Lift Up Your Hearts!

We watched the first half of the PBS documentary Half the Sky last night.  (Quarter the Sky?)  The conclusion is tonight.  I highly recommend it, but not for grandchildren.  Here's the trailer.

The shows will be available for one week at PBS video (maybe not in Europe, sorry).  Here is the link for Part 1.  I'll update with Part 2 when it is released, which should be tomorrow.  And here's Part 2.

Note on flu shots:  This year they're pushing the intradermal shot.  Personally, I think it's because they can use a lower dose, and therefore make the supply go farther.  But they're hyping it as less painful ("90% smaller needle").  No matter how many times I told him needles don't bother me ("I gave blood yesterday!"), the nurse practitioner who administered the shot kept emphasizing the small needle and consequent reduced pain.

Based on a sample size of two, I'm here to say that that is bunk.  Both Porter and I agreed that the intradermal shot hurt more than a regular injection, not less.  I hope our grandkids appreciate the sacrifice.  :)

 Last Saturday was the opening concert for the Orlando Philharmonic's 20th Anniversary season.  Pausing only briefly to wonder how the "new kid on the block" can be twenty years old already—I've done that several times already, the latest being only last month, with the first of our nephews to leave the teenage years behind—I'll just say that Maestro Christopher Wilkins once again began the season with a blockbuster program guaranteed to fill the house.  One work:  Mahler's Third Symphony.  No intermission.  Nearly 110 minutes long.  The first movement alone is longer than the entirety of Beethoven's Fifth.  The orchestra did a great job, but I have to say that they were upstaged by the members of the Florida Opera Theatre Youth Program.  Some of those kids were as young as seven, they were highly visible on a platform well above the orchestra, the part that they had to sing was brief and late in the symphony, and they did not fidget.  They sat still, they kept their hand in their laps most of the time, and they at least appeared attentive.  In short, they did better than me.

I was not familiar with Mahler's Third; it's not programmed often, and I can see why:  the orchestra is much larger than that required for most performances, and there's a large chorus as well.  E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E.  I'm glad the OPO took the plunge to offer it.  I do have to say, however, that—unlike Mahler's First, which was love at first hearing for me—this one may take a little more exposure for me to appreciate.  I found most of the movements reasonably enjoyable, but the sixth and last was interminable.  I don't think that had to do with the fact that we'd been sitting for so long as that to my ears it didn't seem to get anywhere.  Slowly.

Still, it was a good experience, quite possibly once-in-a-lifetime.  We don't even have a copy of Mahler's Third in our extensive music library, though that of course could be remedied.

Except the Dying by Maureen Jennings (St. Martin's Press, 1997)

I had been looking forward to reading the first of Jennings' detective stories, the inspiration for the Murdoch Mysteries television series; as I stated in my review of the shows, I'd hoped the book would be less anachronistic than the TV version.  In that I got my wish:  Except the Dying presents a much more believable view of the seamy underside of late 19th century Toronto.  Much to my surprise, however, I plan to continue to enjoy the shows without reading any more of Jennings' other stories.

The movies are perhaps the greater more pernicious lie:  the prostitutes are clean and well-mannered; the abortionists are thoughtful, civilized gentlemen; the streets are free of manure and of emaciated children; not a spittoon nor a chamber pot is to be seen.  Which is worse, to make the darkness light or the light darkness?  The book's lurid detail of evil and filth overwhelms the story, and stains the small glimmers of goodness.  How I long for the more restrained writers of the past, who could describe a cesspool without making the reader feel as if he had fallen into it.

Except the Dying is not a terrible book.  Jennings writes well, and with more historical accuracy than the TV writers.  But as for me, I have had enough.  There are more uplifting books waiting to be read.

Whenever I see a title that looks as if it comes from something I feel I should know, I renew my gratitude for Google.  (Google the search engine, that is, even though I have mixed feelings about Google the large company.)  Except the Dying is from a poem by Emily Dickenson:

The last night that she lived,
It was a common night,
Except the dying; this to us
Made nature different.

The Happiness Project:  Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin (Harper Collins, 2009)

Is it selfish to think about our own happiness?

Had this book not been recommended by someone I respect, I'd have given it a wide berth out of just such a concern.  And that would have been a sad mistake.  Certainly we are now awash in tragedies caused by people seeking their own happiness at others' expense, but as Rubin adroitly demonstrates,

One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

No one who regularly reads my reviews will be surprised to hear that I have my points of disagreement with Gretchen Rubin, but they are surprisingly few.  Although she bolsters her conclusions with quotes from her extensive research into happiness theory, this book is primarily a highly personal account of the year she spent in the laboratory of her own life.  Rubin is a wealthy woman, a best-selling author, and a lawyer who once worked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; she lives in New York City, employs a nanny, and likes to collect objects that need to be dusted.  Despite the obvious contrasts with my own life, there's much in her discoveries that inspires me.

I highly recommend The Happiness Project—especially for those who have been trained to answer "yes" to the question above.  There's a sequel, just released, called Happier at Home, but I'm 10th in line at our library so won't be reviewing that one for a while.  However, as with many contemporary books, there's a lot to explore at the Happiness Project website.

Miracles:  A Journalist Looks at Modern-Day Experiences of God's Power by Tim Stafford (Bethany House, 2012)

Do you believe in miracles?  If you believe they've happened in the past (manna in the wilderness, Jesus's resurrection, the healings of Paul), do you think they died out early in the history of the church, or are there miracles today?  Why do we talk about "belief" with respect to miracles?  Are miracles matters of faith only or can they be tested and proven or disproven?  Just what is a miracle, anyway?

I believe that Copenhagen exists.  I've never been there, but Porter has.  I've seen pictures of Copenhagen, and read about it, and can easily access all sorts of documentation as to its existence.  What's more, even if I doubt all these sources, I can hop a plane and end up in a city where the people speak Danish and claim to be living in Copenhagen.  (Or not; who knows?  I haven't tried it.)

Tim Stafford would like to be able to put the idea of modern-day miracles to the Copenhagen test.  Actually, he's been to Copenhagen, as it were, having observed what he considers to be a bona fide miracle of healing in a (formerly) wheelchair-bound friend.  But there's a lot of chaff—wishful thinking, outright fraud, and honest prayers that go unanswered—in the miracle wheat field.  Many people board the plane and end up in Oslo.  Or in the Pacific Ocean.

Stafford, a journalist by profession, examines reported miracles from ancient history to the present, from his own backyard to Mozambique.  His investigations are open-minded, and his conclusions open-ended.  The evidence for modern-day miracles he finds convincing, but not overwhelming.  Moreover, he comes to the counterintuitive conclusion that it is in the very nature of miracles not to be overwhelming.

