Lift Up Your Hearts!

So, the CDC wants all of the "baby boom" generation tested for hepatitis C, in a move reminiscent of school teachers who punish the whole class for the misbehavior of the few.  I was planning on simply refusing the test, should our doctor suggest it, but now I have a better answer.

The Big Red Bus was at our church today, so we hopped on and donated, after the Eucharist.  (Blood in, blood out.)  As it happens, testing for hepatitis C is part of the "mini-physical" you get when you donate blood.  Now if the doctor asks, I can say, "been there, done that."  Several times over, as a matter of fact.

Study finds coffee-drinkers live longer

The bad news?  Lots of cream and sugar could negate the effect.

The good news?  Enjoy your coffee guilt-free.  At least the coffee helps negate the effect of the cream and sugar.  :)  And remember, stress and guilt are bad for you, too!

I haven't read the book myself, but was thrilled to find this review of The Truth about Tummy Time:  A Parent's Guide to SIDS, the Back to Sleep Program, Car Seats and More by pediatric physical therapist Stephanie J. Pruitt.  It's about time someone from the medical profession admitted that Back to Sleep has led to a significant rise in physical problems and developmental delays in our children.

What I find especially interesting is that Back to Sleep is only part of the problem.  See this article, Shackles for Babies, particularly the comments that follow from another pediatric physical therapist.  Babies are being left on their backs during the day as well as at night, despite the known value of "tummy time."  What's much worse, many are kept for hours on end in baby entertainment devices and rigid baby carriers that keep them in unnatural positions and do far more damage than leaving them on their backs, but free to move.  Scary.

Even the strictest adherents of Back to Sleep can make a point of giving their babies freedom to move the rest of the hours of the day.

What's your gut reaction to this story?

There are more than 1,000 varieties of bacteria that live within the human gut, and an average person can have around 300 different varieties of the little critters living within them. Each type of bacteria not only supports one another but support your ability to digest food, stay healthy, and if your gut community is a bit off, perhaps gain weight or develop diabetes.

Or this one?

[The] often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our "second brain".  A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.

U.C.L.A.'s [Emeran] Mayer is doing work on how the trillions of bacteria in the gut "communicate" with enteric nervous system cells (which they greatly outnumber). His work with the gut's nervous system has led him to think that in coming years psychiatry will need to expand to treat the second brain in addition to the one atop the shoulders.

And from a much older source:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”  On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.  If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.  (1 Corinthians 12:21-26)

This is a mighty sad article.  The British government has issued official guidelines aimed at getting the under-five crowd moving.

The British government says children under five, including infants, should exercise every day. The guidelines recommend children under five be physically active for at least three hours per day, they also say that babies should be doing tummy time or in-swim lessons with their parents to help them gain strength.

Well, good for the British government, if it's really necessary.  Is this the fruit of the back-to-sleep campaign, long rides in car seats, baby swings, strollers, bouncy seats, playpens, walkers, baby videos, and other well- and not-so-well-intentioned interventions?

All the under-fives I know (not to mention more than a few five-and-overs) have no problem whatsoever being active for three hours practically every waking minute each day.  Every mother of a toddler from the creation of the world has no doubt groaned more than once, "If I could only bottle that energy...."

The British government's expressed concern is with the later risk of adult obesity, but if our toddlers must be prodded to be active, we're looking at more of a problem than that.  It's nothing less than a sea change in the development of the human race.

The Raw Milk Revolution:  Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights, by David E. Gumpert (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2009)

That the forward to The Raw Milk Revolution was written by Joel Salatin—whose Polyface Farms is the poster child for independent, sustainable farming—gives the reader a good idea of where the book ends up.  That's a lot more than the author knew when he began his investigation.  He was over 50 when he had his first glass of raw milk, and hadn't given milk of any form much thought for some 30 years.

But for a writer with interests in both small businesses and health, the growing demand for unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk—and the increasing governmental interference with the small dairy farms that are its only source—was a natural field to investigate.

