants to be a policeman.
5. Mr Senator, age 45, male, married with 2 children. Just elected as Senator, highly respected and has a good reputation for fairness and fighting for people.

This question reminded me of the TV show Three Rivers. I'd argue for decisions like this to be made behind a veil of ignorance, where such personal details are stripped from a case file, leaving only medically relevant details.

But suppose the donor somehow gets to choose in which person s/her wants her or his heart to live on. Who would you give your heart to? I think I'd rather keep mine for someone who has no heart.

Questions for Lee Shau-Kee

I thought I'd be too busy to blog this week. I have a million and one things I should be doing...like editing a bunch of case studies on private equity deals in Asia, writing 1,000 words on touring Bordeaux wine country or researching a story on "confinement" (post-partum) hotels in Taiwan. Instead, I'm blogging, an activity that neither pays the bills nor gets me a qualification. Yet, I feel compelled to blog. If only to try and think through my own reactions and conflicts to one of the biggest gossip stories in Hong Kong this week as reported in The Standard: "Uncle Four's Triple Score."

In a nutshell, one of Hong Kong's wealthiest property developers, Lee Shau-Kee is celebrating the birth of his three grandsons to his unmarried, girlfriend-less son by an as-yet unnamed surrogate mother. There's been no mention of the biological mother either.

I find this story sad on many levels. My reaction probably has a lot to do with a disturbing film I watched when I was in college: The Handmaid's Tale. Oddly enough, the book's author, Canadian Margaret Atwood, is in town tomorrow to speak at TEDx Pearl River. I wish I had time to go tomorrow, if only to ask Atwood's reaction to this story.

I wonder if Lee Shau-Kee and Peter Lee have thought about these questions and what their answers would be:
1. Is paying for eggs and sperm, the basic building blocks of a new life and the determinants for a future person's physical attributes and personality, the same as buying for life? Should life be bought and sold as a commodity on a free market? How do we value our own eggs and sperm, which is a part of our self?
2. Of course, this raises questions with other medical advances that might give or improve the quality of one's life -- organ transplants, stem cell therapy, etc. We don't allow the sale of most organs (even though it does happen), but we do allow the sale of eggs and sperm. Why is it different? Is it only because giving away our egg and sperm does not affect the safety and continuity of our own life? And yet, in a much deeper sense, it is about the continuation of our own life.
3. Science may often seem to be able to offer expedient and effective solutions to our immediate problems, but have we really thought about possible long-term consequences, especially those beyond material consequence?
4. In the case of the Lee grandsons, do the advantages of growing up in a wealthy family mitigate the disadvantages that will come from not having or knowing one's mother? Perhaps the gender of one's caretaker is unimportant as long as a child has sufficient love, care, attention and resources from other people? What is the value of a mother beyond biological necessity? What is the value of a father beyond biological necessity?
5. Money and power can solve many problems on the surface, but will three grandsons really fill the emotional void between father and son? I feel for the three grandsons. It cannot be easy to be born into a world with such expectations to fulfill, no matter their material comforts. But perhaps, that's what children are for, why they're so important -- they're our second (or third) chance.

It's Reading Week, Time for Some Sandplay!

In the US we call it Fall Break, and it really is a break. Here at HKU, it's reading week, and it really has been a week of reading. I've got a paper to write on Carl Jung's theory of psychological types -- introvert/extrovert, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuiting. So I've been reading quite a bit of Jung this week. Departing from Freud who believed our psyches are only made up of the individual conscious and unconscious, Jung added the collective unconscious. As a writer, I believe that there probably is a collective unconscious that is shaped by the myths, stories, images, advertising, media, pop culture and various other stimuli that infuse some sense of meaning on our lives since the dawn of our civilisation.

HKU's psychology department is often critiqued by other practitioners in Hong Kong as being too empirically and cognitively driven. So when AL, a clinical psychologist and sandplay therapist, told me that Dr E would be visiting Hong Kong from London to give a couple workshops and "personal process" sessions, I decided to check it out. Sandplay, from what I understand of it, allows the "player" (my term) to create a scene/image/pattern/blog/chaos using little figures and other bits & bobs in a tray of wet or dry sand. Many of the figures are supposed to be symbolic, allowing the player and analyst to "communicate" on the level of the collective unconscious.

