Pirola's Dominating - Cool, Cool, Cool, Cool, Cool

Does everyone else picture Andy Samberg when they read about Pirola too?? Isn't everyone reading about the hot new variant, Pirola (BA.2.86/JN.1), these days??

The concern with Pirola is that it's so different from the other strains that it could be unrecognizable to our immune system, and it's as if we've never been vaccinated. I wrote about Pirola last September when it was first identified as a variant of concern. Here's the deal: If you recently got vaccinated, good for you, that should protect you from severe symptoms of the XBB lineage. But vaccines are always chasing the latest mutation and, by the time they're developed and in arms, a new dominate variant is often on the scene. That's why we still have to wear N95s everywhere!! Masks are so effective because they work on all the variants - and on RVS, influenza, and flippin' monkeypox, which is now nearby. You can see how far the XBB variants are (which vaccines targeted) from the JN.1 variant in the image above (from Eric Topol)! 

A kidney doctor online says he's baffled that anyone would care about this new variant because if you think Covid isn't over, then you'll continue masking. And if you think that it's all a hoax, you'll just ignore it and end up in hospital. But he's forgetting about the huge group in the middle. There are many people who vax and relax, and they need to know that the vaccine barely touches this new variant because it's so different from previous strains. And there are many others with a mix of pro/anti-mask attitudes in their home or extended family, and this provides one more reason to rely on N95s as well as (or instead of if necessary) vaccines. People need to be informed about changing risk as it changes!!

On Hearing Others

Louis Cozolino's beautifully written book on neuroscience has an explanation near the end about our necessary interconnectedness. 

Communication from one body part to anther happens when messages throughout our body are transmitted by neurons, but the transmission doesn't happen inside the neurons but between them, in the synaptic gap that separates the dendrites of one neuron from the axon terminal of the other. 

Then there's this bit that I love from Cozolino's book: It doesn't stop at our epidermis. The communication continues outside of our individual bag of bones into others nearby. The space between us, you and I, is a synaptic gap. The transmission of messages is continuous, not just inside our bodies but between them. So, maybe it's silly to think of ourselves as separate beings. We're one giant blob of a being, but some of the transmission circuits are damaged. Inside the body, damaged circuits manifest in a variety of ways, like Alzheimers' and Parkinson's. Between bodies, it feels to me like our systems are struggling to function from the lack of dendrites able to receive our signals. 

Cozolino says,

Goleman's Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but there's a more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. It's not quite updated enough, though. 

He added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and tons of new studies with updated technology. It's kind of refreshing to read a book about the problem with kids today without a single mention of phones, but it feels a little sloppy. Goleman is a science journalist without a clinical practice in psychotherapy as far as I can tell. While his book is about how to be smart according to the front cover, it's also being used in psychotherapy. It's a fast, engaging read, but I have some concerns about the content and application.

The book outlines the need for emotional intelligence (EI) to be overtly taught to children, explains the psychoneurology of EI, argues for the primacy of emotional intelligence for success, adds in the need for emotional supports, and ends with a call for parents to be better educated as well. The principle underlying Goleman's text is that there are four specific domains, adapted from Salovey & Mayer, that emerge from the activity of our brain circuits that have more of an impact on our general well being than does our intelligence: self-awareness, self-management (formerly motivation and self-regulation), empathy, and skilled relationships. Goleman explains that people will be better off emotionally, relationally, and vocationally if they develop their emotional intelligence to identify and understand their feelings as they happen, manage them effectively, understand other people's feelings, and relate to others more positively. With a calm mind, people can make better decisions, which positively affects all other aspects of their life. Goldman has used these domains to help to develop educational programs to teach children Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the schools through the CASEL organization. I feel like it goes without saying that being able to manage our emotional experiences helps in other aspects in our lives, so I'm all in at this point.

Faulty Wiring

We're hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere longterm.

Short-Term Wiring

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn't the result of an accumulation of things. 