I had my first glass of raw milk at lunch, with a homemade chocolate chip cookie....  Suddenly I was back in my childhood, with my all-time favorite snack.  The milk was as creamy and rich tasting as it looked, with a slight sweetness I didn't recall from my childhood milk. ... But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that overhanging the experience was an anxiety-laden question provoked by my American history classes highlighting the importance of pasteurization in saving lives:  Might this wonderful milk kill me?  I actually went to sleep wondering whether I'd wake up. ... Of course, there was no bad reaction of any sort, and I became a regular customer.

Gumpert is lucky.  The places one can legally purchase raw milk are few.  In Switzerland Janet lives an easy walk from a local dairy, where she can buy all she wants at a good price.  Pennsylvania is one of the few states in the U.S. where raw milk is legal, and Heather can get some for the cost of a long drive and a lot more money than the grocery store charges for their agri-business milk.  In Florida we can't buy it legally at any price, except as (very expensive) pet milk, "not for human consumption."

In most places one can still drink the milk from one's own cows (though even that right is in danger), and some farmers have set up "cow share" programs in which the customers actually own a share of the cow and are thus entitled to a percentage of her milk; the farmer's role is caretaker, not owner.  This neat little device reminds me of the old days of homeschooling, where families would incorporate as private schools and thus satisfy the law requiring either public or private schooling.  The legality of that arrangement for homeschoolers was in many cases questioned, and such is now the case with raw milk cow shares.  Worse, really, because education is still very much a local and state concern, but the federal government is putting its muscle behind the campaign against raw milk.

Gumpert does a good job of analyzing the supposed risks versus the supposed benefits of raw milk, while exposing the strong-arm tactics and illogical reasoning being used against small dairies.  He has clearly become a raw milk devotee; however, his concern is not simply about milk, but about similar threats to small farmers and the local/natural/sustainable agriculture movement in general.

A month ago, CNN published an article which used the completely unrelated E. coli outbreak in Europe to call for a total ban on raw milk and juice.  The Raw Milk Revolution is an excellent refutation of the scare tactics.  But here's an interesting quote from the article:

Consuming a diet loaded with fat and salt is unhealthy, but the government has no business regulating that. Raw milk, however, is different.

Really?  Why?  How is raw milk different?  Well, for one thing, the risks associated with raw milk are probably less than the risks of the kind of diet he would keep far away from governmental regulation (as would I).  Even if you exclude the long-term, less-quantifiable risks of heart disease, a study reported in The Raw Milk Revolution showed that for listeria, a disease of concern with raw milk, the per-serving risk is ten times greater with deli meat.  I don't hear anyone calling for a ban on Subway.  (Nor would I; it's my second-favorite fast food restaurant, after Chick-Fil-A.)

I'm not saying the government doesn't have an important role when it comes to food safety.  Inspection and certification can provide necessary information that consumers don't always have access to on their own.  I'm in favor of state certification of dairies for raw milk—as long as the requirements are reasonable and take into account the great differences between small-scale production and factory farming.  (Full disclosure:  my great-grandfather, Willis Langdon (1854-1932), was one of the first dairy farmers in the State of Washington to offer certified milk to his customers.)

If you wonder why raw milk enthusiasts are so passionate about the issue, or if you'd like to try raw milk but, like the author at the beginning of his quest, wonder if it will kill you in your sleep, or if you're even thinking about supporting a ban on unpasteurized foods, The Raw Milk Revolution is a great resource for intelligent decision-making.

The Longevity Project:  Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin (Hudson Street Press, New York, 2011)

In the early part of the last century, Dr. Lewis Terman began a long-term study of children identified by their teachers as particularly gifted academically.  Although Terman was interested in intelligence and intellectual leadership, his study left behind a great collection of sociological data, which Friedman, Martin, and their colleagues have mined for information on the factors that predispose human beings to long and productive lives.