I'm open to the idea that sandplay can be a means of letting the unconscious express itself, but I think it's also dependent on how freely the player goes with the flow and does not allow the conscious to get in the way. That's probably why sandplay is more often used with children than with adults. But I really wonder how effective an analyst is at really seeing the unconscious communication.

Since hearing about sandplay, I've been curious to see what I'd create. So I booked two sessions with Dr E, one to play in the dry sand tray and another in the wet sand tray. The first question that popped into my head about sandplay was whether the analysts' selection of figures and baubles already somehow limits what can be expressed. It's a bit like language, some languages have a multitude of words to describe ice or as the Dalai Lama asked Paul Ekman in their book Emotional Awarenes: "In English, there seems to be a lot of words for these different degrees of anger -- 'outrage,' 'resentment,' 'indignation,' and so on. Why are there such resources in the English language for anger?"

To which Ekman, who acknowledges that he has spent much of his life trying to manage his feelings of anger, replies: "...I was hoping that in Tibetan there would be more different words for different types of anger, because, as far as I am concerned, English is rather impoverished."

Sandplay was fun; it's a great creative outlet. But I found the "analysis" somewhat disappointing. It's always easy to "read" meaning into images; human beings are natural story-tellers. In that sense, I found that the analyst role to be not that far from that of a tarot card reader. I think the analyst would be more useful if s/he approached the endeavor more as a linguist learning a new language, which in the end, may all just be a bunch of babel.

Meaning is in the mind of the beholder: Is this a mess or is it organized?

It Gets Better

In recent weeks, I had passed fleeting glances over the headlines about recent gay teen suicides in the US because of online and offline bullying, but it wasn't until I saw this video LB had posted on facebook that the story captured my attention. That in itself is quite sad. In Hong Kong, suicide among teens is also a problem. For many, it's the pressure to perform academically. And whenever the property or stock markets tank in Hong Kong, suicides spike among adults. I had become numb to suicide headlines, and it's sad that I seem to have built a firewall to other people's pain. Of course, this only contributes to the problem. Those in despair feel even more hopeless in their lonely alienation -- it's your pain, you deal with it yourself.

I was moved by this video by councilman Joel Burns; I can't imagine how much courage it took for him to give that speech and how much pain he's endured to keep his secret all this time. This video is just one of the growing chorus of voices to tell despairing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens that "it gets better". Dan Savage kicked it off in response to reading about the suicide of Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old who hung himself after repeated bullying. It Gets Better is for GLBT teens, but its message is relevant to anyone in a despairing point in life: It will get better, and you will be stronger for it. For people like me, there's the valuable lesson of empathy.



This is why I'm such a huge proponent of teaching, encouraging and supporting creativity. Before one can have hope, one must first be able to imagine something different to hope for. Being able to see just one possible alternative can be enough to turn a hopeless situation into an opportunity.

Are You Happy? Lie To Me

Lately, I've had a bit more motivation to go to the gym for 45-minutes of cardio sessions, because I've started watching Lie to Me (season one DVD). I found out that the show is based on Paul Ekman's research on coding facial expressions of human emotions (in the show, the lead character Dr Lightman is based on Ekman, and uses his knowledge to detect people's lies to solve crimes). I remember I first came across Ekman's name in a 2002 New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell,  "The Naked Face".

After watching a few episodes of the show, I went onto Ekman's site and discovered that he offers online training in recognizing micro expressions of 7 basic emotions -- sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt and happy. Out of curiosity, I checked out the METT Advanced online course.

Now, I am puzzled as to why I am rather inept at recognizing sadness, while scoring high on all the other 6 emotions. On hearing my results, BL joked, "Maybe you just don't hang around sad faces much." I wonder if that's true. Does that mean I see a lot of anger, fear, disgust and contempt, along with happiness and surprise? Or perhaps it means I haven't been tuning into other people's sadness. Will have to put my newly acquired training to the test and see if I notice more sadness...

