Consistency matters

Yesterday we went to watch 100 days of love.
It had no english subtitles, so we can't claim to be the best people to review that movie in the first place.
It had good comedy but it didn't feel like a complete movie.
The parts looked patchy.
It didn't come together as a beautiful story.
The pace was bad. The first half literally dragged.
My favourite actor looked quite tired though no one can doubt his sincerity and effort.
But, it had its moments of brilliance.
It shows that the people behind the movie were smart.
They had an intelligent idea on paper.
They had a vision.
They had some awesome comedy.
They had a very realistic view to many things - love, career, etc.
The hero is shown as an earthy guy, not a greek god without any flaws.
Our guy drinks and does what most of us would do.

It had the best looking pair.
It had an awesome cinematographer who created magic on screen.
It was like watching one of those snow flaky, beautifully lit movies on christmas eve.
The music was too average to even talk about, except that one bit that comes in the trailer.

I think what was missing - was  consistency. A little more effort on everyone's part, especially the editor, the script writer and the director.
The script should have gone through multiple regressions.
The movie needed tremendous trimming. It was too slow paced.
Many scenes never gelled with the movie. They were totally un-necessary.
That's when it got me thinking. Many of us can make awesome 2 minute videos.
We can write tweets. We can do thinks that require a high peak energy for a short time.
But then, there are those beautiful 1000 page books...those 3 hour movies..which take a lot of time to make. The greater the time to make a thing, the higher the chance of us screwing it due to low energy.
So, if someone has written a beautiful 1000 page book or made a 3 hour movie which is great in its entirety, we bow down to them. They deserve special awards.

It takes a lot of discipline, perseverance, commitment and hard work to achieve such goals.
One needs to handle obstacles without getting drained.
One needs to conserve energy in all possible ways to just use it on the goal.
Together these make for the recipe of success..
I bow down to those who've achieved it.
Setting long term goals, working every single day for your goal and keeping the motivation and energy levels high over a long period - all are commendable.

Hunger - psychological or physical?

The causes of hunger are many, not just the state of the upper intestine.

Hunger is triggered by regular meal times and the presentation of food cues. For instance show fast food adds, present cooking smells or even just talk about food and people will feel hungry.

Regular meal times can be so ingrained that even after an afternoon banquet a person may feel hungry again at the regular mealtime.

Clearly these cues can be averted. They develop through conditioning and they can be extinguished the same way eg by thinking about gaining weight and being ugly (negative reward).
 
On purely physically triggered hunger, most people do not experience it as they eat too regularly for such cues to trigger. I estimate than more 95% hunger feelings are psychologically triggered in the average person.

Once hunger is triggered, the stomach is checked for status which is why we associate hunger feelings with the stomach: this is a secondary, not primary hunger feeling. People who have no stomachs also get hungry, indicating that the stomach plays a secondary, not primary role in hunger.

Putting this together it is clear that when psychological hunger is extinguished the physical hunger is all that is left and this is relatively mild, at least initially.

Note that people who experience voluntary fasting report a loss of appetite after a period of time (includes those on hunger strikes). This does not occur when fasting is imposed or unwanted in which case hunger can lead to desperate behaviour.

How can voluntary starvation, as in fasting for health, lead to loss of appetite when imposed starvation, such as those lost during hiking or boating at sea, leads to desperation over similar periods without food?? The answer is that most of the hunger we experience is psychological, not physical.

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"Thus, this study found that women who have recovered from anorexia nervosa show two related patterns of changes in brain circuit function that may contribute to their capacity to sustain their avoidance of food.
First, hunger does not increase the engagement of reward and motivation circuits in the brain. This may protect people with anorexia from hunger-related urges. Second, they showed increased activation of executive 'self-control' circuits in the brain, perhaps making them more effective in resisting temptations."

How do anorexics control their appetite?

Many adults, regardless of their weight, resolve to avoid fatty foods and unhealthy desserts. But despite one's best intentions, when the moment for decision comes, that chocolate lava cake is often too enticing and self-control vanishes.