Here are my takeaways from Miracles:

• Any consideration of the miraculous will be hindered by fuzzy definitions.  We confuse the issue by calling a lovely sunset or the birth of a baby a "miracle," when they are in fact marvellous, awesome, but ordinary works of God.
• Most of us, if we don't think about it too much, tend to divide events into the natural (the way the world works, maybe set in motion by God but moving along on its own, explainable by physical laws, whether or not we have discovered them) and the supernatural (direct intervention by God/gods/angels/spirits, not measurable or explainable—miracles).  For a Christian, however, that's a wrong way of thinking:  the natural, too, is God's present, ongoing work.  All healing is God's healing, all life is his, the provision of bread through planted wheat no less from God than manna from heaven.
• Miracles, by Stafford's definition, happen when God does something unusual, or in an unusual way.  Dead people do not normally come to life again.  Wine-making always begins with water, but in the miraculous version the long process using grape vines and fermentation is side-stepped.
• God acts physically in our material world.  That an event can be "explained" by processes we understand, or hope to understand in the future, does not ipso facto mean it is not miraculous.  It is the unusual, "signs and wonders" aspect that signals a miracle.
• One often-overlooked property of miracles is that they are rare.  If the Bible seems replete with miracles, it's because it covers a long time span.  They are also unevenly distributed, with some peak times when miracles are more frequent being scattered amongst long stretches of no recorded miraculous activity.
• God uses miracles to catch our attention.  They are "signs and wonders."  But they never point to themselves, always to Christ and the Kingdom of God.  A focus on miracles for their own sake is a pretty good sign of a wrong attitude.
• Also suspect is the suggestion that a specific formula, method, person, or icon can somehow force God's hand to work miracles.  Not only is the occurrence of a miracle unpredictable, but God seems determined to change up the means:  strike the rock for water, speak to the rock for water; heal by touch, heal by spoken word alone, heal using clay and spittle, heal by washing; provide food by multiplying flour and oil, provide food by multiplying the bread itself; etc.
• Both historically and in the present, most genuine miracles appear purposely directed at small groups of eye witnesses.  In fact, the idea of doing something miraculous that could be directly attested to by large numbers of people seems to be a temptation Jesus specifically rejected (Matthew 4:5-7).
• Despite several occasions at which Jesus connected healing with faith, the Bible provides plenty of evidence that true faith is neither proved by miracles nor disproved by their absence.

The search for miracles, then, is less like taking a flight to Copenhagen, and more like quantum physics:  real, astonishing, unpredictable, complex, and not for the faint of heart.  Stafford's Miracles is a good introductory course.

Nothing is so likely to lure me to the television set as a good, short mystery.  Fortunately or unfortunately, Netflix has a goodly assortment of the same.  Lately, our queue has been filled with an offering from Canadian TV, Murdoch Mysteries.  The still-running show is based on the books of Maureen Jennings; I've placed a hold at our library for the first of her tales of Detective William Murdoch, hoping to find them an improvement over the filmed version.

Not that the shows aren't enjoyable—if they weren't, we wouldn't be into the third season now.  The premise is interesting:  Murdoch is a police detective in 1890's Toronto who solves his cases using scientific methods and equipment that are unknown, little used, or even not quite invented yet.  Think CSI: Victorian Toronto.

What causes the fingernails-on-the-blackboard feeling is that, while slightly advancing scientific knowledge for the time period, the show greatly advances the main characters' social attitudes.  Be it feminism, abortion, homosexuality, birth control, dating behavior, the church, business practices, or government agents, the setting may be the late 19th century, but the attitudes of the main characters are pure 21st century Hollywood.

You can only push the audience's credulity so far.  If you ask them to accept one unrealistic premise, the rest of your story should be believable.  J. R. R. Tolkien peopled his created world with fantastic creatures—but they thought, spoke, and acted in familiar ways that we could understand.  (That's one of the quarrels I have with the movies—I find them less believable than the books—but that's another post.)  J. K. Rowling had no difficulty getting us to accept a world of magic because Hogwarts was otherwise (I assume) a typical British boarding school.  (Where it wasn't, the discontinuity was glaring.  I still haven't gotten over a British boy describing something as "the size of a baseball bat.")

I'll accept a Toronto police detective using x-ray photography, but I can't swallow a supposedly devout Victorian-era Catholic seriously pursuing a romantic relationship with a non-Catholic, and one with strident anti-Catholic attitudes at that.  And I choke every time a character says to a victim's loved one, "I'm sorry for your loss."  I don't know exactly when that expression became commonplace, but it was within my lifetime.  We've learned to live with the frequent anachronisms, but they diminish the show's credibility.

My favorite character is Constable George Crabtree (played by Jonny Harris), supposedly naive and somewhat dim-witted, but often smarter, and certainly more likeable, than the rest.

The mysteries themselves are inconsistent:  some so ridiculous we're certain they cut out important scenes to save time, some very clever with more unexpected twists than an Olympic gymnast.

But what I really like is the music, especially the theme song, and the opening credits.  Composer Robert Carli has made the most creative use of percussion (think percussion toys and "bells" in all forms) and percussion-like instrumentation (e.g. pizzicato strings) that I can remember.  There's also an artistic flair to the colors and the lettering of the credits that appeals to me.  You can get a taste of it here.  But only a taste, because for some reason the action of the video seems sped up, which takes away from its elegance.

Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007)

Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?

Everyone who speaks wants his ideas to get across, be memorable, and have the desired impact on the listener.  But more often than not we thrash around like a baby in the throes of learning to crawl:  lots of action, no progress.

Before Switch, the Heath brothers wrote Made to Stick.  Like its successor, there is too much in this book to apprehend adequately in one reading.  At least for me:  I read as cows eat, and often need a second go-round to get full benefit from a book.  I found Switch more eye-opening and more immediately applicable, but Made to Stick is at least as important.  Even if you don't think you need any help communicating your ideas, you need to be aware of the techniques other people are using to get you to accept and remember theirs.  You can bet this book is must reading for anyone in the advertising business!  And even those with more laudable goals in mind than persuading you to buy their products have been known to use these techniques to promote ideas that are not necessarily correct or helpful.

You can read the first chapter on the authors' website.  Here's an excerpt that covers the basic premises, followed by a few passages that particularly struck me.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day's worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people's attention. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas. When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: "Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago."

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic "37 grams" doesn't elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it's easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

[The Curse of Knowledge:]  Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.  Our knowledge has "cursed" us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.

[We must] fight the temptation to do too much.  When you say three things, you say nothing.  When your remote control has fifty buttons, you can't change the channel anymore.

[T]o make a profound idea compact you've got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging.  And how do you do that? ... You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience.  You use what's already there.

For example, describing a pomelo as a "supersized grapefruit" then describing the differences, rather than starting your description from scratch.  This use of schemas is strikingly similar to Richard Feynman's depiction of his approach to solving problems:  beginning with something concrete that he know well that shared the properties of whatever obscure physics system he was trying to understand.  (That's not in Made to Stick; I remember it from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!)

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague.  They show a few key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is.  Usually the adventurer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes the first step in a long journey toward the treasure.  If treasure maps were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it would kill the adventure-movie genre.  There is value in sequencing information—not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another.

Memory ... is not like a single filing cabinet.  It is more like Velcro. ... Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops.  The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.  Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain.  A new credit card number has one, if it's lucky.  Great teachers have a knack for multiplying the hooks in a particular idea.

Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves.  Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship.  It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.  Of course, let's also remember that it's easier to lie without statistics than with them.  Data enforces boundaries.  Unless people are unethical enough to make up data, the reality of the data constrains them.  That's a good thing, but it still leave a lot of wiggle room.

This excerpt is long, and is only an illustration of one of the authors' points, not the point itself.  But it's too good to pass up.

In 1993, [environmentalist Bill McDonough] and a chemist, Michael Braungart, were hired by the Swiss textile manufacturer Rohner Textil, which produces the fabrics for Steelcase chairs.  Their mission was one that most people in the textile industry considered impossible:  Create a manufacturing process without using toxic chemicals.

The textile industry routinely deals with hazardous chemicals.  Most dye colors contain toxic elements.  In fact, the trimmings from Rohner Textil's factory—the excess not used on the chairs—contained so many questionable chemicals that the Swiss government classified them as hazardous waste.  Furthermore, the trimmings couldn't be buried or burned in Switzerland—to comply with government regulations, they had to be exported—shipped to a country with laxer regulations, such as Spain. ... McDonough said, "If your trimmings are declared hazardous waste but you can sell what's in the middle, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know you're selling hazardous waste."