The authors expound at length on why the data and their studies are valid, and the results applicable to most people, not just intellectual geniuses.  And the results—no surprise—are much more complicated than conventional wisdom would lead one to believe.  So interesting and complex are the relationships that it would be an insult to the researchers to attempt to distill their findings in a simple review.  But I will note a few items of interest.

• Conventional wisdom often confuses correlation with causation.  For example, although it is commonly believed that happiness promotes good health, and vice versa, the relationship is not in either direction cause-and-effect.  Rather, the same underlying factors promote both happiness and health.
• The best personality predictor of longevity—as children and as adults—was what the authors call conscientiousness:  people who were prudent, persistent, dependable, thrifty, detail-oriented, and responsible.

  It is not only that conscientious people have better health habits and healthier brains, but also that they find their way to happier marriages, better friendships, and healthier work situations.  That’s right, conscientious people create healthy long-life pathways for themselves.

• Another key factor is social network, but as usual, it’s more complicated than simple sociability.  Being an extrovert, having many friends, and abundant social activity do not presage a long life.  Sociability itself, the authors say, is “a wash.” An active social life is a two-edged sword; how it cuts depends on the quality of the friends and of the activities.

  Social ties, however, are critical:  having a large support network is directly correlated with longer life.  Interestingly, feeling loved and cared for did not improve longevity, but helping and caring for others did.

• The death of a parent during one’s childhood, while difficult, had no measurable effect on longevity.  Divorce, on the other hand, was devastating—although for severely dysfunctional and drastically unhappy families, divorce was sometimes the healthier path.

  Parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death, many years into the future.

• It is decidedly unhealthy to be a “Chicken Little,” seeing impending doom everywhere and interpreting misfortunes as larger than life.  Good health is not simply a matter of thinking positive thoughts, but those who lived longer had the habit of  thinking of downturns as temporary and viewing problems as limited and specific rather than long-lasting and pervasive.
• I quote the following because I was so excited to find in print what I have been saying all along about life expectancy, inspired by my genealogical research.  The oft-expressed belief that our ancestors could only expect to live to age forty (for example) did not square with the many sixty- to ninety-year olds in my family tree.  (Emphasis mine)
  

  The average life expectancy of an American born around the time of the Terman participants (about 1910) was forty-seven years.  The average life expectancy of an American born in recent years is about seventy-nine.  Still, it is totally incorrect to conclude that today’s middle-aged adults will live many, many years longer in retirement than did their predecessors.

  The error arises from the fact that the average life expectancy is computed from birth.  For the Terman subjects’ generation, many children died at birth or shortly thereafter.  Many others died of childhood diseases.  The twentieth century saw tremendous advances [that led] to a dramatic plunge in deaths during infancy and childhood.  So-called modern medical cures have played a relatively minor role in increasing adult life span, something most people do not understand.

• An active lifestyle is conducive to a long, healthy life, but the benefit comes not from forcing yourself to visit the health club three times a week or going for a daily run if those activities are miserable and boring for you.  Get active, the authors say, but in ways that you enjoy and which will thus become not a chore but part of your overall pattern of living.

  There is a dirty little secret known to health professionals that they do not usually much talk about.   Let’s assume that you follow the recommendations of a health authority and get out there most days to go jogging, even though you would much rather be doing something else.  Say you get ready, warm up, jog, and cool down for about an hour a day, which is a modest regimen.

  Over a year, you will spend bout 360 hours doing this, and during 40 years (say, from age twenty-one to age sixty-one), you will spend about 14,400 hours.  Assuming that most of us are awake for about 16 hours a day, this means that you would be spending the equivalent of about 900 days jogging.  This is about two and a half years spent exercising.

  How much longer would such an active person live?  How many extra days of life would this diligent jogger gain in which to pursue other well-loved hobbies?  We do not know for sure, but anything that increased average longevity by more than two and a half years in a generally healthy adult population would be considered a very large effect—a striking phenomenon.  So, with two and a half years spent on the pavement, there is not likely to be much of a net gain in available time for our poor jogger.  Anyone who exercised even more would gain even less, winding up with a net loss of time.