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I'd forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I'd come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits - that we all do - or else we'll literally shop 'til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse's Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering: 

Covid and the Brain

Two slightly different takes from lengthy threads on how the brain operates in such a way that makes it ignore Covid risks as it protects us from the trauma caused by Covid risks: 

First, career coach Lisa Petsinis outlined how we think about Covid and why we aren't acting on it. In a nutshell, our brain automatically protects itself from knowledge of a difficult situation (like we did something wrong) with defence mechanisms until it's ready to deal with it. Getting people to focus on which behaviours feel worse generates a more moral outcome than a focus on which creates the best outcome, but we generally tend to solve any internal dilemma by sticking firmly to one side, and then we hunker down there regardless any new information. 

Petsinis explains,

"The mind can protect from trauma by using mechanisms such as repression, denial, and dissociation. This is helpful short-term to allow you to function until you're ready to process the trauma. Repression can allow you to avoid feelings of overwhelm or guilt associated with them. With unethical behaviour, rationalizing, burying, or ignoring can be coping mechanisms. A leader might convince themselves that downplaying reality is needed to prevent widespread panic or economic collapse, or compartmentalizing it, so they can get on with other business. Acknowledging a crisis' gravity can raise questions about past decisions and avoid blame. How convenient! 

I think this has been a major factor in workplace health and safety, as well. Employers, unions, lawyers, HR leaders, association, insurers--all playing hide and seek.

The mind can also be involved in an unconscious tug of war - the battle between what is right vs what is good for someone or in picking from two horrendous options. Check out the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the ethical dilemmas at the end of this study."

Menakem's Somatic Therapy Approach to Anti-Racism Work

Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands came highly recommended. The title refers to the effect that being enslaved had on his grandmother, and Menakem traces the violence of racism through the specific perspectives of people on either end of racial conflicts. Beyond just explaining how racism affects all of us in variable ways, he provides specific exercises for overcoming our past. The book contains some excellent and unique ideas about healing from trauma and responding to pain within the context of ongoing racial oppression, but it takes some liberties with explanations of neuroscience and might be better approached as philosophy.

Psychotherapy in General

I've previously written about healing advice from Gabor Maté focusing on trauma as the cause of all our ills, Viktor Frankl finding a purpose for himself in order to cope in a concentration camp and advocating for the courage to have an authentic experience of the self and world, Mark Solms reworking Freud to better understand the process of tracing emotional experiences to the past, and the use of Buddhism to stop seeking something outside ourselves in order to find slivers of peace between our thoughts. All of them, more or less, aim to get to something akin to this point:

"Once we can find the spaces between the cacophony of thought, in that tiny gap between trigger and reaction, we can reclaim our agency to decide how to act. When we focus on the nothingness instead of following our personal thoughts and feelings, then we’re no longer dragged along by the drama in our lives."

Menakem's book is no different in that respect. This quest has been repeated for thousands of years in various ways and shows up over and over because there's something to it. It works.

In current psychodynamic terms, we've developed maladaptive behaviour patterns that were established to meet some need at a time when we were too young or too overwhelmed to act otherwise. Now we need to become aware of behaviours that don't work for us, go back to find our error, and reintegrate it all. Menakem goes further than just our personal experiences to look at generational experiences, explaining that,

Where is My Mind? On Freud and Neuropsychology

Freud got some things right, and this isn't a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It's a lot like Aristotle's science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It's still pretty impressive how far they got as they laid the foundations for entirely new fields of study. I assimilated most of what's below from neuropsychologist Mark Solms's 2019 Wallerstein Lecture. It's fascinating, but over three hours long, and he talks really fast! I'm just a novice in this field of affective neuroscience, and I don't know enough to be sure his confidence in this theory is warranted, but it's a really interesting way to understand ourselves.  

Here's the gist of it.  

Freud figured that the conscious part of our mind, the part that's aware of our world and ourselves, was something that could be located in the brain, but he placed it in the cerebral cortex, the outermost area that does all the thinking. That makes sense because it's how we connect to the outside world. However, according to Solms, the conscious part is actually way in the innermost region of our brain at the upper part of the brain stem. This has been backed up with studies on people with encephalitis that have found that it's not essential to have a cortex in order to have emotional responses and an awareness of the world and self. When neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp had his students guess which rats didn't have a cortex, they guessed incorrectly because the rats missing this intellectual part of their brain were friendlier, more lively and interactive; they didn't have a cerebral cortex inhibiting their movement toward total strangers much like happens with the subdued inhibitions of friendly drunkenness.