To tackle this problem—eliminating toxic chemicals from the furniture-manufacturing process—McDonough needed to find a willing partner in the chemical industry.  He had to provide Rohner Textil with a source for clean chemicals that would fit the company's production needs.  So he and Braungart started approaching executives in the chemical industry.  They said, "We'd like to see all products in the future be as safe as pediatric pharmaceuticals.  We'd like our babies to be able to suck on them and get health and not sickness."

They asked chemical factories to open their books and talk about how the chemicals were manufactured.  McDonough told the companies, "Don't tell us 'it's proprietary and legal.'   If we don't know what it is, we're not using it."  Sixty chemical companies turned them down.  Finally, the chairman of one firm, Ciba-Geigy, said okay.

McDonough and Braungart studied 8,000 chemicals commonly used in the textile industry.  They measured each chemical against a list of safety criteria.  Of the chemicals they tested, 7,962 failed.  They were left with 38 chemicals—but those 38 were "safe enough to eat," according to McDonough.

Amazingly, using just those 38 chemicals, they were able to create a complete line of fabrics, containing every color but black.  The fabric they chose was made from natural materials—wool and a plant fiber called ramie.  When the production process went online, inspectors from the Swiss government came to check the water flowing out of the plant to make sure chemical emissions were within legal limits.  "At first, the inspectors thought their equipment had broken," McDonough says.  The instruments were detecting nothing in the water.  Then the inspectors tested the water flowing into the factory, which was Swiss drinking water, and found that the equipment was fine.  McDonough says, "The fabrics during the production process were further filtering the water.

McDonough's new process wasn't just safer, it was cheaper.  Manufacturing costs shrank 20 percent.  The savings came, in part, from the reduced hassle and expense of dealing with toxic chemicals.  Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing.  And the scraps—instead of being shipped off to Spain for burial—were converted into felt, which was sold to Swiss farmers and gardeners for crop insulation.

Here's another one I chose from a story in the book, rather than from a specific point the authors were making.  There are a lot of great stories in the book—the Heath Brothers follow their own prescription.

The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event's probability by its availability in our memory.  We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember.  But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.

We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent.  We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common.  The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.

Hence our disproportionate fear of terrorists, child kidnappings, SIDS, criminal assault, death-by-tornado, and plane crashes.  They happen, they're horrible—but they're a lot rarer than our gut instincts think, which leads to bad risk/benefit decisions.

Not all of the book's examples make sense.  There's a very interesting section on what influences our charitable giving, but it's skewed by the assumption that someone who responds to a random appeal for money is more "charitable" than someone who does not, when in fact the non-giver may be the more generous in the rest of his life, giving methodically and rationally to causes he has determined are a good investment.

From the chapter, "Stories":

Three psychologists interested in how people come to understand stories created a few for their study participants to read. ... The first group read a story in which a critical object was associated with the main character in the story—for instance, "John put on his sweatshirt before he went jogging."  The second group read a story in which the same critical object was separated from the main character:  "John took off his sweatshirt before jogging."

Two sentences later, the story threw in a reference to the sweatshirt, and the computer was able to tack how long it took people to read that sentence. ... The people who thought John had taken off his sweatshirt before the jog took more time to read the sentence than the people who thought John had it on.

This result ... implies that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear.  It's one thing to say "Reading stories makes us see pictures in our head." ... It's quite another thing to say that when John left his sweatshirt behind, he left it back at the house in a more remote place in our heads.  For that to be true, we cannot simply visualize the story on a movie screen in our heads; we must somehow simulate it. ... These studies suggest that there's no such thing as a passive audience. ... When we hear a story, we simulate it.

And some people still think watching porn is an innocent and harmless pastime?

A group of UCLA students were asked to think about a current problem in their lives, one that was "stressing them out" but was potentially solvable in the future, such as a problem with schoolwork or with a relationship.

[The control group of students were told to think about the problem and take steps to deal with it.  A second group, the "event-simulators," were asked to mentally retrace the steps that led to the problem, visualizing what happened, what they did, where they were, and who was around.  The final group, the "outcome-simulators," were told to visualize a positive outcome, and the resulting relief, satisfaction and self-confidence attained.  The non-control groups were asked to spend about five minutes each day engaged in these mental simulations, and return to the lab in a week.]

The event-simulation group did better on almost every dimension.  Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes.  In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab.  By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.

When the groups returned a week later, the event simulators' advantage had grown wider.  They were more likely to have taken specific action to solve their problems.  They were more likely to have sought advice and support from others.  They were more likely to report that they had learned something and grown.

You may find these results a bit counterintuitive, because the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success.  It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn't quite enough to get the job done.  Maybe financial gurus shouldn't be telling us to imagine that we're filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to us being poor.

Why does mental simulation work?  It works because we can't imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity.

[Mental simulations can help us manage emotions, overcome phobias, solve problems, and anticipate appropriate responses to future situations.]

Perhaps most surprisingly [but not news to musicians], mental simulation can also build skills.  A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—improves performance significantly.  The results were borne out over a large number of tasks:  Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better.  Trombonists improved their playing, and competitive figure skaters improved their skating. ... Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

The takeaway is simple:  Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it's the next best thing.

And, I will add, this highlights the importance of taking responsibility for the content of our mental rehearsals.  Guarding our thoughts might just make the difference between success at kicking a bad habit—or acquiring a good one—and failure.

It's a clear thumbs up for Made to Stick.  We need to know how to get our ideas across in the best way, and just as much we need to know how to recognize when we are being swayed by something other than the plain truth of someone else's ideas.    I'm beginning to think that a course in advertisers' tricks should be required for high school graduation.   Maybe kindergarten graduation.

Last night we attended a very enjoyable performance of The Pirates of Penzance, proceeds of which were earmarked for a much-needed upgrade to the sound system at the Lake Brantley High School auditorium.  Our choir director and several people from our church were involved.  We almost joined the chorus, but demured after remembering that being involved in a theatrical performance is synonymous with having no outside life.  Daily rehearsals were more than we could handle.  Still, I regret somewhat losing the opportunity to be able to say that every member of our family had sat, however briefly, under the direction of Cindy Berry.

The show was great!  Everyone from the principals (local arts educators) to the middle-school policemen did wonderfully well.  The Pirate King was played by Christopher McCabe, Brantley alumnus and now the theater director at a local private school.  (I believe he was a freshman when Janet was a senior and no longer spending much time on campus, so don't wrack your brains trying to remember him.)  If his performance owed just a little too much to Johnny Depp, that didn't stop him from stealing the show.

Pour, oh pour the pirate sherry, fill, oh fill the pirate glass—and raise it in a toast to Joyce K., who taught us to love Gilbert & Sullivan.

How to Have a 48-Hour Day by Don Aslett (Marsh Creek Press, 1996)

I've always found Don Aslett's books inspiring, and I first read and reviewed this one over ten years ago.  This week I decided it was about time for a re-read, especially since I was looking for something quick, easy, and not too mentally challenging.