  But it gets even worse.  Note that in this contrived example, the unhappy jogger is trading away thousands of hours of youth for perhaps a few extra years in old age. ...

  Of course, the real picture is somewhat more complicated. The jogger might really enjoy jogging and so might consider the time well spent.  Or the jogger might be warding off a diagnosed tendency toward a debilitating chronic disease such as diabetes.  Still, for many reasonably healthy and active individuals who are out running every morning because some advice list or some friend is pressuring them to try to improve their health, the results are not necessarily going to be what they expect.

Perhaps the best news from The Longevity Project is that most of the unhealthy tendencies the researchers identified from their analysis of the Terman data are within our power to change: they are attitude and lifestyle choices, and the time to get onto a healthy path is now.  Of course it's better to start young, but the benefits are measurable at any age.

Across the life span, many predictors emerged as to who would do better and who would do worse, who would live longer and who would die younger.  It was not good cheer or being popular and outgoing that made the difference.  It was also not those who took life easy, played it safe, or avoided stress who lived the longest.  Rather, it was those who—through an often-complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, and close involvement with friends and communities—headed down meaningful, interesting life paths and, as we have illustrated, found their way back to these healthy paths each time they were pushed off the road.

The qualities and lifestyles cultivated by people on these long-life paths reflect an active pursuit of goals, a deep satisfaction with life, and a strong sense of accomplishment.  That’s not to say that these people possessed a giddy sense of happiness—we described how cheerfulness doesn’t necessarily lead to a long life.  But having a large social network, engaging in physical activities that naturally draw you in, giving back to your community, enjoying and thriving in your career, and nurturing a healthy marriage or close friendships can do more than add many years to your life.  Together, they represent the living with purpose that comes from working hard, reaching out to others, and bouncing back from difficult times.

You may remember Michael Merzenich as one of the major researchers mentioned in The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.  Merzenich is no doubt a better researcher than a speaker; this lecture is not nearly as good—and certainly not as comprehensive—as the book.  But it will take less than 25 minutes of your time, and is worthwhile if only for his explanation of the dangers of white noise—continuous, disorganized sound—to an infant's brain, and for the hope he holds out to those of us who grew up with the depressing idea that once you reach adulthood (or perhaps early teens, or even age six, depending on who you believe), you are basically stuck with the brain you've got.

Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain

(Granchild warning:  I don't know if you consider "crap" objectionable, but there are a few instances between 17:00 and 18:30.)

Bad Science:  Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks, by Ben Goldacre (Faber and Faber, New York, 2010)

Bad Science was hard to read.  Not because the material is difficult (it's not), nor because I disagree with the author's positions (though sometimes I do), but because it is 258 pages of sneer.  Since Goldacre repeatedly states that he is bending over backwards to give his adversaries as much credit as possible, perhaps the sneer is unintentional, but it is no less an impediment.

Furthermore, casual statements like the one in which he implies that belief in a benevolent God is equivalent to believing in "flaky spiritual 'energy' that only alternative therapists can truly harness" unnecessarily alienates a large part of his potential audience. He continues this theme in the chapter on AIDS, where he dismisses those who point out that the single most effective method of preventing AIDS transmission is to avoid sex outside of marriage and the use of illegal drugs, calling them as irrational as those who offer AIDS sufferers beetroot and garlic instead of antiretroviral drugs.  He mocks Christian development agencies, implying that providing medical care, clean water, and the means to grow food and earn an income just isn't worthwhile if you don't also provide access to birth control and abortion.  Such statements do not give me confidence in the rationality of his approach to the other issues in the book.

And finally, if one is hoping to be a proponent of the rational, the scholarly, and the credentialed, it seems foolish to pepper your book with expletives.  They make the writing unpleasant to read, and seem as inappropriate in this setting as showing up with tattered jeans and multiple body piercings for a job interview at a bank.