Joel Spring: Promise of an Education is a Better Shopping Experience

From Artist Andreas Gursky's Prada Series via www.seomituus.com

One of the things I love about being a student again is having access to interesting speakers. On any given day, I receive a dozen emails announcing talks and seminars by academics, practitioners and industry titans from Hong Kong and around the world -- filmmaker Ann Hui, Blackstone boss Steve Schwazman, Economics Nobel Prize winner Prof Gary S Becker on the "Causes of the Worldwide Boom in Education, Especially of Women".

I really regret not being able to make Becker's talk in light of Prof Joel Spring's talk yesterday. Spring was critiquing Becker's "human capital" model of education, that the reason to invest in education is to spur economic growth. In other words, in a global capitalistic economy, the goal of education is to "prepare people to enter consumerism -- to make happy shoppers".

On one of Spring's slides, he quotes from Becker's 1964 book, Human Capital: "An economy like that of the United States is called a capitalist economy, but the more accurate term is human capital or knowledge capital economy." So we went from producing goods to delivering services, financial and otherwise.

According to Spring, education was not always thus. It used to be focused on "ethics, morality, "truth", justice, the good society, social control, imperialism, religion". In other words, education used to be about preparing people to get along with others or rule the rest with whom we could not get along. Now, it's about proving our worth.

Artist Barbara Kruger's I shop therefore I am (1987) via tate.org.uk

Among those of us who grew up and work in the developed world, consumption ennui seems to be setting in. Parents complain about the pressures facing their children; it's a never-ending battle to get into the right play group so that they can get into the right kindergarten so that they can get into the right school, university and ultimately land the right job. And what do we work for? We work so we can buy. As Spring points out, "The promise of an education is a better shopping experience." We want a good education so that we can earn more money so that we can shop at Bergdorf Goodman instead of Wal-mart. If you don't consume, who can you be? Singaporeans chase after their coveted C's -- condo, car, country club membership...

Spring explained that our current system does not work unless we keep buying things. In one of his slides, was this quote:

"It is not the increase of goods for consumption that raises the standard of life...but the rapidity with which the consumer tires of any one pleasure. To have a high standard of life means to enjoy a pleasure intensely and to tire of it quickly."

I was somewhat surprised to see that this was written in 1889 by Simon Patten in The Consumption of Wealth.

Did status anxiety shape our education system or did our education system instill in us this status anxiety with tests, tests and more standardized tests? As students' and teachers' performance are tied to test scores, "teachers are becoming angrier and angrier, so have students. Students are taking out their frustrations on teachers, hitting and biting teachers."

Spring has a vision for a new kind of education, one that is "judged on its contribution to one's sense of personal satisfaction and well-being and longevity." He outlines this in his book A New Paradigm For Global School Systems: Education for a Long and Happy Life.

So I wonder if, with the likes of Spring and Tim Jackson (see his TED talk below on an economic reality check), we are on the cusp of beginning the next phase of human evolution, where we look for ways to shift from an economy focused on consumption driven by a desire to achieve individual status, survival and domination to one focused on collaboration driven by a desire for the fulfillment of individual potential so that we might learn to thrive collectively. After all, how much can we really afford to consume?



As Tim Jackson exhorts us, we need to ask ourselves: "So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist...Well, psychology actually says there is a tension, a tension between self regarding and other regarding behaviors."

Can education, once again, teach us to engage this tension, this struggle, rather than escaping from it into the comforting, hazy den of consumerism? Or are we to believe that the story of human civilization is merely one of how we look for and find new ways to lose ourselves and dull the pain and anxiety of facing our fatalistic human condition? I would never write a story like that. For one thing, it doesn't sell.

Here's an excerpt from Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet:


Or download the 2009 report for the Sustainable Development Commission: Prosperity Without Growth? The Transition to a Sustainable Economy