I found it more challenging this time than last.  Not mentally, but emotionally.  I didn't really want to hear, "Just suck it up and work harder," which is how the message struck me this time.  I found it less inspiring than discouraging, and thus easier to quarrel with some of his premises and logic.  On the other hand, I recognize that there's still a lot of wisdom in the book, so instead of picking it apart, I'll reproduce my original review:

“If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.” How to Have a 48–Hour Day explains why this saying is true. If you’re looking for a book that suggests you can accomplish more by doing less, you will be disappointed: This is like one of those tiresome diet books that tell you the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

As he does in many of his other books, Aslett tells us things that we already know, but in such a way that we believe them. He provides no great revelation, no fancy organizational system. Instead, he dresses up wisdom in an entertaining, inspirational package. A few of his suggestions—such as cutting back on sleep—go too far, but most represent sound, common sense.

• It’s good, not bad, to be productive. People who get things done generally find that success, happiness, confidence, respect, motivation, options, influence, and security follow.
• The measure of productivity is not how hard you work, nor how busy you are, but what you actually accomplish.
• To do more, first do less. Get rid of unnecessary and unhelpful possessions, activities, relationships, habits, distractions, interruptions, and worries that clutter your life and divert your time and attention from what is important.
• Determine your direction. From ethical values to career goals to family relationships, knowing where you are going makes it possible to set priorities and think clearly when you come to a crossroads.
• Realize that you are going to have to learn to work within the time you have. Finding a large block of time in which you can catch up is about as likely as getting out of debt by winning the lottery.
• BE EARLY. This is his most important point. Work ahead, not behind. Keep a “frontlog”—a list of things to do ahead—rather than a backlog. Being early eliminates deadline stress, allows for more options, and reduces the chance that you will be derailed by unexpected problems.
• Keep many irons in the fire; be working on a variety of projects simultaneously. As long as you’re working well on a particular project, keep going. When your interest and concentration wane, “jump ship” to another project. If you have a large “to do” list and are working ahead instead of behind, you can work at your peak for each job, and rest by doing different work, rather than stopping. As a side benefit, your subconscious often continues to work on the previous project after you’ve switched, so you may find additional insights when you return. With many goals to work toward, you can always be making progress even if you run in to an obstacle or find yourself in a slump.
• Keep your schedule flexible. If you tie yourself down too rigidly, you won’t be able to “go with the flow” and work at your peak.
• Take work with you wherever you go, so you can take advantage of travel and waiting time.
• Use time fragments. Many small moments add up to much time either used productively or wasted.
• Avoid overkill. It’s counterproductive to do more when less is enough.
• Do it now, perfect it later. Don’t wait till your product (project) is “perfect” to get it out into the real world. You’ll profit from the feedback.
• Getting started is the hardest part of a job, so make it easier. Keep your tools and projects handy, lay out your clothes the night before, make sure the car is filled with gas, straighten the mess in the evening rather than leaving it for the next day.
• Don’t wait to be in the right mood to get started. Get moving, and the right mood will usually follow.
• Don’t allow low–fuel jobs to burn high–fuel time. Do your hard work during your most productive times, and save the easy work for when your energy is low.
• Keep spares on hand—tools, supplies, cash. You don’t want to interrupt something important to run to the store.
• Practice preventive maintenance. It takes less time and trouble to repair things before they actually break.
• Observe productive people and learn from them.
• Be at peace with the people in your life. Disharmony wastes much time and energy.
• Learn to love work. Good work is healthier and more rewarding than most so–called recreation. Working around and with your family and friends builds better relationships than most leisure activities.

The last, I believe, is the key to Aslett’s success. He really enjoys what he is doing. I’m sure it helps that he is self–employed. He has been accused of being a workaholic, of never taking time to “smell the roses.” When you love your work, the division between work and the rest of life blurs, as we discovered with homeschooling. School was never “out”; there was no distinction between “school” and “fun.” There was just life, and life was both education and recreation. Don Aslett would add that roses smell far sweeter if you’ve labored to grow them yourself.

On my recent reading, the advice that struck me as the most valuable is the one I emphasized in my review:  BE EARLY.  No, I don't mean arrive at a dinner party half an hour before the time on the invitation, to the horror of you hosts!  (If the weather or traffic is iffy, however, it might be good to arrive early, and hang out a block down the street until the proper time.)  Janet's oboe professor taught me the value of that:  you'll never be late if you plan to be sufficiently early, and there's always something productive you can do to fill the extra time.

This goes against my grain.  I'm always trying to squeeze in one more job before leaving for somewhere.  It looks productive, but tends to make me late, as everything takes longer than expected.  At the very least, it makes me impatient with red lights and traffic.  Why not leave early instead, and if you have extra time once you've arrived, find a nice place to read a book, or write a letter.  Aslett advises always carrying work with you, so you'll be able to be productive while waiting.  (If you're me, though, you'll need to set an alarm, or you'll be so caught up in what you're doing you'll end up late to the event after all.)

There are many more applications of Be Early, and I'd be a happier and less-stressed person if I made them into habits.  Do you need to mow the lawn before your trip?  Don't wait till the day before you leave.  Are you having company for dinner?  Get your shopping done days early.  Houseguests coming?  Get those boxes off the guest bed now, not as they're pulling into the driveway.  Because you never know what distraction—good or bad—might come up and derail your timetable.  Your mowing plans might get rained out, the store might be out of a key ingredient, your guests might arrive early, you might make an unexpected trip to the emergency room, a friend you haven't heard from in months might call you on the phone....  It takes no more time—and sometimes much less—to do a job early, and then you can rest in the knowledge that you are prepared.

Good advice.  I hope that when I re-read How to Have a 48-Hour Day in another ten years, I'll be able to say, "I've been practicing EARLY for a decade!"

In the Name of Jesus by Henri J. M. Nouwen (Crossroad Publishing 1996; original copyright 1989)

Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit by Henri J. M. Nouwen, with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird (HarperOne, 2010)

I've dabbled in Henri Nouwen's writings for years, always finding value in some of his insights, but never finding myself in a position to appreciate, or even to understand, his work over all.  Wherever he is, I'm never "quite there yet."  These books evoked the same reaction.

Of the two, In the Name of Jesus I found most comprehensible.  Spiritual Formation, a compilation of Nouwen's thoughts, has rough edges from the cut-and-paste effort.  It's meant to be a seamless whole, but I encountered too many unacknowledged contradictions to make sense of it all.

Here are a few quotations, all from In the Name of Jesus, which deals with spiritual leadership.

Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject.  But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.

When you look at today's Church, it is easy to see the prevalence of individualism among ministers and priests.  Not too many of us have a vast repertoire of skills to be proud of, but most of us still feel that, if we have anything at all to show, it is something we have to do solo.  You could say that many of us feel like failed tightrope walkers who discovered that we did not have the power to draw thousands of people, that we could not make many conversions, that we did not have the talents to create beautiful liturgies, that we were not as popular with the youth, the young adults, or the elderly as we had hoped, and that we were not as able to respond to the needs of our people as we had expected.  But most of us still feel that, ideally, we should have been able to do it all and do it successfully.  Stardom and individual heroism, which are such obvious aspects of our competitive society, are not at all alien to the Church.  There too the dominant image is that of the self-made man or woman who can do it all alone.

Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead.  Medicine, psychiatry, and social work all offer us models in which "service" takes place in a one-way direction.  Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles!  But how can anyone lay down his life for those with whom he is not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship?  Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.

The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel is the greatest of all. ... Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the Church, such as the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the immense secularization of the twentieth century, we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible?  Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.  It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.  Jesus asks, "Do you love me?"  We ask, "Can we sit at your right hand and your left hand in you Kingdom?"  (Matthew 20:21).