So it's time to dust off my very own proverb:  The wise man recognizes truth in the words of his enemies.  Goldacre is inconsistent, I'll admit—excoriating the press for publishing frightening reports without backing them up with well-documented, respected, scientific research, for example, while casually and without documentation blaming Dr. Benjamin Spock for tens of thousands of avoidable deaths through his recommendation that babies sleep on their stomachs.  But mixed in with the chaff there are some very good points, and helpful hints for navigating the mess of contradictory news reports, especially in the field of medicine and health, that leave us throwing our hands up in despair of ever learning the truth.

If I had a T-shirt slogan for this whole book, it would be: "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that."

Amen.  That's what he says, and what I'd say to him.  :)  Having worked in a research lab that published, in respected medical journals, the kinds of academic, peer-reviewed papers Goldacre holds up as a gold standard, I know that the system isn't quite as reliable and free of politics and prejudice as he would like us to believe.  It may be the best we have, and pretty good at that, but it has enough of the smell of a "good ol' boy" network to give me sympathy for those who take their findings directly to the media.

The chapter on the Placebo Effect is probably itself worth reading the book.  Why are injections more effective than pills?  Why does the color of the pill matter?  Why does the packaging matter?  How does the Placebo Effect help explain the greater effectiveness of name-brand drugs over generics of the same composition?

Useful, too, is the chapter on statistics and the reporting of data:  Why do drug companies like to compare the effectiveness of a new product to a placebo, when a much more useful comparison is with the effectiveness of the best production already in use?  How are figures from discredited studies or bad mathematics like a bad urban legend?  How can a report that there was "almost no change in patterns of [student] drug use, drinking or smoking since 2000" end up reported in the London Times as "Cocaine floods the playground:  Use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year"?  (Much of the answer to the last lies in a misuse of statistics, but an immediately understandable factor is rounding error:  1.9 is not twice 1.4, but the one was rounded up and the other down.)

The story of a nurse jailed for the supposed murder of several of her patients is a fascinating example of the deadliness of statistics (and poor sampling technique) in the hands of a prosecutor who doesn't understand them.

Goldacre takes on a lot of sacred cows, from homeopathy to the pharmaceutical industry to the MMR vaccine scare.  Even I can recognize that for all his studies and statistics, he has misunderstood and oversimplified much.  But Bad Science is still a valuable book to read whether it changes your mind on anything or not.  It will make you more aware of what might, or might not, be behind the health information you learn from your doctor, your newspaper, the Internet, or your best friend.  A healthy skepticism is the servant of truth.

If you can get past the sneering and the profanity, you'll find Bad Science worth checking out.

What You Think Is What You Get:  An Introductory Textbook for the Study of the Alexander Technique, by Donald L. Weed (Third Edition, ITM Publications, Bristol, UK, 2004)

I wish I understood this book well enough to review it.  The Wikipedia article on Alexander Technique is currently flagged, “This article may be confusing or unclear to readers.”  Much the same could be said for the book, though I have to say that having read the book makes the article, if not clear, at least familiar.

What You Think Is What You Get is a keeper; it’s just not for beginners, despite the word “introductory” in the title.  I would not have read very far if I had not already seen the Alexander Technique in action.  However, not only do I know how much it helped Janet with her overuse injuries, but I’ve observed several classes and even had a few short lessons myself.  Janet’s Alexander Technique teacher studied under Donald Weed, and her classes are nothing less than remarkable.  Who would have thought that a gentle touch and the suggestion that the student relax a certain shoulder muscle would suddenly make his singing voice deeper and richer?  Or that an almost imperceptible postural change would make a pianist’s music come alive?  Or that being asked, “Do you really need to contract that arm muscle to help you walk across the room?” would visibly improve my walking as well as relieve arm pain I’ve had for years?