This behavior is normal because hunger increases the intensity of food rewards. Yet, individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN), despite their state of starvation, are able to ignore such food-related rewards.
A new study by Dr. Christina Wierenga, Dr. Walter Kaye, and colleagues, published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, sheds new light on the brain mechanisms that may contribute to the disturbed eating patterns of anorexia.
They examined reward responding in relation to metabolic state (hungry or satiated) in 23 women recovered from AN and 17 healthy women without eating disorder histories (e.g., the comparison group). Women with active AN weren't studied to reduce potential confounds related to starvation.
The healthy women, when in a state of hunger, showed increased activity in the part of the brain that motivates the seeking of reward, but the women recovered from AN did not. The recovered women also exhibited increased activation of cognitive control circuitry regardless of metabolic state.
Thus, this study found that women who have recovered from anorexia nervosa show two related patterns of changes in brain circuit function that may contribute to their capacity to sustain their avoidance of food.
First, hunger does not increase the engagement of reward and motivation circuits in the brain. This may protect people with anorexia from hunger-related urges. Second, they showed increased activation of executive 'self-control' circuits in the brain, perhaps making them more effective in resisting temptations.
"This study supports the idea that anorexia nervosa is a neurobiologically-based disorder. We've long been puzzled by the fact that individuals with AN can restrict food even when starved. Hunger is a motivating drive and makes rewards more enticing," said Wierenga, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. "These findings suggest that AN individuals, even after recovery, are less sensitive to reward and the motivational drive of hunger. In other words, hunger does not motivate them to eat."
"This study offers new insights about the brain in AN, which we are using to guide treatment development efforts, and reduce stigma associated with this life-threatening disorder," added Kaye, who is a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Eating Disorder Program at UCSD.
"Anorexia nervosa is a devastating illness and this study sheds new light on brain mechanisms that may enable people to starve themselves. In identifying these mechanisms, this work may provide circuit-based targets for therapeutics," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "But these same circuits and processes seem to be engaged 'in reverse' for obesity. Thus, this study may have broad implications for the country's obesity epidemic as well."

Being pleasant

When I am with some people I invariably end up thinking, how to spend the rest of the life with them? I do not want to get affected by their tantrums or negativity of their attitude towards others.
As humans we soak up a lot, so I am very afraid that I will pick up unwanted habits from them.

They are too difficult to deal with. We all have faced such people - very noisy, overbearing, overly complaining, overly pessimistic people. It's a pain to be around them. With age, the problem worsens.

That got me thinking...should we make an effort to be pleasant?
Why should anyone be pleasant at all?

Simple. It makes life easy for those around us.
It makes it easy to transact.
We all share this planet. We share office spaces. We share educational spaces.
We share public spaces. We live under one roof. We share the road.
With so much sharing, being pleasant, fair and considerate makes it easy for all of us to share the spaces. It makes it tolerable for others to be with us.

So we can concentrate on what's important, than to deal with someone's tantrums and behavioural issues. Some people cannot be changed and it's not worth making the effort. The only thing that we are capable of - is changing ourself and we can only guarantee change for ourself.
Others lives are theirs. They need to realize and make the effort to change and we can aid that but we cannot force others to change. It's their life....

Depths of despair

So, the most awaited moment of 2015 arrived.
Due to god's grace I cleared the entrance test. It was quite difficult.
My brain stopped working almost and I froze.
All my preparation and knowledge went out the window.

I was not sure if I would clear the paper. Luckily god shined some grace.
I got through. My interview was also ok. I don't know how much they could get in 3-4 minutes but I'd like to believe that I have a good chance now.

When all this frenzy was over and I came back to the hotel, I cried uncontrollably.
I thought of all the darkness and despair that had surrounded me (rather I had allowed to be surrounded by) the last 3 years.
I quit my job; I could no longer continue such types of jobs.
Despite all my attempts, my IVF failed.

So, what was I sitting at home and doing?
It was a bad phase. I was mid thirties. Jobless. No hopes.

Obviously I did not want to wake up in the mornings.

But despite that, I proceeded to find what was it that interested me, that I may be good at.
I read a lot of philosophy, psychology and slowly neuroscience also.
I read about child education.
I read about art and artists.
I read many things that came my way.
I had to improve myself. I had to find some skill, some career.

I figured that Philosophy, psychology and neuroscience was a deadly combination.
A lethal weapon to understand the mind.

But I didn't know what I could do and how I could create a career around it.
My nights and days were spent in despair.
I had my good days too.
I corrected a lot of things in me.
I learnt to appreciate myself more.
I learnt to accept my limitations and laziness.
I understood more of the world.
I understood the fallacy of thought.
There was occasional insight after reading some powerful texts.
I worked very hard to prove that I was not useless.
That is what takes a toll on most people.
We have these fancy jobs and titles and that makes us feel better about ourselves.
The lack of job and title can dent a person's identity.
It can seriously dent your self esteem and confidence.
You're afraid to face the world.
When you meet a working person, no matter what work they do, you feel inferior. You feel worthless.
I have felt that when I used to see my domestic help. I used to feel that see - she works so hard to feed her family. I'm not earning anything. These thoughts were eating into me every day.

In my jealousy I used to feel - so many average people also have jobs. What's wrong with me? Why can't I hold on to a job? Why do I have to be so finicky? I would not settle for anything less. Sometimes I wished that I had the capacity to take life a little easily, lightly.