[Christian leadership in the future] is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.  I, obviously, am not speaking about a psychologically weak leadership in which the Christian leader is simply the passive victim of the manipulations of his milieu.  No, I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love.  It is a true spiritual leadership.  Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone else make decisions for them.  They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Broadway Paperbacks, 2011)

I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up.  I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking [a community college biology class] for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around.  I was completely lost.

But it was in that biology class that Rebecca Skloot first heard the name:  Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer. ... But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish.  Scientists had been striving to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died.  Henrietta's were different:  they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped.  They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

By the mid-1970's, when I was working in the University of Rochester's Analytical Cytology Laboratory, the HeLa cell line, as it was called, had been a standard research tool for over 20 years.

[The] cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they'd been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. ... Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta's cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

"HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years," Skloot's professor told her.

What he couldn't tell her, however, was anything at all about the woman behind the cells, Henrietta Lacks herself.  The quest for that information would consume much of her life, culminating in this book.

Although The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has special interest for me because of my background in cervical cancer research, such inside information is hardly necessary for finding the book very difficult to put down.  Skloot weaves together the story of Henrietta's famous and ubiquitous tumor cells and that of her short and difficult life in such a way that neither the science nor the sorrow becomes overwhelming.  Henrietta's cells, holding an honored and essential place in modern biomedical research, contrast sharply with Henrietta's family, which could be the poster child for the poor and marginalized in our country.  Reading about their lives in Clover, Virginia confirmed my conclusion that the smartest thing my great-grandparents did was to flee their own hometown on the other side of the Appalachians.  Without a doubt, it was harder on Henrietta's family because they were black, but poverty, inbreeding, and, shall we say, non-traditional morals take their toll without regard to race.

The book leaves one with many questions, from medical ethics ("Will our descendants look upon those who profit from people's discarded cells—excised tumors, biopsies, blood taken for newborn testing—as we now look upon 19th century grave robbers?") to social justice ("How can we help someone whose whole community is dysfunctional?").  But I'm left with one especially pressing question, from outside of the book, as it were:  How did the troubled teen that Skloot describes herself as end up an excellent and award-winning science writer?  There's hope, even for the apparently dysfunctional.

Many thanks to my sister-in-law, the library book sale master, for this gem!

Switch:  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Broadway Books, 2010)

You don't get lots of snippet quotes in this review, because I had to read the book quickly; it was a gift for my son-in-law.  I love his Amazon wish list:  I look it over, pick out a book I want to read, order it, read it, and give it to him.  :)  But my timing wasn't as good this time as it could have been.

Instead, you get a hearty endorsement of Switch.  I'm not sure the Heath brothers have everything right, but they sure have a lot of great ideas that I plan to take more time to consider.  Our library has two copies on order, and maybe my library book sale maven sister-in-law will come upon a used copy before I get around to ordering it myself.  :)

Here's a link to the authors' site, where you can check out some free resources, and read the first chapter of Switch.  Unfortunately, the first chapter doesn' t include one of my favorite stories, that of how a humanitarian organization that made an (almost) immediate, life-saving change to children's nutrition in Vietnam.  But you can read that story here.

Finally, here's a summery from the book.  It won't make much sense until after you've read it, but I'm putting it here as a handy reference for myself, and for anyone else who would appreciate it.

DIRECT THE RIDER

Follow the Bright Spots. Investigate what's working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy]

Script the Critial Moves. Don't think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad]

Point to the Destination. Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it. [“You'll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP]

MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT

Find the Feeling. Knowing something isn't enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters's demos at Target]

Shrink the Change. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform]

Grow Your People. Cultivate a sense of identity and instil the growth mindset [Brasilata's “inventors,” junior-high math kids' turnaround]

SHAPE THE PATH

Tweak the environment. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet]

Built Habits. When behavior is habitual, it's “Free”--it doesn't take the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action trigger,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists]

Rally the Herd. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. [“Fataki” in Tanzania, “free spaces” in hospitals, seeding the tip jar]

UPDATE:  Here's a link to more good points from Switch

Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown, 2012)

I waited a long time for my name to percolate to the top of our library's waiting list for Quiet.  In another example of God's amazing sense of humor, I was able to pick up the book on my way home from dropping the Daleys at the airport.  Returning to a house no longer ringing with the sound of grandchildren was at the time altogether too much quiet for me.  Being able to bury myself in the book did help assuage the sense of loss, however.

I'm tempted to say that Quiet is by far the best of all the books I've read on introversion, though that may only be because it's the third, and I have the advantage of having read others.  Introverts in the Church made me cry because it was the first, revealing to me the value of character traits I've been pressured to suppress all my life, but it is not particularly well written, and is a bit strident for sharing with extroverts.

Although I found the second book overly psycho-therapeutic, I learned from The Introvert Advantage some of the physical differences between the brains of introverts and those of extroverts, and some advice for understanding (and helping) both introverted and extroverted children.  Quiet takes that ball and runs a lot further with it.

It helps that the book is well written, enabling me to concentrate on the content without being distracted by the form.  The author is also more even-toned in her approach, highlighting the contributions of introverts, yes, but at the same time emphasizing the value of both temperament types.  She's much easier on extroverts than some writers whose scars from growing up in an extrovert-dominated world are more visible.  Nonetheless, I can't unequivocally recommend the book for all extroverts.  If you're an insecure extrovert looking for affirmation of your own temperament, you won't find much help here.  If you think the problem with the world is that most people are not extroverted enough, Cain is not singing your song.  But if you yearn to understand, appreciate, and support the introverts in your life—especially if you have an introverted spouse or child who frustrates or puzzles you, or if you're an employer desiring to create the most productive work environment for employees of diverse temperaments, don't miss Quiet.

Cain deliberately broadens her use of the terms "extrovert" and "introvert" from the popular consideration of whether one is renewed by crowds or solitude.

This book is about introversion as seen from a cultural point of view.  Its primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the "man of action" and the "man of contemplation," and how we could improve the world if only there were a greater balance of power between the two types.

Actually, her brush is broader still, which to my mind makes it worthwhile reading "yet another book on introverts":  She covers other, related personality traits, along with how they interact with intro- and extro-version.  This could profitably have been seven books rather than one.  Which is a bit frustrating, I'll admit, as it seems she is just getting started on an interesting subject when she veers in another direction.

Quiet is a popular book, which means I had only two-thirds the normal time to keep this library copy, with no hope of renewal, and it was due yesterday.  So for the remainder of this post you'll get a somewhat random collection of a few of the points that caught my eye.

The 20th century was not a good time for introverted children.  Reading about the development of the Cult of Personality and the psychological concept of the Inferiority Complex helps explain why I provoked comments in my father's journals (which I read many years later) on the order of, "I sure wish Linda were more sociable."  Never mind that my parents were as introverted as I am—they wanted better for their children.

[C]hild guidance experts of the 1920's set about helping children to develop winning personalities.  Until then, these professionals had worried mainly about sexually precocious girls and delinquent boys, but now psychologists, social workers, and doctors focused on the everyday child with the "maladjusted personality" ... The experts advised parents to socialize their children well and schools to change their emphasis from book-learning to "assisting and guiding the developing personality."  Educators took up this mantle enthusiastically. ... Well-meaning parents of the midcentury agreed that quiet was unacceptable and gregariousness ideal for both girls and boys.  Some discouraged their children from solitary and serious hobbies, like classical music, that could make them unpopular.  They sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize.  Introverted children were often singled out as problem cases.

Maybe I'd have been better off growing up in Taiwan, as in this quote from a present-day American high school student whose parents are from that country.