There’s no question that the Alexander Technique can have an amazing effect; the problem is hanging onto the changes, and being able to initiate them outside of class.  Hence my desire for the book.  But it’s not a how-to manual, at least not in any form I can fathom.

Nonetheless, I’m making progress.  One idea that Weed stresses repeatedly is the importance of experimentation, observation, and evaluation, and that, on top of my experiences with Janet’s teacher, has let me to a much greater awareness of what my body is doing, and how my mind can affect my muscles.  I can relieve some of my neck and shoulder tension merely be remembering the teacher’s admonition, “There are seven bones in your neck; don’t move as if they were fused.”  I used to think it required heavy massage to get a tight muscle to relax; now I can sometimes achieve the same effect with a mere touch—more a reminder—and some mental effort.

The question of what muscles are really needed to perform an action turns out to be one of the more significant ideas:  many of our muscles were designed in pairs, so that contraction of one pulls an arm (say) one way, and contraction of the opposing muscle pulls it back the other way.  All too often—and I see this in myself—we are actually firing both muscles at once, so that in order to move in one direction we must work twice as hard, first to overcome the opposing muscle and then to achieve the intended motion.  Even when we’re standing still we often engage muscles that are totally unnecessary.  I would hope that all this extra work would at least burn more calories, but apparently the more significant effect is to make us stiff, restrict our motion, and inhibit a ready and reasonable response to the environment.

My greatest take-aways from What You Think Is What You Get:  Increased awareness of how my body is working, knowledge that the conscious mind can correct unconscious habits, and a willingness to experiment and to attempt to improve situations that I thought were merely “the way things are.”

For a normal, healthy person dealing only with minor illnesses—including diseases like measles and chicken pox, which were no big deal for most people—in many ways it was better to be living 50 years ago than now.

(An exception would be for normal childbirth, which had been taken over by hospitals and doctors.  Mothers reclaimed their [ahem] birthright in the late 1970s, only to lose it again, and then to partially regain it—it’s the only branch of medicine that I know to be so cyclical.)

I remember doctors making house calls, and doctors who treating the whole family as a unit, which I believe is healthier for all.  They trusted parents to describe symptoms accurately and as often as not the doctors gave advice over the telephone and saved many a trip—even when they were no longer making house calls.  They still had time to talk with their patients; none of this in-and-out-in-15-minutes assembly line stuff.

However—and it’s a big caveat—for serious illnesses and for emergency medicine, now is a much better time to need medical care.  When I was born, polio was still devastating the country and organ transplants were unheard of.  CAT scans didn’t appear until twenty years later.  From babies to bones, from tumors to head trauma—I hope never to need it, but if I do, I’ll take today’s medical technology with gratitude.

It’s just a pity we can’t have the house calls, too.

When I give thanks for modern dentistry, I’m not referring to the practice of some dentists, which is to do any dental work that might involve pain using some form of anesthesia.  It is good for children to learn how to handle pain in small doses.   Life is not pain-free, and the habit of seeking medication for every ill is a dangerous one.  Personally, I’d much rather deal with the temporary, minor pain of the dentist’s drill than the risk and after-effects of anesthesia.  Moreover, when the patient is aware of where the dentist is probing, the dentist is more likely to notice if he’s gone too far or found a trouble spot.

That said, the improvements in dentistry since I was a child have been vast.  The drills back then were slow, and much more painful. (Porter’s dentist even used a foot pedal powered drill for a while!)  Today’s high-speed drills are almost a pleasure (I said almost) in comparison.

Thanks to fluoride (however controversial it is when put in public water supplies), to dental sealants, and to better attention given to tooth and gum care, even before a baby gets its first tooth, children have many fewer cavities today.  Orthodontia has made badly crooked teeth a thing of the past.  Onlays, crowns, bridges, and dental implants have greatly extended the life of our natural teeth and delayed the need for dentures.