A lot of people appear as if they have it all sorted, as if they know everything. Sometimes such people can frighten you. You feel that you are very unsorted. You feel lost. But then the moment the first deck falls off their neatly arranged stack, they are in the same place as you. You, for a change have been all covered with confusion but you still know a thing or two about life. But externally you're a mess and externally many are all decked. You feel so vulnerable.

I seemed to be made of some wrong materials which never let me be in peace.
Slowly I became a little peaceful. It was a long journey - of self love and self acceptance.

All of this came flooding. I had tears.
Somehow I started to feel that I was beginning to find my way.
All the studies had led me to a course, which was good for me.
If I manage to get through, maybe it will change the course of my life.
I felt a little hopeful. I know that there will be heartbreaks and aches and lots.
I don't know if this venture will succeed. What kind of future does the course behold?
Why does it seem that life is easy for some and complicated for few others?
Can we ever be sure of anything in life?
You just need to give it your best shot. If we know for sure that something will fail, how many of us would still go ahead and do it?

I don't know but I will give it my best shot.. as usual.

The beauty of art

I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on — and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

From http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/19/mark-rothko-on-art-selden-rodman/

Failure

From http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/10/sarah-lewis-the-rise-failure/

The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it’s hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else — a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention — no longer the static concept of failure.

“blankness,” which beautifully captures the wide-open field of possibility for renewal, for starting from scratch, after an unsuccessful attempt. 

Here, again, it’s useful to consider Carol Dweck’s influential work on mindsets, in which she found that students who equated success with a reflection of their natural ability learned much less than those who saw it as a product of their effort; the former group dreaded failure as a tell-tale sign of their insufficiency, while the latter saw in it an invitation to change course, to try harder, to grow.

A near win shifts our view of the landscape. It can turn future goals, which we tend to envision at a distance, into more proximate events.The near win changes our focus to consider how we plan to attain what lies in our sights, but out of reach.

Surrender, we both admitted, might be an imperfect word to describe it. The term is often synonymous with the white-flag retreat of loss in the context of battle. Yet when feelings of failure come with their own form of pain, empowerment through accepting it — surrender — and pivoting out of it can be more powerful than fighting. The kind of surrender that Saunders means is more akin to Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, to love your fate. 

Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power. In aikido, an uke, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or nage, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending. There is no word for competitor, only for the one who is giving or receiving the energy.

John Updike also contemplated the question: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” 

Frederick Douglass was sure, even in the face of war, that the transportive, emancipatory force of “pictures,” and the expanded, imaginative visions they inspire, was the way to move toward what seemed impossible. An encounter with pictures that moves us, those in the world and the ones it creates in the mind, has a double-barreled power to convey humanity as it is, and, through the power of the imagination, to ignite an inner vision of life as it could be. The inward “picture making faculty,” Douglass argued, the human capacity for artful, imaginative thought, is what permits us to see the chasm accurately, our failures — the “picture of life contrasted with the fact of life.” “All that is really peculiar to humanity . . . proceeds from this one faculty or power.” This distinction of “the ideal contrasted with the real” is what made “criticism possible,” that is, it enabled the criticism of slavery, inequity, and injustice of any kind.

It helps us deal with the opposite of failure, which may not be success—that momentary label affixed to us by others — but reconciliation, aligning our past with an expanded vision that has just come into view.

The “key to the great mystery of life and progress” was the ability of men and women to fashion a mental or material picture and let his or her entire world, sentiments, and vision of every other living thing be affected by it. Even the most humble image held in the hand or in the mind was never silent. Like the tones of music, it could speak to the heart in a way that words could not. All of the “Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Photographs and Electrotypes, good and bad, [that] now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings,” Douglass said, could allow for progress through the mental pictures that they conjured. He went on to describe “the whole soul of man,” when “rightly viewed,” as “a sort of picture gallery[,] a grand panorama,” contrasting the sweep of life with the potential for progress in every moment.

Our reaction to aesthetic force, more easily than logic, is often how we accept with grace that the ground has shifted beneath our feet.

distorted, flat, horizontal worlds become more full when we accept that the limit of vision is the way we see unfolding, infinite depth. 

What we lose if we underestimate the power of an aesthetic act is not solely talent and freedom of expression, but the avenue to see up and out of failures that we didn’t even know we had. Aesthetic force is not merely a reflection of a feeling, luxury, or respite from life. The vision we conjure from the experience can serve as an indispensable way out from intractable paths.

A fuller vision comes from our ability to recognize the fallibility in our current and past forms of sight.

we choose how we designate and how we relate to our own experience, and out of that choice, especially amidst tribulation, springs our capacity for triumph.