It's inbred in us to be more quiet.  When I was a kid and would go to my parents' friends' house and didn't want to talk, I would bring a book.  It was like this shield, and they would be like, "She's so studious!"  And that was praise.

During the New York City transit strike of 2005, Craigslist was the go-to place for ride-share listings.  "Yet another crisis, and Craigslist commands the community," wrote one blogger.  "How come Craig organically can touch lives on so many personal levels—and Craig's users can touch each other's lives on so many levels?"  Here's one answer:  social media has made new forms of leadership possible for scores of people who don't fit the [exceedingly extroverted] Harvard Business School mold.

Studies have shown that ... introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the "real me" online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions.  They welcome the chance to communicate digitally.  The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice.

The New Groupthink did not arise at one precise moment.  Cooperative learning, corporate teamwork, and open office plans emerged at different times and for different reasons.  But the mighty force that pulled these trends together was the rise of the World Wide Web, which lent both cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration.  On the Internet, wondrous creations were produced via shared brainpower (e.g. Linux, Wikipedia, MoveOn.org].  These collective productions, exponentially greater than the sum of their parts, were so awe-inspiring that we came to revere the hive mind, the wisdom of crowds, the miracle of crowdsourcing.  Collaboration became a sacred concept—the key multiplier for success. ... But then we took things a step further than the facts called for.  We came to value transparency and to knock down walls—not only online but also in person.  We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. ... The Internet's role in promoting face-to-face group work is especially ironic because the early Web was a medium that enabled bands of often introverted individualists ... to come together to subvert and transcend the usual ways of problem-solving. ... [T]he earliest open-source creators didn't share office space—often they didn't even live in the same country. ... If you had gathered the same people who created Linux, installed them in a giant conference room for a year, and asked them to devise a new operating system, it's doubtful that anything so revolutionary would have occurred.

[In the 1950's, psychologist] Solomon Asch conducted a series of now-famous experiments on the dangers of group influence. ... His questions were so simple that 95 percent of students answered every question correctly.   But when Asch planted actors in the groups, and the actors confidently volunteered the same incorrect answer ... a staggering 75 percent of the participants went along with the group's wrong answer to at least one question.

[A recent, updated version of the experiment by neuroscientist Gregory Berns, which included brain scans, reveals worse news:  the scans indicated that the participants' perceptions had actually been altered by the group.]

If the group thinks the answer is A, you're much more likely to believe that A is correct, too.  It's not that you're saying consciously, "Hmm, I'm not sure, but they all think the answer's A, so I'll go with that."  Nor are you saying, "I want them to like me, so I'll just pretend that the answer's A."  No, you are doing something much more unexpected—and dangerous.  Most of [the participants] reported having gone along with the group because "they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer."  They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.

[Participants did not always conform.  But when they chose the correct answer despite pressure to do otherwise, their brains showed "heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with upsetting emotions such as the fear of rejection."]

Berns refers to this as "the pain of independence," and it has serious implications.  Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices.  But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

In another famous study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play a challenging word game in which they had to learn, through trial and error, the governing principle of the game.  While playing, they wore headphones that emitted random bursts of noise.  They were asked to adjust the volume of their headsets up or down to the level that was "just right."  On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels, while the introverts selected only 55 decebels.  When working at the volume that they had selected—loud for the extroverts, quiet for the introverts—the two types were about equally aroused (as measured by their heart rates and other indicatores).  They also played equally well.

When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by the extroverts, and vice versa, everything changed.  Not only were the introverts over-aroused by the loud noise, but they also underperformed—taking an average of 9.1 trials rather than 5.8 to learn the game.  The opposite was true for the extroverts—they were under-aroused (and possibly bored) by the quieter conditions, and took an average of 7.3 trials, compared with the 5.4 they'd averaged under noisier conditions.

The author does not mention the overall superiority of the extroverts' performances, but I'd hazard that "random bursts of noise" at any volume level would be more difficult for introverts to handle.

Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality. ... You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call "optimal levels of arousal" and what I call "sweet spots," and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.

Imagine that you're lying contentedly in a hammock reading a great novel.  This is a sweet spot.  But after half an hour you realize that you've read the same sentence five times; now you're understimulated.  So you call a friend and go out for brunch—in other words, you ratchet up your stimulation level—and as you laugh and gossip over blueberry pancakes, you're back, thank goodness, inside your sweet spot.  But this agreeable states lasts only until your friend—an extrovert who needs much more stimulation than you do—persuades you to accompany her to a block party, where you're now confronted by loud music and a sea of strangers.

Your friend's neighbors seem affable enough, but you feel pressured to make small talk above the din of music.  Now—bang just like that—you've fallen out of your sweet spot, except this time you're overstimulated.  And you'll probably feel that way until you pair off with someone on the periphery of the party for an in-depth conversation, or bow out altogether and return to your novel.

Imagine how much better you'll be at this sweet-spot game once you're aware of playing it. ... People who are aware of their sweet spots ... can hunt for homes based on the temperaments of their family members—with cozy window seats and other nooks and crannies for the introverts, and large, open living-dining spaces for the extroverts. ... [I]ntroverts function better than extroverts when sleep deprived, which is a cortically de-arousing condition. ... Drowsy extroverts behind the wheel should be especially careful—at least until they increase their arousal levels by chugging coffee or cranking up the radio.  Conversely, introverts driving in loud, overly arousing traffic noise should work to stay focussed, since the noise may impair their thinking.  [This was an aha! moment for me.  I cannot stand to have the radio on when I'm in a stressful driving situation.  Because I always defer to the driver when it comes to radio station and volume, I've more than once been exceedingly stressed by trying to navigate on the fly, through an unfamiliar city, with my brain on half power.]

One personality trait that often, though not always, combines with introversion, is "high reactivity."  It is inborn, though as with all such traits is sensitive to environmental factors, too.  And it complicates a neat division of the world into introverts and extroverts.

Highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap.  They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises.  They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee.   They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital). ... The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation. ... They dislike small talk.  They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive....  They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day.  They love music, nature, art, physical beauty.  They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. ... They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly. ... [S]ometimes they're highly empathetic.  It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. ... They avoid violent movie and TV shows; they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. ... [But] when they're overwhelmed by negative emotions like shame or anxiety ... they can be positively oblivious of other people's needs.

Introverts are not smarter than extroverts.  According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent.  And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better.  Extroverts are better than introvertts at handling information overload.  Introverts' reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity. ... Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going. ... Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating.  Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately.

Then there's "buzz."  Some people are more "reward-sensitive" than others; it appears to have something to do with the brain's dopamine pathways.

[Buzz] fires us up to work and play hard.  It gives us the courage to take chances.  Buzz also gets us to do things that would otherwise seem too difficult, like giving speeches.  Imagine you work hard to prepare a talk on a subject you care about.  You get your message across, and when you finish the audience rises to its feet, its clapping sustained and sincere.  One person might leave the room feeling, "I'm glad I got my message across, but I'm also happy it's over; now I can get back to the rest of my life."  Another person, more sensitive to buzz, might walk away feeling, "What a trip!  Did you hear that applause?  Did you see the expression on their faces when I made that life-changing point?  This is great!"

[But buzz has its downside.]

Financial history is full of examples of players accelerating when they should be braking.  Behavioral economists have long observed that executives buying companies can get so excited about beating out their competitors that the ignore signs that they're overpaying.  This happens so frequently that it has a name:  "deal fever," followed by "the winner's curse."  The AOL-Time Warner merger, which wiped out $200 billion of Time-Warner shareholder value, is a classic example.  There were plenty of warnings that AOL's stock, which was the currency for the merger, was wildly overvalued, yet Time Warner's directors approved the deal unanimously.  "I did it with as much or more excitement and enthusiasm as I did when I first made love some forty-two years ago," exclaimed Ted Turner, one of those directors and the largest individual shareholder in the company.