The need to repair dental caries is so low these days that dentists have taken to whitening teeth to stay in business.  What they’ll do if we ever kick our tremendous sugar habit, I don’t know.

Into the Silent Land:  A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation , by Martin Laird  (Oxford University Press, 2006)

The physical benefits of meditative techniques are well established, and I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.  What has hindered me is that many—though not all—of the studies have focused on Transcendental Meditation (TM), the Eastern religious aspects of which have led me to keep meditation in general at arm’s length since I first learned of it some 40 years ago.  It will not do to gain a physical benefit at a spiritual loss—I can’t help thinking of The Magician’s Nephew, in which Digory was tempted to steal an apple that would have cured his dying mother, but if he had done so, both he and his mother would have later “looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.”

Yet Digory, having passed the test, was eventually given another apple, one that healed his mother in the right way.

Despite all the attention given to TM during my formative years, it turns out that Christian meditation is an ancient and respected practice.  Many of the techniques turn out to be similar, though not identical and of course the focus and intent are quite different.

You don’t hear much about Christian contemplative practice today, at least not outside of the more liturgical traditions—and not much in them, either.  Our cranked-up, frenetic, yammering world is not comfortable with either external or internal silence.

Nor does it help that those who have written about meditation are generally describing the indescribable, which makes them incomprehensible, as far as I’m concerned.  I plowed about halfway through Thomas Dubay’s Fire Within:  St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer before giving it up as being 'way too far over my head.

Into the Silent Land covers much of the same material in a shorter and simpler form, but it still leaves my head spinning—and this was my second reading.  So I cannot, at this point, give it an accurate evaluation.  I will say it’s worth a third attempt at some point.  For now, I’ve found a few ideas that I can hang onto and begin to put into practice, which may help illuminate a re-rereading.

Spiritual and physical benefits remain to be seen, but even what little I’ve been able to glean thus far has been of some help with no fewer than three of my New Year’s Resolutions:  Learn to Relax, Pay Attention, and Cast Away Fear.  (See  the Progress section of New Year’s Resolution #11.)

Side note:  Do you, like me, assume contemplatives must generally be introverted people?  Perhaps it's true; those who choose to be monks would be those who are comfortable with silence and solitude—not that all contemplatives are monks.  But having read recently that introverts have more activity constantly going on in their brains—more internal dialogue,  measurable in neurological studies—I suspect that we are drawn to meditation because we need it more.  We need techniques and much practice to be able to still the chattering mind and achieve inner silence.

Thinking in Pictures:  And Other Reports from My Life with Autism, by Temple Grandin (Vintage, 2006) (Expanded from the original 1995 version)

I’ve already written about Temple Grandin, the movie, which was the inspiration for getting this book from the library.  It’s well worth reading, and the only reason I’m sending back unread the two other books of hers I picked up at the same time is that I realized I must put the brakes on my reading for a while.  At the very least I need to substitute books I won’t be tempted to review. 

Thinking in Pictures would have convinced me, if Grandin’s own commentary on the DVD had not, that the movie is an accurate, if not perfect, portrayal of her life.  It’s fascinating to read about autism from the inside out, as it were, and also interesting to note her opinion that for all the advances we have made in understanding autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as a child in the 1950’s she had a few advantages over today’s children.  School classrooms were well-ordered and quiet; the noise and chaos often seen classrooms now would have been impossible for her to handle.  Parents, teachers, and other adults worked hard to instill good manners and polite behavior into children; these are difficult but essential skills for autistic children to learn, but they are sadly neglected today.  Finally, there were no video games then, which encourage solitary activity; she was forced to interact directly with other children through board games, outdoor play, and other normal, 1950’s-era activities.

Of even more interest to me is her theory that whatever causes autism spectrum disorders, it is closely linked to brilliant, creative thinking.  Too much of whatever it is deprives a person of the ability to function in this world, but a little bit makes for the kind of folks we cannot do without.  Not only are our potential Einsteins being shunted into special education classes instead of the gifted classes where they belong, but if genetic testing someday allows us to screen for risk of autism, we may never see another Bill Gates.