Cognitive biases

Some great books on biases:
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/04/david-mcraney-self-enchancement-bias/

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/09/the-hidden-brain-shankar-vedantam/

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/11/01/you-are-not-so-smart/

 McRaney points to the work of legendary psychologist B.F. Skinner, who believed that our core personality is shaped by small, everyday “experiments” we conduct in childhood, designed to foster our self-enhancement, by putting ourselves in situations where we are competent and thus grow increasingly confident:

Over time, [Skinner] believed, you learn that a wide variety of situations and behaviors will get you attention and praise or some other reward, and you begin to position yourself to always be in situations that allow for such an exchange with the outside world. You build a sense of self-confidence around those actions and situations you can be fairly certain will provide you a return or, as he put it, a reinforcer. This is why, he said, you decide to skip some gatherings and attend others. This is why you become fast friends with some people, and others turn you off within seconds. You tend to protect a bubble you’ve created and nurtured your entire life, a bubble of positive illusions that make you feel good about yourself. Those good feelings bleed into your sense of control and your general attitude when facing unfamiliar problems. Self-esteem and self-efficacy work together to get you out of bed in the morning and keep you going back for more punishment from the unforgiving world.

Rabindranath Tagore - Stray lines

We are like a stray line of a poem, which ever feels that it rhymes with another line and must find it, or miss its own fulfillment. This quest of the unattained is the great impulse in man which brings forth all his best creation. Man seems deeply aware of a separation at the root of his being, he cries to be led across it to a union; and somehow he knows that it is love which can lead him to a love that is final."
- FROM 'Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore'.

Energy drainers

Major energy drainers:

1) Dwelling more on the things we don't have or things that didn't work out or are not working out.
While it's important to have goals and plan for the future it doesn't pay one cent to dwell on negativity.

We are so used to pondering over what we don't have - lack of a good job, lack of a soul mate, lacking good friends, lack of beauty,lack of some skill...that we hardly be grateful for what we have. A lot of us have a lot of positive things is us.. positive things going for us.. our life is not threatened.. we have homes and family and even enough money.. but when the eyes focus only on the lack, the entire perception of life becomes difficult. For a day, I forgot all this and lived carefree and it was quite an eye opener. If your mind is not constantly racing against "what should I do next" - you become a different person. You observe better.. you absorb better...else you're in your selfish world and other things and others and their moods will go unnoticed.

What is not working, has to be solved or left alone... an honest effort has to be made but beyond that we leave it to fate or luck.
Most successful people have just mastered the tricks to deal with this. Move on fast..

Problems don't give us energy.. When we see life as an endless battle we're filled with hopelessness. Hopelessness and helplessness drain everything in us. It weakens even the most intelligent of us.
You cannot live even a day with hopelessness. We need to have things that we look forward to, despite setbacks. That's how we can get out of bed. Else depression leads to more depression and we dig deeper pits for ourselves to die.

2) Constantly comparing with others.. People are more unhappy not because of where they are but because of where others have reached. It's like driving a car always looking at the rear view mirror.

We may be doing well at our jobs but the moment we see a friend opening their own business or getting famous or buying a luxury home and car, jealousy kicks in and our life which was good just a moment ago, looks like a failure. We feel that we have failed to achieve things, but wait a minute - did you plan something that the other achieved? We're so awesome that we compare and feel bad for things that are not even on our radar. Our friend opens a new business and we feel bad. Did you plan to open a business? Did you open and fail? Why feel bad? Quite stupid, right? If only we introspected what is making us feel bad. Those who are planning and doing their work never feel jealous of others. Only because you donno what you want or you did not execute your plan well, do you feel like a failure, which is reflected everytime you see someone else's success. If you feel you're doing your best, you will not feel jealous of someone else.

The only way to reach somewhere is - by planning and working towards it. Simply looking at others never helped us climb mountains. It's such a useless pursuit.

It requires a lot of maturity to get to that place where you're happy where you are, irrespective of where the world has reached. The world has 7 billion+ people. All are doing something. All have goals. Can we track all of them? Do we want to do that? Someone, somewhere in the world is doing an awesome job.. in a field which we love.. doing it the way we wished we could do...The best thing you can do is, congratulate him and befriend him and learn how they did it. Or... believe that you have it in you and in time you too can achieve success.

You have goals and plans and you're not constantly evaluating yourself based on where the world has gotten to. It's good to get inspired by others. It's good to look at new things that others are doing and pick up new hobbies..but that should done the right way. Because, sometimes what we're searching for is lying out there and someone else's pursuit may bring some direction to us. There's only one way to look at someone else's achievements - learning from it. No other way.

3) Constant overthinking.. Setting goals and just doing it, consumes far less energy than half heartedly set goals - pondered over again and again.. overthought and killed.. without your ass being moved one inch.. That is such an energy drainer compared to just not-thinking and going and doing the work.

The mind - which is thought - makes us achieve far less than we are capable of. The mind should be used and listened to - bare minimally, if we are to make progress and find success.