Indeed, although the causes of our recent financial troubles are many and diverse, Cain makes a good case for casting significant blame on a personality imbalance in our financial institutions.  Their culture had for years rewarded the "extrovert" (in Cain's more broad sense, which includes the reward-sensitive risk-takers with a goal-oriented, quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving).  These are the people who made things happen, who chose the high-risk, high-reward approach to investing.  All businesses need people like that.  But what they also need is balance:  other people who will notice the warning signs, sound the alarms, and put on the brakes.  And this few of the major players had.  Enthusiastic, aggressive deal-closers were the ones who made the big money and received the promotions.  The more cautious were passed over, or learned to squelch their natural cautiousness and act like those who were reaping the rewards, making even riskier decisions than those they were attempting to imitate.  "And great was the fall of it."

If you're a buzz-prone extrovert, then you're lucky to enjoy lots of invigorating emotions.  Make the most of them:  build things, inspire others, think big.  Start a company, launch a website, build an elaborate tree house for your kids.  But also know that you're operating with an Achilles' heel that you must learn to protect. ... Teach yourself to pause and reflect when warning signs appear that things aren't working out as you'd hoped.  Learn from your mistakes.  Seek out counterparts (from spouses to friends to business partners) who can help rein you in and compensate for your blind spots.  And when it comes time to invest, or to do anything that involves a sane balance of risk and reward, keep yourself in check.  One good way to do this is to make sure that you're not surrounding yourself with images of rewards at the crucial moment of decision.  [Studies] have found that men who are shown erotic pictures just before they gamble take more risks than those shown neutral images like desks and chairs.  This is because anticipating rewards—any rewards, whether or not related to the subject at hand—excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly.  (This may be the single best argument yet for banning pornography from workplaces.)

So, what drives those who are less reward-sensitive?  One possibility is the concept of "flow" (available to extroverts as well).

The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. ... If you're an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts.  You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. ... [Y]our biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths.  You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you.  But when you're focussed on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless.  So stay true to your own nature.  If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don't let others make you feel as if you have to race.  If you enjoy depth, don't force yourself to seek breadth.  If you prefer single-tasking to multitasking, stick to your guns.  Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.  It's up to you to use that independence to good effect.

The chapter entitled "When Should You Act More Extroverted than You Really Are?" introduces us to Professor Brian Little, a lecturer and former Harvard professor whose enthusiastic and engaging talks would apparently belie his decidedly introverted nature.  You can find samples of his lectures online, although the ones I've found on YouTube, and even on his own blog,  are frustratingly incomplete.  According to Little's Free-Trait Theory, "we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits—introversion, for example—but we can and do act out of character in the service of "core personal projects."  Seems obvious to me, but it must not be, since it's a new field of psychology....  The story of his annual lectures at a military college near Montreal is too long to quote in full, but it's too funny to leave out altogether.  His first speech was a resounding success, but afterwards he was horrified when the was invited to join the top brass for lunch.

Little had to deliver another lecture that afternoon, and he knew that making small talk for an hour and a half would wipe him out.  He needed to recharge for his afternoon performance.  Thinking quickly, he announced that he had a passion for ship design and asked his hosts if he might instead take the opportunity of his visit to admire the boats passing by on the Richelieu River.

This dodge worked for years—until the college moved its campus away from the water.

Deprived of his cover story, Professor Little resorted to the only escape hatch he could find—the men's room.  After each lecture, he would race to the restroom and hide inside a stall.  One time, a military man spotted Little's shoes under the door and began a hearty conversation, so Little took to keeping his feet propped up on the bathroom walls, where they would be hidden from view.  (Taking shelter in bathrooms is a surprisingly common phenomenon, as you probably know if you're an introvert.) [Nursing mothers were finally able to come out of the restrooms; perhaps the introverts' day will come.]

Many introverts, like Professor Little, have learned to put on a persona of "pseudo-extroversion" in order to accomplish something important to them.  Such motivation is what enabled my very introverted parents to take leadership roles in the PTA when I was in school.  The critical difference between this and a harmful self-negation is attitude:  one person will tell himself, Ï'm doing this to advance work I care about deeply, and when the work is done I'll settle back into my true self," where the other is thinking, "The route to success is to be the sort of person I am not."  One "acts out of character for the sake of worthy tasks that temporarily require a different orientation," while the other "believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with who she is."

Perhaps the most important chapter is "The Communication Gap:  How to Talk to Members of the Opposite Type." This goes 'way beyond introversion and extroversion to explain how deeply divergent personalities can lead to disastrous communication problems—and how they might be avoided.  Expanding on this chapter should be Susan Cain's next book.

In one study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play either a competitive or a cooperative game.

The introverts assigned to the cooperative game rated all players—not just their competitors, but also their teammates—more positively than the introverts who played the competitive game.  The extroverts did just the opposite:  they rated all players more positively when they played the competitive version of the game.  These findings suggest something very important:  introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.

In another study, introverted stroke patients worked harder when given gentle, positive reinforcement, such as "Very nice, keep up the good work," but extroverts were more inspired by more aggressive talk, such as "You can do more than that!"

Much of the chapter is the story of Greg and Emily, a couple with extremely different approaches to conflict.

When Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she's being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show.  But Greg thinks she's checking out or, worse, that she doesn't give a damn.  Similarly, when Greg lets his anger fly, he assumes that Emily feels, as he does, that this is a healthy and honest expression of their deeply committed relationship.  But to Emily, it's as if Greg has suddenly turned on her.

John, an introvert I interviewed who has a great relationship with his fiery wife, describes how he learned to [remind himself that she's not really as aggressive as she seems]:

When Jennifer's after me about something, she's really after me.  If I went to bed without tidying the kitchen, the next morning she'll shout at me, "This kitchen is filthy!" I come in and look around the kitchen.  There are three or four cups out; it's not filthy.  But the drama with which she imbues such moments is natural to her.  That's her way of saying, Gee, when you get a chance I'd appreciate it if you could just tidy up the kitchen a little more.  If she did say it that way to me, I would say, I'd be happy to, and I'm sorry that I didn't do it sooner.  But because she comes at me with that two-hundred-mile-per-hour freight train energy, I want to bridle and say, Too bad.  The reaons I don't is because we've been married for twenty-five years, and I've come to understand that Jennifer didn't put me in a life-threatening situation when she spoke that way.

So what's John's secret for relating to his forceful wife?  He lets her know that her words are unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to their meaning.

The most astonishing revelation to me was that the very definitions of "rude" and "caring" can differ so much between individuals living in the same era and place.  It is one thing to realize, for example, that there are differences in negotiation style between the Chinese and the Israelis (explained in the book), and quite another to accept that when someone you love is slapping you in the face he really believes he's expressing loving concern, and when you think you're being polite he interprets that as indifference.

And yet, it brings to mind my own relationship with my mother-in-law.  It was cordial all along, but we only became friends near the end of her life, when I finally took a stand and stood up to her.  Could it be that what I considered respectful behavior she saw as rejection?

Truly only love and the grace of God can save us bizarre mortals!

I've been experimenting with Memrise for several days—long enough to conclude it merits a mention.