On the sensory sensitivities of someone with autism spectrum disorder:

Washing my hair and dressing to go to church were two things I hated as a child….  [S]hampooing actually hurt my scalp….  Scratchy petticoats were like sandpaper scraping away at raw nerve endings.

I can relate to that!

When I was a child, I was expected to sit through formal Sunday dinners and behave.  Most of the time I did.  Rudeness was not tolerated and I was taught to say please and thank you.  Normal family activities provided structured opportunities to learn social skills.  Sit-down meals and activities such as playing cards and board games like Chinese checkers taught turn-taking and patience. …Today many children lack this structure.  Video games and time on the computer are spent solo.  Many of my favorite childhood activities required participation with another child.  … Even the normal children today are growing up with more social problems.  Later on they do not know how to behave at work.

I can drive because the operation of the car, steering and braking, has become a fully automatic skill.  Research has shown that when a motor skill is first being learned, one has to consciously think about it.  When the skill becomes fully learned, the frontal cortex is no longer activated and only the motor parts of the brain are turned on.  I learned to drive on ranch roads in Arizona and I did not drive on the freeway or in heavy traffic for a full year.  This avoided the multitasking issue because when I finally started driving in traffic, my frontal cortex was able to devote all its processor space to watching traffic.  I recommend that people on the [autism] spectrum who are learning to drive spend up to a year driving on easy roads until steering, braking, and other car operations can be done without conscious thought.

That might have saved me the debilitating car-phobia I had for many years.  It took me much longer than most people to reach the “automatic” point, and until then, every second behind the wheel was torture.

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive.  After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear.  It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire.  Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

It is likely that genius is an abnormality.  If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas.

Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are left-handedness, allergies, and nearsightedness.  Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with left-handedness.  Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population.  Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.

During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants.  Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school.  Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-class scientists.

On her vocation in the livestock industry:

I do not believe that my profession is morally wrong.  Slaughtering is not wrong, but I do feel very strongly about treating animals humanely and with respect.  I’ve devoted my life to reforming and improving the livestock industry.  Still, it’s a sobering experience to have designed one of the world’s most efficient killing machines.  Most people don’t realize that the slaughter plant is much gentler than nature.  Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure.  If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious.  Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death.

Nobody likes to be sick, and especially nobody likes children to be sick.  But if you are a child, today is a much better time than 50 years ago to face a mild illness.  I don’t mean because of all the new vaccines—I actually look back with some fondness on the days of chicken pox, measles, and German measles.  (I missed out on that other great disease of early childhood, mumps, despite repeated visits to my friend when she was afflicted.)  Nor do I mean the obvious improvements in the treatment of many diseases, and in emergency medicine, not that I’m not grateful for them.

What I’m thankful for is that we have outgrown the sick-children-must-stay-in-bed philosophy.  Bed is fine when you’re too miserable to do anything else, but in the 50’s and 60’s bed rest was still considered an important part of the cure, and often imposed long after the child would have been much better off up and about.

I don’t remember my own confinements lasting overly long, perhaps because I enjoyed the opportunity to be the center of attention, to be served meals in bed, to read as much as I wanted to, to have my parents sit with me and play games—I particularly remember a car/plane/boat race across the U.S. game on a tray that I never tired of—and to have my mother at my beck and call, at the sound of a bell, a buzzer, or a flashing light—whatever fun device my dad and I had concocted to get her attention.

But I’m not certain Porter’s relationship with his mother every completely recovered from the well-meant instructions from their doctor to keep him in bed for half his kindergarten year because he had been diagnosed with mononucleosis.

I am grateful that doctors today seem happy to assume that if a child feels like staying in bed, that’s probably what he needs, and if he feels like getting up, that’s a good sign he’s ready for more activity.

But I have very fond memories of that race game.