Memrise is a vocabulary review system that specializes in languages, of which there are an incredible number, from French to Quechua to Klingon!  (Alas, no Swiss German, no doubt hampered by the lack of an official written form.)  There are other subjects, as well, but not many yet, and they are not well developed.  The Periodic Table course, for example, would do better not reversing the "o" and the "u" in fluorine, and settling on either of the two acceptable spellings of the element Al, instead of compromising with "Alumnium."  (Or is that a new element, named after all college graduates?)

I'm loving the Introductory German!  My favorite language course is still Pimsleur, which along with Hippo gets the correct sound and feel of the language and its structure into my brain.  But I also need a way to build up vocabulary, and Memrise is the best I've found so far.  The vehicle is a simple "garden" system:  new words are seeds, and through practice you sprout them, help them grow, "harvest" (more like transplant) them to long-term memory, and water them to keep them healthy.  E-mail reminders bring you back to your "garden" at varying intervals—short for recently-learned words, longer for ones you know better—so you don't lose what you've learned.

It's easy to use and kind of fun.  I find that I'm picking up vocabulary pretty well so far, though I do wonder who decided which words to introduce first.  I mean, die Bundesrepublik?  "Federal Republic" is not exactly a term I use every day.  Or how about der Mülleimer?  Dustbin?  Dustbin?  Dustbins are things people in the English novels I love to read are always "tipping" things into, but I'm sure I've used the term fewer times than Federal Republic.  And is blöd (stupid) really an essential vocabulary word?  Still, in addition to these oddities there are more useful terms, such as das Haus (house), vielleicht (maybe), and der Name (name).  And I've finally caught the difference between der Staat (state) and die Stadt (city).

Unfortunately, I can't make the audio work in Firefox, and so must use IE or Chrome if I want to hear the words pronounced.  That's something I find very valuable, not only for understanding and speaking, but because having heard the sound of a noun I'm much more likely to be able to remember whether it's die, der, or das, something I always have trouble with.  I'm beginning to think of the article and the word as one entity, which of course will get me into trouble when I have to worry about inflection, but I'll climb that hill when I get to it.

It's also German German, and so uses the Eszett instead of the Swiss double "s."  However, it accepts the double "s" when I have to type in an answer, so I'm fine with it.  Letters with an umlaut are easy to enter, via either a mouse click or the Windows U.S. International keyboard (which I prefer because it is faster).

Here's hoping I manage to stick with the program, and not lose everything when I go on vacation....

Luke's Story by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Putnam Praise, 2009)

Luke's Story, the second book of LaHaye and Jenkins' Jesus Chronicles, uses the Bible, extra-biblical sources, and a lot of imagination to tell a reasonably credible story about the author of the Gospel of Luke.  I found it more interesting than Mark's Story, though it suffers from many of the same defects.  It's still seems like cheating that the authors get so much of their word count by lifting passages straight from the Bible, and their denominational slant is annoying.  Worse, it lacks a first-century feel.  I'm not sure I'd recognize an authentic setting, but I know the characters are spouting modern language, theology, and attitudes.  Somehow I doubt that first-century worship looked quite so much like a modern American Baptist service....

However, there's more "story" to this book than there was to Mark's Story, which made it more enjoyable to read.

No, We Can't:  Radical Islam, Militant Secularism, and the Myth of Coexistence by Robert Stearns (Chosen, 2011)

I received this book for review under false pretenses, but it was my fault entirely.  This was the blurb that caught my eye:

The world is shifting, and a war for world domination is raging between radical Islam, militant secularism and Judeo-Christianity. But what does it mean for you—and why should you care?  With clarity and astonishing depth, Robert Stearns lays out the dire ramifications of this coming culture clash for Christians. Based on years of global outreach, he shows what believers can and must do. The tipping point in global culture is upon us. What role will you play?

Normally, words like "a war for world domination" wouldn't encourage me to pick up a book.  But I thought this would be a word from the trenches, from one known for his care for the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized all over the world.  I was eager to hear about "radical Islam" from one whose organization has experienced tragedy at the hands of the Taliban, yet continues to provide humanitarian aid to "all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender."  I was expecting "he shows what believers can and must do" to focus on the need for more church involvement in fighting the causes of poverty and injustice worldwide.  I was hoping to hear about World Vision International's experiences dealing with culture clashes, and was especially interested to hear the warnings of such a man about "dire ramifications of this coming culture clash."  I wanted to know what led such a man, who claims we have the knowledge and ability to end most extreme poverty if only we had the will, to write a book entitled, "No, We Can't."

My mistake was in not checking up on the author.  It turns out that the president of World Vision is Richard Stearns, while the author of this book is Robert Stearns.  As far as I know, they are not related, and they certainly have different perspectives.

Having agreed to review the book, however mistakenly, I was obligated to read it.  It's a pity that Robert Stearns' language is so strident and his logic sometimes shaky, because I think he has some good points; it's just too hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The author's basic premise:

[F]rom the stage of world history have arisen three primary houses of thought, three perspectives of the world, three cultural kingdoms that are currently contending for global ascendancy:  Radical Islam, Militant Secularism and the Judeo-Christian worldview.  They are not the only three houses in existence today, but as we survey the landscape of global affairs, we see that their pervasiveness is uncontestable, and their shaping influence beyond doubt.

The author's point of view:

[W]e can plainly see that the Judeo-Christian worldview is the best possible means of providing a platform of liberty for the human race.

I happen to agree with him in this, but his book fails to make this point convincingly.  Part of the problem lies in his over-broad classifications, e.g. viewing all Islam as Radical Islam, and treating "Judeo-Christianity" as one religion, instead of two, albeit with common roots and many important interlinkages.

The heads of state in Germany, France and the United Kingdom have each done an about-face on the subject of multiculturalism.  Just recently, these distinguished leaders have, one by one, publicly stated that their nations have erred in promoting segmented multiculturalism with their borders, particularly in light of the dangerous advancement of Radical Islam in Europe.  All three leaders pointed to the need to uphold their national identity and values among all who immigrate, so as to guard against the rise of these destructive patterns in their communities.

I sympathize with both Stearns and the heads of state he mentions, and grant that immigrants have a "when in Rome" obligation to respect their host culture.  But this swing of the pendulum is a two-edged sword, and has been used to persecute homeschoolers in Germany.

There are no easy answers, and Stearns is right that ignoring problems does not solve them.  An easy, "Why can't we all get along?" approach severely underestimates the differences in how different cultures view the world, and as Stearns points out, Westerners—and especially Americans—are peculiarly prone to assuming that deep down, everyone thinks like us.  Or that they will, as soon as they are sufficiently enlightened.

Hear what Dr. Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregation had to say in an article entitled, What Has Britain Come To When It Takes a Muslim Like Me to Defend Christianity?  (My quote is from the book's excerpt (ellipses in the original), but you can read the entire article here.)

Christianity is under siege in this country:  Britain's national religion has never been so marginalized and derided, especially by the public institutions that should be defending it. ... [A] new form of virulent secularism is sweeping through society—and its target is Christianity. ... It is no coincidence that as Christianity is repeatedly attacked, so the social fabric of Britain becomes increasingly frayed.  As we lose our strong moral compass, family breakdown and violent crime are at record levels, while our once famous sense of community spirit is evaporating.

No, We Can't may be a feel-good, inspirational book for those who already share Robert Stearns' philosophies, and it might be convincing for someone leaning significantly in his direction, but it's too alarmist to be a tool for drawing in the mainstream audience I think he's hoping for.  That's a pity, because some of his points are worth considering.

I still want to read the same book as written by Richard Stearns.